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Financial Times, June 27, 2019
America’s new redneck rebellion
by Edward Luce in Charleston, West Virginia
When West Virginia’s schoolteachers went on strike last year, the
state’s history flared back to life.
The teachers donned red bandanas in honour of the early 20th-century
miners who wore the garments in their infamous pitched battles with coal
operators. The strikers of the so-called mine wars thus acquired the
name “rednecks”. The label meant something very different then than it
does today — the red of workers’ blood, rather than poor white prejudice.
These days West Virginia is better known for its “deplorables”, an
epithet Hillary Clinton ill-advisedly used to describe half of Donald
Trump’s supporters in the 2016 campaign. Though Clinton meant the term
more generally, West Virginia took it personally, giving Trump his
second-largest margin of victory after Wyoming.
There was a time, however, when West Virginia was the most radical state
in the union. “We went ‘red’ because we wanted to hearken back to what
West Virginia once was,” says Jay O’Neal, a teacher based in the state
capital of Charleston, who organised the strike with fellow teacher
Emily Comer over chronically low pay and the declining quality of health
insurance.
Jay 0’Neal, a leader of the teacher’s strike: ‘Moving to West Virginia
radicalised me. The state is government of the corporation, by the
corporation, for the corporation’ © Matt Eich
The historical origin of the term redneck is often traced to poor white
cotton farmers sunburned from working the fields — “po whites”, in the
words of black slaves. Nowadays, a redneck is generally taken to be
racist. There are still plenty of those. West Virginia’s miner rednecks,
though, were a multiracial group.
African-American and Italian immigrant “scabs”, who had been moved in by
the coal owners to replace the striking Appalachian miners, were invited
to join the illegal United Mine Workers union. They accepted. According
to local activists, as the 10,000-strong integrated army marched towards
a showdown with the coal owners’ private army, the strikers desegregated
whites-only public spaces at gunpoint.
Barring the US civil war, the 1921 battle of Blair Mountain was the
largest armed insurrection in American history. Dozens of lives were
lost, with private planes even hired to drop bombs on American citizens.
It was also a milestone in desegregated labour history. Unlike West
Virginia’s teachers, who took nine days to win last year’s strike, West
Virginia’s miners lost their battle. They had to wait for the presidency
of Franklin Delano Roosevelt 12 years later for the right to organise.
A century on, that redneck spirit is stirring again. In 2018, there
were more strikes in America than in any year since Ronald Reagan was
president — and more than 10 times as many days were lost to strikes or
lockouts than in the year Trump was elected. Last month Uber and Lyft
drivers even stopped work for a day. Contrary to its image among some
metropolitan liberals as a hotbed of Trumpian know-nothings, West
Virginia has led the picket lines.
With a per capita income of under $25,000 — less than half the US
average — West Virginia is ground zero for American populist discontent.
Trump caught that frustration in 2016: he scooped up 68 per cent of West
Virginia’s vote against Clinton’s 26 per cent.
Many Democrats, particularly those who rarely visit West Virginia, have
since written it off as “Trump country”. Yet, some polling has suggested
that Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s socialist challenger, who is running
second behind Joe Biden in this cycle’s Democratic primaries, would have
defeated Trump in the state by 48 to 46 per cent.
“Moving to West Virginia radicalised me,” says O’Neal, who came from
Texas. He and Comer were chosen for Time magazine’s list of 100 most
influential people last year. West Virginia’s schools strike triggered
similar walkouts in Los Angeles, Oklahoma, Arizona, Kentucky and
elsewhere. “This state is run by the ‘good ol’ boy’ network,” says
O’Neal. “It is government of the corporation, by the corporation, for
the corporation.”
I drive five hours across some of America’s most breathtaking scenery to
meet Mike Weaver. “Almost heaven, West Virginia” opens John Denver’s
classic song “Country Roads”. Almost Heaven is also the name of the
Washington-based yacht of Joe Manchin, the state’s Democratic senator,
who berths in the capital when Congress is in session.
You can inhale the song’s lyrics as you spin through the deep gorges,
wide meadows and craggy mountain byways. The state is utterly bountiful.
Few landscapes could be so misleading as to the condition of its people.
