Uneven Ground

by Ronald D. Eller

  The study revealed that rates of poverty were higher than the national average across eastern Kentucky, but distress was more severe in the ten interior counties than in peripheral counties along Interstates 64 and 75 and in coal-producing counties along the state’s eastern border. The peripheral counties contained growth centers, such as Pikeville, Prestonsburg, Paintsville, Hazard, Harlan, London, Corbin, Richmond, and Winchester, where poverty was high but less pervasive. The group of ten interior counties, stretching from Morgan in the north to McCreary in the south, was overwhelmingly rural and contained some of the highest concentrations of America’s persistently poor people. Although the extremes of poverty had been ameliorated, little had changed on a comparative basis in these counties since the 1960s. Together the counties had an average poverty rate of 42 percent and a per capita income of less than $6,500, compared to a national average of $17,500. Clustered within these counties, moreover, were communities of even greater distress that crossed county boundaries. Examination of subcounty census tract data revealed communities lying along the edges of these severely distressed counties that contained poverty rates from 46 to 63 percent, child poverty rates averaging more than 54 percent, and unofficial unemployment rates of more than 50 percent. In these poorest of poor communities, only one in three citizens had completed high school, nine out of ten children in female-headed households lived below the poverty level, and 26 percent of residents lived in trailers, compared with 1 percent of people in the state as a whole.

  Geographic information system mapping of the patterns of distress in these communities identified a number of common characteristics that bound them together in poverty. Most of the poorest census tracts were located on the edges of their counties, far from the county seats and miles from regional growth centers. These clusters of communities were overwhelmingly rural and culturally traditional, although the economies of some were based on coal and others on agriculture and logging. Almost all had witnessed the loss of local schools because of county-wide consolidation, and few had access to public water and sewer systems. Existing at the periphery of county political and economic life, they were the backyards of poor counties. Although these cross-county clusters often included natural geographic or social communities, their division among a number of small county government and service units further limited their development opportunities. Between 1965 and 1990, they had received lower per capita ARC expenditures than their urban counterparts, and their counties had received fewer ARC investments for community development than had their more populous and politically powerful neighbors. Over the twenty-five-year period, for example, Owsley County and Wolfe County—the two poorest counties in Kentucky and among the ten poorest counties in the United States—received ARC funding of only $472, 914 and $704,091 respectively. Conditions in Kentucky reflected the loss of momentum in the effort to bring economic growth to Appalachia, but they also reflected the mounting disparities between rural places and urban places and between traditional communities and more modern communities within the region. By 1990 the influence of ARC growth center strategies, structural shifts in the national economy, and the weight of local and national politics had combined to generate significant change in the mountains. For some communities, the construction of highways, industrial parks, shopping centers, hospitals, and education facilities had produced better economic conditions, and, despite the recession of the early 1980s, they continued to experience population growth and assimilation into the global economy. For others, less touched by government development programs and less prepared for the new economy, modernization brought increased dependence and fueled a further decline of community-based jobs and institutions.

  Those communities that were located along the interstate and Appalachian corridor highway systems and were more integrated into the national market economy gradually regained their economic energy and joined the rest of the nation in the march to a postindustrial society. Some Appalachian towns and villages, especially those that functioned as regional government service centers, improved access to telecommunications and higher education and shared in the technological boom that swept the country in the 1990s. Others expanded as amenity centers in response to tourism and second-home development. Those more remote communities in the coalfields and the rural areas, however, continued to suffer from high unemployment, environmental decay, poverty, and the loss of youth to out-migration. Increasingly, some parts of Appalachia looked just like any other suburban place in modern America, but many other places in the region continued to reflect the economic despair, if not the old lifestyles, that had set them apart in an earlier day.

  The ARC weathered the storm of the Reagan budget cuts and was eventually reauthorized by Congress. Allocations to the regional agency, however, remained at only a fraction of their former levels and reflected the loss of national interest in poverty and in Appalachia. The ARC struggled throughout the 1990s to recover from reduced budgets and tepid presidential support. With its survival assured, the commission refocused its energies, pledging to complete the unfinished portions of the Appalachian highway system and to assist mountain communities in the transition to the new economy. In 1991 the ARC revised its code to authorize expenditures from the distressed counties allocation for education and other human service projects. Previously those expenditures had been limited to water and sewer investments. During the Clinton administration, the commission renewed its commitment to helping the distressed counties and, after some debate, increased the portion of its overall allocations dedicated to the distressed counties program.

