Coal Company Towns Left a Legacy of Weak Government and Public Mistrust

Elizabeth Elder’s account of America’s coal company towns begins with a claim about political trust that is narrower, and more concrete, than the usual national story about polarization or democratic backsliding. In former coal-mining areas, she argues, distrust in government is not merely an ideological posture or a media-driven mood. It is rooted in generations of local experience with governments that were weak, captured, corrupt, or visibly subordinate to private power.

Elder’s book, Company Towns: Industry Power and the Historical Foundations of Public Mistrust, studies coal towns in Appalachia and the Midwest, especially places where large coal companies arrived after the Civil War and became the central employers, service providers, and political powers. Her interest is not only in economic decline after coal left, but in what these places learned about government while coal was still dominant.

The core mechanism, as Elder describes it, is that coal companies entered places with very little existing local government. In the decades from the end of the Civil War through the 1920s, many American local governments professionalized: they built sanitation systems, streets, transportation networks, and administrative capacity, and they hired competent public officials. Coal towns, in her telling, were different. The industry was thriving, and these communities might have developed into more durable industrial cities. Instead, coal companies had incentives to keep local governments small and dependent.

That mattered because the relationship between public authority and company authority was often blurred. Elder describes conventional business politics — donations to candidates, coal supervisors encouraged to run for office — alongside straightforward corruption: buying votes, conditioning employment on voting behavior, bribing candidates. In some places, the line between public and private authority became almost literal. Elder gives the example of local officials holding county court inside a coal company store.

For Elder, that history helps explain why present-day mistrust in former coal areas is not well understood as a generic Republican distrust of government. The distrust is tied to a specific local institutional history: government was not experienced as an effective public instrument. It was often experienced as either irrelevant, predatory, or an extension of company power.

That is why the book’s political claim depends on local history. Elder is not saying that people in coal country dislike government because they inherited a slogan. She is saying they inherited institutions that gave them reasons to doubt government’s competence, independence, honesty, and fairness. The distinctive feature of the company town is that the institution citizens might have used to check private power was itself shaped, limited, or penetrated by that power.

A company town is not just a place with one large employer. In Elizabeth Elder’s account, the political character of a company town depends on what the dominant industry needs from workers and from place. A town shaped by the movie industry, a technology company, Walmart, a university, or a coal company will not develop the same institutions or amenities, because the employer’s incentives differ.

Coal is close to Elder’s “worst case scenario” because many things that encourage human flourishing — finishing high school, pursuing higher education and returning, building portable skills, maintaining health and a safe environment — were not aligned with maximizing a coal company’s bottom line. Coal companies needed a large, durable, relatively low-skilled labor force. They had reason to keep workers local and dependent, not mobile and credentialed.

Bentonville, Arkansas, functions in the discussion as the opposite case. Walmart, Elder says, has incentives to make Bentonville attractive because it needs to recruit highly skilled talent to a place that is not otherwise especially accessible. The skill level of the workers a company needs shapes the amenities it has reason to provide. A company that must attract mobile professionals has stronger incentives to make the town desirable.

Coal’s political effects endured because coal mining employed tens of thousands of people over more than a century. Unlike oil towns that may involve a smaller number of engineers and transient workers, coal towns had populations that lived in the same places, developed lasting relationships with companies and governments, and remained after mines closed.

The dependence was economic, social, and geographic. In remote places with few other industries, workers could either stay and work for the coal company or leave the region entirely, often leaving land their families had occupied for generations. Elder says there is evidence that coal companies also tried to limit worker mobility, including blacklists for organizers and unionizers. Even moving to another coal company could be difficult.

The company’s role in coal towns was not simply exploitative. Elder is careful to say that the relationship between company and government was “not all bad.” A company might build a school, a fire department, or a lighting system. For a local elected official, that could be immediately useful. But it also meant the town did not build the public capacity to provide those services itself.

When the company left, the latent weakness became visible. If the company had installed the lighting system, nobody in local government necessarily knew how to do it. If the company had built the school, the town might later need to replace it without the coal tax base that had existed when the company was operating. What had looked like public provision could turn out to be private substitution.

