Uneven Ground (12 page)

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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.