And the government did solve that problem, creating worse problems in the process. The government did place purchasing power “within the reach of the people in the rural sections of our country” even if they had never had purchasing power before. In West Virginia’s Lincoln County, 84 percent of families were receiving welfare as of July 1933.34
Over the winter of 1933–34, many of those families had someone working for the Civil Works Administration (CWA) for forty-five cents an hour, with some at $1.10 an hour. CWA created work projects for only five and a half months, but July 1934 again found a majority of Lincoln County’s families back on nonwork welfare, with the state welfare office explaining that the county welfare office, after CWA ended, had “reinstated [hundreds of families] who were not strictly eligible for relief.”35 The state welfare head explained to Harry Hopkins (the national welfare head) that local relief workers in “some counties have not investigated in six months. They keep sending checks week after week to the same people.”36
And so it continued year after year. A social worker in eastern Kentucky reported in 1935 that “the recipients think that. . . they should all share equally in the relief funds.” But ominously she also reported that “most employers will not hire persons who have been on relief for extended periods.”37
Yes, purchasing power was indeed being put within the reach of rural people, and after having been denied it during the Great Drought, when they really needed it, many of them were willing to accept it during the Depression even if they did not need it. As a rural storekeeper in West Virginia’s Lincoln County put it, “It was the WPA that started farming on its downhill path all around here. The WPA paid farmers to work on the roads, and work on this and that, till they started counting on that money and neglecting their land.”38
After the New Deal started, the number of farms in central Appalachia that saw enough farming for the Census to count them as farms fell. Before the New Deal, from 1929 to 1934, that number had risen 35 percent. But then from 1934 to 1939 it fell back down again by 5.6 percent.39 Welfare was replacing subsistence farming.
Then World War II broke out. Germany invaded Poland, and England and France honored their commitment to Poland by declaring war on Germany. An old-timer from Lincoln County tells what happened then: “People, I was raised in this country during the Depression. . . . In 1940 me and my brother bought an old truck—the war broke out—we moved people out of Lincoln County, out of these hills, by the truckloads—to Logan [County] to the mines, to Cabell County to industry.”40 People whom the New Deal had habituated to cash income left their mountain farms in droves when World War II began creating an acute labor shortage in the mainstream economy (and when welfare was simultaneously being cut off). From 1940 to 1960, the net migration away from Appalachia was 1.7 million people.41
In a nutshell, the more Appalachia’s people had earlier contributed to the economy of the United States by growing much of their own food (even in coal towns) and thereby providing abundant and cheap labor, the more they had to pay later, after 1940, by having to migrate away from home.
Some readers may think of leaving behind a rural home as progress, but the future is unpredictable. The more commercialized our sources of livelihood are and the more specialized our skills are, the worse we will probably fare in any future economic collapse.42
NOTES
1. Patricia D. Beaver, Rural Community in the Appalachian South (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986), chap. 5; Paul Salstrom, “Neonatives: Back to the Land in Appalachia’s 1970s,” Appalachian Journal 30:4 (Summer 2003), 308–323.
2. William Strauss and Neil Howe, Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584–2069 (New York: William Morrow, 1991), 27–30, 261–316, 384–89.
3. “Regional Distribution and Description of Self-Sufficing Farms,” n.d., Bureau of Agricultural Economics records (hereafter BAE records), RG 83, National Archives, Washington, D.C.; General Correspondence, 1923–1946 (entry 19), 1941–1946, box 664, folder: “Study—Subsistence Homesteads.” As to Appalachia comprising only 3 percent of the United States, note that the BAE’s definition of Appalachia included only 205 counties.
4. U.S. Census of 1930, Agriculture, vol. 4 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1932), 873. Life on a typical Appalachian subsistence farm about 1930 is described in detail by James Orville Hill, “The Hill Farm: Making a Living from Mountain Land,” Goldenseal 15:2 (Summer 1989): 18–30.
5. U.S. Census of Agriculture: 1935, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1936), part 2, county table 1, 428–32, 558–67, 594–601. The census-takers were supposed to count as a “farm” one or more tracts of land that were farmed as a single economic unit and that either were at least three acres in size or else produced at least $250 worth of agricultural products in the pre-census year. U.S. Census of 1930, Agriculture, 1:1. That “$250 worth of agricultural products” would be worth about $3,000 today.