That substitution also affected public expectations. If a company provides services that government otherwise might provide, demand for government capacity can weaken. Elder extends the point beyond coal with the example of technology-company shuttle buses: if companies create their own substitutes for public transit that serve their workers, there may be less demand for better public transit between San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Even beneficial corporate provision can crowd out the public sector and make government seem less central to people’s lives.

The economic shock of mine closures is only part of Elizabeth Elder’s account. She emphasizes the institutional shock: coal towns were left with governments that had been kept small and did not suddenly become capable after the companies departed.

In a town where 40% of the adult population works in the mines, Elder says, mass job loss is a catastrophic community-level event. The impact extends beyond miners. Lawyers, accountants, doctors, and other professionals may be indirectly dependent on the mines as well. Some towns did not survive in any meaningful sense. Others became places where people remained because they could not afford to leave.

The capacity problem is practical before it is philosophical. A local government that has never built and maintained core systems cannot simply begin doing so when the tax base disappears. The company may have supplied pieces of daily life that residents treated as part of the town’s operating environment: lights, schools, fire protection, basic infrastructure. But those services did not necessarily leave behind trained staff, administrative routines, procurement practices, financing capacity, or public confidence.

Post-coal weakness in local government is, in Elder’s view, almost certainly both a matter of money and a matter of attitude. Once coal companies left, tax revenue left with them. But public opinion surveys also suggest residents were not especially supportive of raising more money for education and infrastructure. Elder is cautious about why: people may have believed higher spending would not help, or they may have felt there was simply no money available to tax. Still, later findings of mistrust suggest that even if resources had existed, residents may not have clamored for government growth, especially after experiencing government during the coal era as frequently opposed to their interests.

The institutional patterns persisted as well. Elder says mining-area local governments that had experienced decades of corruption did not abruptly stop being corrupt when coal companies left. Nor did they suddenly become larger. Local powerful families, store owners, and administrators of government benefits could take over some of the same political tactics coal companies had used, including patronage jobs and withholding welfare benefits to influence votes.

This is one of the most important continuities in Elder’s argument. The departure of the company did not restore a neutral democratic baseline. It left behind habits, expectations, offices, networks, and methods of control. The economic underpinnings changed; the political life often did not.

The familiar jokes about vote buying in Eastern Kentucky — the candidate who wins with moonshine and a $50 bill — sit inside a broader American history. Elder stresses that vote buying was not unique to Appalachia or coal country. Around 1900, it was common in many parts of the United States, including big cities. But many places reformed over the 20th century. Mining areas, Elder says, were among the last holdouts, with some of the last vote-buying prosecutions occurring in the 2000s in Eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, and other coal-mining regions.

Coal companies, in her account, did not invent all local corruption. They added currency, employment pressure, and company power to existing political systems based on family ties, business ties, and patronage. They also helped cultivate a broader state-level environment: leave us alone, let us conduct our business, and state government or law enforcement can provide support when needed without interfering in how things are done locally. That ethos, Elder argues, allowed corruption to flourish longer than it otherwise might have.

The result is a difficult repair problem. If residents distrust government because government has failed them for generations, the fix cannot be symbolic. It has to show up in administrative competence: services delivered, money handled fairly, programs accessed, and officials responsive enough that citizens can plausibly believe public action changes outcomes.

Elizabeth Elder’s 2023 survey work was designed to measure two things. First, whether residents trusted local government as competent, honest, fair, and able to exercise its duties. Second, whether they believed in democratic accountability: if an elected official is bad, can voters remove that official and replace them with someone better?

Her finding is that people in former coal-mining areas are less trusting of government and less likely to believe democratic institutions can hold officials accountable than people in other parts of Appalachian and Midwestern states.

The distinction matters. Distrusting a particular official is different from doubting the electoral mechanism itself. Elder is focused on the deeper problem: the belief that replacing one elected official with another will not change anything. That belief undermines a foundation of democratic politics. It means the citizen does not merely think officeholders are bad; the citizen doubts whether elections can produce a meaningful correction.

