About Hunter Wallace 12380 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

24 Comments

  1. I’ll be interested to hear what you have to say about Appalachia. My American ancestors lived in the Piedmont region in SW Virginia.

  2. I couldn’t tell from the tables of contents, first pages and cover flaps available online how MUCH of Appalachia http://www.arc.gov/appalachian_region/MapofAppalachia.asp is covered in those books. We’re located well inside the northeastern boundary of Appalachia. I know the area south of Jamestown in extreme southwestern New York State is another very conservative, very white outpost of Appalachian culture on the northern boundary of Appalachia.

  3. ‘As the number of counties in the region continued to grow, some observers began to feel that the boundaries of the region were becoming more political than cultural or geographical. Residents of Pennsylvania and New York, for example, largely did not consider themselves to be Appalachian. Many were actively hostile to being considered part of the region. However, members of Congress saw that such a designation could allow them to bring economic development to their districts, often in the form of what critics would consider pork barrel projects. As a result, many members of Congress lobbied for their districts to be included in the federal definition of Appalachia. In 1967 the ARC expanded the region yet again, this time to include twenty counties in Mississippi, largely due to the efforts of Rep. Jamie Whitten, a powerful member of the House Appropriations Committee. While the ARC was including some highly questionable regions of New York, Pennsylvania and Mississippi in Appalachia, several mountain counties in Virginia that would almost certainly appear to be Appalachian, both geographically and culturally, were left out because their representative, Richard Poff, opposed the 1965 bill. As of 2008 the Appalachian Regional Commission places 410 counties in the states of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York as being part of the Appalachian region. This region includes about 23 million people’: http://podcastappalachia.blogspot.com/2008/03/where-is-appalachia.html

  5. Hunter if you find anything concerning crime rates among poor Appalachian whites please share. I tire of hearing the pathologies of blacks blamed on poverty.

  6. One thing you could do politically, agitate in the rust belt. Particularly West Virginia.

    Get come hospitals and clinics built for the truly under served and betrayed whites living there. Set up math tutoring class in the evening.

    There is a huge untapped populist energy in the old coal belt.

  8. West Virginia is not the rust belt…

    Coal yes, but rust belt, I thought was reserved for all those off-shored old manufacturing populations (like in the northeast…like Buffalo, St Louis, Pittsburgh, Detroit, whatever…all those well…rusty places…

    WV is NOT a rusty rustbelt place. They did have chemical concerns come in (like dupont, carbide, etc.) It’s the only state entirely in appalachia. Also, so much of what is written is from total outsiders…idk…probably hard to find good books.

    Read one once called Bloodletting in Appalachia, I think, which was by a local person and pretty good about the 30s mining wars in so. counties, like Mingo, Logan, McDowell and other others. Like on the KY borders and south borders.

  9. @CrimsonTide

    I appreciate the link. I’ve seen it before though. I’m looking for some hard data and something less anecdotal.

  11. ‘not the rust belt…Coal yes’:

    DixieGirl, the coal mining and border of Appalachia once extended as far as this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_6_gvxlWTQ

    In the beginning there were only Welsh miners. Then the Irish came, and were given the hardest work in the mines (so far, much like southern Appalachian demography, except that there was always a German, Palatinate dialect speaking farming population in all the fertile valleys between the coal districts) — but later in the nineteenth century thousands of Lithuanians, Hungarians, Poles, Galicians, and Russians and other Slavs were imported to work the mines — and finally, in the early twentieth, the southern Italians were the last group of ‘niggers’ (as they were sometimes called) were invited to come over, to work in the mines, but mostly in the new textile mills run by Jews.

    The Mollies were hunted down more for their role in draft resistance (to Lincoln’s War) than labour unrest. More: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynwK7ImVd9w

  12. Thanks, Hereward. Those Welsh who began the coal mines (and also the slate industry in Pennsylvania) graduated to become bosses or straw bosses when the Irish came. In the southern states, Welsh identity was subsumed in the English, but here it remained distinct.

  13. Where Pennsylvanian coal-mining Appalachia has mostly RC Irish, East European and Italian demography, it has scenery and cultural values (‘bars on every corner’) like these (Note: I don’t live in this county): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6x-AXN0tK8 — in stark contrast with the still-prosperous, orderly, ‘northern European-appearing’ landscapes of German farming areas nearby or interspersed with the coal regions where pubs or drinkhouses are few and far between.

  14. The children these supposedly sober Germans send to Pennsylvania State University are typical college age drunkards. And the number of German named non-tetolarers in PA is legion. You can’t bullshit me, I grew up there you sanctimonious Welsh Tract Baptist.

  15. The Anabaptists are the examples I intended (note I said Palatinate dialect) rarely send their children to college. It is true the Lutheran, Reformed and mixed Germans, who are much less agrarian, are at least social drinkers. Rudel, that the picturesque landscape and relative prosperity of the rural farm districts (in contrast to the coal patches) show the effects of Christian morality and self-discipline and devotion to the land is undeniable. My Welsh Revivalist ancestors were very morally strict, but not quite as industrious, productive and ‘successful’ as the Germans.

  16. ‘the number of German named non-tetolarers in PA is legion’

    Yes, the majority indeed — like the Welsh who also exhibit the whole range from excessive drinking to ‘sanctimonious’ (as you would call it) teetotalism. However, one road trip through the coal regions would convince you my comment about the different demography and distinctive ‘beer culture’ is accurate.

  17. If you spent a day mining coal you would need a beer or three after work too. What are you, some sort of paid deacon of your church? What a wimp.

  18. Rudel, the younger generations of northern Appalachian Beer-culture ‘coal crackers’ have long since moved on to pot and meth, while they subsist on subsidies in those dreary, run-down towns — and they’re probably calling the abstainers and quitters among them ‘wimps’ for not using — while in fact, TRUE wimphood is being unable or unwilling to master our habitual desires for intoxication, ‘pornication’, etc. Once again you ‘have things backwards’ regarding morality, God and religion.

  19. Prohibition was one of the worst eras in American history and was foisted upon us by an unholy alliance of a bunch of pig ignorant Baptist ministers and suffragettes.. Jesus wasn’t turning water into Dr. Pepper at The Wedding Feast of Canaan.

  20. I KNEW you’d bring up the most popular Gospel story! Regular Doctor Pepper would have created an ancient diabetes epidemic, and DIET pop contains sugar alcohol that passes the brain barrier and may kill brain cells, I’m told (I have never researched it).

    The apostasy of churches turning from the Gospel to the subtly Talmudic-influenced ‘social’ gospel, along with women’s suffrage, created Prohibition.

    A few dry counties still exist in the South, and a few dry communities might still exist in the North (some did about twenty years ago, don’t have time to research it now). Instead, Pot and METH counties and communities exist now, all over Appalachia. In Appalachian coal towns in Pennsylvania there is not only ‘a bar on every corner’ now but also a drug dealer and harlots — and resistance by the churches that are mostly dead is nought.

  21. “a few dry communities might still exist in the North”

    In my youth the entire state of Pennsylvania was dry on Sundays as practically every business including grocery stores were closed due to the Blue Laws in force back then. Even hunting was not allowed although they exempted both fishing and pro football games back in the 1930’s.

    The only place you could get a drink on Sunday besides a private club was in a hotel restaurant dining room and even then only those in Allegheny and Philadelphia counties.

    I must say that a Sabbath Day enforced by the state made for wonderfully peaceful Sundays.

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