West Virginia 3rd District

Early in the 20th century, the coal fields of southern West Virginia were one of America’s boom areas. Into rural farmland and hollows, inhabited by the same families that settled these mountains 100 years before, came coal company lawyers with mineral rights’ leases to sign, coal company engineers to design and sink the mineshafts, and men from other mountain counties, as well as Europe, to work the mines. Company houses were built, company stores were stocked with goods as the company dictated, and company paymasters kept close tabs on the finances of every employee. These conditions bred dull discontent, which was ignited into the fire of industrial unionism by the tongue of John L. Lewis, president of the United Mine Workers, who organized most of the mines in the 1930s. Lewis was not only a militant unionist, but also an isolationist, and during and after World War II, he called out his coal miners on strikes, to the fury of Democratic Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. The national war effort and postwar economic recovery were threatened by these labor stoppages involving some 300,000 workers, centered in back corners of the country like southern West Virginia.

All that is history now. Coal is no longer central to the U.S. economy and there are only a few thousand coal miners left in southern West Virginia, and many are not UMW members anymore. Most of the old underground mines have been abandoned, leaving behind mineshafts and piles of tailings—and lives that were snuffed out by cave-ins or simple carelessness in America’s deadliest industry. Manufacturing jobs in the area, which had been predominantly in the chemical industry, also have been reduced by more than half since 1980. The region has still not hit bottom: Of seven counties in the nation with more than 20,000 residents that suffered a 10% population loss or greater in the 1990s, four of them—Logan, McDowell, Mingo and Wyoming—were in southern West Virginia. All four have continued to decline in population since 2000. In September 2008, a faint hope of recovery through “clean coal” technology was snuffed out when the U.S. Energy Department cancelled the Bush administration’s proposed $215 million clean-coal project in Greenbrier County after deciding it was unlikely to succeed.

The 3rd Congressional District of West Virginia includes most of the mountainous coal country in the southern part of the state that for years was heavily Democratic. But the coal mining counties now make up less than half of the district. About a quarter of the population is in and around the industrial city of Huntington on the Ohio River, which includes Marshall University. Another quarter is to the east, in Beckley and the farming uplands. (Also located there is the Greenbrier Hotel resort, where the government built a massive secret fallout shelter, code-named “Project Greek Island,” to house the entire U.S. Congress in the event of nuclear war). The population of the 3rd District in 2007 was 585,000, down significantly over the last half-century. The district has shifted to Republicans in the past decade. In 2000, Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore won the district 51%-47%. In 2008, Republican John McCain won it 56%-42%.