Mountain State Matters

The United Mine Workers of America endorsed Obama today. This follows Sen. Robert C. Byrd’s (D-W.Va.) Obama endorsement yesterday and Sen. Jay Rockefeller’s (D-W.Va.) in February.

I wonder if the UMWA’s endorsement will help Obama’s popularity in a state in which he was so soundly defeated.

The state’s second coal mining death of 2008 happened this Saturday when Nathan Dove, 24, was killed in Aracoma Alma No. 1 Mine in Logan County. Dove was electrocuted, and preliminary investigations suggest that he cut a live cable.

This is the same mine in which two miners died in early 2006, immediately following the tragedy at Sago.

In the Pump Handle, a blog about public health, Celeste Monforton addressed the issue yesterday, noting that Aracoma Alma No. 1, a Massey mine, received a safety award about a month ago. Yet, just a year ago MSHA fined the mine $1.5 million. Hmm…

From the Pump Handle:

In my post, “Safety Awards Gone Bad”, I reminded readers that just one year ago, MSHA issued a record-setting $1.5 million penalty against Massey for its ”reckless disregard for safety” in the disaster which killed Bragg and Hatfield. Between January 1, 2006 and April 1, 2008, this mine has been cited for nearly 1,200 violations of MSHA health and safety standards, with 665 of them designated “serious and substantial.” Moreover, this Massey operation has been assessed more than $2,226,000 in monetary penalties, and they’ve only paid $35,651. The vast majority of the violations are being contested, including the dozens of penalties associated with the Aracoma Alma disaster which are classified as “reckless disregard” for miners’ safety.

One of the most common things you’ll hear when talking to a West Virginian about the state is that the young people all move out. Indeed, West Virginia has a hard time holding onto its population, which is perhaps why 15.3 percent of the state was over age 65 in 2006 (the U.S. average is 12.4 percent). That number is closely tied to the economy; if there are no jobs, it’s hard for people to justify remaining in the town they grew up in. In a Wall Street Journal report last December, West Virginia had a 0.2 percent population growth between 2006 and 2007. This is far from the giants in the west that grew anywhere from 2.5 to 2.9 percent, but it’s not at the bottom of the list either (Michigan and Rhode Island had negative growth).

The thing about West Virginia is that even when locals move away, they always want to go back. I’ve heard that it’s something in the water. A New York Times article, written two years ago, does a pretty good job of talking about the efflux of people from the state. Even better, the accompanying multimedia piece tells the story of three West Virginians who left but ultimately came home.

Photo by: Carol von Canon

In the first of a several-part series about some West Virginia (specifically Wyoming County, in the southern coalfields) folklore, below is a recording of Bugs Stover telling the tale of the Wyoming County Courthouse Ghost.

Bugs is the county’s Circuit Clerk, and knows more about local legends than anyone else I’ve come into contact with. He collects the stories of others and tells them around a campfire at Twin Falls State Park when the weather is warm. He’s a wonderful guy, and a great storyteller. More from him next week…I’ve got a recording of him telling the tale of the Poke Gap Monster.

Please excuse the quality of the recording–it’s not great because I was in a public place. The transcription of the story is below, too.

Download Bugs Stover–The Courthouse Ghost

Transcript:

In 1935, the circuit clerk of Wyoming County, for whatever reason, turned up a bottle of carbolic acid, a pint jar, and drank enough to end up killing himself. It dissolves your insides. He was a likeable guy—everybody liked him and would bring things to him. Moonshine or elderberry wine or apple cider. Just bring things. And he was friendly and young and 30-some and quite popular. And there was speculation of why he did this. It was, of course, in the heights of the Great Depression and the Republican Party was in a collapse. In fact, he is the last Republican clerk until me…from 1935 when he died until now.

