Cover Image: Delegates gathered for 1199WV/KY/OH annual meeting, @1983. Courtesy of SEIU District 1199WV/KY/OH.
J.D. Vance's ascent from Silicon Valley venture capitalist to the second-highest office in the nation lends new urgency to examining his narrow portrayal of Appalachia's working-class history.
Few people serious about Appalachian Studies have much use for J. D. Vance. Hillbilly Elegy, Vance’s self-admiring 2016 memoir, updated two-hundred year-old tropes bemoaning Appalachians’ shiftless character and poor behavior. It sits on a shaky foundation of, to be generous, anecdotal evidence. Vance was born in coal ravaged eastern Kentucky in 1984. He spent much of his first twenty years or so with his grandparents in Middletown, Ohio (geographically not part of Appalachia), one of many industrial destinations for waves of Appalachian migrants beginning in the 1920s. Farm crises, World War II manufacturing jobs, and vanishing work in a mechanizing postwar coal industry set these migrants on the road. Vance’s grandfather found a good job with Armco Steel, Middletown’s dominant employer and paternalistic hand in civic and economic life. In 1989, shortly after Vance’s “Papa” had retired, Armco merged with Kawasaki Steel. It is now owned by steel manufacturer Cleveland-Cliffs.
For Vance, his boyhood Middletown was “idyllic,” protected by the benevolent steel corporation, which built beautiful parks, funded scholarships for Armco children, and sponsored picnics and concerts. Most importantly, however, for his Papa and Mamaw, “Armco was an economic savior----the engine that brought them from the hills of Kentucky into America’s middle-class.” Vance’s grandfather “owned stock in the company and had a lucrative pension.” Vance never mentions that Armco’s enlightened wages and benefits were not solely due to corporate benevolence. They were guaranteed by collective bargaining agreements negotiated between Armco and his Papa’s union, the Armco Employees Independent Association (AEIA) Local 1943.
The AEIA won a union representation election in 1943, beating out the United Steelworkers (USW) to become the sole bargaining agent for Middletown’s Armco workers. It could be that Armco workers suspected (with prodding by management?) that the USW was made up of agitators and dictatorial bureaucrats, “others” who could not guarantee the familial rank-and-file representation touted by the AEIA, a precursor to later “participation” plans. Devised both to maintain wartime production and to freeze out the powerful industrial unions, company-friendly organizations like the AEIA still had to earn credibility by negotiating tangible advances for the workers.
Skepticism about whether these unions were “independent” is warranted; that doubtlessly varied from plant to plant. Vance’s grandfather and his co-workers enjoyed their company stock options and “lucrative” pensions through binding labor-management agreements, not simply from the bosses’ good will. Although Vance once refers offhandedly to his grandfather as a “union man,” he is silent on the contributions the union made to his grandparents’ economic security. Vance either forgot or deliberately ignored that.
Vance’s memoir and public comments diminish the long history of collective struggles by Appalachian workers and their families to live dignified lives. When has he acknowledged the West Virginia Mine War of the early 1920s, or the long-term struggles for economic justice and workplace safety by Appalachians in the United Mine Workers of America, the Miners for Democracy, the Black Lung Association, or the Disabled Miners and Widows? He is indifferent to the important leadership of migrants like his grandparents in the sit-down strikes in Akron, Flint, and elsewhere in 1936-1937, which gave birth to the modern labor movement and a revolution in America’s industrial relations. No, these examples (and the courageous 2018 West Virginia teachers strike, after Hillbilly Elegy appeared) intrude upon Vance’s apparent assumption that Appalachians will not fight collectively for social progress, but only as aggrieved rugged individuals enjoying a barroom brawl.
I imagine that Vance is unaware of the story of a small militant union of healthcare workers, Local 1199, in central Appalachia. My 2021 book, A Union for Appalachian Healthcare Workers: The Radical Roots and Hard Fights of Local 1199, retrieves that story. It concentrates on 1199’s hardscrabble early history (1969-1989) in West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and a slice of Appalachian counties in southeast Ohio. To me, it is a heroic story.
