Case Study 41.2: The Rust Belt and Appalachia — Parallel Histories of Deindustrialization

Chapter 41 | Part 8: Synthesis and Reflection

How the communities that left Appalachia for Rust Belt factory jobs experienced the same pattern of single-industry dependency, absentee decision-making, and economic collapse — and how the two regions' stories illuminate the national structure of expendability.

The Highway That Connected Two Crises

If you drove north on U.S. Route 23 in 1955, you would have seen the future of Appalachia leaving.

The road ran from the coalfields of Pike County, Kentucky, through Paintsville and Prestonsburg, north through the rolling hills of Ohio, past Columbus, and on to Toledo and Detroit. It was a two-lane highway for most of its length, often clogged with loaded coal trucks heading south and loaded cars heading north — cars packed with families, their belongings strapped to the roof, leaving the mountains for the promise of factory work in the industrial Midwest.

They called it the Hillbilly Highway. Between the 1940s and the 1970s, millions of Appalachian people traveled this road and others like it — Route 25 through Corbin and Lexington to Cincinnati, Route 19 through West Virginia to Pittsburgh, the winding roads through the Kanawha Valley to the chemical plants of Charleston and the steel mills beyond. It was one of the largest internal migrations in American history, comparable in scale to the Great Migration of Black Southerners to northern cities (see Chapter 20).

They left because the coal was failing. Mechanization — the introduction of continuous mining machines and, later, longwall mining systems — eliminated jobs at a staggering pace. McDowell County, West Virginia, which had employed more than 20,000 miners in the 1940s, saw that number collapse to fewer than 5,000 by the 1970s. Harlan County experienced a similar contraction. Across the central Appalachian coalfields, the arithmetic was brutal: the industry still produced coal, but it no longer needed the people who used to dig it.

And so they left. They followed the highways north to the places where the coal they had dug was being burned — in the furnaces of the steel mills, in the boilers of the power plants, in the engines of an industrial economy that was, in the 1950s and 1960s, the most productive on earth.

They went to Detroit, where the auto plants were hiring. They went to Akron, where the tire factories ran three shifts. They went to Youngstown and Gary, where the steel mills lit up the night sky. They went to Cincinnati, where a neighborhood called Over-the-Rhine became one of the largest urban Appalachian communities in America. They went to Dayton, to Columbus, to Cleveland, to Baltimore, to every city where there was a factory floor and a paycheck.

They were running toward opportunity. But they were also running, unknowingly, into the next iteration of the same pattern.

The Same Pattern, Different Geography

Single-Industry Dependency — Again

In the coalfields, the trap was coal. Everything depended on coal — the jobs, the housing, the company store, the tax base, the identity of the community. When coal declined, there was nothing to fall back on.

In the Rust Belt, the trap was manufacturing. The auto plants in Detroit, the steel mills in Youngstown, the tire factories in Akron — these were not just employers. They were the economic foundation, the cultural identity, and the social infrastructure of entire cities. The United Auto Workers local was the social club. The factory shift determined the rhythm of the day. The paycheck — a good paycheck, a union paycheck, a paycheck that could buy a house and a car and send a kid to college — was the engine of the American middle class.

The Appalachian migrants who arrived in these factory towns found something that felt, at first, like the opposite of what they had left behind. The wages were higher. The housing was better. There was no company store, no scrip, no mine guard. The union contract protected them in ways that the UMWA had fought for and often failed to achieve in the coalfields. For many families, the move north was a genuine improvement — an escape from poverty and dependency into the industrial working class.

But the structural pattern was the same. The factory town, like the coal town, depended on a single industry. The workers, like the miners, had no ownership stake in the means of production. The decisions about when to expand, when to contract, when to automate, and when to close were made in corporate boardrooms — in Detroit (General Motors), in Pittsburgh (U.S. Steel), in Akron (Goodyear, Firestone) — by executives and shareholders who had never set foot on the factory floor. The workers provided the labor. The corporation captured the profit. And when the corporation decided the labor was no longer needed — when automation was cheaper, when foreign steel was cheaper, when the factories could be moved to Mexico or China — the workers were discarded.

Absentee Decision-Making — Again

On September 19, 1977, the Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company announced that it would close its Campbell Works — a massive steel mill that had been the economic backbone of the Mahoning Valley in northeastern Ohio for nearly a century. Five thousand workers lost their jobs in a single day. The announcement was made by the Lykes Corporation, a New Orleans-based conglomerate that had acquired Youngstown Sheet and Tube in a leveraged buyout in 1969. The Lykes executives had never lived in Youngstown. They had no stake in the community. The Campbell Works was an asset on a balance sheet, and when the asset's return fell below the corporation's threshold, the asset was liquidated.

