The Serfs of Appalachia
A book review of Ramp Hollow By Steven Stoll. I admit that I now have a different vision of the "deplorables."
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Named for a place near a once-profitable but now abandoned coal seam outside of Morgantown, W.Va., “Ramp Hollow” offers a granular chronicle of how wealth, poverty and inequality accrete, layer upon generational layer. “If poverty on such a scale is so misunderstood, if it appears to have no historical origin, then it can only be cast back upon the poor as their own failure,” Mr. Stoll writes. Instead he portrays centuries of exploitation by predatory (and often absentee) capitalists and the corrupt local politicians that kowtowed to them.
The villain shape-shifts in Mr. Stoll’s story. Early on it is Alexander Hamilton, as he sets out to organize a national economy by taxing the Scots-Irish mountaineers’ whiskey and inspires a rebellion. Later it is crooked West Virginia judges and officeholders who line their pockets with coal-company funds in exchange for bending laws in the companies’ direction and looking the other way.
Citing a breadth of documents, from archival letters and maps to business records and fictional accounts, Mr. Stoll, a professor of history at Fordham University, traces the assault on Appalachia all the way back to the system of enclosure in England, through which (beginning in the 1500s) landed gentry persuaded local courts to convert communal lands into their own private property. By casting the land grabs as “progress”—a repeated theme here—British elites laid claim to fields where peasants had herded cattle and planted food. To feed their families, he contends, peasants had no choice but to join the cash economy, but wages were kept at starvation levels. Mr. Stoll argues that land-granted American Revolutionary elites dating back to George Washington set up a similar, British-inspired system in Appalachia, which they largely controlled via state-sanctioned absentee ownership from their northeastern homes.
A new form of enclosure, as Mr. Stoll sees it, was jump-started in America’s Southern mountains during the late 1800s, sparked by the advent of locomotives as railroads began carting lumber and coal out of mountain hollows. The homesteaders and squatters who had been feeding themselves fine for a century were forced to evacuate their homes or sell them at rock-bottom prices and move, Joad-like, into coal camps. Some of the same out-of-state industrialists who owned the railroads developed coal mines and logging companies. They shrewdly hired local fixers to sort through courthouse deeds and out-of-state lawyers to exploit mountaineers with scant financial knowledge by intimidating them into selling their land.
More land was seized to create the Blue Ridge Parkway in the 1930s for the benefit of out-of-state tourists. Then the Appalachian Regional Commission was formed in the 1960s, ostensibly to aid War on Poverty efforts, but, according to Mr. Stoll, the administrators were culturally dismissive of the locals, whom they saw as backward. The commission, like other local authorities, was also closely aligned (or misaligned) with the coal industry. Summing up what happened to Appalachia as a kind of “slow violence,” the author argues that the region’s dependence on coal brought stagnation rather than human betterment.
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The author ends by suggesting several solutions, offered in the form of a “thought experiment” that would give small-scale farmers and entrepreneurs renewed access to common lands, managed by the Agriculture Department and owned by land trusts. Education and social services would be paid for by raising taxes on the 1% and on companies that have moved their operations overseas. If this plan seems one note shy of a Pete Seeger sing-along, well . . . it is. Donald Trump, whom many Appalachians voted for, is taking the country in the opposite direction, no matter how Trumpian the idea of an “industrial abandonment tax” might seem to be.
“Ramp Hollow” should be read, however, not for its policy proposals but for the compassion and historical attention that Mr. Stoll devotes to this long-maligned region. His aim is to inspire people to move and think outside the safety of their urban bubbles. The academic may share some territory with J.D. Vance—both studied at Yale—but Mr. Stoll works harder to transcend stereotypes, by encouraging Appalachians to improve their lot, not by blaming themselves but by reclaiming political power.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/review-the-serfs-of-appalachia-1513812192
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