On a frosty January morning in 2006, an explosion occurred in a coal mine owned by the International Coal Group in Sago, West Virginia. The explosion instantly killed one miner. Twelve others became trapped by debris, flames, and toxic gas. Their first shift after an extended New Year break had gone terribly wrong. All the missing men were fathers, some to young families, and the world watched as rescue crews tried to pinpoint their location in vain for two days.
Much of the news coverage focused on the anguish of the miners’ families and how their grief reverberated in small communities like Sago or nearby Tallmansville. The families kept vigil at the Sago Baptist Church, just yards away from the mine, and national and international media crews kept watch with them. Sentimental and intimate narratives of faith and resilience overtook attention to the International Coal Group’s notorious record of safety violations and fines.
Forty-eight hours after the explosion, an official working with rescue crews at the mine called the church to deliver news both heartbreaking and miraculous: the body of the one dead miner had provided an important clue in the discovery of the twelve living ones. The official informed families that rescue efforts were underway and activity at the mine intensified as celebrations at Sago Baptist Church became breaking news on every major network. “Their hope dimmed, but they never gave up,” said ABC reporter Sonya Crawford, live from West Virginia.
Some families believed that rescue workers might triage the rescued men in the church and so they reorganized their surroundings as best they could for such a fraught reunion. They prepared and celebrated for three hours until a new report informed them that all miners save one had perished. A reporter for National Public Radio later confirmed that for most of that period, mine officials were aware there had been a grave miscommunication.
Captured on video, the celebrations of the families were frozen in time, and in their rebroadcast became a symbol of cruelty of the highest magnitude: false hope. Unfolding news coverage foregrounded the spectacle of decent but damaged people hoping in vain for a miracle. This made the reporting about the International Coal Group’s lethal labor practices feel distant by comparison. As sociologist Rebecca Scott wrote of the incident, “Why miners might be afraid to report safety violations at a nonunion mine took second place to a story of a tight-knit, deeply religious community tortured on national television by the dramatic plot twist.”
The coal company was indeed villanized by the press for its part in the tragedy, but not for its longstanding record of shirking state and federal safety regulations. The media presented families expressing anger toward the International Coal Group. But that anger was framed as a melodramatic response triggered by grief, not as a series of reactions compelled by the often abusive tension between mine operators and the communities that served as their workforce.
The media coverage of the Sago Mine disaster naturalized many practices in Appalachia that are not natural. It is not natural for individuals to mine coal, although it is a dominant industry in Appalachia and therefore a logical choice of employment. It is not natural for employees to die in the name of corporate profit and it is not natural to recycle the raw grief of devastated families into a spiritual lesson about sacrifice, as reporters did. Journalists sought details from families about dead miners’ favorite scripture passages and analyzed them for clues that might indicate an acceptance of impeding death. It was as if the miners had undergone a meaningful spiritual trial instead of suffocating in the dark with their noses stuck in lunch pails because the rescue breathers supplied by the mine were useless.
When mine safety crews located letters written by the miners just before their deaths, reporters fixated on the last words of Martin Toler, Jr.: “It wasn’t bad, I just went to sleep.” A community and a nation seeking any sign of redemption from this tragedy naturalized even this most unnatural of deaths. Other, more invisible signs of redemption happened out of the public eye. Industry watchdogs challenged, in vain as it would happen, regulatory oversight of the coal industry and wrongful death lawsuits wound slowly through the courts.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Appalachians were once again framed as decent but damaged people looking for a miracle. Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric centered the projection of a fantasy to “make America great again” by promising to correct the social and economic decline of disadvantaged white workers such as those who once populated the Sago Mine. “My guys,” he often remarked, referring to miners, “don’t get enough thanks.”
Many Appalachians also engaged in fantasies of their own. The mayor of Buckhannon, West Virginia, just miles from the Sago Mine, told the Washington Post that Trump is “going to undo the damage to the coal industry and bring back the jobs, and all of our kids down there in North Carolina are going to come home.” Every prestige publication from the New Yorker to Vanity Fair flocked to the region to capture a glimpse of the people whom they assumed stood ready to gamble the nation’s political health on a last-ditch effort at self-preservation and, ultimately, false hope.
Following Trump’s victory, pundits often engaged in a projection of a different fantasy, one where Appalachia might be isolated and left to reap what it had sown. For liberal political commentators there were no wealthy donors, white suburban evangelicals, or insular Floridian retirees responsible for Trump’s victory, only hillbillies. This time, however, there would be no dignity in death. A month into his presidency, Trump appointed Wilbur Ross, the former owner of the Sago Mine, as his secretary of commerce. Some pundits and commenters applauded the decision for its awful symmetry.
For many Americans, the election simply cast “the Appalachian” in a role he appeared born to play: the harried and forgotten white everyman, using the only agency left in his bones to bring ruin on his countrymen and selfishly move our nation backward, not forward. Instead of serving as the instrument of his own torture, his false hope was now weaponized and aimed at the nation.
This projection of Appalachia is melodramatic and strategic in equal measure. It reflects a longstanding pattern of presenting Appalachia as a monolithic “other America” that defies narratives of progress. These narratives, however, are designed to allow you to applaud the casting choice without wondering who wrote the script. We’ll watch the film here, but we’re also going to stay for the credits.
Of the 2016 presidential election, New York Times international affairs correspondent Roger Cohen wrote, “The race is tightening once again because Trump’s perceived character—a strong leader with a simple message, never flinching from a fight, cutting through political correctness with a bracing bluntness—resonates in places like Appalachia where courage, country, and cussedness are core values.”
Cohen’s dispatch is one of many that came to form a distinct genre of election writing: the “Trump Country” piece, which seeks to illuminate the values of Trump supporters using Appalachia—and most often West Virginia—as a model. “To understand Donald Trump’s success,” the composite argument flows, “you must understand Appalachia.” The march of the “Trump Country” genre became especially striking during a fraught election cycle marked by otherwise erratic coverage and scandal on both sides of the political aisle.
Sandwiched between email servers and Access Hollywood outtakes, Appalachians stood ready to offer human interest stories that demystified, or so the press assumed, the appeal of a distinct type of political annihilation. Pundits explained our socioeconomic realities to one another under the guise of educating a presumed audience of coastal elites whom, they argued, had become hardened to the plight of the forgotten American.
It is possible to glean, through the cumulative veneer of political analyses, think pieces, and grim photographs, some truth about the issues that vex Appalachia. But of equal importance is how this coverage reveals what vexes the nation about Appalachia. The voices of Appalachians as experts on their own condition are largely absent in the standard “Trump Country” think piece.
The emotional politics of this genre cast Appalachians as a mournful and dysfunctional “other” who represent the darkest failures of the American Dream while seeking to prescribe how we—the presumed audience of indifferent elites—should feel about their collective fate. Whether readers find these protagonists sympathetic or self-sabotaging, “Trump Country” writing leaves its audience to assume that Appalachians have not earned the right to belong in the narrative of American progress and are content to doom others to the same exclusion.
