The swell of media attention on Appalachia in the early 1960s was part of a rising wave of concern for the country’s economy. The boom times of the 1950s had begun to falter a bit in the last years of that decade. Although Senator Kennedy had promised to get the nation “moving again” during the presidential campaign, the country’s economy continued to struggle throughout the first two years of the Kennedy administration. Unemployment remained unacceptably high, hovering around 7 percent, and in May 1962 the stock market fell to its lowest point since the inauguration. Unemployment and applications for public assistance continued to rise throughout Appalachia, where joblessness was twice the national average.
During the summer of 1962, desperate families in central Appalachia received an additional blow when the UMWA announced that it was revoking the cherished health cards on which many depended for medical care. The UMWA had established its Health and Retirement Funds to provide free health care and other benefits to miners and their families, and in 1954 the union had built ten state-of-the-art Miners Memorial hospitals in southern West Virginia, Virginia, and eastern Kentucky that provided medical care for a large percentage of families in the area. Now, however, declining revenues in its Health and Retirement Funds made it impossible for the union to sustain benefits for miners whose companies were no longer paying royalties into the funds. Most of the operators who defaulted on their forty-cent-perton royalty payment to the funds were small truck mine owners who had signed “sweetheart contracts” with the UMWA, allowing them to pay wages below the national contract. Declining coal markets in the early 1960s and competition from larger mechanized mines, however, led many of the struggling truck mines to cease their contributions to the funds. Miners in eastern Kentucky had accepted lower wages, but the loss of their family health cards was too much. They responded with a time-honored “wildcat strike” despite the union’s objections.
By September roving bands of pickets were moving from one small mine to another, attempting to shut down delinquent operations. When the UMWA announced in October that it intended to sell or close its hospitals in Kentucky and other Appalachian states, the frustration of out-of-work miners boiled over. The roving pickets movement soon degenerated into class warfare, with jobless families on one side and coal operators, businesspeople, and local government officials on the other. At times nearly five hundred miners caravanned to a small truck mine only to be dispersed by state police, armed company guards, and the local sheriff, who in Perry County was himself a coal operator. Arson, shootings, beatings, and the dynamiting of homes, trucks, tipples, and equipment soon forced Governor Combs to intervene in search of a truce, but only the heavy snow and icy roads of December quieted the violence.33
The lethargic national economy and rising labor unrest in the coalfields prompted President Kennedy to look for ways to stimulate business growth. A fiscal conservative who disliked deficit spending, the president settled on an across-the-board tax cut. Before announcing his decision, however, he asked Walter Heller, chair of his Council of Economic Advisors, to look into recent media estimates of the number of poor people in America. Kennedy anticipated opposition to tax reduction from liberal Democrats in Congress, and he was aware that a tax cut would leave him vulnerable to criticism that he was indifferent to poverty at a time of increasing popular concern for the poor. Prior to this time, poverty had not been a focal point for policy discussions in the Kennedy White House. Like many Americans, the president assumed that a rising economic tide would steadily reduce the size of the low-income population. The domestic programs of the New Frontier had concentrated on generating growth rather than on fighting poverty. As a tireless reader with a strong sense of social obligation to the disadvantaged, however, Kennedy was sensitive to the intellectual currents of his time, especially to suggestions that his administration was not meeting the country’s problems.34
In January 1963 the president read Dwight MacDonald’s lengthy review in the New Yorker of several recent studies of poverty, including Michael Harrington’s The Other America. MacDonald found ample evidence of persistent poverty within the United States, and he lambasted the Kennedy administration for neglecting “our invisible poor.” Ignoring the plight of the disadvantaged not only made us “feel uncomfortable,” he chided, but also challenged the general prosperity of the nation. Hidden in the midst of an otherwise rich country, the very poor could no longer be helped by economic expansion alone but must have government assistance lest they become permanently alienated from the rest of the society.35 Troubled by MacDonald’s criticism, Kennedy encouraged Heller to begin to identify antipoverty strategies that might be included in the domestic agenda for his 1964 reelection campaign.
