by Steven Stoll
All of this should give us pause. It isn’t clear that subsistence wages are preferable to subsistence gardens. Maybe agrarians are better off being agrarians. They still feed one-third of the world. According to the United Nations International Fund for Agricultural Development, 500 million smallholds sustain 2 billion people, producing 80 percent of the food consumed in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Oxfam and the World Bank agree about at least one thing: “Measures to improve smallholder farmers’ capacity to increase food production and productivity, as well as to link to markets, will … contribute to global food security.”69 The way forward is to stop thinking of peasants as categorically poor but to ask what they need to do better. Just because a family has little money, limiting their consumption of store-bought goods, does not mean that they cry out to be moved away. As long as people have access to land, control over their own labor, and freedom from debt, they are unlikely to feel wanting.
“The first step towards reimagining a world gone terribly wrong would be to stop the annihilation of those who have a different imagination,” writes Arundhati Roy.70 Privileging the needs of peasants, campesinos, and smallholders over those of capitalists means acting averse to some of our closely held assumptions. It means accepting the limitations of agrarians without viewing money spent on their betterment as a financial investment. The brutality of enclosure will only cease when we cease to regard people and landscapes as instruments of wealth. Freedom, in order to have any meaning, must include the freedom to live in a village and farm as a household, with all its uncertainty. The question we need to ask of every migration from country to city is whether it originated from a government scheme or corporate gambit that so degraded a people’s autonomy as to give them no choice. We need to know history in order to make policy. Otherwise, we might allow an old story to think for us, a story told for centuries that has never told the truth.
APPALACHIA AS DRAWN BY THE APPALACHIAN REGIONAL COMMISSION, 1967. The ARC offered the widest possible geographical definition of Appalachia, but few historians consider all of western Pennsylvania and any part of New York to be included. There are no generally accepted criteria for what constitutes Appalachia. The region is best understood historically, not geographically or geologically.
ENCLOSING THE COMMONS IN OXFORDSHIRE, 1801. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, enclosure undermined the system of common lands and community governance practiced throughout England, Scotland, and Ireland. But enclosure was more than a change in the landscape. It brought into existence a new legal category: private property. Owning land gave lords greater flexibility to innovate, but it also created two groups that did not exist before the sixteenth century: paupers with no source of income or support and wageworkers who depended entirely on money.
DANIEL BOONE, MOUNTAINEER, C. 1832. When a lithographer reproduced a painting of the Great Pathfinder twelve years after his death, Boone’s reputation was surging. The actual settlers of the southern mountains benefited from his popularity. Politicians praised them in the same language they used for him, as civilizers of wilderness and emissaries of empire. But while Boone remains a hero, the settlers would become objects of pity and ridicule.
(Image LC-DIG-ppmsca-39572, Library of Congress)
RURAL WHITES RACIALIZED, 1891. A popular illustrator contributed this facial study of “Georgia crackers” for an article about cotton-mill workers in The Century Magazine. “They have land but no gardens, pasturage but no stock. Wasting their earnings on gewgaws, drink, and indigestible food. Despite a favorable climate . . . the mortality rate among the poor whites is shockingly high.” Few writers asked how poor people became that way. Instead, they assumed that deprivation passed from generation to generation through “some hereditary channel.”
(Graffenried, “The Georgia Cracker in the Cotton Mills.” Image LC-USZ62-84854, Library of Congress)
NEW SWEDEN, 1639. Swedish and Finnish settlements and fortifications moved up the Delaware River into southern Pennsylvania and from there into the southern mountains by the middle of the eighteenth century. Scots-Irish immigrants would join them and become the dominant ethnic group. Note the longhouses to the east of the river. Members of this woodland culture lived close to Indians, not often peacefully.
