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Appalachian Redshift

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cosmic_Redshift_(noirlab2401d).tiff “Redshift is the term used to describe the stretching of wavelengths of the light from an object as a result of the expansion of the Universe; the greater the object’s distance, the greater the redshift.” – Cosmic redshift reminds me of political redshift, watching Appalachia drift further and further away.

My roommate watched Harlan County, USA for a class the other day and it reminded me of something I’ve thought about before – the rural working class of Appalachia is largely responsible for the labor movement and the progress it produced and has now almost entirely shifted heavily right-wing. Appalachia has almost universally shifted from a strong Democratic to a Republican stronghold.

Coal mining is one of the most prominent examples of the vast tolls labor can take on your body – mine collapses, equipment accidents, black lung from the coal itself – and the lack of access to care for those injuries were why coal mining was such a prominent part of labor conversations and unionization (and the prominence of those injuries is why higher-ups were so against paying for workers’ care). Now, the region is highly conservative – in the 2024 General Election, Harlan County voted in favor of Trump, garnering 88%1 of the total vote. The union is gone2. What happened?

The poverty isn’t gone, the labor isn’t gone, the brutal treatment of mine workers and other laborers isn’t gone. The union and the ideals it represented are, at least as far as the majority of the population and as far as public perception goes. This issue also doesn’t exist in isolation – race, sex, class, all play a role in the development and subsequent dissolution of union support in Appalachia. Race has been used and abused as a dividing factor between workers3. Union support doesn’t necessarily mean universal political progressiveness – though it often does work out that way. As I’ve written this post, I’ve read through several other articles, which I’ll link below (hence why this may read rather piecemeal – I keep getting sidetracked and diving further into the rabbit hole).

Florence Reece’s 1967 rendition of “Which Side Are You On,” which she wrote several decades prior during the Bloody Harlan violence of the 1930s.

A book I might pick up over break on the subject: Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right

A few sources I visited in my exploratory googling:

  1. Kentucky Election Night Reporting – Harlan County
  2. A Brief History of Harlan County, USA – Labor Notes
  3. Human Rights in the Appalachian Region of the United States of America: an introduction – UAB
  4. Radicals, Reunion, and Repatriation: Harlan County and the Constraints of History – Kentucky Historical Society
  5. Union Membership in the United States – BLS
  6. Examining Appalachian Realignment – Belmont University (this article is a really interesting examination of environmentalism’s impact on this alignment in coal-producing counties)
  7. Appalachia Went Republican Because Democrats Left it Behind (explores Democratic focus on urban issues and political sorting due to strongly partisan issues)

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