The two speculations are that he was just sad and ended up committing suicide, and the newspaper articles don’t use that word, but they do imply it. The other thing is that they were getting ready to build a road through a little town in this county called John McGraws. There was a 100-and-some thousand dollars worth, and most of that money ended up disappearing. And there’s some speculation that he knew it, knew who did it, or participated in it, or didn’t but knew about it, and was about to come clean and someone killed him. And if you’re a guy who simply appears one day and there’s a pint jar on your desk and that’s just normal and you turn it up and drink a little moonshine out of it. But he turned up and drank enough what he thought was moonshine, which would burn going down anyway and it turned out to be carbolic acid. And he ran out into the courtroom and apparently died in his wife’s arms…she was the assistant clerk that was in the courtroom that day.

Which is a neat little story, but didn’t end there. Because almost immediately, employees began to hear things moving around the courtroom, both in the upstairs where I am now, and in the courtroom itself. Doors would open, people would walk, some folks even claimed to have heard someone screaming in pain and dashing about. That’s been going on ever since.

In fact, in the 1970s, I was here at a political meeting about clean government or something—I was a fairly young guy. The door burst open and I looked up and didn’t see anyone. We were sitting out in the courtroom. And I assumed because I didn’t see anyone and the door burst open that they had gone out. So I asked a man who was sitting there, Mr. Moler, who was quite a colorful figure, an attorney and former prosecuter, and said ‘Mr. Moler, who just left in such a tizzy?’ And he goes, ‘Aw, no one left, that was just the courthouse ghost!’ That was my first understanding, but people don’t even react much to it now.

But anyway, it did happen and is still said to have occurred. And I still hang around here on the, maybe it was January 18, I’m don’t remember the date for sure without looking it up, but I always anticipate that date and hang around a little bit. We do have some odd things occur around that date. The phone will ring, no one’s on it. You hear people walking, but you know, I’m not sure it’s any more than other times too, those kind of things occur. I don’t know anyone who’s actually walked up and had a conversation with it. But the rumor persists that the courthouse ghost still haunts the courthouse. So that would seem to imply that he probably hadn’t committed suicide, but someone had got to him and he needs to have that solved, I guess.

So, much has been made of the fact that Hillary won Tuesday’s democratic primary in West Virginia. The New York Times ran a story on it, blaming race as a huge factor.

The number of white Democratic voters who said that race influenced their choice on Tuesday was among the highest recorded in voter surveys in the Clinton-Obama nomination fight. Two in 10 white West Virginia voters said that race was an important factor in their vote, and more than 8 in 10 of them backed Mrs. Clinton, according to surveys of voters leaving the polls.

I wonder if it’s fair to compare West Virginia to any of the other races, as Obama definitely gave the state up to Hillary and was noticeably absent in the days leading up to the primary. Although 80 percent of the state backed Hillary, only 20 percent said race played a factor in their vote. I don’t think this is significant enough to paint WV voters as racist hillbillies.

Josh Marshall did a nice analysis of Obama’s troubles in Appalachia in Talking Points Memo.

Let me offer a series of overlapping explanations. First, some basic demographics. It’s widely accepted that Hillary Clinton does better with older voters, less educated voters and white voters. These demographics perfectly match West Virginia — and, more loosely, the entire Appalachian region. A few key points from tonight’s exit polls demonstrate the point: 4 out of 10 voters were over 60 years of age. 7 out of 10 lacked a college degree — the highest proportion of any electorate in the country. And 95% of the electorate was white.

Basically you have a state that is made up almost exclusively of Clinton’s voters. But there’s a deeper historical explanation that we have to apply as well — one nicely illustrated by the origins of West Virginia itself.

At least one West Virginia voter isn’t happy with Hillary for her campaigning in the state. In an open letter to Hillary Clinton on his blog, Tim Graves accuses Hillary of using the suspiciousness of West Virginians against them. While I haven’t seen any proof that Hillary actually “fanned the flames of racism,” it’s an interesting letter.

A Tennessee blogger posted this to comment on tomorrow’s primary in West Virginia. (For those of you who don’t want to click on the link, it’s a clip from the movie Deliverance.) Because clearly the country should be terrified that the ignorant rednecks that comprise the entire population of West Virginia will be playing a part in choosing the Democratic presidential candidate.

