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Overview
From investigative reporter and Pulitzer Prize finalist Alan Maimon comes the story of how a perfect storm of events has had a devastating impact on life in small town Appalachia, and on the soul of a shaken nation . . .
When Alan Maimon got the assignment in 2000 to report on life in rural Eastern Kentucky, his editor at the Louisville Courier-Journal told him to cover the region “like a foreign correspondent would.”
And indeed, when Maimon arrived in Hazard, Kentucky fresh off a reporting stint for the New York Times’s Berlin bureau, he felt every bit the outsider. He had landed in a place in the vice grip of ecological devastation and a corporate-made opioid epidemic—a place where vote-buying and drug-motivated political assassinations were the order of the day.
While reporting on the intense religious allegiances, the bitter, bareknuckled political rivalries, and the faltering attempts to emerge from a century-long coal-based economy, Maimon learns that everything—and nothing—you have heard about the region is true. And far from being a foreign place, it is a region whose generations-long struggles are driven by quintessentially American forces.
Resisting the easy cliches, Maimon’s Twilight in Hazard gives us a profound understanding of the region from his years of careful reporting. It is both a powerful chronicle of a young reporter’s immersion in a place, and of his return years later—this time as the husband of a Harlan County coal miner’s daughter—to find the area struggling with its identity and in the thrall of Trumpism as a political ideology.
Twilight in Hazard refuses to mythologize Central Appalachia. It is a plea to move past the fixation on coal, and a reminder of the true costs to democracy when the media retreats from places of rural distress. It is an intimate portrait of a people staring down some of the most pernicious forces at work in America today while simultaneously being asked: How could you let this happen to yourselves?
Twilight in Hazard instead tells the more riveting, noirish, and sometimes bitingly humorous story of how we all let this happen.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781612199979 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Melville House Publishing |
| Publication date: | 07/05/2022 |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Sales rank: | 1,046,137 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
PREFACE
By every socioeconomic measurement, the area of Eastern Kentucky that I covered for the Louisville Courier-Journal in the 2000s is Appalachia at its most compelling and extreme. I was the last major metropolitan newspaper reporter based in those coalfields, and I wanted to write this book to provide what I believe is the most complete account to date of one of the most mythologized and least understood places in the country.
It took me five years of chronicling Eastern Kentucky as a reporter and another fifteen years of thinking about and returning to those stories, in my dual role as a writer and the husband of a Harlan County coal miner’s daughter, to understand why we still don’t understand Appalachia.
There was hope after the 2016 presidential election that we might be moving toward a more nuanced view of Eastern Kentucky when, for a moment in time, the country’s scholars and storytellers begrudgingly moved past looking at the region merely as an object of perverse curiosity. All of the credit for this hint of progress went to one man: Donald Trump.
In the wake of Trump’s improbable ascendancy to the White House, writers and commentators, almost exclusively from Blue State America, set their gaze on Appalachia to ask variations of the same question: How could you have let this happen? Forget that Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin were the states that swung the election to Trump. Forget that most Eastern Kentucky counties gave previous Republican presidential candidates John McCain and Mitt Romney roughly the same level of support that they gave Trump. And forget that Bernie Sanders trounced Hillary Clinton by a two-to-one margin in most parts of Eastern Kentucky in the 2016 Democratic primary. The experts pronounced that Appalachia held the key to explaining Trump and Trumpism. For the first time, Appalachians and what they thought actually mattered to the country at large. Or that was the premise, at least.
This wave of national interest in Eastern Kentucky was predicated on a misinterpretation of voter registration figures. It is true that registered Democrats far outnumber registered Republicans in many counties in the region, but those numbers are a vestige of mid-twentieth-century social dynamics that do not represent the political leanings of today. If reporters left their bubbles in the hopes of discovering large clusters of people who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 and Donald Trump in 2016, they simply went to the wrong place. Of the 206 counties nationwide that fit that description, 31 are in Iowa and 23 are in Wisconsin. Only one, Elliott County, is in Kentucky. The results there were indeed notable because Elliott County had voted for the Democratic candidate in every presidential election since the county was established in 1869. In 2020, Elliott County again came out in force for Trump, who carried every Kentucky county but two, Jefferson and Fayette.
