Reformers to Radicals (22 page)

Up to this point, the AVs believed that nearly every rural Appalachian welcomed them with open arms. Certainly, they maintained that this was true, despite growing evidence to the contrary of the Appalachians' actual opinions. Some AV members began to feel that the inclusion of VISTA volunteers jeopardized AV efforts. However, individual VISTA volunteers were not the problem. The problem was the inflexibility of the “administratively centered program” that sponsored them. VISTA imposed on impoverished communities, one AV wrote, a set of “predetermined ideas from D.C.” The Volunteers' efforts, by contrast, were characterized by their “understanding and feelings for the worth of every man,” while “government controlled programs view people by statistics.” Linking the AV and VISTA programs threatened that understanding. Further, few mountain residents recognized the Appalachian Volunteers as a government program. “Even though our major source of funds is OEO,” an unnamed AV concluded, “we are still separated from their failures. It would be awkward for me to work in Eastern Kentucky if people realize that I was just another government employee there to help them.” This volunteer also worried about AVs training VISTA volunteers. If there were any “failures” on the part of these federally supported volunteers, the fault, the AV reasoned, would be perceived as resting with the Appalachian Volunteers. Ultimately, the AV member felt that the Appalachian Volunteers could continue to utilize federal money and VISTA personnel only as long as the tie between the AVs and VISTA went unrecognized.
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As AVs and VISTA volunteers worked through 1965 and into 1966, more and more AVs came to feel the same way, soured, perhaps, by experiences similar to that of Bill Wells, who in the spring of 1965 reported on an Elliott County woman who cooperated with the VISTA program because she expected monetary compensation. She had worked with the Volunteers, Wells believed, in the hope of getting herself out of financial difficulty (her
own self-centered War on Poverty) and had become “dissatisfied with the community and with the Council for not showing her more material appreciation for the work she had been doing.” Such self-interest was hardly what the Appalachian Volunteers wanted motivating their acceptance by local communities.
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One observant AV member, reporting from the Leslie County community of Trace Fork, spelled out the damage inflicted on the organization by the inclusion of so many non-Appalachian Volunteers. “The very fact that a volunteer goes into a community to assist, a fact which is realized by everyone no matter how much it is avoided and played down by the [volunteer], degrades, threatens, and sometimes angers the mountain people.” The “college outsider,” the volunteer continued, “is viewed from the start as having a superior education and wider background.” In conclusion, the writer claimed, the mountaineer, “burdened by a feeling of inadequacy,” “tends to feel ill at ease, talk only when necessary—volunteering nothing—and feel disinclined to accept the outsider's suggestions or his friendship.”
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A second critic of the move toward nonnative volunteers echoed the Trace Fork reporter's remarks about the resentment felt toward outsiders and restated the connection many AV workers made between poverty and the problems in local governments. Writing from Thousandsticks, Leslie County, the volunteer Judith Allcock related how local teachers resented the work of every outsider who came to the community to improve it. In fact, the present teacher “harangued . . . the Volunteers for coming in and promising to send supplies and do things and then not come back”: “She also resented that they considered Thousandsticks poor.” In her report, Allcock related how one volunteer commented to the teacher that the children were “really culturally deprived.” This “must have confirmed [the teacher's] feeling that outsiders look down on the community.” According to Allcock, two local teachers reported that photographers came to the community with their own mules, on which they placed children for publicity pictures. Those same teachers claimed that the journalists asked one mother “to take off her kids shoes” before they took pictures and asked other people “to claim they were hungry.” These incidents, Allcock concluded, led the locals to think that all proffered aid, including AV aid, was an attempt either to exploit the mountaineers for personal gain or “
to get votes for the superintendent
.”
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Allcock's report highlights the two fundamental problems that the
Volunteers faced. First, they had to determine what role, if any, outsiders should play in the AV program. Second, they had to determine how to deal with those local officials whom they—and a significant number of local people—considered to be corrupt. The solutions to these problems—which came quickly—had long-term consequences.

