Don West: a legend remembered

I think of Don West (1906-1992) as a Primal Ancestor of Appalachian hellraisers. I feel very fortunate to have had the chance to get to know him and to have received his “blessing” during his last days.

I first became aware of West when I haunted a used bookstore in Huntington’s approximation of Skid Row, now long demolished. It was one of those magical places where something unexpected could be found on any visit.

On one trip, I came across a shelf of softbound books and pamphlets by an outfit called Appalachian Movement Press. Some had titles like “Paint Creek Miner” or “Songs of Freedom” and told stories of the mine wars, while others might document absentee corporate ownership.

Also to be found there were works of mountain poetry and essays by West. It didn’t take much browsing to realize this was not John Boy Walton stuff.

West’s poetry was a bit like Langston Hughes, whose writings helped nudge me in my life’s direction. Like the great African American poet with whom he had some politics in common, West wrote for and about people who don’t ordinarily read poetry. He was unashamedly partisan, declaring that “Poetry and other creative efforts should be levers, weapons to be used in the people’s struggle for understanding, human rights, and decency.”

A native of north Georgia, West told the neglected story of the mountaineers’ long tradition of struggle. He had no use for the “Gone With the Wind” school of southern history. Instead, he wrote of long-forgotten anti-slavery Appalachians who took up the fight while William Lloyd Garrison was still a child, of poor whites helping runaway slaves along the underground railroad, of courageous southern Unionists who fought the Civil War in their own backyards.

Long before it became fashionable, West fought the passive hillbilly stereotype by pointing to mountain labor’s traditions of struggle and solidarity. I think he—along with people like filmmaker John Sayles (“Matewan”) and author Denise Giardina (“Storming Heaven’)—helped the region recover from the historical amnesia that censored the history of the mine wars and other labor struggles for generations of West Virginians.

But West was more like a literary character than a man of letters. When it came to his adventures, it was hard to say where to draw the line between biography and mythology.  Like a left-wing Jay Gatsby, he seemed to have continually and consciously created his own legend. And he did it well.

It went something like this: in high school, he got in trouble for protesting the racist film “Birth of a Nation.” In college, expelled and reinstated for leading a student strike. Agitating for a union in “Bloody Harlan” County, Kentucky. Organizing workers in publics works projects in the New Deal era. Fighting for civil rights since the 1920s. Recruiting volunteers to fight fascism in Spain.

He had known kangaroo courts and jail cells; beatings by company thugs; Ku Klux Klan terrorism; and government inquisitions. But it never seemed to occur to him to give up the battle.

West was a co-founder with Myles Horton of the Highlander Folk School in 1932, now known as the Highlander Research and Education Center, which played a huge role in the history of the civil rights and southern labor movement.

He soon parted company with Horton but went on to found the Appalachian South Folklife Center in Pipestem in the 1960s. (My kids in the mid-1990s used to refer to it as “the Dorklife Center.”) It never rivaled the Highlander, but it did influence a number of Appalachian young people in southern West Virginia. West helped bring some of the political culture of an earlier era to those who were otherwise influenced by that of the 1960s, which in my book wasn’t a bad thing.

I have come to believe that people like Horton and West helped create an Appalachian “lineage” of social action.

I finally got to meet him in 1988, thanks in part to my friend Yvonne Farley, who had a longtime connection with West.  I had gone to a festival there and was interviewing him for the state magazine Goldenseal.  When we were alone, we had a short Zen-like dialogue which was to have a great deal of influence on my later work.

I asked, not too originally, “What is to be done?”

West answered, “Education.”

I said, “Okay.”

I have come to believe that people like Horton and West helped create an Appalachian “lineage” of social action which is based primarily on popular education, understood as dialogue, relationship building and problem posing, that is a bit different from the more issue-based community organizing model of Saul Alinsky.

A similar approach evolved simultaneously in Latin America and elsewhere based on the work of the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. That shouldn’t be surprising, since many people have compared our region to the so-called Third World. Freire said that “Leaders who do not act dialogically, but insist on imposing their decisions, do not organize the people—they manipulate them. They do not liberate, nor are they liberated: they oppress.”

I stayed in touch with West and was able to spend more time with him when, in his last act of political theater, he decided to move back to Cabin Creek to end his days. It was the site of a bitter episode of the West Virginia mine wars in the early 20th century that inspired the writing of “Solidarity Forever,” the international anthem of the labor movement.

West wrote about it at the end of what I think was his best poem:

There was a yesterday of hurt and hope
and solidarity
when a virgin Union’s inspiration
stirred mountain men and women
to heroic feats.
Born on Cabin Creek,
“Solidarity Forever”
went on to stir lowly hearts in all parts of the land.
And there may be a tomorrow
On Cabin Creek
a clean tomorrow,
child of hope and hurt and solidarity.
May it be so.

