Hidden America: From Coal Miners to Cowboys, an Extraordinary Exploration of the Unseen People Who Make This Country Work

Laskas begins the book with a quote from Whitman, which was Whitman’s own tribute to the ordinary American worker—the mechanic and the carpenter, the mason and the boatman—ending with Whitman’s command to “still be flooding the States with hundreds and thousands of mouth-songs, fit for The States only.” Her use of this quote suggests that she too will be celebrating and paying tribute to the American worker.

Laskas begins the introduction in the way she will begin almost all the chapters of the book: with a revealing and entertaining anecdote. Her first experience going into a coal mine, all she can think is “[t]his is not a place for people” (1). This experience, one she knows few people understand, is what leads her to write this book. She does not want the reader to see this book as a desire to return to “the good old days,” a nostalgic longing for life before technological advancements, or “some so-called simpler time” (3). Instead, she insists that she “wanted to connect [her] life to the people who make it livable, and, maybe, reintroduce America to some of its forgotten self” (3). She believes that the people she meets while researching this book change her in significant ways, and she wants the reader to be changed by them as well.

She also insists that her “own political views have no place in this book” (6), and she does manage to keep her beliefs out of the text for the most part; however, when writing about America’s hidden or overlooked professions, some political commentary arises. She is careful not to take any side but the one that advocates for the reader see the humanity of these people and understand their connections to each other.

She ends by arguing that if the reader does not take the time to understand this Hidden America, they risk becoming a spoiled child, “who wants a new toy and gets it, a new set of gloves, a hat. It comes to her because she asks for it, and so she asks for more. This goes on until expectation sets in, privilege and entitlement.” Instead, Laskas wants readers to understand “the family’s larger function, that [their] desires are just a piece of the puzzle; the world is infinitely larger, richer, and worthy of [their] contribution[s], too” (10). Laskas takes this image of the spoiled child and argues that we risk becoming that child unless we recognize each part of the fabric of our democracy.

It makes sense then that Laskas’s journey into the coal mine is the first section, the most hidden part of Hidden America. In fact, this is by far the most detailed section, and the one in which she seems most personally involved. She tells this story through the coal miners she shadowed, “Billy, Smitty, Scotty, Pap, Rick, Chris, Kevin, Hook, Duke, Ragu, Sparky, and Charlie,” as well as Foot, the assistant safety director of the Hopedale Mining coal company. At first, Laskas admits she has a romanticized view of these men; she hopes to see “that the guys who make their living underground do it because of some attachment to the earth, or to history, or to their own ancestry, or to further some fundamental masculine need for brotherhood, or [...] on behalf of the nation’s consciousness and soul.” However, she notes, if “[y]ou talk like that in a coal mine, you’ll get your lunch bucket nailed shut” (18). She skewers her own preconceived notions of who the miners are to show readers a simpler (and more relatable) reality.

Laskas discovers these are just ordinary men, with ordinary lives, who do ordinary things. She is careful, however, to show them as dynamic and complex individuals. She focuses on three men in particular: Pap, Scott “the Rock” Tullius, and Billy Cermak, Jr. Through Billy, Laskas illustrates the process of working in a mine: moving from his application to be a coal miner to his first tour of the mine, where “[y]ou pretty much know instantly if you can take the confinement, the lack of light, the very real worry about the roof caving in or the air supply shutting off or something blowing up” (19).

Billy is the character through which the reader sees the mine itself. He gets “suited up: coveralls, steel-reinforced boots, hard hat, light, and on his belt a battery pack, methane detector, and W65 self-rescue respirator […]” (20). Here, Laskas drives home the discomfort and danger of the job: not just working all day in a place too small to stand up straight, but also shouldering the risk of explosions and cave-ins. The miners don’t seem all that worried, primarily because “[a] coal miner is busy. A coal miner doesn’t have time to sit around and ponder all of this: methane, bad top, no light, no standing, no bathroom, no water fountain, no phone, no radio, no windows, five hundred feet down, a couple of miles in” (23-4).