Allcock provided the AVs with part of the solution. Of particular concern to most rural mountaineers, she stated, was the overtly missionary attitude held by so many who came to the region to “‘help the poor.'” The Trace Fork AV concurred. Throughout the report, she repeatedly warned against exhibiting any type of behavior that could in any way be interpreted as a demonstration of superiority. Few Volunteers heeded the warning, however—not even Allcock herself, her reports (which described “a dull routine way of life” in Thousandsticks) exuding an air of superiority and missionary purpose.
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More important, the AV organization never adequately addressed this issue, focusing instead on relations with local officials.

Augmenting this dilemma was the AVs' growing fear that their efforts addressed only the symptoms of poverty, not the root cause. Already by early 1965, this perception had gained credence. In Pike County, Kentucky, a school renovation project yielded disastrous results. According to the AV fieldman Flem Messer, not only did the local community fail to take part, but the project proved to be “a waste of materials, and more importantly a great waste of enthusiasm for . . . the Appalachian Volunteers program.” Certain unknown individuals “vandalized and [broke] the windows” in the newly refurbished building.
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Though the AVs never determined who was responsible for the vandalism, it convinced some of the activists that simply repairing schoolhouses and broadening the mountaineers' cultural horizons through curriculum enhancement did nothing to change local attitudes or empower local people to deal with their problems on their own. In addition, this event echoed a warning that Tom Gish, the editor of the
Whitesburg, KY, Mountain Eagle
, had issued to the CSM as early as July 1964. Though he contended that education was “the only way out [of poverty] for Eastern Kentucky,” Gish also claimed: “The existing political and economic power structure in the mountains [did] not really want change and will oppose any real reform. . . . Those who wish to bring about change—those who want community development—are going to have to go beyond the political and economic leadership to the people themselves, and deal directly
with them.” Following this vandalism episode, the AV organization began to seek a new direction and began to question the inclusive, nonconfrontational approach championed by the Council.
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Appalachian Volunteer problems, however, went beyond incidents of vandalism and the questions of an influential eastern Kentucky newspaper editor. As the Volunteers continued their work in the field, they again encountered recalcitrant local county officials and failed projects. One particularly problematic area was northeastern Kentucky. Carter, Elliott, Greenup, Lewis, Morgan, and Rowan counties were part of a multicounty community action program (CAP) known as the Northeast Kentucky Area Redevelopment Council, and, as early as mid-1965, when the Redevelopment Council was not yet two months old, the Appalachian Volunteers experienced difficulties with that agency's director, Lee Taylor. It appears that the AVs failed to inform Taylor of their activities and coordinate them with those of the Redevelopment Council. For example, on September 21, 1965, Taylor told his Board of Directors that two VISTA volunteers assigned to the CSM's AV program currently worked in Elliott County. He had “not been able to find out their specific duties,” but he had “learned that the community was in a turmoil because of something related to [their] presence.” In an attempt to resolve the problem, Taylor tried to get the volunteers recalled and told the CSM “that it would be wise and certainly helpful . . . if their VISTAs were withdrawn from our area.”
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Taylor's complaints did not end there. He also reported that the Redevelopment Council had four of its own VISTA volunteers placed in neighboring Lewis County but “discovered that they were not free to
perform
the tasks given them”: “Representatives of the Council of the Southern Mountains consistently countermanded the direction of . . . our director in that [county].” Taylor claimed that the Redevelopment Council VISTA volunteers confronted their CSM “tormentors” and informed them that they would follow the instructions of the Redevelopment Council, not the CSM. Later that morning, after the confrontation, “a representative of the Council of the Southern Mountains childishly stole a distributor cap” off the automobile of one of the Lewis County volunteers.
