Читать книгу Uneven Ground - Ronald D Eller - Страница 12

I’ve been preachin’ the gospel for 25 years, and I’ve never seen a time so bad.

—Levi McGeorge, pastor of the Closplint Church of God, Harlan County, Kentucky, February 1959

The winters of 1959 and 1960 were unusually harsh in Appalachia, bringing additional burdens to an already hard-pressed land. The destruction of the record flood of 1957 could still be seen in many mountain communities, and a national recession only deepened the economic crisis in the hills. Throughout central Appalachia, hundreds of displaced coal miners faced the specter of expired unemployment benefits and dwindling food supplies. Heavy snows and subfreezing temperatures resulted in several deaths from starvation and exposure. Kentucky governor Happy Chandler declared an emergency in eastern Kentucky and initiated a modest relief effort, but state resources were inadequate to meet the problem.¹

Conditions were equally severe in West Virginia when Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts arrived to campaign in the 1960 Democratic presidential primary. Kennedy’s subsequent victory in the West Virginia primary would mark a turning point in his drive to the presidency. Winning in the Mountain State settled the question of whether a Catholic candidate could carry a predominantly Protestant state and smoothed the senator’s path to victory in other primaries. For Appalachia, however, the 1960 primary was a watershed of another kind. Events in West Virginia drew the attention of the federal government and national media to the economic despair that had settled over the region.

When Senator Kennedy came to West Virginia, mountain villages were still digging out from heavy snows and bitter cold, the coldest March on record and the most snowfall since 1914.² By April the campaign began to warm along with the weather, and the candidates carried their search for votes out of the urban areas and into the rural districts and coal camps of the southern part of the state. Political strategists expected that the issue of religion would dominate the campaign, as it had in other states, and Kennedy was prepared to confront religious bigotry head-on. But the crowds of unemployed coal miners who greeted the senator in places like Welch and Williamson and in dozens of other coal communities along Paint Creek, Cabin Creek, and the New River were less interested in the candidate’s religion than in his plans to relieve their economic distress.

Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, the only candidate to challenge Kennedy in the Mountain State, had raised concerns about economic conditions in the coalfields as early as January 1960. In a speech before the West Virginia Legislature, Humphrey attacked poverty in affluent America as “a national scandal,” but he failed to reach the people with his message, and he could not compete with the Kennedy money and political organization. Kennedy, who seemed genuinely stunned by the conditions he witnessed in the coal camps, turned the economic issue to his advantage, suggesting that he was the only candidate who could provide relief for the state, if West Virginians would send him to the White House. Tying himself to the memory of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the patron saint of Democrats who had brought the union and relief programs to the mountains during the Great Depression, Kennedy campaigned alongside Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., who assured hungry coal miners that the Massachusetts senator would follow through on aid to depressed areas. On the eve of the May 10 primary, Kennedy went before television cameras and promised the people of West Virginia, “If I’m nominated and elected president, within sixty days of the start of my administration, I will introduce a program to the Congress for aid to West Virginia.” The next day Senator Kennedy received over 60 percent of the votes of West Virginia Democrats for their party’s presidential nomination, and Senator Humphrey withdrew from the race.³

While Democrats campaigned in West Virginia, state and local leaders in other Appalachian states pressed for federal assistance to the region. In January 1960 newly elected governor Bert T. Combs of Kentucky endorsed Program 60’s recommendations as priority objectives for his administration, including the call for a meeting of Appalachian governors. Later that spring, concerned with the special problems of Maryland’s Appalachian counties, Governor Millard Tawes invited the governors and representatives of seven Appalachian states to convene in Annapolis to coordinate state development efforts across the region. The first Conference of Appalachian Governors met on May 20, 1960, only ten days after the West Virginia primary and a week after President Eisenhower vetoed another depressed areas bill sent to him by Congress. The governors reviewed a report on economic conditions and population trends in eleven Appalachian states prepared by the Maryland Department of Economic Development.⁴ They resolved to push for further cooperation among the states, but they were unable to agree on support for federal action.