Elder also asked about trust outside government: schools, the military, churches, nonprofits, business communities, police, and other local and national institutions. Some patterns look like what one might expect in heavily Republican areas. Former coal-mining areas show less trust in the press and higher education. But other patterns do not fit the standard partisan template.

Former coal areas, Elder says, trust big business less and unions more than the broad Republican pattern would suggest. They also trust police less than people in other places, which diverges from the common finding, raised by Bill Whalen, that police and the military tend to retain relatively high public confidence in Gallup and Pew surveys. Elder connects that lower trust in police to the history she documents: in many company towns, local police were one of the main faces of company power.

This is why Elder resists treating coal-country distrust as merely national partisan identity. The region is now strongly Republican, but its trust profile carries traces of its labor history and its local institutional experience. It is simultaneously consistent with some contemporary Republican attitudes and inconsistent with others.

Whalen frames the partisan shift through West Virginia examples: he says Donald Trump won 70% of the statewide vote in 2024 and every county; that Mitt Romney won 62% in 2012; and that Barack Obama won only 59% of the 2012 Democratic primary vote there, with 41% going to Keith Judd, whom Whalen identifies as a Texas prisoner and convicted felon. Whalen also points to 2008, saying Appalachia was one of the regions where John McCain improved on George W. Bush’s performance.

Elder’s response is that Appalachia has been on a “bumpy but inevitable” path toward the Republican Party since about 1980. In coal-mining areas specifically, the sharp movement came later, especially after the 2000s, as the coal industry and mining unions receded. She identifies 2008 as a major turning point, with the shift solidified in 2016 and afterward. The trend, in other words, is not simply a Trump story.

Trump’s appeal in coal towns, as Elder describes it, has both industry-specific and anti-institutional elements. He made promises about coal, and those promises mattered in places that had come to see the coal industry as a possible economic future. At the same time, residents who believe institutions have not worked for them may be receptive to a candidate who also presents himself as alienated from, or opposed to, those institutions.

Coal-town decline also raises a problem of mobility. Bill Whalen describes taking his father back to McKeesport, Pennsylvania, a former steel town outside Pittsburgh, and seeing burned houses. Whalen’s explanation is that some owners, unable to sell, concluded the only way out was to torch their homes and try to collect insurance. The coal-country equivalent is not simply whether people leave, but who can leave, who returns, and who remains without a realistic alternative.

Elizabeth Elder says the remaining population is more often composed of people who have stayed for life. Former mining areas have been aging steadily over the past 20 years, especially since around 2010, which she identifies as the last Appalachian coal-mining peak. Since the 1950s, people who leave to get a college degree have been very unlikely to return. The reason is straightforward: there are few local jobs where a college degree would improve earnings.

That pattern, Elder says, first characterized coal-mining areas and has increasingly appeared in other former industrial places throughout the Rust Belt. The problem is not simply cultural attachment or lack of ambition. It is the absence of financial returns to education in places without industries that employ high-skilled workers.

Some states and communities are trying to change this. Elder points to Kentucky’s focus on broadband infrastructure as part of an effort to let people work remotely from areas with natural beauty. But she describes that as an uphill battle. Without a creative or high-skill industry, it is hard to build one from scratch; without jobs that reward a college degree, it is hard to get college graduates to return.

Feeling trapped may itself shape institutional confidence. Whalen contrasts California with declining coal towns: Californians may complain about affordability, he says, but many do not feel trapped in the same way, because they can move within the state or elsewhere. A resident of a declining coal town who cannot sell a home may feel more like a prisoner of place.

Elder says political scientists are increasingly studying this idea of being “stuck”: physically or economically unable to move away. She sees two possible responses. Some people become resentful, seeing institutions as partly responsible for trapping them. Others become more attached. If a person expects to remain somewhere forever, more of their identity may become tied to that place, and they may become more invested in defending it and making it better.

