August 9, 2024

This newsletter has been more political than usual of late, and I continue to promise that I will not convert it into a political blog, but there is an obvious reason for the political turn.  Even nonpolitical people know by this point that we are living in a fateful historic moment.  What I can perhaps contribute is an expanded perspective, because historical events always have a mythical background, sometimes obviously, sometimes covertly, almost invisibly.  A primary goal in educating the imagination is to provide both students and the general public with the means of detecting and evaluating this hidden background, coming to see that what seems—and is to some degree—random and chaotic, is at the same time a manifestation of what Northrop Frye once called “the wars of myth in time.”  We are caught up in those wars whether we want to be or not.  Ephesians 6:12 says, “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”  It’s complicated, because there are two ways of taking that famous dictum.  One is paranoid and therefore destructive, the interpretation of the right wing, debouching in the murky swamp of conspiracy theories.  The other is liberal, recreative, and potentially hopeful, the wisdom that drains the swamp.  The wars of myth in time are to a great extent wars of interpretation, battles to persuade people to see issues, to see life itself, in a certain way, and to reject the alternative.  That is why William Blake opened his epic The Four Zoas by speaking of the apocalypse as a “Day of Intellectual battle." 

The discussion begins with Trump’s choice of JD Vance for his vice-presidential candidate.  Vance immediately showed himself to be a problematic candidate, and it is possible he might be “fired,” as is of course Trump’s way, but Trump’s choice of Vance, which has mystified some people, returns the Trump campaign to its origins in 2016, when Trump campaigned as a populist, appealing to the economically left behind, those who felt, and still feel, abandoned by the triumph of neoliberalism, an economic and political philosophy that favors the educated professional part of the Democratic party but has little to offer to the party’s traditional working class constituency, which had been moving towards the Republicans long before 2016.   When Vance published his book Hillbilly Elegy in 2016, it was ironically turned into, first, a best-seller, then a Hollywood movie, because it captivated liberals trying to grapple with their guilt about having given over large numbers of people to dead-end lives and opioid addiction.  Which means they misread the book, but more of that later. 

What puzzled me even at the time was how the large-scale dilemma of the working class came to be epitomized in one group of people:  Appalachians, and in

particular coal miners.  There are presently about 43,000 coal miners left in the whole United States, the population of a smallish town.  Their story is a tragedy, and deserves anyone’s sympathy, but it is symbolic, not representative.  The people who have been left behind in this country are mostly not coal miners, though many of them do tend to be rural and small town.  Why then did Appalachian coal miners come to be a central symbol in the ongoing contest between ways of life?  

I have a special, personal reason for asking, because I find, to my surprise, that I am what could be called Appalachian once removed—in the same way that JD Vance is, with one exception.  There are two ways of defining who counts as Appalachian, geographical and ethnic.  Geographically, you are Appalachian if you grew up in certain counties officially designated as Appalachian.  Neither Vance nor I are Appalachian in that sense.  The parallel is exact:  our immediate forbears, including those who brought us up, came from Appalachia, but in fact we did not grow up there ourselves.  Vance’s grandparents and parents came from rural Kentucky, but he himself actually was raised in the significantly named Middletown, Ohio, a suburb of Cincinnati.  My parents came from Tuscarawas County, which is officially Appalachian, but I grew up in Canton, Ohio, a couple of counties northward.  Each of us regularly visited relatives in rural and small town Appalachia, but were not born or raised there.  Strictly speaking, we are Rust Belt:  both Middletown and Canton are steel towns that have seen better days.  The other way of defining Appalachian, however, is ethnic:  you are true Appalachian if you are Scots Irish.  Vance’s Kentucky grandparents and parents are Scots Irish.  Mine, however, are immigrants.  Does this disqualify me from being considered a once-removed Appalachian?   It is not a trivial distinction, because it leads towards a major criticism of Vance’s book made by various writers, including Elizabeth Catte, a historian from east Tennessee, in her book What You Are Getting Wrong about Appalachia (2018).

