The Gilded Rage by Alexander Zaitchik

Author:Alexander Zaitchik
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hot Books
Published: 2016-07-19T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Four

West Virginia

Along the wooded serpentine path of Coal River Road, it’s common to see hunched figures emerge onto the two-lane blacktop, all dirtied up and shouldering what look like laundry bags. If the sacks are bulging, it was a good day up on the forested ridges digging up wild ginseng—or sangin’ as they say in Raleigh County. The hills of southern West Virginia are rich with cash roots and ramps, of which ginseng is the most coveted on the global market. Once upon a pre-industrial time, sang, not coal, was king. Long before West Virginia statehood, the region sent wagon caravans of ginseng over the Federal Road to the spice capital of Baltimore, where it set sail for San Francisco and China. The first deposits of anthracite coal were unearthed in the same mountains, soon followed by some of the country’s first coal mines. But China never stopped buying the local ginseng, or the paws and gallbladders of its black bears. When the mines opened, scavenging persisted as a rare alternative to picking coal. “Diggin’s a rough life, and you gotta live poor,” one harvester told me on Coal River Road. “But some always figured it’s better than the mines.”

Since the mines started closing, competition for ginseng has intensified in West Virginia’s poorest counties. The state now regulates a four-month season to prevent overharvesting that threatens the root’s extinction in the same mountains where automation and mountaintop blast mining have already transformed the old coal economy. Even those families that still have mining jobs sometimes supplement their declining incomes by sangin’. As in eastern Pennsylvania, many of West Virginia’s new-century mining jobs are non-union and part-time, without the benefits or security of the jobs they replaced.

A spiral of poverty and depopulation has created quasi–ghost towns throughout the state’s verdant hollows. The typical town is a modest church surrounded by the faded husks of social and commercial life: boarded-up shops, abandoned bowling alleys, the charred foundations of the last bar, burned down for the insurance payout. A sixty-one-year-old man from the hamlet of Coal Creek told me in bitter resignation, “We have a higher rate of refugees than Afghanistan and Syria. The whole valley is being depopulated. We lost our last grocery. The hardware store. Things that make a community.”

Much of America is suffering hard times, but in deepest Appalachia, times have always been harder, even when times were good. When a January poll showed Trump’s strongest support in the counties of southern West Virginia, it seemed to offer the explanatory power so many craved. West Virginia was poor, poorly educated, overwhelmingly white, in economic free fall. A rare beam of national media settled onto the state whose Facebook feeds burst with “help is on the way” Trump memes. A state that, like Trump, seemed a caricature of itself, a toothless monster of working-class anger, despair, alienation, bitterness, and defiance. Glossy magazines sent feature writers to Charleston. National newspapers published interactive maps promising, “How West Virginia Explains Donald Trump.” (Short answer: people there are white, feel “left behind,” and blame Obama.

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