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.
WE ARE ALL RESIDENTS OF TRUMP COUNTRY
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 V
irginia 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.
PART II
HILLBILLY ELEGY AND THE RACIAL BAGGAGE OF J.D. VANCE’S “GREATER APPALACHIA”
A CAMERA IS A GUN
An hour before his murder, Canadian filmmaker Hugh O’Connor paid a young coal miner in Jeremiah, Kentucky, ten dollars for the use of his image in an exhibition film destined for the 1968 World’s Fair. Covered in coal dust and cradling his child, the miner “had an expression of total despair,” O’Connor’s film crew remembered, “It was an extraordinary shot—so evocative of the despair of the region.” The miner lived in a rented cottage among half a dozen other families set in a small clearing of land owned by Hobart Ison, who offered the cottages for ten dollars a month. For the price of a month’s rent, the miner traded his image to a man whom his landlord would soon shoot and kill.
Ison, armed with a revolver, discovered O’Connor and his crew of five on his land just minutes after the filmmakers concluded their final shot. Ison ordered the men off his property but, weighed down by their equipment, the crew could not escape before Ison opened fire. He put one bullet in the camera, and a second in Hugh O’Connor’s chest. According to O’Connor’s producer, the fiilmmaker fell to his knees calling out to Ison, “Why did you have to do that?” before dying moments later.
The film company that hired O’Connor sent funds to Kentucky to help the commonwealth’s attorney prosecute Ison, but its influence and wealth had little return in Letcher County. Even though Ison was known as an eccentric in Jeremiah, he enjoyed enormous community support after his arrest. “Streams of people came to visit Ison in jail before he was released on bail,” Calvin Trillin wrote in the New Yorker. “Women from around Jeremiah baked him cakes.” After an unsuccessful jury selection—no locals would even entertain the idea of Ison’s guilt—a judge ordered the trial moved to nearby Harlan County. The first trial resulted in a hung jury, and Ison struck a deal, pleading guilty to involuntary manslaughter, midway through the second. He served one year in prison and died ten years later in 1978 at the age of eighty.
In 1999, Kentucky filmmaker Elizabeth Barret released Stranger with a Camera, a documentary exploring the context of the murder. In answering the film’s central question—what brought these two men face-to-face on that day in 1967—Barret examines the impact of Appalachian “poverty pictures”: images of lurid white poverty intended to shock middle-class audiences. Their creators often cited “poverty pictures” as a necessary catalyst for social change, exposing the alarming conditions of inequality in Appalachia. In reality, Barret argues, outsiders often “mined images in the way the companies mined the coal.”
What becomes of people, Barret’s documentary asks, when they become a wellspring for the nation’s pity or disgust? One answer lies in Barret’s interview with Mason Eldridge, the miner filmed by O’Connor just before his death. Eldridge is sincere, open, and friendly, but never lifts his eyes to Barret’s camera.
One man lowered his eyes, another lifted his gun. Both responses, Barret suggests, are reactions to exploitation and shame. The visual archive of Appalachia created in the 1960s focused exclusively on the region’s deprivation. In the process of its creation it provided the raw material for a new moral position about the lot of the poor. The belief that poverty is a character flaw—a demonstration of moral weakness—hangs over every image of a barefoot child or unemployed miner.
“The American dream has become a nightmare,” the BBC announced in a 1967 documentary about eastern Kentucky. To be Appalachian was to be heir to a distinct kind of wretchedness, endlessly performed before an international audience. This created layers of shame in communities like Jeremiah. The more well-to-do often came to resent the poor for acting as the enticement for those with greedy cameras. “The ties that bind communities together are not always positive,” Barret observes.
As the local with a camera, Barret has a connection to both Ison and O’Connor that is painful and real. Her interviews with O’Connor’s family and colleagues are among the film’s most wrenching scenes, precisely because they possess a clarity about O’Connor’s death that Barret and her community will never—and perhaps should never—experience. All are sympathetic to the suffering caused by the willful misrepresentation of a community. They forgive. But for all the soul-searching performed by Barret, it is one of O’Connor’s Canadian colleagues, Colin Low, who delivers the most electrifying lines in the documentary: “A camera is like a gun,” he explains, “It’s threatening. It’s invasive; it is exploitative…and it’s not always true.”
I thought about Stranger with a Camera often last year, believing that the time had come to experience, as Barret did, what it’s like to live among so many people who have snapped and have put their pain and resentment in the service of terrible outcomes. Their politics will kill good people. If a camera is a gun, then surely a vote can be too.
But I also thought about Barret’s work for another reason. Outdated theories about a culture of poverty in Appalachia, honed in the 1960s, had become popular once more thanks to Hillbilly Elegy. Much like the visual archive generated during the War on Poverty, Elegy sells white middle-class observers an invasive and exploitative story of the region. For white people uncomfortable with images of the civil rights struggles
and the realities of Black life those images depicted, an endless stream of sensationalized white poverty offered them an escape—a window into a more recognizable world of suffering. This intimacy, both now and then, does not equal less contempt, just more value for the viewer and creator.
In some cases the parallels stretch back further, to the exaggerated stories of mountain life created by local color writers during the Hatfield and McCoy era. Appalachian Studies scholar Jordan Laney recently described the experience of reading Hillbilly Elegy while preparing snippets of local color for her class. “How did journalists and correspondents for the New York Times as well as scholars not catch these acts of generalizing and aggrandizing on behalf of elite readers?” she asks. “How did we trade in the breadth of diversity the region has to offer for one view? While reading Hillbilly Elegy I thought, here is how. This is how places and people become caricatures of themselves, ourselves.”
COMMODIFYING THE “OTHER”
Men who shirk employment and women who lack the appropriate amount of shame for their illegitimate children populate the world of Elegy. Instead of attending church, the people of Elegy worship material desires beyond their means and use welfare fraud in the service of their doomed pursuits. “This is the reality of our community,” Vance writes. “It’s about a naked druggie destroying what little of value that exists in her life…Our homes are a chaotic mess. We scream and yell at each other like we are spectators at a football game. At least one member of the family uses drugs—sometimes the father, sometimes the mother, sometimes both. At especially stressful times, we’ll hit and punch each other, all in front of the rest of the family, including young children.”
What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia Page 5