Reformers to Radicals (12 page)

In her reports, Irons failed to explain why Messer objected to the cleanup project, but it may be explained, at least in part, by yet another shift in the direction of the overall effort. By the end of May 1965, the town's focus had returned to the community center. After an extended period of inactivity, Mill Creek held a town meeting at which Messer agreed to deed land for the building, and the people at first rallied to the cause. Hoping that this renewed enthusiasm would spark interest in the continuation of volunteer work in their community, the people held yet another vote on a second summer school program. Because she believed that there was a “lack of sincerity” in the voting process when she was present, Irons excused herself from the meeting. Unfortunately, this meant that she could not report on the ensuing debate. This information, of course, would have explained why the residents again vetoed the plan (further evidence of the insincerity of the previous fall's thank-you letters). Nevertheless, Irons had her own ideas on the subject. The people rejected the project, she felt, because of the heavy workload that most Mill Creek families faced during the summer season or, more significantly, because of dissatisfaction with the previous summer's program, reasons that she considered mere “excuses.”
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Irons saw such dissatisfaction as an excuse because, as she contended, the people were free “to alter the summer school program to fit their own
desires.” More devastating for her was the fact that, in the wake of the rejection of the summer school project, interest in the community center again waned. Irons reported three basic reasons for this turn of events. First, and perhaps most obvious, was the lack of need. Many linked the new building with the summer project, and, without the school, there was no need for a community center. More pivotal, however, was the townspeople's fear that, once the school program was over, the Messers would take over the building and that, “because of her influence,” Amelia would “run activities her way, which is not always in the best interest of all.” Equally influential was what Irons claimed to be Amelia's evident desire for the building. Irons believed that it should go to her if only to prevent “mean[n]ess” following her, Irons's, departure. “In all good conscience,” Irons concluded in her report in early June, “I cannot urge Mill Creek to build and face such unfavorable circumstances.” She speculated that fear of this “meanness” prevented offers of other building sites. She had also come to another decision: “Further, without a building to function in or a private place to live, I will not be able to remain beyond the summer.” And, in fact, she did not. While she submitted a “terminal report” to Ogle from Charlotte, North Carolina, her June report was the last from Mill Creek. On June 22, 1965, more than two months short of the full year she had originally intended, Irons ceased trying to “develop” the residents and town of Mill Creek.
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It would be a mistake to conclude that, while significant, the troubles with Amelia Messer alone caused Irons to abandon her assignment early. Rather, her reasons for leaving reflected Sigmon's concerns of the previous March, in particular, the frustrations of a less than adequately trained person charged with the vague responsibility of developing a community. On June 18, Irons informed Sigmon that she was leaving Mill Creek because of a “lack of understanding with [Amelia] Messer, my landlady and a strong influence on other families; . . . lack of community in terms of unity [and] goals . . . ; inadequate living conditions; . . . no functional place to work.” Irons's inability to develop Mill Creek was, as her first two reasons illustrated, the result of her failure to overcome the dominance of one interested party over the rest of the community. This, in turn, prevented the unity that could have made the community center and summer school projects successful. This chain of events led to Irons's frustration and, ultimately, her departure. Had she been better prepared, or had she focused her attention
on a couple of specific tasks, the sense of futility she experienced might not have been so acute. Moreover, she could possibly have withstood what must have been the proverbial final straw. Some time prior to her relocation, yet after her final regular report, “[a] person not living in Mill Creek, but related to the Messers, offered $25.00 towards the church building fund on the condition that I and my work be given a bad name and I no longer be allowed to use the church.” “The money,” she claimed, “was accepted.”
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Regardless of Irons's personal success or failure, one must question what the Appalachian Volunteers, as an organization, should have learned from its “demonstration project.” Certainly, Mill Creek offered more than its share of potentially useful lessons. Unfortunately, what the Council of the Southern Mountains thought of it is difficult to assess. There being no Mill Creek evaluation reports extant, one can only speculate. Taken as a whole—that is, the CSM-sponsored volunteer summer school in conjunction with Irons's later efforts—the program deteriorated from a successful beginning to a difficult, painful end. Considered by itself, the summer school program seems to have achieved much more success than did Irons's efforts at community development.

Such conclusions would, however, be superficial. An evaluation that addresses the question of why Irons encountered so much opposition would be much more instructive. At issue is how the Mill Creek project should have informed the remainder of the AV experience in the Southern mountains and how the AVs could have solved the problems at the root of Irons's trials.

Beginning with the summer school conducted by the Council-sponsored volunteers, the CSM received little in the way of harsh criticism. In fact, other than those questionable letters of thanks, it got very little feedback directly from either the volunteers or the local residents. What responses it did manage to gather, however, reconfirmed the prevailing notions that dominated America in the early years of the decade. Helping bring impoverished mountain folk “out of their environment” and getting them “interested in the world” attracted not just the Ford Foundation but arguably the rest of the United States as well.
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More important, these types of statements clearly implied the soundness and desirability of modern American culture. Thus, the summer school portion of the program alone fulfilled the basic criteria for success held by such liberal thinkers as the leaders of the
CSM, the various charitable institutions donating to the Council, and the executive branch of the U.S. government. The development work of Carol Irons, on the other hand, taught different lessons.

The most obvious lesson was the inadvisability of the way in which the Council of the Southern Mountains readily accepted nonnative volunteers. Irons's presence refuted the whole idea on which the Volunteer program was based. That is, Irons did not represent the ideal of local people helping each other. As long as she continued conducting essentially the same activities as the preceding volunteers had, however, she had little trouble. In fact, the only complaint came from Irons herself when she made it known that she wanted to do more than just be a helping hand. While she served as the local taxi driver and kindergarten teacher, she experienced a cordial relationship with the entire community. When she placed the idea of a new building before the people, however, problems occurred. The struggle over the community center demonstrated how those supposedly culturally bound, primitive people were not, in fact, locked into a premodern economy in which all were political and economic equals. Rather, throughout Appalachia, as throughout the United States, certain people and interests dominated communities. In essence, Mill Creek was a microcosm of both the region and the nation.

