Reformers to Radicals (3 page)

Using labels such as
contemporary ancestors
and
a strange land and peculiar people
, reformers, from William Goodell Frost, the president of Berea College at the turn into the twentieth century, to the settlement schools' teachers, described a “culture of poverty” that existed in the mountains.
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By perpetuating outmoded customs, values, and traditions, this culture explained the impoverishment of the rural mountaineer. Because at the dawn of the twentieth century the people of the mountains still lived in log cabins, spoke the language of Chaucer, dressed in “sorry clothing,” and exhibited an “awkward demeanor,” as Frost wrote in 1899, Appalachia became not just a land of primitive people but a place “in” but not “of” America, especially when viewed in light of the achievements of the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth. Briefly, Appalachia's “otherness” equaled poverty. According to this explanation, mountaineer lifestyles more closely resembled those of generations past, typified as they were by sparsely settled communities, subsistence farming, a Calvinistic sense of fatalism, and, most important, a value system that was incongruent with modern, urban standards. In response, proponents of the modern model advocated
a system of education, economic stimulation, and a cultural reorientation that would align the region and its people with the rest of America. Underlying this argument was the unquestioned assumption that the values and lifestyles of the dominant culture were inherently superior to those of the mountaineer. Naturally, to those who visited the region and reported what they found, this impoverished, “other” area cried out for aid. Reformers of many types—settlement school teachers, benevolent organizations, and churches—then entered the mountains with the hope of uplifting the impoverished mountaineers out of their deplorable conditions. Thus began the first efforts to reconstruct the Southern mountains. Though rooted in the progressive movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this model resonated through the later reform efforts of the New Deal and the Great Society. Jack Weller's
Yesterday's People
—perhaps the best example of this model—actually served as a training manual for those reformers, including the Appalachian Volunteers, who entered Appalachia during the first few years of the War on Poverty.
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Interestingly, a contemporary of Weller's, the Whitesburg, Kentucky, lawyer Harry Caudill, highlighted how industrialists monopolized coal and timber, exploited the labor force, and turned local politics in their favor. The result, Caudill declared, was a “depressed area.” Though he recognized the arbitrary destructiveness of extractive industries such as coal and timber, Caudill saw Appalachia in the 1960s as a region inhabited by people with a culture as depressed as the economy. It was this interpretation—one that was nearly a century old—that dominated the earliest of the antipoverty efforts of the Appalachian Volunteers. Ultimately, however, Caudill's interpretation, coupled with the experiences of the Volunteers, precipitated different interpretations that, by the 1980s, included modernization theory, labor issues, and sociology.
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Scholars, including John Gaventa, Ron Eller, David Corbin, and John Hevener, have identified the virtual dictatorial control of the coal industry, not the region's culture, as the cause of poverty. Asking (in
Power and Powerlessness
) the fundamental question of why people stoically accepted the power of the coal industry in the region, Gaventa makes the argument—reminiscent of John Steinbeck's depiction in
The Grapes of Wrath
(1939) of the eviction of farmers from their homes during the Great Depression—that the nature of power and its physical location outside the
region prevented local people from ever confronting the source of poverty in the coalfields.

Using modernization as his theoretical model in
Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers
, Eller argued that the process of industrialization, coupled with factors including absentee ownership, resulted in the destruction of traditional Appalachian economic structures, the depletion of the region's resources, and the impoverishment of the rural population. More than just wages and working conditions, Eller states, the “elimination of mine guards, overpricing at the company store, assembly and visitation restrictions, and other issues of civil liberties were almost always major areas of concern” to mountaineers.
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Specifically focusing on the repressive policies of the coal industry, Corbin's
Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields
and Hevener's
Which Side Are You On?
convincingly document the arbitrary power of the coal operators. According to Hevener and Corbin, labor troubles in the coal-fields in the first half of the twentieth century resulted from the nearly complete subservience of the miner in a quasi-feudal society, dominated by coal operators and their local allies. The union struggles in the mountain coal industry were, Hevener contends, “both an attempt to remedy unsatisfactory working conditions and a miners' revolt against the Harlan mine owners' arbitrary economic, political, and social power.”
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Within the past decade, historians have recognized that simply blaming outside corporate interests for Appalachian poverty ignores the role of residents of the region. What role, if any, scholars began to ask, did Appalachians themselves play in the industrial development of the region. Building, in her
Feud
, on Eller's work, which recognized that “insiders” such as John C. C. Mayo contributed to industrial domination, Altina Waller reinterprets the conflict between these two infamous families. While outside corporate interests played a major role in both the causes and longevity of the feud, Waller argues that the Hatfields and McCoys themselves were torn between traditional local economic relationships and participation in a broader national market economy. Waller's contribution charted a new course in Appalachian studies. Historians began to reexamine the paths that coal operators traveled to ensure their domination of the labor force.