(Joan Vinckeboons, Caert vande Svydt River in Niew Nederland (1639). Image G3291.S12 coll .H3. Library of Congress)
MAPPING COAL, 1848. This might be the first map of coal deposits in what became West Virginia, part of a “Great Allegheny Bituminous Coal Field” that braced Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia. Maps like this one made a region thought to be remote and inaccessible more attractive to investment.
(Richard Cowling Taylor, Map Illustrative of the Statistics of the Coal Trade, from Statistics of Coal [1848])
OLD-GROWTH SPRUCE FOREST. Woods formed the ecological base of Appalachian society. The forest gave foods and commodities without demanding more than labor. This functional commons made mountaineer autonomy possible.
(Image 14258, West Virginia and Regional History Collection, West Virginia University Libraries)
HOUSEHOLD NEAR THE TUG RIVER. This family posed for a photographer around the time that the railroad first came through the valley. They were typical of those who attempted to sustain themselves in the hills even as the prices of their commodities collapsed and their common forest was narrowed and enclosed.
(Image 039260, West Virginia and Regional History Collection, West Virginia University Libraries)
RAMPS. Wild onions fed families in the spring, after winter stores were eaten and before their gardens produced. Ramps were one of many foods that came directly from the forest.
LOGGING CREW, 1903. When mountaineers lost their forested land, they lost the resources they exchanged for money. At first, men sought industrial work as a way of replacing the mountain meadow (for cattle) and the foraged foods (like ramps) that the forest once provided their households. As loggers, they participated in the very deforestation that resulted in their dependence on wages.
(Image 10387, West Virginia and Regional History Collection, West Virginia University Libraries)
SKIDDER AT FULL STEAM, 1910. This image from Blackwater Canyon, Tucker County, West Virginia, depicts the scale and rapidity of deforestation.
(Image 050624, West Virginia and Regional History Collection, West Virginia University Libraries)
ALIEN LANDSCAPE. The subject of this photograph could be Nevada. It’s West Virginia in the 1930s. A paper mill stands in the midst of cutover hills.
(Photograph by John Vachon. Image LC-USF33-001388-M5, Library of Congress)
COAL MINERS DIGGING WITH A LOW CEILING, WEST VIRGINIA, 1908. Men who became coal miners often maintained ties with family in the mountains, and some planned to return to their own farms when they made enough money. Managers sought to undermine their ability to walk away from work whenever it suited them by importing immigrants from Europe and African-Americans from other southern states. (Photograph by Lewis Wickes Hine. Image LC-DIG-nclc-01060, Library of Congress)
COAL CAMP AT HOLDEN, WEST VIRGINIA. This is a typical coal camp, made up of small houses lining a hollow with a creek down the center. Coal companies owned these houses and threatened eviction for unionizing or any other infraction. The mine itself was less than a mile away.
(Image 004695, West Virginia and Regional History Collection, West Virginia University Libraries)
TWO VERSIONS OF THE CAPTURED GARDEN. The family shown above posed for a government photographer with their garden behind them. Gardens eased the dreariness of the camps and gave high-quality food, but they allowed employers to pay their workers less, increasing exploitation. The backyard of the home shown below was typical throughout Appalachia. The same home had a chicken coop.
(Top photograph by Russell Lee. Records of the Solid Fuels Administration for War, Photographs of the Medical Survey of the Bituminous Coal Industry, 1946–1947. National Archive Number 540313. Bottom photograph by Marion Post Wolcott. Image L
C-USF34-050066-E, Library of Congress.)
COAL MINER’S WIFE AND CHILDREN, SCOTTS RUN, 1938. Only a few families qualified to move to the “experimental community” of Arthurdale. Most remained in Scotts Run and other abandoned mining sites. The poorest miners, anyone injured, and African-Americans had nowhere else to go.