I first encountered the “Trump Country” genre in a February 2016 Vanity Fair essay by John Saward. “I am in West Virginia to understand Donald Trump,” Saward explains in “Welcome to Trump Country, USA.” Saward’s offering is something of a travel dispatch of his accumulated experiences in Morgantown, Clarksburg, and Charleston. It begins with a tableau of Saward fondling a gun in a small-town strip club and ends with homespun mountain wisdom from a drifter. This structure implies that reality lies somewhere in between the maniacal Trump-supporting strip club denizens and the cosmically indifferent drifter. It also suggests that we should prepare for an age of extremes using Appalachia as a preview of coming attractions.
Saward takes pains to emphasize his difference from the subjects of his essay. What sets West Virginians most apart, according to him, is their longing and nostalgia for ordinary things. “You have never heard people speak so fondly, so intimately about hot dogs,” he writes. “I have never cared as much about anything as this man did about a hot dog recommendation.” When a local provides Saward with a list of restaurants to visit, he shares that “this will keep happening to me, people talking about the decency of other West Virginians and ordinary-seeming food like a dream.”
This dream-walking offers sharp contrast to the realities Saward describes where “everywhere things are leaning, teetering; you might consider this metaphorically, but it is literally true, the houses are breaking.” To collapse this sense of ruined nostalgia into a single anecdote, Saward lists half a dozen crumbling enterprises—car washes, bakeries, auto body shops—named after ordinary people, a “human with a name who had an idea for a place to do a thing and did it.” In “Trump Country, USA,” a car wash closed for the season isn’t just a car wash, but a harbinger of a future when we might all wish for ordinary things in vain.
Early political forecasting compelled Saward and others to visit West Virginia in order to find “Trump Country.” In December 2015, the polling firm Civis Analytics provided the New York Times with data suggesting Donald Trump would perform well in Appalachia and particularly West Virginia, his “best state” according to the Times. A national survey of 11,000 Republican-leaning voters indicated that Trump’s strongest supporters tended to be individuals who once registered Democrat but presently vote Republican, a phenomenon that isn’t uncommon in the South and Appalachia as a holdover from union-influenced politics.
Nate Cohn, who analyzed the data for the Times, argued that candidate Trump was the best fit among individuals “on the periphery of the G.O.P. coalition.” The Civis data also suggested, however, that eight out of the ten best congressional districts for Trump were in New York, and particularly on Long Island. Other news sites often highlighted the metrics of Trump’s appeal in West Virginia in early 2016 as well. A FiveThirtyEight report, for example, suggested that many of Trump’s Facebook “likes” came from users in West Virginia.
Examining election predictions in the first days of the Trump administration is like looking at one’s reflection in a dirty mirror. Many polls and forecasts show something recognizable amongst other distortions, and this phenomenon is also true of the “Trump Country” genre, which built momentum as primary season approached and all but exploded after the West Virginia Republican primary in May 2016. It’s important to acknowledge that Donald Trump did (and still does) enjoy strong support amongst many Appalachians and West Virginians. And these supporters often framed their justification by identifying their alienation from both parties, triggered by unmet political expectations and white racial anxiety. None of their positions, however, were unique to Appalachia or West Virginia.
What we know now, of course, is that these narratives employed a sleight of hand that used working-class people to illustrate the priorities and voting preferences of white middle-class and affluent individuals. The Washington Post and other outlets issued correctives, reporting that “the narrative that attributes Trump’s victory to a ‘coalition of mostly blue-collar and white working-class voters’ just doesn’t square with election data.”
To be fair, the Trump campaign, and the continued rhetoric used by his administration, participated heavily in this myth making. Individuals on both sides of the political aisle, however, are reluctant to change the narrative. Months after the election, hastily written diagnostic texts about the white working class, such as Joan Williams’s White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America, were published, creating further entrenchment.
No place demonstrates the uneasy reality of the “Trump Country” genre better than McDowell County, which sits firmly in West Virginia’s historic coal fields and once had the largest population of African American individuals in the state. In our present climate, however, McDowell County is a majority-white community that shares the worst local employment and health outcomes with neighboring coal counties Mingo and Logan.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, McDowell County became synonymous with “Trump Country.” It was the subject of profiles for the Guardian, Huffington Post, Circa, the National Post, CNN, and CBS, with mention in dozens more about West Virginia or Appalachia at large. A widely-shared video segment in the Guardian in October 2016 asserted that “Donald Trump was more popular in McDowell County than anywhere else in America.”
Coverage of past elections told a different story about McDowell County and West Virginia. In 2008, McDowell County was among the few counties in West Virginia where Democrats held on to a margin of victory. A more modest number of reporters and journalists dove into the history of the county and its politics to explain that phenomenon. The documentary Divide, for example, explores the 2008 election through the eyes of union organizer Sebert Pertee, who canvassed for Barack Obama in coal country. In those days, West Virginia was “Hillary Country,” with Clinton beating Obama in the state’s Democratic primary by substantial margins, including in McDowell County, where she won more than 70 percent of the vote.
Obama won McDowell County by 8 percent in the 2008 general election, but lost West Virginia. By 2012, West Virginia was entirely red. West Virginia Democrats appeared so disillusioned with their party that they gave Keith Russell Judd, a federal corrections inmate in Texas, 40 percent of their vote in the 2012 Democratic primary.
It isn’t difficult to locate compelling political angles in West Virginia’s coal country, which was solidly Democratic for forty years. Analysts point to the dwindling strength of unions and the coal industry’s hostility to environmental regulations as the chief political frustrations turning the tide. Both Republican and Democratic state politicians have pushed “war on coal” narratives that suggest industry decline is the product of overregulation, not market forces and competition from cheaper energy. With often little difference among their elected leaders, West Virginians have witnessed a remarkable political indifference to economic diversification.
Economic strategies most often prioritized financial and tax incentives that helped larger corporations and staved off losses to coal company profits. These strategies offered a united message from Republicans and Democrats that the way forward requires the free flow of capital in the hands of businesses, not people. It’s a position that pits workers against the environment in the battle for economic stability. It also accepts that the replacement of permanent and benefitted jobs with unstable low-wage employment is a natural by-product of corporate growth.
Political candidates committed to labor and environmental issues don’t often fare well in West Virginia, not because they’re unpopular with the electorate but because pro-business moderates from both parties invest in their failure. Take the case of Charlotte Pritt, who in 1996 defeated current Senator Joe Manchin in the gubernatorial primary with an anti-corporate-interest platform. Instead of endorsing Pritt, members of the Democratic Party’s elite, including Manchin himself, touted a “Democrats for Underwood” coalition, supporting the Republican nominee. Pritt narrowly lost the election.