Catte objects to Vance’s reduction of Appalachia to its Scots Irish population, those that are called “hillbillies.”  There are and have always been other people there, and Vance’s willful blindness to them is a deliberate exclusion because it means that the poverty-stricken poster children are then white working class of British background.  Catte pointedly corrects the stereotype that African Americans are only found in urban ghettoes—a stereotype pushed by all the hysterical shouting about urban crime, which is always perpetrated by violent criminals in the big cities, in other words by Black people.  But there is a large African American population in Appalachia, which came there for the same reason that African Americans fled the plantations to the cities:  jobs.  The white “hillbillies” worked in the mines alongside many African American co-workers.  I already knew this, because I have taught the history of folk music.  The banjo is an African American instrument that traveled to this country from West Africa.  The older style of banjo playing, which many people have never heard, is called “clawhammer” because of the shape your right hand has to assume to “frail” the instrument, as they say.  This style came from Appalachia, and was often played on a “mountain style” banjo, meaning one that is fretless for the purpose of sliding between notes.  Where did the famous white Appalachian clawhammer banjo players such as the legendary Hobart Smith learn to play?  Either directly or indirectly from interaction between “hillbilly” and rural African American cultures. 

Catte does not mention the fact that immigrants, like African Americans, are also not just urban: many ended up in the rural communities, once again due to the American Dream of opportunity.  My Italian and Polish grandparents immigrated early in the 20^th century.  My Polish grandfather worked in the coal mines until his leg was crushed in an accident and he retired on double disability, having black lung as well. While my mom’s dad worked in the mines, my grandmother ran a farm, plowing with a horse-drawn plow.  My dad’s dad was trained as a cabinet maker in Italy, and came here to avoid being conscripted into the Austrian army in World War I.  But the Depression meant that he ended up as the carpenter in the coal mines of Midvale, Ohio, population these days about 700.  One of my most vivid memories is of my father taking me and my brother to visit the mine when it was abandoned, yet still standing, showing us the tipple, easily 60-70 feet tall, that my grandfather constructed, without scaffolding, moving in mid-air along planks with a huge, heavy wooden toolbox that I still own.  That mine is long since gone, and so is the house where my mother grew up without electricity or indoor plumbing.  So, rural poverty in the mountains—but not by Republican standards the deserving poor, because we were foreigners.  Of my grandparents, only my Polish grandma spoke fluent English, so I guess you can say what they say of immigrants these days, that they “failed to assimilate.”  Tuscarawas County is Appalachian—yet the cemetery where my parents are buried is full of all those “foreign” names, Italian, Polish, other.   Not true Americans in the eyes of some people then and now.  That’s the point.  Foreign, and on the Italian side often considered to be non-white.  Not the deserving poor. 

The part of the culture wars that has become obsessed with coal miners, however, is an ideological distortion of something much deeper, in all senses.  Imaginatively, miners disappear into the underground depths and emerge, blackened almost beyond recognition, as if they had halfway become creatures of those depths.  They are associated with riches dug out of the earth, coal being an Industrial Age substitution for earlier types of wealth.  What this means imaginatively is that they are akin to the dwarves of mythology and romance.  Several false assumptions have to be immediately put to rest.  First, the dwarves of traditional literature had nothing to do with the modern definition of “human beings of an exceptionally small stature, usually because of a genetic issue.”  No one seems clear about when that usage came into prominence, but, before that, dwarves were non-human supernatural beings, a different race.  The plural “dwarves,” by the way, was an invention of J.R.R. Tolkien, replacing the traditional “dwarfs.”  Snow White’s 7 dwarves derive from the Grimm fairy tale of 1812.  Disney humanized them a good deal, but they remain miners, going off each day singing, “Heigh ho, heigh ho, / It’s off to work we go.” 