Mike Weaver, former poultry farmer, who was paid 21 cents a chicken for
15 years, without ever getting a raise. ‘Chickens taught me to steer
clear of big agriculture,’ he says now © Matt Eich
“Eat your rice Han Ling, don’t you know there are children in West
Virginia who are starving,” said a Chinese mother to her child in a New
Yorker cartoon a few years ago. That was obviously comic exaggeration.
Nevertheless, a child in West Virginia has a greater chance of dying
from opioids than of becoming a doctor.
Many kids enter the school gates as “drug babies” — either having become
addicted in the womb or as victims of parental overdoses. One small
town, Williamson, with a population of just 3,000, shipped in more
than 20 million opioid pills, mostly oxycodone and hydrocodone, in a
seven-year period. West Virginia’s rate of resource extraction — timber,
coal, gas and agribusiness, which are its principal industries — seems
to be matched only by the inflow of prescription drugs.
The steep decline of the coal industry is partly to blame. But other
businesses are flourishing. The state’s mountains are criss-crossed with
pipelines from the big fracking companies. Farms have been bisected, and
their water tables polluted, by the often poorly compensated land
seizures. A number of locals told me that the state’s fastest-growing
suicide rate is among its farmers.
“Someone down the road killed himself just the other day,” says Weaver,
a chicken farmer who recently shuttered his two hulking poultry houses
for lack of profit. He shrugs as though talking about a weather event.
“Suicides are pretty regular round here.” Pendleton County is several
hours’ drive from the nearest coal mine. Yet the problems here are the same.
As I approach Weaver’s farm, I spot a large-antlered deer surveying the
vista. Bears occasionally trample across his 200-acre property. He gives
me a honeycomb from one of his beehives. In some respects, Weaver would
seem to live in Arcadia. Yet his sparsely populated county is
experiencing almost every decline you can name — income, population,
lifespan and morale.
You catch the stench of Weaver’s poultry houses long before you see
them. This is four months after he dispatched his last flock. Each house
is 624 feet long and could hold 45,000 chickens. The companies that
dominate poultry farming give their growers eight weeks per flock: six
weeks to rear the chicks; two weeks to clean out the houses for the next
batch.
America’s poultry farmers are the rural equivalent of Uber drivers.
Nominally independent, they rely exclusively for their inputs and
outputs on one of the handful of huge agribusinesses that between them
control the vast majority of the US poultry market. Americans, like most
people, tend to romanticise rural life. In reality, almost every farming
sector is dominated by a few giant corporations.
Though he had 90,000 chickens, Weaver could afford only one part-time
employee. The company that he dealt with, Pilgrim’s Pride, bought the
chickens from him at an average rate of 21 cents each. In 15 years he
never had a raise. “They control everything you do, without taking any
responsibility for it,” says Weaver.
From the science of the LED lighting to the regularity of the water
drips, everything is minutely designed to produce the fattest possible
chicken in the shortest period of time. The largest profit Weaver
cleared in one year after paying off the debts he incurred to build the
operation was $7,000. He relies on his pension as a former US wildlife
services and forestry officer and his wife’s teacher’s salary to make
ends meet.
Weaver, who used to head the Contract Poultry Growers Association of the
Virginias, recently joined a class-action lawsuit against the big
poultry companies for alleged price-fixing. The companies also face
lawsuits from animal-rights activists. (The companies deny the
allegations and are contesting the cases.)
Weaver finally abandoned his poultry business in January. “I miss
chickens like an aching tooth,” he says. His next venture is to grow
hemp to produce cannabinoid oil for the alternative health market — an
industry which he says has not yet been sewn up by big corporations.
“Chickens taught me to steer clear of big agriculture,” he says. “These
companies are greedy bastards. They control West Virginia and
Washington.” Like O’Neal, Weaver describes the nexus between local
politics and corporations as “the good ol’ boy network”.
The southern term “good ol’ boy” originally meant folk from round here —
much like the characters in The Dukes of Hazzard, the 1980s TV show.
Nowadays the best translation would be “local plutocracy”, which can be
found in any part of modern America.
