The Gilded Rage

by Alexander Zaitchik

  In the months before West Virginia’s May 7 primary, there was a second national spotlight on the Mountain State. It followed the long-awaited criminal trial of Don Blankenship, the CEO of the coal giant Massey Energy, for his role in the explosion of an underground mine in Raleigh County that killed twenty-nine miners. The six-month trial ended in early April when a federal judge convicted the CEO on a single count of conspiracy to violate federal mine safety standards and sentenced him to one year in minimum-security prison. Outside the courthouse, a family member of one of the mine explosion victims expressed his grieving outrage over the paltry sentence to a local TV reporter. The interview was a minor viral hit, briefly humanizing and thus complicating Trump’s Palin-esque promises to “mine, baby, mine.”

  The interview, and the Blankenship trial generally, complicated Trump’s coal boosterism because it opened a window onto the gritty realities of the mining economy: Coal jobs were never all that great, even in the union heyday. West Virginia was always poor, with the highest mortality rates in the country. Trump clearly did not understand the forces that killed local mining economies, any more than he understood why so many West Virginians have always fled in search of other kinds of work, or why some locals were agitating not for more mining, but a stop to the decapitation of its mountains and the poisoning of its land, air, and water.

  There was a time when Trump intuited all this. In a 1990 Playboy interview, a forty-three-year-old Trump was asked about the rush he gets from “doing a deal.” He responded, “It’s my canvas. I like the challenge and tell the story of the coal miner’s son. The coal miner gets black lung disease, his son gets it, then his son. If I had been the son of a coal miner, I would have left the damn mines. But most people don’t have the imagination—or whatever—to leave their mine. They don’t have ‘it.’”

  In 2016 West Virgnia, however, Trump established himself as the black lung candidate. He understood that even if miners hate coal dust and loathe the bosses, they hate those Democrats perceived as “anti-coal” even more. On one of his few remaining afternoons as a free man, Don Blankenship joined a group of miners in waving Trump signs and chanting “Coal! Coal! Coal! Coal!” outside of a Hillary Clinton campaign event in Williamson, Mingo County. (In 1921, Mingo County miners waged the Battle of Blair Mountain, among the biggest and bloodiest labor rebellions in American history.) In neighboring Logan County, local officials barred Clinton and her “anti-coal message” from appearing on County property.

  “In West Virginia, time stands still, at best, and sometimes runs backwards, in hundred-year leaps,” said Bob Kincaid, an online progressive talk radio host in Fayette County. “The miners bellow ‘coal!’ as if invoking some ancient and blood-thirsty god, never understanding that it’s Wall Street, far more than any tepid regulations, who did in all those underground mining jobs. It’s Wall Street that funds mountaintop removal, a process that needs far fewer people to get at the last dregs of Appalachian coal than does underground mining.”

  Trump did not mention Wall Street—or slack global demand, or the rise of gas, or mechanization—when he addressed a Charleston crowd of thirteen thousand two days before the West Virginia primary. Standing before a row of miners waving signs reading Trump Digs Coal, the candidate donned a hard hat gifted him by the West Virginia Coal Association (a trade group) and promised out-of-work and underemployed miners that soon “they’d be back to better than before,” rescued by a coal revival that would keep the country safe from “the hands of OPEC.” Over the course of an hour, he skated a wide, artful circle around King Coal’s dirty open secret: it’s not industry profits that are down for the count, but unionized mining employment.

  The Trump campaign saw Charleston as a fitting location for the candidate’s first energy speech as the Republican nominee. Days earlier, the GOP primary season had effectively ended when Trump’s last two rivals conceded following his victory in Indiana. In the Hoosier State, Trump used the closing of a Carrier plant the way he used the shuttering of mines in West Virginia: as a symbol of globalist, elitist betrayal. But while his version of the Carrier story carried the punch of truth, Trump’s coal story was a clumsy cover and a con.

