Voices in Time: Erased from Appalachia
In 1940, West Virginia governor Homer Holt ordered Bruce Crawford, the director of the West Virginia Writer’s Project—a division of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration—to remove an image of a Mexican coal miner from the official state guidebook, soon to be published as West Virginia: A Guide to the Mountain State. The directive came through an assistant, who summarized the confrontational meeting: “The picture of a Mexican miner was vetoed because Mexican miners are few and far between in West Virginia, which is proud of its Anglo-Saxon origins. I need not labor the point.” The skirmish, in which Crawford emerged mostly victorious (the image of a Mexican miner remained absent in the final publication), was part of a larger struggle over who controlled West Virginia’s history—its industry or its people.
