30 United States The EconomistSeptember 28th 2019
N
ot sincethe 1970s had the miners of “Bloody” Harlan County
been so united in fury. It was bad enough when Blackjewel
mining, one of the main employers in their eastern Kentucky com-
munity and the sixth-biggest mining company in America, went
bust in July with their wages unpaid. But then word got out that the
bankrupt company had sold—and was about to shift—almost 100
trucks of coal that the unrecompensed miners had dug up.
Half a dozen of them took to the tracks and turned the train
back. Another score, with wives and kids and neighbours in tow,
helped them pitch a makeshift camp across the line. “No pay, we
stay” was their slogan—daubed, in a militant-rustic style, on a bed-
sheet banner. A local restaurateur sent provisions, bluegrass mu-
sicians provided entertainment and journalists brought attention
to the fight. Yet it was when the miners were joined by a group of
transgender anarchists, acknowledged some of the handful still
camping out on the track last week (amid vast piles of donated toi-
letries and food and a rising panic about bears), that they really got
their camp organised.
It is amazing how strange this impromptu protest has turned
out to be—and how revealing of America’s culture wars. That is in
part because of history. The miles-deep coal mines of Harlan
County, a region of wooded Appalachian hills rising up to Ken-
tucky’s highest point, were for decades synonymous with violent
industrial action. Clashes in the 1930s sparked by the miners’ ef-
forts to unionise gave the county its “bloody” moniker. Many of the
Blackjewel miners’ fathers and grandfathers were involved in
them. “My dad told me about it, gun battles and company gun
thugs that beat you to death,” recalled Darrell Raleigh, seated be-
side the tracks. A veteran of 46 years underground, he himself took
part in another round of strikes, in the 1970s, which left one dead
and was the subject of an Oscar-winning documentary.
Publicised on social media as #BloodyHarlan, the Blackjewel
blockade looked like a time-honoured, morally unambiguous
stand-off—“the little man against the big man,” as Mr Raleigh said
with relish. The Harlan miners had been stiffed; their community
had rallied around them splendidly; and Blackjewel’s ceo, Jeff
Hoops, looked like a classic fat-cat villain. While running his min-
ing company into the ground, and never mind its 1,700 miners, hedefaulted on corporate taxes while pouring millions into a vanity
project—an Appalachian resort called The Grand Patrician, named
after his wife Patricia, that will boast a 3,500-seat replica of the Col-
iseum. For liberal observers, including journalists, activists and
Bernie Sanders, whose campaign sent a batch of pizzas to express
its support, the protest represented a rare opportunity to set aside
the vexed and divisive realities of America’s dying coal industry—
its pollution, its outsize political influence, its unanimous sup-
port for Donald Trump (for whom 85% of Bloody Harlanders vot-
ed)—and reignite the class war.
The arrival of the anarchists—a roving band of hard-left protes-
ters—was emblematic of that effort. Led by a transgender activist
called Lill, who refused to give a second name and preferred to be
referred to by the pronoun “they”, these efficient activists helped
install a solar shower and camp kitchen, while dispensing legal
advice to the miners. “They were just a big bundle of joy,” sighed
Stacy Rowe, who has been camping out with her miner-husband
Chris throughout the protest. Yet politics impinged.
Early this month the anarchists left in a huff after the miners re-
fused to bar another visitor to the camp—a member of a group of
activist truckers—on the basis that he wore a Trump t-shirt and es-
poused far-right views. Ms Rowe says she feels for them. “But I
can’t tell someone how to believe politically. And we did end up
eating Bernie Sanders’s pizzas, which I didn’t have a problem
with.” Yet since the anarchists’ exit, coincidentally or not, the prot-
est has petered out. Most of the miners drifted away; some to
mines in other states, others to retrain as truckers, or in hope of be-
ing hired by the company seeking to reopen Blackjewel’s five local
mines. Mr Raleigh insists he will stay put “until we get paid what’s
owed to us”. But given the miners’ poor chance of recovering the
full sum, and that the Rowes—mainstays of the camp—are about
to take off in a new truck, that seems unlikely. In a few days, the
bears that Mr Raleigh and his wife are sleeping in their car for fear
of will probably be free to consume the camp’s leftover reserves of
cookies and watermelons unmolested.
For those on the left, such as Mr Sanders, who hope to win back
the white working class with economic programmes and class-in-
fused rhetoric, this is a cautionary saga. The industries and unions
that made those politics possible are too diminished. Kentucky
has as many lawyers as it has miners—only about 6,000, few of
whom are unionised. That helps explain why those in Harlan are
still awaiting justice—even after the state governor and other pow-
erful politicians have spoken up for them during the stand-off. The
social decay that has followed that institutional retreat is another
reason why the politics of economic incentive now finds little pur-
chase among them. The population of East Kentucky is one of the
unhealthiest, most addicted, prematurely aged—and otherwise
unemployable—in America.Not a class act
Mr Trump’s popularity among blue-collar whites, in Harlan and
elsewhere, is not based on his promise to rebuild their shrunken
industries. Having long since given up hope of that, they were
turning to the Republican Party’s quiet white identity politics long
before he upped its volume. That is why hardly any miner in Har-
lan County appeared to blame a president who promised to “bring
back coal” when most of their mines closed. Without wishing to
make too much of a single incident, it was also why a row at the
blockade between a trucker in a Trump T-shirt and an obliging
transgender hippie was always likely to go the trucker’s way. 7Lexington Lessons from Bloody Harlan
A brief reopening of the class struggle in deepest Appalachia slams shut