  Traveling through the state’s gutted hollows, I met people who knew this full well, but planned to vote for Trump anyway. Their number included the most famous anti-coal activist in Raleigh County.

  * * *

  Ed Wiley is a fifty-nine-year-old retired mineworker. Though he has the face of an older man, framed by a long gray chin-curtain style beard, he still has ripped upper arms and Popeye forearms. He has a quiet philosophical manner and piercing blue eyes. Like a lot of West Virginia men, what he loves most is turkey hunting. Lately a pinched leg nerve and back issues have kept him out of the woods and off his feet in the same Coal Creek house where he grew up and now lives with his wife, Debbie. That eponymous creek runs past Wiley’s front yard. Like all moving water in the area, mining runoff poisoned it beyond use ages ago. So long ago, and so thoroughly, there’s never been need for warning signs.

  Even as a kid, Wiley never liked the idea of working down in the cold, dark mines. He chose a career above ground, doing strip work on surface mines. He didn’t think much about the health impacts of the coal industry until 2004, when his granddaughter Kayla complained of feeling sick. When her illness persisted, Wiley began looking into the respiratory ailments that plagued not only his own kin but many other students at Marsh Fork Elementary. He realized the widespread illnesses undoubtedly stemmed from the area’s torrent of toxic coal waste, which sent a steady mist of silica dust and other chemicals down onto the school. Wiley began a crusade to have the school relocated, linking up with a fledgling local activist group, Coal River Mountain Watch. When industry and state officials ignored him—“They just couldn’t admit it was dangerous”—Wiley announced plans to walk from Coal Creek to Washington, DC, where he would directly petition the secretary of education and Robert Byrd, the West Virginia senator who was then in the twilight of his legendary career.

  Thus began an unlikely second career as an activist, taking Wiley to the nation’s capital and beyond. A decade ago, Mike Roselle, the veteran activist who co-founded Earth First! and the Rainforest Action Network, moved a few houses down from Wiley to help lead the fight against mountaintop removal. Roselle describes the miner-turned-activist as “the single best grassroots organizer I have ever seen.”

  Early one morning, I sat down with Wiley in the small tool shed he calls his “pout house.” With his yellow Labrador stretched out at his feet, he talked about coal, Trump, and a future for West Virginia without coal.

  “My family’s been up here in this hollow, probably around three hundred and fifty years. I never did leave. Stayed right here. It’s been pretty good. It’s beautiful country. I met my wife, and here I am.

  “I didn’t work down in the mines. Ain’t for me. It weren’t for my dad. I worked around the faces of the mines, did ground work, strip job work. It was seventeen hours a day a lot of times, seven days a week. The money was more than I ever made before. I had a medical card I’d never had before. But I’d never do it again. It ain’t worth it. The money—unless you got ahold of yourself—the more you make, the more you spend. I’ve seen these guys, they kind of get above their raisins. Then it bottoms out, and here they got a home, cars, four-wheelers they’re trying to pay for. You don’t need a bass boat all the time.

  “I can understand the pride of the deep miners. It’s a dangerous job. Nasty. Dangerous. I’ve been down in that hole. What I don’t understand, after all these years, a hundred years—it’s one of the worst jobs. Why would you want this job? Why wouldn’t you want something better? They won’t let go. They won’t accept something better. I don’t know why. This area down here is one of the toughest bunch of people I’ve ever seen. Hard headed.

  “The new [coal economy] isn’t like the old. There’s millions and millions of dollars that leaves out of here every day, but never gets put back in
to the towns no way, shape, or form. Look at Whitesville. I’ve seen pictures of that town back in the ‘40s. It was booming. Booming. Couldn’t park nowhere. Everything open. Booming. And they was still digging it out by hand, you know what I’m saying? Now you look at the amount of coal that leaves out of here, and that town is dead. Dead. There’s something wrong somewhere.