6. Gillian Mace Berman, Melissa Conley, and Barbara J. Howe, The Monongahela National Forest, 1915–1990 (Morgantown: West Virginia University, Public History Program, Mar. 1992), 53–54; Harvey O. Van Horn, Morgantown, W.Va., conversation with the author, May 25, 1991.
7. Nan Elizabeth Woodruff, As Rare as Rain: Federal Relief in the Great Southern Drought of 1930–31 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), chap. 8.
8. Robert S. Weise, Grasping at Independence: Debt, Male Authority, and Mineral Rights in Appalachian Kentucky, 1850–1915 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2001), chaps. 8–9.
9. David Alan Corbin, Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields: Southern West Virginia Miners, 1880–1922 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 33–35, 123–24; Ronald L. Lewis, Transforming the Appalachian Countryside: Railroads, Deforestation, and Social Change in West Virginia, 1880–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), chap. 9.
10. The Black Diamond (coal industry journal) 60:25 (June 22 1918): 554. In the early 1900s, home gardens provided an estimated 10 to 20 percent of West Virginia miners’ total income. Paul Salstrom, Appalachia’s Path to Dependency: Rethinking a Region’s Economic History, 1730–1940 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994), 63.
11. Woodruff, As Rare as Rain, x, 140, 151–55.
12. Ibid., x, 140, and chaps. 5 and 8.
13. Martin Cherniack, The Hawk’s Nest Incident: America’s Worst Industrial Disaster (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986), 28, 33, 39, 41, 46, 73, 92, 98, 104, 106–8, 150–70; “Editorial: Lessons Learned Hard and Long Shouldn’t Be Forgotten,” Engineering News-Record Vol. 245, no. 16 (Nov. 2000), p. 96.
14. Charles McGhee, “Our Farmers Return to Pioneer Acts in Fighting Depression,” The Lincoln [County] Republican, May 25, 1933, p. 1.
15. Jane S. Becker, Selling Tradition: Appalachia and the Construction of an American Folk, 1930–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 127. Such home-based work continues today throughout the mountains. It is analyzed economically by Ann M. Oberhauser, Amy Pratt, and Anne-Marie Turnage, “Unraveling Appalachia’s Rural Economy: The Case of a Flexible Manufacturing Network,” Journal of Appalachian Studies 7:1 (Spring 2001): 19–45.
16. Becker, Selling Tradition, 13, 143–44, chap. 7, and epilogue.
17. A new twist was added later (in 1992) when the Smithsonian Institution sold the rights to reproduce its “American folk quilts” to an import company, which had the quilts mass-produced by cheap labor in China and marketed back in the United States. See ibid., 1.
18. Ibid., chap. 4.
19. Paul K. Conkin, Tomorrow a New World: The New Deal’s Community Program (1959; reprint, New York: De Capo Press, 1976). On Eastern Kentucky’s Sublimity Farms co-op community, see George T. Blakey, Hard Times and New Deal in Kentucky, 1929–1939 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986), 127–29.
20. David B. Danbom, Born in the Country: A History of Rural America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), ch
ap. 10; Salstrom, Appalachia’s Path to Dependency, 98–106.
21. Rexford G. Tugwell, Roosevelt’s Revolution: The First Year—A Personal Perspective (New York: Macmillan, 1977), 61–63, 294–95; Arthur Dahlberg, When Capital Goes on Strike: How to Speed Up Spending (New York: Harper and Bros., 1938), 109–12; Sidney Baldwin, Poverty and Politics: The Rise and Decline of the Farm Security Administration (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 48–53.
22. Michael M. Weinstein, Recovery and Redistribution under the NIRA (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1980), 273–79; Weinstein, “Some Macroeconomic Impacts of the National Industrial Recovery Act, 1933–1935,” in The Great Depression Revisited, ed. Karl Brunner (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), 268–72.