Local 1199 came to Appalachia in 1969. Founded in New York City in the mid-1930s, this feisty union of health service workers had been organizing hospitals in New York City since 1957. Its founder was Leon Davis, a Russian émigré with previous ties to American communism through the Trade Union Unity League. Representing nurses, nurses’ aides, housekeepers, laundry and kitchen workers, clerical, and maintenance workers, Local 1199 gave voice to low-wage Black, Haitian, Puerto Rican, and White workers, predominantly women, that most other unions shunned as “unorganizable.”
By the early 1960s, 1199 was drawing national attention through its uncompromising identification with the Civil Rights Movement. Martin Luther King, Jr. called 1199 “my favorite union.” In 1965 it boldly declared its opposition to the Vietnam War, the first union to do so. The union’s social agenda and its “flair for the dramatic and militant gesture,” wrote historians Leon Fink and Brian Greenberg, attracted left-leaning activists in and out of the labor movement who, although frustrated by the Cold War conservatism of most unions, believed that organized labor could reassert its earlier dedication to social and economic justice.
Delegates gathered for 1199WV/KY/OH annual meeting, @1983. Courtesy of SEIU District 1199WV/KY/OH.
Believing the time was right, Coretta Scott King urged Leon Davis to embark on his dream of building a national union for all healthcare workers. The union’s expansion beyond New York began in 1969. Davis and Organizing Director Elliot Godoff, an immigrant from Ukraine, sent West Virginia native Larry Harless, one of 1199’s first organizers in Baltimore, to start a “West Virginia campaign.” Harless believed that workers in the small proprietary (private for-profit) hospitals that dotted the southern counties of the state would welcome the benefits a union could offer having witnessed the hollowing out of their communities by the mechanization of the coal industry. Over the next four years, 1199 WV won union representation elections at small private hospitals in Madison (where the owners voluntarily recognized Local 1199 before the election was held), Logan, Holden, and Welch. Harless and Robert Muehlenkamp, Godoff’s second-in-command for organizing, methodically set about educating each new chapter’s elected “delegates” (stewards) about the minutiae of building and running a member-directed union. At the same time another new district, Local 1199 P, was taking hold in western Pennsylvania.
In 1973, the growing 1199 network officially established the national union, comprising the original New York chapter and the newer districts. In practically every campaign 1199 ran in West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and southeastern Ohio over the next decade, they faced well-financed “union avoidance” pushback from hospital management. The playbook for union busting is well-known--captive meetings, whispering campaigns, “say no to union” letters in the family mailbox and local newspapers, and so on. Pro-1199 workers confronted persistent red-baiting and race-baiting, linking 1199 to “New York Communists” and dismissing it with racist rhetoric that denigrated its urban and African American membership. “Union education dealt with race head on,” said longtime organizer David Cormier in a 2004 interview, “and trumped the more nativist attitudes” of some of the White membership. Local 1199 from the beginning invoked the founders’ lessons that a contract was more than just the means to extract a few more pennies from the boss. Echoing legendary activist Anne Braden, 1199 insisted that “the dignity and security” of a democratic union could fundamentally restructure power relationships at work and interpersonal relationships in the larger community. Local 1199’s core belief was that a living wage, health security, and job protection were essential building blocks for social progress and justice. Members of 1199 were expected to get over any personal biases and realize that the only way to get out of the ditch they were all in was through solidarity. Racial biases are stubborn devils, but in time even many White 1199ers proudly adopted the rallying cry of the original New York local, “Union Power, Soul Power.”
1977 contract renewal strike at Cabell Huntington Hospital in Huntington, WV. Huntington Herald-Dispatch photo by Lee Bernard. Courtesy Herald-Dispatch.
