Uneven Ground
Page 25
With the appointment of Whitehead, a struggle for control over the ARC ensued within the triumvirate at the head of the commission. Whisman and Whitehead clashed, leaving the executive director and the staff in the middle of a struggle between the states’ representative and the federal cochair’s office. Whitehead hoped to revitalize the direct involvement of the governors in the decisions of the ARC and objected strenuously to Whisman’s casting a single vote for all of the governors in the executive committee when there was no statutory authority for him to do so. As the father of the ARC and a major contributor to the PARC report, Whisman believed that the commission was straying from its original intent, especially on the matter of growth center development.23 The conflict was resolved when Whisman was forced to resign because of publicity surrounding minor violations of travel reimbursement procedures, but the dispute blackened the image of the commission and resulted in the reorganization of the agency in 1975.24
Under pressure from West Virginia senator Jennings Randolph, ARC’s chief sponsor in the Senate, the 1975 ARDA reauthorization diminished the role of the states’ Washington representative, required a quorum of the governors to be present to approve the annual budget, and obligated state alternates to be members of the governor’s cabinet or personal staff. The reorganization eliminated the power struggle within the Washington offices of the commission, but it failed in the long run to engage the governors personally in the work of the ARC, and in subsequent years gubernatorial interest continued to decline along with federal allocations. The 1975 act did reapportion the division of ARC funds within the region to channel more resources to central Appalachia, but it continued to base the allocation primarily on population. Overall, a decade after the passage of the ARDA, 37 percent of ARC funds still flowed to northern Appalachia, 40 percent to southern Appalachia, and only 23 percent to central Appalachia.25
The reorganization of the commission and the adjustment of the allocation formula dramatized the challenge facing the ARC as it entered the post–Great Society era. Although conditions in the central part of Appalachia had generated national support for the creation of the commission, political necessity had extended the boundaries of the ARC far beyond the Appalachian heartland, and both politics and economic theory had concentrated most of its resources in the population centers of the northern and southern subregions. Critics in the media and in Congress increasingly pointed out the irrationality of a formula that allocated the fewest ARC dollars to the counties with the worst economic conditions, but few within the commission were willing to confront the problem. Alvin Arnett, who replaced Widner as executive director in 1971, recalled, “As long as you kept Senators Eastland or Stennis of Mississippi happy with their little sewage treatment projects and Senator Robert Kennedy happy with his New York thruways, you just don’t ask the other questions.”26 Even the minor reapportionment of funds in 1975 came after heated debate within the commission, since the northern and southern governors vigorously resisted shifting any part of their funds to the central region.
More and more, however, critics outside the ARC did ask the “other questions.” Detractors within the region had challenged the structure and goals of the Appalachian program from its inception. Harry Caudill called the ARDA “a grim hoax” that had little chance of restoring Appalachia to health because it failed to address the real economic and political problems of the region.27 Kentuckian Harriette Arnow, author of The Dollmaker, labeled the act a “tragedy” that had given “false hope to many who needed help the most.”28 Many anti-poverty activists saw the Appalachian program as “chiefly a boon for the rich and for entrenched political interests.” Five years after the ARC’s creation, New York Times reporter Ben Franklin, writing for the Louisville Courier-Journal, found that low-income people in the sixty poorest counties in central Appalachia remained “almost untouched” by the commission’s programs.29
By the early 1970s, the ARC had become a favored target of journalists and activists frustrated with the demise of the War on Poverty. The Louisville Courier-Journal, for example, ran a weeklong series on the commission in April 1973, concluding that it was a “boondoggle” that had become “just another pork dispenser, calloused to the human needs of the region it was created to serve.” Reporter Bill Peterson found that the ARC had “little measurable impact on the economy of Eastern Kentucky or the rest of central Appalachia” and that, despite the claims of its promoters, it had done “little to coordinate the efforts of other federal agencies in the region.” He noted that the thirteen states of the commission were more interested in their own individual improvement projects than in region-wide planning; the agency had ignored major regional problems like black lung disease, mine safety, and strip mining.30
The Whitesburg (Kentucky) Mountain Eagle accused the Washington-based ARC staff of being out of touch with the real conditions in Appalachia. The outspoken paper claimed that commission leaders were planning the wholesale depopulation of large portions of the coalfields, including the resettlement of mining families into distant “new towns.”31 Even the ARC partnership was a facade, wrote Howard Bray, executive director of the Fund for Investigative Journalism in Washington DC, since the governors themselves “have had little to do with guiding the program.” The real source of ARC decision-making power, Bray suggested to readers of the Progressive magazine, was to be found in Congress, which was focused primarily on “bricks and mortar” projects that resounded to the benefit of individual members of Congress. “The Commission,” he determined, had “failed to come to grips with the true causes of much of the . . . distress that has plagued Appalachia for decades.”32