Crandall Shifflett answers Gaventa's query by illustrating, in
Coal Towns
, how mountain residents sought the “stable ideal,” which included
mobility and fecundity rather than stasis. Owing to declining fortunes on the family farm prior to the coming of industry, mountaineers accepted and adapted to the coal industry in the hope of perpetuating preindustrial cultural patterns. “In other words,” according to Shifflett, “mountain culture has not caused mobility, but cultural ideals have given context and shape to the movement.” This did not mean, however, that coal operators faced a passive, reticent labor force. On the contrary, operators, through what Shifflet labels “contentment sociology,” provided company town residents with health care, amusements, and schools with the goal “that a satisfied laboring population would be stable and productive” and should, moreover, “[prevent] unions and lockouts.”
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As illuminating as these more recent accounts are, they too often see easy dichotomies: they pit modernizers against traditionalists or coal operators against an uncertain, volatile workforce. While their general interpretations are accurate, they minimize the diversity of experience in the region. Included in this group is David Whisnant. Published in 1980, Whisnant's
Modernizing the Mountaineer
places the Appalachian Volunteers first in a conservative “Appalachia as culture of poverty” camp, after which they travel to a much more “radical activist” camp. In reality, as the trajectory of the Appalachian Volunteers illustrated, the organization was much more complex. Further, the Volunteers themselves underwent a number of transformations. In their initial phase, the AVs were exactly that: volunteers from Appalachia. By 1965, however, the Volunteers had entered a second phase; while they were still volunteers, they increasingly hailed from outside Appalachia. In their third phase, when the organization focused on issue organizing (Whisnant's “radical” phase), the AVs were, for the most part, neither Appalachian nor volunteers, most being paid “fieldmen” from outside the region. Eventually, in their final phase, as the War on Poverty ground to a halt at the start of the 1970s, they found themselves Appalachians again, if still not volunteers. Instead, the organization employed the services of local people to carry on the organizing agenda.
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As the Appalachian Volunteers story shows, the history of the Southern mountains is more than a struggle between the haves and the have-nots. On the contrary, the War on Poverty in Appalachia illuminates the multiplicity of problems that the various poverty warriors faced no matter where they operated. Though the exploitation of the region by both native and outside
industrialists was at the root of many problems, others were the result of the clash of values and cultures. More than just a conflict between different socioeconomic classes within the area, what emerged as the reform effort progressed was a clash between Appalachians and non-Appalachians. In short, the War on Poverty magnified the social, political, economic, and cultural problems precipitated by the collision of class, culture, urban and rural values, and corporate domination—and not just in Appalachia, but nationwide.

Because the Community Action Program—the centerpiece of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, by means of which Johnson launched the War on Poverty—required the input of virtually every segment of society, this multiplicity of problems led to a plethora of proposed solutions that would result in a confused concept of “community development.” Given that, at the start, the poverty warriors viewed their target communities as characterized by both economic and cultural impoverishment and considered the two states to be equivalently evil, they conceptualized development in these terms. Other participants, however, including public and private interests as well as the poor themselves, had their own sets of values, harboring their own versions of what
community development
meant and how to achieve it. As a result, communities, and those who sought to help them, experienced extreme difficulty defining the term and forging solutions that addressed the problems they encountered. As the War on Poverty progressed, battles arose more over whose definitions and solutions would prevail than over poverty itself. Unfortunately, for those who lost these struggles, the results were devastating.
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This concern with how different individuals or groups understood the designs and functions of the War on Poverty sheds light on the philosophical underpinning of the reform effort and on the history of American liberal reform movements generally. As Alice O'Connor argues in
Poverty Knowledge
, the history of American reform, especially since the advent of “professional social researchers” in the early twentieth century, has focused on the
poor
, not on
poverty
. As a result, she claims, reformers tried to change the impoverished rather than those factors, including racial inequities and gender biases, that placed people in a disadvantaged position in the first place. Focused in this manner, “poverty knowledge has been perhaps most effective as a form of cultural affirmation: a powerful reassurance that poverty
occurs outside or in spite of core American values and practices.” Though her primary concern is poverty within a decaying urban core, in her discussion of poverty research in the 1960s, “when this theme became virtually institutionalized,” O'Connor echoed the attitude held by most poverty planners and warriors
throughout the twentieth century
—and especially those in Appalachia. “Poverty,” she concluded, “to use the terminology of the day, occurs in some ‘other' separate America; as an aberration, an exception, a ‘paradox' of plenty rather than as an integral or necessary condition of the affluent society.” From the Progressive era through the 1960s, American reformers entered battle armed with the unquestioning belief that they, not the targets of their efforts, held the proper attitudes concerning social, economic, and political structures. What held the poor back was not the prevailing political economy but an inability to accept and embrace those proper attitudes.
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O'Connor's evaluation of the Office of Economic Opportunity's performance in America's urban sectors reveals that the same range of problems and proposed solutions existed there as in rural America. To policy makers at the national level, antipoverty measures involved integrating the poor, whether blacks in urban slums or mountaineers in rural Appalachia, into U.S. society. To their counterparts at the local level, they involved overhauling the existing service delivery systems. To the poor, however—whether living in Syracuse, New York, or Pike County, Kentucky—they involved greater personal autonomy. It was this desire on the part of the poor to exert their own agenda that caused the worst of the conflicts for which the Great Society is, unfortunately, known.

As the battle for control of the reform agenda became increasingly heated, one of the contending groups came into its own. As recent scholarship on the civil rights movement demonstrates, that group that John Dittmer calls “local people” was instrumental in the struggle for racial equality. While not overlooking the contributions of such individuals as Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy to the movement, Dittmer argues that it was the efforts of the many unnamed, unsung local people who made the difference. Without the willingness of these local people to persevere in the face of violent repression—much of which was in reaction to the speeches King made and the demonstrations he led—the movement, Dittmer believes, never would have succeeded. Dittmer's analysis, moreover, questions
the identity of the movement's leaders. It reverses the relationship between those traditionally seen as leaders and the rank and file activists and places the latter in the forefront of social change.
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