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 K
os 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.
INVENTING THE APPALACHIAN “OTHER”
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 t
he 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.
What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia Page 3