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.1
The restructuring of the coal industry was especially hard on southwest Virginia. Coal production dropped so rapidly in Buchanan, Dickenson, and Wise counties during the 1990s that the total number of coal miners reached an all-time low of 6,900 in 1996, fewer than half of those employed in 1982. In nearby eastern Kentucky, the number of mining jobs declined from 35,000 to 15,000 during the same period. In counties where mining was once the dominant, if not the sole, source of employment, coal mining accounted for less than 15 percent of the jobs, behind construction and general trade positions. Harlan County, which had supported nearly 20,000 miners earlier in the century, employed only 1,200 in 2002. During the last two decades of the twentieth century, the number of coal mining jobs throughout all of Appalachia declined by 70 percent, falling from 159,000 to 46,000.2
Miners had lost their jobs before in the coalfields, which had always endured booms and busts in the coal market, but the disappearance of jobs in the 1980s and 1990s was permanent. Not only had technology altered the demand for underground miners, but the industry had already tapped the best seams of coal, and the deeper, thinner seams were more expensive to mine. Geologists in government agencies and universities increasingly predicted that the supply of mineable coal in Appalachia was running out and that declining reserves would limit future production. The Kentucky Geological Survey, for example, reported in 1989 that minable coal in some areas might be exhausted in twenty years. In many places, companies were already down to mining seams that had narrowed from seventy inches to as little as twelve inches, and these thin seams were full of impurities.3 Despite the confidence of engineers that they would develop new technologies to reach deeper and thinner seams and the assurances of min
e owners that the geologists were wrong, miners began to recognize that the era of big coal was gone and that fewer of the region’s workers would again find employment in the industry.
The declining number of miners reflected changes in the politics and environment of coal communities. The once powerful UMWA almost disappeared as a political force in some areas of Appalachia, replicating the decline of union membership generally throughout the United States. After the election of Richard Trumka as president of the UMWA in 1982 and the ascendancy of conservative, probusiness interests in the Reagan White House, the union adopted a policy of supporting selective strikes rather than launching national strikes to shut down the entire coal industry. Trumka hoped to bring stability to the coalfields and to preserve jobs by helping American companies compete more efficiently with imported coal, but this policy of cooperation failed to halt sliding union membership. Then the A. T. Massey Coal Company in 1984–1985 and later the Pittston Coal Company in 1989–1990 broke away from industry-wide agreements in order to advance lower-wage and nonunion operations. The latter confrontation erupted as a spontaneous strike in southwest Virginia when Pittston refused to sign the union contract and brought in strikebreakers to replace picketing UMWA members. The strike resulted in the arrests of thousands of miners and their supporters and spread to more than fifty thousand miners in eleven states before reaching a compromise settlement. Pittston was permitted to continue to employ nonunion miners and to set a twenty-four-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week work schedule. The Pittston strike signaled to smaller mining companies in Appalachia that they too could break their union contracts, and nonunion mines proliferated.4
The loss of jobs in underground mines and the decline of union membership sucked the economic lifeblood from scores of rural mountain communities. Few of the coalfield communities had benefited much from the infrastructure and industrial development efforts of the 1970s, and the limited service jobs and branch plants that had come to nearby towns and villages paid significantly less than a miner’s wage and often provided no health or retirement benefits. A small number of miners found employment driving coal trucks and bulldozers at surface mines that began to expand in parts of southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky, but many more left their homes seeking work in the new growth centers or in towns on the perimeter of the region. Those who were able to find work in the remaining nonunion deep mines labored under deteriorating work conditions and declining enforcement of federal mining laws, with fewer health benefits.
Even the landscape itself was altered by the changing structure of the coal industry. In the heart of the coalfields, the expansion of surface mining leveled thousands of acres of mountaintops, filling in the valleys between ridges and covering the heads of creeks with rubble. Blasts from these massive operations polluted or destroyed the well water of nearby homes, cracked foundations, and raised clouds of dust that settled everywhere. The new mining technique, known as mountaintop removal, emerged through a loophole in the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977 that allowed mine owners to circumvent regulations requiring the restoration of land to its approximate original contour if the reclaimed land could be put to “a higher and better use.” The coal industry was quick to recognize the potential of mountaintop removal as a cheap and efficient way to create level land for economic development, and in an era when policy makers were feverish for industrial recruitment, the promise of flat, developable land in the mountains was enough to ease mining permits through the state regulatory agencies and the Army Corps of Engineers. With few exceptions, however, the promised developments never materialized, and communities were left with miles of deserted, treeless plateaus, poisoned water tables, and a permanently altered landscape. Most mountaintop removal sites were remote, and in the small number of cases where strip-mined sites were located close to population centers, the construction of shopping centers, hospitals, hotels, and small manufacturing facilities on old mine sites often ran into problems with unstable, shifting land.