Between 1974 and 1981, Local 1199 organized four major hospitals in West Virginia and Kentucky, two private “non-profits” and two municipally owned. Between 1977 and 1988, the union fought off decertification attacks and management-forced contract strikes at each of these. It also organized nearly two-dozen privately-owned nursing homes. In 1982, the union’s 2,500 members in West Virginia and eastern Kentucky joined 500 1199ers laboring in nursing homes and medical centers in Ohio to form the new District 1199WV/KY/OH. Registered nurses at Fairmont General Hospital violated a vaguely-written West Virginia law forbidding hospital strikes in 1978, winning their case in federal mediation. Fairmont General’s lawsuits against the union were later dismissed by the West Virginia Supreme Court. There were painful losses as well, notably at hospitals in Charleston, Parkersburg, and New Martinsville in West Virginia. Hundreds of 1199ers, about three-quarters of them women, spent time in local jails, usually for occupying offices during a “March on the Boss” or violating court injunctions that banned or limited picketing. “If we hadn’t broken the law,” said Fairmont General nurse Joyce Lunsford, “we wouldn’t have had a union.” Anna May Jenkins was arrested three times during a 1977 strike at Cabell Huntington Hospital. Loretta Williams was arrested in 1984 for blocking an entrance at a Hazard, Kentucky nursing home. “I didn’t know what being arrested was all about at first,” she told Mountain Life and Work. “But I’m proud of it. It’s not hard if you truly believe what you’re fighting for.”
Legendary member-leaders Juanita Jenkins (l) from Glen Manor Nursing Home in Cincinnati, and Joyce Lunsford from Fairmont (WV) General Hospital, probably at a district Executive Board meeting, 1984-1986. Courtesy of SEIU District 1199 WV/KY/OH
In 1983, the Ohio legislature, encouraged by pro-labor governor Richard Celeste, approved the right to collective bargaining for state and municipal employees, a right still denied to West Virginia and Kentucky state workers in 2024. Accordingly, the 1199 national union and 1199WV/KY/OH faced the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), in a two-year competition to organize these workers. In elections run by Ohio’s State Employment Relations Board (SERB) from 1984-1986, 1199 gained about 3,300 of the state’s 9,000 health and social service employees at 14 agencies. This was a significant number, but a disappointment to the 1199 organizers who were overmatched by the massively disproportionate resources available to AFSCME and SEIU, each with vastly larger membership bases than 1199. In contrast, 1199’s national union was just emerging from a disastrous two-year power struggle, ending in the separation of its New York local from the national and the associated loss of about half (75,000) of the union’s total membership. These developments convinced most of the union’s Executive Board that, to survive the relentless consolidation of the health care industry, 1199 must affiliate with a larger, richer union. The commodification of health care had accelerated beginning in the 1970s steamrolling 1199’s early chapters at rural and small-town “mom and pop” facilities in Appalachia. The collateral damage caused by hospital mergers, said an Executive Board member with strong ties to 1199WV/KY/OH, was a sign that the country had become “much meaner.”
Seeking public support for nurses’ aides layoffs at King’s Daughters Hospital, Ashland, KY 1984 Courtesy of SEIU1199WV/KY/OH.
In 1989, all but one of 1199’s nineteen districts voted to merge with either AFSCME or SEIU. The WV/KY/OH district voted decisively to join SEIU. According to organizer Teresa Ball, members were initially apprehensive about the prospect: “Were we going to lose our identity if we went with SEIU? We were proud of 1199. Is our name going to change?” It did, but they retained the “1199,” which was important to the membership. Members wanted to protect their reputation, said Ball, for being an “in your face kind of union.” With the reassurances of the now-retired Leon Davis and their trusted leaders who supported the merger, Ball said the membership “realized that we weren’t powerful enough by ourselves.”
Today, SEIU District 1199WV/KY/OH represents some 8,500 workers in the region I studied. Most of the rest of the district’s approximately 30,000 members work in the urban centers of Dayton, Cincinnati, and Cleveland, cities with thousands of working descendants of internal Appalachian migrants like J. D. Vance’s “Mamaw” and “Papa.” Those workers may well be calling on the “in your face” spirit loved by Teresa Ball. They are up against a Trump-Vance administration unapologetic about its disdain for workers’ rights.
Contract renewal strike, Fairmont (WV), 1987. Courtesy 1199 News; SEIU 1199WV/KY/OH
A Union for Appalachian Healthcare Workers: The Radical Roots and Hard Fights of Local 1199 is available through West Virginia University Press.
