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The Appalachia Issue

LBJ at the Fletchers’ cabin in Inez, Kentucky, in 1964. Photo: Corbis

his State of the Union address in January 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared a “war on poverty.” In part, he said, “[We] must pursue poverty… wherever it exists—in city slums and small towns, in sharecropper shacks or in migrant-worker camps, on Indian reservations, among whites as well as Negroes, among the young as well as the aged, in the boomtowns and in the depressed areas. Our aim is not only to relieve the symptom of poverty but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it… We will launch a special effort in the chronically distressed areas of Appalachia.”

Three months later, in April of 1964, he stood on the porch of Tom Fletcher, a coal miner from Inez, Kentucky, and continued to rail against the poverty that for decades had been whittling the Appalachian people down to kindling sticks.

years later, not a whole fucking lot has changed. Seventy percent of local kids are on school lunch programs. An inordinate amount of the workforce is unemployed, and small businesses routinely expire from crib death. Disabled coal miners can’t get benefits. Up in the hollers, families have been surviving on welfare for four generations. And in 2000, Inez was the site of what the EPA calls the worst environmental disaster in the history of the eastern United States, when 350 million gallons of rancid coal slurry flooded the local rivers.

The prescription-painkiller industry, however, is flourishing.

And hey, how about a final, symbolic nail in the coffin of LBJ’s abortion of an attempt to help Appalachia? The unemployed coal miner whose porch Johnson stood on all those years ago was charged in 1992 with murder in the poisoning of his three-year-old daughter. You can’t make this stuff up, right?

So we went to Appalachia to interview poor people and coal miners. This was going to be called the Poor Issue, then it was called the Coal Issue for a second. Neither one of those worked though, because we met too wide a range of Appalachians down there. It was more like “Who Are the People in Your Neighborhood” than Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Did we meet mountain men that fulfilled every preconceived notion a New Yorker might have about them? Sure. We also met activists, earnest Catholic priests, a bunch of raging partiers, and the male, Kentuckian version of Grey Gardens. The lesson that we humbly learned is that no one place can be just one thing.

But we did get to drink moonshine, see lots of tits, fondle handguns, eat fried chicken for almost every meal, and imbibe sweet tea so pungent that it makes you feel sick on your first sip.

Photos by Jerry Hsu

Inez is in the heart of Eastern Kentucky, so it’s pretty amazing looking. It’s all rolling hills and deep hollers (that’s “hollows” to you Northerners).

Even with its grab bag of problems (drug addiction, abject poverty, ecological Armageddon), most of Inez is, on the surface, a bucolic little Eden. In fact, Eden was the town’s original name.