I went to War this week and survived to tell the tale. Some of the things I saw —abandoned buildings, vacant storefronts — I fully expected. But some of what I saw surprised me.

The streets of War bustled. The people seemed busy and happy —more so than the people of Welch who I hand encountered the day before.

Why did the people of War seem so much happier? “It’s the first of the month,” a colleague told me. Ah, that explained it. The checks had begun to arrive.

It’s safe to say that most of the people in McDowell County, West Virginia, rely on the government in some way. They either work for the government (or an agency funded by the government) or receive some other kind of government check. The federal government mails out a lot of checks each month, including welfare, unemployment, disability, and social security checks. It provides rental assistance, food stamps, school lunches, head start programs, and more. So people are pretty happy at the start of the month. That’s when everyone’s Uncle Sam steps up to the plate. The problem is the rest of the month. Despite all the government help, people here are very poor.

A social service agency described the county in a grant proposal that I obtained. Here is what the proposal said:

Our residents face many challenges. The county is the 8th poorest in America, with a median family income that is less than half the national one, and an unemployment rate that persistently doubles the state rate and more than triples the national rate. We have the 5th highest child poverty rate in American, with 100 percent of our children living in high poverty neighborhoods; 82 percent of our students are eligible for free or reduced lunch. Education has not enabled residents to reach their full potential, as 37 percent are illiterate (the highest rate in West Virginia); 48 percent of the population lacks a high school education; 22 percent of teens are high school dropouts, 29 percent of youth between 16 and 19 are not in school and are not working; and only 5.6 percent of the work force are college graduates. We have the 6th worst health status in America. Absentee landowners own 85 percent of the land and natural resources.

A hospital administrator told a colleague that 70 percent of the women who give birth at her hospital test positive for drugs. More than two-thirds of the homes in McDowell County discharge sewage directly into local streams. I saw a nice home on the market for $30,000 and the owner told me that she hopes to get $20-25,000. A social worker told me that a coal company tested 163 job applicants for drugs. Five applicants passed. A WalMart opened three months late because it had trouble finding drug-free applicants. And so on.

Poverty today, of course, is different from poverty forty years ago. And poverty in Appalachia is different from poverty in the developing world. Few people go hungry in Appalachia. (Indeed, there is an epidemic of obesity here.) Residents may not live in big houses, but the houses have electricity and running water. Just about everyone has cable or satellite TV, a cell phone, a working car, and possibly a home computer. I drove my car down a poor hollow outside Welch, West Virginia, and was able to detect a wireless airport with my computer. That’s American poverty.

It’s hard to know why this poverty exists, much less what can be done about it. Part of the problem, I suppose, is that Appalachia is isolated. In a world of highways, concrete and digital, Appalachia remains a place apart. The mountain geography does not invite industry.

The culture here is also somewhat insular. It is friendly but not necessarily inviting. Immigrants — who tend to be very entrepreneurial — tend to go elsewhere. They go where they feel welcome and where they find economic opportunity. By going, they create even more economic opportunity.

Many Appalachians have left the region for greener pastures. Some coal mining counties have lost 75 percent of their peak population. Economic progress is almost impossible in such a situation.

Appalachian culture, which is romanticized from the inside and belittled from the outside, is problematic in other ways. Substance abuse is common here. Educational achievement is weak. Dependence on the government has become a way of life.

The economy in Appalachia has long relied on extractive industries — timber, coal, and gas — that no longer produce enough jobs or wealth. Residents of the region must find new ways to make money. They must reinvent this place.

I wish that I could blame the government for the poverty in Appalachia. I think the government has hurt the region by failing to protect manufacturers from unfair trade. Certainly, the textile industry has been hurt by our trade policies. But the coal industry has not. The coal industry is booming. It’s just not employing many people. That happened because of technological change — mechanization — and there’s not much the government can do about that.

The federal government has spent enormous sums of money trying to lift Appalachians out of poverty. It has built highways and dams. It has funded a social safety net and an alphabet soup of welfare programs. And people are still poor.

To be fair, the poverty rate has been cut in half over the last half century. Some parts of Appalachia are making real progress, though there is still severe poverty in other parts, such as the coal mining region. Unfortunately, much of the region’s progress rests on a thin reed of government spending. If government spending drops significantly, many local economies will collapse, if they haven’t already.

After seeing first hand, the level of poverty in southern West Virginia, I am at a loss over what can be done to solve the problem.

It’s almost as bad as Youngstown.

Editorial Note: I am usually pretty aggressive taking pictures of people. People pictures are better than building pictures. When traveling through the developing world, poor people are often quite happy — even thrilled — to have their pictures taken. The camera is such a novelty to them and with digital cameras, you can show them the results immediately. In Appalachia, people react differently to cameras. They know what cameras are and they know why you want to take their pictures — to illustrate a point. So I’ve reigned in my aggressive instincts with this blog.
Useful links
McDowell County, WV (official site)
McDowell County, WV (Wikipedia)