Book details West Virginia’s looting
Author John Knowles (1926-2001) attended Phillips Exeter Academy and Yale University and wrote “A Separate Peace,” the quintessential prep-school novel.
But he was born in West Virginia, where his fiction occasionally was set.
In “A Vein of Riches” (1978), Knowles described the coal-mine-owning Catherwood family. Young Lyle Catherwood wanted out because he understood that a “labyrinth of clammy menace underlay every limousine, tea dance and dividend in the world above.”
Knowles’ father was a coal-company executive. The novelist might have been describing his own unease.
But moral qualms of the sort Lyle expressed, about how the rich took advantage, were rare, if you believe ■ Steven Stoll, the author of “Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia.” His book is a powerful and outrageinducing, if somewhat academic, analysis of what has made West Virginia one of the sorriest places — statistically, anyway — to live in America.
“Ramp Hollow” is not “Hillbilly Elegy.” Stoll, a history professor at Fordham University, doesn’t relate his own story, and his book is not warm. As economic history, though, it is gravid and well-made.
Stoll details how outsiders did their worst to the agrarian smallholders of Appalachia: taking their land by fiat in the 19th century and later stripping it of lumber and coal, leaving the people at the mercy of mine owners.
Worse, their representatives betrayed them. Stoll writes, “Perhaps no political leadership anywhere in the United States or the Atlantic World ever exposed its own people and environment to the same unbridled destruction and abuse.”
The author delivers a painstaking history of how public land became real estate, and how hundreds, if not thousands, of people were pushed aside by one or two barons.
The litany of villains in “Ramp Hollow” includes Alexander Hamilton, who wanted to modernize Appalachians and drag them by their beards into the circuit of capital. As secretary of the Treasury, he tried to tax those who made alcohol, leading to the Whiskey Rebellion.
Stoll argues that the West Virginians were better left alone. They weren’t poor by their own standards, and they often made do quite well.
The author takes his time building this story for a reason: “Seeing the world without the past would be like visiting a city after a devastating hurricane and declaring that the people there have always lived in ruins,” he writes.
His book becomes a withering indictment of rapacious capitalism. “What made politicians and investors think,” Stoll asks, “that they could do whatever they wanted wherever they wanted?”
He suggests a way forward that includes reparations, free college tuition and other remedies.