(Photograph by Marion Post Wolcott. Image LC-DIG-fsa-8c29859, Library of Congress)
STRIKING MINERS IN A TENT CAMP, LICK CREEK, 1922. The greatest challenge for striking miners was finding food. They were highly vulnerable to starvation, since the companies forced them to leave the gardens growing beside their company-owned houses. Some miners kept gardens in the hills or had families still capable of supporting them. (Photograph by Herbert A. French. Image LC-DIG-npcc-30258, Library of Congress)
HOMESTEAD STUDY FOR ARTHURDALE. This sketch of a homestead has the same style and design as the actually constructed homes. Notice the open space to the right for alternating the location of the garden. The planners intended highly intensive household food production to offset the cost of the factory at the center of the community.
(Image 005004, West Virginia and Regional History Collection, West Virginia University Libraries)
Winslow Homer, Veteran in a New Field (1865).
(Bequest of Miss Adelaide Milton de Groot, 1967, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City)
Thomas Hovenden, Breaking Home Ties (1890).
(Gift of Ellen Harrison McMichael in memory of C. Emory McMichael, Philadelphia Museum of Art)
George Inness, Short Cut, Watchung Station, New Jersey (1883).
(Purchased with the W. P. Wilstach Fund, 1895, W1895-1-5, Philadelphia Museum of Art)
NOTES
Please note that some of the links referenced throughout this work are no longer active.
Preface
1. Census of the United States (1940), Union District, Monongahela County, West Virginia, Schedules 31–38 and 31–15.
2. Census of the United States (1900), Union District, Monongahela County, West Virginia, Sheet 288.
1. Contemporary Ancestors
1. This book relies on some of the most important recent scholarship on the history of Appalachia. I benefited especially from Billings and Blee, The Road to Poverty; Dunaway, The First American Frontier; Eller, Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers; Salstrom, Appalachia’s Path to Dependency; Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind; Gaventa, Power and Powerlessness; Hsiung, Two Worlds in the Tennessee Mountains; Lewis, Transforming the Appalachian Countryside; Newfont, Blue Ridge Commons; Pudup, “The Limits of Subsistence”; Pudup, Billings, and Waller, Appalachia in the Making; Sachs, Home Rule; Weise, Grasping at Independence; Williams, Appalachia: A History; and other books in the notes and bibliography.
2. The entire range of the Appalachian Mountains runs northeast from Georgia. Just above New York City it makes a hard left turn due north along the Hudson River. It embraces the Green Mountains of Vermont and the White Mountains of New Hampshire before heading northeast again into Maine.
3. The more specific definition has 165 counties, compared to the 406 in the wider view. To the extent that this book relies on any geographical definition, it uses the narrower one. See Williams, Appalachia, 12–14, and Fernow, The Great Timber Belt, 5.
4. For this and the previous paragraph: Huntington, Williams, and Van Valkenburg, Economic and Social Geography, 170. Another report noted, “The Mountains and the Bluegrass were settled by people of the same racial stock.” Quoted in Billings and Blee, Road to Poverty, 29. The Oxford English Dictionary gives an instance of Appalachian used to describe the people of the region from 1888, but the term did not enter common usage until at least the 1970s. John Alexander Williams thinks of Appalachia as “a zone where diverse groups have interacted with one another and with a set of regional and subregional environments over time.” Williams, Appalachia, 12. The government report is Marschner, Rural Population Density in the Southern Appalachians, 1.
5. I am thinking of Immanuel Wallerstein, Fernand Braudel, André Gunder Frank, Raúl Prebisch, David Harvey, and Raymond Williams. Each of them followed a similar intellectual evolution, from the influence of markets to the political economy of societies organized by capital. In Wallerstein’s thinking, the world-system is “an integrated zone of activity and institutions which obey certain systemic rules.” Wallerstein formulated the world-system with (or against) the evidence and arguments of historians of capitalism like Fernand Braudel, Paul Sweezy, and Karl Polanyi. He added in David Ricardo’s comparative advantages and Karl Marx’s observation that history can be understood as the perpetual transformation of modes of production. The terms core and periphery came from the National Economic Commission for Latin America. Most of all, Wallerstein took the global division of labor from the economist Prebisch. Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis; Harvey, Social Justice and the City; Williams, The Country and the City; Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism (three volumes); Frank, “The Development of Underdevelopment.” For a narrative describing Chicago and North America, see Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis.
