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Authors: Ronald D. Eller

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I have spent over forty years teaching and writing about Appalachia. Much of that time I served as director of the University of Kentucky Appalachian Center, a multidisciplinary research center designed to link the resources of the university to the public policy needs of the Appalachian region in areas ranging from education to health care, civic leadership to economic development. In that capacity I worked with journalists, administrators, citizens' organizations, and public policy makers at the community, state, and national levels, including appointments to head several gubernatorial commissions. At the University of Kentucky, and earlier during a decade of teaching at a small mountain college in North Carolina, I attempted to apply my knowledge as a historian to the challenges and issues facing the region, serving
on county planning boards, civic groups, and regional organizations and completing a two-year term as the scholar in residence at the Appalachian Regional Commission. The knowledge I gained from my participation in the public process informs my narrative just as much as do the hours of research in historical documents, archives, and books.

Some of my colleagues would call me a “presentist historian.” I study the past from the perspective of the present to gain insight about those challenges that confront contemporary society. For me, the past is a window to present problems that plague Appalachia and a guide-post for building a more just and sustainable society in a part of the United States that has seen too much inequality, cultural loss, and environmental destruction. My people have lived in the region for more than two hundred years, surviving as farmers, coal miners, mill hands, musicians, preachers, and factory workers. Like other rural Americans, they developed close ties to the land, to family, to their religion, and to their local communities, and they have followed the rest of the nation into the age of consumption. I participated in the great out-migration from Appalachia during the 1950s, the War on Poverty of the 1960s, and the Appalachian renaissance of the 1970s, and I have sat at the table with policy makers as they distributed public funds for the development of the region. In recent years, scholars have gained a much better understanding of the political and economic history of the mountains, but too often we have ignored the lessons of that history, and we, citizens and leaders alike, have continued to abuse each other and the land in our continuing quest for progress. History speaks to us only when we listen.

Like most books, this one is the culmination of years of research and reflects the contributions of dozens of librarians, archivists, statisticians, students, activists, and scholars throughout the region. The staffs at the University of Kentucky Special Collections Library (especially Kate Black), the Berea College Special Collections and Archives, the West Virginia University West Virginia and Regional History Collection, the West Virginia State Archives, the Appalachian Regional Commission in Washington DC, and the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum in Austin deserve special thanks. Over the years graduate students attending my seminars and serving as research as
sistants at the Appalachian Center have provided data analysis and criticism through their own work. Among the many students to whom I am indebted are Glenna Graves, Nyoka Hawkins, Tim Collins, Tom Kiffmeyer, Glenn Taul, Phil Jenks, Carrie Celia Mullins, Jim White, Debbie Auer, Tom Riley, John Burch, Jerry Napier, Carlye Thacker, Lori Copeland, Margaret Brown, Roy Salmons, and Jodi Mullins. Several colleagues and friends read early drafts of this manuscript, including Dwight Billings, Rudy Abramson, Ron Formisano, Robert Weise, and Chad Berry. I deeply appreciate their insight and kindness, even though I did not always take their advice. I am, moreover, indebted to the University of Kentucky College of Arts and Sciences for a sabbatical leave, to the Appalachian Regional Commission for a term as its John Whisman scholar, and to the National Endowment for the Humanities for a summer research stipend. Finally, I want to thank my stepdaughter, Sarah Jane Herbener, for many hours of editing a much too long manuscript. Her critical eye and way with words have added immeasurable clarity to my academic prose.

One person is, however, more responsible for this book than any other, my wife Jane Wilson Eller. Without her steady support, encouragement, and gentle prodding, this manuscript might not have been completed. She alone understands my love for the mountains. After all, this is her story too.

How America Came to the Mountains
Jim Wayne Miller

The way the Brier remembers it, folks weren't sure

at first what was coming. The air felt strange,

and smelled of blasting powder, carbide, diesel fumes.

A hen crowed and a witty prophecied

eight lanes of fogged-in asphalt filled with headlights.

Most people hadn't gone to bed that evening,

believing an awful storm was coming to the mountains.

And come it did. At first, the Brier remembers,

it sounded like a train whistle far off in the night.

They felt it shake the ground as it came roaring.

Then it was big trucks roaring down an interstate,

a singing like a circle saw in oak,

a roil of every kind of noise, factory

whistles, cows bellowing, a caravan

of camper trucks bearing down

blowing their horns and playing loud tapedecks.

He recollects it followed creeks and roadbeds

and when it hit, it blew the tops off houses,

shook people out of bed, exposing them

to a sudden black sky wide as eight lanes of asphalt,

and dropped a hail of beer cans, buckets

and bottles clattering on their sleepy heads.

Children were sucked up and never seen again.

The Brier remembers the sky full of trucks

and flying radios, bicycles and tv sets, whirling

log chains, red wagons, new shoes and tangerines.

Others told him they saw it coming like a wave

of tumbling dirt and rocks and carbodies

rolling before the blade of a bulldozer,

saw it pass on by, leaving a wake

of singing commercials, leaving ditches

full of spray cans and junk cars, canned

biscuit containers, tinfoil pie plates.

Some told him it felt like a flooding creek

that leaves ribbons of polyethylene

hanging from willow trees along the bank

and rusty cardoors half silted over on sandbars.

It was that storm that dropped beat-up cars

all up and down the hollers, out in fields

just like a tornado that tears tin sheets

off tops of barns and drapes them like scarves

on trees in quiet fields two miles from any settlement.

And that's why now so many old barn doors

up and down the mountains hang by one hinge

and gravel in the creek is broken glass.

