Donald Trump a working man's hero in US coal country

Updated

US coal wars fuel Trump train

In the early 1920s, the largest labour uprising in US history took place in Logan County, in West Virginia's rich coal country. Today, as the region struggles to cope with the industry's downturn, US Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is at the centre of a new rebellion.

Logan County in West Virginia is arrestingly beautiful.

Its towns are huddled in the river valleys that cut through the Appalachian mountains, turning from green to amber with the autumn.

The state has an intriguing history. It split from Virginia during the Civil War, abolished slavery and was admitted to the Union in 1863.

But a large number of the southern counties remained staunchly Confederate.

The county might not be familiar, but most would know of America's most infamous family feud, between the Hatfields and the McCoys.

It ran for nearly 30 years, from 1863, with the murder of Asa McCoy by a Confederate guerrilla unit called the Logan Wildcats.

Its captain William Anderson 'Devil Anse' Hatfield did not participate in the killing but seems happy to have accepted the blame.

Asa's death would be the first of many lives lost in both families.

Today, markers of the feud are hard to find.

One is on the Jerry West Highway just outside a handful of houses called Sarah Ann.

A steep rocky trail leads up to a graveyard where the likeness of Devil Anse stands in stone.

The life-sized statue towers over the headstones of his kin, taken by violence, disease and age.

A Confederate flag fluttering nearby shows not all the rebels here have been buried.

The Battle of Blair Mountain

Coal made Logan County rich, but it too has a violent history.

The company towns brutally suppressed all efforts to unionise, employing muscle and guns from the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency.

In May 1920, a group of agents arrived in the town of Matewan to evict some miners and were confronted by a posse led by a pro-union mayor and sheriff.

When the shooting stopped, seven agents were dead along with the mayor and two in his posse. The sheriff, Sid Hatfield, became a working man's hero.

His murder a year later by Baldwin-Felts agents sparked what is remembered in labour history as the Battle of Blair Mountain.

It is said that one million shots were exchanged in the greatest internal conflict in the United States since the Civil War.

To distinguish themselves in the fight, the miners tied red handkerchiefs around their necks and would be immortalised as the Red Neck Army.

Estimates of the dead range from 20 to 100, although one local is sceptical, saying he thinks the battle was overblown.

"I don't know anybody who claims to have a relative killed in that battle," he says.

Donald Trump: The working man's hero

Like so many things in this part of the world, facts are bitterly contested.

There is a new coal war in southern West Virginia and the working man's hero is Donald Trump. His stickers and banners litter their yards.

Logan County is on its knees with the long decline of coal mining, crippled by low prices, competition from cheap gas, and tighter environmental laws.

This once-rich corner of America now has the second lowest household income in the nation.

When employment is measured against population, it shows less than half of the adults here have a job.

That leads to the grim procession of statistics that always follows poverty: the highest level of people on disability benefits nationwide, the worst rates of obesity, cancer and diabetes and sky-high levels of prescription drug abuse.

The signs of despair scar Logan's streets in burned out and abandoned shops and houses. It is also etched deep in people's faces.

Trevor Bryant

Trevor Bryant is an area director with Youth Works, a non-denominational Christian group that brings in young volunteers to run children's camps and help the elderly and disabled with home maintenance.

He says the coal industry has done little to look after the workers it has left behind, but a lot of the anger is directed at politicians.

"I think the people are frustrated because they don't feel heard," he says.

Trevor believes Mr Trump feeds people's fears of falling incomes and changing demographics.

"When you look at West Virginia and coal mining, it's a traditionally white community, it's a traditionally lesser educated state and Trump is promising to take things back to the good old days and I think that's what everyone wants here," he says.

Betty Adams

Twenty minutes drive from Logan, 62-year-old hairdresser Betty Adams is standing on a street corner in Chapmanville, campaigning for Richard Ojeda, the Democratic candidate for the State Senate.

"I trust him and I believe in him and we need a change to help the little people because people are leaving here in droves," she says.

"People are losing their jobs and their homes and they don't even have enough to eat. It's really sad, so people here have changed their mindset on politicians. They're either going to have to help, or be voted out."

Betty has lived in Chapmanville all her life. Her father worked 40 years in the mines and died in his second month of retirement.

She represented four counties on the state Democratic committee but became an independent after the party "voted God out of the platform".

And although she's backing Democrats in the state races, that support ends at the border.

"I have voted early and I voted for Trump," she says.

She's not alone. This once staunch Democrat county has turned viciously against the party it voted for in all but two presidential elections from 1829 to 2000.

Tony Robison

Long before he became a Chapmanville City councillor 17 years ago, Tony Robison was a wrestler with the stage name Psycho.

He was born in Logan County and has lived in this town for 30 years. He doesn't like what's happened to it.

"We go with the mining industry," he says.

"When it's up, we're up, when it's down, we're down."

He happily poses beside a banner of Hillary Clinton, behind bars, that adorns the exterior of the Mine Lifeline company where he works.

He says she and Bill Clinton built political careers on breaking the law and he is campaigning hard for a Trump victory.

"Yes sometimes he says things like I do, off the wall," Tony says.

"But everyone doesn't have to be technically sound and speak in the greatest language.

"Sometimes you need that hard core. Somebody to step up and say: 'No, it's not going to happen that way. Here's what's real. We're doing it this way'."

How will he feel if Mrs Clinton wins?

"It will be a sickening day and I do mean that from the bottom of my heart," he says.

"I will be sick at my stomach and I know a lot of people around who would be because she came here on our ground, our land in West Virginia, and said she would shut the rest of them down.

"She said she would put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business."

It's a sentiment that is echoed across the county and many quote 15 words of a statement Mrs Clinton made in March.

Here is the entire sentence: "I'm the only candidate who has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country, because we're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business".

Michael Cline

The Beatles White Album is playing in the Hot Cup coffee shop on Stratton Street in Logan.

It seems apt that John Lennon is singing Revolution in a business the owner Michael Cline describes as "a place where the misfits fit".

He won't be voting for Mrs Clinton, or Mr Trump. His choice is Jill Stein, the Green.

Michael stands out from the Logan crowd in every way — from his opinions, his sharp, city-slick cap and Tony Stark-inspired goatee, to his T-shirt homage to the Australian rock band Jet.

Michael says he had two goals when he set up his first coffee shop five years ago: "To serve the most kick ass coffee in the cosmos and to shove a little class and culture down Logan's throat, whether they wanted it or not".

He describes himself as a realist and an atheist, which puzzles some of his Bible belt neighbours.

"People ask me what my religion is and I say my religion is kindness," he says.

"I don't care what religion, race, colour, creed or sexuality you are, I care if you are an asshole or not.

"Somebody once asked me if I would put a sticker in our window that said 'Friends of Coal' and I said 'No I won't, but I will if you have one that says friends of coal miners and their families', because I care about people."

He believes the local support for Mr Trump is born of desperation and fear.

"When Trump says make America great again, what he means is make America white again," he says.

"At what point exactly are they pining for in American history? When women couldn't vote? When black people couldn't use the same bathroom?"

Michael says he understands that Mr Trump taps into a disillusion with the major parties that he shares.

"But while standing up to the establishment is a thing, you shouldn't do it at the cost of having a mildly retarded demagogue man-baby in office," he says.

"And it also stems from their hatred of Hillary Clinton, which is also justified.

"She represents everything that's wrong with politics."

Topics: us-elections, coal, industry, business-economics-and-finance, united-states

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