Americans have always placed special faith in local government. From New England town meetings to the raucous ward politics of industrial cities, local democracy is where self-governance feels most personal: where citizens know their elected officials, experience real consequences of policy decisions, and feel their voices can be heard. Even as trust in the federal government has fallen sharply over the past half century, Americans have remained confident in the governments closest to them.
But this is not true everywhere. In former coal-mining areas of Appalachia and the Midwest, trust in local government is distinctively low. In fact, unlike most Americans, people in mining areas have historically trusted their local governments less than their state or federal ones.
In a survey I conducted in 2023, residents of former mining areas saw their local officials as less fair, less competent, and less honest than did people living elsewhere. They doubted that elections work—that voting can actually hold politicians accountable for poor performance or corrupt acts. They were no less critical of misbehaving officials than anyone else. They simply didn’t believe the system would punish them.
As America marks 250 years of independence, and we reflect on the state of civic participation and trust in institutions, this poses a question worth asking: how did self-governance in former mining communities come to feel so broken?
Corroded democracy in a single-industry town
Some usual suspects might come to mind: economic decline, cultural conservatism, or the broader national trend towards political cynicism. These factors may play a role. But in my book, Company Towns: Industry Power and the Historical Foundations of Public Mistrust, I argue that the roots run much deeper—to decisions made by coal companies more than a century ago that corrupted local politics and set in motion a cycle of mistrust that persists today.
When large coal companies arrived in Appalachia and the Illinois Basin after the Civil War, they left a lasting impact on local governance. Some made valiant efforts to avoid local government as much as possible, locating themselves in unincorporated areas and privately taking on as many government functions as they could. Others involved themselves deeply in local governance, buying votes, coercing workers into supporting preferred candidates, and wielding local police as instruments of corporate control. In Windber, Pennsylvania, for example, the coal company paid for a hundred additional borough policemen to suppress labor unrest. In Vintondale, Pennsylvania, the colliery superintendent stood at the polls reminding miners how to vote, and justices of the peace held court in the company store.
Both avoiding and dominating local government served the same goal: making sure “public” goods like infrastructure, law enforcement, and education were provided on companies’ terms, with little risk of democratic oversight.
These were not occasional abuses. They were routine features of political life in places where a single industry dominated the economy. Where there was no meaningful plurality of economic interests, coal companies shaped not just individual policies but the structure of governance itself, leaving local governments less capable and more corrupt than those elsewhere in the region.
These tales from the peak of mining’s dominance, now more than a century ago, may seem remote. But as coal’s footprint shrank across the mid-twentieth century, corrupt practices didn’t disappear when the companies did. Local elites adopted the industry’s methods for maintaining political control.
Vote-buying scandals continued to surface in West Virginia and Kentucky well into the 2000s. Data on public corruption prosecutions since 2000 show that while coal companies themselves no longer play as important a role in local politics, more local government officials are charged with corruption in coal counties than in other parts of the region. The infrastructure of corruption outlasted the industry that built it.
Citizens took notice. In 1967, for example, political scientists surveyed schoolchildren in Knox County, Kentucky, where more than half the workforce had been employed in the coal industry. Twenty-six percent of high-schoolers scored the highest possible level of political cynicism, compared to just 5 percent nationally. Nearly 60 percent agreed that “people in the government don’t care much about what people like my family think.” A West Virginia University study around the same time found that half of state residents agreed “people who go into public office are usually out for all they can get.” A 1958 survey of southern Appalachia concluded that for the typical resident, “the government is ‘they,’ not ‘we.’ ”
These attitudes were not temporary discontents. They were transmitted across generations, from parents who had lived under company-controlled government to children entering the electorate already convinced their institutions were broken.
Today, even as coal has all but departed, former mining areas remain more corrupt than their neighbors, and their residents remain distinctively cynical about whether government can work for them.
A warning about real-world civics
So, what does this history teach us as we mark 250 years of American self-governance?
First, it reveals a blind spot in how we think about democratic health. Scholars and commentators rightly worry about threats to democracy at the national level. But the erosion of self-governance in company towns shows that democracy can hollow out locally, too—and the effects can persist for generations. Politics happening outside the national spotlight can still have large-scale consequences for trust in institutions.
Second, this history complicates how we talk about anti-government sentiment. It is tempting to treat distrust of government as “cheap talk”: as expressive or ideological rather than rooted in real concerns. But in former mining areas, that distrust was earned by generations of governments that were genuinely captured, corrupt, or ineffective. Dismissing it as ignorance or stubbornness misses the point. Any serious effort at civic renewal in these communities must start by acknowledging this history.
Third, and perhaps most important, this is not just a story about coal. The dynamics that made company towns corrosive to public trust are not unique to mining. Wherever a single employer dominates a local economy—whether it is a meatpacking plant, a data center, or a large-scale agricultural operation—the same risks arise. When one company accounts for most of a community’s jobs and tax revenue, local officials face enormous pressure to accommodate its interests, even at the expense of democratic accountability. The American federal system, which delegates so much to local governments, is vulnerable to this kind of capture.
The promise of American self-governance has always been that citizens can shape the institutions that govern them. In former company towns, corporate power prevented that promise from being fulfilled. The damage has outlasted the industry by generations. As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of independence, it is worth asking not just whether our national institutions are sound, but whether citizens everywhere have the local civic infrastructure to make democracy real.