In Appalachia, Elder sees both dynamics. Some people could not leave but also do not want to. Their families may have lived on the land since the 1800s or 1700s. Appalachian music, heritage, and culture often emphasize close family ties, close-knit communities, and long relationships with land. The fact of being stuck can be negative, but it can also intensify belonging.

For Elizabeth Elder, the implications for democratic health are not limited to coal. She argues that democracy should not be measured only at the national level. Within the United States, there is wide variation in the health of people’s relationships with local government: whether they trust it to collect the trash and keep the lights on, whether they think contacting an elected official matters, whether attending a city council meeting can accomplish anything.

That local efficacy is not ancillary to democracy. For many people, local officials are the officials they are most likely to contact. Local government is where citizens most directly observe whether public institutions can solve problems. If a city council meeting never matters, if local officials cannot be reached, if basic services fail, and if elections do not seem to change the personnel or the performance of government, then national democratic abstractions have little force.

Company towns, in that sense, are a symptom of a broader condition, but not the whole story. Elder says the country also contains “shining examples” of places where people feel connected to responsive local governments. The point is variation. Some places show how local democracy can work; others show how it can be damaged.

This is also why she rejects the idea that anti-government sentiment in Appalachia is merely performative. Whalen invokes Nancy Pelosi’s description of the Tea Party as “Astroturf” rather than grassroots. Elder says she cannot speak for every region or person, but in Appalachia there is a real history of people being mistreated or ignored by government.

That history, in Elder’s view, cannot be corrected by telling people they are mistaken or that they learned the wrong lesson from school or media. The remedy has to be visible performance by government itself.

Whalen offers California as a counterexample to any purely partisan account. He describes it as a progressive state where Democrats outnumber Republicans roughly two to one, yet says statewide polling shows the public split on confidence in government. Elder agrees with the broader point: not everything comes down to partisan politics. People form beliefs not only from national news but from what happens in their own cities and towns. Their sense of what government is, and what it can do, comes from local experience.

That premise also guides Elder’s current research. She says she is building a database of local elections, especially in places that are not big cities, where most election data already exist. She wants to examine basic questions: how many people run for office, how many incumbents win, and how election conduct differs between larger and smaller cities. Studying coal towns, she says, has shown her how much scholars know about big-city politics and how little they know about small-town politics.

Elizabeth Elder separates the policy problem into two tasks: making life better in former company towns and preventing new company towns from forming.

First, former company towns need capacity that local governments often cannot build alone. Elder says higher levels of government can help with infrastructure, connectivity, and the practical work of accessing resources that already exist. Grant programs, grant-writing requirements, and matching-loan structures may be available in theory but difficult for low-capacity local governments to navigate. If a local government has been weak for generations, even applying for help can be beyond its ordinary administrative ability.

The basic goal is not only economic development but restored competence. If residents see government collect trash, keep lights on, and perform basic duties, they may come to view it as competent, trustworthy, and worth investing in. That bridge matters because Elder’s account of mistrust is not primarily attitudinal. A public information campaign cannot substitute for public services that work. If bad government produced mistrust, then better government has to be experienced as better: visible, routine, fair, and administratively capable.

This is where the grant-access problem becomes more than a bureaucratic detail. A higher level of government may create programs for distressed places, but the places most in need may be least able to use them. A town with thin staffing, little technical expertise, weak fiscal systems, and a long history of underdeveloped local government may fail to capture resources nominally intended for it. Elder’s prescription therefore includes not only money for infrastructure and connectivity, but help translating available resources into actual local capacity.

Second, governments should avoid creating new single-employer dependencies. Elder argues that once a single company controls most employment in a place, it is very difficult to prevent that company from wielding significant influence over government. For that reason, she is skeptical of government efforts to attract a large employer to a remote place with tax incentives or similar programs. That model may create jobs in the near term, but it can also create a company town where one did not previously exist.

Her question is whether the long-term democratic costs are worth the short-term economic gains. If the downstream result is a town where residents believe government is not really accountable to them, then the incentive package may have purchased more than employment.

