High Mountains Rising (42 page)

When the Conference of Appalachian Governors met again in Lexington, Kentucky, on October 17–18, 1960, the number of participating states increased to eleven. Chaired by Governor Combs, the meeting included governors Buford Ellington of Tennessee, Lindsay Almond of Virginia, Luther Hodges of North Carolina, and Millard Tawes of Maryland. Also attending were representatives of several federal agencies, as well as President Willis Weatherford of Berea College, and Perley Ayer, director of the Council of the Southern Mountains. Although the conference failed to approve a resolution supporting the passage of federal area redevelopment legislation, it adopted a Declaration for Action Regarding the Appalachian Region that pledged to form a voluntary association of the states that would advance a special regional program of development. The Lexington resolution drew heavily on Program 60 for its language and development strategies, and it distinguished between the problems of depressed urban areas that needed temporary relief and those of “underdeveloped” regions such as Appalachia that had been denied the basic infrastructure for development. The governors called for the creation of an Appalachian “developmental” highway system and asked all
candidates for national office to support “appropriate federal participation” in the solution of the region's problems.
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Three weeks after the Appalachian governors met in Kentucky, John F. Kennedy was elected to the presidency. Immediately the president-elect set up several task groups to draw up a legislative agenda and, keeping his word to the people of West Virginia, organized a special task force to draft a new depressed area bill. John Whisman, now serving as aide to Governor Combs and secretary to the Conference of Appalachian Governors, was asked to participate on what came to be called the West Virginia Task Force.
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Chaired by Senator Douglass, the task force recommended a package of immediate job training and relief programs and a long-term strategy of area development to promote permanent growth. Whisman managed to include many of the recommendations endorsed by the Conference of Appalachian Governors in the final report. In addition to the passage of area redevelopment legislation similar to that which had failed in the Eisenhower years, the report urged that a system of regional development commissions be established across the country to coordinate comprehensive planning and that the president establish an Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC), based on the initiative of the Appalachian governors, that might serve as a pilot program for other regions.
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Unfortunately, the recommendations of the Appalachian governors failed to be included when Senate Bill #1 was introduced in Congress the following January. Although most Appalachian political leaders enthusiastically supported the legislation, they were privately disappointed, and a number of governors testified before Congress that other measures were also needed to address Appalachia's special problems, including a highway program, funds for natural resource development, and increased aid to education. The Area Redevelopment Act passed on May 1, 1961, and when the Conference of Appalachian Governors met a week later in Washington, they again pressed their case for a special Appalachian initiative with the president and with the newly appointed head of the ARA. Without responding to their appeal for a federally supported Appalachian commission, Kennedy instructed the ARA to work closely with the Appalachian governors and created a Federal Interagency Committee to serve as a liaison between the governors and the ARA. Responsibility for drafting a comprehensive regional development plan was left to the governors.
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The Area Redevelopment Act proved to be a disappointment for much of Appalachia, as it turned out to be for the nation as a whole. The act was designed primarily to meet the needs of urban industrial districts for more capital to nurture new and expanding businesses rather than the basic social and physical infrastructure needs of rural areas such as Appalachia.
Investments primarily benefited larger companies, with the hope that job opportunities and wages would “trickle down” to the unemployed. Over the next two years frustration grew with the ARA and with the slow pace of federal aid. Not only was the ARA severely underfunded for its task, but also fully one-third of the counties in the nation qualified for ARA benefits. Seventy-six percent of Appalachia qualified for the program, but the bulk of ARA resources flowed to businesses located in urban centers outside the region. Rural areas, like most of Appalachia, lacked the existing industries or business prospects that would make them eligible for assistance, and they lacked the professional staff 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 provide. ARA also could do little for education, health care, and other human resource development needs. In Appalachia, only West Virginia benefited significantly from ARA resources, and those funds were used primarily in the development of tourism projects in two counties.
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By 1962 critics of ARA were easy to find. Eastern Kentucky lawyer 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.”
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The 1962 Annual Report of the Eastern Kentucky Regional Planning Commission noted that ARA loans, grants, and training programs were “useful tools” but that the agency's potential function of coordinating plans for comprehensive development had been “inadequately used.”
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The Council of Appalachian Governors continued to lobby the president to create a separate Appalachian commission that could coordinate federal programs with those of the states and that could administer supplemental federal benefits for regional development, but the president's attention shifted to other domestic and foreign policy issues.

Meanwhile, the nation's concern for Appalachia grew, as media attention increasingly focused on the severe poverty of the region. Spurred by the image of a privileged, young New England senator being greeted by hungry children and destitute coalminers, a spate of journalists had descended on Appalachia after the West Virginia primary to capture the story of poverty in America. Concerned about the growing disparity between the “affluent society” and what Michael Harrington called the “other America,” journalists rediscovered Appalachia as a depressed American region. Between the summer of 1960 and the fall of 1963 more than a dozen books and articles were published illustrating the plight of the poor in central Appalachia. Exposés in the
Washington Post, Look, Progressive, Dissent, Commentary, Newsday
, and other magazines described a land of misery, neglect, and
hopelessness in the heart of a wealthy nation. Harry Caudill's
Night Comes to the Cumberlands
and Harrington's
The Other America
attracted a wide audience and even found their way into the president's stack of night reading. In late 1963 CBS aired a one-hour documentary on poor children in the mountains titled
Christmas in Appalachia
, and a series of articles by Homer Bigart in the
New York Times
dramatized the plight of unemployed coalmining families facing a bleak winter in eastern Kentucky.

