Reformers to Radicals (19 page)

In spite of these early warnings, the Appalachian Volunteers continued to bring work groups from all over the country into the region. Three of these were from Earlham College, Wilmington College (in Ohio), and Queens College. Prior to the students' scheduled arrival on January 29, 1965, the Wilmington Project was already in trouble with the AV staff because of an article that had appeared in the
Louisville Courier-Journal
on January 20. In a letter written the same day the article appeared, Gibbs Kinderman chastised Tim Sword of the Wilmington College Appalachian Project because, as he saw it, the article implied that the Wilmington students sought “national recognition” for their efforts. Kinderman reminded the Ohioans that the AVs worked “with” and not for impoverished mountaineers. He also pointed out that there was no mention of the Council of the Southern Mountains in the article and that, as the agency that actually administered the AV program and sponsored the Wilmington group, the CSM had to be included in all statements issued about the project.
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Still concerned about its financial position and its fund-raising potential, the CSM wanted to maintain the level of visibility that it had achieved with
Christmas in Appalachia
.

Putting this incident behind them, the Ohio students conducted a combination curriculum enrichment and renovation project at the Kerby Knob school in Jackson County. The work must have been more difficult
than anticipated because the students failed to complete all they had hoped to do. They did, however, write to Otis Johnson, the superintendent of the Jackson County schools, requesting permission to return later and finish the job. Johnson refused the request. In a letter to the AV fieldman Rhodenbaugh, Johnson stated: “At our regular board meeting . . . the letter from Wilmington College requesting their return to Kerby Knob School to finish their job was refused by the board. The reason was because of all the unjustified publicity.” It is uncertain whether Johnson meant the earlier
Courier-Journal
article, but it is clear that one more superintendent began to curb Volunteer activity in his county.
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The Queens College and Earlham College projects were also significant in that they spurred a change in AV operations. Taking place in the early spring of 1965 at Decoy in Knott County and at Wright-Watson in Elliott County, the Earlham College program adhered to the Appalachian Volunteers' curriculum enhancement program to the letter. The twenty-seven Earlham students held dances and sing-alongs and presented dramatic skits and arts and crafts classes. They attempted to teach nutrition and health. They also served as teachers' aides, instructing the local children in nearly every subject. According to the fieldman Bill Wells, few volunteer groups embraced projects with such energy. Unfortunately, this enthusiasm nearly ruined the project. Wells reported that the “zeal and almost revolutionary spirit” of the Earlham students stationed at Wright-Watson disrupted the daily routines of the community and the school. According to the local teacher, the volunteers were one step away from disaster because they had little regard for local sensibilities until confronted with their insensitivity. Bill Marshak closed his report to the AV staff with the cryptic statement: “Reminder that all people are human beings and are just like us.”
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Though no reports or evaluations of the Queens College project are extant, a questionnaire used to prepare the New Yorkers for their summer visit to Appalachia remains. Though problematic—there is no indication who composed it or why—the language used provides insight into the participants and their perception of eastern Kentucky, illustrating the gap between the “monotony of daily routine” in the mountains and the “sophisticated culture” of New York City. Among other queries, project organizers asked whether students could endure “smelly clothes” and “do without washing for an extended period.”
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Most interesting, however, were a series of preproject statements that questioned the rationale behind the project: “Tutorials [were] ineffective since the children will return to their inadequate education in the fall. Whose idea was this recreation stuff anyway? In a poor society recreation is irrelevant.” One student even declared: “Community development is a joke. Renovation programs cannot be accomplished with our limited resources, . . . and even if minimal achievements are accomplished they will not be maintained.” Certainly, recreation is not irrelevant, and even short-term improvements are just that—improvements. So one wonders why the New Yorkers made such statements. The prompts directed at the students were, most likely, designed to make them say that any improvement, no matter how small, was beneficial. In many ways, such a position was correct. Nevertheless, as future events would soon indicate, the direction of the Queens College project questions was more prophetic than rhetorical, foreshadowing the future of the entire AV program. Further, because it recognized the possibility of failure, however remote, it also suggests that cracks had formed in the AV foundation of overwhelming confidence and self-assurance.
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That foundation, nevertheless, was still strong enough in 1965 to withstand the weight of the continued influx, in the form of the AV Spring Break and Summer 1965 projects as well as additional VISTA volunteers, of non-Appalachians. These three developments further undercut the notion of local people helping each other and solidified the change in the meaning of
Appalachian Volunteer
.