  As governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton had admired the structure and resources that the ARC provided for Appalachian development. As president he established the Mississippi Delta Commission to bring ARC-type development to his home region and appointed Jesse White, former head of the Southern Growth Policies Board, as federal cochair of the ARC. White, a Mississippi-born economist, attempted to revitalize the Appalachian program and established new regional initiatives to encourage entrepreneurship and telecommunications to better equip the region for the new economy. White also hoped to restore a commitment to the original ARC goal of regional planning by engaging the states in a comprehensive strategic planning process and by sponsoring a series of economic development conferences. In 1996 the ARC produced its first regional strategic plan in more than twenty years, establishing goals in the areas of job creation, infrastructure development, health, highways, and education. For the first time in its history, the ARC also placed a priority on developing civic leadership in the mountains, although it allocated very limited resources to this goal.

  Like other federal cochairs before him, White struggled to engage the active interest of the governors in the work of the ARC but failed to generate much enthusiasm for multistate planning. Except for the governors who served on an annually alternating basis as the states cochair, most governors delegated their ARC responsibilities to lower-level staff members, who were reluctant to take policy initiatives or endorse alternative or politically sensitive approaches to development. Among the general population of the region, the ARC remained a distant and almost unknown government agency.

  With few resources and limited guidance coming from the states, the commission fell back into the mode of project management, building much-needed infrastructure and funding beneficial human service programs but providing little leadership to address the region’s persisting social and economic problems. Even President Clinton’s well-publicized trip to Appalachia in the summer of 1999 failed to generate significant new resources or development strategies for the region. Touring communities in eastern Kentucky in the manner of Lyndon Johnson more than thirty years earlier, Clinton attempted to rally support for his “new markets” initiative to stimulate private investment in distressed rural and inner-city areas. Despite the return of prosperity to the national economy, the number of officially distressed counties in Appalachia had grown from 60 in 1982 to 108 in 1999. Accompanied by Kentuck
y governor Paul Patton, several cabinet secretaries, and Jesse Jackson, Clinton hoped to attract support for his pending legislation and to renew Johnson’s commitment to Appalachia.

  The president’s visit to Appalachia dramatized the dilemma facing the ARC and the region at the turn of the century: how to stem the widening gap between those mountain communities that were growing and those that were not. The ARC had helped to bring new roads, schools, health care facilities, water and sewer systems, and other improvements to many in the region, but it had failed to eliminate the “hardcore pockets of poverty” that were, as one reporter noted, “seemingly oblivious to all efforts at improving their lot.”67 Throughout the region there were communities of people who were better educated, better fed, and better housed than their parents. Some counties on the fringes of the mountains had even attained socioeconomic levels above national averages, but there were as many places of despair, scarcity, and frustration.

  The route of the president’s journey into Appalachian Kentucky illustrated the disparity that divided Appalachia. Clinton’s entourage of reporters, business leaders, and government dignitaries landed in Lexington before boarding helicopters for rural Jackson County. Among the crowd that met Air Force One in Lexington were many who had migrated from eastern Kentucky to the Bluegrass decades before in search of jobs and educational opportunities. A good number of the shopping centers, housing developments, and small businesses that had helped to turn the small university town into a growth center in the 1970s had been constructed with “coal money,” acquired by mountain entrepreneurs during the boom years and invested in Lexington, where the promise of financial return was greater than in the rural eastern Kentucky communities that had generated the wealth.

  The president’s helicopter passed over Interstate 75 and Madison County before heading east into the mountains to land at an elementary school in the small community of Tyner in Jackson County. Madison County, on the edge of the region, was home to the growing cities of Richmond and Berea, which had taken advantage of their location along the interstate to attract branch manufacturing plants and expand education, health, and retail services. Berea College, long a champion of Appalachian uplift and traditional culture, had broadened its student body to reach larger numbers of poor and minority students outside the mountains and had become one of the leading liberal arts colleges in the nation. Even the small school at Tyner was a new, multigraded facility, worlds apart from the one- and two-room schools that once dotted rural landscapes throughout Appalachia. Graduates of the Tyner school were bused to the modern, consolidated high school twelve miles away in the county seat, McKee. Fifty percent of those who graduated from Jackson County High School now went on to college, but one in two elementary students failed to complete high school, and 43 percent of the adult population had not finished the ninth grade.68

  From the Tyner school, the president’s motorcade drove into Whispering Pines, a cluster of small trailer homes with about one hundred residents. There Clinton sat briefly in a plastic lawn chair and talked with sixty-nine-year-old Ray Pennington, a retired laborer with emphysema who kept a portable oxygen tank at his side. In a conversation that echoed the visit of another president to the porch of a cabin in nearby Martin County in 1964, the two men shared stories of growing up in rural places and talked about the need for jobs that might reduce the outflow of the area’s young people. “Pennington’s daughter Jean Collett told Clinton that since she had to quit her job at the Dairy Queen to care for her recently widowed father, the family relie[d] heavily on her son-in-law’s paycheck from the nearby Mid-South plant.”69 The local electric components assembly plant was one of several that benefited from new tax incentives, and it now employed almost five hundred people.

