Reformers to Radicals

by Thomas Kiffmeyer

  Young America, nevertheless, was not the only agent for change in the years following World War II. Beginning immediately after Japan’s surrender in August 1945, the Cold War caused many older Americans—those who had lived through the trauma of global conflict—to fear for their continued safety. In the “dual world” of the 1950s, in which one was in either the Soviet or the American camp, the “fall” of China to communism and the detonation of a nuclear device by the Soviet Union, both in 1949, heightened these fears. Just as the existence of poverty was an affront to some Americans’ sensibilities, Communist “successes” particularly frustrated the World War II generation. How could these nations, devastated by the recent war and technologically inferior, equal American successes in the scientific arena? Equally frightening was the extension of communism in Asia. Convinced of its monolithic nature, these Americans interpreted any and all “Red” advances as a loss for the free world. By the dawn of the 1950s, America believed that it faced a serious new threat to its freedom, a threat that would require it to match the vigilance, determination, and unity of its enemies.8

  America’s view of the world as dominated by the two irreconcilable forces of freedom and communism was perhaps best expressed in the National Security Act and National Security Council Report 68 (NSC-68). Passed in 1947, the National Security Act expanded the powers of the president through the creation of the White House–controlled National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency. Set up to gather information and “perform other such functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the National Security Council may from time to time direct,” the CIA was yet another addition to the “centralized power of the State.” Written by the State Department official George Kennan in 1950, NSC-68 argued that “a defeat of free institutions anywhere is a defeat everywhere.” It also reflected the belief that the superior productive capacity of the United States (along with higher taxes but not true economic sacrifice) would enable the country to easily increase defense spending to the point where it could protect the entire free world. The United States thus embarked on a global strategy of “containing” communism wherever it existed.9

  More important than the finances involved, policy makers argued, a successful counter to the Soviet challenge “would require the mobilization of American society and the creation of a ‘consensus’ that ‘sacrifice’ and ‘unity’ were necessary.” This sacrifice was, of course, personal and political, not just economic. Subjected to loyalty boards, the McCarran Act of 1950, the Communist Control Act of 1954, and “attorney general lists” that enumerated suspected political subversives, Americans saw their political freedoms severely restricted in the name of national security. While under presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower the loyalty boards fired twenty-seven hundred federal employees for being associated with “totalitarian” ideologies and through fear and intimidation caused another twelve thousand to resign, the McCarran Act required Communist Party members to register with the national government. When President Eisenhower signed the Communist Control Act, the government terminated “all rights, privileges, and immunities” of the Party. The country, moreover, “denied Communists their passports, terminated their social security and military disability payments, and deported those who were not citizens.”10

  It did not stop at the federal level. As “McCarthyism” took hold of the nation, Ohio State University restricted speakers, and the University of California fired those employees who refused to sign loyalty oaths. Institutions of higher learning, both large and small, across the country followed suit, and, in the early years of the Cold War, America’s centers of learning were anything but a marketplace of ideas. In her study of the academy and anticommunism, Ellen Schrecker claims that over six hundred teachers and professors lost their jobs because they refused to sign loyalty oaths or bow to state laws or institutional pressure. Finally, many states, including Pennsylvania and Kentucky, enacted their own versions of these laws. Most important were state antisedition laws patterned after the federal Smith Act of 1940. With many linking any type of deviance with communism, fitting in rendered one immune from charges of disloyalty. Of course, those who advocated change—even the relatively modest changes of the first half of the 1960s—failed to fit the criteria for loyal citizens. Even more sinister were the activists of the later 1960s, those who openly questioned the country’s economic and social institutions.11

  At the dawn of the 1960s, these two opposing forces, one stressing increased state controls over dissidence and the other focusing on the nation’s problems, dramatically clashed. Though their battlefields seem obvious to many, the nature and causes of the conflicts run deeper and are much more complex. Beyond the immediate issues of national security and the Communist threat, civil rights, and the war in Southeast Asia exist questions concerning the nature of American liberalism, the identification of the country’s radicals, the role of local people in reform (or antireform) issues, the political uses of anticommunism, the methods of community development employed, and, especially in the case of Appalachia, Americans’ image of themselves. These questions—essentially the same issues that civil rights scholars confront—place the Appalachian Volunteers and the War on Poverty squarely within the context of the decade of the 1960s. Though the AVs operated in the southern mountain region, their experience reveals much about the nation’s history. Essentially, they were American, not just Appalachian, activists.

