Appalachian Earl
| ⛏️ | |
| Era | The Sixties |
|---|---|
| Age | 40-55 |
| Home | Logan, WV |
| Demographic | rural, white, coal miner |
| Lean | labour_left |
| Race | white |
A West Virginia coal miner in his forties, a United Mine Workers loyalist whose Democratic vote is inherited from the New Deal and held in place by the union. He is the cast's poorest white voter and its most neglected.
Who they stand for
The coalfields of southern West Virginia, eastern Kentucky and western Pennsylvania in 1961 were the poorest white country in America. Mechanisation had cut mining jobs by more than half since the war. John L. Lewis's UMWA had traded jobs for wages and a welfare fund, and the fund's hospitals were being sold off as the money ran short. Kennedy's 1960 West Virginia primary win over Humphrey brought national television coverage of hunger in the region, and the Appalachian Regional Commission of 1965 and the War on Poverty were both created with these counties in mind.
The vote is Democratic because of the union and because of the memory of the WPA and the TVA. It is not a liberal vote on other issues. The miner is white and Protestant, and he does not see civil rights as his own cause. Black lung was not a compensable disease until the Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969, passed after the Farmington explosion of 1968 killed 78 men.
Playing to them
A president wins his support with policy that reaches the mine directly. This includes federal safety inspection, compensation for black lung, money for the union's pension funds and hospitals, and public works in the hollows where miners live. He measures Washington by whether it notices him at all, so a visit, a regional programme or a named appropriation for Appalachia counts for more with him than a national growth figure. He does not forgive a strike broken by federal injunction, a right-to-work concession, or a president who sides with the mine operators over the miners. Taft-Hartley remains his standing grievance against the federal government, and automation is his other one. A president who praises rising productivity in coal mining is praising the technology eliminating his job.
He shares almost every political tendency with Union Hall Frank, so a change in one tends to produce the same change in the other. The cost falls on the right of the cast. Texas Oil Jack and Wall Street Henry read a safety bill or a strike settled on the union's terms as government taking labour's side. Goldwater Barry Jr and Prairie Ruth read Appalachian relief as an expansion of the welfare state.
Where they live
The five states where Appalachian Earl makes up the largest share of the electorate in the sixties:
- PR
- West Virginia
- Michigan
- Wisconsin
- Pennsylvania