Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired
8-23-20
I was surfing around on the Internet and came across this short video detailing some of the
poverty in Appalachia. There are many such videos available. What I did not
like about this video was the narrator’s assessment of blame. He doesn’t like
to blame the government, “it goes both ways” he says which means he attacks the
victims, not just of government policy but history
He says the community doesn’t take care of their “lawns or
their houses” and “don’t have money to
fix things” as he also points out that they have no, “sanitation or garbage
disposal”, public services that are somewhat useful for taking care of lawns and
homes and giving people a sense of pride in their community along with decent employment of course.
I have been in the US for 47 years and as long as I can remember Appalachia has always been the symbol of white poverty and despair. Jesse Jackson raised it as an example of the failure of capitalist greed and I have read much of US labor history of the struggles there and the complete domination of mining corporations in these areas, particularly West Virginia and Kentucky. So I decided to poke around a little more.
One thing that jumps out at me in this casual investigation, is the role of land and the dependency of the population on one industry. It reminded me of the role of tobacco production in the earliest colonial period when tobacco often acted as a currency; the first permanent English colony in what was to become the US was dependent on one crop alone to its detriment. In later times, in Central Appalachia and West Virginia in particular, coal was king.
Another irony is that these Appalachians were settlers, colonizers who settled on land stolen from its original inhabitants. Yet the history of this area and the settlers in it, follows the same path as powerful companies and corporations outside the area applied the same methods to the new inhabitants. “Seventy to 90 percent of land in some [Appalachian] counties is still absentee or corporate land, and a lot of the coal and timber companies leased their land from these companies. Harvard University actually still has a chunk of land…”writes Nicholas Brumfield
It is this history that is the cause of the present catastrophe that engulfs much of Appalachia. Following are a few excerpts and details about Appalachian history that explains the reason for the backwardness, poverty, and the consequences of it like drug addiction that afflicts Central Appalachia. The source is in an excellent article by Gwynn Guilford, The 100-year capitalist experiment that keeps Appalachia poor, sick, and stuck on coal
The author tells of one West Virginian whose, “…people had settled the Clintwood and George’s Fork area, along the Appalachian edge of southern Virginia, in the early 17th century. Around the turn of the 1900s, smooth-talking land agents from back east swept through the area, coaxing mountain people into selling the rights to the ground beneath them for cheap. One of Mullins’ ancestors received 12 rifles and 13 hogs—one apiece for each of his children, plus a hog for himself—in exchange for the rights to land that has since produced billions of dollars worth of coal.”
The second swindle indeed as land they settled was taken from them by the same land speculators, politicians and moneymen who were stealing land from one end of the continent to the other.
Guilford again: “The British crown and colonial authorities granted huge tracts to court favorites, Virginia planters, and eastern capitalists, according to historian Wilma Dunaway’s book, The First American Frontier. From there, land accumulation by distant capitalists snowballed. In the 1790s, Virginia—followed by Kentucky—began selling cheap warrants for frontier land. By 1810, absentee investors owned around 93% of what’s now West Virginia and at least three-quarters of eastern Kentucky, according to Dunaway.” My added emphasis.
West Virginia was not much different to any other colonial country and the Coal companies held sway over the communities in the same way United Fruit Company and other US corporations have over the small Central American countries, and as the British did in South Africa or Nigeria, the Belgians in the Congo and so on: “The greatest drain on the miners’ wages was the company store,” explained historian David Alan Corbin in Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields. “Coercion, the scrip system, and the physical distance often combined to force the miners to deal at the company store, and through the monopolistic control of food and clothing and tools and powder, the coal companies were able to render wage rates and wage increases meaningless.”
Mortality rates
Though mortality rates for most major
causes of death have improved in the region since the late 1990s, they’re still
far higher than the rest of the country. Between 2008 and 2014, heart
disease—the leading cause of death in the US—killed nearly 250 people per
100,000 in central Appalachia, 42% higher than the rest of the nation,
according to ARC
research. Cancer claimed 222 lives per 100,000 in the region, around a
third more than the US as a whole. Rates for chronic pulmonary obstructive
disease exceeded national rates by more than 80%; diabetes deaths were 40%
higher”
I will limit the excerpts from this article to that last paragraph, there is simply a wealth of information in it that completely refutes the ridiculous idea that Appalachians, especially Central Appalachians, are responsible in any way for the social conditions they are faced with. This method of blaming the victim, the traditional ideological falsity propagated by the apologists for capitalism, is used to blame Black people for the conditions that exist in these communities, for the crime the poverty the lack of opportunity and do on. As I have stated before, the idea that Black people should just “get over slavery” is absurd and ultimately racist. They can no more get over slavery than the poor of Appalachia can overcome the historical conditions that are the root cause of their present situation.
Ms Guilford does mention the US government’s attacks on organized labor in the 80’s as a contributing factor to the present situation and she is correct, but I have to go further. The failure of the leadership of organized labor to confront the capitalist offensive is the problem. There were numerous attempts in the 1980’s and early 1990’s to confront this assault including the strike of miners at Pittston Corp.
I was in discussion with some activists from the Black
community in Louisville KY and one woman pointed out in frustration that the
whites in Eastern Kentucky which is part of Appalachia are “poorer than us” yet they vote for Trump. I can sympathize with this view but I am of the firm conviction
that people in the same exploitative conditions can and will build class unity. Bu the exploiters, the corporations, bankers, speculators, are always trying to undermine this class unity through bribery,
favoritism, and first and foremost in the US, racial or color division. The role of leadership in combating this offensive is crucial.
In the last two or so years in Kentucky there have been huge struggles and there is one going on at the moment over the killing of Breonna Taylor, a black worker shot by police. The teachers and parents in Louisville shut down the schools. We had non-union miners blocking a railroad track to their mine in order to get wages denied them. Then we had striking UAW members out during the GM strike. During the course of the teachers struggles, the Black teachers and parents asked that the teachers union oppose a gang ordinance that has tragic consequences in the Black community as it increases police power and ability to stop, frisk and harass Black youth. The union leadership refused claiming it would weaken the movement when it would have strengthened it. Appalachian Eastern Kentuckians followed the leadership which as far as I could tell is predominantly white.
There was never any attempt to my knowledge, to link the struggles that were taking place, education, racial justice, the miners, the GM workers and whatever other disputes may have been occurring in to one generalized campaign against capital and the right-wing forces in the state.
I can understand the hopelessness and frustration that some Black
folks feel at this situation but in my opinion, the blame lies solely with the
union leadership at the state and particularly national level. Had they played
a different role, the efforts to divide workers would not have been as successful or certainly less so.
Just a few thoughts that all arose out of me watching that short video. Please read the full article from which I took some of these quotes. Again, Gwynn Guilford, The 100-year capitalist experiment that keeps Appalachia poor, sick, and stuck on coal
Here is an article from this blog that gives a bit of my labor history and my views as to why the labor leaders refuse to fight. https://weknowwhatsup.blogspot.com/2019/08/14-million-union-members-why-wont-their.html
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