Democratic governors at the Annapolis meeting favored special legislation to assist the self-help programs being developed within the Appalachian states, but Republican governor Cecil Underwood of West Virginia defended the president’s veto of the depressed areas bill. “The President was 1,000 percent right to veto this bill,” he argued, “on the grounds that it sets up another federal agency. We already have enough departments in the federal government.” Adding that the “magic” of depressed areas legislation was “not the answer,” he complained that politicians and journalists who had publicized the plight of West Virginia during the recent primary had not given a balanced picture: “It is true that 20 per cent of our workforce has been displaced. But we still have a strong, vigorous economy. We are not as bad off as Michigan. We have not had to borrow for unemployment compensation as Pennsylvania has. We are still teetering on the brink of solvency.”⁵

Despite his opposition to the depressed areas bill, Underwood supported the idea of interstate cooperation, and the group agreed to hold a second Conference of Appalachian Governors to be hosted by Governor Combs the following fall. Meeting in Lexington, Kentucky, on October 17–18, 1960, the governors of five states and the representatives of six others discussed mutual problems facing their Appalachian areas, especially the challenges of highway construction and water control. Present were Governors Luther Hodges of North Carolina, Buford Ellington of Tennessee, and Lindsey Almond of Virginia, as well as Combs of Kentucky and Tawes of Maryland. Also attending were representatives of several federal agencies; Willis Weatherford of Berea College, who outlined the goals of the Appalachian regional survey then underway; and Perley Ayer, director of the CSM, who pledged the support of his organization.

Again Governor Combs called for the passage of federal area redevelopment legislation that would help address the “acute problem of unemployment in the region,” and he appointed a committee chaired by Governor Tawes to draft a “statement of principles” that might serve as a framework for cooperation and “might be able to get the interest—and possibly some commitments—from both the presidential candidates [Richard Nixon and Kennedy] and from candidates for Congress.”⁶ Notwithstanding the reluctance of representatives from Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, and Virginia “to yield even a portion of state sovereignty” to any new federal program,⁷ the governors approved the “Declaration for Action Regarding the Appalachian Region.” The resolution pledged to form and continue a “voluntary association of the states” to advance “a special regional program of development,” and it called for candidates for national office to support “appropriate federal participation” in the solutions to the region’s problems.⁸

The conference and the declaration for action bore the distinct mark of John Whisman. Serving as aide to Governor Combs, Whisman had helped to organize the Annapolis meeting and had coordinated planning for the Lexington conference. The Lexington resolution drew extensively on Program 60 for both its language and its strategies for action. The resolution, for example, avoided the phrase “depressed area” that was popularly associated with urban redevelopment efforts and instead pointed to the “chronic condition of underdevelopment and severe unemployment” that existed in the region. “As a result [of underdevelopment],” the declaration read, “many people [of Appalachia] are denied reasonable economic and cultural opportunities through no fault of their own. In addition, the productive force in both physical and human resources is severely limited in its contribution to the nation, while the costs of essential welfare services are steadily increasing.”⁹

By characterizing Appalachia as an underdeveloped region rather than a depressed area, the governors hoped to draw attention to Appalachia’s special problems and to distinguish the needs of the mountains from those of urban areas that had achieved development but were now suffering from temporary economic decline. “By underdevelopment, we mean that basic handicaps to development of adequate facilities involving transportation and water resources have in turn hindered the local ability to support necessary public services and private enterprise activity. Because of such basic deficiencies, the success of local development activity in all areas of life is severely handicapped.” What Appalachia needed, the document suggested, was temporary public work and job training programs similar to those being proposed for the rest of the country and the creation of modern economic infrastructure such as key roads and major water control facilities. Planning for this basic infrastructure should be connected to a “comprehensive state and regional development program . . . in appropriate fields of activity, including forestry, agriculture, mineral resources and tourist travel, industrial and community development, education, health and welfare.”¹⁰ The declaration attempted to move policy discussions beyond relief programs and toward the use of federal resources for the comprehensive development of the region. Effectively, the Lexington resolution outlined the issues that would shape efforts to create a special Appalachian development program over the next five years. The conference also adopted a resolution endorsing an Appalachian development highway system and elected Governor Combs as chair. Whisman was designated to head a permanent staff committee to plan future meetings and actions.

The recommendations of the governors’ conference in Lexington took on additional significance three weeks later, when John F. Kennedy was elected to the presidency of the United States. To prepare his domestic agenda, the president-elect immediately asked his brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver, to put together a series of twenty-nine teams that would meet to draft a legislative program for the new administration.¹¹ Fulfilling Kennedy’s pledge to the people of West Virginia, one of the first teams created was the Task Force on Area Redevelopment, appointed to formulate specific recommendations to assist people in economically depressed areas. Generally the Kennedy task forces comprised academics, business leaders, congressional staff, and members of the Kennedy team, but the ten members appointed to the Task Force on Area Redevelopment included seven labor and industrial leaders from West Virginia, the secretary of labor and industry from Pennsylvania, and the assistant to the president of the UMWA in Washington. Kennedy asked Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois, who had led congressional efforts to enact depressed areas legislation throughout the 1950s, to serve as chair of the committee and, after a last-minute request from Governor Combs, added Whisman to the team.¹²