  Appalachia, nevertheless, was a natural battleground for the War on Poverty. Harboring some of the poorest counties in the United States, the Southern mountains long held the interest of reformers. In the 1890s, the local color movement—a literary movement that highlighted the deplorable living conditions of the people in the more remote sections of the mountains—brought national attention to the region, and women such as Katherine Pettit and May Stone founded settlement schools there. Modeled after their urban counterparts, including Hull House in Chicago, these turn-of-the-century mountain schools instructed students in proper living as well as academic subjects. Like their 1960s descendants, reformers designed these efforts to lift Appalachians out of their depressed conditions. Critical to the settlement school program, however, was the maintenance of those aspects of mountain culture that set it apart from the new immigrants, mostly Southern and Eastern Europeans, who were flooding into the United States at that time.12

  Using labels such as contemporary ancestors and a strange land and peculiar people, reformers, from William Goodell Frost, the president of Berea College at the turn into the twentieth century, to the settlement schools’ teachers, described a “culture of poverty” that existed in the mountains.13 By perpetuating outmoded customs, values, and traditions, this culture explained the impoverishment of the rural mountaineer. Because at the dawn of the twentieth century the people of the mountains still lived in log cabins, spoke the language of Chaucer, dressed in “sorry clothing,” and exhibited an “awkward demeanor,” as Frost wrote in 1899, Appalachia became not just a land of primitive people but a place “in” but not “of” America, especially when viewed in light of the achievements of the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth. Briefly, Appalachia’s “otherness” equaled poverty. According to this explanation, mountaineer lifestyles more closely resembled those of generations past, typified as they were by sparsely settled communities, subsistence farming, a Calvinistic sense of fatalism, and, most important, a value system that was incongruent with modern, urban standards. In response, proponents of the modern model advocated a system of education, economic stimulation, and a cultural reorientation that would align the region and its people with the rest of America. Underlying this argument was the unquestioned assumption that the values and lifestyles of the dominant culture were inherently superior to those of the mountaineer. Naturally, to those who visited the region and reported what they found, this impoverished, “other” area cried out for aid. Reformers of many types—settlement school teache
rs, benevolent organizations, and churches—then entered the mountains with the hope of uplifting the impoverished mountaineers out of their deplorable conditions. Thus began the first efforts to reconstruct the Southern mountains. Though rooted in the progressive movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this model resonated through the later reform efforts of the New Deal and the Great Society. Jack Weller’s Yesterday’s People—perhaps the best example of this model—actually served as a training manual for those reformers, including the Appalachian Volunteers, who entered Appalachia during the first few years of the War on Poverty.14

  Interestingly, a contemporary of Weller’s, the Whitesburg, Kentucky, lawyer Harry Caudill, highlighted how industrialists monopolized coal and timber, exploited the labor force, and turned local politics in their favor. The result, Caudill declared, was a “depressed area.” Though he recognized the arbitrary destructiveness of extractive industries such as coal and timber, Caudill saw Appalachia in the 1960s as a region inhabited by people with a culture as depressed as the economy. It was this interpretation—one that was nearly a century old—that dominated the earliest of the antipoverty efforts of the Appalachian Volunteers. Ultimately, however, Caudill’s interpretation, coupled with the experiences of the Volunteers, precipitated different interpretations that, by the 1980s, included modernization theory, labor issues, and sociology.15

  Scholars, including John Gaventa, Ron Eller, David Corbin, and John Hevener, have identified the virtual dictatorial control of the coal industry, not the region’s culture, as the cause of poverty. Asking (in Power and Powerlessness) the fundamental question of why people stoically accepted the power of the coal industry in the region, Gaventa makes the argument—reminiscent of John Steinbeck’s depiction in The Grapes of Wrath (1939) of the eviction of farmers from their homes during the Great Depression—that the nature of power and its physical location outside the region prevented local people from ever confronting the source of poverty in the coalfields.

  Using modernization as his theoretical model in Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers, Eller argued that the process of industrialization, coupled with factors including absentee ownership, resulted in the destruction of traditional Appalachian economic structures, the depletion of the region’s resources, and the impoverishment of the rural population. More than just wages and working conditions, Eller states, the “elimination of mine guards, overpricing at the company store, assembly and visitation restrictions, and other issues of civil liberties were almost always major areas of concern” to mountaineers.16

  Specifically focusing on the repressive policies of the coal industry, Corbin’s Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields and Hevener’s Which Side Are You On? convincingly document the arbitrary power of the coal operators. According to Hevener and Corbin, labor troubles in the coal-fields in the first half of the twentieth century resulted from the nearly complete subservience of the miner in a quasi-feudal society, dominated by coal operators and their local allies. The union struggles in the mountain coal industry were, Hevener contends, “both an attempt to remedy unsatisfactory working conditions and a miners’ revolt against the Harlan mine owners’ arbitrary economic, political, and social power.”17

  Within the past decade, historians have recognized that simply blaming outside corporate interests for Appalachian poverty ignores the role of residents of the region. What role, if any, scholars began to ask, did Appalachians themselves play in the industrial development of the region. Building, in her Feud, on Eller’s work, which recognized that “insiders” such as John C. C. Mayo contributed to industrial domination, Altina Waller reinterprets the conflict between these two infamous families. While outside corporate interests played a major role in both the causes and longevity of the feud, Waller argues that the Hatfields and McCoys themselves were torn between traditional local economic relationships and participation in a broader national market economy. Waller’s contribution charted a new course in Appalachian studies. Historians began to reexamine the paths that coal operators traveled to ensure their domination of the labor force.

