What people did talk about around the bar at Pappy’s was sex, gossip, and mining. A retired miner at the bar toasted me as I hoisted a bottle of Yuengling, Pennsylvania’s finest, and offered to get me up to speed.
“Around here, you got gas wells and you got coal mines,” he said. “More than a third work in the mines. I’ve watched it all go to hell. Bob Murray [the coal magnate and CEO of Murray Energy]—he don’t give a shit about the workers. It’s, ‘Wink wink, get the coal out and be safe. I ain’t paying you shit, though.’ He owns mines here, some in Utah. He’s trying to break the union. When the contracts come up, he won’t budge. He shuts down the mines for one year and a day. Then he opens them back up with nonunion labor at lower pay. He just hires all new workers. Jobs down in the mine used to be $35 or $38 an hour, now it’s $25. The union used to be strong, but not anymore.”
A younger, heavier man in a backward Browns cap chimed in from the other end of the bar. “You know who you should talk to, is my roommate, Stanley,” he said. “He’s an old-timer. Used to vote Democrat, now he’s with Trump. I am, too. Big time. He’s having his chemo today, but maybe we can all meet tomorrow.”
The following morning, I visited John Beatty and his roommate Stanley Stockdale at their trailer home located high in the green hills outside Carmichaels. The air smelled of stale cigarettes, the walls were decorated with paintings of Indians. A dozen porcelain eagles crowded a cabinet next to a wide-screen television. The men were a bit of an Odd Couple: Stockdale, sixty-nine, taciturn, wiry, and neat in a button down tucked into his jeans. Beatty, twenty years younger, chatty, fat, a loose Cleveland Browns jersey hanging off his frame, which was still massive after losing a hundred pounds following a heart attack. Stockdale, though trim, is no healthier. He wheezes from thirty-three years in the mines, and has stage-four cancer of the lungs and brain.
Beatty has a palpable admiration and love for his dying friend. When I’d met him at Pappy’s, he gushed like a proud son that Stockdale knew as much about mining as anyone in the county. “When Stanley started,” he said, “they still used canaries to test the oxygen. They chose canaries because they have such a tiny lung capacity. If they dropped over, it meant methane was eating up the oxygen. It meant get out of there, quick.”
Beatty looked on with pride the next afternoon, as Stockdale talked about trucking and mining, and the switch from voting Democrat to voting Trump.
“My family is from right here, a long ways back. They were farmers, all the way up and down the ladder. I was the youngest of seven. Growing up, it was a situation where you did what you had to do, and you busted your ass doing it. I started working in the womb. We had a little dairy farm, grew our own beef. It was milking cows, work the hay, more hay. A whole bunch of hay [laughs]. I was usually up and on the roll about six in the morning. That was year round. I didn’t like farm work.
“In the ’60s, I moved to Detroit and got married. Drove trucks, long-haul semis, for ten years. Driving trucks is tough on a marriage, but the major problem was the bitch couldn’t keep her panties on. We divorced. I came back here, filled out an application for the mines. Got hired by Consol. Back then they were all union jobs. I bought this place in the early ’70s. The land is mine clear down to the wood line.
“Miners worked swing shifts back then. One week, you’d be on days, the next week afternoons, the third week, you’d be on graveyard. That’s how it worked. It was rough. You wouldn’t any more get used to this shift than you were onto the next shift. You had trouble adapting, especially coming off midnights, even if it was always dark down there anyway. I never knew why they did it that way, but that’s the way they did it. After a certain amount of time, you could bid for jobs that were steady shift.
“We’d follow the machines and bolt the roof and put the coal in the scoops, ten feet at a time. Once an area was drilled out, you moved to the next one—cut, dig, bolt—then went right back to the first one and started all over again. Ten more feet. That’s not even safe, ten feet, but it’s safer than going further than ten feet. I got covered up in coal twice. The worse one, I was bolting the roof in an area that had a loose top. We’d bolt only every four feet. I went to drill a hole and when I sank the bit, the top splintered and a big chunk come down on me. That’s when I screwed up my back, my leg, my neck. I was out of work about six weeks. Not long enough. I was still in pain. But the company, it was, like, ‘When are you coming back to work?’”