Here’s an elegant rebuttal from another Tennessee blogger.

To add one more element to the discussion of Hillary’s supporters all being racist, here’s a funny SNL sketch about it:

Last week, I had the opportunity to speak with Lenny Kohm, the campaign director for Appalachian Voices. Appalachian Voices is a non-profit with several offices throughout Appalachia; the organization’s goal is to bring people together to solve the region’s environmental problems. Recently, the group has been spending most of its time on issues involving clean air and mountaintop removal.

You can click on the media player to listen to the interview in its entirety (it’s five minutes long) or read the transcript of the interview, posted below.

Download Lenny Kohm Interview

Transcript

Erica Peterson: I’m on the phone with Lenny Kohm, the campaign director for Appalachian Voices. Thanks for talking with me, Lenny. So, tell me about your campaigns that specifically affect West Virginia.

Lenny Kohm: Well, there’s two. Obviously the most important one that we work on that affects West Virginia is trying to stop mountaintop removal and one of the vehicles we’re using is the Clean Water Protection Act, which is a bill in the House of Representatives that would basically make using the rubble from mountaintop removal explosions as valley fill.

EP: It would make that illegal?

LK: Well, yeah. It would make it illegal to put that waste into a stream. The way it is now, the current administration defined the waste from mountaintop removal as fill, which is legal to put in a body of water. But this legislation would once and for all make the definition of that rubble as waste and according to the Clean Water Act, you can’t put waste in any body of water in the United States.

EP: And what kind of opposition are you facing from coal companies on that legislation?

LK: I think we’ve gotten their attention. I really haven’t seen anything about the legislation from the coal companies yet. But certainly the coal industry is aware that they’re under the gun and I imagine that we’ll start seeing some push-back pretty quickly on the Clean Water Protection Act, H.R. 2169. I imagine, depending on how the election comes out, the way it looks like it’s going to come out, they’ll be pushing back pretty hard.

EP: Does Appalachian Voices do any work towards advocating alternative forms of energy?

LK: Yeah. You know, we work on clean air. Air is one of our programs, and one of the things we’re doing in that program is trying to stop coal-fired power plants from being built in the region. As part of that, we’ve done some studies on like, Coal River Mountain in West Virginia, a wind feasibility study that shows that they would actually realize more potential for electric power over a 50 year period from the wind than from knocking the mountain down. When a congressperson or a decision-maker asks us, ‘well, 50 percent of all the electricity in the United States comes from coal-fired power plants,’ we do talk about the options. It doesn’t have to be that way.

EP: And what do you think about clean coal?

LK: There is no such thing as clean coal. When they talk about clean coal, ‘they’ being the proponents of clean coal, basically what they’re talking about is when it’s burned in a power plant and it comes out of the stack, it’s probably cleaner than it was. But they’re only considering one part, the end part, of the process. They’re not considering extraction. What we say as part of our argument against clean coal, or the concept of clean coal, is how can coal that is mined using mountaintop removal coal mining possibly be clean? It can’t. I mean, it destroys the environment, it destroys people’s lives and the Appalachian culture. It can’t be clean coal. It’s sort of like ever since the surge started in Iraq and everyone’s saying how terrific it is. It knocked down American soldiers from being killed at 100 a month to 50 a month. How is that good? It’s sort of the same thing. Yeah, it burns cleaner, probably, not because the coal is clean, because the technology is better, but they still haven’t talked about the extraction part of it and all the steps in between.

EP: So are you saying that coal mined underground could potentially be clean coal?

LK: No. I mean, there are so many things the coal industry would have to do. First of all, they’d have to obey the law, which they haven’t been doing. So I think that there’s a long way to go. We’re not going to be off of coal tomorrow, and whatever coal mining they do, we would prefer they do it underground—it’s less destructive, and more miners would work and that’s really what they’re interested in doing.

