High Mountains Rising

by Richard A. Straw

  3. Mary Lee Daugherty makes this point about hope-infused, situational realism in her excellent article “Serpent-Handling as Sacrament,” Theology Today 33:3 (Oct. 1976): 232–43.

  4. See this book’s list of suggested reading for Howard Dorgan’s groundbreaking, field-based books on contemporary Old Time Baptists in Appalachia.

  5. John Wallhausser’s sensitive article on Kentucky’s Old Regular Baptists was among the first written from a religious studies perspective: “I Can Almost See Heaven from Here,” Katallagete 8:2 (Spring 1983): 2–10. Melanie L. Sovine’s “A Sweet Hope in My Breast: Belief and Ritual in the Primitive Baptist Church” (master’s thesis, University of Georgia, 1978) is exceptionally good for understanding the theology of Calvinism as many of Appalachia’s contemporary Old Time Baptists practice it. By extension, Sovine’s thesis also helps us to see how Old Time Baptists’ understanding of Calvinism has influenced much of the theology of Appalachia’s Holiness people.

  6. Becky Simpson (1936– ), founder of Cranks Creek Survival Center, a self-help organization in eastern Kentucky’s Harlan County, distinguishes between religion and salvation, framed in this understanding of faith, and comments perceptively on the helping stance of today’s “big churches,” which she says are defined as much by their greed as by the need they seek to meet. See Deborah Vansau McCauley and Laura E. Porter (with Patricia Parker Brunner; photographs by Warren E. Brunner), Mountain Holiness: A Photographic Narrative (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003), 78, 79.

  7. Brother Coy Miser (1918–92), a Holiness preacher and coalminer from Pennington Gap in southwest Virginia, expresses such a worldview in explaining how God lives “in the hearts of the people.” “In the mountains in particular,” he notes, “about all the churches and about all the preachers abut the heart.” See Deborah Vansau McCauley, Appalachian Mountain Religion: A History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 335–36.

  8. We find the earliest direct statement of this conflict between emerging mountain religious cultures and the developing Protestant national culture in John F. Scher-merhorn and Samuel J. Mills, A Correct View of That Part of the United States Which Lies West of the Allegany Mountains, with Regard to Religion and Morals (Hartford, Conn.: Peter B. Gleason, 1814); facsimile reprint in To Win the West: Missionary Viewpoints, 1814–1815, ed. Edwin S. Gaustad (New York: Arno Press, 1972), 1–52. At that time Appalachia was “the West” (ca. 1810s), “Southwest” (ca. 1850s), or “Old Southwest” (late 1800s), reaching beyond the Alleghenies but no farther than the Mississippi River. Today these three terms designate parts of the Southwestern continental United States, highlighting Native American and early Spanish regional cultures.

  9. Raise the Dead (Waltham, Mass.: James Rutenbeck, 1998) is an important and beautiful film study about Appalachia’s independent Holiness tradition. The film features H. Richard Hall, an old-time tent evangelist from Cleveland, Tennessee, who has traveled for more than fifty years holding revivals throughout Appalachia. It also features Sister Eula Shelton of War, West Virginia, in the coalmining county of McDowell. Sister Shelton is a woman in her seventies who founded and supports with three other women the Jesus Church, which she pastors and in which she preaches in a storefront building. See “Study Guide for the Documentary Film,” .

  10. Becky Simpson of Harlan County in Kentucky states, “I can look at the mountains and that’s something that God made and it’s like love to me” (quoted in McCauley and Porter, Mountain Holiness, 78).

  11. See “Two Men of God: The Praying Rock, Watchman on the Wall,” in Foxfire 9: General Stores, the Jud Nelson Wagon, a Praying Rock, a Catawba Indian Potter— and Haint Tales, Quilting, Home Cures, and Log Cabins Revisited, ed. Eliot Wigginton and Margie Bennett (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1986), 321–45, plates 347–69. The first man of God featured in this excellent oral history and extensive photo study is Brother Charlie Bry Phillips (d. 1975), a Missionary Baptist preacher from Rabun County, Georgia, whose “praying rock” this chapter highlights. The second is Brother Harrison Mayes (1898–1986) of Middlesboro, Kentucky, an independent Holiness coalminer famous for his worldwide sign ministry, which he began in 1918. Brother Mayes is also featured in Eleanor Dickinson and Barbara Benziger, Revival! (New York: Harper and Row, 1974).

  12. Although conclusions about Scotch-Irish sacramental revivalism and their applications to the communal conversion experience and plain-folk camp meeting religion on the Appalachian frontier require much digging in these dense social histories, the essentials are found in Marilyn J. Westerkamp, Triumph of the Laity: Scots-Irish Piety and the Great Awakening, 1625–1760 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Leigh Eric Schmidt, Holy Fairs: Scottish Communions and American Revivals in the Early Modern Period (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989); and Paul K. Conkin, Cane Ridge: America’s Pentecost (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990).

  13. Rhys Isaacs’s Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982) and J. Stephen Kroll-Smith’s “In Search of Status Power: The Baptist Revival in Colonial Virginia, 1760–1776” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1982) help to provide the tools for reaching the conclusions that follow in this paragraph.

  14. The foundational study by Dickson D. Bruce Jr. must be taken into account: And They All Sang Hallelujah: Plain-Folk Camp-Meeting Religion, 1800–1845 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1974). For a dense but good social history, see Ellen Eslinger, Citizens of Zion: The Social Origins of Camp Meeting Revivalism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999).

  15. Henry D. Shapiro goes into some depth about the influences of home missionaries on popular perceptions in Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978). David E. Whisnant’s Modernizing the Mountaineer: People, Power, and Planning in Appalachia (Boone, N.C.: Appalachian Consortium Press, 1980) is also required reading for understanding mountain people’s “alienation and cultural stripping” (p. ix) through “missionary, planning, and development efforts” (p. xvi).

  16. Loyal Jones’s important essay explores the conflict: “Old-Time Baptists and Mainline Christianity,” in An Appalachian Symposium: Essays in Honor of Cratis D. Williams, ed. J. W. Williamson (Boone, N.C.: Appalachian State University Press, 1977), 120–30.

  17. The first look at coal camps and miners on the subject of religion is by William John Bryant Livingston, “Coal Miners and Religion: A Study of Logan County” (Th.D. diss., Union Theological Seminary, Richmond, Va., 1951). An early important investigation of millworkers and religion located in the southern Piedmont of North Carolina is Liston Pope, Millhands and Preachers: A Study of Gastonia (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1942). John R. Earle, Dean D. Knudsen, and Donald W. Shriver Jr. provide follow-up research in Spindles and Spires: A Re-study of Religion and Social Change in Gastonia (Atlanta, Ga.: John Knox Press, 1976).

  18. Catherine L. Albanese offers this pathbreaking recognition of Appalachian mountain religion’s regional character in “Regional Religion: A Case Study of Religion in Appalachia,” chapter 10 in her book America: Religions and Religion, 3d ed. (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1998), 324–49. An early and indispensable source is John C. Campbell, “VIII. The Growth of Denominationalism in the Highlands” and “IX. The Religious Life of the Rural Highlands,” both in his book The Southern Highlander and His Homeland (1921; reprint, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1969), 152–75, 176–94.

  19. Robert T. Handy’s landmark book A Christian America: Protestant Hopes and Historical Realities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971) provides the conceptual framework for understanding national denominational trends that we may apply to denominational likenesses and differences with religious life in Appalachia and how these trends affected denominations’ interaction with Appalachia in the nineteenth and twentieth cent
uries.

  20. Jeff Todd Titon’s Powerhouse for God: Speech, Chant, and Song in an Appalachian Baptist Church (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988) is a good, comprehensive model of an interpretive investigation into a local church community’s oral culture.

  21. Dickinson and Benziger’s Revival! is the first and only work on mountain religion to embody this approach. Revival! embraces oral literature, but it especially emphasizes material culture not only through photographs of mountain religion’s art and artifacts but also through Dickinson’s own line drawings of people at worship services.

  22. Loyal Jones’s book Faith and Meaning in the Southern Uplands (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), winner of the W. D. Weatherford Award, has taken the route of oral history and oral literature in a revealing manner in which it has not previously been developed.

  23. Melanie L. Sovine’s “Studying Religious Belief Systems in Their Social Historical Context,” in Appalachia and America: Autonomy and Regional Dependence, ed. Allen Batteau (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983), 48–67, provides a helpful interpretation that is still timely.

  24. Whitney R. Cross’s landmark social history The Burned-over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800–1850 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1950) was the first of its kind in American religious studies.

  25. About this era, see especially Melanie L. Sovine’s insightful chapter “Traditionalism, Antimissionism, and the Primitive Baptist Religion,” in Reshaping the Image of Appalachia, ed. Loyal Jones (Berea, Ky.: Appalachian Center, Berea College, 1986), 32–44.

  14

  Modernization, 1940–2000

  Ronald D Eller

  World War II marked an important watershed for Appalachia. The outbreak of fighting in Europe temporarily eased the distress of many mountain families left struggling by the collapse of the industrial era a decade before. As early as 1938, coal production began to recover slowly as operators reorganized their mines in anticipation of wartime markets. With the entry of the United States into the conflict itself, demand for mountain labor and natural resources rose once again. The expansion of war industries stimulated interest in Appalachian coal and timber, and the new aircraft plants, steel mills, ordinance factories, and uniform manufacturers clamored for additional workers.

  The effect of the war was to revive hope for a generation of mountain young people, a generation that had known only poverty and hard times. In rural areas farm prices recovered, and workers began to return to the mines and mills, lessening the pressure on overstressed land. Individuals and entire families migrated to defense jobs outside the mountains, and thousands of young men and women joined the armed forces. Appalachian people had always been quick to serve their country during war, and enlistment rates in the region were among the highest in the nation.1

  However, the wartime boom did little to alter deep-rooted flaws in the mountain economy. A pattern of growth without development had settled on the region earlier in the century. The expansion of extractive and primary industries generated low-wage jobs in the mines and mills, but that growth had come without the development of schools, roads, small businesses, and other internal capacities that might sustain prosperity. Most of Appalachia’s mineral and timber resources continued to be owned by outside corporations and fell to the control of nonresident interests. The value added from their extraction remained largely untaxed for local benefit. Moreover, a single-industry economy frustrated the diversification of local enterprises and tied most mountain communities to the vagaries of national and increasingly international markets. Local political leaders, many of whom benefited economically from the outside interests, continued to defend the status quo. As the economy stagnated, the gap between rural Appalachia and the rest of the country grew.

  The temporary rise in the demand for labor during World War II failed to change this pattern, and despite a short-lived boom in coal prices after the war, hard times again returned to the hills. Ironically, the same forces of technology and modernization that transformed the rest of the nation in the years after World War II, bringing jobs and new consumer goods, worked against the postwar recovery of Appalachia. The introduction of fertilizers, pesticides, tractors, and other mechanized equipment, for example, revolutionized agricultural production. Even before the war, the modernization of agriculture began to replace human labor on American farms, causing thousands of small land owners and tenant farmers across the South to abandon their farms and move to the manufacturing centers of the Midwest. In Appalachia, the war increased this movement off of the land. As families migrated to jobs in the Midwest or to nearby urban communities on the fringe of the region, the population of rural mountain counties declined proportionately.2

  The application of new technology to coalmining also displaced thousands of miners and their families in the 1940s and 1950s. Wartime demand for coal and generous government subsidies encouraged many larger coal companies to introduce automatic loading and (later) undercutting machines into the mines, effectively bringing an end to the labor-intensive hand loading era of the American coal industry. Even the smaller “truck mines” that sprang up by the hundreds during the war gradually turned to mechanization to compete in the volatile postwar market. Tapping smaller seams of coal on secondary ridges and taking advantage of the improved roads in order to sell coal on the “spot” market, the predominantly nonunion truck mines thrived on cheap labor and quick delivery of coal to new markets. When John L. Lewis’s United Mine Workers union established a Health and Retirement Fund in 1946 and launched a series of annual strikes that increased levies on coal production to finance the fund, larger union mines turned increasingly to mechanization to reduce labor costs and compete with the smaller truck mines. The introduction of the continuous miner in 1948 and the growth of surface mining in the 1950s eventually sealed the fate of thousands of workers. By 1960 the number of miners in Appalachia was less than half what it was during World War II, and that number continued to decline through the end of the century.3

  The combination of new technologies and declining coal prices in the early 1950s produced widespread layoffs and unemployment throughout the coalfields, just as large numbers of young people were entering the civilian workforce. For the generation of the 1940s, the wartime hopes for recovery quickly faded into frustration and disappointment. Young men and women from the mountains, who had grown up in the Depression and had been scattered across the globe by the war, returned home confident of their ability to build a better life for their children. They had experienced modern housing, improved health care, and steady wages, and they had seen the comparative wealth of other parts of the country. They expected to share in the postwar prosperity that was sweeping Middle America, but increasingly they found there was no need for their labor at home, and the schools, roads, and public services in their local communities were neglected and poor. Determined to shape a brighter future, many turned to opportunities outside the region to fulfill their dreams. Over the next two decades, the stream of young people that poured from the mountains during the war became a flood of displaced families.

  By the mid-1950s conditions throughout Appalachia had begun to draw the attention of journalists, social critics, and state policymakers. As early as 1951 the Council of the Southern Mountains, an association of social workers and academics located in Berea, Kentucky, called for the creation of an organization that would address the problems of Appalachia by uniting the mountain counties of eight southern states and representing their concerns in Congress.4 Several states, including Georgia, Maryland, and North Carolina, launched new initiatives to encourage areawide planning in their mountain counties, and in other Appalachian states economic development agencies and private civic organizations adopted special programs to recruit industries and provide emergency relief.

  In Kentucky, where conditions were among the worst in the region, the state Board of Agricultural and Industrial Developm
ent commissioned a study in 1956 to identify the potential for industrial growth in the depressed east Kentucky coalfields. In that same year, Berea College president Willis Weatherford convened an interdenominational meeting of church workers to discuss collective action to aid the region’s poor and unemployed, and the state Jaycees launched an initiative aimed at involving local civic clubs in community development work. Under the direction of John Whisman, a young Jaycees president from eastern Kentucky, community leaders formed the Eastern Kentucky Regional Development Council, an organization designed to coordinate public and private relief efforts.5

  These initiatives came together the following spring when disastrous floods struck eastern Kentucky. Responding to local pressure, the acting governor transformed the East Kentucky Development Council into a permanent state commission, charging it with the coordination of flood relief and the development of a long-range strategic plan for the area. After federal relief efforts proved inadequate to address the larger employment and infrastructure needs of the mountain counties, the commission hired John Whisman as its executive director. In 1958 Whisman launched a series of public meetings designed to recommend legislation that would promote economic development and organize local governments for developmental planning.

  Whisman and many leaders of the East Kentucky Development Commission hoped to bring their World War II military experiences to bear on the problems facing eastern Kentucky. They were confident that they could combine public resources and modern ideas of strategic planning into a kind of “Marshall Plan” for the development of Appalachia. This plan would encourage improvements in both physical infrastructure (roads, water systems, and new industrial sites) and human capacity (education, job training, housing, and health care) in a comprehensive strategy of community development that would make up for the deficiencies they believed the region had suffered because of its isolation and single-industry economy. Program 60, as the plan was called, also recommended the creation of a series of area development districts to facilitate local planning and called for the establishment of a multistate Appalachian Development Authority to coordinate regional efforts and to lobby Congress for special federal assistance. When Bert Combs, a young eastern Kentucky lawyer running for governor, endorsed the plan, Program 60 became the foundation for regionwide efforts to garner federal aid for Appalachia in the early 1960s.6