Dwarves are those who delve into the deep mysterious underground, excavating two kinds of riches.  One is the traditional riches of gold and jewels, but the other is metals, because dwarves are famously smiths and craftsmen.   Many a hero carries a sword that is exceptional, even supernatural, forged by dwarves.  In Tolkien, something of a class system lurks in the background that privileges elves over dwarves.  It is elves who forge the rings of power, whereas a dwarf, Thorin Oakenshield, becomes obsessed with treasure in a cave, thereby diminishing himself to the level of the greedy dragon who guards it.  This seems to be revisionism.  In Tolkien’s likely source, the Nibelungenleid (and secondarily Wagner), it is the dwarf Alberich who renounces love and forges the ring, greed for which leads to universal tragedy.  At any rate, dwarves are associated with the treasures hidden in the earth, which they mine and, as craftsmen, refine.  This is a powerful and important mythological complex.  Blake’s figure of the imagination, Urthona, is a smith who dwells in the cavelike “dens of Urthona.”  Scholars of folklore and mythology at times are led astray on a fruitless quest to prove influence—that one motif causes another.  It is more often the case that relationships are systemic, connected not by causality but by being part of a vast network of associations.  Human miners are part of a system of interconnections by which they are related in a non-causal way to the supernatural beings who dwell in the depths of the earth and are associated with hidden wealth.   

It is only with the Industrial Revolution that the mines featured in literature harbor coal rather than gold or jewels.  But once that realistic displacement, as Northrop Frye would call it, occurs, it is remarkable how many memorable songs and stories appear, both about coal mining and the labor unrest that so often accompanies it.  Coal miners arguably became more or less the foremost working class symbols, beyond any other labor group—steel workers, dock workers, construction workers, railroad workers, auto workers, and so on—partly because they came first, partly because of their archetypal associations.  A powerful song, “Blackleg Miner,” depicting, with approval, in fact with outright enthusiasm, some really nasty violence against the strike-breaking “blackleg,” was inspired by a lockout as early as 1844:

Oh, Delaval is a terrible place.
They rub wet clay in the blackleg's face,
And aroond the heaps they run a foot race,
To catch the blackleg miner!

So, divvint gaan near the Seghill mine.
Across the way they stretch a line,
To catch the throat and break the spine
Of the dirty blackleg miner.

The last verse advocates joining the union “while you may,” meaning while you are still alive to do so.  The pioneering electric folk group Steeleye Span made this song popular as early as 1970.  Richard Thompson has been performing it more recently.  I doubt that any of us folkies really advocate throwing miner scabs down the shaft: we just know a great song when we hear one.  

Perhaps the greatest novel ever written about coal mining was Zola’s Germinal of 1885.  I read it as an undergraduate, and still remember its stunning  portrayal of the conditions in which the miners worked.  Coal mining was one of the occupations that most frequently involved child labor, as children could work in cracks and corners too small and narrow for any adult.  Horses spent their entire lives underground without ever seeing daylight.  Injuries were commonplace, as were deaths when tunnels or whole mines collapsed.  I remember my dad talking about how the wives of the miners in Midvale, Ohio watched with dread as the mine foreman walked up the hill toward their house, waiting to hear which of their husbands was injured or dead.  The protagonist of Germinal is a young, naively idealistic socialist who leads a miners’ strike that is brutally put down by the army and the police.  Frye talks about how, in displacement, the title may act as a clue to the mythical pattern hidden beneath the realistic surface.  His example is, significantly, The Grapes of Wrath.  Zola’s title is a close parallel:  Germinal refers to a month in the French Revolutionary calendar, so that both titles hint that the uprising of proletarian groups may take on overtones that are not only revolutionary but apocalyptic.  The famous last line of the novel explains the metaphor of the seed germinating from the black but fertile underground: “Beneath the blazing of the sun, in that morning of new growth, the countryside rang with song, as its belly swelled with a black and avenging army of men, germinating slowly in its furrows, growing upwards in readiness for harvests to come, until one day soon their ripening would burst open the earth itself.”

