High Mountains Rising (41 page)

Modernization, 1940–2000

Ronald D Eller

World War II marked an important watershed for Appalachia. The outbreak of fighting in Europe temporarily eased the distress of many mountain families left struggling by the collapse of the industrial era a decade before. As early as 1938, coal production began to recover slowly as operators reorganized their mines in anticipation of wartime markets. With the entry of the United States into the conflict itself, demand for mountain labor and natural resources rose once again. The expansion of war industries stimulated interest in Appalachian coal and timber, and the new aircraft plants, steel mills, ordinance factories, and uniform manufacturers clamored for additional workers.

The effect of the war was to revive hope for a generation of mountain young people, a generation that had known only poverty and hard times. In rural areas farm prices recovered, and workers began to return to the mines and mills, lessening the pressure on overstressed land. Individuals and entire families migrated to defense jobs outside the mountains, and thousands of young men and women joined the armed forces. Appalachian people had always been quick to serve their country during war, and enlistment rates in the region were among the highest in the nation.
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However, the wartime boom did little to alter deep-rooted flaws in the mountain economy. A pattern of growth without development had settled on the region earlier in the century. The expansion of extractive and primary industries generated low-wage jobs in the mines and mills, but that growth had come without the development of schools, roads, small businesses, and other internal capacities that might sustain prosperity. Most of Appalachia's mineral and timber resources continued to be owned by outside corporations and fell to the control of nonresident interests. The value added from their extraction remained largely untaxed for local benefit. Moreover, a single-industry economy frustrated the diversification of local enterprises and tied most mountain communities to the vagaries of national and increasingly international markets. Local political leaders, many
of whom benefited economically from the outside interests, continued to defend the status quo. As the economy stagnated, the gap between rural Appalachia and the rest of the country grew.

The temporary rise in the demand for labor during World War II failed to change this pattern, and despite a short-lived boom in coal prices after the war, hard times again returned to the hills. Ironically, the same forces of technology and modernization that transformed the rest of the nation in the years after World War II, bringing jobs and new consumer goods, worked against the postwar recovery of Appalachia. The introduction of fertilizers, pesticides, tractors, and other mechanized equipment, for example, revolutionized agricultural production. Even before the war, the modernization of agriculture began to replace human labor on American farms, causing thousands of small land owners and tenant farmers across the South to abandon their farms and move to the manufacturing centers of the Midwest. In Appalachia, the war increased this movement off of the land. As families migrated to jobs in the Midwest or to nearby urban communities on the fringe of the region, the population of rural mountain counties declined proportionately.
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The application of new technology to coalmining also displaced thousands of miners and their families in the 1940s and 1950s. Wartime demand for coal and generous government subsidies encouraged many larger coal companies to introduce automatic loading and (later) undercutting machines into the mines, effectively bringing an end to the labor-intensive hand loading era of the American coal industry. Even the smaller “truck mines” that sprang up by the hundreds during the war gradually turned to mechanization to compete in the volatile postwar market. Tapping smaller seams of coal on secondary ridges and taking advantage of the improved roads in order to sell coal on the “spot” market, the predominantly nonunion truck mines thrived on cheap labor and quick delivery of coal to new markets. When John L. Lewis's United Mine Workers union established a Health and Retirement Fund in 1946 and launched a series of annual strikes that increased levies on coal production to finance the fund, larger union mines turned increasingly to mechanization to reduce labor costs and compete with the smaller truck mines. The introduction of the continuous miner in 1948 and the growth of surface mining in the 1950s eventually sealed the fate of thousands of workers. By 1960 the number of miners in Appalachia was less than half what it was during World War II, and that number continued to decline through the end of the century.
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The combination of new technologies and declining coal prices in the early 1950s produced widespread layoffs and unemployment throughout the coalfields, just as large numbers of young people were entering the
civilian workforce. For the generation of the 1940s, the wartime hopes for recovery quickly faded into frustration and disappointment. Young men and women from the mountains, who had grown up in the Depression and had been scattered across the globe by the war, returned home confident of their ability to build a better life for their children. They had experienced modern housing, improved health care, and steady wages, and they had seen the comparative wealth of other parts of the country. They expected to share in the postwar prosperity that was sweeping Middle America, but increasingly they found there was no need for their labor at home, and the schools, roads, and public services in their local communities were neglected and poor. Determined to shape a brighter future, many turned to opportunities outside the region to fulfill their dreams. Over the next two decades, the stream of young people that poured from the mountains during the war became a flood of displaced families.

By the mid-1950s conditions throughout Appalachia had begun to draw the attention of journalists, social critics, and state policymakers. As early as 1951 the Council of the Southern Mountains, an association of social workers and academics located in Berea, Kentucky, called for the creation of an organization that would address the problems of Appalachia by uniting the mountain counties of eight southern states and representing their concerns in Congress.
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Several states, including Georgia, Maryland, and North Carolina, launched new initiatives to encourage areawide planning in their mountain counties, and in other Appalachian states economic development agencies and private civic organizations adopted special programs to recruit industries and provide emergency relief.