Aside from the environmental destruction, increased production from surface mining generated few jobs, destroyed the area’s potential for sustainable timber and tourism development, and pushed another generation of Appalachian youth out of their rural communities. By 2000 almost half of the coal mined in Appalachia came from mountaintop removal, but the growing industry’s appetite for land seemed unlimited. As environmental writer Erik Reece put it, there were “now enough flattened mountains in Eastern Kentucky to set down the cities of Louisville and Lexington.”5 Despite the efforts of industry and government officials to recruit manufacturing plants to these so-called industrial parks, most remained abandoned or were later designated as wildlife sanctuaries. One site became the location of a federal prison, and another the home of a herd of elk transplanted from the western United States.
Local, state, and federal governments heavily invested public funds in making some of these mining sites suitable for development. At one valley fill location near Hazard, Kentucky, for example, more than $209 million in grants, tax credits, and local bonds were committed to build a fabricating plant that utilized timber from other surface mining sites in the production of glued wood trusses. Contractors spent $1 million of that amount to dig twenty feet down to find ground that was solid enough to build the facility.6 Several years later, the commonwealth provided another incentive package to construct a four-thousand-square-foot aluminum building for a Florida-based computer call center, which left in 2003 after the tax abatement expired, taking its 393 low-paying jobs to El Salvador.7 The wave of mountaintop destruction that swept across the central Appalachians as a result of growing urban demands for cheap electricity generated few jobs for mountain people but left a permanently scarred and wasted landscape.
As coal employment withered, attempts to recruit manufacturing facilities to the coalfields and nearby rural Appalachian communities intensified. Anxious government leaders diverted millions of dollars of public resources into the effort, but their plans were generally met with disappointment in an era of national economic transition. After taking advantage of incentive packages and tax rebates, most of the branch textile, shoe, food processing, and other small plants attracted to Appalachia in the 1980s and 1990s left the region by the end of the century, shifting their production to offshore, even-lower-wage facilities in Latin America and Asia. A study conducted for the ARC concluded that manufacturing in Appalachia, relative to the rest of the country, looked much the same in 1992 as it had in 1967—lower wages, lower productivity, and much more reliant on branch plants.8
The fever for manufacturing recruitment, of course, was not limited to Appalachian leaders. State governments across the South expanded their marketing programs and incentive packages to bring outside jobs into rural communities. Most of the funds and the employment opportunities, however, flowed into the more prosperous regions of those states rather than into the distressed mountain counties. A study of North Carolina’s economic development programs in 2003 revealed that only 7 percent of the state’s industrial recruitment funds were invested in western North Carolina, despite the loss of 6,700 regional industrial jobs in that year alone.9 A similar investigation in Kentucky found that barely more than 6 percent of the corporate income tax credits granted by the commonwealth for rural economic development between 1990 and 1997 went to eastern Kentucky.10 Nevertheless, Appalachian leaders were often among the strongest proponents of these incentive programs, and by the mid-1990s, almost every mountain county had developed its own industrial park in hopes of succeeding in the increasingly competitive hunt for runaway companies.
Enthusiasm for industrial recruitment was especially strong in Appalachian Kentucky, where local officials hoped to combat job loss by attracting low-wage industry. Under the leadership of Paul Patton, a former coal operator and Pike County judge executive who was elected governor in 1992, eastern Kentucky counties launched aggressive campaigns to develop industrial sites on flat, often strip-mined land and to build sp
eculation buildings at public expense. Patton’s statewide incentive program allowed recruited companies to keep their corporate income taxes and the state income taxes paid by their workers, but even these incentives failed to fill industrial parks or to retain many of the businesses that agreed to relocate. Frequently these companies fell short of the number of jobs specified in their contracts with the state, or they closed after a few years of operation.
Harlan County’s experience with industrial recruitment was typical. Beginning in the early 1990s, the state approved more than $11 million in tax breaks and incentives to recruit manufacturing companies to the county in the wake of declining coal employment. Four of the seven companies that received subsidies closed or never opened, and two more employed far fewer people than projected.11 One North Carolina company, United Glove, defaulted on its promise to provide 100 jobs after securing a $1 million tax credit and left the state. Another plant, the Sunshine Valley Farms biscuit factory, opened in 1994 promising to create 106 jobs. After employing only 7 people five years later, the company was sued by the state to recover the public’s half-million-dollar investment.12 Sunshine Valley Farms was owned by two Kentucky nonprofit corporations created during the War on Poverty, the Kentucky Highlands Investment Corporation (KHIC) and the Christian Appalachian Project. Other questionable coalfield development schemes involved investments by local politicians, business leaders, and even coal-related interests. A Harlan County sock factory that had received more than $1.5 million in grants and loans failed soon after one of its owners was elected to the state senate in 1998. In Governor Patton’s Pike County, the state spent $15 million over a decade to recruit, and lose, seven manufacturing facilities at a forty-three-acre industrial park, including one short-lived company that built aluminum dump trailers for hauling coal.13
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