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

“It seems to me we used to know the people who made our lives livable. We were more than likely related to them. In a preindustrial America, and in a small-town America, there was Uncle Charlie with his cows, Cousin Mike coming by with his truckload of hay, Aunt Sarah and her basket of lima beans, and, of course, the milkman. The raw material and the labor of the everyday had personalities associated with them, as well as culture and history.”

Here, Laskas describes her impetus for starting this project, a desire to reconnect with those on whom America depends. However, despite the nostalgic tone here, Laskas is not advocating a return to some simpler time, or simpler system of values. Instead, she is deeply curious about the people who keep America running, and wants to introduce them to the reader as well.

“Everything you know about America—all the history, all the politics, all the lessons from all the economic indicators, all the arguments from the red states and the blue—is irrelevant when you are sitting in a coal mine, or staring at a radar screen showing thousands of airplanes flying at once, or wrangling five hundred pregnant Red Angus cows beneath a blazing hot desert sunrise.”

For Laskas, one of the benefits of this project was the way it made all the things we argue about in America seem unimportant. At a time when pundits and politicians seem to always ask what the average American wants without ever actually asking one of those average Americans, Laskas does just that, meeting them on their own terms, and allowing them to dictate the conversation and outcome.

“Coal, if it disappeared from the nation’s consciousness, never went away. This is America, and this is our fossil fuel, a $27.6 billion industry that employs nearly eighty thousand miners in twenty-six states. We are sitting on 25 percent of the world’s supply—the Saudi Arabia of coal! —and lately we’ve been grabbing it in record amounts, gorging on the black rock the Bush administration once called “freedom fuel.”

This is a brief foray into the political aspect of the jobs she is exploring in this section. However, Laskas makes no pronouncement about America’s use of coal, but instead just provides her reasoning for being interested in it.