The president’s tax cut languished in Congress during 1963, but his request to Heller generated considerable interest among a small group of Kennedy advisors. Heller invited other economists from the Council of Economic Advisors, including Robert Lampman and Kermit Gordon, to meet for informal Saturday discussions with colleagues from the Bureau of the Budget and the Labor, Justice, and Health, Education, and Welfare departments. Most of these advisors were economists like Heller, trained in the postwar Keynesian philosophy of government investment in the economy to sustain growth, but some, like Daniel Moynihan, were social scientists who believed in government intervention to rectify social distress.36 Although Heller and his associates viewed poverty as a moral problem, they also assumed that an assault on poverty would have economic and political benefits for the administration in 1964. Not only would a limited antipoverty program help to boost the national economy, but, since poverty cut across race and geography, it would appeal to rural whites in the South as well as to blacks and suburban liberals.37
As the Heller group began its meetings in the White House, spring rains in the mountains once again brought Appalachia to national attention. In mid-March 1963 back-to-back floods once more struck the Cumberland Plateau, causing rivers to pour out of their banks and displacing twenty-five thousand people from their homes. Coming within eight days of each other, the heavy rains caused more than $80 million in damage across fifty counties in the heart of the region. Although the work of the informal interagency committee on Appalachia expedited flood rehabilitation efforts among federal agencies, editorials throughout the region criticized the inadequate federal response. “The floods that are tearing the economic life out of the mountains are the direct and inevitable result of fifty years of federal neglect,” wrote the Louisville Courier-Journal. “Our people and our economy are tired, worn out, exhausted,” lamented the Whitesburg (KY) Mountain Eagle. “We do not have the money, the energy, or the willpower to dig ourselves out.”38
On March 29, 1963, Governor Bert Combs and his staff met with Ed McDermott, chief of the federal Office of Emergency Planning, and other White House aides to discuss specific actions on postflood problems. Along with a number of proposals for immediate action, Combs again emphasized the difficulty of “the dual emergency of Appalachia—the long standing economic emergency now compounded by the natural disaster emergency.” He also pointed out the proposal of the Appalachian governors for a special, comprehensive, and long-term Appalachian regional development program. Later the same day, McDermott met with the president, who expressed interest in the idea of an Appalachian program and agreed to add the subject to the agenda of an April 9 cabinet meeting originally scheduled to review the ARA. As a result of the president’s decision to include the special focus on the Appalachian problem, the Appalachian governors were invited to attend the cabinet meeting.39
Over the next week, John Whisman and Governor William Barron of West Virginia, who had succeeded Combs as chair of the Council of Appalachian Governors, coordinated arrangements for the meeting with the governors and their staffs. On the afternoon of April 9, five Appalachian governors—Combs of Kentucky, Barron of West Virginia, Tawes of Maryland, Frank Clement of Tennessee, and Albertis Harrison of Virginia—along with representatives of the governors of North Caro
lina and Pennsylvania, met with the president, his cabinet, and a number of agency heads in the Cabinet Room of the White House. Also in attendance were presidential aide Lee White, Walter Heller of the Council of Economic Advisors and the informal antipoverty discussion group, and Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., undersecretary of commerce.40
The president was delayed by a ceremony in the Rose Garden granting honorary citizenship to Winston Churchill. As those assembled awaited his arrival, Commerce Secretary Luther Hodges asked the other cabinet secretaries to begin reporting on the effectiveness of their departments’ programs in Appalachia. The theme was one that the governors had heard many times before. Labor Secretary William Wirts, for example, lamented the inability of job training programs under the Area Redevelopment Act and the Manpower Development and Training Act to alleviate the long-term problems of the region. Unless they could identify new kinds of businesses to receive trainees, he pointed out, Appalachian people would continue to be trained for jobs that were simply not there. Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman added that overall regional planning was desperately needed, but he could offer no suggestions for developing a comprehensive regional plan.41
In the middle of Freeman’s remarks, President Kennedy arrived and assumed leadership of the meeting. The president welcomed the governors and reemphasized his deep concern for the economic problems of the Appalachian region. He noted that it had been a primary goal of his administration to reduce the immediate distress in the mountains and to help “build a solid economic basis on which the region could prosper.” But unemployment remained unacceptably high, and federal efforts through the ARA and other programs were “not making much progress in the sense of really biting into the long term unemployment.” Consequently, the president announced, he would take the following actions: First, he would direct his department heads to speed up current programs affecting Appalachia and to include more programs for the Appalachian region in their fiscal year 1965 budgets. Second, he would establish within the Department of Commerce a joint federal-state committee on the Appalachian region to develop a comprehensive program for regional economic development that would report back to him by January 1, 1964. This program would include recommendations for improving transportation facilities; providing education and job training; conducting research; developing water, mineral, and forest resources; and attracting tourists. Finally, he would seek to create an Appalachian development institute to serve as a nonfederal center for research and training on the economic problems of the region.42
After completing his remarks, Kennedy moved to a chair directly across from Combs while members of the cabinet and the governors discussed his proposals. Secretary Freeman resumed his comments, but everyone was watching the president as he pulled a sheet of note-paper from the table and wrote something. He then folded the paper into a little airplane and sent it gliding toward Combs, landing in front of the governor. The note read, “Bert, what do you really want?” Combs seized the opportunity and, in his formal remarks to the group, commented that the creation of a permanent federal-state regional agency would be the most important product of the president’s committee. “The more I come up here [to Washington],” he explained, “the more I believe we need a handle to work with. You cannot go to Commerce and then to Agriculture and then to HEW, and then go to all of these other agencies and get a great deal done unless you live up here. And I just don’t have the time to stay up here.” The other governors concurred.43
Kennedy’s choice to head the joint federal-state committee, the President’s Appalachian Regional Commission (PARC), was Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., who had campaigned with the president in West Virginia during the crucial 1960 primary. Once informed of his appointment to chair the commission, Roosevelt outlined the steps that he would take to achieve his goal. He asked each governor and each cabinet secretary to appoint a representative to the commission, which would begin its work with a tour of the state capitals to gather information and ideas for the development of the region. To assist him in drafting the final report, he selected John L. Sweeney from the Department of Commerce as executive director of the commission and appointed John Whisman to represent the states as executive secretary. Interestingly, he invited no members of the informal White House antipoverty group to serve on the commission.