In the absence of anything more broadly applicable to a dissection of electoral politics, most of the resulting Eastern Kentucky–set stories relied on tired old tropes about alienation from government and parochial world views. Welcome to Trump Country, everyone. Nothing more to see here. Time to catch that flight back. Left unchallenged, that bogus narrative has persisted, with national publications ruminating on a “split partisan identity” in Eastern Kentucky that simply doesn’t exist.
Unlike after the 2016 election, no one in 2020 flocked to Eastern Kentucky seeking insight or votes. Only parts of Central Appalachia in key battleground states received any attention at all from the presidential candidates. Moon Township, Pennsylvania, became a regular campaign stop. For all the attention it was paid, Appalachian Kentucky might as well have been a region on the moon. The future of Central Appalachian coal jobs, a major theme of the ’16 campaign, hardly got mentioned, mainly because Trump failed to deliver on his promise to revive the coal industry. So, instead, he tried to use Democratic opposition to fracking as a new Republican rallying point.
Yet there remains an undeniable symbolism to Eastern Kentucky, and it is one that both captures and transcends the political climate of the day. But to grasp it, we need to get better at viewing the region in the framework of a larger American story about income inequality, generational poverty, and the lack of upward mobility. Only then will we start the demystification process.
When I think about the things I saw and documented in Appalachian Kentucky, I realize that this small swath of America with a population of around 700,000 offers tremendous insight into who we are and what we value as a nation. You cannot tell the story of a place as complex and contradictory as Eastern Kentucky in 800- or 1,200-word chunks written in inverted pyramid style, as I was once tasked with doing. That was a whiplash-inducing and at times overwhelming assignment. Coal mining could have been its own beat. The same applies to prescription drugs, poverty, religion, and culture.
This book is my attempt to pull all of the strands together, to journey beyond the hundreds of newspaper bylines I accumulated, to capture the essence of a place that I observed for years and continue to revisit and reevaluate. The major events I chronicled for the Courier-Journal frame the narrative, but it is the material that didn’t make it into the paper that I believe makes this more than just another crack at explaining Appalachia.
The book examines the economic and social experiment that created the power structure of modern-day Eastern Kentucky, a proxy for struggling regions everywhere, and traces how the dramatic events of the early years of this century impacted the region and influenced the soul of the nation as a whole. It also highlights the essential role of the journalist in writing the first rough drafts of history, especially now that newspapers have left Eastern Kentucky and places like it, leaving no one to tell some very essential stories.
The result is a story about drug epidemics, political violence, environmental degradation, and morality debates, but also about a seemingly laid-back rural culture where a large segment of the population is clinically depressed, about an area of natural beauty where the land has been stripped and the forests torched for amusement, and about a defining push and pull between fierce pride and a nagging sense of inferiority. Ultimately it is a story about how America and its institutions have failed Eastern Kentucky, but for better and for worse, how the people of the region have remained loyal to their idea of Americanism.
INTRODUCTION
Do Us Right
In the fall of 2000, I had a decision to make: stay in Europe, where I had been working and living since graduating from college five years earlier, or put an end to my overseas adventure and move back to the United States to continue my burgeoning journalism career. I had a job as the news assistant in The New York Times’s Berlin bureau where, between making coffee runs and trips to the post office for the bureau chief, I had managed to carve out a niche for myself as a reporter, mostly covering the European sports scene. Eventually I moved on to weightier subject matter, including a story about the shattered lives of female swimmers in East Germany who were force-fed a daily regimen of steroids as young girls and sent out to compete in championship meets. The sources I developed while writing a number of smaller pieces on the subject helped me build rapport with these former athletes. I was proud of the story. I felt it mattered. And I wanted to do more like it.
But after half a decade in Europe, I felt on the brink of becoming an “expat,” that breed of individual who achieves an advanced level of comfort abroad and starts to question the virtues of returning home. The year 2000 seemed as favorable a time as any to start a new chapter. Earlier that year, I had declined admission to an international studies program at Georgetown. The thought of sitting in a classroom for two years didn’t appeal to me. Relocating to my native Philadelphia or another East Coast city also didn’t grab me. The editors I worked with at the Times felt I could use more seasoning, and a job at a different big-city newspaper would have likely meant a few years of dues-paying on the suburban desk covering zoning and school board meetings—not a bad gig, but not the kind of beat that excited me.
