Hollow, a Documentary on the People of McDowell County, West Virginia

It doesn’t have Brad Pitt or Selena Gomez; the movie isn’t even premiering in Hollywood. But a new film promises to shed some light on Appalachia and its people. Due to have its initial showing this Saturday in Welch, West Virginia, a new documentary called Hollow focuses on the people of McDowell County, West Virginia.

            McDowell County is in the middle of coal country, and Welch is a typical coal town of Appalachia. I went to college with folks from Welch, as well as other West Virginia coal towns, such as Iaeger and Bluefield. At the time, in the mid seventies, the relative prosperity that coal brought to mining towns had already started to wane.

            And things have not improved in McDowell County. As this article in the Seattle Post Intelligencer on the new documentary sums up:

More than a third of its 22,000 residents live in poverty, and median incomes are less than half the U.S. average. McDowell also ranks last in the state in many health areas, with a premature death rate nearly double the state average and high rates of physical inactivity, adult smoking and obesity. It leads the state in teen pregnancies and has led the nation in fatal prescription painkiller overdoses.

Pretty grim. As I said earlier, McDowell County is right in the middle of coal country. If you go to Google Maps and take a satellite view of McDowell, you can see a number of the mountaintop mines strewn about the landscape.

            At one time, Welch was a prosperous working class town, and McDowell County the home to 100,000 residents. Today, only about a quarter of that number remains in the county. The mines have not shut down, and coal production in West Virginia remains at levels that have comparable to past decades. The decline for McDowell County, as it is for many other areas of Appalachia, is in part due to the union busting of the UMW by some to the big coal companies, such as Massey Energy. In the fifties almost all coal mining in West Virginia was performed by union miners. By 1998 membership in the UMW was down to 240,000, half or what it was in 1946,[i] when the union may have been at the height of its power under John L. Lewis. Mountaintop removal exacerbated the economic decline. A traditional coal mining operation requires dozens miners. In some cases, a huge mountaintop removal mine might employ as few as nine men.

            Other industry has left McDowell County. A little over 25 years ago, US Steel closed down its factory in McDowell County, leaving over 1,200 workers jobless. In the mid to late eighties, an otherwise prosperous time for the United States, personal income in McDowell County plummeted by two-thirds.

            Though the coalmines keep the coal coming out of the ground, the people of southern West Virginia don’t benefit from the mining. The situation in McDowell County is particularly bleak. It’s hard to get my head around this—it baffled me when I was growing up in West Virginia, and I still can’t make sense of it—how can a state with such mineral wealth have people who are so poor?

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[i] Fox, Maier B. United We Stand, The United Mine Workers of America 1890-1990 United Mine Workers of America 1990

Losing Blair Mountain: The Mountaintop Removal of History

A federal judge yesterday ruled against the Sierra Club and other organizations in a case brought before the court to preserve Blair Mountain, a historic landmark in American and labor history. The ruling opens up the ability of a coal company to destroy the mountain, or at least a significant portion of it, through mountaintop removal mining.

I use this cyber soapbox often to point out how mountaintop removal is destroying our ecological and cultural heritage. In this case this mining practice will destroy part of our history as well. The largest armed conflict on American soil since the time of the Civil War occurred on Blair Mountain. In 1921, after years of lawless exploitation, 10,000 West Virginia miners marched against the oppression of the mine owners. Met with armed resistance by the local sheriff, hired mine guards, and a makeshift militia at Blair Mountain, a battle ensued. The conflict lasted ten days. President Warren G. Harding sent in the Army, including the Air Force, and included the use of aerial bombing.

            Once the Army came in and the bombs started to fall from the sky, the miners went home. The mine owners won this battle. It was not until 1933, under FDR’s first term, that West Virginia coal miners gained unionization.

            As far as labor history goes, the Battle of Blair Mountain bears the same significance as John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry does to the Civil War. And just as our understanding of the Civil War is incomplete without a knowledge and appreciation of Brown and his quixotic raid, we do not fully understand the New Deal or other achievements of the labor movement without a knowledge of the struggle of Blair Mountain.

Details about the court ruling can be found here. Briefly summarizing, the plaintiffs in this case were trying to have Blair Mountain returned to the National Register of Historic Places, which the National Park Service had bestowed on the landmark in the spring of 2009. Being on the register would keep the mountain safe from mountaintop removal. The judge ruled that the Sierra Club and others lack standing, the ability of a plaintiff to demonstrate to the court that the actions of the defendant would cause harm to the plaintiff.

Mountaintop coal mining has decimated the United Mine Workers, depressing wages and the economy of West Virginia and rolling back the accomplishments of the UMW and organized labor. What those miners fought for at the Battle of Blair Mountain is being lost. Losing the mountain as well makes this irony especially bitter.