The West Virginia task force, as the Kennedy people called it, met initially in Charleston, West Virginia, on December 9, 1960, and within two weeks it issued a report recommending both a short-term package of immediate relief for those unemployed as a result of the recession and a broader strategy of area development to provide long-term job opportunities. The report called for the passage of area redevelopment legislation similar to that which had failed during the Eisenhower years, including the creation of an area redevelopment administration and programs in human resource development, natural resource development, and public works. Most of these proposals were designed to address unemployment problems in declining urban areas such as Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Chicago, but the final recommendation of the report—reflecting Whisman’s influence—urged the establishment of a system of regional development commissions across the nation that would attack the special problems of distressed regions and carry out comprehensive development programs. As an immediate step, the committee recommended that the president appoint an Appalachian regional commission, based on the initiative of the Appalachian governors, that might serve as a pilot for similar efforts in other regions.¹³

The core recommendations of the task force became Senate bill 1 when the new Congress convened in January 1961, but the proposals for a national system of development commissions and a pilot Appalachian regional commission failed to make the final draft of the legislation. A parade of Appalachian members of Congress testified in favor of the bill during House and Senate hearings. Jennings Randolph and Robert Byrd of West Virginia, John Sherman Cooper and Carl Perkins of Kentucky, Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, and Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania described the critical economic conditions in their mountain counties that had led to official unemployment rates of 12 to 25 percent. Governors Tawes of Maryland, Ellington of Tennessee, and Combs of Kentucky all praised the bill but added that other measures were also needed, including a highway program, funds for natural resource development, and increased aid to education. Opponents of the Area Redevelopment Act complained that the legislation was not needed and objected to the federal government’s interfering in the economic affairs of local areas, but Congress passed the legislation in late March 1961.¹⁴

The Area Redevelopment Act authorized the creation of the Area Redevelopment Administration (ARA) in the Department of Commerce and the expenditure of $394 million over a four-year period. Most of the funds were to provide low-interest industrial loans, grants to local governments for public facilities needed to attract businesses, and subsistence for worker training programs. Even ARA officials acknowledged that the act “essentially followed a ‘trickle down’ approach to poverty and unemployment, with most of the direct benefits going to businesses and not to unemployed people,” but Appalachian political leaders hoped that the legislation would lead to broader efforts to assist the region.¹⁵

The act became law on May 1, 1961, and a week later the Conference of Appalachian Governors met in Washington with President Kennedy and the director of the new ARA to coordinate regional development strategies with the agency. In response to the governors’ proposal to create an Appalachian commission, the president asked the ARA to establish a liaison with the governors to coordinate state and federal development strategies. The governors appointed a staff committee, chaired by Whisman, to work with the ARA liaison to channel recommendations to the agency. Later this informal arrangement became the federal interagency committee on the Appalachian region, but there were no special funds set aside for Appalachia, and the responsibility for drafting a comprehensive development plan for the region remained with the governors.¹⁶

Over the next two years, the Conference of Appalachian Governors (now called the Council of Appalachian Governors) continued to meet on a regular basis and to formulate proposals for an Appalachian highway program, water resource and forestry development, and education and job training programs, but the president proved unresponsive to the call for a state-federal Appalachian regional commission. Frustration also grew with the ARA and with the slow distribution of federal aid to distressed mountain communities. Not only was the ARA severely underfunded for its task, but fully one-third of the counties in the nation qualified for ARA benefits. Seventy-six percent of Appalachian counties qualified for the program, but the bulk of ARA resources flowed to private businesses located primarily in urban centers outside the region. Rural areas, like most of Appalachia, lacked the existing businesses and business prospects to make them eligible for assistance, and they lacked the professional staff necessary to prepare the overall economic development plans necessary for funding. Furthermore, ARA and other federal programs continued to require local matching funds that seriously depressed rural communities were unable to supply. ARA also provided no funds for education, health care, or other human resource development needs.¹⁷

Only West Virginia benefited significantly from ARA resources, and these were utilized primarily in the development of tourism projects. Over half of the ARA funds expended in Appalachia ($79 million) during its four-year existence went to the Mountain State, and much of that was allocated to the massive New River Gorge project designed to create a series of tourism attractions in Fayette and Raleigh counties. The bulk of business loans and grants were funneled to a handful of heavily industrialized valley counties in West Virginia and Pennsylvania. The Appalachian portions of three states (Maryland, North Carolina, and Ohio) received no public facilities dollars at all, while four other states (Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, and Georgia) received less than 7 percent of the funds. ARA job training programs were slow to get started, and the few training programs funded in Appalachia were not linked to specific business expansions. Many of the trainees had to be shipped out of the region to find jobs.¹⁸

