by Steven Stoll
In Machine Age in the Hills (1933), a Quaker journalist named Malcolm Ross wrote, “When West Virginia was young and hopeful it chose as its motto: ‘Montani semper liberi.’ This was living truth to men who found shelter in the hills from grasping lowlanders. Today it is merely an epitaph cut in the marble façades of Charleston’s public buildings. The mountaineers of West Virginia have not even the freedom to earn bread for their bellies.” The General Assembly kept that motto even as they preferred another one more suitable for tourists: “the Switzerland of America.” The slogan had appeared as early as the 1880s in guides for visitors and in geography textbooks. But calling the state “the Switzerland of America” took away its identity by describing it as an imitation. Besides, it’s difficult to imagine that anyone would have mistaken toxic rivers, violence on the scale of warfare, and desolate clear-cut hills for the relatively thriving agrarian landscapes of the Alps. The members of the General Assembly must have expected that no one would actually compare them.47
Some mountaineers still lived in the mountains. One of the most significant documents produced by the United States on life in Appalachia was a miscellaneous report by the Department of Agriculture. Its lead author was Lewis Cecil Gray, an economist and historian of the South. The researchers found that household subsistence endured as the most common form of livelihood in the upland counties of Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama. There were 150,659 “self-sufficing” households in the survey area in 1930, or between 50 and 70 percent of the total. The most typical farm consisted of sixty-seven acres: thirteen in crops, eleven in plowed pasture, five in hillside pasture, and the rest in woodlot, bare ground, or eroded gullies. Most such families owned one or two cows and the same number of pigs. But self-sufficing went beyond food. Between 60 and 100 percent of households in two Kentucky counties were found to have churned butter, canned fruits and vegetables, butchered hogs, and made soap. These farms produced food and other commodities valued at $450 annually, of which they consumed $320, leaving an excess value of $130.48
Self-sufficing people know how to survive in the crevices. No one told them that doing so meant that they were poor. John C. Campbell quoted a woman who argued to him, “‘What more does a body need?’ … pointing to her little corn field and garden. ‘Yonder is a right smart chance of corn and a heap of cushaws, and the shoats will be big enough to kill for meat after the mast [nuts and acorns] is gone.’” Another writer said of the Blue Ridge in the 1930s, “While the local economy was focused overwhelmingly on subsistence agriculture—and barter and exchange labor were far more important than cash in the local economy—most families didn’t regard themselves as poor or deprived.” A brushy second growth appeared where giant spruce once shaded, providing grazing spaces and limited forest products. About 70 to 80 percent of children attended school, and illiteracy had fallen to around 2 percent in most of West Virginia.49
Still, no one argued that mountain people were thriving. Planted area declined between 1900 and 1930 from 16.5 percent to 14.1 percent of the upland landscape. The average farmer cultivated between five and ten acres, depending on location. Five acres is surely enough to feed a family, but how much food it gives depends on the diversity of products and the quality of its soil. As for the decline in the area planted, Gray speculated that erosion had caused “compulsory abandonment.” A body might have needed more in calories and nutrients than cushaws and shoats. Some of the first dietetic research began in the 1920s, leading census takers to ask about milk consumption as they traveled from cabin to cabin in 1929. “On more than 65,000 farms no cows were milked in 1929, indicating that many of the families may not have had an adequate supply of milk for family use.” Milk alone does not make an adequate diet, nor is it necessary for one, but it isn’t irrelevant either.50
Foresters, economists, and New Dealers had a word for these farms: submarginal. Any farm that presented barriers to full-scale commercial production (like steep topography inhospitable to machinery) was submarginal. When they converted the product of mountain homesteads into dollars and cents, they declared the people poor. But the economy of makeshift continually denies that measure. The experts talked about resettlement, moving people who apparently knew no better to richer valleys or out of farming altogether. Marginal people would be redeemed from marginal land by working at the new hotels on the Blue Ridge. They could build dams on the Tennessee River and manufacture nitrogen fertilizer at Muscle Shoals. Rotting cabins in steep and stony hollows looked to conservationists like rural versions of the same slums being demolished in the cities under pressure from reformers. The solution was eviction and clearance.
And yet, the lead author of the USDA’s study didn’t see the self-sufficing farm this way. “By every normal criterion a large proportion of the farms in the Southern Highlands are submarginal … Yet, I am inclined to believe that we should go very slowly in undertaking a program of elimination.” Gray’s reading of the census data convinced him that highlanders did not always suffer in privation and that life in a hollow could be better than life in a coal camp. He moved beyond the language of backwardness. “The mountain farmer can gradually be taught to improve greatly his standard of living without the intervention of that uncertain and unreliable medium called money.”