Following a hiatus, Pritt has returned to politics, announcing in 2016 her intention to once again run for governor, this time affiliated with West Virginia’s Mountain Party. Pritt isn’t the only candidate inspired by Bernie Sanders’s success in the region. Joe Manchin’s opposition to populists like Pritt helped elevate him to the rank of senator, but he’ll soon face off against Bernie Sanders acolyte and political newcomer Paula Swearengin, a single mother from Coal City, West Virginia. As she told the New Republic’s Sarah Jones, “It’s time for us to fight back.”
In the interview, Swearengin recalls a moment at a town hall meeting in Charleston when Joe Manchin tried to incite the crowd against her by framing her call for cleaner, safer jobs as hostile to working men and women. Interjecting layers of such divisiveness is typical of the establishment’s political playbook for both parties in Appalachia, and particularly West Virginia. To be pro-environment and pro-worker is to walk a tightrope where individuals on either end hope you fall. In March 2016, Hillary Clinton did just that.
Two months before the West Virginia primary, Clinton made remarks at a CNN-sponsored town hall that would continue to haunt her campaign in West Virginia and Appalachia. Asked what her platform could offer struggling poor and working-class white voters, Clinton used coal country as an example of a region that would benefit from the creation of new economic opportunities under a development plan that utilized clean energy technology to fuel job growth.
“I’m the only candidate which has a policy about how to bring economic growth using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country,” she said, “Because we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business, right?” She continued, “And we’re going to make it clear that we don’t want to forget those people. Those people labored in those mines for generations, losing their health, often losing their lives to turn on our lights and power our factories.”
A move away from fossil fuels, including coal, was not, Clinton insisted, a “move away from the people who did the best they could to produce the energy that we relied on.” But these remarks played badly in coal country. The Trump campaign handily transformed her comment about out-of-business coal workers into a threat.
It’s not possible for anyone with more than passing knowledge of Appalachia and the coal industry to listen to those comments without cringing, regardless of one’s political affiliation. Clinton’s remarks about out-of-work miners are a ghastly but honest flub. But her tone—“those people who did the best they could” —and her poor appropriation of the “coal keeps the lights on” slogan are equally problematic. “Coal keeps the lights on” is often the rallying cry of those condemning the “war on coal,” but I suspect even the most progressive among us have been tempted to lob the phrase at someone clueless about the human cost of their energy. People didn’t “do their best” to keep the nation’s lights on; they died.
Analysts often pointed to Clinton’s remarks as the moment she sealed her fate in West Virginia and Appalachia. A somewhat excruciating campaign stop in Williamson, West Virginia, just before the state’s May primary seemed to confirm this prediction. During a roundtable session, an unemployed former coal miner named Bo Copley grilled Clinton about her town hall remarks, resulting in a lukewarm apology from the candidate. After clarifying her earlier statements, Clinton told Copley, “I do feel a little bit sad and sorry that I gave folks the reason, or the excuse, to be so upset with me…I’m here because I want you to know whether people vote for me or not, whether they yell at me or not, is not going to affect what I’m going to try to do to help.”
His confrontation with Clinton made Copley into a coal country celebrity, and he later told Fox News host Neil Cavuto that he did not feel particularly nervous during the meeting because he “speaks for a lot of people in our area.” Copley also appeared on ABC, CBS, and Yahoo News, personalizing the “war on coal” narrative by sharing his own struggle to find stable employment after his former employer Arch Coal filed for bankruptcy. Clinton lost the West Virginia Democratic primary later that month. Bernie Sanders cleared more than 50 percent of the vote, winning every county. Donald Trump received more than 70 percent of the vote in the state’s Republican primary, also winning every county in the state.
The “Trump Country” genre exploded after the West Virginia primary. Both Trump and Sanders won parts of Appalachia by large margins. The media made a broad and unconvincing attempt to de-legitimize Sanders’s popularity in Appalachia. This attempt wasn’t forcefully challenged when Sanders ceased to be a viable presidential candidate, but it has returned with a vengeance among the left. Alex Seitz-Wald from MSNBC, for example, found Trump’s victory in parts of Appalachia to be “weird” and suggested that “mischievous Trump supporters sought to damage Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee, by voting for Sanders.”
Many networks picked up an exit poll that suggested as many as one-third of West Virginian Sanders voters would choose Trump over Clinton in the November election. Projection of this sort was somewhat unique to West Virginia. All primary results bear the mark of “delegate math”—predictions for the remaining primary elections and how these votes might yield clues for the general election—but analysts gave the West Virginia primary more intense scrutiny. The outsized attention of this and other coverage was often at odds with the fact the state only commands five Electoral College votes and is not particularly instrumental in presidential elections.
The media often declared, as Canada’s National Post did in the early fall of 2016 that “there are few better places to understand how Donald Trump could become the U.S. president than McDowell County.” CNN called McDowell county residents “members of a forgotten tribe,” pointing to Trump’s share of the primary that yielded the candidate 90 percent of the Republican vote. But that figure amounted to just over 700 votes in actual numbers split between a pool of candidates narrowed by the primary’s timing.
CNN’s segment also featured another minor celebrity of the election cycle, a ninety-three-year-old gas station owner named Ed Shepard who appeared in a number of articles and essays distilling wisdom about coal country’s decline. Shepard became the living personification of this decline, often photographed in his cluttered gas station that appeared only to serve the press. His presence in “Trump Country” pieces was so ubiquitous that when a post-election segment by West Virginia Public Radio implored listeners to reach out to Trump voters, it included “dusty gas station” owners in its roll call.
McDowell County and other coal country counties also became the subject of a glossy New Yorker profile in October 2016. “In the Heart of Trump Country,” written by Larissa MacFarquhar, featured intimate interviews with West Virginia voters alongside bespoke images taken by Magnum photographer Alec Soth. Of one Trump voter, MacFarquhar writes, “He is not the Appalachian Trump supporter as many people elsewhere imagine him—ignorant, racist, appalled by the idea of a female President or a black President, suspicious and frightened of immigrants and Muslims, with a threatened job or no job at all, addicted to OxyContin.”
It’s revealing that MacFarquhar imagines her piece both within and outside the “Trump Country” genre. While noting its power to reduce voters to a series of caricatures and stereotypes, she nevertheless uses its momentum to tell what she presumes to be a more nuanced story using the same individuals to decode the rise of Trump to her audience. “Everywhere you go in West Virginia, there are wrecks of houses half-destroyed by fire or fallen in with age,” the text notes, under a photograph of a perfectly intact house with a only pair of children’s tricycles visible in its surroundings.
Her piece ends with a scene of an enthusiastic Trump supporter caring for neglected graves in local cemeteries including, we learn, a slave cemetery. This finale blithely implies that many Trump voters might not be the enemies of equality we’ve imagined them to be, but rather individuals trapped in limbo, stuck in communities of the barely living and the dead.