Scheduled to take place from March 15 through March 20, 1965, the AV Spring Break Project had as its “primary concern” “the growth of an enrichment program whereby the students of the one- and two-room schools can gain new insights into their world.” Prior to the start of the program, however, the AV staff requested that all participants (most were from the University of Kentucky) meet in Berea for one day of “orientation to Eastern Kentucky and to Appalachian Volunteer techniques.” Only after the volunteers were properly trained did the AV staff send them into the hills.
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The weeklong effort followed the pattern of virtually every other Appalachian Volunteer project in that it was designed “to bring the outside world . . . to these children.” At the Spruce School in Knox County, for example,
a group of volunteers made much-needed repairs to the school building. They patched the leaking roof, glazed the windows, and painted the entire structure. They also constructed a rock wall around a flower garden and laid a stone path from the school to the water pump. One AV member, Larry Qualls, used the telescope he brought to the community to teach an astronomy lesson, and foreign exchange students spoke about their countries. Similarly, volunteers at the Ligon School in Floyd County and the Bruin School in Elliott County focused on the basics, including spelling, geography, history, and science, because, as one volunteer argued, that was what was needed.
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An examination of some of the Spring Break Project's participants reveal emerging structural problems within the Appalachian Volunteers and the increasingly resistant attitudes of some of the mountaineers themselves. One of the exchange students who did foreign culture enrichment programs at a number of schools reported on the parents' lack of involvement with their children's education. “They sent their children to school,” he stated, “but they weren't bothered by the happenings [there].” A second exchange student lamented the fact that the constant travel the project involved prevented him from meeting local people and also told the AV leaders that the parents were “terribly indifferent.” Unfortunately, he did not indicate whether they were indifferent to the school itself or to the Volunteer program. Still, given the information the Appalachian Volunteers had already gathered on mountaineer attitudes (including Charles Kuralt's interviews), it is likely that their indifference was to the Volunteer program, especially since fewer and fewer AVs were themselves Appalachian.
³⁵

Within the organization itself, reports indicated that the Appalachian Volunteers came up short in preparing the students for their weeklong projects. “I think if we had more information on the program,” one student volunteer exclaimed, “we would have absorbed more. In fact information on the whole project [was] needed especially as to what the community expects of the volunteers.” Other spring break volunteers echoed this sentiment. One declared that the Volunteers placed too much emphasis on the physical environment and not enough on the “socialogy [
sic
]” of the mountaineers. According to this individual, potential volunteers needed to have a better understanding of the norms and mores of the people with whom they would be working. Another added that the program would be more
beneficial if the volunteers knew the education level of the children and what the teachers really wanted in terms of help.
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All three who criticized the orientation program indicated that they had no idea what was expected of them once they were on the job. Equally important was the question of the mores of the mountaineers. Because they were operating under the assumptions inherent in the culture of poverty model, the AV staff may have ignored the rural mountaineer culture since that was what they ultimately hoped to change. In addition, very few of the AVs understood mountain culture because so few of them were Appalachians themselves.

