COMMENTARY: West Virginia at 143: A State and a State of Mind
By Stephen N. Reed
Happy Birthday, West Virginia! Today, your many young sons and daughters, living elsewhere due to a shortage of jobs back home, wish you a wonderful celebration of your independence, warmth, and good cheer despite the challenges you face.
West Virginians have proven well the observation that the nicest people are oftentimes those who have had been dealt the most difficult blows. This may be more evident to those from outside the state, our visitors, than to ourselves.
For example, who can forget President John F. Kennedy, who owed his Presidency to his primary win in West Virginia, visiting Charleston again a few months before he was assassinated.
Kennedy took stock of this rugged terrain and the hardy people who lived in it, who endured floods and blizzards and an oftentimes poor economy amid the most striking green hills and crystal rivers in the eastern U.S.
He said, joining us outside on a rainy day, back on June 20, 1963, the year of our state's Centennial celebration:
"The sun does not always shine in West Virginia, but the people always do."
That captures the essence of our proud, yet good-humored people. Starting with the Native American tribes, then the English, Scots-Irish, and Welsh, then Germans, Italians, and Eastern Europeans, freed blacks and emancipated slaves--all of them found a niche here, working in the coal mines, timber operations, or owning small hill farms quite unlike the large, flat slaveowning plantations in Tidewater Virginia.
When the Civil War came, most West Virginians decided that they did not want to separate from the Union. They wished, instead, to separate from Mother Virginia, a poor parent who had done little to open up this mountainous western country.
Luckily for us, the war went our way. For like-minded Unionists in Eastern Tennessee and Western North Carolina, the outcome of the war did not go as well. They were ostracized by their southern state legislatures and kept poor for decades. They were too far south to pull off what West Virginia had done.
Wherever a West Virginian travels, no matter how far away from home, he or she remembers this spirit of independence that has been the hallmark of our state's citizens ever since. We don't look for a fight, but we also have little tolerance for b.s. and will tell you so. Then we will laugh off with you your attempt to put one over on us.
That is the state of mind of a West Virginian. We try hard to not only see the best in another person but to cultivate it, just like our ancestors tried to cultivate crops on this sometimes rocky soil.
Like those earlier West Virginians, we all like a challenge.