  “This mayor that’s down there now in Whitesville, when he first got in, three or four years ago, he tried to [get the coal company to reinvest in the local economy] but the company slapped him down. They told the coal miners to move their bank account to another bank so it wouldn’t be in Whitesville. The coal company was going to take their money out of Whitesville Bank because the mayor was bucking on them. They put him in his place. He just rolled up. They let that town die. Millions of dollars go through it—and nothing [comes back]. Now they want to try to restore it, wanting to turn it into like a ‘Coal Mining Historical Something Town.’ Why? That’s what killed your town.

  “There’s a lot of things we could do here. When they do this stripping here [points in the direction of a decapitated mountain], all that timber got pushed in big piles and burnt. That could have been turned into toys, furniture, anything. That’s jobs there. That’s jobs. They wouldn’t even let the pulp people get it out of there because they couldn’t get it out fast enough. They could’ve turned it into chip board and stuff. But they wouldn’t let the timber people get it out. They weren’t fast enough. They just shove it in a pile and bury it, burn it.

  “There’s jobs in coal, but look at other states that don’t have coal. What do they do? How are they making it? West Virginia University just moved some people out here, in Beckley. It was on TV a little while ago, they’re going to get some training going, help retrain people.

  “The coal miners get up on TV, I don’t know if the companies are paying them to say this—they get up on TV, and say, ‘If I can’t do coal I can’t do nothing. I don’t know anything else.’ Buddy, you’re wrong. You guys are some of the smartest guys in West Virginia. They could do about anything. If they’ve never done it, you show them once and they’ll do it. Why would they say that? Here you are, a high school graduate, some of them’s college graduates. Some of them’s got engineer degrees. If you want people to come to West Virginia and bring jobs here, you don’t want people sitting up there saying, ‘Well I don’t know nuthin.’ You couldn’t pay me to get up there and say that. That’s a disgrace to West Virginia. To get up on TV—it’s not right. I don’t like it. Why disgrace yourself like that when you know you’re smarter than that? We could do lots of things.

  “The Big Branch explosion [leading to Don Blankenship’s conviction] made the miners prouder. The saddest part about it is, people lost their fathers and people lost sons. Some of them settled right off the bat for $3.5 million. I know some of these people. My buddy Irv, his sister lost a husband. They took this money, and I don’t know what they’ve done. Some people, like the Coles, built this great big stone house. Well, if you look out at the hollow, there’s the strip job. They built a mansion of a house up in this little hollow. But you look out the door and you can see the strip job. They’re stripping in his back yard and wanting to come around both sides of him. It’s his business to do it that way. It’s his son’s money. Lost a son. But we ain’t seen one dime of that money go into these communities. Why not say, ‘I got $3.5 million, I’m going to take a million and build a packaging factory.’ Something to create jobs, so nobody else’s kids got to go back into a coal mine. I haven’t seen nothing like that happening in this community. Not even an ice cream shop. Not even a little, tiny mom-and-pop ice cream shop. That upsets me.

  “I know everybody up and down this river. Hunted with them, worked with them, hung out with them, all kind of stuff. Since the school [pollution] issue, they don’t hardly look at me now. People won’t talk to me, won’t come around. You go out to the store, you might get a nod or a wave out of them. You really thought they was your best buddy at one time. You know? You find out who your friends are when something like this happens. You really do.

  “I went up against the company for their kids too. I made that clear a lot of times. This ain’t just my granddaughter. I’m standing up and speaking for all the kids. Nobody else will, I’ll be their voice. Once I’d seen, and learnt, and did some research and stuff, I knew it was a bad place for kids. It was a bad place for anybody. Still is.

  “When I worked the mines, I was blinded by the money and the medical card I never had. I worked behind my granddaughter’s school. I didn’t even think about it. My granddaughter was down there. Never thought nothing of it until she was sick. All the time, that silica dust. You can’t see it. It’s a really fine particle. Well, sure the company knew. They didn’t care. There were a lot of violations, two hundred and some violations. It wasn’t just the dust. If [the dam holding the waste] failed, nine hundred and seventy-seven lives would be perished. Three hundred kids. In seconds. No time to evacuate.

