The County That Built the Country (““Connected: A Search for Unity” episode) (Grateful Inconvenience, PBS , aired March 39, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the American Experience program on Isaac Woodard (that also told the story of one of my political and social heroes, South Carolina federal judge Julius Waties Waring, who had an extraordinary road-to-Damascus moment that turned him from a typical upper-class Southerner with typical attitudes about ract to a fiery champion for civil rights that led him to write a scathing dissenting opinion in one of the cases that eventually became Brown v. Board of Education) PBS showed a program called “The County That Built the Country” as part of a series called Connected: A Search for Unity, produced by Monty Moran, founder of the Chipotle’s Mexican fast-food chain who took some of the money he made doing that to buy a private plane and fly around the country with a camera crew. His objective, he said in an opening narration, was to show that despite the intense political and social polarization of the United States today, there are more things that unite us than divide us.

His case in point in this episode was McDowell County, West Virginia, which through much of the 20th century was the richest county in the state, courtesy of its giant coal mines. They were owned not by a coal company but by United States Steel, which wanted a “captive” coal producer to feed its steel mills that in turn provided steel for just about everything the U.S. made: skyscrapers, automobiles, appliances and the million and one other products that are dependent on steel. Other than that the towns in McDowell County, including Welch and Gary (named after United States Steel’s historic headquarters in Gary, Indiana), were run pretty much like other coal towns: the miners lived in company-owned housing and were paid not in actual U.S. currency but so-called “scrip,” private money issued by the company and usable only at the company’s own stores. (The show featured a shot of a scrip coin issued by United States Steel for their co-workers.) The company thereby got to exploit their workers at both ends, as both producers and captive consumers; it’s the source of the line in Merle Travis’s song “Sixteen Tons” (which one of the interviewees actually quotes), “Tell St. Peter I can’t go/I owe my soul to the company store.” (Travis recalled his father, a coal miner, saying that line and put it into the song.)

The show details both the collapse of McDowell County’s economy when United States Steel closed the coal mine in 1986 and the resourcefulness of the people left behind – alas, I haven’t been able to find an online source about this show that gives the names of the people profiled, but some of them were interesting. Among them were the 29-year-old owner of Welch’s three-days-a-week newspaper and an unlikely team of an 80-something white man and a 40-something Black woman who bought the local high school for $100 – he notes rather grimly that they got it so cheaply because selling it to them cost the city less than tearing it down – and used it to set up something called a “School for Life” to teach the local kids to start their own enterprises and work hard as an alternative to collecting welfare and getting on drugs.

“The County That Built a Country” has ideological points to offer both the Left and the Right: the Right can point to it as an example of how government welfare payments destroy people’s will to work and better themselves, and set them up to become drug addicts (though no one in the show seems to be aware of how drugs came to the area – presumably they could have made meth in outlaw labs but cocaine and heroin would have had to be imported, and the 80-something white co-founder of the School for Life tells us he had the trappings of a middle-class lifestyle until he lost it all to his crack habit but he doesn’t give us much of an idea of how he got off the drug)/ The Left in turn can look at it as the sort of “creative destruction” of capitalism run amok and essentially being destructive destruction; one of the crueler aspects of America’s de-industrialization as company after company has shut down American manufacturing and exported it overseas (or kept their plants in the U S. but brought in undocumented immigrants to replace U.S.-born workers) and instead of preserving the industrial infrastructure for someone else that might be able to do useful work with it, they just destroy it on their way out.

I’ve never forgot the photos I’ve seen of the insides of abandoned auto factories that look like a bomb was set off inside just to wreck everything; infrastructures that took decades to build up are destroyed in months and no one stops to think of the social costs. It’s heartbreaking to me that America has pissed away the industrial advantage that allowed it to win World War II (I’ll never forget the story of Akio Morita, the founder of Sony, touring the U.S. in 1946, admiring the huge factories and wondering, “Just how did we think we could win a war against such a big country?”) Charles watched the show with me and called it “pablum,” pointing out that all the resourcefulness of the people who are sticking it out in places like Gary and Welch isn’t going to get them anything more than a small-town existence in which they’re hanging on for dear life and squandering their talents.

This was an interesting show to see in our political climate, though; thanks largely due to the anger West Virginians feel over the wanton destruction of the coal industry and the total disinterest of both the private sector and the government in setting up anything to replace it, West Virginia has shifted from one of the most reliably Democratic states in the country to one of the most reliably Republican, and in the current Senate the balance of power is held by West Virginia’s nominally Democratic Senator, Joe Manchin, who’s holding the threat of switching parties and delivering the Senate majority to the Republicans if Joe Biden and the rest of the Democrats in Washington, D.C. move too far Left to suit him. With the actual Republicans adopting the scorched-earth policy towards Biden they did towards Obama before him (and Clinton before him) and refusing to vote for anything he and the Democrats propose, Manchin has essentially become the one voice on the Right they can (indeed, have to) negotiate with and compromise.

If Monty Moran’s intent in telling this story was to assure the watchers that for all our differences there’s more that unites America than divides it, this show – as moved as I was by the stories – was an abject failure. I’m a city boy, born in San Francisco (the city all too many rural Americans regard as a den of iniquity because of its cosmopolitanism in general and tolerance of Queer people in particular), and people maintaining what I think is an irrational attachment to a deservedly dying industry like coal (both its toll on the miners themselves and the damage coal did to the environment) is as far beyond my ken as the whole “gun culture” – my response to gun massacres like the resent ones in Atlanta and Boulder is to want to tell all rural idiots who whine about us wanting to “take away our guns,” “You’re damned right I want to take your guns! There’s no earthly reason why a private citizen should be able to buy or own an assault weapon. If I had my druthers the Second Amendment would be ripped out of the Consttution and thrown onto the dung heap of history and burned along with all the parts of it that condoned slavery.”