Tell us about the new book, and why you decided to go back to the same community
You can't really understand the reasons for this new book without understanding the old book. Just before I came to Oxford, I served as a volunteer in a rural Appalachian community on the border of Tennessee and Kentucky. I learned that in one of the valleys where I was working, all the land was owned and controlled by a British mining company, which had a terrible legacy of political and economic control, destructive mining, poor company housing and more.
When some of the community members found out I was going to England to study, they said to me, “can you find out who owns us? And tell them how bad it is?” And being a young, naïve university graduate, I said, “sure, no problem”. As a result, I spent much of my first year at Oxford in Companies House in London, tracing corporate records, trying to discover who really owned and controlled this rural bit of Appalachia. In those days, you could not trace ownership electronically, you had to check out one paper file, which took you to another company, which took you to another and so on.
Ultimately, I discovered that all this land was owned and controlled by a very wealthy individual in Britain, a former Lord Mayor of London. In turn, this company in Appalachia was just a small part of a somewhat secretive empire of hundreds of companies the Lord Mayor controlled around the world. Working with a film maker, we ended up making a World in Action documentary exposing the impact of this company’s control of the Valley, which was aired nationally in the UK in November 1972.
The documentary and ensuing publicity led to some violence and backlash, against the people who were brave enough to speak out and later towards me. The community members, said, “well, you've done what you can, why don't you go back to school?” (I had taken off bits of time while I was working on this project, spending part of my time at rural Appalachia, part in Oxford.)
I returned to Oxford where my Balliol tutor at the time, Steven Lukes, was just writing his book Power: A Radical View, which has since come to be a very important book in the field. I told him what had happened and he said, “I think you've just learned something about power. Why don't you write about it?” I took up the challenge. The topic became my PhD dissertation in 1975, later published as the book Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley (1982). The book won several awards and continues to be in print.
About three years ago, I thought it would be interesting to revisit the same community to see what had happened in subsequent years. In the 1970s when I was doing my original research, the coal mines were booming though the people were poor. A great deal of attention had been brought to the region through the War on Poverty led by Presidents John F. Kennedy and then Lyndon Johnson. Now the mines have all closed, but the region still remains poor. When isolated by postal code, the community at the heart of the Valley is listed as among the top 99.9% most distressed communities in America.
My original idea was just to do an update of the old book with a couple of new chapters. But as I got into it, I realized the story of what was happening was much bigger and more fascinating than a simple update could cover. While beginning my new research, I had met a young scholar, Gabe Schwartzman, who had just finished his PhD on the same Valley 50 years after I had finished mine. We decided to collaborate on this new book, bringing an intergenerational perspective on what has happened since my earlier book was written.
You were able to interview some of the same people you met 50 years ago?
Yes, though many of them of course had already died. And unfortunately, of the people I did manage to interview, in the three years it's taken to get the book out, several have also passed away.
And had they read the first book?
Educational levels are not high in this area. I didn't really expect people to have read it, but many had. What was interesting though is that many of the younger generation of community leaders and activists whom I interviewed this time have now gone to university, where they had been assigned the book in their courses. So when I asked to interview them with the introduction, “you don't know me, but I'd like to follow up on work I did 50 years ago,” they said, “yes, of course we do know you, we read your book. You taught us a lot.” It was really surprising and humbling to see how the earlier research I had done has lived on in that area.
I had always told the community that I was not writing the first book to make a profit, even if it did well. To my surprise, it has sold over 30,000 copies. All the royalties have gone back to support grassroots groups in that area. Through that mechanism, I also I had also kept up with some of what was happening in the area. Any royalties from the sale of the new book will also go back to support community organizing and education in the area.
Going back 50 years later, presumably a completely different set of issues are facing the area?
Yes, to some degree. The company first came to the area in the 1890s, so there had been over a century of ownership and control by a single industry. The original company, called the American Association, had been founded by the entrepreneur Alexander Arthur, who also developed the small town of Middlesboro, Kentucky, near the historic Cumberland Gap. Ironically, while doing my research on my Rhodes Scholarship, I learned that when Arthur died his epitaph referred to him in very colonial terms as ‘a type of Cecil Rhodes’ who had ‘opened’ the area for development. A historical marker in downtown Middlesboro still honours his role in discovering coal and founding the town.
The first book focused a lot on how the company had developed a system of domination, including a culture of internalised powerlessness and fear. I had asked the question, “why was it that in the face of the glaring inequalities, there was so little visible protest?”
