The Story of Appalachia … is the story of a land that epitomized
poverty in America, and the circumstances
that gave rise to workers’ unions.
(Left) Child coal miners, West Virginia, 1908. (Photo: Lewis Wickes Hine
(1874-1940) – Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)
In 1993, my former college roommate and I bicycled
from Bellingham, Washington to New Bern, North
Carolina. In advance of the trip, we tried to figure a way
to avoid cycling through the poverty stricken lands
of eastern Kentucky but could find no viable options.
“Maybe it won’t be so bad,” I said to Dave, but it was.
When we arrived in the rugged land, the cheerful
waves and “God bless you” sentiments that had been
our constant companion for 2000 miles were gone.
No one gave a tinker’s damn about two exhausted
men, but cold shoulders were minor irritants compared
to the region’s endless supply of unchained,
trained-to-attack dogs. When we were most vulnerable,
such as when our speeds slowed on uphill climbs,
the dogs would sneak up on us from behind and try
to rip the flesh off our unprotected legs. I damned
every two-toothed person in sight, their friggin’ dogs,
rusted homes, and hopeless land.
In this, the month we celebrate Labor Day, I wish to
share the story of eastern Kentucky, an area that was
at the epicenter of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1965
“War on Poverty.” The program failed but at least the
intention was honorable, which is more than what we
can say about the other “outsiders” that impacted the
area, including businesses and labor unions.
The Appalachians were settled by Scots-Irish
immigrants, a clannish sort of people who never looked
to others for help. Poor in wealth by Washington
D.C. standards, sure, but some locals, like the author
Harriette Simpson Arnow, never saw it that way:
When I went out to teach in 1926 there
were hundreds of roadless creek valleys all
through the Southern Appalachians, and
almost no roads at all in Eastern Kentucky…
The best homes were usually the older log
houses, and around those log houses there
were many pleasant things including much
that was beautiful; for those who like open
fires, children, human talk and song instead
of TV and radio, the wisdom of the old who
had seen all life from birth to death, none of
it hidden behind institutional walls, there
was a richness of human life and dignity
seldom found in the United States today.
But in terms of formal education, most people in
eastern Kentucky could neither read nor write, did not
know that huge deposits of coal worth hundreds of
millions of dollars was on their land. One hundred years
ago, coal companies ruthlessly exploited the land and
the people. Jean Ritchie, a songwriter, who was born
in 1922, recalls,
For my Grandpa Hall, it was an unwitting sin.
He, along with most of his neighbors, sold the
mineral rights to his land to the friendly, likable
man who said he represented a company
that thought there might be a little coal on
our land worth getting out. The company was
willing to take a big chance and pay Grandpa
50 cents an acre, and since Grandpa had
more than a thousand acres, this amounted
to around $500.00, a handsome sum in those
days. For a man with a dozen children, it was
also impossible to refuse.
As Mike Clark, once an Appalachian Program Director
notes, as soon as grandpa signed the papers
about “a little coal,” the huge bulldozers moved in and
the strip mining began.
Strip mining began on a large scale around
1961 in East Kentucky. By 1964 large areas of
Pike, Knott, Harlan and Lechter Counties had
been gutted…As months passed it became
clear that the only farms saved from strip
mining were places where small landowners,
family, and friends were willing to physically
stop the stripping machines. Almost without
exception the courts backed the coal companies,
not the small landowners.
Oh, never mind the land, here is what happened
to the people, as written by Jim Hamilton, a disabled
coal miner:
We was bern’ told to do whatever the company
and bosses told us to do, regardless of what
hardships it was—goin’ in water holes and
standin’ in water to our knees to load coal.
I’ve come home many a night in the wintertime,
way after dark, come in with my clothes
froze so stiff they would stand up. They’d done
eat supper and all gone to bed and my old
mother’d hear me go by and she’d say, There’s
poor little Jim—listen to his clothes rub together
froze stiff. If you’d forget and pull your cap
off too quick, it would pull your hair out—be
frozen to your hair. It was just a way of making
people be slaves, because they had to do that
to live. But we done it, didn’t we, brother Jake?
