Uneven Ground (36 page)

Undertaken by a coalition of regional activists and academicians, the landownership study exposed the depth of absentee control of Appalachia's natural resources and linked that control to almost every problem in the region—inadequate taxation, mine safety, black lung disease, strip mining, the decline of farming, deforestation, floods, substandard housing, welfare, and more. Detailed analysis of over 20 million acres in the heart of the region revealed not only that ownership of land and minerals in Appalachia was concentrated in the hands of a few giant corporations but that these corporations were increasingly the subsidiaries of multinational energy conglomerates. More than 40 percent of the land surveyed—some 8 million acres—was held by only fifty private owners and the federal government. Large corporations controlled almost 40 percent of the land and 70 percent of the mineral rights in the survey, and the vast majority of those resources were owned by entities outside the county in which the property was
located. The survey found that more than 75 percent of the mineral owners paid annual taxes on their properties of less than twenty-five cents per acre.
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As a result of this concentrated pattern of landownership, the researchers concluded, options for alternative economic development were limited, taxes were inadequate, and public services were starved. Nor was this a problem restricted to the coalfields, since government ownership of land and tourism development constrained the economic choices of noncoal counties as well. An estimated one-third of the farmland in the survey was lost to agricultural production in the 1970s, and about half of the region's farmers quit farming. “No one who has lived for any time in Appalachia,” admitted John Gaventa, one of the coordinators of the study, “can be surprised to hear that a handful of absentee corporations control huge portions of the region's land and minerals and pay a pittance in local taxes. But the documentation of landownership and taxation in county after county establishes for the first time the pervasive pattern of inequity, and this factual information should provide the basis for long-needed changes.”
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Gaventa was too optimistic, for in many ways the landownership study represented a turning point itself in the debate over the region's future. Released in 1981, the report could not have come at a worse time for the ARC. Controversial even when the commission decided to fund it, the study drew little attention at an agency suddenly threatened with extinction by the inauguration of Ronald Reagan. Determined to cut federal budgets and eliminate regional commissions, the new Republican president failed to include the ARC in his executive budget requests, and agency leaders abandoned the politically sensitive study to rally support for their own organization's survival. With its very existence in jeopardy, the ARC ignored the recommendations of the 1,800-page report. Although widely recognized by this time as a growing regional problem, absentee landownership slipped once more from the political agenda.

The alliance between activists and academics dissipated as well in the years following the publication of the groundbreaking study. Conceived after the disastrous floods that swept southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky in 1977 and organized at the first Appalachian Studies Conference the following year, the landownership study
brought together more than a hundred former antipoverty warriors, graduate students, and college professors in one of the largest and most detailed explorations of rural landownership in American history. Coordinated by the Highlander Research and Education Center in east Tennessee, the grassroots project combined meticulous research in county courthouse records, statistical analysis, and a lengthy discussion of policy implications. After the publication of a summary volume in 1983, however, the task force disbanded, and coalitions of citizen-activists and academics became increasingly rare in the region. The Appalachian Alliance eventually faded, and the Appalachian studies movement, growing with institutional acceptance, shifted its energies to matters of teaching, learning, and theoretical research.

The collaborative landownership study also revealed a watershed in the evolving structure of the Appalachian economy. The recovery of the coal industry spurred the globalization of the mountain economy just as the energy crisis exposed the dependence of American consumers on foreign oil. By the end of the 1970s, a few multinational energy conglomerates dominated Appalachian coal production, and the giant firms managed their mineral resources, mining methods, and environmental impacts at even greater distances from the communities in which they operated than had the great domestic corporations of an earlier day. To feed the rapidly growing energy demands of the nation and to meet rising air quality standards, more and more low-sulfur coal from Appalachian strip mines poured into the furnaces of American power plants. Older, metallurgical coal mines, mostly underground mines, closed down as steel production shifted abroad, and coal employment in the mountains began a final, precipitous decline.

Elsewhere in the region, the globalization of markets was evident in the daily lives of residents. The construction of Appalachian corridor highways and burgeoning government transfer payments began to instill new life into the larger mountain towns. Chain stores and nationally franchised restaurants opened in new commercial centers at the edges of many towns, and small housing developments and trailer parks replaced old farms on city peripheries. Mountain residents soon had access to the same mass-produced clothing, food, and entertainment as other Americans, and some found employment in the small
shoe factories, food processing businesses, and sewing plants that set up operations in local industrial parks.

The rush to create jobs motivated many southern mountain leaders to join scores of other public officials in the great “buffalo hunt” to bag runaway manufacturing plants from the North with promises of government-funded building sites, low taxes, and cheap labor. Rural communities throughout the region organized economic development commissions, established industrial parks, and constructed speculation buildings at public expense with the hope of luring northern branch plants that pledged to provide one hundred to two hundred low-wage, low-skilled jobs each. Funds from the ARC became a prime source of revenue for the access roads, water lines, and job training programs necessary to compete for companies' attention. The majority of the industrial sites, some built on abandoned strip mines, went unoccupied, but a few attracted small assembly plants, metal fabrication facilities, and clothing manufacturers.

Communities located along the southern interstate and ARC corridor highways benefited most from industrial recruitment strategies. By 1980 more than 1,700 miles of the Appalachian Development Highway System and almost 4,000 miles of interstate highways were completed in the region. These modern roads connected larger towns in the mountains and the foothills with external markets, increased access to the mountains for tourists, and facilitated the transportation of coal to electric power plants outside the region. The new highways reduced the travel time for rural residents to reach stores, health care, education, and employment opportunities in the designated growth centers, but they furthered the decline of community-based businesses and services in the outlying districts.