(Note: I wrote this piece, adapted from a memoir in progress, for Doug Imbrogno's newish online multimedia "magazine" WestVirginiaVille. It's worth checking out. The occasion was the airing on WV Public Broadcasting of a new documentary on West titled "What Will You Do for Your Hills? The Legacy of Don West,” which unfortunately I couldn't watch because we don't get public TV on the farm for some reason.)

Another big day in history

W.E.B. DuBois, 1868-1963

Today, August 15, is another big day in West Virginia and US history. It marks the first public meeting of the Niagara Movement in Harpers Ferry. That civil rights organization would eventually launch the NAACP.

 W.E.B. DuBois, one of the leaders, led a barefoot march to the engine house where radical abolitionist John Brown was captured during his 1859 raid. On the scene, he said that "here on the scene of John Brown’s martyrdom we reconsecrate ourselves, our honor, our property to the final emancipation of the race which John Brown died to make free."

J.R. Clifford, 1848-1933

Also in attendance that day was West Virginia's own J.R. Clifford, the state's first African-American attorney. A major civil rights leader in his own right, Clifford was also a teacher, principal, journalist and Civil War veteran. In 1898 he won a landmark case establishing education as a basic civil right, arguing that ‘‘discrimination against people because of color alone as to privileges, immunities and equal protection of the law is unconstitutional.’’

Solidarity forever!

It's a little known fact that "Solidarity Forever," the international anthem of the labor movement,  was inspired by events in West Virginia. Ralph Chaplin, writer and long time rebel worker, lived for a time in the Mountain State and edited a labor paper in Huntington, one of several then published in the state.

While here, he was inspired by the solidarity of coal miners during long and bitter strikes that raged in Kanawha County in the Paint Creek and Cabin Creek areas around 1912-1913. It took him a while to finish the song, which is sung to the tune of the Battle Hymn of the Republic.

Today most people familiar with the song only know the chorus. In honor of West Virginia's teachers, service workers and public employees, here's the whole thing:

When the union's inspiration through the workers' blood shall run,
There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun;
Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one,
But the union makes us strong.

CHORUS:
Solidarity forever,
Solidarity forever,
Solidarity forever,
For the union makes us strong.

Is there aught we hold in common with the greedy parasite,
Who would lash us into serfdom and would crush us with his might?
Is there anything left to us but to organize and fight?
For the union makes us strong.

Chorus

It is we who plowed the prairies; built the cities where they trade;
Dug the mines and built the workshops, endless miles of railroad laid;
Now we stand outcast and starving midst the wonders we have made;
But the union makes us strong.

Chorus

All the world that's owned by idle drones is ours and ours alone.
We have laid the wide foundations; built it skyward stone by stone.
It is ours, not to slave in, but to master and to own.
While the union makes us strong.

Chorus

They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn,
But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn.
We can break their haughty power, gain our freedom when we learn
That the union makes us strong.

Chorus

In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold,
Greater than the might of armies, magnified a thousand-fold.
We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old
For the union makes us strong.

Chorus

(Note: this song has shown up in this blog before, but it seem especially relevant today.)

A birthday to remember

I have long been fascinated by the life and death of John Brown, who was like a monkey wrench thrown by God into the machinery of a sinful slave-holding society. He was a man who lost every battle and major effort of his life yet succeeded after his death in his greatest objective.

I've blogged about Brown here over and over through the years, usually around the time of his raid (October) or his hanging (December).

How's this for historical irony: his trial and execution took part in a part of the state of Virginia that would soon become West Virginia, in large part as a result of a chain of events Brown started.

Thanks to the wonders of Twitter, I realized that he was born on this date 217 years ago.

So once again, here's an excerpt from his last speech, given while on trial for his life:

Had I interfered in the manner which I admit...in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great, or in behalf of any of their friends, — either father, mother, brother, sister, wife, or children, or any of that class, — and suffered and sacrificed what I have in this interference, it would have been all right; and every man in this court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment.

This court acknowledges, as I suppose, the validity of the law of God. I see a book kissed here which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament. That teaches me that all thing whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them. It teaches me further, to “remember them that are in bonds as bound with them.” I endeavored to act upon that instruction. I say, I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done — as I have always freely admitted I have done — in behalf of his despised poor, was not wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, — I submit; so let it be done!