The media also used other Appalachian communities to explain Trump’s popularity. Roger Cohen filed a dispatch from eastern Kentucky for the New York Times in September 2016 that emphasized how Trump’s character resonated in down-andout coal country. “For anyone used to New York chatter, or for that matter London or Paris chatter, Kentucky is a through-the-looking-glass experience,” he writes. But in Lewis Carroll’s books, curious creatures exist in a world without time or direction, and things break that cannot be repaired.
For Cohen, what makes eastern Kentucky—a nine-hour drive from New York City—Wonderland isn’t its unfamiliar-tohim surroundings, but the issues that preoccupy many of the individuals he interviews. Many are, Cohen observes, “blue lives matter” supporters. Most are incensed by wage stagnation. But according to Cohen, these attitudes are different than those found in New York, where a white police officer strangled an African American man to death for selling cigarettes, or Paris, France, where police and citizens joined forces to destroy the temporary housing of Muslim migrants.
“Somewhere on the winding road from whites-only bathrooms to choose-your-gender bathrooms, many white, blue-collar Kentucky workers—and the state is 85.1% white—feel their country got lost,” he concludes. The voices of eastern Kentucky’s African American residents—whose numbers equal around 10 percent of the population of Paris—are absent from Cohen’s dispatch.
Momentum to visit and re-visit Appalachia to decode the ascendency of Trump also sustained itself through the publication of Hillbilly Elegy, and Vance’s consequent media ubiquity as chief analyzer of the white working class. The proliferation of Vance interviews featured in articles with titles such as “How hillbillies helped Trump shake politics” and “Trump: Tribune of poor white people” did little to complicate what had become an entrenched belief that Appalachia, and to a lesser extent the Rust Belt, was ground zero for Trumpism.
The website Daily Kos even began running predictions that treated Appalachia as one very large state, offering a graphic-heavy analysis of Trump’s domination in the region. Analysis and prediction of this sort, which the site continued to use even after the election, implied that Appalachia would be singularly responsible for a Trump victory.
Appalachia’s vote most assuredly helped Trump’s victory, but so did votes in Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. Trump also fared well in some congressional districts in blue states such as California and New York. Eastern Long Island and Staten Island voted for Trump by substantial margins. As pundits scrambled to determine what went so amiss in exit polling, the nation awoke on November 9 to the news that we were all now residents of Trump Country.
Pew Research reported that Trump, with his largest wins among white individuals without college degrees, fared well among all white voters. Trump’s popularity among white women received a great deal of press attention and often became the portal to broader discussions of race. Jesse Washington wrote that “one sentiment rang loudest in many African-American hearts and minds: the election shows where we really stand. Now the truth is plain to see, many said—the truth about how an uncomfortable percentage of white people view the concerns and lives of their black fellow citizens.”
Many African American writers were not surprised that so many white individuals stood ready to uphold a racialized status quo. Sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom wrote in the Atlantic that “Those of us who know our whites know one thing above all else: whiteness defends itself.” Others pushed back at this narrative, seeking more nuance in election statistics. Kelly Dittmar from the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers, commented, “I think this narrative about Clinton failing to win white women really overshadows the strong support she had among all women, and women of color in particular.” This optimistic interpretation of election results was not uncommon in postelection bloodletting. Many white individuals were aghast to see their progressive credentials questioned by proxy. Pundits previously content to cast an entire region as universally white and poor now demanded the absolution of nuance for themselves.
Generously used human interest stories from Appalachia freshened up older discourse. Producing, consuming, and commenting on stories about down-and-out white voters became a specific form of political engagement. As one commenter wrote on the Guardian’s videologue of McDowell County, “It is unhelpful, as this piece makes clear, to demonize or belittle those who voted for Trump out of desperation. Rather, we need to hear their desperation and help them.”
Trump’s inauguration, however, brought a new set of emotional politics to bear on the “Trump Country” genre, particularly among progressive individuals. Unrewarded by calls for empathy for the Trump voter, pundits pivoted as Trump’s brutal executive orders called for immigration bans, deportations, threats to healthcare, and the dismantling of environmental protections. Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos, for example, proclaimed that Americans should “be happy for coal miners losing their health insurance.” From New York Magazine to the New Republic, many progressive outlets ran pieces that expressed a performative wish, quite simply, for the deaths of millions of people.
It is possible to observe in the “Trump Country” genre a conversation between pre-and-post election commentaries. To interpret this conversation generously, one might suggest that the authors aren’t angry with Appalachia at large, but instead are striking back at what the seemingly endless array of pre-election “Trump Country” pieces told them to think or feel. Many are fed up that reasonable discussions of racism among Trump’s base keep getting deflected with copies of Hillbilly Elegy. Most writers appear exhausted by relentless election re-litigation that suggests #Berniewouldhavewon by citing his popularity in red states.
What these pieces lack, however, is an acknowledgment that this dynamic fits a longstanding pattern of “expert” analysis of Appalachia. Appalachians are the subjects of the “Trump Country” genre, not its creators. Indeed, the primary factor determining expertise in this and other eras is social and geographic distance from Appalachia.
“Trump Country” pieces share a willingness to use flawed representations of Appalachia to shore up narratives of an extreme “other America” that can be condemned or redeemed to suit one’s purpose. This is the region’s most conventional narrative, popularized for more than 150 years by individuals who enhanced their own prestige or economic fortunes by presenting Appalachia as a space filled with contradictions that only intelligent outside observers could see and act on.
Prolific Appalachian historian Ronald Eller wrote, “We know Appalachia exists because we need it to define what we are not. It is the ‘other America’ because the very idea of Appalachia convinces us of the righteousness of our own lives.” Appalachia is real, but it exists in our cultural imagination as a mythical place where uncomfortable truths become projected and compartmentalized.
To understand how Appalachians came to be defined as “the other” requires a trip back in time, but the strategies employed will be recognizable to modern eyes. People in power use and recycle these strategies not because it’s enjoyable to read lurid tales of a pathological “other”—although that certainly informs part of the allure—but because they are profitable. And if you trace a flawed narrative about Appalachia back far enough, you’ll often find someone making a profit.
What follows is the briefest slice of Appalachian history, from the Civil War to the Great Depression, to emphasize how the invention of the “other” went hand in hand with the desire to broker a rich land from poor people. This process unfolded with intent and malice, often to justify the most exploitative manifestations of capitalism in order to make them appear natural or necessary.
The belief that Appalachians represented a legibly distinct culture—what historian Henry Shapiro called a “strange and peculiar people”—formed just after the Civil War. Ways of life that existed in Appalachia before the Civil War were shaped by the forced migration of indigenous peoples and the resulting encroachment of white European settlement, along with mercantile networks carved out by distant land speculators.
