Uneven Ground (23 page)

Doubts about the War on Poverty were slower to appear in Appalachia, in part because of the intensity of despair in the mountains and the hope generated by national attention. Mountain power brokers welcomed the early community action grants that funded service-oriented programs run by well-connected leaders and traditional institutions. By the time open apprehension about the antipoverty program
emerged in the region, the OEO was already under fire at the national level, its budget limited and its future compromised by rising inflation and the Vietnam War. The seeds of change and resistance, however, had been planted, and even as government-sponsored funds for fighting poverty began to tighten, a wave of dissent washed across the mountains that would dramatize the depth of the region's problems and reframe the debate over regional disparity for years to come. The activism generated by the War on Poverty, moreover, stirred a renaissance of regional scholarship, culture, and identity that survived long after the poverty battles had calmed.

The confidence, idealism, and enthusiasm that accompanied the launching of the antipoverty campaign in Appalachia provided fertile ground for the emergence of a regional awareness and reform movement. An unlikely coalition of ages, classes, and cultural backgrounds came together in the poverty wars to challenge popular ideas about the region and confront economic and political injustice. Young people from inside and outside Appalachia eagerly transferred their classroom civics lessons into the “real world” of the community. Academics found a laboratory and resources with which to test larger theories of development and empowerment. Local citizens and poor people found allies who were economically independent and skilled in negotiating government bureaucracies. Labor leaders and civil rights activists found an abused landscape and a struggling people in need of their community organizing talents. They were strange bedfellows, but they came together in the trenches of the poverty program, sharing mutual frustrations and learning from each other. Their collective experiences would test the limits of the social services model and shift the focus of the antipoverty campaign from individual uplift and local action to regional collaboration and structural change.

Challenges to the prevailing ideas about poverty and Appalachian culture emerged from the contested terrain of the poverty program itself. The urgency and experimental quality of early community action initiatives encouraged creativity and the open exchange of ideas. Agency heads brought in experts on human behavior and community development to train the young poverty warriors. Some encouraged workers to serve as role models for personal improvement; others advocated
more radical solutions to societal change. Student volunteers listened intently to the concerns of the poor with whom they worked and sometimes lived. They read widely about the region and quickly transferred knowledge from the civil rights movement, the women's movement, liberation theology, and later the antiwar movement to their work in rural Appalachia. For many, the task of fighting poverty in the mountains was indistinguishable from other social crusades of their time. College-age youth from across the country took up John Kennedy's call for public service, and young people from the mountains found new meaning in their own roots and new pride in their culture.

At first the ideas of individual opportunity and community action were vague enough to encompass a range of strategies. Assumptions about the culture of poverty in the mountains were widespread, and almost everyone believed that education and economic development would uplift the poor. Over time, however, the ideas about social change that were churning in the larger society mixed with experience and memory within the region to produce a whole new understanding of the Appalachian condition. This interactive process empowered activists across the region—natives and nonnatives, young and old, intellectuals and the working poor—to join in the common cause of a variety of political and economic concerns. In Appalachia, as in urban ghettoes, community action took on new meaning, and fighting poverty came to imply systemic reform.

This movement from individual uplift to community organizing strategies was evident in the transformation of the AV. Established in 1964 as an early student service organization, the AV initially recruited students from within the region but eventually included volunteers and staff from a variety of backgrounds and places. After receiving one of the first OEO grants, the organization evolved from repairing one-room schoolhouses and providing occasional enrichment programs for poor schools to placing permanent field-workers in rural communities and training hundreds of VISTA and other volunteers. As the number of poverty workers associated with the AV increased, the mission of the organization grew from human services to community development and eventually to issue organizing on a broader regional basis. In 1966 the AV split with the more moderate CSM and
became a leading force for structural change in central Appalachia, helping to organize citizens around strip mining, welfare rights, health care, and other regional problems.

