On The Road: Clinton's Very Bad Day

It’s hard to imagine now, says Charlie Peters, but back in 1960, the Catholicism of John F. Kennedy was every bit as big a problem for Appalachian voters as Barack Obama’s race appears to be today.

When Peters, Kennedy’s Kanawha County campaign chairman, first took him around Charleston, W.Va, at least 20 percent of the people refused to shake his hand. So Kennedy spent 16 of the 30 days before the primary showing West Virginians “he wasn’t wearing the Pope’s clothes,” Peters said.
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Last week, U.S. Sen. Jim Webb, D-Virginia, who has been mentioned as a possible vice-presidential candidate to Obama, made the point that the traditional Scots-Irish culture of Appalachia should be more of an ally than an enemy of the African-American community.

http://www.kentucky.com/254/story/414666.html

The company town was an economic institution that was part of the market for labor. In a company town a single firm provided its employees with goods and services, hired police, collected garbage, dispensed justice, and answered (or failed to answer) complaints from residents. The economy of the company town was totally "privatized" -- community services that today are provided by municipal governments were provided by the profit-maximizing firm, which ran the company town. Property rights were defined in such a way that companies could exclude competition by other firms that wished to provide goods and services to their employees.

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The prevalence of company towns, at least in the coal industry, was related to the settlement of regions where mines were developed. When mines opened in isolated regions they needed to provide housing and other necessities to their employees. Thus in more settled regions, the proportion of miners living in company towns was less than in areas that were less settled. In the early 1920's the United States Coal Commission found that in Southern Appalachia (West Virginia, Eastern Kentucky, Tennessee, Maryland, Virginia, and Alabama) and in the Rocky Mountains 65 to 80 percent of miners lived in company towns. In most of the Midwest only 10 to 20 percent of miners lived in company towns. In Ohio 25 percent lived in company towns, while in Pennsylvania 50 percent lived in company towns.

http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/boyd.company.town

Wage slavery is a term first coined by the Lowell Mill Girls in 1836, though articulated as a concept at least as early as Cicero and elaborated by subsequent thinkers, particularly with the advent of the industrial revolution. It refers to the similarities between buying and renting a person, and denotes a hierarchical social condition in which a person chooses a job but only within a coerced set of choices (primarily working for a boss under threat of starvation, poverty or status diminution), which make that "person dependent on wages or a salary for a livelihood,"esp with total and immediate dependency on the income derived from...<wage> labor."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery