Uneven Ground

by Ronald D. Eller

  Emerging from the work of anthropologist Oscar Lewis, the culture of poverty model became a widely accepted explanation in the 1960s for the “underdevelopment” of certain “third world” societies and, by extension, of impoverished populations within the United States. In two best-selling books, The Children of Sanchez (1961) and La Vida (1966), Lewis argued that people from “primitive” cultures were not inferior to modern people; they just lacked the skills, habits, and attitudes necessary to achieve success in the modern world. Their traditional cultures perpetuated apathy, divisiveness, and resignation and reproduced underdevelopment rather than integration into the modern, market economy. Lewis identified a long list of deviant psychological traits that were perpetuated by the family within these cultures and prevented children from breaking out of poverty. In addition to jobs and job training, he suggested, programs of cultural intervention were required if the children of poor families were to take full advantage of changing conditions and opportunities in their lifetimes.12

  Although Lewis’s research was based on fieldwork with families in Mexico and Puerto Rico, other scholars applied the culture of poverty theory universally to the poor, including to southern blacks who had migrated to northern ghettoes and pockets of hillbilly poverty in Appalachia and the Ozarks. In 1962 North Carolina sociologist Rupert Vance wrote that the physical isolation that had created a distinct culture in Appalachia now was in danger of producing “a permanent culture of poverty” in the mountains unless the government intervened to raise the “goals and aspirations of the people.”13 That same year Michael Harrington utilized the model in The Other America to suggest that the poor were like an “underdeveloped nation” within the United States.14 This tendency to think about the poor as part of the third world not only allowed policy makers to see poverty as a universal condition that could be overcome by American-style “development” but also displaced responsibility for poverty onto the culture of the poor themselves. Later generations of scholars would reject the culture of poverty model as blaming the victim, but the theory played a powerful role in shaping many of the antipoverty programs of the late twentieth century.

  Lewis, Harrington, and other leading advocates of the culture of poverty participated in the Shriver planning meetings to design the War on Poverty, and almost every program administered by the OEO reflected the theory. The Job Corps, for example, although it was one of the administration’s few concessions to calls for a massive job training program, was essentially an education program whose primary goal was to teach young people how to apply for jobs. Senior Johnson administration officials referred to OEO employment programs like the Job Corps and state-sponsored efforts like Kentucky’s “Happy Pappy” program for unemployed fathers as “our charm school” because they were based on assumptions “that people who didn’t fit the established culture didn’t get jobs.”15 Educational programs such as Head Start, after-school enrichment, VISTA, and homemaker skills training were designed to change the behavior of families, raise the expectations of youth, and prepare adults for jobs in the new economy. Even the participation of the poor in CAAs was deemed by many OEO administrators as just another tool to acculturate the poor into the value system and behaviors of the middle class, since most CAAs, they assumed, would be operated under the aegis of the local government.16

  The culture of poverty model fit the popular idea of Appalachia flawlessly. Not only was mountain culture considered to be a remnant of the American past, but now the region’s socioeconomic problems also could be attributed to that backward culture. After all, according to popular myth, the region was inhabited by old-stock Americans who, in the words of British historian Arnold Toynbee, had simply “acquired civilization and then lost it.”17 For many intellectuals and poverty warriors of the 1960s, Appalachia needed only to be redeemed from government neglect and geographic isolation. Once the mountaineers were returned to the cultural mainstream, the problem of poverty in the region would be alleviated without any significant restructuring of the political and economic system.

  Indeed, one popular monograph distributed to poverty workers throughout Appalachia during the War on Poverty labeled Appalachians as “yesterday’s people” and contrasted their anachronistic folk culture with that of modern, middle-class Americans. Written by Jack Weller, a New York–born Presbyterian minister who borrowed heavily from Oscar Lewis’s ideas, the book found mountain people to be fatalistic, person oriented, present minded, and individualistic in a world given to reason, accumulation, community organizations, and faith in the future. The “personality” and “general tendencies of behavior in the mountaineer,” Weller suggested, had ill prepared the mountain people for life in the modern world. “The greatest challenge of Appalachia, and the most difficult,” he claimed, “is its people.”18

  Bolstered by an introduction from sociologist Rupert Vance and a foreword by Appalachian advocate Harry Caudill, the volume implied that “to change the mountains is to change the mountain personality,” as Vance put it.19 Weller himself did not consider the traditional mountain subculture to be wrong, only different, but it was an easy step for readers to conclude that cultural difference was the cause of mountain poverty. Endorsed, moreover, by the CSM and published by the University of Kentucky Press, the monograph linked the academic ideas of the culture of poverty with popular images of Appalachian otherness to provide an intellectual framework for regional uplift programs. Weller’s book became a working manual for hundreds of antipoverty warriors and one of the most popular volumes on Appalachia in the 1960s.