The date became known in Youngstown as Black Monday. It was followed by a cascade of additional closures — U.S. Steel's Ohio Works, Republic Steel's Youngstown operations — that eliminated more than 40,000 manufacturing jobs in the Mahoning Valley within five years. The effect on the community was catastrophic. Tax revenue collapsed. Public services deteriorated. Population plummeted as younger workers left in search of employment elsewhere. The same hollowing-out that had devastated McDowell County and Harlan County was now devastating Youngstown and the communities that depended on it.

The parallel to Appalachian deindustrialization is precise. In both cases, the decisions that destroyed communities were made by distant executives with no connection to the community. In both cases, the workers who lost their livelihoods had no voice in the decisions. In both cases, the framework that had structured daily life — the mine, the factory, the shift, the paycheck — collapsed, and nothing replaced it.

Blaming the Victims — Again

And then came the familiar narrative: it was their fault.

Just as Appalachian people had been blamed for their own poverty — too traditional, too stubborn, too resistant to change — Rust Belt workers were blamed for the loss of their factories. The narrative had a different vocabulary but the same structure. They were told they should have seen it coming. They should have gotten college degrees. They should have learned to code. They should have moved to where the jobs were — to the Sun Belt, to the coasts, to the knowledge economy cities where the future was being built.

The cultural commentators who had once written about Appalachian poverty as a function of mountain culture now wrote about Rust Belt decline as a function of working-class culture. The workers were too attached to their hometowns. They were too loyal to dying industries. They had unrealistic expectations about the kind of work they deserved. They should have been more flexible, more mobile, more willing to reinvent themselves.

This narrative — in both its Appalachian and Rust Belt versions — performs a crucial ideological function: it shifts responsibility from the system to the individual. If the problem is structural — if communities are poor because their wealth was extracted, their industries were destroyed by corporate decisions beyond their control, and their political power was insufficient to demand alternatives — then the system must be changed. But if the problem is personal — if people are poor because they are lazy, traditional, or resistant to change — then no systemic change is required. The status quo is preserved.

The economist Anne Case and the Nobel laureate Angus Deaton documented the consequences of this double blow — economic collapse combined with cultural blame — in their landmark study of "deaths of despair": the dramatic increase in premature deaths from suicide, drug overdose, and alcohol-related liver disease in white working-class communities, particularly in Appalachia and the Rust Belt. Case and Deaton argued that these deaths were not merely the result of economic hardship but of a deeper loss — the loss of the social structures, community bonds, and sense of purpose that had organized working-class life for generations.

The opioid crisis that devastated Appalachian communities (see Chapter 33) and the opioid crisis that devastated Rust Belt communities were, in many cases, the same crisis — affecting the same families, the same diaspora, the same people who had traveled the Hillbilly Highway looking for a better life and found, instead, another version of the pattern they had left behind.

The Human Bridge: Appalachian Communities in the Rust Belt

The connection between Appalachia and the Rust Belt was not abstract. It was embodied in the millions of Appalachian migrants who built new lives in industrial cities while maintaining deep ties to the mountains they had left.

Cincinnati's Appalachian Community

In Cincinnati, the neighborhood of Over-the-Rhine and the surrounding communities of Price Hill, Lower Price Hill, and the East Side became home to one of the largest urban Appalachian populations in the country. By the 1960s, an estimated 50,000 Appalachian migrants lived in the Cincinnati metropolitan area. They had come from the coal counties of eastern Kentucky and southern West Virginia — from Harlan and Letcher and Pike and McDowell — seeking factory jobs at General Electric, Procter & Gamble, and the smaller manufacturing firms that lined the Ohio River.

They brought their culture with them. Bluegrass music played in the bars on Vine Street. Churches — Baptist, Holiness, Pentecostal — sprang up to serve congregations that worshipped in the style of the mountains. Family networks channeled new arrivals to neighborhoods where kin already lived, replicating the kinship-based settlement patterns of the Appalachian hollows in the grid of the industrial city.

But they also faced discrimination. The term "briar" — a slur directed at Appalachian migrants — was common in Cincinnati schools and workplaces. Appalachian children were placed in remedial classes because their accents were interpreted as signs of low intelligence. Appalachian adults were denied housing in some neighborhoods and denied service in some establishments. The stigma of being a "hillbilly" in the city was, for many migrants, as painful as the poverty they had left behind.

The Urban Appalachian Council, founded in Cincinnati in 1974, was one of the first organizations to advocate for Appalachian migrants as a distinct cultural community deserving recognition and services. The council's work — documenting discrimination, advocating for culturally sensitive education, preserving Appalachian identity in the urban context — was groundbreaking and remains an important chapter in the history of Appalachian diaspora communities.

Detroit's Appalachian Workers

In Detroit, Appalachian migrants filled the assembly lines of the Big Three automakers — General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler. They settled in neighborhoods on the city's southwest and northwest sides, in the suburb of Hazel Park (known locally as "Hazeltucky"), and in the downriver communities of Lincoln Park and Allen Park. They earned union wages, bought houses, and entered the American middle class — many of them for the first time in their family's history.

