BLOOD ON THE MOUNTAIN: Rage And Decay In Coal Country

West Virginia has suddenly become the subject of intense scrutiny. The denizens of the state could well be forgiven for wondering where the mass media and political class were before the 2016 presidential primaries and election turned West Virginia into an unlikely bellweather for the appeal of Donald Trump’s populist rhetoric. Trump’s hardhat-donning ‘Trump Digs Coal’ campaign delivered him the state by a resounding 68.6%.

The state became emblematic of the ‘white working class’ which carried Trump to power. But look back, and the embrace of Trump’s noxious brand of anti-politics seems not only explicable but inevitable. During the 1960 presidential race, John F. Kennedy lamented the depths of poverty in Appalachia; mining jobs began to vanish in the ’60s and ’70s in the face of automation; and fracking has dealt the industry a further blow.

Blighted by falling revenues and declining populations, the 2008 financial crisis heralded a surge in heroin and opioid addiction. McDowell County has the lowest male life expectancy in the country at 66.3 years, placing it on par with Rwanda. Seen through this lens, the grievances of those who extract immense wealth for the benefit of others, and in so doing destroy their own communities, seem entirely valid. Trump represents a brick though the window of a neoliberal elite that has legislated their immiseration.

Sacrifice Zones

This is not new terrain for Mari-Lynn C. Evans and Jordan Freeman; they have been involved in the documentation of life in these communities for a over decade with projects like Coal Country, Low Coal and the PBS mini-series The Appalachians. But in bringing these struggles to the screen, they have an illustrious legacy to live up to in the form of Barbara Kopple‘s vérité masterpiece Harlan County, USA, which captured in intimate detail the violent year-long ‘Brookside Strike’ by miners in Harlan County, Kentucky.

Blood on the Mountain is an equally caustic essay on inequality which burns with the same humanity and indignation. It shows the depredations of what journalist Chris Hedges describes as a ‘sacrifice zone,’ a term coined to describe an area ‘destroyed for quarterly profit’ by ‘unfettered, unregulated capitalism.’ West Virginia is one of many American sacrifice zones described in Hedges’ book, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt. Hedges is one of the most incisive critics of the ‘awful logic’ which strives to crush solidarity and minimise costs, making explicit that ‘we have unleashed forces which we cannot control.’

The first twenty minutes of Blood on the Mountain offers a potted history of the development of the coal industry in Appalachia. It is a legacy of worker struggle against exploitation, intimidation, violence, wilful negligence, corruption and government collusion which merits a documentary in its own right. This opening segment brings into sharp relief how hard these concessions were won, and how devastating their loss would be.

An Assault on Memory

The totemic site of this struggle is Blair Mountain, which in 1921 saw the largest labour uprising in US history, the Battle of Blair Mountain. One of the film’s most sobering scenes is a public meeting for proposed mountaintop removal on Blair Mountain. It is a moment which speaks to the atomisation of the workforce and the predicament of the modern miner. As miners step up to speak in favour of blowing off the top of this historic site, we see the desperation, the desire to maintain their precarious foothold.

This desperation manifests itself in nostalgia, fear of change, suspicion of outsiders and hostility towards regulation. Hedges provides some historical perspective in the portion on the New Deal, rightly pointing out that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ‘greatest achievement is that he saved capitalism’ with reforms that functioned as a ‘safety valve.’ This diffusion of worker power is brought into focus in another discomfiting scene: a Mayday counter-rally held by Massey Energy Co. featuring Ted Nugent and Sean Hannity. It is an indication of the forces which inspire signs like ‘EPA: Employment Prevention Agency.’

The film’s final third deals with contemporary malaise. As former underground miner Nick Mullens explains, Appalachia is ‘a shell of its former self’ in which ‘that look-out-for-number-one mentality has really taken over.’ One illustrative case is that of Patriot Coal, which declared bankruptcy in order to shirk its pension and healthcare responsibilities. It is this sort of corporate ‘escape hatch’ which sends the powerless into the arms of demagogues. One is overwhelmed by the weight of injustice heaped on West Virginia; but the film’s strength is its refusal to simplify these issues or fall prey to romanticism.

The Verdict

Evans and Freeman present a series of startling statistics, and use archival footage to orient us within a landscape beset by uncertainty and division. Blood on the Mountain is not overly daring in its formal approach; it sticks to a tried-and-tested formula to tell its story, but the story is so compelling that stylistic bells and whistles are not necessary. Its evocation of a surplus workforce searching for a fixed point of stability is reminiscent of Jesse Moss’s The Overnighters, and in detailing the ravages of industry it calls to mind Josh Fox‘s GasLand. It harnesses fact and fury to honour those stories consigned to the memory hole.

The brutal logic of ‘the monster always wanting more’ is laid bare by history professor Chuck Keeney’s observation that ‘if a few hillbillies get killed in the name of progress, so be it.’ Blood on the Mountain charts an abusive relationship. what attorney Bruce Stanley describes as ‘the war that coal has waged on West Virginia for the past 150 years.’ Evans and Freeman capture the lunar landscape created in places like Brushy Fork, a slurry impoundment which houses 8 billion gallons of toxic waste. An historical seam runs from Brushy Fork to Hawk’s Nest Tunnel, whose excavation in the ’30s caused an epidemic of silicosis.

These conflicts have been told dramatically in works like John Sayles‘ Matewan and Martin Ritt‘s The Molly Maguires, but the reality of these battles is bigger than fiction could ever encompass. Evans and Freeman pose the question: how can people living on some of the richest land in America be some of the poorest, sickest, most drug addicted people in America? Blood on the Mountain offers a dispatch from the frontline of an asymmetrical war. It tempers its rage for the coal industry, and the politicians in their pay, with compassion for the workers whose rage is often misdirected towards easy scapegoats.

By facing the implications of automation and a fractured workforce, Blood on the Mountain speaks to the anxieties that attend a dying paradigm. In West Virginia we see a worst case scenario, but also a reminder that power concedes nothing without a demand. Its fate could well presage that of the wider US workforce in the coming bonfire of the regulations, but could equally offer historical models of organisation and resistance. Blood on the Mountain is a powerful and persuasive plea to engage those in the heart of Trump country.

What are your thoughts on the depiction of the coal industry in Blood on the Mountain?

Blood on the Mountain gets a digital and DVD release on February 21st.