But West Virginia’s elites are seen as unusually plunderous. The
Appalachian state’s economy is based almost purely on the extraction
industries. Ultimately, however, its biggest extraction pipeline is
wealth; very little of it stays in the state. None of the state’s big
employers has its headquarters there.
Both Republicans and Democrats in state politics are intimate with big
business. Many of them join the payroll when they take a breather from
politics. The parties are often hard to distinguish. Joe Manchin, who is
a former governor of West Virginia as well as the current senior
senator, sponsored Jim Justice as the Democratic party’s gubernatorial
candidate four years ago. Justice, a coal-mine operator with a net worth
of $1.5bn, won. He promptly switched his allegiance to the Republicans.
Manchin, meanwhile, votes with Trump about two-thirds of the time. He
confirmed both of Trump’s Supreme Court nominees and has opposed
virtually any measure that would limit US carbon emissions. In Manchin’s
view, the only way for Democrats to win in West Virginia is to act as
though they are Republicans. You could say that Manchin is a “Dino” —
Democrat In Name Only.
He is now facing an unlikely insurgent, Stephen Smith, who is fighting
to be the Democratic nominee for governor. Smith, 39, is not the type
West Virginia normally elects; he speaks with an undrawly East-Coast
diction and peppers his sentences with “Holy Cow!” He was born in
Charleston, but moved to Texas as a child and spent much of his adult
life in Chicago. Pete Buttigieg, the popular young Democratic
presidential candidate, was at college with him.
Unlike most Ivy League liberals, though, Smith has faith in Appalachia’s
people. He resents how the US media depicts them. In Smith’s view, most
West Virginians are as ripe for leftwing economic populism as they are
prone to its more virulent rightwing counterpart. “Racism in West
Virginia is a mile wide but an inch deep,” Smith says. “When you talk to
West Virginians you realise race is not what is motivating people.”
Their real anger, he says, is about rigged capitalism. Much like the
late 19th century’s robber barons, today’s resource barons essentially
control the state. Bill Marland, the last governor who tried to tax the
extractive industries, was drummed out of office in the late 1950s. He
took to alcohol and ended up as a cab driver in Chicago.
His successors took note. When he was governor in the early 2000s,
Manchin slashed corporate taxes. Partly as a result, West Virginia now
comes last out of 50 states on surveys of quality of infrastructure. It
comes close to the bottom on almost every other indicator, including
lifespan and rates of college education.
Meanwhile, Manchin has become a wealthy man, partly through investments
in coal. His net worth of $7.9m puts him 21st among US senators. His
daughter, Heather Bresch, is chief executive of Mylan, the
pharmaceutical company which attained notoriety in 2016 for having
raised the price of EpiPen, the adrenaline auto-injector used to treat
anaphylactic shock, almost fivefold to $600 for a pack of two. She was
paid $38.9m over the preceding two years, according to Forbes. In 2018,
Bresch laid off 400 people from Mylan’s West Virginia plant. Her company
has donated $211,000 to her father’s campaign fund over the past decade.
Manchin is a skilled retail politician. People say he has Bill Clinton’s
personal touch — the type who remembers your mother’s birthday and
always returns calls. To no one’s surprise, he was re-elected as senator
in last year’s midterm elections. Yet his fortunes and those of West
Virginia have sharply diverged since he became its dominant political
figure.
Smith is campaigning against both parties’ establishments. He says there
is only one party in West Virginia — “the good ol’ boys”. Judging from
how people react, he is striking a chord. In this year’s first quarter,
more than 18 months from the election, he raised $150,000 in small
donations. He has a campaign chair in each of the state’s 55 counties.
“Joe Manchin has been the most powerful person in West Virginia for the
last 20 years,” Smith tells town hall gatherings across the state.
“Joe’s life has got better. Has yours?”
Most answer with a resounding no. Like most of his neighbours, Mike
Weaver voted for Donald Trump. He is likely to do so again next year.
“Trump isn’t afraid to put pressure on big companies,” he says. “He’s
already made his billions.”