John interrupted, saying, “And that was in a union mine. Now there are union and nonunion mines. My nephew works for a Bailey mine, which is nonunion. He makes big money hourly, but the benefits suck. That’s why everybody wants to be union. He got a four-dollar pay cut, and is only working four days a week. It’s either that, or you have no job. Years ago, there was a steady medium.”
Stanley shook his head in agreement. He continued: “Years ago, you went to work at eight o’clock in the morning and you worked until four o’clock that afternoon, and you come home, and went back to the same situation. And every ten days you swung shifts. There’s no comparison to what there was then. I got out in 2010 making a union rate, $60-plus an hour. But a lot of guys are still working, trying to make that, and there’s no way they’re going to. At Bailey, they’re working four days a week, if they’re lucky, making $25 or $30 an hour. In my situation, I’m retired. I have my pension, and I have my Social Security. I’m basically set. But what about all these other people struggling?
“I’m originally a Democrat, but they’ve changed so drastically. They don’t support solid fuels. That’s why the coal mines are shutting down. There’s no market there for the coal, so, shut it down. And it just keeps going on and on and getting deeper and deeper. A lot of coal miners went elsewhere. We’ve had several coal mines close down. Not just one or two. This economy went from being … lower middle class, to being basically a depressed area. The coal industry in this area meant absolutely everything. Probably seventy-five percent of this area had an affiliation with the coal industry.”
Beatty cut in again: “I’ve heard the term ‘dumb coal miner’ many times in my life. Each time, it agitates me. We’re the little men, understand, we live in this little community, we’re rural, we’re out in the woods, we’re not to be heard. We don’t have a voice, okay? Well, we do. I’m tired of watching my friends and family suffer, listening to the Democrats make coal the enemy. I’m telling you, it’s all Obama’s doing. Until he took office, coal around here was thriving. My whole family was involved with the coal industry. My uncle was boss in a mine. His wife worked as a secretary. Both their kids got out of high school and went right into mining. And then you look at Obama on television—you know what I am saying? When you have no concerns about your fellow man…. This is why I never talk about this kind of stuff when I’m drinking. Because it agitates the hell out of me. If Obama cared a bit, he would look at this area. Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Indiana, even parts of Ohio. It’s gone. Probably never will come back. I really believe that Donald Trump is the answer. Never in my lifetime have I felt like this about a candidate. I believe he gets into office and says, ‘Okay, now let’s start thinking about the little guy. All you politicians have your pockets padded, let’s worry about the little man… .’
“I love Donald Trump’s thoughts on a lot of different things. I’m not a bigot, but I like the idea of sealing our borders. I’m tired of calling somewhere and I’m talking to Mohammad Mohaqa, who has no idea, who sounds like he has a mouth full of marbles, and my cousin is out of work. That doesn’t make sense to me. We’re Americans. I understand that we live in a democracy. I’m a very educated man. I’m of above-average intelligence. But like I said, my cousin’s out of work. He’s got a wife and three kids he can’t feed right now. They are on welfare, getting food stamps. He’s worked his whole life. It makes no sense. America first. Punish companies moving the jobs.
“In the beginning, I thought, ‘Trump, this guy is an asshole.’ He’s arrogant and crass, I’ll
give you that. Women don’t like him much, other than the ones that sleep with him. I won’t call him a bigot, but he’s not too far from it. But I believe the way that he thinks can do what has to be done. People think, ‘Okay, this is enough of my son not having a job because Mohammad has one. That’s enough of that.’ I’m not against any foreign people, other than terrorists, obviously. But this is America. We have veterans on our streets. When you have a war veteran sleeping on cardboard, somebody dropped the ball. I don’t believe Trump will allow that to happen any more, I really don’t. I believe if he takes office, the economy is going to change. My biggest and only concern with him is he may create World War III.
“Instead of jobs around here, you got a lot of drugs. Used to be, people smoked some weed. We never got the crack epidemic like in Cleveland. Since this economy hit bottom, there’s dope heads, heroin. Shooting it. People taking Xanny bars. One of my buddies found his kid with a needle hanging out of his arm, dead. From Fayette County all the way to Washington County. It would help if the coal mines started reopening and people could get jobs again, instead of loitering and sitting around. It becomes boring to anybody. A lot of people depend on that type of motivation. You know, ‘Oh, man. I’m making $30 an hour. Let me get up and go to work.’ I think the community would go back to the right path it was on, when we were in the coal mine.