  “When Kayla got sick, I worked on it for about a week. I called Channel 5 [WDTV, the CBS affiliate in Weston, West Virginia], and turned out at the school, did an interview. I didn’t even know Coal River Mountain Watch existed in Whitesville. I drove right by it every day working down there. Didn’t even know. They’d been watching that school too. They said, “Let’s get together.” So we did.

  “Two years later, and we done about everything we could do. I couldn’t sleep at night. I’m just sitting down here, and I got to thinking, ‘Senator Byrd.’ He’s about ready to retire. He’s in his last term. He is who he is. You can’t hurt his name. It won’t hurt him to shake this boat and help these kids. I said, ‘Well, why don’t you announce that we’re going to Senator Byrd’s house? Take the news straight to the man.’ Go down to the capital, do a press thing. I’m thinking, ‘I’ll do that. I’m ready to go right now. That’ll shake them up maybe.’ Left within a month’s time.

  “Met a lot of good people on the walk. Every town I come to, I went to the mayor’s office. Handed my pamphlets to everybody, put a pamphlet in every mailbox. I got in trouble for that [chuckles]. I was handing out too many pamphlets. Everybody got a pamphlet. If somebody would be on their front porch, believe it, I’d walk up. Everybody got a pamphlet.

  “I met with Byrd in the Hart Senate Building. Byrd stood right there next to the big poster I carried all over the country. It’s a full-sized poster, aerial view of the school, and you’d point and show everything out. Had that in there, and pointed and described everything that was going on, plain and simple to him. Byrd was from this area, he’s from the Daniels area. I just made it kind of clear to him: these are your people. Somewhere down there, you’re bound to have some kind of kinfolk. This is your territory, Raleigh County area. I thought he’d do something. I figured he would do more than what he did. I kept writing letters to him. He said it was a county and state issue, not a federal. Nothing he could do. He called Blankenship and Massey a ‘rogue coal company’. Well, what coal company ain’t never been a rogue coal company? You tell me what’s not.

  “A little colored boy from New York died for the campaign. There was a [special-needs] school up in the Bronx, one of the teachers got involved to help me raise money. There was one class that was leading this. They brought in pennies, had a chart, keeping count. This one particular little boy, a little African American boy, he had asthma real bad. He had a bad attack this particular night before the collection ended. He made it through the night okay. He wouldn’t go to the doctor. He got to school, the first thing he done, was take his pennies. That’s all he cared about. Then he sat down in his chair and took a real bad asthma attack there. Made it to the hospital, and passed away. At the hospital, they said [to his parents], ‘Why didn’t you bring him?’ They said, ‘Because he wanted to come and get his pennies in.’ [long pause.] That whole class was special little kids. They knew everything about the story. One little girl wanted to come up on stage with me. She was four feet tall. Arm
s maybe an inch around. She put her little fist up, and yelled, ‘All I want to say, is to you Governor [Joe] Manchin, you’re a bad governor. You better help them little kids!’ You know, you’re sitting there and your heart is going out.

  “That class encouraged the whole school to get involved, talking about environmental issues. They were the first people to give money—was those little kids from New York. They raised $650. They were the poor kids. Then I had what I called the ‘richie kids.’ There’s a school, two blocks above Trump’s office, where the park is, a private Catholic school, big old place. I’d go up there and meet with them kids twice a year. Take ‘em in the park and show ‘em different plants and such. The ‘richie kids,’ they wasn’t comin’ up with nothing. It was the poor kids, they were the only ones that gave money.”

  I asked Wiley what kind of Raleigh County he’d like to leave for his grandchildren. “They can do a lot around here.” There’s a lot to save. It’s a beautiful area. You get out towards Arlington and all that, anywhere with Civil War battles. Well, shoot, that’s the prettiest place, it’s protected, they get extra money and all that. Well, they was Civil War people down in here, too! I like to see this get turned into a big national park myself, and the jobs that would go with it.