Based on a somewhat vague notion, I came to the conclusion that my transition to life back in the United States would go more smoothly if I went to a place where I had no connections or familiarity, where the newness would challenge and consume me. If possible, I wanted to work in a region that would feel as foreign to me as a different country. It wasn’t long after I formulated that idea that I ran across an ad for an opening in the Louisville Courier-Journal’s Eastern Kentucky bureau. Based in the town of Hazard, it seemed to fit the bill. I read up a bit on the Courier-Journal and learned that the Hazard office had recently been vacated by a reporter who won a prestigious national award for a series called Dust, Deception and Death about coal mining industry manipulation of coal-dust tests in underground mines. That was the high-impact type of project I wanted to work on.
Up until that point, I don’t think that I had ever really known anyone from Appalachian Kentucky. On family car trips in my youth, we had nipped the corners of West Virginia and passed through some of the other more well-traveled parts of the region, but Eastern Kentucky, as I soon learned, isn’t a place you pass through on the way to anywhere else. If you end up there, it’s because that’s where you intended to go. And not many people from outside the area have that intention.
Other than it being poor and poorly depicted in movies, particularly John Boorman’s 1972 Academy Award–nominated film, Deliverance (tagline: “Where does the camping trip end . . . and the nightmare begin?”), I knew little about Appalachia. But its reputation intrigued me. One of my strongest mental connections to the area came from a short-story anthology that my father cowrote in the 1970s. One of the stories is about a man who enters into a conversation with a stranger while riding a metropolitan subway to his high school reunion. We only hear one side of the conversation as the man talks about his eagerness to reconnect with old friends, but also about his deep regret over how he and his classmates tormented a newly arrived kid from Appalachia to the point where his parents pulled him out of the school. I had thought a lot over the years about people’s tendency to stereotype and how dehumanizing a habit it is. Few areas in the US have been as subject to stereotype as Appalachia.
I applied for the Hazard job, which entailed covering an area roughly the size of Vermont and New Hampshire put together and included eight of the poorest twenty counties in the country. The federal government has a name for places where more than 20 percent of the population has lived in poverty for the past twenty-five years: persistent poverty counties. The entire eastern part of Kentucky falls into that category. A US map highlighting the nation’s most economically distressed areas shows clusters of extreme poverty in certain urban areas, American Indian communities, and the Deep South. But no other part of the country has as concentrated a pocket of distress as Eastern Kentucky.
The editors at the Courier-Journal flew me in for an interview. It was a long day of meetings in a newsroom full of clicking keyboards and harried-looking journalists. My only distinct memory of the visit was something that regional editor Gideon Gil said to me as I made the rounds: “Most people in Louisville have never been to Eastern Kentucky and have no idea what’s happening there,” he said. “We would want you to cover the area like a foreign correspondent would.”
That confirmed what had been running through my head. I could live in the United States and still heed Stephen Dedalus’s words about “fly[ing] by those nets” of nationality, language, and religion. I could be a foreigner in my own country. A few months later, I accepted an offer to become the newspaper’s Eastern Kentucky correspondent. My planned relocation to Kentucky invited the expected jokes. “Have fun in Kentucky working on your still in between articles on squirrel brain delicacies and coon huntin’ contests,” one friend e-mailed. Another suggested I could get a luxury box at the local cockfighting arena. And of course there were the Dukes of Hazzard quips.
Table of Contents
Preface 3
Introduction: Do Us Right 7
Chapter 1 The Dams Break 29
Chapter 2 King Coal 58
Chapter 3 Life Beyond the Mines 92
Chapter 4 Killing Season 118
Chapter 5 God and Country 141
Chapter 6 Bad Nerves 160
Chapter 7 Poison Politics 180
Chapter 8 The Day the News Left Town 207
Chapter 9 From the Hood to the Holler 227
Afterword 245
Acknowledgments 249
Notes 251
Index 283
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