Appalachia Is More Diverse Than You Think

Beneath the pro-Trump sentiment is a region struggling to rebuild itself.

Mr. Gipe is a novelist.

Credit...Mike Belleme for The New York Times

HARLAN, Ky. — I have lived in the Appalachian coal fields for 30 years, working as a writer and an educator, and I have often been asked to “explain” my region. Appalachia is a huge, diverse part of the country, including some or all of 13 states and 25 million people, but around me there is high unemployment, poverty and dependence on government subsidies. People ask me how an overwhelming majority of people in a community such as mine could vote for Donald Trump.


When I arrived in Appalachia in 1989, America relied on coal for a third of its electricity. Through the early 2000s, coal trucks filled the highways and winding two-lane roads around my home. The state reaped millions in taxes on the industry. It was such a big, valuable business that if a chunk of coal flew off a truck and cracked a windshield, the state replaced the windshield, no questions asked.

Earlier in the century, the coal companies — and in some places, the miners’ union — maintained the infrastructure of coal mining communities. That meant that when coal employment began to collapse in the 1960s, everything took a hit: health care, roads, housing.

The industry’s paternalism gave way to the paternalism of the federal government and its S.S.I. checks and black-lung checks and food stamps. All that did, though, was prop up the coal industry, which remained the dominant, if not exclusive, private employer in many Appalachian communities.

By the early 21st century, thousands of people still worked in the mines, but those thousands were only a fraction of the number who worked in them in the 1930s and ’40s. Coal production remained high, but coalfield counties had some of the country’s highest unemployment and poverty rates.

At the same time, we were watching a political shift. As technology enabled fewer miners to produce more coal, union ranks dwindled, and the Democratic Party came to rely less on rural and industrial workers and more on an urban and suburban base. The remaining miners made common cause with the coal operators.

By the time Barack Obama was re-elected in 2012, a scientific and corporate consensus had coalesced around the reality of global warming. But to the coal industry and its workers, it felt like an existential challenge: To be anything other than 100 percent in favor of the industry line was to be an “enemy of coal.”

Not that workers have a choice. The remaining jobs are too often wielded as a cudgel of social control. As are government benefits. Saying the wrong thing, voting for the wrong person, can cost a person his job, or get his check cut off.

And things got worse; between 2012 and 2016, mine employment took another sharp downturn. In 2016, over 70 percent of coalfield voters chose Donald Trump.

I voted for Hillary Clinton, but many of my friends voted for Mr. Trump. I try to listen when they talk about why.

I don’t think my community necessarily believed that Mr. Trump could bring back mining jobs, as he promised, but we desperately miss good work in Appalachia. Millions of us have left the region to find work. Many of us who remain are striving to create new work here in Appalachia, for ourselves and our neighbors. But the national political rhetoric plays on our worst selves and drives us apart.

Many of my pro-Trump neighbors are frustrated and angry, but they are not naïve. They bear a hard-earned sophistication regarding the reliability of political promises. Federal subsidies have kept a roof over our heads and food in our bellies, but they are no substitute for good jobs. Ignoring or eliminating environmental and workplace safety regulations and suppressing taxes on the corporations that own the minerals and run the companies have not created prosperity for the bulk of the community, either.

Sexism and racism have played a significant role in the voting habits of some of my neighbors. So has anger. So have conservative religious beliefs. But that isn’t just in Appalachia. That’s what’s happened in America. As a nation, we are capable of great violence against those we have discounted, disagree with or feel we can afford to ignore. It is very discouraging when we do. It is painful.

What pains me and many of my neighbors in the mountains the most are divisive political posturing and partisan wrangling divorced from the realities of our economic struggles. Between the coal economy crash in 2012 and Mr. Trump’s election in 2016, coalfield communities began to look for economic life after coal. We began to look at our other assets and what else our people might do. We still are looking, but that is more difficult to do when we are pitted against one another.


Robert Gipe is the author of the novel “Weedeater” and a contributor to “Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to ‘Hillbilly Elegy.’”