Under Roosevelt’s leadership, PARC began immediately to gather ideas and program recommendations from state, federal, and academic leaders. The commission launched initial visits to seven state capitals, and Roosevelt appointed Benjamin Chinitz, a Harvard-trained economist and chair of the University of Pittsburgh Department of Economics, to undertake a study of regional conditions. Chinitz pulled together a task force of academic sociologists, economists, political scientists, and geographers to analyze data gathered by agency professionals from each of the Appalachian states. With the assistance of staff from fourteen federal agencies, the research team collected information on a wide assortment of chronic problems, including water resources, coal, electric power, finance, highways, education, and forestry.
Like Whisman, Chinitz considered the Appalachian region to be underdeveloped in the same sense that “poverty-ridden countries in Latin America are underdeveloped.” An unfortunate history of resource extraction, he believed, had left the region without the “super-structure” (schools, factories, private enterprises, public services) on which to sustain a modern economy. In the absence of core infrastructure for development, human resources languished. “So there is no second and third wave of economic development,” Chinitz wrote, “founded by an interested entrepreneurial society.” Federal, state, and county governments alone had not been able to address the region’s chronic needs, he wrote, but “federal-state-county governments working together can.”44
Chinitz’s opinion that Appalachia’s problems resulted from a lag in the natural stages of development was consistent with contemporary academic theories of economic growth and paralleled the ideas that Whisman had incorporated into Program 60 and the “Declaration for Action Regarding the Appalachian Region” issued by the Conference of Appalachian Governors. American intellectuals and business leaders in the post–World War II years, drawing on their experience in rebuilding Europe and Japan, were confident that the mobilization of government resources to build basic infrastructure could set an impoverished region on the road to development.
This confidence in the benefits of physical infrastructure development was reinforced by suggestions that PARC received from meetings with state officials and cooperating federal agencies. Department of Transportation officials, for example, were “only too willing to suggest a $1.2 billion program of regional and local-access roads to be financed largely by additional federal funds.”45 The states were clear that they wanted highways, resource development, and preferential treatment on federal grants. State and federal bureaucrats agreed that the problems of Appalachia resulted from a lack of basic infrastructure for development. In this manner, academic theories about the process of development came together with the professional interests of federal agency personnel and state political leadership to provide a common agenda for the region.
During the summer of 1963, Whisman and Sweeney organized PARC into five working teams, which began to draft recommendations on transportation, human resources, physical resources, water, and the organization of a permanent commission. In addition to Chinitz’s academic advisors, more than three hundred individuals from various branches of government participated in the deliberations. At the end of October, a draft report was readied, and between November 12 and 20, the commission staff again toured the states, seeking responses to its preliminary recommendations. By this time the number of states to be included in the new program had increased to ten with the addition of Ohio and Georgia.
While PARC prepared to finalize its report, President Kennedy followed through on his commitment to tap existing federal programs for emergency relief in central Appalachia. Responding to Bigart’s October New York Times article
that exposed the hardships of Kentucky coal miners facing a “grim winter,”46 the president informed Walter Heller that he planned to include antipoverty legislation in the agenda for the next Congress. He also ordered a special winter relief program for the mountain coalfields that would serve as an advance demonstration of the special Appalachian initiative. Announced on November 14, 1963, the winter program included grants for food relief, home repairs, education, and school lunch programs. The president also instructed the Army Corps of Engineers to accelerate work on a number of water projects to provide additional jobs, and he requested the Forest Service to redirect funds for timber stand improvement to hire unemployed youth. Finally, he asked the Department of Labor to create a special job training program for displaced coal miners.47
The following day, Kennedy telephoned his congratulations to the newly elected governor of Kentucky, Edward “Ned” Breathitt, and assured him that the White House would follow through on its commitment to Appalachia. PARC, he added, was about to complete its work, and Kennedy would be in touch with Governor Breathitt to set up a meeting on the Kentucky–West Virginia border to announce his support for an Appalachian commission. He would have his secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, call the governor’s office with details shortly after he returned from a brief trip to Dallas, Texas.
The assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963, however, suspended plans to announce the Appalachian program and raised serious questions about the future of that initiative as well as that of the parallel antipoverty program being discussed by the Heller committee. Some observers feared that the Appalachian effort might die along with the slain president, since relations between Vice President Lyndon Johnson and PARC chair Roosevelt were strained at best, and Johnson had no particular knowledge of the region. At an Executive Office Building gathering on the evening before Kennedy’s funeral, though, Johnson assured the nation’s governors that he intended to complete everything on Kennedy’s legislative agenda. Later that evening, Governor Breathitt and former governor Combs met privately with the new president in Johnson’s vice presidential office. Recalling his election day conversation with Kennedy, Breathitt praised the work of Combs and other governors on the Appalachian program. Johnson responded that if the commitment had been made, he would carry it out along with other Kennedy proposals.
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