Gray looked to wages with such dread because money, by itself, never seemed to deliver stability. Many families abandoned the hollows to move closer to the mines, only to find the worst imaginable ground for planting. “Back when I had liberty on the farm,” explained a resident of Whitaker, Kentucky, speaking to an interviewer about the 1920s, “I could have my garden where I thought it would produce, I could put out anything I wanted to. Lots of times in the coal camps if the company allotted that miner a little garden spot [it was] halfway to the top of a hill.” Imposing an inferior space for planting on one side and a poverty wage on the other locked them into a standing wave. Gray called this kind of partial employment “uncertain, impermanent, or exploitative.”51
He acknowledged that gardens and fields were mostly unprofitable, but planners could reach out to farmers. Gray advocated “farm-forest communities,” a commons much like what mountain people maintained by themselves. He recommended local control over woods for cottage logging, combined with subsistence cultivation and off-farm wages. This model would have maintained autonomy, rejuvenated the ecological base, and provided cash. It endorsed the commodity circuit and suggested a stable place within the United States and American society for agrarians. Gray asserted this report as the basis of an Appalachian policy, concluding, “It is along these lines that I should like to see the ‘new deal’ … come to the Southern Highlands.”
Appalachia during the 1930s presented some hard questions for reformers. Did the people who endured in compromised hollows represent a distinct southern tradition worth preserving? Were they practicing a legitimate form of economy that should be encouraged, or were they the abject poor, underserved and neglected? Did they need a relief program to help them get through hard times, or should they be moved to lowland towns and cities with running water and dependable roads? Yet instead of clear-sighted programs meant to address the causes of poverty, studies that followed tended to depict Appalachia in all the old ways, as eternally poor and seized by static cultural beliefs.52
The authors of Hollow Folk (1933) saw them at their nadir—crowded together in hollows that could not possibly sustain them, deficient in cattle or much else for exchange, lacking anything to hunt but rodents, and dependent on tourists and industry for the money that connected them to the rest of the world. But whereas Hollow Folk might have addressed the social and political roots of poverty, instead it falls back on the old tropes.
“Social evolution” presumably still goes on but so slowly do groups go forward under their own power that no movement can be discerned through generations,—or so rapidly do more highly evolved people change that all the intermediate stages are l
ost. It may be only a short way, on a scale of evolution, from the medicine man’s antelope skin stretched across a hollow log to the radio, but left to themselves, it would take a very long time indeed for a jungle tribe to begin attaching aerial wires to the tree-tops.53
It is the language of degeneracy and cultures of poverty. Slow-moving groups stagger and backslide. Yet those “highly evolved” skip stages, which raises the question of whether stages actually exist. (After all, how can something be universal if it doesn’t universally apply?) The authors also universalize one particular technology against which the backsliders continually demonstrate their failure. But the hollow where the authors conducted their fieldwork was not strange or static or primitive, but poor. It was cut off from its previous sources of food and commodities, not left behind by history. The book offers a kind of Appalachian gothic rather than empathic social science.
Appalachia became a place where metropolitans experienced a vanishing American authenticity, where rocking chairs and baskets could be procured from people who could trace their artisanship back to the vanishing point. Depth of time and primitive skills gave folk objects a strangely modern virtue. They seemed to emerge from outside the flow of events that produced the present. But they embodied a contradiction. They increased in cultural value as industrial capitalism undermined their environmental and social basis. According to one critic, they gained allure from the destruction of the culture that created them. Tourists driving the Blue Ridge Parkway went looking to buy handcrafts. Each of these transactions was a little performance, with the artist acting as a representative of the world gone by. The circumstance of any exchange shapes the commodity itself. Visitors to Appalachia, like visitors to Indian reservations, deceived themselves into thinking that they bought something used by the maker, rather than something mass-produced for them.54
Tourists seeking handcrafts continued to arrive as Appalachians continued to flee. By the 1920s, outmigration from Appalachia was nothing new. It had been running parallel to the crisis in mountain farming. At first no one noticed it. The surge in the number of industrial jobs during the interwar period combined with a high birthrate compensated for the people leaving. It masked what would otherwise have been a downward trend. Thousands took off down the Hillbilly Highway, the name for any road leading anywhere out of the region. West Virginians and Kentuckians traveled Route 23 into Ohio. They stamped out tires in Akron and steel for Armco at Middletown. They made paper, rolled cigarettes, and assembled cars in cities like Cincinnati, Greensboro, Flint, and Detroit. They became Appalachians or just southern whites when they arrived in these cities, having lost their local identities.
The flow reversed course during the 1930s. When the factories shut down, some of the same people (or their children) returned to grow their own food, hunt whatever they could, and reconnect with family. The number of new farms increased by 51 percent between 1929 and 1934 but without an increase in the area cultivated. Families subdivided their already unproductive farms into smaller, even less viable fields and gathering grounds. Government relief, in the form of direct cash payments from a variety of agencies, sustained those who continued to subsist as other opportunities for earning cash disappeared.
After the Depression, the outmigration began again. The increasing mechanization of coal production resulted in layoffs and retirements. Destitute men sought work in nearby counties rather than emigrate—anything to keep their households and family networks intact. But the region lost at least 700,000 people down the Hillbilly Highway during the 1940s. For those who remained, a granular poverty set in that government did not address until the 1960s.55
7. Negotiated Settlements
THE FATE OF THE COMMONS AND THE COMMONERS
If there is any hope for the world at all … it lives low down on the ground, with its arms around the people who go to battle every day to protect their forests, their mountains and their rivers because they know that the forests, the mountains and the rivers protect them.