“A mine is like a big family. Coal miners care about each other. Everybody loves everybody. I make homemade meatloaf that he loves still to this day.” He smiled and shook a finger at Stanley. “I used to give it to him to make a couple sandwiches to put in his bucket, to take to the mine. Look, he’s laughing already!” Both men broke out laughing. “Before lunchtime, he’d put his bucket on the charging station while he was out doing his thing. And everybody would be like, ‘Sniff, sniff, what is that going on down there?’ And he’d say, ‘Get away from my lunch!’ Those charging stations get really warm, like a stove. They’ll heat your lunch. If you get cold down there, and you can get around one of them and work for a couple hours, life is good.”
* * *
On the way back to Pittsburgh, I stopped in at the oldest miner’s bar in Carmichaels, Serb’s Red Star. The Serbian immigrant who opened the place in 1965, known affectionately as “Serb,” still tends bar most days and keeps up traditions that make the Red Star the Old McSorley’s of Greene County—a quieter, all-male alternative to the coed, raunchy badinage at Pappy’s, whose bartender described Serb’s as “where the old codgers get together and hang out.” Specifically, old codgers who vote Democrat. Serb runs a Democratic bar and still does. If there were a groundswell of Democratic support for Trump, he’d know.
But Serb wasn’t in. “Out of town with his wife for a wedding,” said the bartender, “Tiggie” Teegarden, a bearded, fit, and gruff middle-aged man in a Harley-Davidson shirt and a Pirates cap. “It’s a shame you missed him,” he said, cracking me a Yuengling. At the bar, a few men sullenly nursed beers and whiskeys. In one corner, someone played an old electronic poker game; in another, a tribe of plains Indians galloped across a muted TV tuned to the Western Channel. Above the bar hung a yellowed campaign poster for Bill DeWeese, a longtime regular and ex-House Speaker whose career in Pennsylvania politics ended on a raft of indictments for conflict of interest, theft, and criminal conspiracy. Or, as Tiggie put it with a shrug, “No worse than anybody else done.”
I asked if any of Serb’s regulars talked about voting for Trump.
“Not in here, they know better,” he said. “But in Greene County, sure, there’s been a lot of Dems switching for Trump, and some the other way around. A lot of party switching. I know a few of them. I’m not tempted. Trump wants to talk trade. He’s blowing smoke. He just wants to badmouth everyone. It’s pretty bad when the Pope comes out and says he doesn’t like you. That’s pretty bad.
“No [Democratic leaders] are for coal, though. They don’t wanna touch it. The EPA comes up with all these goofy rules. They want to shut down all the power plants. Now, the big companies, like Alfa Natural Resources, what I work for, and Patriot, and Berch, they all want to take away the pension plans we were promised. Where will this place be? Alfa wants to take our vacation. Cut wages by six dollars. Do away with health and pensions. They want to hire contractors. It’s all about profit. They’re filing for bankruptcy. Well, who did that? Them guys did, the bosses. The workers did their jobs. We put the coal in the trains. I’ve worked for Alfa 37 years. Finished high school, then into the mines.”
Teegarden went over to an old refrigerator in a small room behind the bar and brought back a jar. On a paper plate, he dumped out a pile of pickled cucumbers and onions slathered in balsamic vinegar. “The recipe called for normal oil, but these are pretty good,” he said, handing me a fork.
He continued, “The natural gas boom is gone. We had gas rigs all over the place. All these people that made money off gas moved on. They shut ‘em down when the price went down. All the gas companies that was here—very few people from Greene County got jobs. Halliburton brought Mexicans in from Texas, Oklahoma. You might have got a security guard job. Some of them hired a couple people. But they didn’t train ‘em. There was no proper safety. One local boy, a star athlete at the high school, a running back, got his head taken off. Rocky Doman. He was working on a well, just got outta high school. Another boy got killed on out toward Mount Morris. The explosion blew up everything around it. They could barely find the boy. That’s how bad it was. The company wouldn’t even let the DEP [Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection] come in. It was four days before they let the federal government in. They don’t want gas unionized like coal is.