After the war, speculators and industrialists became more strategic in their acquisition of land. Appalachia’s timberlands and mineral regions created eager competition among investors. Advances in rail transportation, in turn, facilitated more efficient movement of people and cargo to and from the region. Charles Dudley Warner, a travel writer and co-author with Mark Twain of The Gilded Age, wrote in 1888 of his travels in Kentucky, “I saw enough to comprehend why eager purchasers are buying forests and mining rights, why great companies, American or English, are planting themselves there and laying the foundations of cities, why gigantic railway corporations are straining every nerve to penetrate the mineral and forest hearts of the region.” He concluded, “It is a race for the prize.”
That prize, of course, was the accumulation of personal wealth in the name of modernization and progress. Although Appalachia’s first extractive industries also included copper and mica, coal quickly became the region’s most valuable resource, fueling much of the nation’s industrial expansion, from the rebuilding of railroads to the generation of power. Mineral agents purchased enormous tracts of land while at the same time sending scouts into coal-rich areas of the region to offer individual landowners quick cash for their subterranean mineral rights.
Coal companies often justified their expansion and the recruitment of local populations into their workforce as benevolent actions that would bring backward mountaineers into their own as equal participants in America’s expanding spirit of industry. Outsiders consumed the circumstances of “mountain life” in the form of travel writing or “local color” essays. Horace Kephart, a writer who lived among Appalachians in Tennessee during the 1910s, wrote that “in Far Appalachia, it seemed I might realize the past in the present, seeing with my own eyes what life must have been to my pioneer ancestors.” This projection also suited the needs of industrialists who benefited from narratives that suggested the people of the region should be “developed” and put to purpose.
The idea of Appalachia as a peculiar and untamed corner of America grew in popularity during the early twentieth century. This shared belief facilitated a number of experiments and outcomes within the region. Outside entrepreneurs pushed the limits of industry in the name of modernization, folklorists sought and collected “primitive” arts, missionaries brought religion to the “unchurched,” and industrialists drew from a vast pool of expendable labor.
According to Shapiro, these outcomes and their justifications formed a “secondary vision of Appalachia as an area in need of assistance from outside agencies.” Experts, he continued, “insisted vigorously on the vision of Appalachian ‘otherness’…and their discussions on the nature and meaning of Appalachian otherness were rarely made with reference to the real conditions of mountain life or the normal complexity of social and economic conditions which prevailed in the mountains as in every other section of the nation.”
Narratives of Appalachian “otherness” often worked too well. America at the turn of the twentieth century had little patience for upstarts who complicated notions of progress and national unity. Just as immigrants and African Americans in the Northeast faced hostility for diluting the social and cultural norms of elites, Appalachians were also regarded with an assimilationist gaze. Since the dilemmas of “otherness” were so often self-created and abstract—the real conditions of life in Appalachia or in immigrant neighborhoods did not reflect what elites envisioned them to be—they could not be solved. Appalachians were not uncivilized in the way that intellectuals imagined them to be, and the symptoms of their “backwardness”—favoring different religious practices, for example—did not constitute pressing social issues.
In order to reconcile these irreconcilable Americas, Appalachian “otherness” became a form of deviance. As Shapiro observed, outsiders “defined Appalachia as a discrete region and the mountaineers as a distinct people, and responded to abstract dilemmas which this ‘fact’ seemed to pose without asking whether it was a ‘true’ fact, or indeed whether it was still a true fact in 1920 as it might have been in 1900 or 1870.”
For industrialists, the national perception of Appalachia as a blighted and unnatural place aided their economic expansion. The most degraded of all Appalachians were those who, by chance or intent, had not taken their rightful place in the region’s mines and mills. One community located near the Tug River along the West Virginia-Kentucky border came to be synonymous with deviance of the highest order. During a period of rapid industrial expansion, the “primitive” ways of the Tug River Valley ceased to be innocent or quaint and instead became sinister and lethal.
Not far from my home is Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, a place where visitors can dig into “feudin’ fried chicken” at the Hatfield-McCoy Dinner Show, a glitzy comedic musical featuring down-home Southern fixins. The Hatfield-McCoy feud remains one of the most legendary moments in Appalachian history. This nineteenth-century epic family rivalry between the West Virginian Hatfields and the Kentuckian McCoys has served as the basis for films, cartoons, musicals, documentaries, historical fiction, and reality television shows. There’s even a reference to the feud in the online role-playing game World of Warcraft. A cottage industry of Hatfield-McCoy tourism is popular in Appalachia and one needs not travel to Kentucky or West Virginia to consume the Hatfield-McCoy spectacle. Much like fixins at the Hatfield-McCoy Dinner Show, this cultural fare is all-you-can-eat.
Popular interpretations of the feud emphasize idiosyncratic and primitive aspects of mountain culture: log cabins, bonnets and overalls, impenetrable accents, moonshine, fiddles, and banjos. The tourism industry presents the Hatfields and McCoys, and their various analogues, as patriarchal, lawless, prone to violence, uncivilized, stubborn, barely educated or articulate, highly isolated, and alarmingly impoverished. Even Vance claims, by way of explaining his family dynamics, that he is a descendent. “If you’re familiar with the famous Hatfield-McCoy family feud back in the 1860s, ‘70s, and ‘80s in the United States, my family was an integral part of that,” he writes.
In our present day, the Hatfield-McCoy feud feels folksy and humorous. We indulge in the mildest of subversive impulses by enjoying exaggerated but harmless representations of anarchy and lawlessness. But make no mistake, the feud was a real event that occurred in Appalachia at the turn of the twentieth century. Today, however, it is also a story that reflects a number of abstract dilemmas imposed on the region and demonstrates just how consumable lurid stories of Appalachian folkways can be. To spoil the plot somewhat, the Hatfield-McCoy feud is more than just a legendary example of bad blood. It is also a tale of what happened when coarse representations of an untamed “other” boomeranged back to the region.
In the most basic interpretation of the conflict, two families separated by Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River carried home Civil Warera rivalries that spiraled into a feud that lasted for the better part of twelve years. Shortly after the war ended, a former Union soldier on the McCoy side was murdered, presumably at the hands of former Confederate soldiers on the Hatfield side. Thus the feud began, with periods of dormancy interrupted by livestock theft, murder, and unwise and doomed romances between younger members of the Hatfield and McCoy families.
Local law enforcement grew tired of the families’ tit-for-tat and took to the mountains to round up what they described as a community at war. Law enforcement captured members of both families, and in 1889, the court secured the conviction of several members of the Hatfield family for murders connected to an 1888 massacre. National newspapers and curious journalists followed the feud, some traveling to the region in the hope of meeting depraved and lawless mountaineers engaging in old fashioned frontier justice. Patriarch “Devil” Anse Hatfield appeared often in menacing sketches and photographs posing with rifles, and by many accounts enjoyed his celebrity. Local developers, politicians, and business people, however, did not.
