West Virginia

C

Government and Politics

West Virginia is governed under its second constitution, adopted in 1872. The chief executive is a governor, who is popularly elected to a four-year term and may not serve more than two consecutive terms. Other major state officials, all elected to four-year terms, include the president of the state senate, secretary of state, attorney-general, auditor, treasurer, and commissioner of agriculture.

Legislative authority is vested in a 34-member Senate and a 100-member House of Delegates. The senators are popularly elected for four-year terms and the delegates for two years.

At a national level, West Virginia sends two senators and three representatives to the US Congress. The state has five electoral votes in presidential elections (see Electoral College).

The economic depression of the 1930s transformed West Virginia from a predominantly Republican state to one in which the Democrats held a clear advantage. Few Republican presidential candidates have carried West Virginia since 1932. In the early 1990s about two thirds of the state’s registered voters were Democrats. The leading political figure has been Robert C. Byrd, elected to the US Senate from West Virginia in 1958 and later Democratic majority leader (1977-1981; 1987-1988).

In the 2006 elections two Democrats and one Republican were returned to represent the state. John D. Rockefeller, IV and Robert C. Byrd (both Democrat) represent West Virginia in the Senate. Byrd is currently serving his ninth term in office and faces re-election in 2012. Joe Manchin (Democrat) was elected as state governor in 2004.

IV

History

The first Europeans to visit the territory that is now West Virginia found a rugged, beautiful, and empty land. Explorers such as Thomas Batts and Robert Fallam, who in 1671 reached the New River where it enters West Virginia, found deserted sites of villages and cornfields, but no Native Americans. Later, impressively large and ancient burial mounds and earthworks were found along the Ohio and Kanawha rivers. Archaeological evidence confirms that the Adena culture (c. 1000-100 bc) flourished along these rivers and that West Virginia was occupied by indigenous peoples as late as the mid-17th century.

West Virginia became an arena of warfare as the Shawnee of nearby Ohio tried to stem the advance of white settlers. This struggle disrupted, but did not halt, the process of settlement between 1750 and 1790. As western Virginia matured during the next 50 years, it differed in important respects from eastern Virginia. It was a poorer but freer society, characterized more by subsistence farms than by large plantations.

A

Separation from Virginia

Eastern and western Virginia might have worked out their differences amicably, as they appeared to be doing in the 1850s, had it not been for the American Civil War. Instead, Unionist outrage at Virginia’s secession and swift Union military conquests in June-July 1861 encouraged separatist leaders to organize, first, a so-called restored Virginia government based in Wheeling, followed by a separate state government that entered the Union as West Virginia on June 20, 1863. For strategic and economic reasons, the state-makers took in the Greenbrier and Potomac regions along the present Virginia border. This gave West Virginia a large Confederate minority, to which a number of disenchanted Unionists were added after 1865. These dissidents gained political control of the state in the elections of 1870 and remodelled its institutions according to Virginian precedents.

B

Coal-Mining Economy

More than any other single element, the bituminous coal industry has shaped West Virginia’s history since the issues of statehood and the Civil War faded during the 1870s. Coal underlies nearly two thirds of the state. The exploitation of these reserves, which followed the creation of a rail network between 1880 and 1910, led to massive population shifts and social dislocations. A second “civil war”, caused by labour-organizing drives among mineworkers and the mine owners’ resistance, raged sporadically between 1912 and 1954. By the 1950s the increasing mechanization of coal mining had brought disaster to miners throughout the Appalachian states. West Virginia was hit the hardest; scores of small operations closed and thousands of workers were dismissed from the mines. During the 1950s the state’s unemployment rate was the highest in the country, at three times the national average. While most state populations boomed, West Virginia suffered a loss of 7.2 per cent as thousands fled in search of employment.

Labour problems still trouble the mining industry, as do environmental controversies involving surface, or strip, mining; flood hazards have resulted from denuding the land in the narrow valleys where much of the coal is mined. In 1985, in an effort to improve the economic conditions, the much-disliked Business and Occupations Tax was removed on all businesses except utilities, and coal company contributions to the workers’ compensation fund were reduced. More importantly, tax credits were extended to new industries coming into the state and to existing industries that expanded their number of jobs or modernized their operations.

Despite an increasingly diverse economy, including urban-industrial centres in the major river valleys, West Virginia remained one of the poorest states in the United States at the beginning of the 1990s. However, in 2000 the state recorded a small increase in population, in contrast to the decrease of over 8 per cent recorded between 1980 and 1990.