In Kentucky, where conditions were among the worst in the region, the state Board of Agricultural and Industrial Development commissioned a study in 1956 to identify the potential for industrial growth in the depressed east Kentucky coalfields. In that same year, Berea College president Willis Weatherford convened an interdenominational meeting of church workers to discuss collective action to aid the region's poor and unemployed, and the state Jaycees launched an initiative aimed at involving local civic clubs in community development work. Under the direction of John Whisman, a young Jaycees president from eastern Kentucky, community leaders formed the Eastern Kentucky Regional Development Council, an organization designed to coordinate public and private relief efforts.
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These initiatives came together the following spring when disastrous floods struck eastern Kentucky. Responding to local pressure, the acting governor transformed the East Kentucky Development Council into a permanent state commission, charging it with the coordination of flood relief and the development of a long-range strategic plan for the area. After
federal relief efforts proved inadequate to address the larger employment and infrastructure needs of the mountain counties, the commission hired John Whisman as its executive director. In 1958 Whisman launched a series of public meetings designed to recommend legislation that would promote economic development and organize local governments for developmental planning.

Whisman and many leaders of the East Kentucky Development Commission hoped to bring their World War II military experiences to bear on the problems facing eastern Kentucky. They were confident that they could combine public resources and modern ideas of strategic planning into a kind of “Marshall Plan” for the development of Appalachia. This plan would encourage improvements in both physical infrastructure (roads, water systems, and new industrial sites) and human capacity (education, job training, housing, and health care) in a comprehensive strategy of community development that would make up for the deficiencies they believed the region had suffered because of its isolation and single-industry economy. Program 60, as the plan was called, also recommended the creation of a series of area development districts to facilitate local planning and called for the establishment of a multistate Appalachian Development Authority to coordinate regional efforts and to lobby Congress for special federal assistance. When Bert Combs, a young eastern Kentucky lawyer running for governor, endorsed the plan, Program 60 became the foundation for regionwide efforts to garner federal aid for Appalachia in the early 1960s.
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Shortly after assuming office, Governor Combs persuaded Millard Tawes, governor of Maryland, to call a meeting of all of the Appalachian governors to discuss common problems across the region and the need for collective action. Concerned with the special problems of Maryland's Appalachian counties and encouraged by staff that had worked in Kentucky with Whisman and the East Kentucky Development Commission, Tawes invited the governors of seven states to meet in Annapolis on May 20, 1960. Each of the governors shared similar challenges in promoting economic development in their mountain counties—inadequate state funds for infrastructure such as roads and water systems, inappropriate federal regulations, and the lack of coordination among federal agencies—and most saw the value of collaborating and bringing regional needs to national attention.
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West Virginia Governor Cecil Underwood agreed to join Combs and Tawes, along with gubernatorial representatives from Tennessee, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina.

Even before the governors could gather, however, events in West Virginia and Washington focused the eye of the nation on the region and prompted a national rediscovery of Appalachia's problems. Presidential elections
generally were not influenced by campaigns in Appalachia, but the 1960 presidential primary was an exception. On May 10, 1960, West Virginia Democrats voted to nominate Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts as the party's candidate for president. Kennedy's victory in the West Virginia primary settled once and for all the question of whether a Catholic candidate could carry a predominantly Protestant state. The victory proved to be a critical turning point in Kennedy's march to the presidency.
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For Appalachia, however, the West Virginia campaign had added significance. Not only did the primary ingratiate the future president to the people of the Mountain State, but media coverage of the Kennedy campaign also drew national attention to the appalling poverty of the region.

When Senator Kennedy came to West Virginia in the spring of 1960, mountain communities were still digging out from heavy snows and bitter cold, the coldest March on record and the most snowfall since 1914. By April, when the campaign began to heat up, the weather also warmed, and the candidates carried their message 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 in the Mountain State. But the crowds of unemployed coalminers who greeted the senator in towns along the Kentucky border and in dozens of other coal communities in the heart of the state were less interested in the candidate's religion than in his plans to relieve their economic distress. Reporters following the Kennedy entourage and the candidate himself were shocked by the poverty they saw in places such as Welch and Williamson and in villages along Paint Creek, Cabin Creek, and the New River.

Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, the only other candidate to challenge Kennedy in West Virginia, had expressed concern 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 of the state with his message, and he could not compete with the Kennedy money or political organization. Kennedy, who seemed genuinely stunned by the conditions that he witnessed in the coal camps, turned the economic issue to his advantage, suggesting that he was the only candidate who could provide relief if West Virginians would send him to the White House. Drawing on the memory of New Deal relief programs, Kennedy campaigned alongside Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., who assured desperate coalminers that the Massachusetts senator would follow through on aid to depressed areas such as Appalachia. 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 60 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 more than 60 percent of the votes of West Virginia Democrats for their party's presidential nomination. Senator Humphrey withdrew from the presidential race.

Three days after the West Virginia primary, President Eisenhower vetoed for a second time a depressed area bill sent to him by the Democratic Congress, ensuring that government intervention to assist poor areas would become a partisan topic in the fall election. Led by Senator Paul Douglass of Illinois, Democrats had pressed throughout the late 1950s for legislation to reduce high unemployment in depressed areas of the nation's cities through the creation of an Area Redevelopment Administration (ARA). Indeed, when the Appalachian governors met in Annapolis on May 20, the defeat of the depressed area legislation assumed center stage and almost derailed any agreement to cooperate on a regional program. Democratic governors went on record supporting the creation of a federal agency to assist depressed areas, whereas Republican Governor Underwood rejected the depressed area bill on the grounds that “we already have enough departments in the Federal Government.”
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Despite his opposition to creating a new federal agency, however, Underwood favored regional cooperation and “self-help programs.” After reviewing a report on economic conditions and population trends in the Appalachian states prepared by the Maryland Department of Economic Development, the governors resolved to meet again in the fall and to push for further regional cooperation.