Nevertheless, a child in West Virginia has a greater chance of dying from opioids than of becoming a doctor. “Eat your rice Han Ling, don’t you know there are children in West Virginia who are starving,” said a Chinese mother to her child in a New Yorker cartoon a few years ago. ‘Chickens taught me to steer clear of big agriculture,’ he says now © Matt Eich
Mike Weaver, former poultry farmer, who was paid 21 cents a chicken for 15 years, without ever getting a raise. Few landscapes could be so misleading as to the condition of its people. You can inhale the song’s lyrics as you spin through the deep gorges, wide meadows and craggy mountain byways. Almost Heaven is also the name of the Washington-based yacht of Joe Manchin, the state’s Democratic senator, who berths in the capital when Congress is in session. “Almost heaven, West Virginia” opens John Denver’s classic song “Country Roads”. I drive five hours across some of America’s most breathtaking scenery to meet Mike Weaver. “It is government of the corporation, by the corporation, for the corporation.” “This state is run by the ‘good ol’ boy’ network,” says O’Neal. West Virginia’s schools strike triggered similar walkouts in Los Angeles, Oklahoma, Arizona, Kentucky and elsewhere. He and Comer were chosen for Time magazine’s list of 100 most influential people last year. “Moving to West Virginia radicalised me,” says O’Neal, who came from Texas. Yet, some polling has suggested that Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s socialist challenger, who is running second behind Joe Biden in this cycle’s Democratic primaries, would have defeated Trump in the state by 48 to 46 per cent. Many Democrats, particularly those who rarely visit West Virginia, have since written it off as “Trump country”. Trump caught that frustration in 2016: he scooped up 68 per cent of West Virginia’s vote against Clinton’s 26 per cent. With a per capita income of under $25,000 - less than half the US average - West Virginia is ground zero for American populist discontent. ‘Without coal we are nothing,’ is a popular refrain throughout the state – but these days the march of natural gas seems unstoppable © Matt Eich ‘Lunch in the Coal Mine’, a mural in downtown Matewan, West Virginia. Contrary to its image among some metropolitan liberals as a hotbed of Trumpian know-nothings, West Virginia has led the picket lines.
Redneck driving navigator drivers#
Last month Uber and Lyft drivers even stopped work for a day. In 2018, there were more strikes in America than in any year since Ronald Reagan was president - and more than 10 times as many days were lost to strikes or lockouts than in the year Trump was elected. They had to wait for the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt 12 years later for the right to organise.Ī century on, that redneck spirit is stirring again.
Unlike West Virginia’s teachers, who took nine days to win last year’s strike, West Virginia’s miners lost their battle. It was also a milestone in desegregated labour history. Dozens of lives were lost, with private planes even hired to drop bombs on American citizens. According to local activists, as the 10,000-strong integrated army marched towards a showdown with the coal owners’ private army, the strikers desegregated whites-only public spaces at gunpoint.īarring the US civil war, the 1921 battle of Blair Mountain was the largest armed insurrection in American history. West Virginia’s miner rednecks, though, were a multiracial group.Īfrican-American and Italian immigrant “scabs”, who had been moved in by the coal owners to replace the striking Appalachian miners, were invited to join the illegal United Mine Workers union. Nowadays, a redneck is generally taken to be racist. The historical origin of the term redneck is often traced to poor white cotton farmers sunburned from working the fields - “po whites”, in the words of black slaves. The state is government of the corporation, by the corporation, for the corporation’ © Matt Eich Jay 0’Neal, a leader of the teacher’s strike: ‘Moving to West Virginia radicalised me. “We went ‘red’ because we wanted to hearken back to what West Virginia once was,” says Jay O’Neal, a teacher based in the state capital of Charleston, who organised the strike with fellow teacher Emily Comer over chronically low pay and the declining quality of health insurance. There was a time, however, when West Virginia was the most radical state in the union.