Long ago, a businessman I knew in West Virginia told me the story of how, even longer ago, he paid his first and only bribe.
He and his partners weren’t West Virginians themselves, but they had started a coal company that would depend on substantial holdings in the state, purchased from a defunct former operator. Through some combination of a swindle and their own inexperience, one of the properties turned out to be an environmental disaster that would bankrupt them before they ever mined their first ton.
A more seasoned West Virginia businessman suggested to these fellows that there were ways around such problems and that introductions could be made. So these men — corporate types more familiar with boardrooms than backrooms — set out to try a little corruption.
It was easier than they thought, until they got to the price. This was back when a quarter of a million dollars could buy a grand mansion, so they were hard-pressed to come up with that much cash — and it had to be cash. So they went to their banks and took the money from their personal accounts in discrete sums in multiple withdrawals and sent their novice bagman to make the delivery.
Seasick with fear of going to prison but desperate for deliverance from a predicament that would turn his bold career move into personal bankruptcy, the businessman still had to ask one question: “Why does it have to be so much?”
The laughing answer: “You’re lucky, there aren’t many of these good deals around anymore.”
And it was worth it. The taxpayers got stuck with the bill for cleaning up the old mine and the new company took flight, eventually making many millions for its founders. That company is now long gone, and so are all the men who taught and learned that expensive lesson in how West Virginia politics worked.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about that bundle of cash in a grease-stained burger bag and captive economies.
Everyone who paid even passing attention in high school history knows the story about how natural resource-rich places like West Virginia were captured and exploited during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Timber, coal and then natural gas drew wealthy and powerful interests to Appalachia, and to protect those assets once acquired, owners then purchased local and state officials to protect their investments.
Men like Don Chafin, hereditary sheriff of Logan County and as crooked as a dog’s hind leg, would provide whatever services the out-of-state interests required: rousting the families of unionizers from their company towns, jailing agitators and busting skulls alongside hired goons. These local bosses, in turn, used the money and protection from their out-of-state patrons to make their hollers into fiefdoms of their own, squeezing their constituents and granting themselves monopolies of vice built on illegal liquor, prostitution and gambling.
And that’s how the worm turned. Over the next 50 years, the relationship between the exploited and the exploiters started to reverse itself. Out-of-state operators became publicly traded corporations that had to comply with the federal regulations driven by the public outrage over the wild excesses of the 1920s and 1930s. But the home team had used the spoils from those bad old days to build political machines that could touch every part of life from Weirton to Welch. And they could claim the power of the people as they raised their populist pitchforks to the windpipes of anybody who tried to complain.
Politicians figured out that the companies that wanted to take from West Virginia were going to give something in return. In the case of some noble-minded public servants, that meant better wages and safer conditions for workers as well as limits on environmental degradation. But for many others, it meant treating the companies unfortunate enough to need to do business in the state the way a spider might treat a cricket caught in its web.
The capricious enforcement of those rules born out of the robber baron days was one way to put the squeeze on. So too were lawsuits filed by politically connected lawyers then heard by judges who were part of the machine themselves. But brute force still worked, too. Another mine operator told me the story of how during an illegal wildcat strike, a sheriff worked as the negotiator for the well-armed mob that had the operation surrounded: Comply with the demands, or he and his men would look away while the gang smashed the property and beat the workers inside.
“We might even get in a few licks ourselves, just for fun,” he told the terrified manager, who had his masters in mine engineering but no education in the ways of extortion, as they were locked in a little room high atop a coal tipple.
Which is all to say that what’s going on in Washington these days feels all too familiar to me: The brazen corruption, the capricious enforcement, the intimidation tactics, the kickbacks and all the rest of the business end of MAGA feel an awful like the world of politics and power that was already almost dead when I started covering West Virginia politics as a cub reporter 30 years ago.
I got to thinking about all that when I heard the Treasury Department secretary say the president is getting ready to declare an “emergency” about housing prices and start seizing the means of production. Mean old Sheriff Chafin would have to look on in admiration. If you’re the boss of a whole country instead of just one county in the coalfields, every industry is a captive industry.
The administration’s critics call it “socialism” or “state capitalism.” But from the banks of the Guyandotte River, it would look like something a lot less lofty sounding: just old-fashioned bossism and the doctrine of the spider and the cricket.
Chris Stirewalt is the politics editor for The Hill, veteran campaign and elections journalist and best-selling author of books about American political history.