By 1962 disappointment with the ARA was widespread in the mountains. Harry Caudill wrote that the ARA had been launched with “the most laudable intentions” but had “accomplished little beyond a few small loans for minor business enterprises.”¹⁹ The Louisville Courier-Journal complained that the agency’s efforts in eastern Kentucky were “as useless as oars on an airplane.”²⁰ The annual report of the Eastern Kentucky Regional Planning Commission noted that ARA loans, grants, and training programs were “useful tools” but that these were “far less important” than the agency’s “potential function—inadequately used to date—in providing technical assistance and in coordinating federal programs.”²¹

The Appalachian governors and the CSM continued to lobby the president to create a separate Appalachian regional commission that could coordinate federal programs with the states and could administer supplemental and special federal benefits for regional development. Although the president’s attention turned to other domestic and foreign policy concerns in 1962, intellectual and political currents were converging rapidly on a mainstream assault on poverty as part of a new national agenda. Events in the mountains would place Appalachia at the center of that effort.

Following the West Virginia presidential primary in 1960, national journalists had increasingly turned to Appalachia as a symbol of the growing disparity between poverty and affluence in the United States. The image of a rich, young New England senator being greeted by barefoot children and destitute coal miners fueled an escalating sense that two societies had emerged in postwar America. Despite the conspicuous wealth evident in new suburban housing projects, shopping centers, interstate highways, and other signs of an emerging consumer culture, many rural areas and inner-city communities in the 1960s still struggled to overcome the blight of depression and poverty.

Kennedy’s visible alarm at conditions in the Mountain State and the attention given to economic issues in the presidential campaign lured dozens of journalists to the mountains in the months that followed the election. Stories of human tragedy, personal struggle, cruel injustice, and heroic perseverance abounded in Appalachia and provided grist for a growing media mill of articles about poverty in America. The region’s natural beauty and romantic folk culture added mystery and curiosity to tales of personal adversity and hardship, and it was an easy progression from stories of individual tragedy to descriptions of Appalachia itself as a region apart from the rest of America, a poor place in an otherwise rich land. Embedded in the idea of Appalachia as a distressed region, moreover, were unsettling questions about the American economic system as a whole—who benefited from development and who didn’t, and why entire regions of the country failed to share in the rewards of postwar growth.

For the second time in less than a century, Appalachia appeared at the heart of national debates about modernization and progress. Whereas a generation of writers after the Civil War had helped to define Appalachia in the popular mind as the antithesis of an emerging national culture, journalists in the 1960s concentrated their attention on images of Appalachia as a socioeconomic problem area. To a generation immersed in the cold war and confronted by the civil rights movement, Appalachia provided further evidence of the failure of the American promise for many whites as well as for blacks. The presence of widespread poverty in an old and predominantly white part of the nation’s heartland challenged prevailing assumptions about technology, the free market, and the social responsibility of wealth. In the context of the 1960s, the region became a popular symbol of poverty and of weakness in the American economy itself.

The rediscovery of the region fed on old stereotypes and outdated images, but the new commentaries spoke as much to the anxieties confronting the larger society as they did to the political and economic problems of the mountains. Images of Appalachia as isolated and of Appalachians as a quaint and sometimes violent people persisted, but increasingly observers described Appalachian poverty not as a permanent condition but as something that could be alleviated by the application of modern resources to human problems. If Appalachia was a distressed region, they reasoned, it must not have experienced the same economic and cultural changes that had lifted the rest of the nation out of the Depression and placed it on the road to prosperity after World War II. Appalachia might once have been a cultural and geographic anomaly, but, thanks to advances in science and technology, these conditions could now be overcome.

Postwar confidence in the American path to modernization provided the solution to the conundrum of Appalachian poverty, just as American capitalism provided a light for third world progress, but Americans differed on how to put the region on the road to prosperity. For some, poverty was the result of individual character weaknesses that could be alleviated through technical education, job training, and the cultural adjustment to modern values. For others, poverty was the consequence of governmental neglect of the basic public infrastructure that moved societies through the stages of development and capitalist expansion—roads, water systems, and public facilities. Most assumed that raising the expectations of poor people and providing the goods of industrial production—that is, modernization—would bring poor regions into the mainstream. Few questioned the benefits of growth or associated poverty with systemic inequalities in political or economic structures.