6. In The First American Frontier, Wilma Dunaway argues that Appalachia became part of the world-system in the eighteenth century. She further argues that subsistence production (in the limited way she defines it) ended at that point. In my argument, subsistence production and exchange are not mutually exclusive. In fact, the one has rarely existed without the other.
7. Abraham Lincoln, speech at New Salem, Illinois, March 9, 1832, Abraham Lincoln: A Documentary Portrait, 31.
8. The judge and merchant was Richard Henderson.
9. Ferguson’s proclamation of October 1, 1780, quoted in McCrady, History of South Carolina in the Revolution, 778. For an account, see Virginia Gazette, October 21, 1780.
10. Thwaites and Kellogg, Documentary History of Dunmore’s War, 371. Dunmore referred to the Watauga Association, a frontier government in eastern Tennessee created in 1772. See Williams, “The Admission of Tennessee into the Union,” 291; Rush, “Account of the Progress of Population,” in Essays, 215; Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, quoted in American Georgics, 24. James Madison also agonized over them. “Our own people nursed and reared in these habits and tastes,” he propounded to an audience of lowland planters, “easily slide into those of the savage and are rarely reclaimed to civilized society with their own consent.” Madison, “Address Before the Agricultural Society of Albemarle.”
11. Absentee landowners are discussed in chapters 3 and 4.
12. Ioor, Independence; Or Which Do You like Best, the Peer, or the Farmer?
13. Faulkner, The Speech of Charles Jas. Faulkner (of Berkeley) in the House of Delegates of Virginia, 9; Benton, “Speech of Mr. Benton, of Missouri, on the Oregon Question,” 30.
14. Woodbury, “Speech of Senator Levi Woodbury,” 92.
15. The Knickerbocker; or New York Monthly Magazine, August 1839, 2, 14.
16. For this and the previous paragraph: Hill, Daniel Boone, 11, 229–30; Aron, How the West Was Lost, 78–84; Faragher, Daniel Boone, 242–50.
17. Hill, Daniel Boone, 229–30. Also see Hale, Trans-Allegheny Pioneers, 158.
18. Faulkner, Speech upon the Mineral and Agricultural Resources of the State of West Virginia, 10, 12, 15, 23–24.
19. Taylor, Alleghania, 23–24; New York Times, November 6, 1862; June 19, 1861; October 24, 1861.
20. Pollard, The Virginia Tourist, 28–30. Also see Mayer, “A June Jaunt,” Harper’s Magazine, April 1857, 592–612. “Everything seems to be the property of the wilderness—a wilderness incapable of yielding to any mastery but that of an engineer.”
21. Harney, “A Strange Land and a Peculiar People,” 431–32.
22. The quotation is by George E. Vincent, quoted in Turner, The Frontier in American History, 35. Hsiung, Two Worlds in the Tennesse
e Mountains, 187–88. On nineteenth-century social science, see Wallerstein, “Societal Development, or Development of World-System?” in Unthinking Social Science, 78, 81.
23. Frost, “University Extension in Kentucky.” On Frost and his thoughts about Appalachian otherness, see Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind, 115–22. On Roosevelt and Turner, see Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 29–42. The phrase “barbarian virtues” comes from the book of that title by Mathew Frye Jacobson.
24. Semple, “Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains,” 1–7. The Daughters of the American Revolution dates to October 11, 1890. Congress chartered the National Society of the DAR in 1896 at the peak of immigration from eastern and southern Europe. William R. Grace was elected the first Irish (and Catholic) mayor of New York City in 1880. Hugh O’Brian became the first Irish mayor of Boston in 1884.