  As the OEO prepared to launch its assault on poverty in the mountains, it therefore did so from a position narrowed by politics, conflicting strategies, and misguided assumptions. Pressured by political expediency, antipoverty planners turned to untested theories and experimental urban programs to design a universal and practical strategy for change. Denied the option of direct income transfers of wealth to the poor, they relied on the latest academic theories of human capital development to provide a bridge for the assimilation of the poor into the cultural mainstream. Divided over the meanings of community action and local control, they initiated a process for change that pitted disparate forces and incompatible ideas against each other in a volatile environment and in unpredictable times. Initially an important symbol of the paradox of poverty in America, Appalachia became a critical testing ground for academic theories and popular ideas about government intervention on behalf of the poor. Already rent by decades of exploitation, corruption, and greed, the region also became a battleground for the political struggles and the alternative social visions that divided the Great Society itself.

  The Eighty-eighth Congress passed the EOA on August 7, 1964, just three months before the presidential election. Staff of the new OEA scrambled to set up programs and channel funds into communities as quickly as possible to maximize the political benefits of the new program before the fall elections, but launching the War on Poverty proved to be a challenge. Early designers of the antipoverty program had proposed to fund a limited number of startup projects and to provide for a lengthier planning and evaluation period, but politics and the massive scale of the billion-dollar national effort demanded swift results. President Johnson had raised awareness of the initiative during his poverty trips the previous April, but planners at the OEO found that organizing the poor to design and submit applications for federal assistance was slow. The agency distributed hundreds of brochures describing the new federal programs and urging local officials to establish CAAs and submit proposals to Washington. When applications dribbled in slowly, the staff turned to conventional organizations and institutions to launch demonstration projects as models for local action.

  In Appalachia there was no shortage of service organizations, government planning agencies, and educational institutions eager to take up Washington’s challenge on behalf of the poor. For decades the region had drawn the attention of well-meaning missionaries, academics, social workers, philanthropists, and
college students intent on understanding and/or resolving the otherness of the mountains. Many of these reformers were connected with each other through the CSM and other organizations that had been calling for government intervention in the region. Now, with the promise of federal funding, this network of people provided a ready vehicle for launching antipoverty initiatives in communities and institutions throughout the mountains. Although some programs of “national emphasis” filtered down from Washington and a few experimental, grassroots projects eventually bubbled up from the bottom, local and state governments, colleges and universities, and other institutions within Appalachia provided the organizational and communication structures for early poverty proposals.

  Out of these institutions poured a generation with pent-up energy and idealism that transformed a medley of federal programs into a progressive, moral crusade. Interest in improving Appalachian life had grown among southern educators, church officials, planners, and social service providers since the early 1950s. Convinced of their ability to organize communities, overcome challenges, and uplift people, an army of social change agents swept up the hollows and coves after the passage of the EOA, bringing a flurry of public and private programs designed to address a host of community needs. Within a year, hundreds of CAAs, Head Start programs, job training centers, and other projects had been launched, serving almost every county of the region. Early projects established rural community centers, set up adult education programs, sponsored free health screenings, provided housing rehabilitation, and conducted summer reading programs in rural schools. Since most Appalachian counties qualified for 100 percent federal funding, initial grants were often utilized to hire professional staff whose job it was to manage the local, nonprofit CAA, organize constituencies, and develop new initiatives.

  State and local governments across the region were eager to tap into the new source of federal dollars. Some states, like West Virginia, organized CAAs in almost every county to coordinate the delivery of expanded welfare services. Others converted existing economic development councils into nonprofit CAAs or created new, multicounty agencies to develop programs for large rural areas. OEO grants went to local school boards, state councils of churches, and colleges and universities, and the CSM received several grants for region-wide initiatives, including one of the first national demonstration grants for a student voluntary service program, the Appalachian Volunteers. One of the first CAAs funded in North Carolina was WAMY, a four-county antipoverty program in the Blue Ridge created earlier by the North Carolina Fund, an original partner in the Ford Foundation’s Gray Areas Program.

  Despite having a common source of funding and shared program guidelines from the OEO, this plethora of local programs and structures did not represent any regionally or nationally coordinated strategy to fight poverty in Appalachia. Sargent Shriver’s report to the president outlining the War on Poverty had recognized that poverty in Harlan County, Kentucky, was not the same as poverty in Harlem, New York, but “the program’s design did nothing to address Appalachian problems as different from those of Harlem.”20 Resembling more a conflagration of scattered assaults and experimental incursions than a well-orchestrated battle, the war to end poverty in the mountains was waged on multiple levels, utilizing different tactics in each community, and it produced a wide range of responses from indigenous people. What gave the campaign a collective momentum and unity of spirit was the moral sense of outrage, hope, and mission that the legislation itself unleashed. For Appalachia, the War on Poverty was as much an attitude, a moral crusade, as a set of programs. Eventually, among a core group of young poverty warriors, this commitment to social justice and reform would evolve into a regional social movement that reached far beyond the work of the OEO.