EP: Is there any end to mountaintop removal in sight?

LK: Yeah, there is a light at the end of the tunnel, I guess is the phrase they use. I hesitate to talk about it, because when you start talking about ‘things are looking good,’ then people tend to slack off. But the point is that today they’re blowing up mountains in West Virginia, and as long as they’re doing that, they’re doing it, right, and we have to stop it. So, the end may be in sight, but it’s not in sight today and that’s what we’re after. I mean, I think that over the period of a couple years we’ll probably at least get the Clean Water Protection Act passed, but there’s a lot of work to be done, we’re not there yet. But we’re doing really well, and in the Congress we have 138 co-sponsors for the Clean Water Protection Act. So we’re doing pretty well, but doing pretty well is not the same as winning.

EP: Well, that’s all the time we have. Thanks so much for your time, Lenny, and good luck with your campaigns.

Today is Mother’s Day, which many probably know was started by a West Virginian.

Ann Maria Reeves Jarvis lived in western Virginia in the nineteenth century (which later became West Virginia during the Civil War). To ease the tensions caused by returning Confederate and Union soldiers after the war, she organized a Mother’s Friendship Day to bring together soldiers and neighbors from both sides. Mothers Friendship Day became an annual event for several years. After Ann’s death, her daughter, Anna, dedicated her life to establishing a national Mother’s Day in honor of her mother. In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson signed a congressional resolution marking the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day.

Jarvis’ old church in Grafton, WV is now known as the International Mother’s Day Shrine (a National Historic Landmark).

Happy Mother’s Day!

Photo by: Daniel Ross

I read in a post on West Virginia Blue that Emmett Pugh, the mayor of Beckley, officially endorsed Obama on Monday. Quoting from an e-mail, the blog quoted Pugh as saying:

“Barack Obama is the only candidate who can restore people’s trust and faith in government. Washington is rife with partisan politics and we need change. We need to fix what’s wrong with the country and Senator Obama understands you need Democrats, Independents and Republicans to do it.”

Obama has built his campaign around change. However, no matter what Pugh says, change may not be the catchword that earns Obama votes in West Virginia.

In a New York TImes article (accompanied by an awesome slideshow shot by a friend of mine) the reporter brings up the issue Obama is encountering in small-town Indiana: maybe people don’t want change. At the very least, they have a problem with the vague notion of change being tossed out without specifics, something that Obama is often guilty of.

No matter how much Indiana and West Virginia need some kind of change, it remains to be seen whether they’re going to give Obama a chance to deliver on his promise.

Now that we’re a couple of days into May, the WV Democratic primary is getting closer. For the first time in memory, the primaries are actually stretching on this long and actually matter. That’s not something West Virginians, as well as most of the country outside of Iowa and New Hampshire, are used to.

But who will win West Virginia? A lot of the media are becoming skeptical over Sen. Obama’s ability to win out over white, working class voters. That might be a problem for him in the Mountain State where 94.6 percent of the population is white, and the per capita income was $19,417 (in 2006).

For a while I figured both candidates would have handicaps in West Virginia: Clinton for her sex and Obama for his race. However, most people I talked to didn’t have a problem with the fact that Hillary’s a woman. Waiting in line at a Dollar General in Mullens, WV several months ago, I heard an older man say he was going to vote for Hillary. Why? Because he liked Bill Clinton’s administration, and figured Hillary was pretty much running it anyway.

No matter who takes West Virginia, the question of who can get the most votes in a general election is still up in the air. In a recent Wall Street Journal article, one of John McCain’s advisers was quoted as saying:

“Sen. Obama doesn’t appear to have the ability to hold the traditional Democratic coalition together as well as Sen. Clinton might,” says Charlie Black, a top adviser to Republican presidential candidate John McCain. “On the other hand, he runs much better with independent voters than Sen. Clinton does.”

On May 13, I guess we’ll see if WV has more traditional Democrats or independents.