Reformers to Radicals (18 page)

As Sutherland moved from the schools to the homes, he apparently missed the worst of Appalachian poverty. Rather than speaking with unemployed miners, he spent the majority of his time with farmers, many of whom supplemented their income with jobs in nearby towns. In particular, they worked as school bus drivers and lunchroom cooks, jobs that the county school superintendent controlled. One family Sutherland interviewed actually employed four farmhands. Moreover, even though most
of the adults had never attended high school, they still placed a high value on education for their children. “Many had children in high school or intended to send them [there],” Sutherland reported. “Some children were in college.”
¹⁶

Though Sutherland failed to come in contact with Appalachia's poorest, his findings revealed that, despite his contention that the mountaineers needed to “learn what is most important—to
put first things first
,” their long-term concerns were remarkably congruent with those of the Appalachian Volunteers. “Interviews with Eastern Kentucky parents in small schools,” he wrote, “revealed some of the things they consider important [such] as education, . . . moral training, . . . [and] homemaking.” So too were their more immediate, short-term concerns: the need for improved schools, more playground facilities, improved roads (to facilitate bus service and, thus, education), and more jobs.
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In certain ways, the Sutherland survey was a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Appalachian Volunteers began almost a year earlier with the hypothesis that mountaineers were undereducated and that, given the opportunity and the example, they would warmly welcome a better school environment. To test this supposition, the organization sent agents first to the county school superintendents, who were already quite familiar with the program, and then to the schools themselves, where the AV representatives told the teachers and students about the purpose of the visit. When he finally introduced himself to his subjects, Sutherland “stress[ed] the Appalachian Volunteers and school connection.” Even during the interviews themselves, as his assistant observed, “he became [the]
teacher
. . . more than [the]
interviewer
.” Furthermore, because the superintendents directed him to specific households and those households had prior warning of his visit, those individuals whom Sutherland interviewed probably told him exactly what he wanted to hear or, more probably, what the superintendents wanted him to hear.
¹⁸

Ignoring the extremely poor did not necessarily reflect suspicion on the part of the local superintendents toward the AVs. Rather, their hesitancy to send Sutherland to the most impoverished areas of their counties was probably a reaction to the growing national attention being paid to the region and its problems. In late December 1964, CBS News produced two special reports on impoverishment in eastern Kentucky,
Depressed Area U.S.A
. and the more famous
Christmas in Appalachia
. Both set out to find the worst
that eastern Kentucky had to offer, and the powers that be in the region apparently became increasingly concerned about how the region and they themselves were being portrayed.

Hosted by Charles Kuralt and filmed on Pert Creek, Letcher County, Kentucky,
Christmas in Appalachia
juxtaposed the immense poverty of the Appalachian coalfields with the spirit of joy and giving felt by most Americans during the holiday season. It showed many hardworking people who “lived in a country far removed from ours” and struggled to survive. Kuralt interviewed a number of local residents, asking them about, among other things, the local school. Again,
all
claimed to recognize the value of education and affirmed that they wanted their children in school. Despite scenes of coal cars “carrying the wealth of Appalachia away” and the “tour” of the abandoned town of Weeksbury, once “the trading center for this whole valley” where jobs could be had, the report never attempted to explain the cause of poverty, which, as Allen Batteau has pointed out, “was due to the coal-buying policies of the Tennessee Valley Authority, or how the electricity powering the viewers' television sets came from cheap coal.” “[The report] showed a run down schoolhouse,” Batteau continued, “but it failed to explain that the inadequate fiscal structure of Letcher County was due to its domination by some large mineral interests.” Equally mystifying was the continued discussion of the mountaineers' attitudes toward education. The report implied that all that was needed to bring these poor mountain folk out of that “country far removed,” rebuild the town of Weeksbury, and keep wealth in the region was a proper education. This belief, already embraced by the Appalachian Volunteers, took hold of the rest of America as well.
¹⁹

Much more biting in its criticism,
Depressed Area USA
, in which the Council of the Southern Mountains took an active part, did attempt to provide a more comprehensive analysis of Appalachian poverty. According to the suggested story line submitted by CBS to the Council of the Southern Mountains, the report sought to develop the theme that, “while many can be accused, all of these people we see and hear are the victims of history, an oversight on the part of the body politic.” Rather than contrasting poverty in Appalachia and the Christmas spirit in more prosperous areas of the country,
Depressed Area
first showed the Clay County resident Odie Mills “accusing the school system of taking more than a year of her life,” followed by the faces of “local big wigs” claiming “‘We're doing the best we can'” and
local bankers revealing “that they are minions of larger banks in Lexington and Louisville, which set credit policy.” Though the script did not specify in what way the mountaineers were “victims of history,” it claimed that the problems in Appalachia lingered because of a national “failure of nerve” and “fear of risk.”
²⁰

In the proposal submitted to the CSM,
Depressed Area USA
did not offer any tangible solutions. Rather, it focused on the problems and allowed locals to make accusations. Much like
Christmas in Appalachia
,
Depressed Area
called on all Americans to take responsibility for remedying the national oversight of Appalachian poverty. The implicit message was the need to educate Appalachians so that they might take part in the wealth and prosperity of the modern United States. This, of course, was the message of the Appalachian Volunteers.