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Taylor also believed that CSM-AV training of VISTA volunteers biased them against the area councils. Along with a few fellow Redevelopment Council employees, Taylor attended an AV training session in Berea in the
hope of “getting some of these people assigned to our Area Council.” “We had the distinct impression,” he reported, “that these people [the VISTA trainees] had been trained to believe that the members of an Area Council and its staff were their worst enemies.” The CSM, moreover, “knowing that all young people do not subscribe to this philosophy,” would not allow anyone to personally interview the potential volunteers and would allow CAPs to have VISTA volunteers “only as the [CSM] assigned them.”
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Though the CSM staff member Alan Zuckerman tried to pacify Taylor, the Council of the Southern Mountains faced an uphill battle. “You should realize . . . that your organization has made a very unfavorable impression on me,” Taylor wrote Zuckerman. For any agreement to be reached, he continued, the CSM would need to understand that, though it had “certain facilities and services available,” they must be “offered to and not forced upon” other agencies if they are to be “of any value.” Additionally, Taylor noted, the CSM could expect the full cooperation of his (or any other) agency only if he was “fully informed, consulted with and ha[d] prior understanding of the program” in terms of how it would fit into the Redevelopment Council's own activities. Before he and Zuckerman could even meet, Taylor indicated, the CSM would have to remove its workers from his region “so that the turmoil and resentment [could] subside.”
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Both the letter and the spirit of Taylor's statements explicitly placed the functions of his and all other CAPs ahead of those of the Appalachian Volunteers. The Volunteers, Taylor argued, were to support and aid the CAPs, which, in his view, had the primary responsibility for solving Appalachian poverty. Equally important, his reaction to Volunteer activity confirmed Gish's warning about dealing directly with the people. Nevertheless, if the AVs bypassed or ignored the many CAP directors, school superintendents, and other local elected officials, they would violate the CSM's philosophy that all segments of eastern Kentucky's population be included in reform efforts.

Oddly enough, it was representatives of the OEO who came to observe and evaluate the Volunteer program that provided the mountain reformers with additional incentive for moving further from the CSM's traditional position of cooperation. Following his visit to eastern Kentucky, the OEO evaluation team member Frank Prial wrote: “The poverty program in Eastern Kentucky is in trouble and unless some drastic changes are made rather
rapidly, there is a good chance it may never get off the ground.” Describing the region as a place where “none of the standard rules of democracy apply,” Prial articulated the growing concerns of many of the Appalachian Volunteers. “There is a hostility to outside assistance,” he wrote to the OEO's mid-Atlantic regional director Jack Ciaccio, “unless the power structure can use it to turn a profit.” The powers that be, moreover, were “resisting strenuously the threat that the poverty program will alter the status quo in their areas.”
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Supporting the local political leaders, Prial reported, were the coal operators. In fact, he declared: “The coal operators are closely allied—often literally related to—the political powers in these counties. Together, they have no intention of permitting Federal poverty program money to upset the delicate economic balance they have maintained for many years.” After detailing the nepotism inherent to this corrupt political system, Prial hit on what he perceived as yet another key factor underpinning the widespread political corruption—the absence of an articulate opposition to the ruling oligarchy. “The absence of any middle class is one of the factors contributing to the perpetuation of poverty in Eastern Kentucky.” Doctors, lawyers, all the “better teachers,” and even the United Mine Workers have “vanished from the scene.” Only those too old, too young, or too sick to fight back, and “those who prey upon them,” Prial argued, were left in the mountains.
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As a result, according to Prial, those who administered the OEO programs, in particular the county-run CAPs, in Appalachian Kentucky “evidenced in some cases little or no sympathy for the poor.” At best, the local program directors had “not the faintest notion of what is expected of them, of the meaning of social action, or of the import and content of the Economic Opportunities Act.” Prial went so far as to include in his attack the Council of the Southern Mountains because its personnel were “overly conditioned to working through the established power structure.” The Council's executive director “would rather not jeopardize the outfit's prestige by tilting at windmills.”
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