—Arundhati Roy, Walking with the Comrades (2010)
PEASANTS RULED DEVELOPMENT THOUGHT during the twentieth century. Eighty-five percent of the population of Africa lived in the countryside in 1950, slightly higher than the ratio of peasants to city dwellers in China, India, and all of East Asia. Americans grappled with what it meant that so much of humanity existed in social forms they considered primitive. W. W. Rostow borrowed from Lord Kames and Adam Smith to write The Stages of Economic Growth (1960), among the most influential works of development theory of the century. Along with most other economists, Rostow assumed that peasants had always struggled to feed themselves, that their suffering was endemic. His confidence stood upon the Allied victory in World War II and the belief, written into the Atlantic Charter, that growth would eliminate poverty and backwardness, that affluence through trade came along with self-determination—toward “a world free of want and fear.” Behind it all, economists imagined the peasant working interminably with nothing to show for it, neither producer nor consumer, left behind, outside the borders of civil society.
Backwardness demanded a program of modernization. That was the watchword of the age, the self-justifying consummation of stage theory, an amalgam of institutions and individualism predicated on technological and social change. Seven hundred and thirty delegates from forty-four nations met at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944 for a United Nations conference intended to reconfigure the world’s monetary policy toward a new economic order. The delegates created the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, known as the World Bank. The year before, a United Nations conference on food and agriculture dedicated the postwar world to connecting farmers to sources of credit. With their institutions in place, the representatives of modernity undertook an unprecedented project to end poverty by re-creating global peasantry in their own image.1
Yet even before the Great Depression, an antimodernizing countermovement had spread among intellectuals. The small town, the aboriginal nation, the self-sufficing farm—forms of social organization and modes of production once confidently slated for oblivion became inspirations. The National Folk Festival began in 1934. Appalachian handcrafts surged in popularity, displayed in museums and purchased by vacationers. Among the coterie of intellectuals who sought out American authenticity, the notion that every society moved through the same stages (or failed to) met resistance. The sociologist Carle C. Zimmerman saw a trend contrary to the course of progress—population flowing toward the countryside. “The cities have passed into a stage of rapidly diminishing returns … The magical system of beliefs which surround the individual and make his economic system work has lost much of its force.” Even an industrialist argued for the recovery of agrarian values. The soap manufacturer Samuel Fels worried that the political order had become “detached from the soil from which it sprang.” People needed to declare their independence anew, to “again exert a self-reliant mastery over our scheme of subsistence or we may lapse into a new peonage—this time to the machineries we have set up.”2
Millions of Americans knew how to grow some or most of their own food. Keeping a robust garden was hardly a fringe activity. Of the 30 million households in the United States, around one-third grew some, most, or all of their food. Weary industrial workers looking for a way out of breadlines found a shelf of books published between 1900 and 1940. Three Acres and Liberty (1907) and Five Acres and Independence (1935) became popular guides, but Flight from the City (1933) by Ralph Borsodi demonstrated greater authorial voice and narrative force than the others.3
Borsodi declared a new American independence. He wanted to “release men and women from their present thralldom to the factory and make them masters of machines instead of servants to them,” in order to “free them for the conquest of comfort, beauty and understanding.” He told a story about himself. “In 1920 the Borsodi family … lived in a rented home. We bought our food and clothing and furnishings from retail stores. We wer
e dependent entirely upon my income from a none too certain white-collar job.” Evicted when the landlord sold the house, their crisis led them to a farm just outside of New York City. There, Borsodi had his revelation. “We began to enjoy the feeling of plenty which the city-dweller never experiences. We cut our hay; gathered our fruit; made gallons and gallons of cider … We ended the year with plenty not only for our own needs but for a generous hospitality to our friends.” Borsodi looked forward to a reverse migration toward a desired agrarianism that afforded a dignified (if not a middle-class) standard of living.4
The new agrarianism took many forms. In 1928, Robert Winslow Gordon (and later John A. Lomax) assembled field chants and folk ballads into the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress. John Collier became commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1933 and immediately reversed a century of policy that outlawed religious practice and ritual observance. Collier upheld the Navajo as an exemplary community who had “preserved intact their religion, their ancient morality, their social forms and their appreciation of beauty,” like “an island of aboriginal culture in a monotonous sea of machine civilization.”
In 1930, a group of writers who called themselves Twelve Southerners (also known as the Agrarians) published I’ll Take My Stand. They condemned northern industrialism and leftist collectivism as brutalizing concentrations of power and redefined the Confederacy as a radical experiment in “moral, social, and economic autonomy.” But the Agrarians constructed a racial fantasy. For example, Allan Tate’s “Notes on Liberty and Property” is a study in denial. Tate makes no attempt to reconcile his genteel defense of agrarian values with the legalized suppression of black sharecroppers, whose own liberty, property, and agrarianism he never acknowledges. By conflating rural antimodernism with the Confederacy, the Twelve Southerners entombed their thought in white supremacy.5
