Uneven Ground. Ronald D Eller
automobile dealers, contractors, and other small-business owners, creating a network of political and economic interests where a few individuals controlled the meager resources available to the entire community. In rural counties where a single family gained control of the county school board and the county government, domination was virtually complete.
The mountain political structure fed on the poverty and dependent relationships that had emerged in the region and choked efforts at long-range planning and community development. Civic participation was low and usually limited to the voting process itself. Especially in the coalfields, mountain residents had little experience in public decision making or in managing public affairs. When the large corporations withdrew from direct involvement in local matters—except to maintain low taxes on their land and mineral resources—local leaders had little incentive to change existing economic and political relationships. As long as their decisions did not threaten the interests of the external landlords, and in the absence of any opposition, the local machines were able to use public funds and programs to perpetuate their power.
Everywhere in the region, the intertwining of economic self-interest and political influence worked to maintain the status quo. This relationship was perhaps best revealed in the connections among mountain professionals, especially physicians, bankers, land developers, and lawyers. Mountain physicians, for example, had long held influential positions in local politics and often were among the principal investors in local land development efforts. As pressures mounted to certify more and more unemployed men for disability benefits, some physicians were not averse to manipulating public assistance for their own political ends. The combination of a good word from the county judge executive and a certification of disability from the local doctor was almost certain to convince the Department of Social Welfare to approve a monthly check and to obligate the claimant to the local political machine as well. In a similar way, bankers benefited from their control over local credit and sometimes used their influence over home mortgages, automobile loans, and small-business loans to influence local politics. Not only did bankers manage the assets that passed through the county from the development of area resources, but they were a primary source of capital for new business development, including new mining and logging enterprises.
Often at the center of this feudal political system were the land developers, the real estate brokers, and the local lawyers who served as agents for absentee developers and who managed litigation, land and mineral titles, and other legal matters. Indigenous land developers had served as midwives to the industrialization of the region at the turn of the century by promoting and selling local timber and mineral resources to outside developers, and after World War II they reasserted their influence over the local economy. Purchasing tax-delinquent properties and buying blocks of coal camp housing from coal companies for resale to individual buyers, these mountain elite were intimately involved with county-wide political decisions, especially those affecting roads, public utilities, and taxation. Many of the most powerful land brokers were also engaged in banking and politics, and in the coalfields, they were often the force behind the expansion of new truck mines and small surface mining operations after 1950. Native coal operators controlled the political process in most coalfield counties. In Harlan County, Kentucky, for example, the secretary of the coal operators’ association was the chair of the county Republican committee, while the president of the association was the head of the county Democratic committee.53 These local entrepreneurs accumulated small fortunes in counties where the majority of their neighbors lived below the poverty level, and they were not opposed to using the political system to maintain their good fortune.54
This political and economic system formed the backdrop for the emergence of a new form of mining enterprise in the 1950s that would leave a deep and permanent mark on the politics and landscape of the region. Surface mining, or “strip” mining, as it was pejoratively called, was not feasible on a large scale in Appalachia before the war, but the development of diesel-powered earth-moving equipment, giant screwlike augers, and more powerful explosives made it possible to extract great quantities of coal from outside the mountain rather than penetrating the seam using traditional, deep mining methods. A local entrepreneur, backed by a loan from a supportive banker, could open a seam of coal with minimal investment and only a fraction of the labor costs of a deep mine. After paying the cost of trucking the coal to a nearby tipple, the strip operator could sell his product more cheaply than that produced by underground mining and, within a year or two, could pocket millions of dollars in profit.
During the 1950s, hundreds of small coal operators and a few larger companies cut into the outcroppings of mountainside coal seams utilizing the new technology. In flat country, surface mining simply involved making a series of parallel cuts into the earth to uncover the coal and dumping the surface dirt and rock back into the previous cut as the process moved along. In the mountains, however, surface miners were forced to follow the contour of the coal seam as it wound around the mountainside. Contour mining removed the soil and rock from above the seam, gauging a shelf around the hillside to get at the coal below. This process not only left a forty- to ninety-foot “highwall” exposed on the inside of the cut but pushed most of the dirt, rock, and tree stumps from above the coal over the hillsides along the outer edges of the seam. This “overburden” created a loose, unstable mass that oozed down the hillside and sometimes broke loose, roaring through the hollow with the first heavy rains and destroying everything in its path. The coal left in the seam underneath the highwall could be further exploited by using giant augers to drill horizontally into the hillside at regular intervals, leaving the mountain ringed by a series of ledges and holes. A seam that was located near the top of the ridge could be reached by removing the crest of the mountain, decapitating it and creating a huge mesa of barren, flat land.
Surface mining not only added to the competition in an already overexpanded industry, further stimulating mechanization and unemployment in the deep mines, but it left the mountains disfigured and the environment altered in ways previously unimagined in the region. The practice of contour mining cut into the hillsides ugly scars that ran for miles along the ridges. Mountaintop removal leveled thousands of acres, filling in the hollows between the hills and creating vast, inaccessible stretches of barren land. In a region once known for the purity of its water, surface mining altered water tables, polluted nearby creeks and streams, and contaminated local wells. When it rained, sulfur in the exposed coal produced sulfuric acid that filtered into the creeks, killing the fish and most plant life. “Gob piles” of mine waste clung to the hillsides, and huge rocks and tree stumps loosed by the mining process were sometimes sent flying down the hillside, destroying fields and gardens below and occasionally crashing through residences and barns.
Mining companies were required by law to replace the soil and to replant the ravaged hillsides, but small operators seldom took the time and expense to reclaim the land. Even where meager efforts at reclamation were undertaken, the absence of topsoil and the composition of the fill itself meant that little vegetation grew on the disturbed site. Given the need for jobs and the political power of the coal industry, state governments were slow to enforce existing regulations. As a result, the heavy mountain rains washed acres of rocks and topsoil into the streams each year, choking and silting over rivers and flooding the farms and communities below. One study by the U.S. Geological Survey found that in strip-mined areas, the rains washed away 27,000 tons of earth per square mile each year, in contrast to 1,900 tons in areas where strip mining had not occurred.55
The social cost of the new industry was as appalling as the cost to the land itself. In much of Appalachia, mineral rights had been severed from surface rights by the actions of mineral buyers at the turn of the century. For as little as twenty-five cents per acre, hundreds of thousands of acres of coal were sold to absentee land companies, whose intricate deeds granted them use of the timber on the surface for mining purposes and access to the coal at some future date. The ownership and use of the surface land remained with the mountain farm family. These “broad form” deeds, as they were known in eastern Kentucky, effectively transferred to the land company all of the mineral wealth and the right to remove it by whatever means necessary, leaving the original owners and their descendants the semblance of landownership and the responsibility for paying the taxes.56
With the advent of surface mining in the 1950s, however, these old deeds took on new meaning as the mining companies sought access to their