Prophetic words. And others

I'm in the middle of a research project on the timely subject of why WV is poor. Along the way I rediscovered this prophetic 1884 report from the WV Tax Commission, which was alarmed by how quickly out of state business interests were gaining control of the state. Here's how it ended:

The wealth of this State is immense; the development of this wealth will earn vast private fortunes far beyond the dreams even of a modem Croesus; the question is, whether this vast wealth shall belong to persons who live here and who are permanently identified with the future of West Virginia, or whether it shall pass into the hands of persons who do not live here and who care nothing for our State except to pocket the treasures which lie buried in our hills? 

If the people of West Virginia can be roused to an appreciation of the situation we ourselves will gather this harvest now ripe on the lands inherited from our ancestors; on the other hand, if the people are not roused to an understanding of the situation in less than ten years this vast wealth will have passed from our present population into the hands of non-residents, and West Virginia will be almost like Ireland and her history will be like that of Poland. 

The rest is here and it's well worth a look. Golly gee, wouldn't it be terrible if they were right?

Slightly off topic, here's an interesting post from Ken Ward's Coal Tattoo about Donald Trump, black lung and coal. Here's an excerpt from an interview Trump gave back in 1990:

I like the challenge and tell the story of the coal miner’s son. The coal miner gets black-lung disease, his son gets it, then his son . If I had been the son of a coal miner, I would have left the damn mines. But most people don’t have the imagination–or whatever–to leave their mine. They don’t have “it.”

Imagine the outrage if something like that came from the mouth of other candidates...

Two on health care...and the legacy of racism

One of the reasons it took the US nearly 100 years to have something like a nationwide health insurance program is pretty stark and ugly: racism. The idea was initially raised in Theodore Roosevelt's 1912 run for the presidency on the Bull Moose or Progressive Republican ticket. His distant cousin Franklin talked about it but couldn't quite get there.

Neither could his successor Harry Truman, thanks largely to the opposition of southern senators who feared that health care reform would benefit African Americans and undermine the segregated hospital system.

It took the election of Barack Obama in 2008, a House Democratic majority, and a (brief) Democratic supermajority in the Senate to make the Affordable Care Act possible, as limited as it is.

While the ACA survived a challenge in the US Supreme Court, the majority of justices dealt it a major blow by making Medicaid expansion a state option rather than a mandate. And, surprise, many of the states that have so far not chosen to expand Medicaid under the ACA are former Confederate slave states.

Ironically, many if not most of southerners who would benefit from the expansion are white. That's just another example of how racism hurts everyone, not just the obvious targets.

You can read more about the politics of ACA in Mississippi here and look at how many Americans are or could have been covered by Medicaid expansion here.

Once again, I'm grateful that WV's Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin did the right thing in 2013. Since his decision to expand Medicaid, around 155,000 working West Virginians have gained coverage.

Oh, yeah, and I'm glad WV left the southern Confederacy 151 years ago. Otherwise, and among other things, that expansion of health care might never have happened.

With his hammer in his hand

I'm a bit behind on newspapers, blogging, sleep, and such these days. However, an article in the Gazette caught my eye about West Virginia and folklore legend John Henry. Actually, the article was about visiting Boy Scouts fixing up the memorial park in Talcott WV, where the legendary showdown between the steel drivin' man and the machine drill was said to have taken place.

I have no idea exactly what went down, although I tend to believe there is some historical basis behind most legends. I do believe though that John Henry's story is a fitting metaphor for much of West Virginia's labor history. The dead labor power of machinery continues to compete with the living labor power of workers and the latter usually comes off worse.

John Henry is also an example of the role of African Americans in the state's economic history. After the Civil War, many came from the south to find work on the railroads or in the mines where they helped build the nation's industrial might and sometimes died in the process.

One more random but related thought: if you haven't read it, I highly recommend Colson Whitehead's quirky 2001 novel John Henry Days. Here's a review from when it first came out.

A day late and...

El Cabrero has been running around so much lately that I feel like a road kill in waiting. And the running isn't over yet. A lot of this week was spent on programs celebrating the African American contribution to West Virginia history. Ironically, I didn't make it to the state's official 150th birthday celebration yesterday. Or, to put it another way, I celebrated it by talking with around 200 WV kids about how we could make WV a better place. I guess that would count.

In that vein, here's a reflection on WV history by my editor at the Gazette, Dawn Miller, a great advocate as well as a great journalist and here's an article on one of my favorite WV historians, John Alexander Williams.

ONE FOR THE ROAD. Finally, here's a look at who would benefit by an increase in the minimum wage.

Now, it's once more unto the breach...

Small change

In lieu of a real blog post, here's...