  After touring the Mid-South Electronics plant, the president greeted onlookers at a local Stop-N-Go and an Auto Mart before flying on to Hazard, deep in the coalfields. The sixty-five-mile journey would have taken Clinton two hours by car through Clay County, one of the poorest counties in the United States, and along the Daniel Boone Parkway, a link in the Appalachian Development Highway System. By air, the president traversed countryside of rugged hills and narrow hollows, substantially unchanged since the 1960s. Along the winding but now paved roads were modest homes, rehabilitated cabins, nearly abandoned coal camps, and the occasional tiny country store. Beneath the forest vegetation lay hidden patches of marijuana, a major source of income in the new underground economy of the area. The schools and many of the churches and other public buildings had long ago migrated to the “big road” communities, along with the young people and the jobs.

  As the president approached Hazard, he crossed miles of devastated ridgetops, flattened by the new surface mining process of mountaintop removal. The technique, a legal loophole in the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act, decapitated thousands of square miles of the surrounding mountains, dumping the soil and rock from above the coal seams into nearby hollows and streams and creating vast acreages of level land. A small portion of the mined land was set aside for industrial parks and other anticipated development, but the vast majority of the barren plateaus were reserved as “wildlife sanctuaries.” Local residents complained about the destruction of the water tables, the pollution of well water, the contamination of creeks, and the destruction to homes and fields from blasting and high levels of dust, but the mines operated twenty-four hours a day, providing fuel for the nation’s growing energy demands. Overloaded coal trucks hauled their product to nearby railheads or low-country generating plants across the Appalachian corridor highways that also carried rural workers to jobs and services in distant growth centers.

  In Hazard, the president told a crowd of almost five thousand that Appalachia and other poor places in America needed more help from government and more investment in private industry if they were to share the prosperity of the rest of the nation. “If we, with the most prosperous economy of our lifetimes, cannot make a commitment to improve the economy of poor areas,” he said before departing for Lexington, “we will have failed to meet a moral obligation, and we also will have failed to make the most of America’s promise.”70 People in the crowd were enthusiastic and polite as they “sat on the hot streets of Hazard . . . drinking bottled water and wearing Old Navy,” but most had heard these promises before.71 The town, of course, had changed—it now boasted a new regional hospital, a fine community college, a Wal-Mart shopping center, dozens of retail outlets, and even several modern housing developments—but not far away, up the hollows and in the dying coal towns, was another Appalachia, one that sustained the old stereotypes of poverty and backwardness. That Appalachia persisted in the shadows of the new.

  6

  THE NEW APPALACHIA

  In the heart of the mountains and along the northern and southern fringes of the region, the new Appalachia and the old survived side by side. During the years since the War on Poverty and the creation of the special program for Appalachian development, some communities had prospered and grown, while others had languished and declined. Everywhere the region’s people were drawn into the web of a more modern and complex world. Growth centers and hollows alike had developed a greater dependence on the national economy and culture, although some communities had benefited from government-sponsored programs more than had others. Despite the transformation of places like Hazard and significant improvement by almost every gauge of region-wide socioeconomic performance, Appalachia still lagged behind the rest of the country in measures of income, health, education, and job security.

  At the close of the twentieth century, the region was a much more diverse place. The modern highways, vocational schools, health facilities, and other public infrastructure projects funded by the ARC had altered the mountain landscape, reshaping much of Appalachia in the pattern of American consumer society. Appalachian teenagers wore the same clothing styles and listened to the same music as their counterparts in the rest of the nation, and local Wal-Marts carried an abundance of cheap,
internationally made goods. Hidden within this new society, however, were old Appalachian problems that government initiatives had failed to address. An inadequate tax base, a low-wage economy, environmental abuse, civic fraud, political corruption, absentee landownership, and corporate irresponsibility continued to weaken the region and to limit the lives of its residents. The physical destruction of the mountains, rising drug dependence, and the loss of traditional values and culture, moreover, threatened to destroy those things that had made the region distinct. Appalachia was rapidly joining the cultural and economic mainstream, and that prospect raised a new set of uncertainties.

  In the popular mind, Appalachia continued to represent the other America—an isolated place of backwardness and poverty ironically rich in romance and tradition. President Clinton’s trip to eastern Kentucky, media fascination with mountain culture during coal mining tragedies, and the persistence of stereotypes in plays, television, and movies continued to dramatize the popular belief that Appalachia was somehow different from the rest of the country. The mountains and mountain people had served as counterpoints to American identity for over a hundred years, and the failure of the War on Poverty and economic expansion to abolish the perceived differentness of Appalachia only reinforced old images and perceptions. The idea of Appalachia as a place in, but not of, America continued because Americans needed to believe in Appalachia’s existence as part of the ongoing debate over national identity itself.