Experts all wrong about W. Va.
The lefties on MSNBC had a fine week, highlighted by Rachael Maddow, who gave the country its first glimpse of Donald Trump’s tax returns. These two pages from 2005 may be all we ever see. The president of the United States has not exactly been forthcoming on this front.
Earlier, Chris Hayes took his hour-long primetime show to Welch, in southern West Virginia. Tagging along was Sen. Bernie Sanders. There, the two staged a television version of a town hall meeting with a panel of McDowell County residents and an audience of locals.
Judging by the applause and the warm reception accorded the Vermont senator and 2016 presidential contender, the network was able to gather in one place at one time all of the people of McDowell who retain a warm spot in their hearts for the Democratic Party. Candidate Trump captured nearly 75 percent of the vote in the county.
(Heck, that’s nothing. A neighboring county, Wyoming, went for Trump 83-17.)
Now, one of the edifying things about the show was how wrong Hayes, Sanders and those who spoke to the subject were about one very large aspect: the length of time southern West Virginia has been groaning under the weight of abject unemployment.
Hayes and his guests referred more than once to the good times of the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. Do you know what the unemployment rate in McDowell was in the early 1990s? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it was 23 percent!
Southern West Virginia had been a basket case for years. In the spring of 1960, this portion of the state got the once-over from one of the media stars of the day, New York Times-man Harrison Salisbury.
Typical of the southern half of the state, Salisbury wrote, was Campbell’s Fork, described as “a half-abandoned coal camp where of 91 persons still living in paintless, sagging houses, only five or six have jobs.”
In Kelly’s Creek, miners had been without work since 1952. These eight fallow years, Salisbury wrote, had spawned a class of individuals unrecognizable to most Americans. Men once accustomed to work “sit on the porch or the loafer’s bench and stare sad-faced and gentle-eyed at the scarred hillside.”
Salisbury spoke to a local merchant, who recalled “the best days” took place in 1922. By the late ’50s West Virginia was in a steep social and economic decline. The truth is a post-World War II recession never loosened its grip on West Virginia.
By 1960, the state’s jobless rate was three times the national average. It ranked close to the bottom in per capita income. The Times ran a front page photograph of a weather-beaten shack-home in Blakely, noting the nearby mine had closed eight years earlier.
In January 1960, the cautious The Saturday Evening Post tossed a stone the state’s way with an article it called “The Strange Case of West Virginia.” It was grim reading.
Experts of the day noted that newer, cheaper methods of mining coal had worsened the state’s unemployment picture.
The word “automation” had raised its ugly head. Mechanization, whether in the office or the mines, was here to stay. The nation had better to get use to it. Workers had to learn to adapt.
Back to the present. MSNBC spoke to a service station owner who has been at his post 66 years. Once, within memory, “the coal mines was all working,” he said. He described a “boom” time.
In his dreams.
The decline of coal didn’t start with Obama and it won’t end with Trump.
Robert Kennedy visited Welch in 1968. “People are still having a very, very difficult time. There is no hope for the future amongst many of the people who worked hard in the coal mines,” he later said.
Folks in this portion of the country, Sen. Kennedy noted, are “filled with despair.”
“We can do things all over the rest of the world,” he concluded, “but I think we should do something for people in our own country.”
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — “Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation” and “Our People.” He can be reached at grandsalutebook@gmail.com.