Yet Weaver has also signed up to support Stephen Smith — Trump’s
opposite in almost every way. Oddly enough, Weaver cites the same
motivation for both his likely votes. Trump stands up for America, he
says. Smith, meanwhile, will be a thorn in the side of big, out-of-state
businesses. Smith vows to tax West Virginia’s corporations at normal
rates and invest the money in new industries. He would target the
state’s almost completely untaxed forested land, much of which is owned
by national rail companies — a legacy of the robber-baron era.
Smith also forswears donations from lobby groups. In Weaver’s mind,
crony capitalism is just another name for corrupt government. “Anybody
who is running against the good ol’ boys will get my attention,” he says.
One of West Virginia’s most attractive qualities is its hospitality.
When I visit Terry and Wilma Steele, a retired miner and teacher, they
invite me to stay the night, though they have never met me. “You don’t
get out of our clutches that easy,” says Wilma. After I gratefully
decline their offer, they show me where they hide the keys — if my
family happens to be in the vicinity, we know where to look.
I had spent some time finding the Steeles. Their address defeated Google
Maps’ best efforts. Terry worked underground for more than a quarter of
a century. Wilma runs the Mine Wars museum in Matewan, which is where a
storied battle took place between the miners and the hired guns of the
notorious Baldwin-Felts detective agency, whom the coal operators had
retained as their private army.
Most of the early coal settlements were company towns. Their denizens
had no democracy. They were paid in company scrip, which could only be
spent in company stores. If they joined a union, they were evicted
overnight. They were like caged animals. “I owe my soul to the company
store,” goes the classic song “Sixteen Tons”. “If you see me comin’,
better step aside/A lotta men didn’t, a lotta men died/One fist of iron,
the other of steel/If the right one don’t a-get you, then the left one
will.”
After miners won the right to unionise, life steadily improved. By the
1950s, West Virginia’s miners had middle-class security. Many of them
kept a picture of FDR on their living-room walls. Their redneck spirit
continued. Wilma grew up in desegregated Matewan. The last mayor of the
town, Johnny Fullen, was African-American. “Johnny taught me history in
high school,” says Wilma. “He was a good man.”
Things changed dramatically in the 1980s. Ronald Reagan won his battle
with the unions and membership began to decline. As more mines
de-unionised, coal turned into an emblem of West Virginia’s identity. It
is now almost an ideology.
As the unions faded, racial antagonism resurfaced. The trade-off between
class and race is stark in the US — nowhere more so than in West
Virginia. “Even today, if a black person came to someone’s door, they
would invite him to dinner,” says Wilma. “But they would say: ‘I fixed
that n****r something to eat.’”
Wilma was at school with a man called Don Blankenship, who went on to
become chief executive of Massey Energy, a coal operator. In 2010, when
Blankenship was chief executive, an underground blast killed 29 miners.
It was the worst accident in a generation. He was jailed for a year for
having violated safety rules.
Blankenship quickly became a cause célèbre of anti-Obama forces. He
published a booklet calling himself an “American political prisoner”.
Supporters dismissed climate change as a liberal conspiracy. “We are
nothing without coal,” goes the refrain.
As local historians, the Steeles see today’s frustrations from a long
perspective. Each of their families can be traced back to the 1730s,
when West Virginia was settled. Both are also descended from branches of
the Hatfields, who were on one side in the infamous Hatfield-McCoy
feud in the 19th century.
Plays are still put on about the Hatfields and the McCoys — dead
brothers, corrupt sheriffs, Yankee land grabbers and a score-settling
that seemed to stretch to infinity. Folklore says the feud started over
a dead pig. In reality, it was triggered by the loss of land to the big
railway companies. “Outsiders depict us as inbred idiots who are always
killing each other,” says Wilma. “That’s because a Yankee writer got to
write the history.”
Just outside Wilma’s museum in Matewan, which is close to Williamson,
the town drowning in opioid pills, you can still see plenty of bullet
holes in the walls. In those days, rednecks drank the company moonshine.
Today is the age of oxycodone. A freight train loaded with coal takes
about 10 minutes to trundle past.
They say Americans pay little heed to history. West Virginians arguably
remember too much. “The devil lives in these hills,” goes the saying.
Some have a story about big East-Coast capitalists raping their land for
what lies underneath. The latest example is mountaintop mining —
blasting hilltops for the little coal that remains. Much of the
groundwater is now unusable. Others say the opposite: that East-Coast
liberals are trying to close down West Virginia’s livelihood by spinning
tall stories about global warming. In each case, outsiders are to blame.