The mythological and ideological (the two are intermixed and often inseparable) aspects of coal mining traveled to the United States from Europe, specifically from coal-mining areas of England such as Nottinghamshire.  Along with the political class-war tensions that erupted periodically during strikes and lockouts came psychosocial tensions capable of disrupting families.  These were dramatized by D.H. Lawrence in his autobiographical novel Sons and Lovers (1912).  Lawrence’s father was a coal miner, with a coal miner’s lower-class habits, especially heavy drinking.  But his mother was middle class, with dreams of upward mobility of a type that we have co-opted as the American Dream.  The novel’s title is deeply ironic—and psychoanalytic, for the mother, with her powerful personality, turns her sons into lovers, turning them against the father, instilling in them the ideal of rising beyond lower-class circumstances through education and achievement.  It is startling how this pattern reproduces itself in the upbringing of both JD Vance and myself.  In Vance’s case, it was his Kentucky grandmother who was the matriarch that saved him from the irresponsibility of his mother and, like Lawrence’s mother, instilled in him the idea of escaping the dead-end lifestyle of working-class poverty and dysfunction by leaving it and getting an education.  My father was a lathe operator in a steel mill rather than a miner, but the battle between working-class bad habits and middle-class respectability still played itself out.  Like Lawrence’s father, my dad drank after work, stopping at a tavern on the way home, then came home to eat dinner, get in an argument with my resentful mother, and go back out drinking again for the rest of the night.  My mother had the same kind of contempt for him that Lawrence’s mother had for his father.  Although my father respected and supported my love of books and education, it was my mom who actually read books, and who also had a creative streak that drove her to try her hand at every possible kind of craft.  It is impossible to separate psychological issues from social class issues, and it is this, I think, that gave Hillbilly Elegy a certain power. 

At the same time, unfortunately, Vance’s dysfunctional upbringing helped to generate his book’s reactionary conclusions.   Hillbilly Elegy advocates a bootstrap philosophy that blames the suffering of the poor on their own moral failings.  They lack the discipline and drive to do something to better their situation, or else leave it behind, instead taking the easy way of wallowing in self-pity, alcohol, and opioids.  Blaming the poor for their own plight is an old game.  The rich love it because it absolves them of having created, for the purposes of exploitation, a no-win system.  Elizabeth Catte does not fail to notice the parallel with African Americans.  She mentions the Moynihan Report of 1965, which concluded that the problems of African Americans in the ghettoes were self-generated: the product of irresponsible fathers who abandoned families and irresponsible mothers who kept having babies.  I remember that report because it was resurrected during the period in the 80’s and early 90’s when Ronald Reagan was talking about welfare queens with Cadillacs and Bill Clinton promised to “end welfare as we know it,” and did. 

Because he did, the false debate about African Americans had to move forward, if that is the right word.  Instead of being branded as economic parasites, they were instead branded as violent criminals.  Police brutality was excused because all those Black males are threatening—you know it because they wear hoodies, which terrify old white people.  Hence Black Lives Matter.  Hence Donald Trump’s inability to tear himself away from the subject of big-city violence.  But saying that it is African Americans responsible for what he falsely claims is a skyrocketing crime rate would cause a furor and likely boomerang, so he deflects to undocumented immigrants, which means that he shifts from overt to covert racism.  If undocumented immigrants did not exist, he would have to invent them.  As a matter of fact, he has invented them, at least an interpretation of them.  As for Vance, he does not see, and does not want to see, that the poverty and dysfunction of both Black and Appalachian lifestyles derives largely from an exploitative system rather than the faults of individuals.  Catte makes this point strongly.  He doesn’t want to see it because he has identified himself with and assimilated himself to the system.  He has undergone a makeover at the hands of one right-wing billionaire, Peter Thiel, and become Mini-Me to another, Trump.  It is his Social Darwinist version of the American Dream, the survival of the fittest, and his survival tactic is to identify with the powerful group that is on top, even though it means betraying the more liberal values of his earlier years.  People act as if this is mystifying, but I don’t see why.   I think it’s pretty clear.

Vance was taken onboard as a representative of the culture wars economic attitudes of his book, but it is his misogynistic ideas about women that have come to dominate media coverage.  These too emerge out of his background.  Vance seems to be trying to break the hold of the strong feminine will represented by his Kentucky grandmother, in a way that again parallels D.H. Lawrence, who became resentful as he tried to break free of being the puppet of his mother’s ambitions.  This led Lawrence, exactly as it has led Vance, towards fantasies of male dominance in later life.  By the time of a late novel like The Plumed Serpent (1926), Lawrence was fantasizing about setting up an authoritarian community in the American Southwest with a cult leader clearly modeled on himself, who gives speeches condemning women for having orgasms, which represent their egocentric willfulness.  All of Vance’s bizarrely unreal ideas about more or less enforcing childbirth, outlawing and prosecuting abortion, and so on, are about controlling women, forcing them back into a submissive position.  As psychological allies he has picked rich and powerful men who represent male dominance:  Trump is of course an abuser and rapist and Peter Thiel does not think women should have the right to vote.  These men, along with all the lower-order influencers and incels, are weak males intimidated by the feminine.  Whether Kamala Harris wins or loses, the present situation demonstrates the idea that invisible forces are moving the pieces on the chess board.  Trump and Vance are suddenly facing their symbolic antithesis:  a Black woman who is also South Asian (hinting at the immigrant “not real Americans” slander) married to a Jewish husband (whom Trump has just called a “horrible Jew” because he’s liberal). 