A group of young researchers came to similar conclusions when they issued A Citizens’ Handbook on the ARC in 1974. Calling themselves the ARC Accountability Project, the authors endeavored to inform mountain residents of the failures of the agency in preparation for reauthorization hearings that the ARC was holding throughout the region—the first public forums in the commission’s nine-year history. The investigators found the government program deficient in a number of areas: accountability, access, assumptions, and achievements. “The ARC was never structured to meet the needs of poor and working people,” they concluded. “Nor was it meant to benefit a truly representative base of Appalachia’s citizenry. In virtually every one of its programs, the direct beneficiaries of ARC’s development strategies are the already entrenched power structures.”33
Widely distributed among activists and academics, A Citizens’ Handbook on the ARC summarized most of the criticisms of the ARC leveled by Caudill and others. The local and area development districts were dominated by nonrepresentative boards that comprised small-town mayors, county officials, and their appointed cronies. Easily controlled by area political machines, the development districts utilized the ARC funding process to enhance the political interests of local power brokers, and they provided “no mechanism for public access, redress, or accountability.” The commission’s growth center strategy, furthermore, exacerbated the poverty and depopulation of rural areas and facilitated the continued drain of wealth from the region by absentee industries. Education and health programs were designed to encourage out-migration from rural areas rather than to improve public services where people lived, and the ARC had failed to justify the expenditure of almost 80 percent of its budget on an uncompleted highway system. “The time has come to turn the authority of the Appalachian Regional Commission around or demand that it cease to exist,” recommended the researchers. “It is time for a different vision of regional resource development. It’s time for a whole new set of goals which encourage a different sense of how to use resources to create job security, provide social services or otherwise contribute to a qualitatively different way of living.”34
An alternative vision for Appalachia, however, eluded the ARC. The Nixon administration continued to pursue a national policy of economic growth while shifting administrative control and revenues back to the states. The ARC approach to p
roject management was consistent with White House goals, and the nonhighway budget of the agency survived unscathed, averaging around $300 million annually throughout the decade. Despite the demise of the War on Poverty, federal spending for entitlement programs (food stamps, Medicaid, and Social Security) increased 76 percent in the 1970s as the nation shifted its attention from eradicating poverty to managing the welfare system. The portion of the total ARC allocation dedicated to nonhighway projects increased by 20 percent as well.35
Growth in federal transfer payments and infrastructure expenditures contributed to a resurgence of economic activity in the mountains between 1965 and 1975, providing at least statistical evidence that progress was being made in alleviating mountain poverty. Per capita income in the region increased from 78 percent of the national average in 1965 to almost 83 percent in 1974. Unemployment and poverty rates declined, and housing stock, educational attainment, and infant mortality rates improved. Central Appalachia continued to lag far behind the rest of the country in most socioeconomic measures, but even there, personal income grew from 52 percent of the national average to 65 percent in the decade after the passage of the ARDA. The migration of people out of the region slowed and even reversed in some counties.36
Part of this economic activity was attributable to the recovery of the coal industry. Coal production had begun to rise in the late 1960s, but demand for Appalachian coal skyrocketed after the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) raised the price of oil by 400 percent in protest of American support for Israel after the 1973 Yom Kippur War. While inflation soared throughout the rest of the country, spurring a business recession in 1975, the coalfields boomed again as they had done periodically since the turn of the century. Coal exports more than doubled by the end of the decade, bringing new jobs, in-migration, and small-business growth. The boom would collapse with the restoration of world oil production levels in the early 1980s, but the energy crisis temporarily restored faith in natural resource development as a private sector cure for Appalachia’s problems.
At the same time that rising government expenditures and the recovery of the coal industry diverted attention from the persistent inequities and weaknesses of the mountain economy, other forces, deeply rooted in the environmental movement and in the War on Poverty of the 1960s, combined to challenge the prevailing devotion to “more” and to question the ARC approach to development. By the mid-1970s, substantial numbers of Americans had become disenchanted with the moral direction of a government that had produced the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal and with an economic system that seemed to reward greed and unrestrained consumption. Building on a movement that began in Britain, intellectuals and scholars within the United States increasingly questioned the limits of growth and the environmental and social costs of technology. Adding their voices to the work of British scholars like Peter Laslett (The World We Have Lost) and E. F. Schumacher (Small Is Beautiful), American critics such as Wendell Berry (The Unsettling of America), Rachel Carson (Silent Spring), Robert Bellah (Habits of the Heart), and others rejected the idea of growth-based development and led an ever widening reaction to consumerism.
In Appalachia, as in the rest of the country, the new movement represented a shift in values that revealed a different way of thinking about land, quality of life, and the meaning of progress. Regional activists, fresh from the political wars against poverty and racial injustice, turned their attention in the 1970s to the abolition of strip mining, the improvement of health and working conditions for miners and textile workers, the protection of mountain forests from clear-cutting, and the defense of family farms from the construction of hydroelectric facilities and the expansion of national parks. Likewise regional scholars rejected the notion of Appalachian exceptionalism and recast the region’s recent history and culture as the consequence of the same modernization and unbridled development that had shaped the rest of the nation. What Appalachia needed in the future, they argued, was not more growth but a different kind of development.