“People out that way [in D.C., in New York] think we’re dirtying the economy. That is our economy. Without the coal mines, we don’t have no economy. They’re closing stores left and right. They just closed the Kmart and the Sears in Uniontown. The only thing helping is gas prices are down. People can afford to drive out of county to work. If prices go up, they’re gonna stay right here. All you’re gonna have is ghost towns. Already do. Nimocal used to boom. Rice’s Landing used to boom. Kids here, they don’t work. Nothing here for ‘em. They’re going into the military. Or they’re on dope. There’s drugs, big time. Heroin overdoses. Crack. Started eight to ten years ago. In West Virginia, it’s even worse.”
West Virginia is where I was headed. I asked Teegarden if there’s a town in the nearby Mountain State he’d recommend for talking coal and Trump. A man at the bar murmured, “All of ‘em.” He was right. The state’s central coal counties had for months polled the highest levels of Trump support in the country, reflective of the candidate’s promise to start “winning again” with coal. His “dig, baby, dig” mantra marked a sharp reversal for Trump, even by the “nothing matters” standards of his campaign. In December 2009, Trump signed a letter urging President Obama to take bold climate action “to avoid catastrophic and irreversible consequences for humanity and our planet.” In April 2016, the idea that he ever cared about climate change was as fantastical as the new golden age he was promising the people of Appalachia.
Chapter Four
West Virginia
Along the wooded serpentine path of Coal River Road, it’s common to see hunched figures emerge onto the two-lane blacktop, all dirtied up and shouldering what look like laundry bags. If the sacks are bulging, it was a good day up on the forested ridges digging up wild ginseng—or sangin’ as they say in Raleigh County. The hills of southern West Virginia are rich with cash roots and ramps, of which ginseng is the most coveted on the global market. Once upon a pre-industrial time, sang, not coal, was king. Long before West Virginia statehood, the region sent wagon caravans of ginseng over the Federal Road to the spice capital of Baltimore, where it set sail for San Francisco and China. The first deposits of anthracite coal were unearthed in the same mountains, soon followed by some of the country’s first coal mines. But China never stopped buying the local ginseng, or the paws and gallbladders of its bla
ck bears. When the mines opened, scavenging persisted as a rare alternative to picking coal. “Diggin’s a rough life, and you gotta live poor,” one harvester told me on Coal River Road. “But some always figured it’s better than the mines.”
Since the mines started closing, competition for ginseng has intensified in West Virginia’s poorest counties. The state now regulates a four-month season to prevent overharvesting that threatens the root’s extinction in the same mountains where automation and mountaintop blast mining have already transformed the old coal economy. Even those families that still have mining jobs sometimes supplement their declining incomes by sangin’. As in eastern Pennsylvania, many of West Virginia’s new-century mining jobs are non-union and part-time, without the benefits or security of the jobs they replaced.
A spiral of poverty and depopulation has created quasi–ghost towns throughout the state’s verdant hollows. The typical town is a modest church surrounded by the faded husks of social and commercial life: boarded-up shops, abandoned bowling alleys, the charred foundations of the last bar, burned down for the insurance payout. A sixty-one-year-old man from the hamlet of Coal Creek told me in bitter resignation, “We have a higher rate of refugees than Afghanistan and Syria. The whole valley is being depopulated. We lost our last grocery. The hardware store. Things that make a community.”
Much of America is suffering hard times, but in deepest Appalachia, times have always been harder, even when times were good. When a January poll showed Trump’s strongest support in the counties of southern West Virginia, it seemed to offer the explanatory power so many craved. West Virginia was poor, poorly educated, overwhelmingly white, in economic free fall. A rare beam of national media settled onto the state whose Facebook feeds burst with “help is on the way” Trump memes. A state that, like Trump, seemed a caricature of itself, a toothless monster of working-class anger, despair, alienation, bitterness, and defiance. Glossy magazines sent feature writers to Charleston. National newspapers published interactive maps promising, “How West Virginia Explains Donald Trump.” (Short answer: people there are white, feel “left behind,” and blame Obama.)
The Gilded Rage Page 6