In trying to tell us what we are “getting wrong about Appalachia,” Elizabeth Catte succinctly lays out the history of coal mining labor unrest in order to show that Vance is betraying a movement that, until recently, was liberal in its affinities, meaning that it took the part of a worker underclass against an exploitative capitalist system consisting of the greedy, cruel, and ruthless mine owners as well as the system of “law enforcement” that included corrupt local political figures and the “detective agencies” that supplied the mine owners with thugs who brutalized the miners. In addition to inhuman conditions and a complete lack of safety laws, the mining bosses created a system by which miners could never leave because, in order to get by, they had to buy from the company store, and so were always in a debt that was beyond their ability to pay.  This rigged game is what is described in the famous chorus to Merle Travis’s song “Sixteen Tons” (1947):

You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store

It is interesting, though a bit disheartening, that the speaker compensates for his trapped and helpless situation with an amount of male bravado and anti-female bluster, indicating that this defense mechanism goes way back:

I was born one mornin', it was drizzlin' rain
Fightin’ and trouble are my middle name
I was raised in the canebrake by an ol’mama lion
Can’t no high-toned woman make me walk the line

But at least the singer knows who his real enemy is.  “Sixteen Tons” was inspired by the mines in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky.  In 1971, John Prine’s “Paradise” updated the story of those mines.  Paradise was actually the name of a town in that county, where Prine’s parents came from, and the Peabody coal company eliminated Paradise by eliminating the mines through the devastating practice of “surface mining,” which strips the land altogether:

And Daddy, won’t you take me back to Muhlenberg County?
Down by the Green River where Paradise lay
Well, I’m sorry, my son, but you’re too late in asking
Mister Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away.

Loretta Lynn’s autobiographical song “Coal Miner’s Daughter” (1970) described the hard conditions under which she grew up in Kentucky:

My daddy worked all night in the Van Leer coal mines
All day long in the field, a-hoin' corn
Mommy rocked the babies at night
And read the Bible by the coal-oil light
Everything would start all over, come break of mornin'

My grandparents too lived and raised kids on both coal mining and farming, though my tough Polish grandmother did the farming.  The effort of doing both wore Lynn’s father out.  Already suffering from black lung (like my grandfather),  he died of a stroke at 51. 

The union movement in the United States was spearheaded by the coal miners.  The Coal Wars of 1921 were fought in West Virginia, and culminated in the Battle of Blair Mountain, the largest labor uprising in United States history.  The battle was won by the mine owners, dealing a serious blow to the United Mine Workers, led by the legendary Mother Jones.  It was followed, however, by Bloody Harlan, the Harlan County war of 1931, which inspired the most famous of all union songs, “Which [or Whose] Side Are You On?” by Florence Reece, wife of the union leader.  Company forces broke into their home in her husband’s absence and terrorized her and her children.  When they left, she wrote the lyrics to the song on the back of a calendar.  Pete Seeger made it famous in 1940, singing with the Almanac Singers for the cause of unions.  Later, Seeger transferred his activist energies to the civil rights and antiwar movements, inspiring the counterculture even though he was much older than they were.  In other words, there was a direct line of descent from coal miner activism to my generation’s liberal and leftist causes.  Pete Seeger belonged to the Communist Party, though he left it in 1949, after the Cold War turned it from democratic socialism to Soviet style authoritarianism, and paid for his membership by being blacklisted during the McCarthy era.  My father was a steward in the United Steelworkers, and I was always proud of his union involvement, which stood for the rights of the little guy against the big capitalists. 