The late 1800s and early 1900s—the prime decades
of our Industrial Revolution—was a period of great social
change, as we morphed from a mostly rural country
to one with bustling cities and busy factories. But
amidst the general prosperity, there were costs. In the
absence of government regulation, toxic wastes poured
into our lakes and rivers. The “human condition”
wasn’t much better. When Reinhold Niebuhr, a minister,
toured a Detroit factory in the 1920s, he wrote,
The foundry interested me particularly. The
heat was terrific. The men seemed weary. Here
manual labor is a drudgery and toil is slavery.
The men cannot possibly find any satisfaction
in their work. They simply work to make a living…
We are all responsible. We all want the
things which the factory produces and none
of us is sensitive enough to care how much
in human values the efficiency of the modern
factory costs.
During this era, a few national labor unions formed,
but it would take decades for competing factions
within the labor movement to form their unions,
fend off rivals, and attract members. Notwithstanding
some tumultuous history—including links to the
Mafia and organized crime—labor unions became an
established part of American life, with their membership
reaching 33% of our nation’s workforce in
the 1950s. Heroes appeared, such as the remarkable
Caesar Chavez.
In 1962, Chavez co-founded the United Farm
Workers (UFW), a labor union that focused on the
rights of California’s migrant workers. A few years later,
Chavez organized a march to the capital, Sacramento,
to fight for better wages. The strike lasted five years and
was ultimately successful. Chavez, influenced by his
own Catholic tradition and the life of Mahatma Gandhi,
often fasted to promote the principle of nonviolence.
But Tony Boyle, president of the United Mine Workers
(UMW), and not the honorable Caesar Chavez, represented
the struggling coal miners of eastern Kentucky.
The coal miners of eastern Kentucky had long
suspected that Boyle, like other union leaders, was in
cahoots with coal company management.
In 1970, I turned on the national news to learn that
this person named Joseph Yablonski, his wife, and his
daughter had been murdered in their beds. The popular
Mr. Yablonski had run against Boyle in the union’s
presidential election, but lost. Yablonski and the miners,
confident that the voting counts were rigged, asked
the Department of Labor to investigate. Three weeks
after the request, the Yablonski family was murdered.
In early March 1971, Tony Boyle was indicted for
embezzling $ 49,250 in union funds. In 1974, he was
convicted of ordering the murders, sentenced to three
consecutive terms of life in prison.
Today, only 10% of America’s workers are unionized,
a huge decrease from the 33% of
the 1950s. Some trace the decline to the anti-union
and pro-business presidency of Ronald Reagan in the
1980s, but that is sheer nonsense. Let’s start in the
1970s, when American consumers shunned the expensive,
gas-guzzling, poor quality, business-as-usual
cars made in highly-unionized Detroit, for millions
of the low cost, fuel-efficient, high quality cars from
Japan. Due to globalization and loosened import restrictions,
Chrysler, General Motors, and Ford no
longer held their virtual monopolies. Today, American
consumers have many more choices, including cars
from Japan, Korea, and Germany, a good portion of
which are now either manufactured or assembled in
the anti-union American South.
According to various studies, there has been economic
improvement in many parts of Appalachia.
But according to ABC News, roughly 40 percent of
Appalachia’s population in the hills and hollows remains
stuck in poverty, still searching for the road to
success. Their history has been rough, full of “outsiders”
who exploited the land and people. It is not at all
surprising that twenty years ago they did not wave
at two men on their bicycles, and I don’t hold that
against them, anymore.
Americana is a monthly column highlighting
the cultural and historical nuances of this
land through the rich story-telling of columnist
Bill Fitzpatrick, author of the books, Bottoms
Up, America and Destination: India,
Destiny: Unknown.