The feud provided sensational material for individuals preaching the gospel of Appalachian “otherness.” In the late-1880s, New York reporter T.C. Crawford traveled to Appalachia—which he called “Murderland”—to obtain material for a book about the feud published in 1889 as An American Vendetta: A Story of Barbarism in the United States. According to Crawford, “barbaric mountaineers” populated Appalachia, a place where a primitive race of people lived in “a blood-stained wilderness” that was “as remote as Central Africa.”
Crawford’s dispatches inspired a number of fictional accounts of blood-feuds in Appalachia, including Harvard writer John Fox, Jr.’s A Cumberland Vendetta in 1895. Fox describes his feuding protagonist as “a dreamy-looking little fellow, and one may easily find his like throughout the Cumberland—paler than his fellows from staying indoors, with half-haunted face, and eyes that are deeply pathetic when not cunning…he suffered to do his pleasure—nothing, or much that is strange without comment.”
Academics also offered their analysis of Appalachia’s primitive culture by dissecting the Hatfield-McCoy spectacle. In 1901 the University of Chicago’s S.S. MacClintock chronicled the feud in the American Journal of Sociology. After noting that “blood-revenges” are nonexistent in civilized society, MacClintock writes, “The proportion of murder to other crimes in the mountains is strikingly large. Stealing is rare, killing is common.” In MacClintock’s learned opinion, the causes of the feud are attributable to primitive kinship societies in Appalachia, the sensitivities of mountaineers, and their sheer idleness. “There are so few industries and responsibilities of any kind that even a feud is a relief from the awful monotony,” he argues. He was just one in a cohort of sad academics who wrote paper after paper trying to unlock the secrets of the universe by revealing that rural people sometimes steal livestock and hate their neighbors.
We can’t leave out locals from this group of profiteers as well. As historian Altina L. Waller notes, local businessmen and politicians benefitted from the idea that modern employment and industry were just what the region needed to clean up its act. Through their efforts to bring state “justice” to the Tug River Valley—to make the region seem more hospitable to outside developers—up-and-comers often exacerbated tensions, even during periods when the families were at peace. Today, Appalachians are free to profit off the feud through tourism, but only if we present it through the most clichéd of regional hillbilly stereotypes.
Intellectuals like MacClintock looked to other solutions when the triumph of law and order in the valley proved to be short-lived. One popular solution was simply capitalism. If Appalachians could be tamed and put to industrial purpose, these theories suggested, then they might be spared the bloodshed, vice, and moral degeneracy natural to their primitive existence. This was music to the ears of developers, who justified economic expansion by contending that modern employment would bring order and harmony to the mountains and save mountaineers from their own worst impulses in the process.
A desire to “tame” Appalachians for the benefit of industry often lurked behind twentieth-century theories of Appalachian “otherness.” Although industrialists deployed region-specific narratives to justify the development of Appalachia, widely held attitudes about the social position of the poor aided them in this. Late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Social Darwinism, for example, posited that wealth and privilege fell naturally to those who most deserved them and that social differences between the rich and the poor reflected differences in their innate abilities.
The poor might improve their station through hard work and industry, but those of greater means owed them nothing in this struggle. This theory befit a world enthralled by the free market and the competitive accumulation of capital. Many industrialists felt little responsibility to their workforce, often believing that their social assistance would encourage an undesirable overpopulation of the lower classes.
By contrast, some industrialists were paternalistic in their attitudes toward the working poor who labored in their factories, mines, and mills. Industrialists demanded obedience from their workers, much like children, and in return showed their benevolence in the form of housing, entertainment, or more comfortable working conditions. What these two social attitudes shared was the belief that power and capital came naturally to those of greater ability and that safe working conditions and other residual benefits of labor were a sign of their generosity, not the obligations of a good and moral business.
In Appalachia, narratives that presented mountaineers as helpless and otherwise doomed without industrial purpose abounded. Coal barons credited their industry with bringing order and harmony to an uncivilized place, but what actually came to the mountains was a vast system of economic exploitation, facilitated through violence and malice by both outside developers and compliant local elites. The company town became emblematic of this new industrial order. Miners and other coal workers in West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and southwestern Virginia—Appalachia’s historic coal fields—often lived in privately owned towns, which grew to outnumber independent and unincorporated communities.
In addition to recruiting local mountaineers, coal companies imported labor from other parts of the United States. African American miners were common in Appalachia at this time, 20 to 50 percent of the workforce. Recent European immigrants, particularly from Italy and Poland, also populated the coal fields. In coal camps and company towns, the nation’s accumulated “others” worked and lived in a coercive environment designed, as one coal operator explained, “to have men concentrated so as to have proper supervision over them, to better control them in times of labor agitation and threatened strikes.”
Proper supervision meant armed security, often drafted from private detective agencies and local law enforcement. As you might imagine, it proved difficult to convince workers to risk their lives daily in the dark holes of the earth for almost no money. Bribing local law enforcement and politicians to maintain coercive practices became part of the cost of doing business for coal companies. Political corruption flourished in the coal fields. In West Virginia, Logan County sheriff Don Chafin made $50,000 a year in his prime in kickbacks from the Logan County Coal Operators Association.
Coal companies exhibited a distinctly violent hysteria toward organized labor and suppressed union agitation by any means available. In 1912, for example, private detectives attempted to curtail a strike by repeatedly terrorizing the wives and children of miners in the Paint Creek-Cabin Creek area of West Virginia with machine gun fire. For many miners, however, unionization was a matter of life and death. One could die in the mines or march, and many chose to march. Mary “Mother” Jones, who cofounded the Industrial Workers of the World, said of West Virginia, “The story of coal is always the same. It is a dark story. For a second’s more sunlight, men must fight like tigers. For the privilege of seeing the color of their children’s eyes by the light of the sun, fathers must fight as beasts of the jungle.”
Labor agitation in West Virginia is immortalized in many songs and union anthems. “Law in the West Virginia Hills,” written around 1912, contains a verse that describes the experience of watching private detectives beat pregnant women to the point of miscarriage. “My sister saw these cruelties,” the singer explains, “as they terrorized the town. She saw them murder unborn babies and kick these helpless women down.” This is what martial law looked like in the coal fields, and it came often. Using nonunionized labor gave southern West Virginian coal companies a competitive market advantage over unionized mines and made their West Virginian coal fields frequent targets for efforts to expand the United Mine Workers of America. Each campaign brought bloodshed, but none loom larger than the uprisings of 1920 and 1921 that culminated in the Battle of Blair Mountain, the final chapter of West Virginia’s mine wars.
