Burgie was one of the millions of Appalachians who participated in one of the largest internal migrations in American history. The road north became known as the Hillbilly Highway as job opportunities dried up in the coal mines and forests and Appalachians sought work in the industrial Midwest. In the three decades between 1940 and 1970, 3 million Appalachians took to the Hillbilly Highway. Dwight Yoakam’s 1985 tune “Readin’, Writin’, and Route 23” memorialized the migration in song.
The migration transformed Appalachia. The era of the yeoman farmer, which tapped into the region’s precolonial roots, was over. In the 1950s, forty counties in eastern Kentucky and West Virginia lost about 70 percent of their farm population. Harlan County lost 82 percent, Leslie County a mind-boggling 98 percent. Only 20 fulltime farming operations remained in Leslie by the end of the decade.
A bevy of factors led to the decline of manufacturing in Appalachia. Environmental struggles, increased regulatory burdens, mechanization, and some companies’ difficulties paying retirement benefits all played their part. But it all took place against the backdrop of an increasingly globalized market economy, governed by a ballooning number of “free” trade agreements that spanned thousands of pages, which made foreign goods, and more importantly foreign labor, more attractive than Appalachia. Between 1970 and 2001 in Appalachia, the number of apparel workers declined by 66 percent and textile workers by 30 percent. For those who remained, living off the government dole became a way to make ends meet.
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), signed in 1993 by President Bill Clinton, was the nail in the coffin for manufacturing and other Appalachian industries. Six years later, Clinton would deliver remarks from Tyner, Kentucky, to bring public attention to Appalchian poverty. “I’m here to make a simple point,” Clinton told the nation. “This is the time to bring more jobs and investment to parts of the country that have not participated in this time of prosperity. Any work that can be done by anybody in America can be done in Appalachia.” The problem for Clinton was that those jobs were no longer being done in America.
Burgie spent decades working in that Ford plant far from the hills of Appalachia he called home. He became involved in the plant’s United Auto Workers (UAW) chapter and eventually ascended to a number of leadership positions. As the years passed, Burgie became increasingly disenchanted with his involvement in the UAW. “I don’t want to get into detail about it,” Burgie told me, as we sat on a bench sipping Diet Cokes. “But the point is it stopped being about the workers and more about the politics, and I just didn’t like that so much.”