What is sad is how it all went wrong, meaning that it all went right—right wing—when the Reagan era ushered in what would become the culture wars.  The Cold War spawned a politics of paranoia, the hysterical fear of Communism abroad, matched domestically by the racism born of fear of emancipated Black people, fear of independent women no longer controlled by men, fear of those of different sexual and gender identity.  The wave of collective toxicity that culminates in the Trump-Vance candidacy has been building since the 1980’s, with roots going back into the 1950’s.   The only weakness of Catte’s book, while it is invaluable in nailing the real cause of the Appalachian tragedy, ruthless capitalist exploitation designed to ensure a cheap labor supply, is that it admits but is reluctant to confront the implications of the fact that the Appalachian people have drunk the Kool Aid, as they say today, and have switched sides, siding now with management.  In 2011, activists decided to demonstrate at the famous Blair Mountain.  Catte admits that “Deep resentment developed in coal country, between conservationists and the industry at large, including non-union miners” (164).  On one side of the second battle of Blair Mountain were “archeologists, historians, conservationists, and their legal representative” (165), who were trying to prevent a historic site from being utterly destroyed by planned surface mining, allied with more traditional activists:  “The second Battle of Blair Mountain foregrounded ecological conservation, but it was about labor as well.  The United Mine Workers helped sponsor the march, concerned about their history and the ongoing erosion of workers’ rights in southern West Virginia” (165).  

On the other side were the coal miners, siding with the coal company, filled with the kind of insane rage that consumes those taken over by culture wars collectivism: “A pickup crawls by with a homemade banner that reads, ‘FUCK YOU TREEHUGGERS.’ It’s followed by another truck and another banner, this time ‘FUCK YOU SONS OF BITCHES I LOVE COAL.’ Children scream at marchers and ask them, mimicking their parents, ‘Have you ever worked a day in your life?’ | The wives of coal truck operators, who believe their husbands will be fired if the protest delays their deliveries, are filmed telling bewildered West Virginians to ‘go back where you came from’” (165-66)—Blair Mountain is in West Virginia.  The counter-demonstrators have learned false history, no doubt from the usual sources: “One tells the group of activists that the 1921 miners would be ashamed of them because they had taken up arms for their right to mine coal” (166).  They have to be set straight: “’They fought to unionize.  Do you work at a unionized mine?’ But the organizer gets only a “blank stare.”  Catte reports all this with painful honesty, but seems reluctant to draw the painful conclusion—namely, that Vance is at least partly right for the wrong reasons.  White working-class Appalachians are partly responsible for their own plight—not because they are lazy and irresponsible moral slackers, but because they have bought the lies that cause them to side with their own oppressors, the rich capitalists, as Thomas Frank pointed out years ago in What’s the Matter with Kansas? (2005).  Large numbers of people consistently, enthusiastically vote against their own best economic interests. 

But of those people, the Scots-Irish have been singled out and mythologized.  They have become known as the “hillbillies” who live in the mountains, clannish and insular, resisting modernization, with a tendency to violence that can be focused inwardly in constant feuds, such as that of the Hatfields and McCoys, but also directly outwardly when they come to feel that they are the last survivors of an old way of life that they will go down fighting to defend even though it is a lost cause.  Some of this is fantasy, but it is true that they have always been a beleaguered people.  The Scots-Irish were originally Lowland Scots who were Dissenters or Nonconformists, rejecting the authority of the Church of England.  They fled first to Northern Ireland, to Ulster, where they were violently resented and resisted, and some of them therefore migrated to the United States in the 18^th century. They ended up in Appalachia because they were a later wave of immigration, and more convenient locations were already settled.  Thus, they were not particularly associated with coal mining until they arrived in the mountains.  They do indeed have their own culture, and it is a rich one:  they brought with them the great traditional ballads from England and Scotland.  In the early 20^th century, Cecil Sharp, the first great English collector of folk songs, made a trip to Appalachia because the mountain people’s version of songs were sometimes richly different from the English and Scottish versions.  At times, as “hillbillies,” they have been treated with satirical humor, as in The Beverley Hillbillies TV comedy and the comic strip Snuffy Smith. Their speech is usually identified as a distinct Southern dialect, “mountain Southern,” distinct from the “plantation Southern” of the deep South. 