Although traditional mountain lifestyles offered alternatives to the postwar culture of consumption, the rejection of growth-based strategies for progress in Appalachia reflected more than romantic nostalgia for a simpler past. In contrast to the self-absorption and escapism of much of the hippie culture, much of the counterculture movement in the mountains was grounded in conventional American values of economic and social justice, cooperation, tolerance, respect for family and community, and a spiritual sense of land as place rather than commodity. The same organizations that opposed unregulated second-home development in western North Carolina supported striking miners in eastern Kentucky and farm families fighting federal land condemnation in southwest Virginia. Groups like the new CSM and the Appalachian Alliance rallied members in opposition to strip mining, gender discrimination in coal employment, brown lung disease among textile workers, and the concentration of absentee landownership in the coalfields and the Blue Ridge.
As a result of these contrasting visions for the good life, much of the public discourse about the future of Appalachia in the late 1970s focused on achieving a balance between economic growth and environmental quality. On the one hand, Appalachia needed jobs and economic expansion to lift its people out of poverty. The region needed to increase the production of its mines and mills, encourage tourism and second-home development, and attract branch manufacturing plants that could increase the local tax base and provide revenue for schools and roads. On the other hand, economic development should not destroy the landscape, exploit the people, or threaten traditional values. Growth should be limited and development sustainable to protect the natural and human assets of the region.
With the election of Jimmy Carter to the presidency in 1976, balanced growth became the national objective of an administration elected to restore moral direction to a nation struggling with inflation, unemployment, and energy challenges. Appalachian leaders assumed major roles in the national effort to find a middle path between economic growth and environmental protection, between consumption and conservation. Responding, for example, to the national energy crisis and to growing pressure to end surface mining in the mountains, the Senate Environment and Public Works committee, chaired by West Virginia’s Jennings Randolph, called in 1976 for a national conference on balanced growth. Two years later, President Carter’s secretary of commerce, Juanita Kreps, a native of western North Carolina, organized the White House Conference on Balanced National Growth and Economic Development. Chaired by West Virginia governor Jay Rockefeller, the gathering brought more than five hundred delegates to Washington DC and spawned several smaller, regional conferences, including one in Charleston, West Virginia, sponsored by the ARC.
The White House conferences on balanced growth, however, failed to resolve the inherent tensions over the goals of development. Although organizers hoped to achieve some compromise between unbounded growth and no growth, reaching agreement on the definition of “balance” proved to be impossible in an atmosphere where the real issues were wealth, power, and conflicting visions of the good life. Especially in Appalachia, the call for balanced growth opened old conflicts over landownership, land use, taxation, government regulation, and environmental quality. National priorities, as well, sometimes fueled bitter regional clashes, as when the demand for energy alternatives sparked a rise in coal production and inspired proposals to increase federal funding for research in coal technology.
Appalachian opponents of strip mining were angered further when national environmental groups compromised on the abolition of surface mining in the passage of the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977. They saw strategies to build a new national energy policy around coal as furthering the destruction of the mountains. Proposals that reduced American dependence on foreign oil by increasing the production of coal, they argued, only shifted the real costs of energy consumption onto the people of the coalfields. Given the rising percentage of coal being produced by surface mining, they feared
that Appalachia would become a “national sacrifice area.”37
Other coal country leaders, however, saw the adoption of a coal-based national energy policy as a boon for the region. Named to chair the President’s Commission on Coal as well as the White House Conference on Balanced National Growth and Economic Development in 1978, Governor Rockefeller acknowledged that there were “environmental tradeoffs” to the increased consumption of coal but insisted that these costs had to be balanced against the goal of national energy independence. Appalachian coal mines, he suggested, were prepared to increase production by 100 million tons a year, and this prospect would help not only to reduce the national dependence on foreign oil but also to alleviate the unemployment of thousands of miners in his state. With current environmental regulations and new clean coal technologies, he added, coal could be burned responsibly and without dirty smokestack emissions.38 None of the conferences and commissions on balanced growth produced much consensus, but they did illuminate what Rockefeller described as “the incredible array of tensions involved with growth.”39 These conflicts intensified with the skyrocketing inflation and subsequent recession that followed yet another OPEC oil crisis in 1979–1981.
Despite these failures, the efforts by the Carter administration to achieve harmony on national economic policy opened a dialogue within the country about the limits of economic expansion. The president appeared to encourage, even welcome, debate. In Appalachia, community forums, academic conferences, and regional publications explored the prospects for more balanced development, and even the ARC appeared more flexible and open to alternative voices. Under Robert W. Scott, the former North Carolina governor whom Carter appointed as federal cochair of the ARC in 1977, the commission launched an early childhood basic skills education initiative, reached out to groups representing the elderly and women, and approved $4 million in aid to ease the financial problems of former UMWA hospitals in the coalfields. Scott’s successor, Al Smith of Kentucky, supported a $100,000 grant to the Appalachian Alliance to study landownership patterns in six Appalachian states and extended a research fellowship to longtime ARC critic Harry Caudill.40