That's how the Brier remembers America coming

to the mountains. He was just a little feller

but he recollects how his Mama got

all of the younguns out of bed, recalls

being scared of the dark and the coming roar

and trying to put both feet into one leg

of his overalls.

They left the mountains fast

and lived in Is, Illinois, for a while

but found it dull country and moved back.

The Brier has lived in As If, Kentucky, ever since.

INTRODUCTION

Americans have an enduring faith in the power of development to improve the quality of our lives. At least since the late nineteenth century, we have associated progress toward the attainment of a better society with measures of industrial production, urbanization, consumption, technology, and the adoption of modern education and cultural values. Early in the twentieth century, we assumed that movement along the road to the good life was best left to the engine of private enterprise, but after the Great Depression and World War II, government played a larger role in assuring economic growth and incorporating minorities into the new American dream. Areas such as Appalachia were deemed to be backward and underdeveloped because they lacked the statistical measures of progress, both material and cultural, that had become the benchmarks of success in a modern world. For policy makers of the 1950s and 1960s, convinced of the appropriateness of the American path to development, those backwater places needed to be energized and brought into the supposed mainstream.

Appalachia has long played an ironic role in the drama of American development. Discovered or, more accurately, created by urban journalists in the years following the Civil War, the idea of Appalachia provided a counterpoint to emerging definitions of progress at the turn of the twentieth century. Those writers who disliked modernity saw in the region a remnant of frontier life, the reflection of a simpler, less complicated time that ought to be preserved and protected. Those who found advancement in the growth of material production, consumption, and technology decried what they considered the isolation and backwardness of the place and sought to uplift the mountain people
through education and industrialization. The perceived economic and cultural deficiencies of Appalachia allowed entrepreneurs a free hand to tap the region's natural resources in the name of development, but by midcentury the dream of industrial prosperity had produced the opposite in the mountains. Persistent unemployment and poverty set Appalachia off as a social and economic problem area long before social critic Michael Harrington drew attention to the region as part of the “other America” in 1962.
1

As the United States matured into a global economic power in the late twentieth century, the effort to spread the development faith at home and abroad once again focused the nation's attention on the region. The migration of millions of young whites from Appalachia and young blacks from the Deep South into the cities of the Midwest added to the congestion and poverty of urban ghettoes, and the shocking scenes of rural blight captured by the media during John F. Kennedy's 1960 presidential primary campaign in West Virginia contradicted popular notions of an affluent America. The rediscovery of Appalachia as a cultural and economic problem area was an embarrassment and a challenge to a generation confident of its ability to shape a better world. Attempting to eliminate the disparities between mainstream America and Appalachia, government made the region a domestic testing ground for strategies to promote economic growth, and social scientists used it as a laboratory for experimentation in human behavior modification.

Government and private programs launched during the 1960s eventually transformed the mountains, stirring both hope and resistance among mountain residents. The short-lived War on Poverty and the more lasting Appalachian Regional Commission fueled a new cultural identity in the region and spawned a multitude of new roads, schools, retail centers, and other symbols of the consumer society. Appalachia was swept up in another round of modernization that reshaped the physical landscape and permanently altered the way of life for most of the region's residents. Even so, the transformation begun by the War on Poverty failed to eliminate the perception of Appalachian otherness, and the new Appalachia that emerged from the special development programs continued to reflect the social inequalities and environmental exploitation that had burdened the region for decades.
By the turn of the twenty-first century, growth and government-sponsored initiatives to promote change had altered the outward appearance of Appalachia, but development had done little to correct the structural problems of land abuse, political corruption, economic shortsightedness, and the loss of community and culture. Despite the rise and fall of national attention and resources, no other region within the United States has presented a greater challenge to policy makers or a greater test of modern notions of development. The idea of Appalachia survives in the popular mind, and the heart of the region continues to lag behind the rest of the country as an area of persistent economic and social distress.

Appalachia endures as a paradox in American society in part because it plays a critical role in the discourse of national identity but also because the region's struggle with modernity reflects a deeper American failure to define progress in the first place. For more than a century, Appalachia has provided a challenge to modern conceptions of the American dream. It has appeared as a place of cultural backwardness in a nation of progressive values, a region of poverty in an affluent society, and a rural landscape in an increasingly urban nation. We
know
Appalachia exists because we need it to exist in order to define what we are not. It is the “other America” because the very idea of Appalachia convinces us of the righteousness of our own lives. The notion of Appalachia as a separate place, a region set off from mainstream culture and history, has allowed us to distance ourselves from the uncomfortable dilemmas that the story of Appalachia raises about our own lives and about the larger society. However, Appalachia is more than just an intellectual idea. It is also a real place where public policies designed to achieve a healthy society, the objective of development itself, have played out with mixed results. As a venue for development, Appalachia provides a stage for the larger political debates over the meaning of progress, over who wins and who loses as a result of change, and over the role of government in assuring the good life.

I have spent much of the past four decades observing, participating in, and writing about the process of development in the mountains. My family has lived in the southern mountains since the 1790s, and we have witnessed many of the changes that have swept the region in the name of progress and modernization. We have survived as farmers,
coal miners, mill hands, and ministers, and we have fought the nation's wars and enriched the larger culture with our music. As a college student in West Virginia during the War on Poverty, I served as a part-time caseworker in child welfare. I was told by my professors and field supervisors that the problems of poverty in my community were the result of cultural deficiencies, antiquated values, and low expectations; my responsibility as an educated person was to serve as a role model for my less advantaged clients. Uncomfortable with those assumptions, I became a historian, teacher, and activist, determined not only to gain a better understanding of my land and my people but to translate that knowledge into the national conversation about Appalachia.

BOOK: Uneven Ground
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