23. Willard E. Hotchkiss, F. G. Tryon, and Charlotte K. Warner, Mechanization, Employment, and Output per Man in Bituminous Coal Mining, Report No. E-9, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: WPA National Research Project, Aug. 1939), 1: presentation page, xxvi, 12; Jerry Bruce Thomas, An Appalachian New Deal: West Virginia in the Great Depression (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 99.
24. Paul Salstrom, “Appalachia’s Path to Welfare Dependency, 1840–1940,” (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 1988), 296–305; Douglas Carl Abrams, Conservative Constraints: North Carolina and the New Deal (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992), 128–29. By 1938, New Deal agencies had gone far toward creating their own autonomous economy separate from private enterprise. See A. J. Thomas (a WPA lawyer) to David K. Niles (WPA assistant administrator), Mar. 22, 1938, David K. Niles Papers, box 20, folder 129, Harry S. Truman Presidential Library, Independence, Mo.
25. Vernon W. Ruttan, “The TVA and Regional Development,” in TVA: Fifty Years of Grass-Roots Bureaucracy, ed. Edwin C. Hargrove and Paul K. Conkin (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 155–57.
26. Arthur E. Morgan, The Making of the TVA (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1974), 62–63.
27. What happened in the case of forestry was revealed by the TVA’s chief forester in Edward C. M. Richards, “The Future of TVA Forestry,” Journal of Forestry 36 (1938): 643–52.
28. Quoted in Thomas K. McCraw, Morgan vs. Lilienthal: The Feud within the TVA (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1970), 65.
29. Quoted in John M. Glen, Highlander: No Ordinary School, 2d ed. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996), 27.
30. See John Lozier and Ronald Althouse, “Social Enforcement of Behavior toward Elders in an Appalachian Mountain Settlement,” The Gerontologist 14:1 (Feb. 1974): 69–80.
31. More about the implications of voluntary reciprocity as an economic system is in Salstrom, Appalachia’s Path to Dependency, chap. 3.
32. Arthur E. Morgan, “Some Suggestions for a Program to Promote Better Opportunities for Rural Young People Especially in the Southern Highlands,” n.d., p. 2, box III B3, Arthur E. Morgan Papers, Antioch College Library, Yellow Springs, Ohio.
33. H. G. Kump (gov. of West Virginia), “Address to a Regional Meeting of County Boards of Education,” Charleston, W.Va., July 21, 1933, in H. G. Kump, State Papers and Public Addresses . . . March 4, 1933-January 18, 1937 (Charleston, W.Va.: Jarrett Printing, n.d.), 170.
34. “West Virginia, July 1933: Counties Having Very High Percentage of Families on Relief Rolls,” in Federal Emergency Relief Administration records (hereafter cited as FERA records), RG 69, state files: West Virginia, box 312, special folder: Materials taken by Mr. Hopkins on his S.W. trip in August [1933], National Archives, Washington, D.C. Lincoln County was “60 percent agricultural,” meaning that 60 percent of its families lived on farms that had met, as of 1930, the census definition of a farm.
35. FERA records, state files: West Virginia, box 311, folder 400. The average amount of relief payment per household per month in Lincoln County (as of May 1935) was $9.66. See Monthly Bulletin on Relief Statistics 2:5 (May 1935), in box 312, folder 401. Today that $9.66 would be worth about $135.
36. William N. Beehler to Harry Hopkins, Apr. 4, 1934, FERA records, state files: West Virginia, box 312, folder 400. Two years later, Lincoln County’s welfare recipients were still so numerous (43 percent of households) that FERA did an in-house investigation, which attributed the high numbers to many Lincoln County natives having come home unemployed from coal and timber jobs elsewhere. See Thomas, Appalachian New Deal, 128.
37. Irene Conley, “Survey of the Rural Relief Situation for Johnson County, Kentucky,” Oct. 1935, pp. 3, 15; in BAE records, RG 83, Rural Relief Studies [entry 156], box 5, folder: “Johnson Co., Ky.”
38. Ray Gene Black (mgr., Black Brothers General Merchandise store, Myra, W.Va.), statement to author, June 1973. Similarly, a major 1935 newspaper investigation in Virginia found welfare money going to subsistence farm families who were no worse off than they had been before the Depression. The investigation found those families growing dependent on the government. See Ronald L. Heinemann, Depression and New Deal in Virginia: The Enduring Dominion (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), 83–84.
39. U.S. Census of 1940, Agriculture, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1942), part 3, county table 1, 220–24, and part 4, county table 1, 16–25, 168–75.
40. Jack Roy, statement at a public hearing held in Lincoln County by the West Virginia Department of Energy, June 28, 1988, regarding an application by Black Gold Coal Company and Mountain Black Diamond Coal Company to strip-mine at Six Mile Creek (p. 2).
41. James S. Brown and George A. Hillary Jr., “The Great Migration, 1940–1960,” in The Southern Appalachian Region: A Survey, ed. Thomas R. Ford (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1962), pp. 58–60 (tables).
42. John Craft Taylor, “Depression and New Deal in Pendleton: A History of a West Virginia County from the Great Crash to Pearl Harbor, 1929–1941” (Ph.D. diss., Pennsylvania State University, 1980), 844.
7
Migration
Phillip J. Obermiller
This chapter is a study of the streams of individuals and families moving out of the region now known as Appalachia. It does not describe how the area was initially populated by Native Americans, then by Europeans and Africans, because these topics have been examined in other chapters.1 Our interest here is not in migrants who became Appalachians but in Appalachians who became migrants.
It is appropriate to focus on Appalachian migration because of the distinctive composition and patterns in the movement of the region’s population. However, this approach does not justify the assumption that Appalachian migration is somehow unique. As we shall see, Appalachians who left or returned to the region were responding to the larger forces that influenced most internal migrants in America, such as economic and demographic pressures, social changes, new technology, and evolving national policies, to name a few.
Mountains are an abiding symbol of permanence, but in Appalachia that symbolism can be misleading because fluidity and movement have long been characteristics of the Appalachian population. Early accounts indicate that some Appalachian migration was simply a part of the opening of the American frontier: “Several large families have been traced . . . from the Atlantic seacoast in 1790, through North Carolina to Kentucky by 1820, and some were found in Indiana and Missouri in 1840, while by 1850, a few were located in Oregon and Washington. In 1870 another large group of these same people had settled in the Panhandle region of Texas.”2
These initial trans-Appalachian migration streams flowed through the region to the nation’s western frontier throughout the nineteenth century. Early settlers in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri and Arkansas came predominantly from migration out of the southern Appalachians between 1820 and 1840. After the Civil War a second wave of Appalachian migrants came to the Ozark-Ouachita range, a hilly region extending from southern Illinois across Missouri and into Arkansas and Oklahoma. From 1880 to 1890 eastern Kentucky and eastern Tennessee in particular contributed heavily to the population of the Ozarks.3
Step migration from the Southern mountains i
nto the Ozark-Ouachita area and then into central Texas in the mid-nineteenth century is well documented. High rates of natural increase and overcrowding in the mountains between 1845 and 1880 brought many Appalachian families south and west out of the mountains into the Texas hill country. The rural agricultural economy and hilly terrain of central Texas lured migrant families accustomed to a similar social and economic environment back in the mountains.4
Jobs in the timber industry, along with the availability of large tracts of timber through the Federal Homestead Act, attracted migrants from the Southern mountains north to Wisconsin and west to Washington and Oregon. Beginning in about 1880, mountaineers from the East began settling on Washington’s Cascade Range and in the Klamath Mountains of southern Oregon; these earlier migrants used a combination of jack boat and railroad to make their way west. The availability of direct rail connections caused this migration stream to flow even faster after 1900: “It was a profitable business to haul mountaineers to Cincinnati, from whence they could continue rapid transit through alien country of flat prairies to the wonder of Chicago, then across treeless plains and sage-covered mountains to a somewhat familiar and welcoming mountain country on the western Cascade slope.”5
The Appalachian population in the Cascades became so dense that residents of other parts of the Northwest called it “Little Kentucky.” In some locales an estimated 70 percent of the population came from the mountains of Kentucky or Tennessee. Kinship networks substituted for formal social organizations among the migrants, with extended families ranging in size from 50 to 250. The Appalachian migrants in the Northwest even organized politically; in one instance a group of migrants unsuccessfully tried to secede from the local government and form their own county.6
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