As early as the 1950s, liberal politicians and scholars had begun to describe poverty as an anomaly, a minority condition within an otherwise prosperous nation. Early in the decade, Minnesota senator Hubert Humphrey called for the creation of a youth conservation corps to address what were believed to be growing problems of juvenile delinquency, idleness, and poverty in urban areas. Later, Governor Averell Harriman asked the New York legislature for funds to study the causes of poverty in the Empire State, and twice in the decade Illinois senator Paul Douglas, a professional economist, sponsored federal legislation to aid depressed areas. Most of these efforts saw poverty as a deviation from the American norm that could be corrected by government investment in public works projects and job programs, but these New Deal–style initiatives failed repeatedly to pass in the face of postwar Republican opposition.

In 1958 Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith confirmed American confidence in the arrival of a new age of mass prosperity with the publication of his best-selling book The Affluent Society. The economic crisis of the Great Depression, he suggested, had been overcome now for most Americans. Scarcity had been replaced by affluence except in a few unrelenting pockets of poverty that still demanded government attention. Galbraith saw the persistence of poverty as a national scandal, but as a Keynesian economist he was primarily interested in the growing gap between private opulence and the need for public sector investment in roads, schools, parks, and other infrastructure to sustain growth.²²

Other writers, however, led by Michael Harrington, soon extended Galbraith’s analysis and questioned the depth of the postwar economic miracle. In the July 1959 issue of Commentary magazine, Harrington estimated that as much as a third of the nation’s people still lived at substandard levels and were permanently, not temporarily, distressed. It was a popular myth, Harrington argued, that the poor in the United States were a small and declining group, largely limited to nonwhites and rural southerners and protected from despair by the reforms of the New Deal. The facts, he suggested, presented “a different and far less pretty picture.” Poverty had become a trap for many Americans, and he called for a “comprehensive assault on poverty . . . [in] America’s rural and urban slums.”²³

The events of the West Virginia primary appeared to confirm Harrington’s views, and, soon after Kennedy’s victory in the Mountain State, Washington Post staff reporter Julius Duscha followed up on Harrington’s critique of the American economy by touring Appalachia, “this country’s worst blighted area.” Duscha’s August 1960 essay set the pattern for a generation of writers who would see the southern Appalachian Mountains as a region in need and mountain people as victims. “From the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia to the trail of the Cumberland Gap in Kentucky,” he wrote, “tens of thousands of Americans live in appalling poverty. Live? No, they hardly exist.” These once proud and independent mountain families—“many of them descendants of pioneer American families”—had been reduced to living on handouts of surplus food or what they could scratch from hillside gardens. According to William D. Gorman, a community leader in Hazard, Kentucky, things were so bad that some people in his church were no longer coming to worship services “because they didn’t have clothes to wear or food to eat.”

Duscha found evidence of misery throughout the half-ghost, half-coal towns of eastern Kentucky and southern West Virginia: “the gaunt, hungry faces; the unpainted, crumbling homes; the women who are pitifully old before their time, and the men who have nothing to do but sit and tell a grim story that needs no substantiation with figures.” The decline of coal mining and the obsolescence of the small farm had caused this suffering, and the region needed “massive assistance of the kind that Government and industry have given to the underdeveloped countries of the world. For much of the Southern Appalachians is as underdeveloped, when compared with the affluence of the rest of America, as the newly independent countries of Africa.” In light of American abundance, he concluded, the nation “should be able to provide a decent life for all persons, whether they live in a hollow, on a ridge, in a city or on a 500-acre Iowa farm.”²⁴

A host of other writers followed in the literary path opened by the Washington Post reporter. Over the next three years, a wave of articles, books, and television documentaries flooded the media with descriptions of Appalachian poverty. In 1961 David Grossman and Melvin Levin, New England–based planners who had prepared the reference materials for the Annapolis Conference of Appalachian Governors, published a report in the journal Land Economics that statistically defined Appalachia as a “national problem area.” Grossman and Levin identified a number of obstacles to economic growth in the region, including the topography, tax policies, inadequate community facilities, “unfavorable psychological attitudes,” and a “superannuated, unskilled” workforce.²⁵ In 1962 a group of nationally acclaimed scholars came to similar conclusions when they released The Southern Appalachian Region: A Survey, sponsored by the Ford Foundation. The study provided scientific analyses of the region’s economy and social institutions, but it laid most of the blame for regional backwardness on the provincial culture of the mountain people.²⁶ Later that year Michael Harrington included Appalachia as part of the “other America” in his book of that title designed to stir the conscience of Americans to do something for the nation’s poor.²⁷

