Uneven Ground (39 page)

The president's helicopter passed over Interstate 75 and Madison County before heading east into the mountains to land at an elementary school in the small community of Tyner in Jackson County. Madison County, on the edge of the region, was home to the growing cities of Richmond and Berea, which had taken advantage of their location along the interstate to attract branch manufacturing plants and expand education, health, and retail services. Berea College, long a champion of Appalachian uplift and traditional culture, had broadened its student body to reach larger numbers of poor and minority students outside the mountains and had become one of the leading liberal arts colleges in the nation. Even the small school at Tyner was a new, multigraded facility, worlds apart from the one- and two-room schools that once dotted rural landscapes throughout Appalachia. Graduates of the Tyner school were bused to the modern, consolidated high school twelve miles away in the county seat, McKee. Fifty percent of those who graduated from Jackson County High School now went
on to college, but one in two elementary students failed to complete high school, and 43 percent of the adult population had not finished the ninth grade.
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From the Tyner school, the president's motorcade drove into Whispering Pines, a cluster of small trailer homes with about one hundred residents. There Clinton sat briefly in a plastic lawn chair and talked with sixty-nine-year-old Ray Pennington, a retired laborer with emphysema who kept a portable oxygen tank at his side. In a conversation that echoed the visit of another president to the porch of a cabin in nearby Martin County in 1964, the two men shared stories of growing up in rural places and talked about the need for jobs that might reduce the outflow of the area's young people. “Pennington's daughter Jean Collett told Clinton that since she had to quit her job at the Dairy Queen to care for her recently widowed father, the family relie[d] heavily on her son-in-law's paycheck from the nearby Mid-South plant.”
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The local electric components assembly plant was one of several that benefited from new tax incentives, and it now employed almost five hundred people.

After touring the Mid-South Electronics plant, the president greeted onlookers at a local Stop-N-Go and an Auto Mart before flying on to Hazard, deep in the coalfields. The sixty-five-mile journey would have taken Clinton two hours by car through Clay County, one of the poorest counties in the United States, and along the Daniel Boone Parkway, a link in the Appalachian Development Highway System. By air, the president traversed countryside of rugged hills and narrow hollows, substantially unchanged since the 1960s. Along the winding but now paved roads were modest homes, rehabilitated cabins, nearly abandoned coal camps, and the occasional tiny country store. Beneath the forest vegetation lay hidden patches of marijuana, a major source of income in the new underground economy of the area. The schools and many of the churches and other public buildings had long ago migrated to the “big road” communities, along with the young people and the jobs.

As the president approached Hazard, he crossed miles of devastated ridgetops, flattened by the new surface mining process of mountaintop removal. The technique, a legal loophole in the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act, decapitated thousands of square miles
of the surrounding mountains, dumping the soil and rock from above the coal seams into nearby hollows and streams and creating vast acreages of level land. A small portion of the mined land was set aside for industrial parks and other anticipated development, but the vast majority of the barren plateaus were reserved as “wildlife sanctuaries.” Local residents complained about the destruction of the water tables, the pollution of well water, the contamination of creeks, and the destruction to homes and fields from blasting and high levels of dust, but the mines operated twenty-four hours a day, providing fuel for the nation's growing energy demands. Overloaded coal trucks hauled their product to nearby railheads or low-country generating plants across the Appalachian corridor highways that also carried rural workers to jobs and services in distant growth centers.

In Hazard, the president told a crowd of almost five thousand that Appalachia and other poor places in America needed more help from government and more investment in private industry if they were to share the prosperity of the rest of the nation. “If we, with the most prosperous economy of our lifetimes, cannot make a commitment to improve the economy of poor areas,” he said before departing for Lexington, “we will have failed to meet a moral obligation, and we also will have failed to make the most of America's promise.”
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People in the crowd were enthusiastic and polite as they “sat on the hot streets of Hazard . . . drinking bottled water and wearing Old Navy,” but most had heard these promises before.
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The town, of course, had changed—it now boasted a new regional hospital, a fine community college, a Wal-Mart shopping center, dozens of retail outlets, and even several modern housing developments—but not far away, up the hollows and in the dying coal towns, was another Appalachia, one that sustained the old stereotypes of poverty and backwardness. That Appalachia persisted in the shadows of the new.

In the heart of the mountains and along the northern and southern fringes of the region, the new Appalachia and the old survived side by side. During the years since the War on Poverty and the creation of the special program for Appalachian development, some communities had prospered and grown, while others had languished and declined. Everywhere the region's people were drawn into the web of a more modern and complex world. Growth centers and hollows alike had developed a greater dependence on the national economy and culture, although some communities had benefited from government-sponsored programs more than had others. Despite the transformation of places like Hazard and significant improvement by almost every gauge of region-wide socioeconomic performance, Appalachia still lagged behind the rest of the country in measures of income, health, education, and job security.

At the close of the twentieth century, the region was a much more diverse place. The modern highways, vocational schools, health facilities, and other public infrastructure projects funded by the ARC had altered the mountain landscape, reshaping much of Appalachia in the pattern of American consumer society. Appalachian teenagers wore the same clothing styles and listened to the same music as their counterparts in the rest of the nation, and local Wal-Marts carried an abundance of cheap, internationally made goods. Hidden within this new society, however, were old Appalachian problems that government initiatives had failed to address. An inadequate tax base, a low-wage economy, environmental abuse, civic fraud, political corruption, absentee landownership, and corporate irresponsibility continued to
weaken the region and to limit the lives of its residents. The physical destruction of the mountains, rising drug dependence, and the loss of traditional values and culture, moreover, threatened to destroy those things that had made the region distinct. Appalachia was rapidly joining the cultural and economic mainstream, and that prospect raised a new set of uncertainties.