Located in the Appalachian Volunteer papers are biographical data sheets for twenty-seven volunteers from the Spring Break Project. These forms clearly illustrate that, by March 1965, the organization had abandoned its founding concept of local people helping each other. Of the twenty-seven, two were from Tennessee, and seven were Kentuckians. The rest—the majority of whom were University of Kentucky students—listed hometowns such as Rockville, Maryland, Bay City, Michigan, and Syracuse, New York. More interesting, only one listed an Appalachian county, Sullivan County, Tennessee, as his place of origin.
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Compounding this demographic change was an attitudinal shift that also went against the founding principles of the Appalachian Volunteers. By this time, there were many AV members who turned the focus of the projects on themselves rather than on the mountaineers. “I would like to help the unfortunate people of Eastern Kentucky,” answered one volunteer when asked why he wished to join the AVs, “because I feel that it is part of my responsibility as a human being. . . . I will provide them with a broader education and better facilities which will make their everyday life much more enjoyable and prosperous. . . . I will
be a missionary
.” Echoing this statement was a native of Bay City, Michigan, who wanted to change Appalachia into a “better and happier [region] through a little understanding, friendship and hard work”: “For those of us who are rich in essentials . . . it is not foolish to say that it is
our duty to share
.” A third participant saw the Volunteer experience as an opportunity for selfless action. She complained that all her life she thought only of her self but that now, through the AVs, she could finally do “for others.”
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Though many saw the AV experience as an opportunity to cleanse their
souls, others, like the Pomona College group, saw it as an opportunity to learn themselves. One University of Kentucky student, for example, wanted to do anthropological research in eastern Kentucky, and she looked to the Volunteers as a means to this end. Implying that genetics explained the region's limitations, she hoped that the AV experience would enable her to complete her tentatively titled thesis “The Consequences of Genetic Lines in Eastern Kentucky.” Still others hoped simply to bring a ray of sunshine into the bleak world of the central Appalachians: “I see myself trying to penetrate their world and trying to make them smile where before they may have had sad, dismal faces.” Finally, two participants fell back on the Appalachian Volunteers. One had been rejected by the Peace Corps and, thus, settled for the AVs, while another, possibly hoping to avoid the same fate, decided that the AVs could provide him with a quality Peace Corps training experience. Though the reasons for wanting to participate in the program varied widely, what was important was that many applicants had little connection with the mountaineers. Indeed, concepts of missionary charity and a sense of noblesse oblige began to emerge within the Appalachian Volunteer organization.
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Their place of origin and attitudes concerning the mountaineers notwithstanding, the participants in the Spring Break Project were but a small part of the outside world that descended on eastern Kentucky. By the summer of 1965, the Appalachian Volunteers had VISTA volunteers in fifteen schools in twelve counties, and, with the Summer 1965 Project, they brought in nearly 150 additional volunteers. According to the AVs, the VISTA volunteers had the responsibility to make sure that efforts—particularly school renovation and curriculum enrichment—continued in those places where Volunteers had already started the work.
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Accompanying the Volunteers that summer were “VISTA associates,” the product of an interesting combination of the Volunteer and the VISTA programs. Rather than spending a year on assignment like regular VISTA volunteers, the associates signed on for an eight-week tour of duty over the summers. Of the 150 volunteers for the Summer 1965 Project, half were out-of-state VISTA associates from thirty different states. These volunteers worked for eight weeks in forty-three eastern Kentucky communities. Despite their widely dispersed geographic origins and the fact that, technically, they were Volunteers, VISTA volunteers and VISTA associates should
be considered as part of the AVs. While some VISTA volunteers worked in eastern Kentucky in other capacities, those who came to the mountains under the AV banner operated, Loyal Jones declared, “under the direction of the Council” and worked “solely on the Appalachian Volunteers Project.” In this way, the Council truly considered VISTA volunteers to be AVs. In fact, the two programs—VISTA and the Appalachian Volunteers—were so closely linked that the Volunteers distributed VISTA applications and told those interested in the Southern mountains to specify that they “want placement with the AVs and AV training” on their VISTA application. The AV staff member Tom Rhodenbaugh told one VISTA associate: “You will be, as far as we are concerned, an Appalachian Volunteer.” Equally important was the attitude of the VISTA volunteers themselves. One AV-VISTA, as they frequently labeled themselves, described himself and his fellow VISTA volunteers as “full time A.V.'s.” This individual was not unique. A careful reading of the AV correspondence reveals that those who wrote to AV headquarters, either during their tenure in the mountains or after, constantly referred to themselves as Appalachian Volunteers or “AV-VISTAs,” as opposed to just VISTA volunteers, and the
Appalachian Volunteer
label always came first.
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