These and other essays fed a growing chorus of commentary among the intellectual elite on the political and economic dilemma of poverty,²⁸ but when Look magazine published a collection of photographs of Appalachia in December 1962, the face of poverty in the United States, at least for many middle-class Americans, became indelibly Appalachian. Part of a series of essays about American regions, the Look photographs avoided the old stereotypes of mountain residents as historical relics or degenerate rubes. Instead they captured images of solid American families surrounded by the trappings of modern life but caught in the web of economic deprivation. Abandoned appliances and disabled cars belied the gaunt beauty of a young mother or the hidden strength of an unemployed coal miner. In images that evoked middle-class values of family, religion, and hard work, the magazine connected Appalachia with readers’ notions of mainstream America. The people of “Appalachia, U.S.A.,” declared the accompanying text, lived in an underdeveloped country. “No less than Latin Americans or Africans, they can use more American aid. They are more entitled to it because they are our own people.”²⁹

The idea that Appalachia deserved special attention as an internal example of the third world received further validation the following year with the publication of Caudill’s Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area. Probably the most widely read book ever written about Appalachia, Caudill’s passionate account of the human and environmental devastation wreaked by the coal industry on his native eastern Kentucky was a cry from the exploited heartland for government assistance to a desperate people. In a mixed narrative that combined images of cultural degeneracy and corporate abuse, Caudill decried the economic, political, and social blight that had settled over the mountains and called for the creation of a southern mountain authority, patterned after the TVA, to oversee regional development. “Idleness and waste are antipathetic to progress and growth,” he wrote, “and, unless the Cumberland Plateau is to remain an anchor dragging behind the rest of America, it—and the rest of the Southern Appalachians—must be rescued while there is yet time.”³⁰

Caudill quickly became a popular and eloquent spokesperson for the region, spreading the story of Appalachian distress on television and before congressional committees. Journalists by the dozens visited his Whitesburg, Kentucky, home and, after absorbing the Caudill “treatment” over tea, were granted a personal tour of decaying coal camps and scarred hillsides. One Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter, Homer Bigart, wrote a moving series for the New York Times following his pilgrimage to Whitesburg that depicted a wasted landscape and a people so poor that children ate dirt out of the chinks of chimneys to ease their hunger.³¹ The series caught the attention of President Kennedy and helped to seal his commitment to antipoverty legislation for the 1964 Congress.

By the end of 1963, the image of Appalachia as a region of endemic poverty had settled once again in the popular mind.³² Regional scholars and policy makers alike utilized the image to build their cases for federal funding for uplift and development programs. Journalists and politicians outside the mountains exploited regional economic distress to gather public support for a national crusade on poverty. Ironically, within the mountains the idea of Appalachia as a problem region was not widely recognized except among academics and social reformers. The word “Appalachia” itself was seldom used by mountain residents, except in reference to the town of that name in southwest Virginia. Interestingly, as the region came to be identified with national poverty, many among the mountain middle class rejected the application of the term “Appalachia” to their own community, preferring to associate it with communities far removed from their own. For observers in the rest of the country, however, Appalachia was more than an embarrassment. It had become part of a national problem.

The swell of media attention on Appalachia in the early 1960s was part of a rising wave of concern for the country’s economy. The boom times of the 1950s had begun to falter a bit in the last years of that decade. Although Senator Kennedy had promised to get the nation “moving again” during the presidential campaign, the country’s economy continued to struggle throughout the first two years of the Kennedy administration. Unemployment remained unacceptably high, hovering around 7 percent, and in May 1962 the stock market fell to its lowest point since the inauguration. Unemployment and applications for public assistance continued to rise throughout Appalachia, where joblessness was twice the national average.

During the summer of 1962, desperate families in central Appalachia received an additional blow when the UMWA announced that it was revoking the cherished health cards on which many depended for medical care. The UMWA had established its Health and Retirement Funds to provide free health care and other benefits to miners and their families, and in 1954 the union had built ten state-of-the-art Miners Memorial hospitals in southern West Virginia, Virginia, and eastern Kentucky that provided medical care for a large percentage of families in the area. Now, however, declining revenues in its Health and Retirement Funds made it impossible for the union to sustain benefits for miners whose companies were no longer paying royalties into the funds. Most of the operators who defaulted on their forty-cent-perton royalty payment to the funds were small truck mine owners who had signed “sweetheart contracts” with the UMWA, allowing them to pay wages below the national contract. Declining coal markets in the early 1960s and competition from larger mechanized mines, however, led many of the struggling truck mines to cease their contributions to the funds. Miners in eastern Kentucky had accepted lower wages, but the loss of their family health cards was too much. They responded with a time-honored “wildcat strike” despite the union’s objections.

