Uneven Ground
Page 9
The Area Redevelopment Act authorized the creation of the Area Redevelopment Administration (ARA) in the Department of Commerce and the expenditure of $394 million over a four-year period. Most of the funds were to provide low-interest industrial loans, grants to local governments for public facilities needed to attract businesses, and subsistence for worker training programs. Even ARA officials acknowledged that the act “essentially followed a ‘trickle down’ approach to poverty and unemployment, with most of the direct benefits going to businesses and not to unemployed people,” but Appalachian political leaders hoped that the legislation would lead to broader efforts to assist the region.15
The act became law on May 1, 1961, and a week later the Conference of Appalachian Governors met in Washington with President Kennedy and the director of the new ARA to coordinate regional development strategies with the agency. In response to the governors’ proposal to create an Appalachian commission, the president asked the ARA to establish a liaison with the governors to coordinate state and federal development strategies. The governors appointed a staff committee, chaired by Whisman, to work with the ARA liaison to channel recommendations to the agency. Later this informal arrangement became the federal interagency committee on the Appalachian region, but there were no special funds set aside for Appalachia, and the responsibility for drafting a comprehensive development plan for the region remained with the governors.16
Over the next two years, the Conference of Appalachian Governors (now called the Council of Appalachian Governors) continued to meet on a regular basis and to formulate proposals for an Appalachian highway program, water resource and forestry development, and education and job training programs, but the president proved unresponsive to the call for a state-federal Appalachian regional commission. Frustration also grew with the ARA and with the slow distribution of federal aid to distressed mountain communities. Not only was the ARA severely underfunded for its task, but fully one-third of the counties in the nation qualified for ARA benefits. Seventy-six percent of Appalachian counties qualified for the program, but the bulk of ARA resources flowed to private businesses located primarily in urban centers outside the region. Rural areas, like most of Appalachia, lacked the existing businesses and business prospects to make them eligible for assistance, and they lacked the professional staff necessary to prepare the overall economic development plans necessary for funding. Furthermore, ARA and other federal programs continued to require local matching funds that seriously depressed rural communities were unable to supply. ARA also provided no funds for education, health care, or other human resource development needs.17
Only West Virginia benefited significantly from ARA resources, and these were utilized primarily in the development of tourism projects. Over half of the ARA funds expended in Appalachia ($79 million) during its four-year existence went to the Mountain State, and much of that was allocated to the massive New River Gorge project designed to create a series of tourism attractions in Fayette and Raleigh counties. The bulk of business loans and grants were funneled to a handful of heavily industrialized valley counties in West Virginia and Pennsylvania. The Appalachian portions of three states (Maryland, North Carolina, and Ohio) received no public facilities dollars at all, while four other states (Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, and Georgia) received less than 7 percent of the funds. ARA job training programs were slow to get started, and the few training programs funded in Appalachia were not linked to specific business expansions. Many of the trainees had to be shipped out of the region to find jobs.18
By 1962 disappointment with the ARA was widespread in the mountains. Harry Caudill wrote that the ARA had been launched with “the most laudable intentions” but had “accomplished little beyond a few small loans for minor business enterprises.”19 The Louisville Courier-Journal complained that the agency’s efforts in eastern Kentucky were “as useless as oars on an airplane.”20 The annual report of the Eastern Kentucky Regional Planning Commission noted that ARA loans, grants, and training programs were “useful tools” but that these were “far less important” than the agency’s “potential function—inadequately used to date—in providing technical assistance and in coordinating federal programs.”21
The Appalachian governors and the CSM continued to lobby the president to create a separate Appalachian regional commission that could coordinate federal programs with the states and could administer supplemental and special federal benefits for regional development. Although the president’s attention turned to other domestic and foreign policy concerns in 1962, intellectual and political currents were converging rapidly on a mainstream assault on poverty as part of a new national agenda. Events in the mountains would place Appalachia at the center of that effort.
Following the West Virginia presidential primary in 1960, national journalists had increasingly turned to Appalachia as a symbol of the growing disparity between poverty and affluence in the United States. The image of a rich, young New England senator being greeted by barefoot children and destitute coal miners fueled an escalating sense that two societies had emerged in postwar America. Despite the conspicuous wealth evident in new suburban housing projects, shopping centers, interstate highways, and other signs of an emerging consumer culture, many rural areas and inner-city communities in the 1960s still struggled to overcome the blight of depression and poverty.
Kennedy’s visible alarm at conditions in the Mountain State and the attention given to economic issues in the presidential campaign lured dozens of journalists to the mountains in the months that followed the election. Stories of human tragedy, personal struggle, cruel injustice, and heroic perseverance abounded in Appalachia and provided grist for a growing media mill of articles about poverty in America. The region’s natural beauty and romantic folk culture added mystery and curiosity to tales of personal adversity and hardship, and it was an easy progression from stories of individual tragedy to descriptions of Appalachia itself as a region apart from the rest of America, a poor place in an otherwise rich land. Embedded in the idea of Appalachia as a distressed region, moreover, were unsettling questions about the American economic system as a whole—who benefited from development and who didn’t, and why entire regions of the country failed to share in the rewards of postwar growth.
For the second time in less than a century, Appalachia appeared at the heart of national debates about modernization and progress. Whereas a generation of writers after the Civil War had helped to define Appalachia in the popular mind as the antithesis of an emerging national culture, journalists in the 1960s concentrated their attention on images of Appalachia as a socioeconomic problem area. To a generation immersed in the cold war and confronted by the civil rights movement, Appalachia provided further evidence of the failure of the American promise for many whites as well as for blacks. The presence of widespread poverty in an old and predominantly white part of the nation’s heartland challenged prevailing assumptions about technology, the free market, and the social responsibility of wealth. In the context of the 1960s, the region became a popular symbol of poverty and of weakness in the American economy itself.
The rediscovery of the region fed on old stereotypes and outdated images, but the new commentaries spoke as much to the anxieties confronting the larger society as they did to the political and economic problems of the mountains. Images of Appalachia as isolated and of Appalachians as a quaint and sometimes violent people persisted, but increasingly observers described Appalachian poverty not as a permanent condition but as something that could be alleviated by the application of modern resources to human problems. If Appalachia was a distressed region, they reasoned, it must not have experienced the same economic and cultural changes that had lifted the rest of the nation out of the Depression and placed it on the road to prosperity after World War II. Appalachia might once have been a cultural and geographic anomaly, but, thanks to advances in science and technology, these conditions could now be overcome.
Postwar confidence in the American pa
th to modernization provided the solution to the conundrum of Appalachian poverty, just as American capitalism provided a light for third world progress, but Americans differed on how to put the region on the road to prosperity. For some, poverty was the result of individual character weaknesses that could be alleviated through technical education, job training, and the cultural adjustment to modern values. For others, poverty was the consequence of governmental neglect of the basic public infrastructure that moved societies through the stages of development and capitalist expansion—roads, water systems, and public facilities. Most assumed that raising the expectations of poor people and providing the goods of industrial production—that is, modernization—would bring poor regions into the mainstream. Few questioned the benefits of growth or associated poverty with systemic inequalities in political or economic structures.
As early as the 1950s, liberal politicians and scholars had begun to describe poverty as an anomaly, a minority condition within an otherwise prosperous nation. Early in the decade, Minnesota senator Hubert Humphrey called for the creation of a youth conservation corps to address what were believed to be growing problems of juvenile delinquency, idleness, and poverty in urban areas. Later, Governor Averell Harriman asked the New York legislature for funds to study the causes of poverty in the Empire State, and twice in the decade Illinois senator Paul Douglas, a professional economist, sponsored federal legislation to aid depressed areas. Most of these efforts saw poverty as a deviation from the American norm that could be corrected by government investment in public works projects and job programs, but these New Deal–style initiatives failed repeatedly to pass in the face of postwar Republican opposition.
In 1958 Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith confirmed American confidence in the arrival of a new age of mass prosperity with the publication of his best-selling book The Affluent Society. The economic crisis of the Great Depression, he suggested, had been overcome now for most Americans. Scarcity had been replaced by affluence except in a few unrelenting pockets of poverty that still demanded government attention. Galbraith saw the persistence of poverty as a national scandal, but as a Keynesian economist he was primarily interested in the growing gap between private opulence and the need for public sector investment in roads, schools, parks, and other infrastructure to sustain growth.22
Other writers, however, led by Michael Harrington, soon extended Galbraith’s analysis and questioned the depth of the postwar economic miracle. In the July 1959 issue of Commentary magazine, Harrington estimated that as much as a third of the nation’s people still lived at substandard levels and were permanently, not temporarily, distressed. It was a popular myth, Harrington argued, that the poor in the United States were a small and declining group, largely limited to nonwhites and rural southerners and protected from despair by the reforms of the New Deal. The facts, he suggested, presented “a different and far less pretty picture.” Poverty had become a trap for many Americans, and he called for a “comprehensive assault on poverty . . . [in] America’s rural and urban slums.”23
The events of the West Virginia primary appeared to confirm Harrington’s views, and, soon after Kennedy’s victory in the Mountain State, Washington Post staff reporter Julius Duscha followed up on Harrington’s critique of the American economy by touring Appalachia, “this country’s worst blighted area.” Duscha’s August 1960 essay set the pattern for a generation of writers who would see the southern Appalachian Mountains as a region in need and mountain people as victims. “From the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia to the trail of the Cumberland Gap in Kentucky,” he wrote, “tens of thousands of Americans live in appalling poverty. Live? No, they hardly exist.” These once proud and independent mountain families—“many of them descendants of pioneer American families”—had been reduced to living on handouts of surplus food or what they could scratch from hillside gardens. According to William D. Gorman, a community leader in Hazard, Kentucky, things were so bad that some people in his church were no longer coming to worship services “because they didn’t have clothes to wear or food to eat.”
Duscha found evidence of misery throughout the half-ghost, half-coal towns of eastern Kentucky and southern West Virginia: “the gaunt, hungry faces; the unpainted, crumbling homes; the women who are pitifully old before their time, and the men who have nothing to do but sit and tell a grim story that needs no substantiation with figures.” The decline of coal mining and the obsolescence of the small farm had caused this suffering, and the region needed “massive assistance of the kind that Government and industry have given to the underdeveloped countries of the world. For much of the Southern Appalachians is as underdeveloped, when compared with the affluence of the rest of America, as the newly independent countries of Africa.” In light of American abundance, he concluded, the nation “should be able to provide a decent life for all persons, whether they live in a hollow, on a ridge, in a city or on a 500-acre Iowa farm.”24
A host of other writers followed in the literary path opened by the Washington Post reporter. Over the next three years, a wave of articles, books, and television documentaries flooded the media with descriptions of Appalachian poverty. In 1961 David Grossman and Melvin Levin, New England–based planners who had prepared the reference materials for the Annapolis Conference of Appalachian Governors, published a report in the journal Land Economics that statistically defined Appalachia as a “national problem area.” Grossman and Levin identified a number of obstacles to economic growth in the region, including the topography, tax policies, inadequate community facilities, “unfavorable psychological attitudes,” and a “superannuated, unskilled” workforce.25 In 1962 a group of nationally acclaimed scholars came to similar conclusions when they released The Southern Appalachian Region: A Survey, sponsored by the Ford Foundation. The study provided scientific analyses of the region’s economy and social institutions, but it laid most of the blame for regional backwardness on the provincial culture of the mountain people.26 Later that year Michael Harrington included Appalachia as part of the “other America” in his book of that title designed to stir the conscience of Americans to do something for the nation’s poor.27
These and other essays fed a growing chorus of commentary among the intellectual elite on the political and economic dilemma of poverty,28 but when Look magazine published a collection of photographs of Appalachia in December 1962, the face of poverty in the United States, at least for many middle-class Americans, became indelibly Appalachian. Part of a series of essays about American regions, the Look photographs avoided the old stereotypes of mountain residents as historical relics or degenerate rubes. Instead they captured images of solid American families surrounded by the trappings of modern life but caught in the web of economic deprivation. Abandoned appliances and disabled cars belied the gaunt beauty of a young mother or the hidden strength of an unemployed coal miner. In images that evoked middle-class values of family, religion, and hard work, the magazine connected Appalachia with readers’ notions of mainstream America. The people of “Appalachia, U.S.A.,” declared the accompanying text, lived in an underdeveloped country. “No less than Latin Americans or Africans, they can use more American aid. They are more entitled to it because they are our own people.”29
The idea that Appalachia deserved special attention as an internal example of the third world received further validation the following year with the publication of Caudill’s Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area. Probably the most widely read book ever written about Appalachia, Caudill’s passionate account of the human and environmental devastation wreaked by the coal industry on his native eastern Kentucky was a cry from the exploited heartland for government assistance to a desperate people. In a mixed narrative that combined images of cultural degeneracy and corporate abuse, Caudill decried the economic, political, and social blight that had settled over the mountains and called for the creation of a southern mountain authority, patterned after the TVA, to oversee regional development. “Idlene
ss and waste are antipathetic to progress and growth,” he wrote, “and, unless the Cumberland Plateau is to remain an anchor dragging behind the rest of America, it—and the rest of the Southern Appalachians—must be rescued while there is yet time.”30
Caudill quickly became a popular and eloquent spokesperson for the region, spreading the story of Appalachian distress on television and before congressional committees. Journalists by the dozens visited his Whitesburg, Kentucky, home and, after absorbing the Caudill “treatment” over tea, were granted a personal tour of decaying coal camps and scarred hillsides. One Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter, Homer Bigart, wrote a moving series for the New York Times following his pilgrimage to Whitesburg that depicted a wasted landscape and a people so poor that children ate dirt out of the chinks of chimneys to ease their hunger.31 The series caught the attention of President Kennedy and helped to seal his commitment to antipoverty legislation for the 1964 Congress.
By the end of 1963, the image of Appalachia as a region of endemic poverty had settled once again in the popular mind.32 Regional scholars and policy makers alike utilized the image to build their cases for federal funding for uplift and development programs. Journalists and politicians outside the mountains exploited regional economic distress to gather public support for a national crusade on poverty. Ironically, within the mountains the idea of Appalachia as a problem region was not widely recognized except among academics and social reformers. The word “Appalachia” itself was seldom used by mountain residents, except in reference to the town of that name in southwest Virginia. Interestingly, as the region came to be identified with national poverty, many among the mountain middle class rejected the application of the term “Appalachia” to their own community, preferring to associate it with communities far removed from their own. For observers in the rest of the country, however, Appalachia was more than an embarrassment. It had become part of a national problem.