Blood on the Mountain: Why Coal Miners Voted Trump

By Melina Paris, Contributing Writer

This past November, when Blood on the Mountain was released in Los Angeles and New York, The Los Angeles Times called it a “grim documentary” that provides a “sobering early autopsy of a dying business.” The New York Times, “a clumsily made attack on the coal industry in West Virginia,” that benefitted from the recent election of President-elect Donald Trump. Random Lengths News, however, calls the film a hard-hitting analogy for what happens to communities held in the clutches of unchecked corporate power and greed.

The film takes on special significance considering that during the 16 months leading up to the Nov. 8 general elections, as a presidential candidate Trump promised West Virginia voters that he would bring coal mining jobs back. The state voted overwhelmingly for Trump.

Through the use of interviews, archival clips, news footage and a timeline of headlines, the film takes a deep look into the social and economic injustices to which corporations like Massey have subjected West Virginia coal miners and their families.

The film’s cinematographer Jordan Freeman, a San Pedro resident, first went to the Coal River Mountain region of West Virginia in 2005 from Los Angeles, although he was originally based in New York. For much of the past decade, the cinematographer has been documenting the unfolding controversies surrounding coal mining throughout Appalachia.

Freeman has worked on several documentary films on the coal industry. Blood on the Mountain executive director Mari-Lynn Evans worked on two of his films, including the recently released film. Evans spent the past 15 years making films about coal miners’ hardships in her home state of West Virginia. Her first film, the PBS documentary, The Appalachians, is her love letter to her birthplace.

Massey Energy Co. was originally founded in 1920, named after its founder A.T. Massey. It was first a coal brokering company before it opened its first coal mining operation in 1945 in West Virginia.

The company was founded at the tail end of West Virginia’s largest and most violent labor battles, including the battle of Blair Mountain, the largest labor uprising in American history. This episode as well as the managerial style of Massey’s heirs, E. Morgan Massey, dictated how the company would be run from the 1950s onward.

In an interview with Richmond’s alternative news publication, Style Weekly, E. Morgan summed up his philosophy by stating that customers came first followed by shareholders. Employees rank third on his list of concerns, followed by the community and the environment.

This managerial style continued under Don Blankenship when he was elevated to CEO in the 1980s and mountaintop removal became en vogue since it was less expensive and required fewer employees to execute. Companies touted the economic benefits and argued it was safer than underground mining, but the environmental and health impacts are becoming all too clear.

Entire towns are getting covered in dust as a result of mountaintop removal, while impacting air and water quality. The practice also is destroying numerous deciduous forests tracts and impacting endangered animal species.

If that weren’t enough, retired miners are getting the shaft too.

In 2015, Patriot Coal, the second largest coal mining operation east of the Mississippi River filed for bankruptcy. This act got the company out of paying retirement benefits and health care spending obligations. The bankruptcy appeared to be a test to which the industry paid close attention. When the bankruptcy was completed, it established a precedent leading other companies to follow suit, Freeman said.

“That was a major motivating factor in making the film,” Freeman said. “It’s so easy to look at the people there and their failure to move forward. But I think it’s really on all of us that we have not taken into account that we all need to offer a better way to move forward together. Without that, we will repeatedly see regressive things happen

“They have the miners and communities fighting the battles of the company…. Retired miners told me when they grew up you would never see a miner fighting a battle for the company. It just wouldn’t happen. Miners had the strength of their community and the strength of being a force to keep the company responsible.”

In a spark of hope, the film showed old newsreel footage of retirement age people testifying how they told their grown children to just get out of there. They could see the problems for their children but not for themselves. Or rather, they did, but it was just too late for them.

“There are so many good, good people in the mines who have given up on their own future but are doing it so their kids can get out.” Freeman said. “At its core is looking at the labor, the environmental, all are symptoms of the same problem, which is lack of respect for community, for people, for the future.”

Freeman shared a quote from Judy Bonds, a woman he called an amazing organizer in the coal fields. She came from a mining family and has since died from cancer.

“There are no jobs on a dead planet.”

“It can be hard, to love those mountains,” Freeman said. “And, I think that’s why, to a lot of the miners, it’s the best and the worst. They just can’t ever leave.”

To see a screening in your neighborhood visit: www.bloodonthemountain.com.