In 1920, a group of private detectives employed by the Baldwin-Felts Agency on behalf of the Stone Mountain Coal Company traveled to Matewan, West Virginia, to evict the families of miners from their company housing after they had attempted to join the union, a common union-busting tactic. Unlike their counterparts in the notoriously corrupt Logan County, the miners in Matewan, in Mingo County, had a number of important allies. One of these was Mingo County police chief Sid Hatfield, whom journalist Hamilton Nolan recently memorialized as “a strongly pro-union man who was also a bit of a psycho killer.”
Hatfield, a legendary figure sometimes called the “Terror of the Tug,” secured arrest warrants for the crew of Baldwin-Felts agents when they couldn’t produce eviction notices, and he deputized a number of local miners to help him keep the peace. Not surprisingly, arming angry miners as a peacekeeping strategy did not work. Instead it led to a spectacular gunfight in downtown Matewan that killed Albert and Lee Felts, the villainous brothers who helped run the detective agency, along with five other private detectives. Hatfield’s reputation became outsized, a mountain David in a world of Goliaths. While awaiting trial for the murder of Albert Felts, Hatfield shot a silent film for the United Mine Workers of America in which he played himself in a re-enactment of the gunfight.
Despite being acquitted on the murder charge, Hatfield ultimately proved to be vulnerable. In 1921, Thomas Felts, aiming to avenge his brothers’ deaths, pressured McDowell County officials to indict Hatfield on charges stemming from a year-old incident. When Hatfield appeared for the trial on August 1, Baldwin-Felts agents murdered him on the courthouse steps.
A hero was dead and tensions in the coal fields reached a fever pitch. The United Mine Workers had planned a demonstration, but organizers wondered if it was wise to sponsor industrial action in such a fraught environment. Mother Jones, it appears, had the privilege of the deciding vote. The United Mine Workers rallied at the capitol in Charleston, presenting a list of demands to the governor. A week later the governor refused all union demands and coal country went to war.
By the end of August, more than 13,000 individuals stood ready to take whatever form of justice most satisfied them from the West Virginian coal fields. For some, it was the liberation of miners from economic exploitation through union solidarity. For others, it was revenge: one of the most popular songs hummed in the assembled crowds was a bright little anthem about murdering Don Chafin, set to the tune of union hymn “Solidarity Forever.”
It was the most significant labor uprising in United States history and the largest show of armed resistance in America since the Civil War. The assembled crowds included doctors, lawyers, women, farmers, children, business owners, and teachers. Their number included around 2,000 African American men and women, some who were born into slavery like George Echols who said, “I was raised a slave. My master and mistress called me and I answered, and I know the time when I was a slave, and I felt just like we feel now.” Many assembled wore red bandanas around their neck, the only insignia available, leading their enemies to call them “rednecks.” One miner wrote, “I call it a darn solid mass of different colors and tribes, blended together, woven, bound, interlocked, tongued and grooved and glued together in one body.”
This is how I prefer to remember the Battle of Blair Mountain. There was, of course, a battle; a weeklong campaign during which miners fought valiantly against a private army that the National Rifle Association would later praise for “using every type of firearm produced in the United States.” Its arsenal included not only firearms, but also gas explosives and aerial bombs deployed by private planes. But not even Mother Jones herself could call back the miners, who had to be driven off the mountain by federal troops. I have no claim of kinship to this story, but I imagine it often, the unafraid and justice-seeking united in one body snaking through the mountains to reclaim themselves. “How do you come to Mingo?” the miners’ scouts asked, to identify their allies. “I come creeping,” came the answer. Like vines they went, slow and purposeful and of the earth, fed at long-last on sunlight.
There are a number of different ways to evaluate the Battle of Blair Mountain and what it meant to West Virginia and Appalachia, organized labor, and the larger body of exploited workers in the United States. On a practical level, the battle and the violent suppression that followed weakened the United Mine Workers of America in West Virginia. One conventional historical narrative is that organized labor in West Virginia languished until Franklin Roosevelt’s more labor-friendly administration set about creating pro-union legislation.
But there’s another side to this story, one told through the hysterical reactions of the coal industry and its political allies at the mere mention of the Battle of Blair Mountain. By the 1930s, the coal industry had spent sixty years crafting the story of Appalachia as a region and of Appalachians primed for their benevolent development. When the people tried to reclaim their narrative and write their own history, all hell broke loose.
In 1935, the government proposed an ambitious plan to commission a history for every state, written by ordinary men and women. The idea behind what became the Federal Writers’ Project’s American Guide Series was New Deal logic through and through. The project would put unemployed men and women to work, giving them relief from the Depression, and would use their labor to create something for the public good. In a time of dramatic social upheaval, many Americans—including those in the White House—felt an urgency to repurpose history to show the nation its populist roots. This, of course, was a political strategy that suited the Democrats’ new vision for America, but it was also attuned to a deeper social need to explore a shared past during a moment when many were overcome with feelings of isolation.
The government envisioned the American Guide Series, as one Federal Writers’ Project official observed, as a “history of the whole people…in which the people are historians as well as the history, telling their own stories in their own words—Everyman’s history, for Everyman to read.” In both theory and practice, the series raised uncomfortable questions about who constituted “the whole people” and what aspects of a “people’s history” should be remembered. Federal and state officials censored the contributions of local authors heavily, actions that resulted in power struggles and political crises in Appalachia, particularly in West Virginia.
West Virginia’s history of radical labor uprising proved to be a source of consternation for both Federal Writers’ Project officials and state leaders. Left in the hands of local politicians, the West Virginia guidebook would have been a bland piece of coal industry public relations. As historian Jerry Thomas writes, “The leadership of both major political parties in West Virginia had long clung to the notion that organized labor, especially among miners, was a deadly conspiracy to be ignored publically and suppressed privately. Legitimizing labor by acknowledging its importance along with heroes of the frontier and the Civil War was a bitter pill for the established political community to swallow.”
There are few historical events that I wish I could have witnessed firsthand, but on that short list is the moment that Homer Holt, West Virginia’s anti-union governor, learned that his state’s history would be compiled by Bruce Crawford, the former editor of a left-wing union newspaper who was once shot while providing aid to striking miners and who called for a “producers’ dictatorship” to overthrow the elite. Crawford took over the direction of the West Virginia Federal Writers’ Project in 1938, after the first version of the state guide was nearly complete, and his conflicts with Holt became the stuff of local legend. (One of the great joys of writing this book was discovering that Bruce Crawford cut his teeth publishing a leftist newspaper in Norton, Virginia, where my people are from. It moves me that Crawford, however indirectly, fought for my family.)
Opponents of organized labor saw in Crawford’s guidebook the potential to indulge “every tint and taint of radicalism.” One Republican asked if the schoolhouses of West Virginia would be painted “not the red of the Red, White, and Blue…but the ‘red’ of the revolutionary?” Holt refused to authorize the publication of any guidebook written under Crawford, calling his re-written manuscript “propaganda from start to finish.” In other words, the history of the people, in Holt’s view, did not include the mine wars, labor agitation, or industrialists murdering Black workers with impunity through silicosis. Mother Jones never came to West Virginia, Blair Mountain never happened, and coal camps were as clean as a pin and populated only by whites.