...a look at great and not so great one liners;

...more on the whole bird/dinosaur thing, a topic I think about frequently when watching the turkeys and peacocks at Goat Rope Farm;

...some good coverage of the events celebrating the African American contribution to WV in the Charleston Daily Mail, including this editorial and this news story;

...and another whack at my perennial favorite target, Ayn Rand-ism.

What he said

 From a recent address by Pope Francis to newly appointed ambassadors to the Vatican:

The worship of the golden calf of old (cf. Ex 32:15-34) has found a new and heartless image in the cult of money and the dictatorship of an economy which is faceless and lacking any truly humane goal.

...human beings themselves are nowadays considered as consumer goods which can be used and thrown away. We have started a throw-away culture. This tendency is seen on the level of individuals and whole societies; and it is being promoted! In circumstances like these, solidarity, which is the treasure of the poor, is often considered counterproductive, opposed to the logic of finance and the economy. While the income of a minority is increasing exponentially, that of the majority is crumbling. This imbalance results from ideologies which uphold the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation, and thus deny the right of control to States, which are themselves charged with providing for the common good. A new, invisible and at times virtual, tyranny is established, one which unilaterally and irremediably imposes its own laws and rules. Moreover, indebtedness and credit distance countries from their real economy and citizens from their real buying power. Added to this, as if it were needed, is widespread corruption and selfish fiscal evasion which have taken on worldwide dimensions. The will to power and of possession has become limitless.

Read the rest here.

WHAT A SURPRISE. Locking kids up in juvenile prisons doesn't do a whole lot of good.

BE THERE IF YOU CAN. Here are op-eds by the Rev. Ron English and the Rev. David Fryson about the upcoming celebrations of the African American contribution to WV's first 150 years that will take place June 16-19. Details are in the links. If you know WV's history it's hard to deny this basic statement: no black folks, no West Virginia.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The art of the formal boast

Wu is a master of the formal boast.

When current events allow, I've been amusing myself here lately by taking a look at the old Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, which holds up better than one might think. You'll also find links and comments about current events below.

Here's one thing I've gotten out of several recent readings: if you want to be a hero like Beowulf, there are certain things you have to be able to do. Having the strength of 30 men is a big help, as is experience in slaying monsters of the land and sea variety.

But those traits, as worthy as they no doubt are, are not enough. To do things right from the beginning, one has to be the master of the art of the formal boast. This isn't exactly bragging, which is often just a matter of words. It has to be backed up by previous glorious deeds, a serious intent to carry out the matter boasted about, and (one would hope) a successful outcome.

To do it right, you must (not necessarily in the following order):

*State who you are, including your glorious family lineage (note: it helps to have one);

*Refer at some length to the mighty deeds you have already done (it helps to have some); and

*State, as specifically and in as much detail as possible, exactly what you intend to do and to whom you intend to do it.

It's a lot cooler than the modern practice of sending in a resume or writing a proposal.

THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM when it comes to federal spending is discussed here.

CUTTING KIDS. Paul Krugman argues that children will bear the brunt of cuts in public spending.

NOT GOING QUIETLY. Labor protests against union busting continued in Wisconsin and around the country over the weekend.

WV HISTORY. Here's a review of an interesting book by a friend of mine on post-WWII WV history.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

ONE BLUE HOUSE

If these walls could talk. Pictures of the home of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.

El Cabrero is back in WV after 10 days in Mexico, split between Mexico City and Oaxaca. There were plenty of things to see and plenty of native speakers for me to torment with my horrible Spanish. Thanks to good farm-sitters, no mass animal graves were required on our return, which was a plus.



I enjoy traveling but always have this haunting fear that I'll miss something interesting while I'm gone. The great Greek sage Heraclitus said that you can't step in the same river twice, but given the state of some of our rivers, that might not be an altogether bad thing.



There were several places I wanted to see, one of which was the Casa Azul, home of revolutionary artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera and currently a museum in the Mexico City neighborhood of Coyacan.



There I learned that every home should have its own pyramid. I've got it on my to-do list.

Now, where were we...

MISTAKES WERE MADE. A new Army report finds major faults with the early stages of the occupation of Iraq.

RETIREMENT. More older workers are working longer as economic conditions decline, according to this Economic Policy Institute snapshot.

CAN WE TRUST OUR BRAINS? Maybe not so much...

A LITTLE GOOD NEWS. Supporters of clean elections will celebrate the state legislature's recent passage of a bill that requires financial disclosure for political ads. A previously passed law was struck down in a court decision.

A LITTLE FORGOTTEN HISTORY was the subject of an op-ed of mine in yesterday's Gazette-Mail.

URGENT EARLY TETRAPOD UPDATE. A new fossil from Latvia shows the link between fish and land animals.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED