And even the self-sufficient families that were not hurt much by the Depression were soon dealt a stunning blow by the Great Drought of 1930–31. That drought’s driest belt ran west from Virginia across West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee to Arkansas. Annual precipitation dropped to 16 inches, and many rivers quit flowing. Some large towns laid their firehoses upriver from one pool to the next so they could at least get drinking water. In northern West Virginia, for example, both Morgantown and Elkins did so.6 In Kentucky, undernourishment among pregnant women caused infant death rates to rise 10 percent in the last four months of 1930. Undernourishment also caused pneumonia and pellagra rates to multiply, along with outbreaks of smallpox, scarlet fever, typhoid, diphtheria, whooping cough, and the eye disease trachoma. In some areas starvation threatened. As the winter of 1930–31 began, Red Cross investigators in eastern Kentucky found distress caused by the drought at “almost unbelievable” levels and reported “a growing army of itinerants travelling on foot” in search of food. Meanwhile, the national Red Cross had closed down its relief programs in Kentucky and West Virginia as a way of stretching their supplies to last through midwinter. Then, when the Red Cross finally started distributing supplies again in January 1931, some of the county-level Red Cross chapters refused to pass the relief goods along to rural people, whom they were hoping would move elsewhere.7
Those county-level Red Cross chapters were led by well-to-do business and professional people, members of what have been called Appalachia’s “local power elites.” In earlier generations, their forebears had gained control over much of Appalachia’s bounteous resources of coal and timber, but their wealth had been only in land. They had lacked enough money to finance railroads or the other infrastructure that large-scale mining and timbering required. So they had advertised Appalachia’s vast coal and timber resources to the world along with its “cheap labor”: the labor of their poorer mountain neighbors. They wanted subsistence farmers to become wage earners and thereby to start contributing (as consumers) to the local cash economy. Members of the local elites became agents, lawyers, and managers for outside corporations, which then financed the region’s large coalmines and timber operations, which did hire hundreds of thousands of mountain farmers, but at very low wages.8 The wages were so low that, to make ends meet, those new coalminers and lumberjacks had to continue raising at least a few farm animals and growing large vegetable gardens.9 And so they continued having lots of children to help do all the work.
That pattern of rural industrialization had grown by leaps and bounds in the late 1800s and early 1900s. By the 1920s, 70 percent of Appalachia’s coalminers and their families lived in company towns, but they still had to keep some livestock and raise large gardens to make ends meet. In fact, many coal companies passed out free vegetable seeds and awarded prizes for the best gardens. That helped the companies keep their wage scales low and their profits high.10 (Two-thirds of the cost of mining coal went into wages.)
When the Great Depression struck in 1929, and soon afterwards the Great Drought in 1930–31, members of the local elites felt that their counties contained “excess” population. They hoped that the dual blows of the Depression’s unemployment and the Drought’s crop failure would convince impoverished rural people to pack up and move somewhere else.11 President Herbert Hoover insisted that feeding hungry people should be handled by the Red Cross and local governments, but the national Red Cross was dragging its feet, hoping to force Hoover and Congress to tackle the huge relief job themselves. In Appalachia, national gridlock suited many of the local power elites just fine: They wanted to keep the amount of outside help so low that “excess” people would have to come out of their remote hollows and down off their remote ridges and leave the county.12 It would take the New Deal’s welfare blitz of federal money to convince such local leaders to let their desperate neighbors get some relief.
Meanwhile, the first three “Hoover years” of the Depression saw many desperate people accepting any kind of work they could find. Many West Virginia coalminers were unemployed and desperate by 1930 when Union Carbide corporation had its contractor begin drilling a cavernous three-mile tunnel through Gauley Mountain, under the famous Hawk’s Nest lookout point, to eliminate a U-turn in the New River. The river was to run through the tunnel, dropping 162 feet in altitude and gaining enough force to turn four turbines at Union Carbide’s new hydroelectric power plant.
Union Carbide knew that Gauley Mountain was up to 99 percent silica; it used the tunnel’s rock cuttings to make a valuable steel alloy called ferrosilicon. But it is unclear whether Union Carbide officials knew of the danger of silicosis. When tunnel workers became too weak to work, they were evicted from company housing and generally left the area. Although the tunnel took a year and a half to finish, the average worker stayed on the job less than sixteen weeks. Besides local coalminers who were hired, many African Americans from the Deep South were brought in. The town of Gauley Bridge became known as the town of the living dead. Union Carbide and its subcontractor denied all responsibility for the disaster, but more than five hundred tunnel workers (or their survivors) eventually filed lawsuits against them, resulting in almost no compensation. The most careful study of the tragedy estimates that out of 1,213 men who worked inside the tunnel for more than two months, 764 had died of silicosis or other lung ailments by 1938. It is certain that at least 400 tunnel workers died because of their participation and that no more than 2,000 did so.13
Before Herbert Hoover was defeated by Franklin D. Roosevelt in the November 1932 election, an array of responses to the Depression had proliferated. In West Virginia’s Lincoln County, for example, local farmers organized themselves into an informal cooperative to plow their land and harvest their crops.14 Throughout the region, handicraft businesses were expanding. By 1933, about 15,000 mountain people were copying craft patterns by hand at home in return for low piecework wages.15
A lot of those craft items were inauthentic, but middle-class consumers all over the United States wanted to acquire quilts, baskets, and other craft items handmade by rural Appalachian whites, and those middle-class consumers didn’t know (or maybe care) that the craft patterns had often been designed in places such as New York City.16 Samples of such craft work were avidly collected by museums, especially by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.17 New Deal officials saw the possibilities in such handicraft businesses. First the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), then the Department of Agriculture, and finally the Works Progress Administration (WPA) started funding handicraft cooperatives.18
Crafts weren’t the only old-time tradition that the Depression helped to revive. “Community” also became a 1930s buzzword. The stock market had hardly crashed before back-to-the-land groups started launching co-op communities where “stranded” coalminers and “redundant” farmers could pool their small-scale agricultural efforts and start small manufacturing co-ops. Both President Roosevelt and his wife, Eleanor, had long favored that response to hard times, and the government created at least ninety-nine coop communities (all of which were liquidated by Congress after the New Deal ended). Six of those government-created co-op communities were in Appalachia, including Eleanor Roosevelt’s favorite, Arthurdale in northern West Virginia.19
But the New Deal didn’t just tinker with handicrafts and co-op communities. Mainly it tried to revive the U.S. economy by making major agricultural and industrial adjustments that changed the lives of millions of people. It also provided welfare to millions of people, including many Appalachian farm families and coalminers’ families. The vast scale of those programs immensely boosted the morale of the American people.
Surpluses of the main U.S. farm products had been piling up in storage bins since the early 1920s, and the New Deal used its Agricultural Adjustment Administration to try to limit the output of those products, for if their supply went down, then their prices would go up, enabling many farm families to make a living again. Eight products were to be reduced, and f
arms in Appalachia produced major amounts of five of them: corn, hogs, and milk were produced all over the region, tobacco was produced in central Appalachia, and cotton was produced in far southern Appalachia. Corn and hogs were linked together in a single unified program, and large-scale farmers gained disproportionate benefits from that program. Appalachia received short shrift simply because it had few large-scale farms. In the cases of tobacco and cotton, small-scale farmers usually received equal benefits if they owned their own farms. However, sharecroppers and other types of tenants were no longer allowed to grow tobacco or cotton unless their landlords let them, nor did they share in the cash recompense (for not growing those crops) unless their landlords let them.20
Naturally, consumer prices then went up. Consumers had to pay more to eat. But under the New Deal’s industrial adjustments, their wages likewise were supposed to go up. However, many consumers had no wages. They were usually eligible for welfare, and when the government passed out welfare money it became purchasing power. Fortunately, that new purchasing power caused almost no inflation (because the supply of goods was still so much larger than demand for goods). But President Roosevelt wanted inflation because he thought his overall recovery plan needed inflation. Many powerful interest groups also wanted it—not just farmers but other debtors, including homeowners with mortgages. Inflation would make it easier to pay debts. Even some businesspeople who were in debt wanted inflation, but of course bankers did not want it because it made money worth less.21
The government soon found a way to bring inflation about. Inflation was one of the explicit goals of the National Recovery Administration (NRA), and that agency’s “codes of fair competition” inflated U.S. prices an average of 14 percent a year for the next two years. Unfortunately, that inflation offset the benefit of simultaneously “pump-priming” the economy with new money. Without the NRA and its “codes of fair competition,” the United States might have recovered from the Depression by 1936, as most of Europe did. But NRA and its codes retarded the growth of the United States’ real gross national product by about 8 percent a year.22
In Appalachia, meanwhile, the NRA also played a more positive role: It established workers’ absolute right to join labor unions and the right of unions to represent workers for purposes of collective bargaining. Those two new rights prompted John L. Lewis and his United Mine Workers (UMW) to blitz the region’s bloodied coalfields with an organizing campaign. The antiunion terrorism that had long been imposed by coal companies broke down in the spring of 1933 as tens of thousands of miners showed up at meetings and joined the UMW. That allowed the UMW to gain high wages for mountain miners in its September 1933 Appalachian Agreement with major coal companies, and it also gave the NRA the leverage to mandate high wages in its “code of fair competition” for bituminous coalmining.
But the coal companies still had an ace up their sleeves: mechanization. By mechanizing the underground loading of coal into mine cars, the companies could reduce their need for miners by as much as 40 percent. Most of the companies waited a bit, and in June 1935 they rejoiced when the Supreme Court declared NRA to be unconstitutional. But when Congress then passed the Wagner Act (the National Labor Relations Act), the coal companies rapidly mechanized, leaving thousands of coal-shoveling miners without jobs as the companies acquired mobile conveyor belt coal-loading machines. In West Virginia, only 2 percent of the output was loaded by machines in 1935, but by 1938 that had gone up to 21 percent.23 Those coal-loading machines, in turn, led to much higher rates of black lung disease among the remaining coalminers, but the New Deal ignored that. Not until 1969 did the government even acknowledge the existence of black lung disease, after many thousands of miners had already died from its slow suffocation.
Because NRA had undermined the U.S. economy’s recovery, the New Deal was in trouble by 1935. So President Roosevelt launched a much larger welfare program called the Works Progress Administration. Today WPA would be called a “workfare” program, but unlike today’s workfare participants,WPA workers were direct government employees. WPA soon became a competitor to private enterprise, especially in Appalachia and the South, where WPA’s wage scale (40 cents an hour) stood far higher than many private companies could afford to pay. That competition from WPA helped prevent U.S. economic recovery until World War II started.24
The New Deal’s agencies and programs numbered far too many to all be mentioned here. Only one major agency made its headquarters inside the region: the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), based in Knoxville, Tennessee. To organize TVA, Roosevelt chose a truly great American, Arthur E. Morgan. Morgan was the nation’s leading hydraulic engineer and its most experimental college president. President Roosevelt wanted TVA not just to build dams and provide cheap hydroelectric power but also to help the Tennessee Valley in any other way possible.
The TVA touched off some controversies that still are not settled today, but in the process it racked up several accomplishments. It pioneered the kind of electric power co-ops that the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) soon used to reach most of America’s farms with cheap electricity.
TVA also channeled and dammed the Tennessee River until it was navigable from Knoxville downstream to the Ohio River at Paducah, Kentucky. And it helped convince Appalachia’s farmers to quit growing corn on their eroding hillsides by providing them with bags of phosphate almost free of charge. Phosphate acts like lime to reduce soil acidity, and that is all it took to make hay and pasture flourish on Appalachia’s soils.25
But Arthur Morgan’s dreams went beyond that. To start repairing the damage that clearcutting had inflicted on the mountains, he started a large nursery for a forest replanting program. He emphasized species of trees that would provide fodder for wild game and also for livestock, especially hickories, walnuts, mulberries, papaws, Asian chestnuts, and Asian persimmons.26 But Morgan lasted only five years at the helm of TVA, and most of his vision for a self-sufficient Appalachia was nipped in the bud, including his vision for sustainable forestry.27
Unfortunately, the socioeconomic transformation that TVA was accelerating in East Tennessee did not concern the other two directors of TVA. One of them, the brash young lawyer David Lilienthal, just wanted TVA to produce and distribute cheap kilowatt-hours. “I don’t have much faith in ‘uplift,’” he liked to say.28
Meanwhile, one year before Morgan arrived in East Tennessee with his assignment to organize TVA, a new Highlander Folk School had opened its doors there and had immediately found itself embroiled in the same kind of questions. The letterhead on Highlander’s stationery announced two goals that turned out to be mutually contradictory. One of the goals was “to conserve and enrich the indigenous cultural values of the mountains,” and the other was “to educate rural and industrial leaders for a new social order.”29
During the Depression, Highlander focused on labor union organizing. Highlander wanted a “new social order” that treated wage workers with respect and paid them good wages. But meanwhile, “the indigenous cultural values of the mountains” were being preserved by the lack of cash—by Appalachia’s countless networks for exchanging economic favors in rural neighborhoods. Trying to sustain traditional cultural values while putting cash in rural people’s pockets was like trying to make “authentic mountain crafts” for New York City catalog companies.
Subsistence farmers were living by the cultural values of their local cashless economic networks because they had to. With their household cash incomes often below $100 a year, they lacked purchasing power and got what they needed by exchanging favors with their neighbors and kin. No agreements were usually involved. It was all voluntary and all very local. Each network of voluntary reciprocity guided and to some extent coerced the behavior of its participants, but it could do so only in the absence of cash.30 When people received cash (maybe from a timber or coal job or a TVA or WPA job), the goods and services they could buy with that cash reduced their need for favors from other people.31
Thus, when
the New Deal started giving cash to subsistence farmers, their local community started losing its influence over them, and many of them had to start learning self-discipline the hard way. (Arthur Morgan foresaw this, and in one of his speeches about Appalachia’s young people he said, “The waste of personality which will accompany the increase of [cash] income, may be very great.”)32
Overall, without intending to do so, the New Deal’s distribution of money in rural Appalachia started a reversal in the region’s economic relationship with the rest of the United States. Before the New Deal, Appalachia had been on the giving end of that relationship, and the rest of the United States had been on the receiving end. With its large families supported directly from the land, Appalachia had contributed to America’s cheap labor. The United States lost that cheap labor—and thereby lost the competitive edge that had sustained the strength of the U.S. national economy—because of the New Deal’s unspoken agenda, namely, the belief that to revive the U.S. economy, more of it had to be monetized. Here is how the governor of West Virginia put it after he returned from consultations in Washington, D.C., in the summer of 1933:
The National Recovery Administration . . . [has] so encouraged the business people of this country that they are setting about their affairs with renewed energy. . . . The manufacturer, with his employees working full-time, is engaged in producing commodities and articles for the use of the people of this country. Wholesale places are stocked with the manufacturer’s goods. Retail places are ready for the goods to be placed upon their shelves to be sold to the people of this country. There must be placed within the reach of the people in the rural sections of our country purchasing power before this problem will be solved, and that is the situation with which the Federal Government is wrestling.33
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