Lou Martin is an associate professor of history at Chatham University and author of Smokestacks in the Hills: Rural-Industrial Workers in West Virginia.
Out now, Volume 17, issue 1, of West Virginia History: A Journal of Regional Studies is the first fully online issue of the journal, available through Project Muse. Kevin Barksdale served as editor, and I am proud to have authored one of the articles in this issue.
Titled “Appalachia in the Neoliberal Era,” the article examines the concept of neoliberalism and argues that the social, economic, and political developments in the region over roughly the past four decades are best understood within the context of the rise of neoliberalism. The article opens with quotes from a 2017 column by Nobel-prize-winning economist Paul Krugman that relied heavily on deeply flawed assumptions about West Virginian voters and Appalachian culture. Reading that column when it was published, I concluded that historians in the state and the region needed to write more about the effects of political and economic changes on the ground. While national commentators will likely continue to rely on stereotypes and suppositions about Appalachian culture, historians could make sure that there are empirical studies of the effects of things like free trade, deindustrialization, the decline of unions, and defunding colleges and universities.
In “Appalachia in the Neoliberal Era,” I hope to add another chapter to the historiography of the region. Important histories of the region seemingly portray the policies of mid-century liberalism as well-intentioned but sometimes misguided and almost always underfunded. The years that follow the War on Poverty then feel like the denouement of a story about hopes and dreams never fully realized. What I thought was missing was the rise of neoliberalism, an array of policy positions flowing from a faith in free market capitalism that were part of the undoing of Great Society programs as well as, I argue, the decline of the economic bases of many communities throughout the region.
In one part of the article, I examine the modest growth of college and university towns, which became beacons of hope for policymakers in recent decades. The head of the Appalachian Regional Commission expressed the hope that universities would become engines of economic growth at the same time that they prepared students for professional careers. However, state legislatures have been consistently cutting funding for higher education, and as early as the 1990s, administrators and policy analysts were warning that the large cuts would lead to problems. Many of those predictions now seem quite prescient.
After presenting a draft of this paper at the Appalachian Studies Association’s annual conference, I expressed the hope that graduate students would take up the challenge of writing more about these recent decades, exploring such topics as how the decline of the United Mine Workers of America affected West Virginia politics. One student responded that their professor had discouraged them from studying the 1980s and 1990s. My hope is that “Appalachia in the Neoliberal Age” strengthens the case for historical research on more recent decades as well as provides a conceptual framework for future studies.
When my friend and colleague Hal Gorby and I talked, we realized that our research projects were closely related. He was researching in the collections of West Virginia governors Jay Rockefeller, Arch Moore, and Gaston Caperton. That research became the second article of the issue: “‘Balancing the Budget on the Back of Education’: Neoliberalism and the 1990 West Virginia Teachers’ Strike.”
A teachers’ rally at the state capitol, an economic downturn, and increased health care costs—Hal could not help but think about the parallels between the 1990 teachers’ strike and the 2018 strike of teachers and service personnel. In his article, he puts the 1990 strike in the broader context of the state legislature’s austerity measures during the 1980s as well as West Virginians’ resistance to the efforts to undermine unions, deregulate the economy, and disinvest from government services, including education. Throughout the decade, there were calls for increased funding for teachers’ compensation and to make sure that rural schools were funded at the same rates as urban schools. Yet, these concerns went largely unaddressed. One teacher Hal quoted said in 1990: “We have for at least a decade been told to wait until next year. Every governor has told us that education is his No. 1 priority, and every session has education last on his agenda.”
Hal tells the complex story of the long roots of the conflict over school funding as well as the efforts of the West Virginia Federation of Teachers (WVFT) and the West Virginia Education Association (WVEA) to conduct the first effort at a statewide teachers’ strike. The article details the negotiations of WVEA President Kayetta Meadows and Governor Gaston Caperton, the events of the strike at the local level in different parts of the state, and reactions from news media around the state. Finally, it is remarkable how many of the underlying problems remained unaffected by the resolution of the strike—the same problems that would haunt the state’s school system a generation later.