  Crandall Shifflett answers Gaventa’s query by illustrating, in Coal Towns, how mountain residents sought the “stable ideal,” which included mobility and fecundity rather than stasis. Owing to declining fortunes on the family farm prior to the coming of industry, mountaineers accepted and adapted to the coal industry in the hope of perpetuating preindustrial cultural patterns. “In other words,” according to Shifflett, “mountain culture has not caused mobility, but cultural ideals have given context and shape to the movement.” This did not mean, however, that coal operators faced a passive, reticent labor force. On the contrary, operators, through what Shifflet labels “contentment sociology,” provided company town residents with health care, amusements, and schools with the goal “that a satisfied laboring population would be stable and productive” and should, moreover, “[prevent] unions and lockouts.”18

  As illuminating as these more recent accounts are, they too often see easy dichotomies: they pit modernizers against traditionalists or coal operators against an uncertain, volatile workforce. While their general interpretations are accurate, they minimize the diversity of experience in the region. Included in this group is David Whisnant. Published in 1980, Whisnant’s Modernizing the Mountaineer places the Appalachian Volunteers first in a conservative “Appalachia as culture of poverty” camp, after which they travel to a much more “radical activist” camp. In reality, as the trajectory of the Appalachian Volunteers illustrated, the organization was much more complex. Further, the Volunteers themselves underwent a number of transformations. In their initial phase, the AVs were exactly that: volunteers from Appalachia. By 1965, however, the Volunteers had entered a second phase; while they were still volunteers, they increasingly hailed from outside Appalachia. In their third phase, when the organization focused on issue organizing (Whisnant’s “radical” phase), the AVs were, for the most part, neither Appalachian nor volunteers, most being paid “fieldmen” from outside the region. Eventually, in their final phase, as the War on Poverty ground to a halt at the start of the 1970s, they found themselves Appalachians again, if still not volunteers. Instead, the organization employed the services of local people to carry on the organizing agenda.19

  As the Appalachian Volunteers story shows, the history of the Southern mountains is more than a struggle between the haves and the have-nots. On the contrary, the War on Poverty in Appalachia illuminates the multiplicity of problems that the various poverty warriors faced no matter where they operated. Though the exploitation of the region by both native and outside industrialists was at the root of many problems, others were the result of the clash of values and cultures. More than just a conflict between different socioeconomic classes within the area, what emerged as the reform effort progressed was a clash between Appalachians and non-Appalachians. In short, the War on Poverty magnified the social, political, economic, and cultural problems precipitated by the collision of class, culture, urban and rural values, and corporate domination—and not just in Appalachia, but nationwide.

  Because the Community Action Program—the centerpiece of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, by means of which Johnson launched the War on Poverty—required the input of virtually every segment of society, this multiplicity of problems led to a plethora of proposed solutions that would result in a confused concept of “community development.” Given that, at the start, the poverty warriors viewed their target communities as characterized by both economic and cultural impoverishment and considered the two states to be equivalently evil, they conceptualized development in these terms. Other participants, however, including public and private interests as well as the poor themselves, had their own sets of values, harboring their own versions of what community development meant and how to achieve it. As a result, communities, and those who sought to help them, experienced extreme difficulty defining the term and forging solutions that addressed the problems they encount
ered. As the War on Poverty progressed, battles arose more over whose definitions and solutions would prevail than over poverty itself. Unfortunately, for those who lost these struggles, the results were devastating.20

  This concern with how different individuals or groups understood the designs and functions of the War on Poverty sheds light on the philosophical underpinning of the reform effort and on the history of American liberal reform movements generally. As Alice O’Connor argues in Poverty Knowledge, the history of American reform, especially since the advent of “professional social researchers” in the early twentieth century, has focused on the poor, not on poverty. As a result, she claims, reformers tried to change the impoverished rather than those factors, including racial inequities and gender biases, that placed people in a disadvantaged position in the first place. Focused in this manner, “poverty knowledge has been perhaps most effective as a form of cultural affirmation: a powerful reassurance that poverty occurs outside or in spite of core American values and practices.” Though her primary concern is poverty within a decaying urban core, in her discussion of poverty research in the 1960s, “when this theme became virtually institutionalized,” O’Connor echoed the attitude held by most poverty planners and warriors throughout the twentieth century—and especially those in Appalachia. “Poverty,” she concluded, “to use the terminology of the day, occurs in some ‘other’ separate America; as an aberration, an exception, a ‘paradox’ of plenty rather than as an integral or necessary condition of the affluent society.” From the Progressive era through the 1960s, American reformers entered battle armed with the unquestioning belief that they, not the targets of their efforts, held the proper attitudes concerning social, economic, and political structures. What held the poor back was not the prevailing political economy but an inability to accept and embrace those proper attitudes.21