  The idea of community action provided the only common theme that ran through the poverty program, but just as policy makers in Washington differed on the meaning of local control, the CAAs differed in how they administered federal funds in the mountains. Some were little more than transformed economic development commissions, controlled by local elites. Others evolved out of grassroots organizations and were designed to confront local bureaucracies and power structures in the interest of the poor. The majority of CAAs were more moderate, functioning primarily to deliver social services designed to modify the behavior of individual poor people. Where they included the participation of the poor, CAAs usually designated sympathetic county professionals to represent the poor or established local, community-based advisory boards.21

  This was especially the case among many of the early CAAs launched in response to the initial call for applications to state and local officials, before the staff at the OEO began to insist on maximum feasible participation of the poor in the composition of CAA boards. The CAA in Rockcastle County, Kentucky, for example, was created out of the Rockcastle Development Association when the county became one of the first 182 counties eligible nationally for full OEO funding. The board of the new Rockcastle County Economic Opportunity Council included the county judge executive, the superintendent of schools, the county agricultural extension agent, the mayor of the largest town, and the chair of the county Democratic Party. With funds from its first OEO program development grant, the council hired a local schoolteacher as administrator and established an office in the school board administration building. Most of the agency’s early programs involved expanding educational services to the poor, including establishing a Head Start program and hiring additional teachers and teachers’ aides for summer enrichment programs.22

  Service-oriented CAAs like the one in Rockcastle County burgeoned and became a common model for uplifting the poor throughout the region. Such programs focused federal resources on education and low-skill employment activities disguised as job training opportunities (such as clearing roadside brush and painting public buildings) rather than on more structural approaches to fighting poverty. In mountain counties, where local school superintendents often controlled county political machines, these strategies assured that poverty dollars would be channeled through local institutions, where power brokers could utilize the funds for patronage purposes. The public schools were usually the largest employers in rural counties, and jobs as recreational directors, trainers, teachers’ aides, counselors, janitors, cooks, and bus drivers only increased the poor’s dependency on the political status quo.

  Even those CAAs that were more willing to listen to the poor themselves—often those whose directors had been hired from outside the area—opted for moderate programs of personal empowerment, establishing rural community centers, craft programs, sewing centers, and cooperative small businesses. In Kentucky, the Knox County Economic Opportunity Council, established at the same time as the Rockcastle County CAA, provided home economic aides, home improvement demonstrations, recreational activities, and early childhood programs in thirteen community centers located in discarded one-room schools in poor, rural districts. Representatives of these centers filled a third of the seats on the Knox County CAA board. Eventually the award-winning agency started a small furniture factory and handcraft shop for low-income workers. However, a study undertaken by University of Kentucky researchers three years into the program found that, despite these services, the agency had done little to alter the county’s institutional structures or patterns of political alignments.23 Such was the case in Mingo County, West Virginia, as well, where the local CAA’s agency-based strategy, intended to improve existing service delivery programs, gradually evolved into a more confrontational strategy. Under the leadership of Mingo County native Huey Perry, the program eventually organized a political action league and a fair elections committee and established an independent grocery that threatened local political and business interests.24

  At least at the outset of the War on Poverty, mountain power brokers welcomed the new federal programs and assumed that funding would be administered through state and local governments in the pattern established by the New Deal. Douglass Arnett, who studied the community
action process in Clay County, Kentucky, pointed out that political leaders in the mountains “had no objections to giving more money or more services to poor people” as long as those “resources were channeled through existing institutions and organizations controlled by the local power structure.”25 Only when OEO administrators in Washington began to pressure CAAs to increase involvement of the poor on their boards and to directly fund demonstration projects by grassroots groups and nongovernmental organizations did the local political machines begin to question the intent of the national program. By that time, hundreds of outside VISTA volunteers, energetic college students, and idealistic community organizers fresh from the civil rights movement had arrived in the mountains. Increasingly they joined with poor people, labor organizers, and indigenous reformers to question the service delivery approach and to challenge the assumptions on which it was based.

  From the beginning, a small but influential group of OEO administrators, led by Richard Boone and his associate Sanford Kravitz, believed that defeating poverty would require more than the expansion of existing social services programs. Convinced that the poor “need access to power as well as to resources,” they advocated a bolder approach to community action and increasingly used their positions to encourage more radical change.26 Deeply committed to the idea of maximum feasible participation of the poor, Boone pushed OEO staff to demand greater involvement of poor people on CAA boards, especially after some county governments in the South refused to allow black representation and some urban startup proposals in the North became dominated by representatives of the local city hall.