Appalachia is a land of contradictions. It’s a crossroads of peoples, and it’s an isolated pocket of cultural residue. It is a place and it is a mentality. Appalachia conjures up the most beautiful mountains and valleys, and the most environmentally denuded places in the country. Its signature music – bluegrass – perfectly encapsulates these contradictions. The standard songs come from 19th century Tin Pan Alley standards, Gospel hymns, 17th century Scots-Irish reels, 1960s folk anthems and African American blues. The instruments – the Spanish guitar, the Hawaiian (by way of a Slovak manufacturer) Dobro, the Scottish-Irish-English fiddle, the Italian mandolin, the African banjo – all reflect the varied influences on a music most Americans think of as “traditional” – even if only 50 years old.
Appalachia is a land of contradictions. And so is its politics.
Before the Civil War the Great Valley from central Pennsylvania down to East Tennessee was a land of riches. The “Switzerland of America” produced corn, grain, dairy and timber for a nation. Its central eyelet – the Cumberland Gap – lured more than 100,000 Americans to reach the western land of Kentucky. Nearly 60 million Americans can trace their ancestors to those who passed through that small gap in the Cumberland Mountains between 1780 and 1810.
Its politics before the Civil War reflected a stubborn resistance to lowland commercial farming interests. If the lowlanders in North Carolina were Whigs, the mountaineers were Democrats. If the plantation elites of Middle and West Tennessee were Democrats, the East Tennesseans were Whigs.
And then came the Civil War, which destroyed the great breadbasket of America and left in its wake a region perpetually divided and exploited for its natural resources like timber and coal. Much of southern Appalachia supported the Union during the Civil War, though most just wanted to stay out of the conflict. In western North Carolina, however, Confederates remained powerful. Western NC secessionists like Zebulon Vance and Thomas Clingman established their pro-Southern bona fides by out-seceshing the tobacco plantation belt secessionists. If you’ve seen the movie Cold Mountain, you’ve seen the power of Confederate Home Guards. If you’ve read Philip Shaw Paludan’s book “Victims,” you’re familiar with the Shelton Laurel massacre in which a family of 15 was murdered simply on suspicion of supporting the Union.
Across the Great Smoky Mountains in East Tennessee, the story was reversed. At Greeneville, Andrew Johnson and Parson Brownlow conspired to create a new state of East Tennessee – much like the new West Virginia – that would remain loyal to the Union. After the war, supporters of the Union exacted vengeance against the Confederate minority by driving them – and all Democrats – from the area. Tennessee’s Second District based in Knoxville has not voted for a Democrat since 1857. It was the only part of the solid Democratic South never to abandon the Party of Lincoln. Just south of Cumberland Gap in Tennessee is the world’s largest museum dedicated to Lincoln, on the campus of Lincoln Memorial University – home of the Railsplitters.
And that history is alive and well here in Southern Appalachia. In this election John McCain will do as well in East Tennessee as he will in Utah or Idaho. What’s remarkable is that he will do much worse just over the mountains in western North Carolina. There, the pull of tradition draws older voters to the Party of Jackson.
And so today I, a Democratic supporter of Barack Obama in East Tennessee, made my piece with history and traveled yonder over the Great Smoky Mountains and canvassed in western North Carolina. It so happens that the Old North State is a true battleground this year, and the evidence is apparent as soon as you cross the state line. Along the roadside in rural Jackson, Haywood and Swain Counties are rows of Obama ’08 signs – along with those for Democrats running for Senate and Governor. How could these Obama signs not get stolen or defaced in rural southern Appalachia? Isn’t that what the pundits said? Rural whites would never vote for a black man, right? The trek down Sevierville Road through Blount and Sevier County in Tennessee is like running a gauntlet of McCain-Palin signs. But over the mountain the McCain signs are matched – even surpassed – by those supporting a black Democrat. How is this possible?
I canvassed in a working class section outside Waynesville in Haywood County. A mix of small houses and trailers, fences with loud dogs, cars on blocks (some with amateur mechanics underneath them), lawn ornaments and gazing balls, dilapidated play equipment, lots of dirt motor bikes. People hanging out on a Saturday morning – many people my age (35) looking like 55. A guy answers his door, stoned out of his wits, has already voted – for Obama. A 90-year old man excitedly tells me he voted early – for Obama – and his wife will vote on Tuesday. A 19 year-old woman holding a child – already voted “for Obama and all the Democrats” – is getting her mother to vote on Tuesday.
No sign of racial angst here. No Bradley Effect or Appalachian racism. Well, there was a little bit. One older woman guarding a garage sale and breathing with a respirator said she wasn’t registered to vote and won’t vote this year. But if she could, she’d vote for “the white one.”
And another uncomfortable moment – though not racial – when a man answered his door and told me the woman I came to ask about no longer lived there. “I run’d her off seven weeks ago.”
In fact, the most striking thing about life here in poor, rural southern Appalachia is how transient people are. Families pick up and move on a moment’s notice and rarely bother to fill out all the necessary paperwork to keep voting files updated. It’s no wonder Republicans want to match mail returns with voter rolls – the poor (most likely Democratic) are more likely to move around a lot. Strangely enough, it was Andrew Jackson and his ilk that did away with the property requirement for voting (for whites) in the 1830s. No wonder the renter class still votes Democratic.
Anyway, it was an inspiring day. I went with my parents and we had a family affair of it. Waynesville is one of those fancy western NC mountain communities filled with Yankee retirees. Like Asheville, Boone, Black Mountain, Maggie Valley and Hendersonville, the town is artsy and beautiful. But like those other places, you don’t have to go very far outside of downtown to see the “real Appalachia.” What’s striking is that in the hardscrabble communities where whites live in poverty matching that of the inner city, voters are not scared to vote for a black man.
I have no illusion that this applies everywhere in southern Appalachia. Not only is East Tennessee off-limits to Obama for historic reasons, much of southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky is also still hostile territory. But the reason may be a matter of ignoring the region and not racism. Appalachian voters like to get to know the candidates. They are rarely impressed by high-minded idealism and soaring oratory. They just want to see who they’re voting for. And because Obama has shamefully avoided WV and KY like the plague, voters there are ready to return the favor.
But western NC and southwestern Virginia have seen plenty of Senator Obama. I suspect that Obama does surprisingly well in those areas on Tuesday. Voters in those areas know the real man and they know that they have much more to lose by following their prejudices than listening to their hopes.