When the auto industry began its long contraction in the 1970s and 1980s — a contraction driven by Japanese competition, automation, and corporate restructuring — the Appalachian workers who had escaped one industry's decline found themselves caught in another's. The pattern was achingly familiar: the factory closing, the layoff notice, the loss of the paycheck that held everything together, the slow collapse of the community that the paycheck had built.

Some went back to the mountains. The return migration of Appalachian workers from Rust Belt cities back to their home communities — a phenomenon that accelerated in the 1980s and 1990s — added another layer of complexity to the region's story. They returned to communities that had continued to decline in their absence, bringing with them the skills and savings of their industrial years but also the trauma of a second displacement.

The Political Convergence

The parallel experiences of Appalachia and the Rust Belt converged politically in the early twenty-first century in ways that reshaped American politics.

Both regions experienced a dramatic political realignment. Appalachian counties that had voted Democratic for generations — "Yellow Dog Democrat" counties where loyalty to the party of FDR, the New Deal, and the UMWA was a family tradition — swung sharply Republican in the 2000s and 2010s (see Chapter 34). Rust Belt counties that had been reliably Democratic — union counties, factory counties, working-class counties — followed a similar trajectory.

The 2016 presidential election brought both regions' grievances into national focus. The communities that had experienced extraction and deindustrialization — the coal counties and the factory counties — voted overwhelmingly for a candidate who spoke directly to their sense of abandonment. Whatever one thinks of the politics that followed, the underlying dynamic was clear: communities that had been used and discarded by the American economic system were angry, and they expressed that anger at the ballot box.

The political convergence of Appalachia and the Rust Belt is not a coincidence. It is a consequence of the shared structural position described in this case study. When communities in different geographies experience the same pattern — extraction, dependency, collapse, abandonment, blame — they develop similar political responses, even if those responses take different partisan forms at different historical moments.

What the Comparison Reveals

The Appalachian-Rust Belt comparison reveals several things that neither story, told in isolation, can show:

The extraction pattern is not limited to natural resources. In Appalachia, the extracted resource was coal. In the Rust Belt, the extracted resource was labor — the physical labor of factory workers, whose productivity generated corporate profits that flowed to shareholders and executives rather than to the communities where the factories stood. The mechanism is the same: wealth is generated in one place and accumulates in another.

Single-industry dependency is a policy choice, not a geographical inevitability. Neither the Appalachian coalfields nor the Rust Belt factory towns were required to depend on a single industry. That dependency was the product of specific decisions — by corporations, by governments, by the communities themselves — that prioritized short-term employment over long-term diversification. The lesson is that economic diversification must be pursued before the dominant industry collapses, not after.

The "Hillbilly Highway" was a conduit, not an escape. The Appalachian migrants who traveled Route 23 to the Rust Belt were not escaping the extraction pattern. They were moving from one expression of it to another. The pattern followed them because it was structural, not geographical — embedded in the relationship between capital and labor, between ownership and work, between the places where wealth is generated and the places where wealth accumulates.

Cultural stigmatization travels. The "hillbilly" stereotype that followed Appalachian migrants to Cincinnati and Detroit — the slurs, the discrimination, the assumption of ignorance — served the same function in the city that it served in the mountains: it marked a group of people as culturally inferior, making their exploitation and neglect easier to justify.

Solidarity is possible. The shared structural position of Appalachian and Rust Belt communities creates the possibility of cross-regional solidarity — a politics grounded not in regional identity but in the common experience of communities that have been used and discarded by an economic system that was never designed to serve them. Whether that solidarity materializes depends on whether the communities can see past the differences — of geography, of culture, of race — to the structural pattern that connects them.

Discussion Questions

1. The case study argues that the Appalachian migrants who moved to the Rust Belt "were not escaping the extraction pattern" but "moving from one expression of it to another." Do you find this argument persuasive? Were the factory jobs genuinely better than the mining jobs, even if the structural dynamics were similar?

2. The "deaths of despair" phenomenon (Case and Deaton) affected both Appalachian and Rust Belt communities. What does this convergence suggest about the relationship between economic structure and individual health?

3. The case study notes that Appalachian migrants in Cincinnati and Detroit faced discrimination — slurs like "briar," placement in remedial classes, exclusion from certain neighborhoods. How does this discrimination compare to the discrimination faced by other internal migrants — for example, Black Southerners who moved to northern cities during the Great Migration? What are the similarities and differences?

4. Both Appalachia and the Rust Belt experienced dramatic political realignment in the twenty-first century. The case study frames this as a consequence of shared structural position rather than cultural similarity. Do you agree? What other factors might explain the political convergence?

5. The case study ends by suggesting that solidarity between Appalachian and Rust Belt communities is "possible" but conditional on the ability to "see past the differences." What are the obstacles to such solidarity? What role does race play in facilitating or preventing cross-regional working-class politics?

Chapter 41 of 42 | Part 8: Synthesis and Reflection