West Virginia has just 14,000 people working underground — barely a 10th
of its mid-20th-century peak. That headcount has risen marginally since
Trump was elected. But not even he can arrest the march of natural gas,
which is the main cause of coal’s decline (as opposed to Obama’s
regulations, which are seen as the chief culprit by many West Virginians).
“People keep telling us there’s a hundred years of coal in the ground,”
says Wilma. “That’s a myth. At best we have 10 years.” The Steeles show
me government survey maps that leave little doubt that the bulk of the
remaining coal seams are uneconomic. “The good ol’ boys don’t talk about
that,” Wilma says.
It took me weeks to secure an interview with Joe Manchin. Even then it
was only 15 minutes over the phone. I wanted to ask him about economic
populism. To my mind that included asking him about Smith’s campaign,
which paints Manchin and Justice — Democrat and Republican — as members
of the same oligarchy. Manchin told me he may quit the US Senate to
enter the West Virginia governor’s race. Then again, he may not.
Manchin’s grip over the state Democratic party is tight. He prevaricated
in much the same way in the lead-up to the 2016 governor’s election,
which many saw as his way of deterring grassroots hopefuls from throwing
their hats into the ring. Then he handpicked Justice to fill the slot.
Justice’s now-Republican governorship has not gone well.
I asked Manchin whether he really means to enter this time. “I have to
wait and see and look at my responsibilities,” he replied. As for the
good ol’ boy label, he rejects it as “name-calling”. “I was never part
of any clique,” he said. “Stephen Smith,” however, “seems like a nice
young man,” he added.
Our conversation sputtered evasively for a few more minutes. Manchin’s
tone made it clear he would rather be mucking out a poultry house.
Afterwards his aide called and said that Manchin would never give me an
interview again. “You said you wanted to talk about economic populism,”
said the aide. “Then you asked about politics. It was a bait and
switch.” I tried to explain that economic populism and politics were the
same thing. It was an odd exchange. Either way, Smith is clearly
rattling Manchin’s nerves.
At his town halls, Smith plays a game of musical chairs. He picks six
volunteers and arranges five chairs on the stage. Two of the volunteers
are given two chairs each, which they lounge over. That leaves one chair
for the four other people. They tend to squabble over who takes the
remaining chair rather than try to evict the first two from their perches.
That is how politics works, says Smith. People with nothing tend to
fight each other over the little that remains. People with everything
know how to make the rest scramble.
It is a simple yet strangely effective game. Next, Smith asks the
audience what is the first thing a campaign does. The answer is that it
seeks large donors to fund itself. “Who then gets to shape the
campaign?” asks Smith. “The donors!” comes the answer. Smith then
explains that he is restricting his fundraising to small donors. Who
controls our campaign? he asks. “We do!” comes the reply. Yes, he says.
This is your campaign.
I watched Smith interact with several different groups. He makes up in
earnestness what he lacks in charisma. Some voters, such as Mike Weaver,
are fans of Smith but are also supporters of Trump. Others, such as the
Steeles, detest Trump and are strong backers of Smith.
The Steeles have even held small fundraisers in their backyard, where
they give out red bandanas. “I’ve done more for Smith than any candidate
in my life,” says Terry. Interestingly, both Weaver and the Steeles
speak warmly about Manchin. “He always responds when you ask for his
help,” says Weaver.
Most West Virginians, however, do not bother to vote. The only category
that beat Trump in West Virginia was those who did not go to the polling
booths — 43 per cent of the adult population. Even in 2016, it seems,
apathy was a larger force than anger. That is how Smith’s musical-chair
winners seem to like it.
Smith’s bet is that there is an older redneck surviving beneath today’s
West Virginian. The original miners took control of their destiny and
embraced solidarity. Many of their descendants have fallen sway to the
politics of identity.
What is most gripping about West Virginia today is that the two are in
competition. Politics here, as in so much of America, is as wide open as
anyone can recall. “I don’t know for sure whether our movement will
succeed,” says Smith. “But I know for sure that we can.”
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