A social democrat responds to ‘Hillbilly Elegy’
The debate over “Who lost China?” was a popular Georgetown parlor game in the 1950s. In the wake of President Donald Trump’s smashing electoral victory last fall, there is a new, more xenophobic-tinged domestic version making the rounds: “Who lost Appalachia?’’
In his best-selling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,’’ the conservative author J.D. Vance blamed Appalachia’s suffering on the poor. He said they had no one but themselves to blame for their shifty morals and logy work habits. In “Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia,” Steve Stoll, a selfavowed social democrat, identifies a different culprit: capitalism. More specifically, the logging and coal-mining industries. With the full blessing of state governments, those industries invaded the hills and hollows in the late 19th century and stripped the place bare without ever providing fair compensation, he claims.
In our polarized political climate, it’s easy to dismiss Mr. Stoll’s thesis as the bleating of yet another liberal snowflake. But Mr. Stoll, a history professor at Fordham University, marshals his extensive knowledge of ancient and modern economic systems to present a compelling and persuasive argument worthy of consideration.
According to Mr. Stoll, the East Coast capitalists exploited Appalachia by employing a 17th-century tactic known as enclosure. English lords used it to turn peasants into peons. It works like this:
Before the 16th century, Mr. Stoll says, no one in England owned land, not even Richard II. Everyone lived off a commons, which describes any set of resources used or controlled by a village, town, nation or some other group. English peasants and lords each had different rights to the commons. But at some point that wasn’t enough for the lords, who wanted to derive economic value from the land. They wanted to be paid. So they divvied up the land into parcels and required the peasants to compensate them for usage. Debt was used to tie thepeons to the land.
Much the same thing happened across Appalachia, Mr. Stoll says. Most of the highlands had been awarded to Colonial-era absentee owners such as George Washington, who let the land lay idle because it had no economic value. By the 18th century, Scots-Irish and German immigrants occupied the land as squatters,living subsistence lives by farmingand hunting and gathering.
Following the Civil War, when coal was needed to fuel the engines of the Industrial Revolution, this idle land suddenly became valuable to the Eastern business syndicates. Property disputes between squatters and absentee owners made it costly and time-consuming for the syndicates to acquire mineral rights parcel by parcel, so they rigged the state governments to do their bidding.
Shortly after his election as West Virginia’s governor in 1892, William A. MacCorkle threw open the doors to the coal and lumber industries. By 1910 West Virginia was in recession, unable to compete with new coal fields in Nova Scotia and Indianaand southern Illinois.
Except for brief upticks during the two world wars and in the 1990s, Appalachia — defined by the federal government as stretching from lower New York to northern Alabama and Georgia — has remained economically stagnant since the Great Depression, Mr. Stoll points out. Appalachia’s 20 percent poverty rate is nearly a quarter higher than the national average.
West Virginia’s population has fallen 40 percent since the 1950s — a sign that millions of young workers are moving to where the jobs are, leaving behind a population that’s older, poorer and sicker than the rest of the nation. Eight percent of West Virginians with paying jobs still don’t enjoy three meals a day or have adequate housing, Mr. Stoll says. “A few years ago, in Bluefield, W.Va., I found no locally owned restaurants,’’ he writes. “The largest business in town was a pawnshop. … In 2016, the Walmart in McDowell closed.” So what’s the solution? Mr. Vance encouraged Mountaineers to follow his escape plan: Get an education and get out. It worked for him, but what about the millions too old or unable to relocate? Mr. Stoll offers them some practical advice. First, stop voting for politicians who work against your personal interests. “It is difficult to find anything Appalachians have gained by voting for Republicans,” he says.
He also advocates for the federal government to take a page from history and help establish commons communities in which families can hunt, farm, graze cattle and harvest timber for wages. That sounds more than a bit utopian. Nevertheless, “Ramp Hollow” adds an eerie sense of déjà vu to the present-day arguments over what, if any, benefits Appalachian communities are reaping from Marcellus shale drilling.