Universities and government employment are potentially healthier foundations for a single-employer or single-sector town. Whalen suggests college towns and government-centered regions as examples: universities can provide steady employment, health care, intellectual life, and outreach, while government employment helped Northern Virginia become, in his telling, a wealthy region tied to a durable federal presence. Elder agrees those are attractive examples in part because they are durable. A town is unlikely to wake up and find that the college or government has vanished.

But she notes a downside: universities and governments generally do not produce the same tax base that private industry might. Universities can attract employers, but often are not themselves major taxpayers; governments certainly are not.

Her preferred principle is not a specific industry but an incentive structure. Industries that need to attract people, and therefore must make a place good to live, are more likely to leave behind a town capable of persisting and attracting additional employers. Bentonville fits that logic. So do some university-adjacent places. Coal did not, because its incentive was to keep workers low-skilled, local, and less mobile.

That distinction also shapes Elder’s evaluation of modern technology towns. Whalen raises Menlo Park, where he says Meta has paused a long-running mixed-use development plan involving land it owns and below-market housing, and where a tuition-free school founded by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife is set to close. His point is that Menlo Park would likely survive even if Meta disappeared, because Silicon Valley has a history of firms replacing one another: he notes that Meta occupies a former Sun Microsystems site and that Google’s Mountain View campus was formerly associated with Silicon Graphics. Elder accepts the broader comparison: technology companies need highly educated workers, mobility, connectivity, and an ecosystem in which people can change jobs, found startups, and attract other firms. Coal companies did not have those incentives.

Cupertino’s dependence on Apple is not, by Elder’s standards, a healthy relationship, though she does not think Cupertino would cease to exist if Apple left. The problem is democratic accountability. When a company has enormous influence over what a town does, residents can develop the sense that things are rigged: people and companies with money get their way, while regular people do not.

The outcomes may be good in some visible sense, but the political relationship can still be corrosive. A company that builds amenities, schools, roads, or transit substitutes may be helping its workers and community. It may also be making government seem less necessary, less capable, and less worth demanding things from.

The moral question follows from the institutional one: what does a dominant company owe the town it dominates? Is it responsible for hospitals, roads, schools, and social life? What is it “on the hook for”?

Elizabeth Elder answers first from the shareholder perspective: a company is on the hook for returns to shareholders and nothing more. Even in company towns that are good places to live, she says, amenities are not provided out of benevolence. They are provided because the company needs them to attract the kind of workers it wants.

One could imagine alternative models in which companies are expected to account for the needs of the places where they operate, beyond their immediate employees. Elder does not fully develop such a model here, but she points to a reason the question may become more pressing: AI and other technological shifts could create large companies that are located in a place but employ relatively few people there.

The traditional company-town bargain, however unequal, was built around employment. Coal companies needed large workforces. Technology companies may have far fewer local workers relative to their economic power. If a company’s footprint remains large while its employment relationship shrinks, the balance between obligation to employees and obligation to the broader community becomes less settled.

Elder’s coal-town argument therefore travels beyond coal only with care. Not every dominant employer produces the same kind of place. Not every single-industry town collapses when the first industry fades. Whalen describes Greenville, South Carolina, as a former textile town with a second act: a newer economy, a BMW plant nearby in Spartanburg, young people moving in, affordable housing, and former textile mills repurposed into condos or left as industrial relics. Elder says there is hope for similar second acts in former mining areas, especially through tourism, natural beauty, and environmental cleanup.

But she has not found many large-scale coal-town success stories. Berea College in Kentucky is her best example of a place in a former mining region where an educational institution has helped support a stronger community. Places with colleges and universities, she says, tend to do somewhat better because they provide centers of productivity and knowledge generation even in regions that lack a broader creative-class economy.

The larger lesson is that decline is not only about job loss. It is about whether a place has institutions capable of absorbing loss, adapting to it, and persuading residents that public action can matter. In Elder’s account, coal companies had incentives to keep local government small, to substitute company provision for public capacity, and to limit worker mobility. When the industry weakened, the towns were left with the consequences of that institutional design.