Through Scott’s story, on the other hand, Laskas demonstrates the complexity of the reasons why these men do this kind of work. Scott, for example, began mining to fund his dream of being a boxer. Scott lost his most important fight and decided to retire from boxing. Laskas stands in for the reader here, who might be tempted to feel sorry for Scott, condemned now to a life in the mine. However, Scott doesn’t feel sorry for himself, and he “didn’t look sad. Or he was the happiest sad man [she’d] ever met” (35). In fact, Scott and his wife, though only in their thirties, have saved enough that they’ll be able to retire early.

Laskas also uses Scott to illustrate what the miners themselves often ignore or refuse to talk about: the physical toll of working in the mines. Indeed, Laskas notes, except for “combat soldier” she’d “never been around people who knew so many dead people” (37). However, it’s not just that the men are unwilling to consider the danger of their jobs. In fact, Laskas makes it clear that they are aware of all the ways things can go wrong. Instead, she suggests there is a comfort with death that is unusual for most Americans. She explores this acceptance through Pap, the oldest of the miners. He never explains why he continues to work at his age or why he doesn’t apply for a less dangerous position. Instead, Pap takes Laskas to his mom’s house. She is 87, and she reminisces about when Pap was a boy, before falling asleep. Laskas states, “[s]he was dying in that room. Of course she was. And there was nothing shameful, or odd, or worrisome about it” (40).

Through these men and their stories Laskas demonstrates that though there may be nothing romantic about being a coal miner, though they are just ordinary people, they are at peace with the precariousness of life in ways others are not. Furthermore, there is a clear sense of brotherhood. The men explain that the essence of their job—whether they are running the miner machine, bolting the roof, or “capturing the coal and hauling it to conveyer belts” (24)—is that each of them is “trying to make everything all right for the next guy” (29). It is this connection, this sense of dependency, that lures Laskas back to the mine repeatedly. Furthermore, this idea of brotherhood (and, eventually, sisterhood) becomes one of the text’s main themes.

Unlike the miners, Laskas cannot seem to get as close to the migrant workers, with good reason. Many of the people she meets are undocumented and fear being deported. Unlike the sense of connection and community that underlies her interactions with the coal miners, here there is isolation and fear. Indeed, unlike the miners who work to make things “all right for the next guy,” Urbano and his sons “labored to support a culture they had virtually no part in, for people who had no part in theirs” (60). This provides a sharp contrast to the sense of brotherhood and camaraderie evident in the first section and serves to highlight a void in the American economic quilt.

Laskas contrasts the lack of appreciation America has for its migrant workers with the importance of the blueberry to Maine. Laskas manages to walk a fine line in this section, laying out facts about immigration and the United States’ dependency on migrant labor without contradicting her claim in the introduction that she “deliberately steered away from making pleas on behalf of anyone” (6). Indeed, just as with the miners, she presents empathetic and well-rounded pictures of the migrant workers she meets, never devolving into stereotypes or romanticizing them.

Nevertheless, it is clear that the migrant workers are treated very differently than the coal miners, and Laskas makes the reader experience this difference through her use of the second person. She explains how the workers begin their day by getting empty containers and running into the field to begin what is called raking:

Your kids, those under twelve, hid in the car […], waiting until nobody from the company was around, before they started raking. The company has zero tolerance about letting underage kids work, because there are laws in America. But your kids wanted to rake, and your family needed the money, so what was the problem? (62)

Raking is like shoveling snow, and is completed with what is often a handmade, custom rake “to fit the body God gave you to work with” (62). It is tedious and hard work, but it isn’t “like Florida or Georgia, where half the time you pissed in your pants because they didn’t allow bathroom breaks” (63). Using the second person invites the reader to empathize with the workers’ plight. In this way, Laskas provides commentary about migrant workers and their experiences without preaching to the reader.