Now, the most striking thing is that people aren't afraid of the company anymore. It and the mines it controlled are all gone; it is no longer the big employer; it no longer owns the housing. But the legacy of its extractive mining has left behind a set of terrible conditions. The jobs have gone, and there's not much to replace them. As the mines declined, so did the tax base for schools, roads and social services. Miners who also often had poor health because of the legacy of working in the mines were vulnerable to marketing by the opioid companies. The area became Ground Zero for the epidemic of opioid addiction, which continues to destroy the health and social capital of communities in the region. Even though in the 1970s the area was seen as poor, now fifty years later, the area and its people are now in many ways even more dispossessed.
These “left behind” areas are closely associated with the rise, not just in the US, of populism. Did you get a sense of that when you went back?
This is one of the questions that the book wrestles with. Until the early 2000s, this was a heavily unionized and Democratic area. In the presidential elections, people tended to vote 80% Democrat and 20% Republican. What we saw in this one valley, like we've seen in much of rural America, is a complete shift over the last 20 years in the other direction. In the 2024 elections close to 90% of the local population voted for Trump.
Scores of pages have been written on trying to understand this rapid political shift and the rise of the conservative right in America. Our book also takes up the issue, using the micro example of this one Valley. Based on our interviews and other sources, we put forth several reasons for the shift. First, there is a strong sense of economic and social abandonment amongst people who have lost their jobs and seen the decline of their communities, and with it anger at the powers at be in general. In reality, not many Democratic presidential leaders since Kennedy and Johnson level have paid much attention to rural areas like these. On the other hand, Trump did try and speak to their predicament, promising to ‘Make Coal Great Again.’
Along with this, there was also manipulation of the anger away from the economic issues people were facing towards divisive cultural, race, and immigration issues. It is important to realize that this didn’t just happen spontaneously. As the mines were closing, and the fossil fuel industry was being pushed to wind down fossil fuel production due to the urgency of climate change, the more they put big money into a conservative, anti-climate change agenda. For instance, as Obama began to enforce environmental regulations to lessen emissions by the industry, in the mining region millions of dollars were spent on public relations campaigns around “Friends of Coal”, the “War on Coal”, and later “Make Coal Great Again” to protect the interests of the industry. All of this was also an effort to change the narrative away from the need for transitions from coal, and the effective and just ways to do so, to blaming the loss of jobs and decline of communities on others - whether they be Blacks, immigrants, Democrats, or environmentalists trying to ‘steal local jobs.’
With the decline of rural newspapers and the decline of the United Mine Workers Union, which once had a very widely-read journal for its members, side-by-side with the rise of Fox News, Christian radio and social media, there were very few sources of counter information to challenge this dominant conservative narrative.
Moreover, while the attention has been on the shift of voters from Democrats to Trump, often ignored has been the fact that many people chose not to vote at all. In the last election, more people in the region stayed at home than voted. And now, already we are seeing the rise of disillusionment in the region as coal still has not made the comeback that was promised, and as federally funded benefits for miners and their communities have been cut, including the proposed cuts of Medicare and Medicaid, on which a high percentage of the local people depend.
Does the book make any recommendations on how to help communities like this?
When Biden was President, much of the funding his administration offered through the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law was being directed towards economic and environmental revitalization of communities like these, often through support for greener jobs and industries. One of his first Presidential initiatives was Justice 40, which directed that 40% of funds from these and other federal initiatives go to frontline communities affected by environmental and economic injustice. This promised to be by far the largest flow of federal funds for the recovery of the region since Kennedy and Johnson’s War on Poverty in the 1960s. In fact it was to be much larger, at least for a while.
In response to this initiative - finally the issues facing these communities were on the national agenda - there was a flurry of proposals from workers, communities, non-profits and local communities for how to create new futures. In the book, we talk a lot about some of the visions for the future emerging from the grassroots, based on their own values and hopes. A recent study has shown that these funds stimulated private investment in the region as well, bringing ‘new projects, new jobs, and a renewed hope for the region’. Unfortunately, one of the first acts of new administration has been to cut all of this funding. So, the problem now isn’t a lack of ideas for how to develop a more just transition away from fossil fuels, it is the political will and resources to do so.
We conclude the book by arguing that what has happened in this one rural Valley is not an isolated case. Rather, we suggest that the Valley can serve as something of a metaphor for the broader global challenge of how to transition away from a fossil fuel economy in the face of climate change. and in the face of the fossil fuel industry’s efforts to resist such change. Achieving a just transition is not simply a technical issue of how to replace technologies of coal with renewables such as solar and wind power. Rather, it also must mean challenging and transitioning away from forms of political and economic power which have affected mining communities for over a century. While the story of the Valley gives us pause about the possibilities of doing so, the ongoing resilience of the people leaves us with cautious hope for the future, despite the overwhelming odds.