Holt attempted to have Crawford dismissed and censured, and the manuscript languished until 1940, when Holt lost his reelection to his rival Matthew Neely. The federal government and its proxies at Oxford University Press published a mostly un-sanitized version of the book—West Virginia: A Guide to the Mountain State—in 1941 with the new governor’s approval. It included a separate essay on organized labor in the state, as intended.
“The workmen’s struggle in West Virginia for better working conditions and the right to organize has been a long one and, in the mining industry particularly, one marked by bitter conflict, violence, and tragic incident,” it began with purpose that yes, in retrospect, was a bit radical. My favorite part of the chapter is not the text itself, but the somewhat out of place and whimsical sketch of an apple tree that concludes it. It reminds me of Helen Lewis, an elder Appalachian activist who wants to reclaim former mining land with apple orchards.
It’s tempting to conclude this story with that sentimental image. Believe me, there are people in Appalachia reading this, thinking, “Oh Helen, you are too pure for this world,” and I hate to wreck that with pettiness. But I will. As governor, Holt had established an agency called the State Publicity Committee, which became an instrument of the coal industry. Public relations propaganda about how positively wonderful the coal industry was flowed through the agency with the governor’s seal of approval. But when Holt lost his reelection bid, the Publicity Committee got a new director. That man was Bruce Crawford.
The battle to control the narratives of Appalachia went through many phases between the Civil War and the Great Depression, but we see a number of similar themes. Chief among them is the tendency of those in power to represent rank-and-file Appalachians as helpless and in need of intervention to earn their place in the story of American progress. In the period of rapid industrial expansion, this outlook facilitated the coercion of poor Appalachian workers into an exploitative system of labor and created powerful and prevalent narratives of Appalachian “otherness.”
When the national narrative of progress shifted during the Great Depression to emphasize the contributions of the worker, the powerful reacted with hostility. They attempted to censor meaningful episodes of Appalachian history that suggested its people had more than earned their belonging and had, in fact, instigated positive social change in their own right. The “Trump Country” genre borrows the worst aspects of both impulses. The press often used the perceived helplessness of Appalachians to naturalize a specific political choice and ignored the voices and stories of those attempting to call a different outcome into being.
Before moving on to see how this battle played out in more recent history, let’s check in with West Virginia’s coal country one last time. Was McDowell County “Trump County” in the way that the media purported? Using gritty black and white photographs, the Huffington Post offered McDowell County as a “glimpse at the America that voted Trump into office.” The use of the phrase “the America” to set Appalachia apart from the places inhabited by the article’s presumed audience is telling; Appalachians, of course, don’t need an invitation from flagship outlets to take a look at their surroundings. A CBS segment on McDowell County hosted by Ted Koppel concurred with the Huffington Post: “McDowell County was, unambiguously, Trump Country.”
In the 2016 presidential election, McDowell County gave Donald Trump 4,614 votes and Hillary Clinton 1,429. The election rolls indicate that there are 17,508 registered voters in the county, although the actual number in circulation is likely lower. Nevertheless, Trump won McDowell County during an election that had a historically low voter turnout for the county. If we use reported numbers we find that only 27 percent of McDowell County voters supported Trump.
Bo Copley, a coal country celebrity after his tense encounter with Hillary Clinton, reported to CNN’s Van Jones after the election that Clinton’s position on the future of coal mining was irrelevant. He was never going to support a “pro-abortion” candidate because of his religious beliefs, a very common position among conservatives nationwide. And Ed Shepard, the elderly gas station attendant regarded as a source of regional wisdom by many outlets? He simply didn’t vote. “I didn’t vote in this election. I see no meaning of this. Whoever goes to the White House will do whatever he/she wants to do and won’t give a damn about us,” he told the Huffington Post.
If it is appropriate to label a small but visible subgroup as unambiguously representative of 25 million people inhabiting a geographic region spanning over 700,000 square miles, then we should ask a number of questions. Where were the “Bernie Country” pieces about Appalachia? There are more people in Appalachia who identify as African American than Scots-Irish, so where were the essays that dove into the complex negotiations of Appalachian-ness and blackness through the lens of the election? I associate contemporary eastern Kentucky with grassroots prison abolition, so where were the essays about how a presumed Trump victory would imperil that work? West Virginia has the highest concentration of transgender teenagers in the country, so why didn’t anyone examine this facet of “Trump Country” and how the election might reverberate in their lives? In April, filmmakers in West Virginia hosted the fourth Appalachian Queer Film Festival. How did that play out at the close of Trump’s first one hundred days in office?
Many things about Appalachia may be true simultaneously. The support for Trump may be real, too strong for my comfort, and it may also be true that there are many who hoped and still hope for a different outcome. It might be true that much of the region is overwhelmingly white, but it is also true that there are few towns or cities in Appalachia without a visible African American or Latino community. Constructions of the region as “all-white” to satisfy a particular fetish about the white working class maliciously erase individuals whose lives also matter.
To be sure, there are many stories about Trump and Appalachia that can and must be told, they’re just not the ones that individuals with powerful platforms want to tell. As Jessica Wilkerson observes, “Ignoring or erasing stories of community organizing and coalition building makes it easier to paint Appalachians as perpetual victims of economic decline or hypocrites who receive government aid without reciprocity.”
How does life go on in “Trump Country” for those of us who never lived in “Trump Country” to begin with? It goes on much the same as it always did. For me, I will try to build power with likeminded individuals and challenge the institutions that harm us. I won’t do that by reaching across political divides that are far more complicated here than you can image. I’ll do it by exercising the basic principles of mutual aid and community defense. The people of Appalachia have never needed empathy; what we need is solidarity, real and true, which comes from understanding that the harm done to me is connected to the harm done to you.
bell hooks writes that “we will not change or convert folks without extending the forgiveness…that is essential for the building of communities of solidarity.” I admit this election has caused setbacks for me on this path of grace. But in my world, it is not immaterial to me as someone who wishes to achieve specific outcomes that, for example, a “landslide” victory of 90 percent of the vote represents, in some places, fewer than one thousand people. It is not immaterial to me that many saw a different way forward. And it is not immaterial to me that individuals with power and capital still subject us, in our pain, to the sense of entitlement that allows even the most ambiguous of outcomes to be presented as a concise narrative, richly rewarding, satisfying to everyone but us.
Entitlement. It is, I think, the perfect word to bear in mind as the next chapter unfolds. Elegy is another. In a former life, I used to be a translator. It was, as it turns out, a completely useless profession, but it did allow me to spend several years reading poetry. While reading Greek poetry, my professors warned us to be careful of the double meaning of elegies; they were, it seems, often written as political propaganda.