The radicalization of the AVs and other young people derived from both cultural and intellectual forces at work in American society in the 1960s. The same optimism and confidence that had fueled the consumerism of the post–World War II generation inspired their children to pursue transcendent goals of social justice and economic simplicity. For financially secure and better-educated youth of the mid-1960s, extending the American dream involved broadening the benefits of democracy, expanding civil rights, and challenging long established barriers to opportunity.

At first the cultural differences between some urban-raised volunteers and rural mountain residents created barriers to communication, but gradually the poverty warriors and local poor people found common ground. Many of the young volunteers rejected the consumer culture that was emerging in postwar America and questioned the benefits of unbridled corporate power. They found in Appalachia a welcoming culture that appeared to resist modernization and to appreciate interpersonal relationships and community. As one AV recalled, “It was an introduction to a culture, values, and a way of life that we didn't know anything about. The whole Appalachian culture and history was very fascinating. You felt very much welcomed and involved. There wasn't any of that outsider standoffish sort of stuff that you sometimes hear about.”
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Disenchanted with mass society, they longed for roots themselves and found a certain romantic simplicity and honesty in the lives of the rural poor.

Eventually these young outsiders learned to listen to the viewpoints of their mountain hosts, and they came to share many of their values and to appreciate their music and art. Among the Appalachian middle class, the volunteers remained little more than outside troublemakers, long-haired hippies who failed to understand traditional community mores. For many rural poor, however, the AVs were increasingly welcomed as well-meaning, although naive, young people who shared a common vision of a just world. Among many rural Appalachians, the love of children, inherent egalitarianism, and sense of fairness eased the way for acceptance and trust. On the battlefields of the antipoverty
campaign, cultures merged, and ideas and perspectives that each brought to the struggle were transformed.

Among the first assumptions to dissolve in the wake of field experience for many volunteers was the belief that poverty resulted from inherent deficiencies in mountain culture. Whereas weekend recruits could more easily accept cultural and geographic explanations for economic conditions in the region, volunteers who lived and worked in mountain communities for any period of time had more difficulty attributing poverty to the values, culture, and isolation of a people they came to admire. Occasional volunteers could “pop in, pop off, and pop out,” as local residents put it, but field-workers with their feet in communities understood the complexity of local circumstances and the political consequences of powerlessness. AVs and VISTA volunteers who lived in coal camps and other rural communities quickly rejected the culture of poverty theory and behavior adjustment strategies and searched for other explanations for poor housing, inadequate health care, deficient education, and joblessness among their neighbors. As they listened to local residents express “bitterness about their life experience, about the political structure and their relationship with the coal companies and other big industries,” the volunteers adjusted their perception of powerlessness. “I felt like I was radicalized or politicized or whatever by the people who lived in the mountains themselves,” remembered one AV.
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Increasingly they came to understand the mountain experience in new ways, and they responded to alternative voices that defined the region's poverty less as the product of Appalachian culture than of economic and political self-interest.