In the popular mind, Appalachia continued to represent the other America—an isolated place of backwardness and poverty ironically rich in romance and tradition. President Clinton's trip to eastern Kentucky, media fascination with mountain culture during coal mining tragedies, and the persistence of stereotypes in plays, television, and movies continued to dramatize the popular belief that Appalachia was somehow different from the rest of the country. The mountains and mountain people had served as counterpoints to American identity for over a hundred years, and the failure of the War on Poverty and economic expansion to abolish the perceived differentness of Appalachia only reinforced old images and perceptions. The idea of Appalachia as a place in, but not of, America continued because Americans needed to believe in Appalachia's existence as part of the ongoing debate over national identity itself.

Modern Appalachia, however, increasingly reflected the social divisions and the divergent dreams of the larger society. The growing gap between mountain middle-class and working-class people, between rural places and suburban communities, and between local families and neo-Appalachians raised troubling questions about the direction of American culture and the equity of unregulated development. The new Appalachia was as tied to material consumption and mass culture as was any part of the country, but in rural areas one could still find people who kept gardens, visited neighbors, and attended family churches. In the shadow of the new artist colonies, golf courses, and gated communities that increasingly dotted the hillsides of the Great Smoky Mountains and the Blue Ridge stood the trailer homes of families who struggled to hold on to farms that had nurtured their ancestors. Some of the wealthy newcomers admired mountain music and supported local craftspeople, but much of the talent and natural wealth of the region continued to flow out of the hills, along with many of the native youth.

Appalachia had been drawn closer to the rest of America, but the fundamental problems of the region remained: issues of land use and ownership, taxation and public responsibility, environmental quality, economic security, civic leadership, human rights, and respect for cultural diversity. Despite decades of behavior modification strategies, welfare management practices, and infrastructure development, the gap between the rich and the poor within Appalachia and the loss of land and community by longtime residents continued. In part, these public strategies designed to address the “Appalachian problem” failed not only because they did not confront the structural inequities behind the conditions but also because Appalachian problems were fundamentally those of the rest of the nation.

The Appalachian economy, for example, had always been tied to national markets, despite popular images of the region as isolated and underdeveloped. The postwar effort to modernize the mountains came at a time of rapid transition in the national economy, but politics and misperceptions of the region's history limited the actions of planners and policy makers to playing games of economic catch-up rather than to designing a sustainable, place-based economy for a changing world. During the 1970s and 1980s, as promoters of Appalachian development were building industrial parks, supporting the expansion of coal mining, and chasing runaway branch plants, the United States was undergoing a fundamental change from a manufacturing-based economy to a service-based economy. At a time when Appalachian leaders were struggling to recruit labor-intensive, low-wage manufacturing plants to an underdeveloped region, technology and globalization were moving these older forms of industrial growth abroad. Traditional industrial recruitment strategies not only perpetuated the long pattern of wealth flowing out of the mountains but also failed to provide a sustainable economic foundation or to protect the region's sensitive environmental resources. Branch plant economies provided jobs but created little permanent wealth in the communities where they operated. As the rest of the nation invested in expanding higher education, improving environmental quality, and encouraging creativity for a higher-tech and more service-based world, the core communities of Appalachia remained tied to the old, extractive economy.

This pattern of economic change without the benefits of diversity, forethought, and social equity was apparent throughout the region, but nowhere was it more evident than in the central coalfields. Despite the short-lived boom of the mid-1970s, employment in the coal industry continued to decline steadily throughout the final decades of the twentieth century. The introduction of new mining technologies, the depletion of easily accessible coal seams, competition from western U.S. and South American mines, and government regulation of air quality standards combined to restructure coal industry ownership and to shift production from underground mines to surface operations. Rural communities that had survived decades of uncertain employment in deep mines now found those remaining jobs disappearing, probably forever.

At least part of the decline in coal mining jobs was the result of the utilization of new technologies, especially robotics. Just as automated cutting and loading machines had displaced thousands of miners in the years immediately after World War II, the introduction of continuous mining equipment and remotely operated longwall machines revolutionized underground mining, allowing for increased production with still fewer employees. By the early 1980s, larger, more heavily capitalized companies were adopting the new technologies. Smaller operators, less able or willing to invest in the latest machinery, found it difficult to compete. In an era of energy industry consolidation, scores of smaller, locally owned companies sold out. Many operators moved their families and their wealth to Lexington, Roanoke, Knoxville, and other urban centers within the region.

The introduction of modern mining machinery reflected fundamental changes in the ownership structure of the coal industry, as a few large energy conglomerates came to dominate Appalachian coal production. Big operating companies such as Massey Energy, Arch Coal, and Consol Energy could afford to invest in the latest equipment, but the arrival of the energy corporations gave new meaning to the long legacy of absentee ownership of Appalachian resources. Less productive mines could be closed with little regard for local economies, and the application of new technologies was disproportionately weighted to increase production rather than to improve the health and safety of miners. Distant corporate executives and international stock-holders
were even less concerned with the future of declining coalfield communities than their predecessors had been.

As a result of globalization, technology, and the extension of the federal Clean Air Act in 1970, coal production within Appalachia shifted heavily toward the lower-sulfur coalfields of southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky and toward cheaper surface-mined coal. With the decline of the American steel industry as a result of offshore competition, demand for metallurgical coal dried up, and production overwhelmingly shifted to steam coal. Older metallurgical mines in central West Virginia, southwest Virginia, and some areas of eastern Kentucky closed, leaving thousands of underground miners unemployed. In 2002, Appalachia still produced nearly 40 percent of the nation's coal, enough to generate about half of the electricity used in the United States, but region-wide production levels were on the decline, and the industry was concentrated in a few counties.
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