There was a second implication in
Depressed Area
that the Council openly exploited—the lack of leadership in the Appalachian region, as demonstrated by the report's depiction of the “local big wigs” as powerless “minions” of outside forces. In contrast to those powerless flunkies, the Council of the Southern Mountains saw itself as the source of a renewed mountain authority. “The desperate region-wide material poverty and poverty of the mind and spirit and inadequate resource development throughout the entire Appalachian South,” Ayer wrote to the OEO, “is fundamentally based in a lack of specific and interrelated information, a lack of social and organizational ‘savvy' and a lack of competent leadership in this new day as differentiated from the power structure group of so-called leaders under whose domination and control the situation came to be as it is.” Because of this dearth of local leadership, he continued, those involved in implementing the OEO's community action programs (CAPs) must “come from outside the community.” Finally, he argued that only the Council was in a position to provide any reliable information on the conditions in Appalachia and that the OEO should consult it before approving any CAP there. Though Ayer claimed that he sought only to ensure that the OEO developed programs on the basis of accurate data, his argument that the Council “need[ed] to have the authority . . . to act as OEO's emissary” in Appalachia clearly translated to a desire for control of federal dollars.
²¹

Interestingly, these harsh words about the “power structure” did not produce any fundamental alterations in the AV focus. The publicity that
Appalachia gained as a result of the national news coverage was, however, a boon to the AV cause. Donations of all sorts poured into the region (and not just to the AVs), and the organization opened its doors to the flood of young Americans who wanted to do their part for the less fortunate. By this time, Appalachian Volunteer chapters existed on three college campuses outside the region: at Earlham College in Indiana, Queens College in New York, and Harvard University in Massachusetts. With the addition of the VISTA volunteers who filtered into Appalachia in early 1965, the War on Poverty exploded on eastern Kentucky. The
Appalachia
in
Appalachian Volunteers
now referred more to where the AV members worked than to where they were born—though most were still volunteers.
²²

This transformation was intentional. Ayer suggested that the CSM attempt to attract sociology students from places such as the University of Wisconsin, Columbia University, Cornell University, and other “far flung campuses on which there are people orientated to and concerned about this area.” In addition, the AV staff member Gibbs Kinderman informed an interested student from Louisville that the organization was “most interested in involving colleges outside the Eastern Kentucky area in our work.” Before the spring was over, his wish was granted.
²³

In late 1964, the Council's assistant executive director, Loyal Jones, had “encourage[d] Peace Corps returnees to check with the Council” about working in the mountains following their overseas assignments. Further, he worked with the United Church Board for Homeland Ministries to find suitable “work camp experiences” for interested young people. This was but the beginning of a massive influx of nonnatives into the Appalachian Volunteers. In February 1965, Flem Messer began making arrangements for a church group from Elkhart, Indiana, to conduct a school project in eastern Kentucky, and, during the summer of that year, Beloit College in Wisconsin sent two female students to the Appalachian Volunteers through the school's social service program. In November, volunteers from a student church group at Pennsylvania State University held a weeklong project at Quicksand Hollow, Knott County, while volunteers from Saint Pius X Interracial Council, located in Uniondale, New York, provided manpower for the Volunteers in April 1966. Not all the new volunteers, however, came from so far away. By 1965, University of Louisville students actively participated in the AV program. Nevertheless, extant in the Appalachian Volunteers files
are letters to and from virtually every state in the Union either from individuals requesting information about the AVs or from the Appalachian Volunteers themselves seeking new volunteers and asking former students to return for yet another tour of duty. By mid-1965, the AVs were a national organization.
²⁴

Not only were the Appalachian Volunteers more than willing to accept participants from outside the region; they also were ready to abandon that sense of selflessness that they originally hoped to infuse in the project. From Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, Bard College asked to send students to the Appalachian Volunteers so that they might gain knowledge that would supplement their classroom studies. Even certified teachers expressed a desire to spend time in the rural mountain schools. Representing a group of teachers in New Jersey, Richard Blass wrote to the Council about arranging a “teacher exchange” program between the rural instructors and those from the Northeast. Such a program, Blass argued, would be of great benefit to the Jersey children, who were very interested in learning more about the “romantic Appalachian area.”
²⁵

Ironically, the Appalachian Volunteers' overwhelming confidence in their own abilities prevented yet another group from turning the fight against want in the Southern mountains into a lab course for its students. Clarke Moses of Pomona College in Claremont, California, wanted to form a “social action seminar” in which students would work with reform efforts such as the Appalachian Volunteers and read prescribed texts, assigned by Pomona faculty as a supplement. This seminar, he believed, would successfully combine academics with actual experience. Responding to the proposal, the AV fieldman Thomas Rhodenbaugh informed Moses that his idea was an admirable one but that the Volunteer staff was the better judge of what academic work should supplement the “action” part of the course.
²⁶

Rhodenbaugh's response is interesting on many levels. First, he was open to the possibility of a group using mountaineers as research subjects. Second, he must have understood that the primary objective of the proposed seminar was not the improvement of the mountaineers' condition but the education of the college students. Finally, his reaction to the professor's attempt to control the reading material for his own class again illustrated how sure of themselves the Volunteers were and how they believed they were the ones most prepared to initiate change in the Appalachian coalfields.

By the end of 1966, the Appalachian Volunteers began to suffer the consequences of both the national publicity and the changing composition of its work groups. After the
Depressed Area
film crew completed its work in Clay County, the county school superintendent, Malie Bledsoe, was so incensed that she refused to allow the Appalachian Volunteers to undertake any additional school renovation projects in her district. William Miller, a member of the AV Board of Directors, subsequently urged the AV staff to evaluate the methods used by the Volunteer groups to contact local officials. Many superintendents, he warned, were “disturbed at the Volunteers [for] ignoring them.” Ayer, somewhat uncharacteristically, believed that the “push” from the national media would lead only to progress in the region. “We cannot alleviate any of these great social problems by sweeping them under the rug,” he told an NBC reporter, “and if we offend some of the dominant ‘leaders' in the area this may result in positive action which would not otherwise have been aroused.”
²⁷