But some portrayals appear to transplant, from the Scottish Highlanders to the Scots-Irish, a myth of tragic, doomed resistance by a people who have been isolated so long they have become reactionary and ultimately nihilistic.  The Scottish Highlanders, isolated in the northern Scottish mountains, were warrior clans speaking only Scots Gaelic.  Their culture was virtually annihilated after they took part in the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745.  Sir Walter Scott’s portrayal in his novel Waverley (1815) of Highland leaders Fergus and Flora MacIvor as brave and noble yet self-destructive and wrongheaded was widely influential.  Again, we see a pattern of social mythology repeated in a way that may not be causal but which remains suggestive.  At any rate, the Scots Irish sense of being united under the banner of a noble cause that preserves the old traditions against the evils of modernizing life is at work in the Appalachian coal mining communities, even though it has no doubt influenced people beyond the special group.   

And yet, to think that there is any future in mining coal is the saddest denialism.  Coal mining is on the verge of passing entirely into the imagination, of becoming a mythical activity like chivalric jousting and dragon slaying, like Western gunslinging.  That does not mean that miners or any other kind of blue collar workers need to sit around dying deaths of despair.  Both working class and lower middle-class people can change the game by resisting the forces of exploitation:  through unionizing, through education, most of all through refusing to vote for those who are just conning them.  Only a large-scale uprising, born of large-scale solidarity, is going to change the game.  Local resistance is too easily squelched or co-opted.  But it could happen.  The 1%, and the politicians who are in cahoots with them, need to be shown that there is a limit to injustice, and that it has been reached.  If it changes, it will change for everyone, not just for miners, not just for the white working class:  for everyone. 

Until such a time, individuals are left with a choice:  stay or get out.  Yeats said that we make rhetoric out of our quarrel with other people, poetry out of our quarrel with ourselves.  Yeats should know:  one of his famous poems is called “Vacillation,” and it begins, “Between extremities, man runs his course.” In 2007, at Jorma Kaukonen’s Fur Peace Ranch, I took a course in Songwriting with Darrell Scott.  Scott is a remarkable multi-instrumentalist, a Nashville session musician.  But he also majored in English, and is one of the real wordsmiths of folk and country.  Some of his finest songs run the course between the extremities of staying and leaving his Kentucky roots.  He first caught my attention with a song  inspired, Scott has said, by a tombstone in a graveyard in Harlan, Kentucky that read "You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive,” which became the title of a song in which the chorus describes the place as one

Where the sun comes up about ten in the morning
And the sun goes down about three in the day
And you fill your cup with whatever bitter brew you’re drinking
And you spend your life just thinking how to get away

His song “Long Time Gone, made famous by the Dixie Chicks, describes a family diaspora in which the whole younger generation scattered in all directions: 

My Brothers found work in Indiana
M' Sisters a nurse at the old folks home
Mama still cooking too much for supper
And me I’ve been a long time gone

The singer, like Scott himself, went to Nashville to make it as a musician.  But for everyone it’s a

Long time gone
And it ain't coming back again

And yet, Scott has a new album, Old Cane Back Rocker, whose first song, “Kentucky Morning,” is sung by one who says,

I am the one who stayed behind
While the others were going away
To the mills of Chicago, the plants of Detroit

And these others, when they come back to visit “Wonder how I ever stayed.”  But the chorus explains: 

Oh, your bright lights don’t shine like a Kentucky morning
You can’t hear a whippoorwill out in the street
Give me a good piece of land and an old cane back rocker
While life goes on and on and on, while life goes on and on

This would have pleased Hoagy Carmichael, whose famous song “Rockin’ Chair” (1929) might have been in Scott’s mind. 

The city and the country, urban and pastoral.  As I have written elsewhere, these are not just places but aspects of human nature.  They are Contraries, and cannot be reconciled.  We run our course between them, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. They say you can’t go home again, but I’m not so sure about that, especially now in old age.  We can return because we never really left.  And we can leave, we can escape, because actually, even in childhood, in imagination, we’ve always been a long time gone. 

Reference

Catte, Elizabeth.  What You Are Getting Wrong about Appalachia.  Belt Publishing, 2018.