The use of special federal funds to construct the Appalachian Development Highway System was intended to free up state resources to improve secondary roads, connecting more remote communities to the regional transportation network, but the improvement of state and county roads failed to keep pace with the new Appalachian corridor system. Small towns farther removed from the four-lane highways languished as local residents turned to the cities for jobs, entertainment, and the latest consumer goods advertised on television. Consequently, the social and economic distance between urban and rural Appalachia
increased as the uneven access to better transportation drained human and financial resources into the growth centers.

Even local entrepreneurs were drawn to the amenities of the transportation corridors and tended to relocate their investments in the burgeoning corridor towns rather than nearby rural communities. For example, not long after the local developers of a data processing company opened a facility in distressed Harlan County, Kentucky, they moved the plant to London, Kentucky, along Interstate 75, at the western edge of the mountains. A decade later, Appalachian Computer Systems employed more than four hundred low-wage data entry workers there, and the London area (home to Harland Sanders, founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken) became one of the fastest-growing places in the commonwealth.
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Harlan County, meanwhile, continued to suffer population decline. This pattern was followed throughout the region. Of the more than 400,000 new manufacturing jobs attracted to Appalachia between 1965 and 1980, 60 percent were located within thirty miles of one of these major highways.
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Communities situated at the intersections of ARC corridors and interstates often experienced rapid growth as regional employment, retail trade, and public service centers. The population of Raleigh County, West Virginia, for instance, expanded from seventy thousand in 1970 to almost eighty-seven thousand in 1980, after the completion of ARC's Corridor L between Beckley and Morgantown. Beckley, located at the intersection of Interstates 77 (on the West Virginia Turnpike) and 64, became a regional medical services center for the southern West Virginia coalfields, and, after the opening of the New River Bridge in 1977 (for which ARC contributed $29 million of the $42 million cost of construction), the town became a major center for tourism development as well. In little more than a decade, Beckley grew from the tenth-largest city in West Virginia to the third.
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The growth of towns such as London and Beckley reflected even more fundamental changes in the Appalachian labor force. Despite the expansion of manufacturing facilities in the 1970s, industrial employment accounted for less than one-tenth of the new jobs created in the region during the decade. Along with the rest of America, Appalachia gained the bulk of its 1.5 million new jobs in the service sector of the economy, especially in retail trade, health services, and education. As
the nation moved from an industrial-based economy to a service-oriented economy, Appalachia was drawn more tightly into the consumer society, and its workforce increasingly mirrored that of a postindustrial world. Industries that had once provided the majority of nonfarm jobs in the mountains—coal, textiles, and furniture—reduced their labor needs through mechanization or shifted their production offshore, leaving thousands of low-skilled and undereducated workers to compete for jobs as waiters, sales clerks, receptionists, and other entry-level service positions.
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Some areas of the country, including many northern Appalachian communities, were better equipped to make the transition to a service-and information-based economy. Superior adult education levels, greater research and higher education infrastructure, and stronger civic capacity eased the adjustment from heavy industry to high-tech production and corporate services in the old steel towns of the North and Midwest. A long history of educational neglect in central Appalachia, however, hampered the jump to the new economy in the most economically distressed parts of the region. Despite significant improvements in education and job training since 1965, Appalachian workers still lagged far behind the rest of the nation in technical skills and education levels. The proportion of Appalachian people over twenty-five years old with a high school education had increased from 57 percent to 83 percent of the national average, but almost one in three Appalachian adults remained functionally illiterate, compared with 20 percent of all Americans. Among the unemployed in the mountains in 1980, 46 percent were functionally illiterate. Only one in nine Appalachians had attained a college degree, compared with one in six in the rest of the nation.
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The new service economy was also more female than the older industrial economy. The numbers of Appalachian women with jobs outside the home increased significantly after 1970 as rural mountain women found employment in low-wage manufacturing jobs and entry-level service positions. Retail chain stores such as Kmart and Wal-Mart and fast-food restaurants like Hardee's and McDonald's provided disproportionate employment for women, as did the motels, resorts, and gift shops associated with the tourism industry. Women also found jobs as bank tellers, real estate brokers, office managers,
and other semi-professional positions. Most of the new jobs in the mountains were in the low-wage sector of service employment. They seldom offered health or other benefits or provided job security or opportunities for advancement. Increasingly the Appalachian household looked much like that of the rest of the nation, with both spouses employed outside the home, though in the mountains this trend was driven as much by economic necessity as by gender parity.

Encouraged by changes in the mountain labor force, improvements in transportation and other infrastructure, rising education levels, and advancing per capita incomes, ARC planners were convinced that progress was being made in Appalachia.
Appalachia: Journal of the Appalachian Regional Commission
reported in the spring of 1979 that “at last, at long last” the region was “on the way” toward “vigorous, self-sustaining growth.” Progress would take time, the journal acknowledged—time for residents of Appalachia to learn how to work with the ARC partnership, time to complete the infrastructure for development, and time to find the “balances between the nation's need for energy and the region's fragile environment.” Problems remained, admitted the publication, but after fifteen years of effort, the ARC had laid “a new economic, social, and psychological foundation” for development.
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ARC optimism, however, turned to frustration with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Neither claims regarding the success of its programs nor arguments based on the persisting needs of the region or on the organization's unique structure would alter the new president's opposition to regional commissions. Reagan's single-minded determination to reduce both taxes and the size of the federal bureaucracy left the Appalachian program and other Great Society initiatives vulnerable to budget cuts and elimination. Shortly after the inauguration, White House officials informed the Appalachian governors that the ARC would be closed, all noncommitted funds would be rescinded, and the highway program would be transferred to the Department of Transportation. In his subsequent executive budget proposal, and annually throughout the remainder of his presidency, Reagan included no funds for the Appalachian program.