A second lesson was that, at this stage of the reform effort, the concept of community development remained too vague to be of much use. What was a volunteer charged with the task of developing a community to do? Was a community center integral to development, and, if so, how? Was development to concentrate on education, economics, health concerns, or politics? In short, what was the volunteer's job? While the CSM certainly hoped to avoid dictating to the mountaineers, the directive to let the community lead proved insufficient for a volunteer with little or no experience working in central Appalachia. Another argument for the need for a more specific notion of community development was the constantly shifting focus of Irons's ultimately unsuccessful efforts. She repeatedly redirected her attention from the kindergarten, to the community center, to the pickle project, to a cleanup program, back to the community center. Though these course changes could be rationalized as following the community's wishes, they are more accurately seen as a series of attempts by a frustrated and possibly naive volunteer to do something constructive for the community.
Ultimately, neither Irons, the CSM, nor the AFSC had a clear view of the path toward community development. Whether it was a confused volunteer, who had little idea of what the community wanted or what was expected of her, or the CSM, which failed to provide sufficient supervision and guidance, who was at fault, the point remains that the term
community development
lacked sufficient definition in Mill Creek.

Another lesson the CSM should have learned was the role played by the AV fieldman, Flem Messer, both as a CSM employee and as a private individual. Messer's political activism in Clay County and the resentment on the part of local officials that it generated clearly put the CSM-AV leaders on the defensive. In keeping with its “open forum” position, the CSM refused to censure Messer for what he did on his own time, but it did terminate his official duties as a staff member in the county. Early in AV history, then, the CSM leaders became aware of the opposition on the part of the school superintendents and political bosses that could result from the AVs' pursuance of an overt political program. The Council, moreover, did face direct resistance to its efforts in Mill Creek when, as Irons reported, someone offered the town's residents cash to discredit her work. Certainly, the CSM should have realized that acceptance and success—especially in the realm of community development, no matter how vaguely it defined or how poorly it implemented that concept—would not be easy.

Confirming this final lesson were the experiences of the other volunteers who, by the start of the 1964–1965 academic year, began filtering into the Southern mountains. Not long after Irons moved to Mill Creek, the AFSC sent two additional VISA volunteers (who also were nonnatives) to the small mountain town of Decoy, Kentucky. These volunteers did not quit their assignments; instead, the community asked them to leave. When Robert Sigmon traveled to Decoy to investigate, he “found the going rough,” as he reported to Jones. Finally, the AFSC leader concluded, the community wanted
teachers
, not
community workers
, and, when the volunteers tried to fill both roles, some of the residents responded negatively. The volunteers tried to rectify the situation prior to Sigmon's arrival, but, after many frustrating attempts to resolve the issue, they left Decoy so that “half-truths” would not become “more distorted” and “suspicious notions” “unduly aroused.”
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Also, after Irons announced her decision to leave Mill Creek, Loyal Jones endeavored to get her a second assignment, this time
near Booneville, in Owsley County, Kentucky. Jones wrote to a Booneville minister about the reassignment, but his offer of help was refused. “I will be glad to help if I can,” the clergyman replied, “but frankly we have not been too impressed by some of the workers who thus far have been in our area.”
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As this response indicated, locating assignments for all volunteers was decidedly more difficult than most Council staff members had thought it would be. Problems dominated this “demonstration project,” and, as Jones himself admitted, these problems were, for the most part, unanticipated and difficult to solve. “Everything seem[ed] to have happened all at once,” an apologetic Jones wrote to Sigmon during Irons's initial troubles in Mill Creek, “and by the time we realized that we had a problem, it was almost too late to do anything about it.”
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As future events would show, Jones was not so much apologetic as he was prophetic.

The “Battle for Mill Creek” convinced the Council of the Southern Mountains that school renovation and tutorial programs such as that conducted by the first two volunteers were fundamental to ending poverty. More important, it convinced the Council that these types of efforts would be well received by the targeted communities. Finally, it reinforced for the CSM the culture of poverty model that provided the ideological foundations for the organization's future antipoverty initiatives. The efforts of those first two volunteers in Mill Creek who “brought alive” the minds of the young mountaineers equipped future antipoverty soldiers with the weapons of war. As these volunteers prepared for battle, they armed themselves with books, records, paper, scissors, glue, and guitars. Their enemy was the dark shadow of ignorance cast by a rugged topography.

 

Areas to be stressed will be school renovation and enrichment with special notice to tutoring. . . . This may sound like a lot but actually it is not much.

—University of Kentucky Appalachian Volunteers Newsletter,
December 7, 1964

By the time Roslea Johnson entered Berea College in 1961, her experiences had become quite familiar for many Appalachians. Born in Wisconsin in 1943, Johnson was the child of what the historian Chad Berry calls “northern exiles,” people from the Appalachian region who had relocated to Northern industrial centers in search of employment during World War II. She was just a year old when her father got a job in a munitions plant in Tennessee and the family returned to the South. Some time later, when she was still young, the family finally resettled in the city of Radford, Virginia—very close to Johnson's father's ancestral home. Also closer was her mother's family, who lived in Caney Valley, near Kingsport, Tennessee. Visits to her mother's relatives, in particular, impressed on Johnson the “differences” between residents of cities such as Radford and those of more “rural” parts of Appalachia.
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