By September roving bands of pickets were moving from one small mine to another, attempting to shut down delinquent operations. When the UMWA announced in October that it intended to sell or close its hospitals in Kentucky and other Appalachian states, the frustration of out-of-work miners boiled over. The roving pickets movement soon degenerated into class warfare, with jobless families on one side and coal operators, businesspeople, and local government officials on the other. At times nearly five hundred miners caravanned to a small truck mine only to be dispersed by state police, armed company guards, and the local sheriff, who in Perry County was himself a coal operator. Arson, shootings, beatings, and the dynamiting of homes, trucks, tipples, and equipment soon forced Governor Combs to intervene in search of a truce, but only the heavy snow and icy roads of December quieted the violence.³³

The lethargic national economy and rising labor unrest in the coalfields prompted President Kennedy to look for ways to stimulate business growth. A fiscal conservative who disliked deficit spending, the president settled on an across-the-board tax cut. Before announcing his decision, however, he asked Walter Heller, chair of his Council of Economic Advisors, to look into recent media estimates of the number of poor people in America. Kennedy anticipated opposition to tax reduction from liberal Democrats in Congress, and he was aware that a tax cut would leave him vulnerable to criticism that he was indifferent to poverty at a time of increasing popular concern for the poor. Prior to this time, poverty had not been a focal point for policy discussions in the Kennedy White House. Like many Americans, the president assumed that a rising economic tide would steadily reduce the size of the low-income population. The domestic programs of the New Frontier had concentrated on generating growth rather than on fighting poverty. As a tireless reader with a strong sense of social obligation to the disadvantaged, however, Kennedy was sensitive to the intellectual currents of his time, especially to suggestions that his administration was not meeting the country’s problems.³⁴

In January 1963 the president read Dwight MacDonald’s lengthy review in the New Yorker of several recent studies of poverty, including Michael Harrington’s The Other America. MacDonald found ample evidence of persistent poverty within the United States, and he lambasted the Kennedy administration for neglecting “our invisible poor.” Ignoring the plight of the disadvantaged not only made us “feel uncomfortable,” he chided, but also challenged the general prosperity of the nation. Hidden in the midst of an otherwise rich country, the very poor could no longer be helped by economic expansion alone but must have government assistance lest they become permanently alienated from the rest of the society.³⁵ Troubled by MacDonald’s criticism, Kennedy encouraged Heller to begin to identify antipoverty strategies that might be included in the domestic agenda for his 1964 reelection campaign.

The president’s tax cut languished in Congress during 1963, but his request to Heller generated considerable interest among a small group of Kennedy advisors. Heller invited other economists from the Council of Economic Advisors, including Robert Lampman and Kermit Gordon, to meet for informal Saturday discussions with colleagues from the Bureau of the Budget and the Labor, Justice, and Health, Education, and Welfare departments. Most of these advisors were economists like Heller, trained in the postwar Keynesian philosophy of government investment in the economy to sustain growth, but some, like Daniel Moynihan, were social scientists who believed in government intervention to rectify social distress.³⁶ Although Heller and his associates viewed poverty as a moral problem, they also assumed that an assault on poverty would have economic and political benefits for the administration in 1964. Not only would a limited antipoverty program help to boost the national economy, but, since poverty cut across race and geography, it would appeal to rural whites in the South as well as to blacks and suburban liberals.³⁷

As the Heller group began its meetings in the White House, spring rains in the mountains once again brought Appalachia to national attention. In mid-March 1963 back-to-back floods once more struck the Cumberland Plateau, causing rivers to pour out of their banks and displacing twenty-five thousand people from their homes. Coming within eight days of each other, the heavy rains caused more than $80 million in damage across fifty counties in the heart of the region. Although the work of the informal interagency committee on Appalachia expedited flood rehabilitation efforts among federal agencies, editorials throughout the region criticized the inadequate federal response. “The floods that are tearing the economic life out of the mountains are the direct and inevitable result of fifty years of federal neglect,” wrote the Louisville Courier-Journal. “Our people and our economy are tired, worn out, exhausted,” lamented the Whitesburg (KY) Mountain Eagle. “We do not have the money, the energy, or the willpower to dig ourselves out.”³⁸

