A journalist chased out of town by hired hitmen brings forth images of an action sequence from a box office blockbuster. Yet, Bruce Crawford, Appalachian writer and activist, found himself in this situation in Harlan County, Kentucky in the 1930s.
Hollywood may be unlikely to produce an action film whose lead role is an outspoken Communist labor advocate and friend of coal miners, but this does not stop Josh Howard from telling the story of Appalachian labor in Hell’s Not Far Off: Bruce Crawford and the Appalachian Left (West Virginia University Press).
This book, at its heart, is a historically-researched biography of Bruce Crawford. Crawford was a journalist, editor, and political critic working in southern Virginia in the first half of the twentieth century. He challenged pro-business politicians on behalf of Appalachian laborers and wrote pointed, colorful critiques of American capitalism. Howard writes, summarily, “At the very least, Bruce Crawford’s life provides a glimpse into the mind of a southwest Virginian who thought deeply at a time when most of America believed southwest Virginians did not think at all.”
Howard enumerates Crawford’s political battles in an episodic, chronological manner andfights for Crawford’s inclusion in the academic discourse of Appalachian studies by putting his writing, overlooked and dismissed by scholars, on full display.
Hell’s Not Far Off works best when the story is carried by the provocative and inviting prose of Crawford himself. Crawford once wrote, “Revolution is the placental covering that makes possible the birth of the new society free from the diseases of its predecessors,” saying elsewhere, in more direct terms, “In short, I’m for revolution. You can’t wait on universal enlightenment and democracy.” This second quote appears in Crawford’s 1931 essay “Harlan: A Study in Futility?” Indeed, the Harlan County miners’ strike, colloquially called the Harlan County War, provides a major turning point in Crawford’s personal history and occupies one of the book’s five chapters.
The chapter on Harlan County shows Crawford at his most revolutionary. Here is where we find him running across a wooden bridge ducking shots from unseen foes. A bullet finds purchase in his leg, but he escapes. Not to be dissuaded, Crawford returns to Harlan under the cover of night, determined to stake his life on behalf of the miners there. Years later, upon leaving his career in journalism, Crawford remarked, “If I get shot in the leg again, or go to jail, there won’t be that damned feeling of apology to the respectable.”
Coal companies, however, fail to even encroach upon the full list of Crawford’s nemeses and rivals. In a lively bit of praise, contemporary writer Louis Jaffe said, of Crawford, “[He was] the consistent enemy of humbuggery, cant, false pretense, intolerance, obscurantism, persecution, and pecksniffery.”
At times, Hell’s Not Far Off finds its protagonist battling shockingly cartoonish villains one might expect to find in John Goodman’s cycloptic swindler in the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? Crawford’s years-long rivalry with West Virginia governor Homer Holt is another major episode in Howard’s telling of Crawford’s life. Crawford’s fight for the inclusion of a chapter on labor history in West Virginia’s FWP Guidebook (a New Deal project) feels climactic after his Sisyphistic endeavors to expand the rights of workers in Appalachia.
Crawford becomes a more complicated character as the book progresses, espousing troubling views on race and feminism, particularly in his later years. Howard attempts to address this set of Crawford’s writings, though the criticism falls short of denouncement. Rather, it settles in a state of confusion and disappointment. The revelation of these writings dampens Crawford’s charisma and favorability, though these characteristics are not extinguished.
Crawford was a “class conscious writer [who] argued capitalism was the root of Appalachia’s economic downfall.” 90 years after Crawford’s work in southern Virginia, Appalachia still suffers from a lack of federal programs and attention, still plagued by the ‘Mountain White’ stereotypes Crawford fought valiantly to change.
Hell’s Not Far Off is the story of a writer and activist who believed Americans could rally around reorganization, and yet he was thwarted at each turn by capitalists, congressmen, coal companies and a slew of other Boss Tweeds that, then and now, held the thing which Crawford would call power. In this book, however, getting shot in the leg once is enough to become a hero.
NONFICTION
Hell’s Not Far Off
By Josh Howard
West Virginia University Press
March 1, 2024
Southern Review of Books 