One of the most important of these voices was that of Harry Caudill. Although Caudill's best-selling book
Night Comes to the Cumberlands
had little impact on the administrative design of the War on Poverty, his scathing exposé of the coal industry in the mountains was widely read by reporters and poverty warriors in Appalachia. Caudill himself was a tireless writer and lecturer, speaking frequently at VISTA, AV, and CAA training sessions and frequently guiding national journalists on discovery trips into the hollows. The eloquent Whitesburg, Kentucky, lawyer and environmental advocate reinforced what the young volunteers and journalists heard from community residents and connected local conditions to a pattern of regional exploitation.
More than anyone else in the 1960s, Caudill shaped an alternative image of Appalachia as an oppressed region and provided the intellectual framework for a generation of mountain activists.
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Caudill attributed the economic problems of central Appalachia to the years of government neglect and corporate greed that had turned the mountains into an industrial wasteland. Most Americans, he argued, had seen the face of Appalachian poverty—“the bleak hillsides, the gray mining camps, the littered roadsides, the rickety houses, and the tattered dispirited people”—but few were familiar with the other face of Appalachia, the affluence that remained discreetly out of view. “Absenteeism and anonymity,” he pointed out to all who would listen, “curtain the vast domain of giant corporations which own the region's wealth.” Coddled by state and local officials who were too often corrupt and self-serving, the absentee corporations drained the wealth of Appalachia just as surely as they stole the riches of Central America.
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Some of the nation's great steel and manufacturing corporations, Caudill explained, had turned Appalachia into “little more than an internal colonial appendage of the industrial North and Midwest.” Exploited for its natural and human resources, Appalachia was a rich land inhabited by a poor people: “Its plight is worse than that of a banana republic receiving U.S. foreign aid. Its exploitative economy generates much wealth and much poverty. The wealth flows to distant cities; the poverty accumulates at home. Like Latin America, Appalachia can find no relief for its dilemma until there is far-reaching tax reform and an overhaul of the antiquated political structure.”
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There was a great need, he believed, for regional advocates “to impress upon the electorate the fact that they are living on a rich land whose inhabitants are poor because of mismanagement of the land base and the almost endless exploitation of the soil, minerals, and timber by both local residents and giant absentee corporations.” It was their responsibility, he told AVs in 1966, “to inform the people of this fact, and to set in motion a revolutionary change of thought.”
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Caudill's use of the image of Appalachia as an internal American colony fit well within the American liberal tradition of resistance to outside oppression, and it reinforced the frustration and anger that the AVs were hearing from local residents. Volunteers could see the train-loads of coal that flowed past unemployed miners' shacks to enrich
distant investors, and they could envision their role as populists resisting corporate oppression and injustice. The colonial model, moreover, connected the Appalachian experience to universal theories of economic dependence stirring in the civil rights, labor, and antiwar movements. Whereas conventional service delivery strategies failed to confront structural inequalities within the system and cultural explanations simply blamed the poor as individuals, the colonial model provided a clear adversary—outside corporations and their local henchmen—around which to organize citizen resistance. For energetic but impatient young poverty warriors, it offered a framework for thinking about political and economic change in the region that linked local and regional problems with global human struggles.

The idea that Appalachia was an exploited resource colony not only provided an explanation for the paradox of poverty in a rich land but also pointed to intervention strategies more consistent with Saul Alinsky's formula for political organizing on Chicago's South Side than with Oscar Lewis's framework of cultural modernization. If Appalachia was to throw off the corporate domination that controlled its wealth, the poor people of the mountains must free themselves from the feudal system of local politics that protected the absentee interests. The challenge in Appalachia, activists soon argued, was to facilitate this change by organizing citizens locally around specific community concerns—political participation, health care, welfare rights, access to housing and education, and property rights—and to build a regional identity and regional alliances around shared regional issues.

This combination of community action and regionalism generated a movement culture that bound Appalachian activists, intellectuals, and local people to a common crusade that was larger than the War on Poverty and survived long after the OEO's demise. No longer a caricature of cultural deviance, Appalachia became a proving ground for the democratic process itself, a challenge to the fulfillment of professed American values. Shady politicians, self-indulgent corporations, elite institutions, and even corrupt unions became the focal points for confrontation; organizing the poor to take control of their lives and resources became the agenda for regional transformation. As Naomi Weintraub Cohen, a volunteer from New York, recalled, “By day you might say we were day-camp counselors and tutors of children. By
evening we were out there organizing and getting people stirred up about issues. . . . We were trying to convince people that by community organizing they could change the West Virginia state law and make the law more responsive to the people and more protective of the property rights of the people instead of just the strip mine operators.”
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Inspired by postwar assumptions about what America symbolized to the world and motivated by what they saw and heard in mountain communities, the majority of poverty warriors sought justice from a system that they believed should work for everyone. Few anticipated the opposition that would emerge from those in the local power structure who had a different vision for the future.