On March 29, 1963, Governor Bert Combs and his staff met with Ed McDermott, chief of the federal Office of Emergency Planning, and other White House aides to discuss specific actions on postflood problems. Along with a number of proposals for immediate action, Combs again emphasized the difficulty of “the dual emergency of Appalachia—the long standing economic emergency now compounded by the natural disaster emergency.” He also pointed out the proposal of the Appalachian governors for a special, comprehensive, and long-term Appalachian regional development program. Later the same day, McDermott met with the president, who expressed interest in the idea of an Appalachian program and agreed to add the subject to the agenda of an April 9 cabinet meeting originally scheduled to review the ARA. As a result of the president’s decision to include the special focus on the Appalachian problem, the Appalachian governors were invited to attend the cabinet meeting.³⁹

Over the next week, John Whisman and Governor William Barron of West Virginia, who had succeeded Combs as chair of the Council of Appalachian Governors, coordinated arrangements for the meeting with the governors and their staffs. On the afternoon of April 9, five Appalachian governors—Combs of Kentucky, Barron of West Virginia, Tawes of Maryland, Frank Clement of Tennessee, and Albertis Harrison of Virginia—along with representatives of the governors of North Carolina and Pennsylvania, met with the president, his cabinet, and a number of agency heads in the Cabinet Room of the White House. Also in attendance were presidential aide Lee White, Walter Heller of the Council of Economic Advisors and the informal antipoverty discussion group, and Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., undersecretary of commerce.⁴⁰

The president was delayed by a ceremony in the Rose Garden granting honorary citizenship to Winston Churchill. As those assembled awaited his arrival, Commerce Secretary Luther Hodges asked the other cabinet secretaries to begin reporting on the effectiveness of their departments’ programs in Appalachia. The theme was one that the governors had heard many times before. Labor Secretary William Wirts, for example, lamented the inability of job training programs under the Area Redevelopment Act and the Manpower Development and Training Act to alleviate the long-term problems of the region. Unless they could identify new kinds of businesses to receive trainees, he pointed out, Appalachian people would continue to be trained for jobs that were simply not there. Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman added that overall regional planning was desperately needed, but he could offer no suggestions for developing a comprehensive regional plan.⁴¹

In the middle of Freeman’s remarks, President Kennedy arrived and assumed leadership of the meeting. The president welcomed the governors and reemphasized his deep concern for the economic problems of the Appalachian region. He noted that it had been a primary goal of his administration to reduce the immediate distress in the mountains and to help “build a solid economic basis on which the region could prosper.” But unemployment remained unacceptably high, and federal efforts through the ARA and other programs were “not making much progress in the sense of really biting into the long term unemployment.” Consequently, the president announced, he would take the following actions: First, he would direct his department heads to speed up current programs affecting Appalachia and to include more programs for the Appalachian region in their fiscal year 1965 budgets. Second, he would establish within the Department of Commerce a joint federal-state committee on the Appalachian region to develop a comprehensive program for regional economic development that would report back to him by January 1, 1964. This program would include recommendations for improving transportation facilities; providing education and job training; conducting research; developing water, mineral, and forest resources; and attracting tourists. Finally, he would seek to create an Appalachian development institute to serve as a nonfederal center for research and training on the economic problems of the region.⁴²

After completing his remarks, Kennedy moved to a chair directly across from Combs while members of the cabinet and the governors discussed his proposals. Secretary Freeman resumed his comments, but everyone was watching the president as he pulled a sheet of note-paper from the table and wrote something. He then folded the paper into a little airplane and sent it gliding toward Combs, landing in front of the governor. The note read, “Bert, what do you really want?” Combs seized the opportunity and, in his formal remarks to the group, commented that the creation of a permanent federal-state regional agency would be the most important product of the president’s committee. “The more I come up here [to Washington],” he explained, “the more I believe we need a handle to work with. You cannot go to Commerce and then to Agriculture and then to HEW, and then go to all of these other agencies and get a great deal done unless you live up here. And I just don’t have the time to stay up here.” The other governors concurred.⁴³

Kennedy’s choice to head the joint federal-state committee, the President’s Appalachian Regional Commission (PARC), was Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., who had campaigned with the president in West Virginia during the crucial 1960 primary. Once informed of his appointment to chair the commission, Roosevelt outlined the steps that he would take to achieve his goal. He asked each governor and each cabinet secretary to appoint a representative to the commission, which would begin its work with a tour of the state capitals to gather information and ideas for the development of the region. To assist him in drafting the final report, he selected John L. Sweeney from the Department of Commerce as executive director of the commission and appointed John Whisman to represent the states as executive secretary. Interestingly, he invited no members of the informal White House antipoverty group to serve on the commission.