Media coverage of conditions in Appalachia and in the “gray areas” of inner-city ghettos soon revived interest in a national poverty program at the White House. Led by Walter Heller, head of the President's Council of Economic Advisors, a group of Kennedy aides began to meet in the spring and summer of 1963 and to press for the inclusion of a poverty initiative in the administration's domestic policy agenda for 1964.
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Although most of their discussions focused on programs for troubled youth and poverty in the inner city, this group of Kennedy confidants proved to be receptive to pressures from the Appalachian governors for a special program of aid for Appalachia. By March 1963 the Council of Appalachian Governors had grown impatient with the lack of progress in the ARA on regional projects and decided that it was time once again to approach the president about establishing an independent Appalachian commission.

Just as White House discussions about a possible poverty initiative began to open a dialogue between the governors and the president's staff, another natural disaster in the mountains created an opportunity for action. In mid-March 1963 back-to-back floods again struck the Cumberland Plateau, causing rivers to pour out of their banks and displacing 25,000 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 expedited flood rehabilitation efforts among federal agencies, editorials throughout Appalachia 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
Mountain Eagle.
“We do not have the money, the energy nor the willpower to dig ourselves out.”
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After urgent requests from Governor Combs of Kentucky and Governor Wally Barron of West Virginia, who had succeeded Combs as chair of the Council of Appalachian Governors, President Kennedy invited all of the governors to a special meeting of his cabinet on April 9, 1963, to discuss the crisis in the mountains. At that meeting, the president announced immediate actions to improve flood relief and outlined plans for a longer-term strategy
for regional development. He instructed the cabinet to speed up current programs for job training and emergency relief in central Appalachia and announced the creation of a joint federal and state commission that would recommend a comprehensive development program for the region by January 1, 1964. Kennedy designated his old friend Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. to head the new commission.
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Over the next several months the President's Appalachian Regional Commission (PARC) gathered data on the area, held public meetings in each Appalachian state, and discussed development strategies with academic economists and government agency heads. Almost all of the recommendations of Program 60 and the Lexington Declaration found their way into the early draft report, including calls for a federally funded Appalachian Developmental Highway System and a permanent federal and state planning commission. Underlying the report was a common feeling that Appalachia's problems were the result of “underdevelopment” of the basic human and physical resources that had built modern America: roads, schools, hospitals, housing, natural resource management, and flood control.
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Federal investment in these resources, PARC believed, would put Appalachia on the road to development, and almost every bureaucrat and politician involved in the report recognized the potential benefits of these investments to their department or community.

As the PARC neared the end of its work, President Kennedy announced a special winter relief program for the coalfields that would serve as an advance demonstration of the Appalachian initiative. On November 14, 1963, he ordered the Army Corps of Engineers and the Department of Labor to accelerate construction projects and training programs to provide jobs for unemployed miners, and he released additional funds for food relief, home repairs, education, and school lunch programs.
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He then telephoned his congratulations to the newly elected governor of Kentucky, Edward Breathitt, and assured Breathitt that the White House would follow through on its commitment to Appalachia. The president told the governor-elect that PARC was about to complete its work, and Kennedy would be in touch with Breathitt to set up a meeting to announce the program when he returned from a trip to Texas.

The assassination of President Kennedy a week later threw some doubt on the future of the Appalachian program. Vice-President Lyndon Johnson had not been involved in early discussions with the governors, and it was well known that he did not get along with some of the Kennedy staff, including Franklin Roosevelt Jr. When Johnson announced that he intended to follow through on all of the slain president's commitments, the Appalachian governors began to lobby for their program, but the PARC report was
delayed until Johnson could get his own agenda in order. With the 1964 presidential campaign on the horizon, Johnson wanted to identify a national program of his own that would separate him from the Kennedy legacy and appeal to a wide constituency of Democrats. Because internal discussions had already begun on the design of an antipoverty program and it appealed to Johnson's pride as a New Deal liberal, he settled on the “War on Poverty” as a cornerstone of his Great Society initiative. The Appalachian program would have to be delayed until after Congress acted on his poverty bill.

Recognizing that special legislation for Appalachia might appear to duplicate the new poverty program, PARC staff worked to revise their proposals for a comprehensive development plan. In a decision that had widespread implications, the final report placed greater priority on highways and other infrastructure needs than on education, community organization, and the improvement of human services. Although the report acknowledged the need for a balanced, coordinated series of investments in both the physical and human capacities of the region, it emphasized the long-term role of the proposed Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) in building public facilities for development while leaving the immediate goal of alleviating individual hardship to the new poverty agency.
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Indeed, it was difficult to separate Appalachia from the idea of poverty in the popular mind, and when the president decided to rally public support for his War on Poverty bill, he came first to Appalachia. On April 24, 1964, Johnson flew to Huntington, West Virginia, with an entourage of dignitaries and drove into eastern Kentucky to see mountain poverty first hand. Near Inez, he sat on the porch of an unemployed sawmill worker with eight children who survived on an income of $400 a year. In Paintsville he toured a job training facility for unemployed coalminers and told a courthouse audience that he would not rest until “we have driven poverty underground and found jobs for our people.”
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The next day he met with the Council of Appalachian Governors and assured them of his support for their Appalachian bill, after he had passed the antipoverty legislation.