Reformers to Radicals (36 page)

Mulloy, however, refused to resign. Then, on December 2, 1967, because his “declared position on the draft and the Vietnam War and the likelihood of it being identified as a stand of the AV program . . . [had] render[ed] him ineffective to work with the people of the Appalachian mountains,”
the Kentucky AV staff fired him by a vote of 20–19. According to David Whisnant, the vote to fire Mulloy took place “amid charges of procedural irregularities” and “rumors” that local interns and some members of the AV staff would lose their jobs if they supported Mulloy (since the organization would lose its funding) and that Ogle had “set up [the vote] to back [his] pre-formed decision.” In addition, Whisnant described the AV executive office as using “home style Appalachian politics.” Ogle and Walls defended the AV staff action by asserting that the local people involved in the AV program had the right to choose the issues for which they would fight and that, although Mulloy had made a courageous moral stand, he had no right to force others to embrace his position. While Ogle referred to Mulloy's decision as a “rather selfish stand” that jeopardized those “infrequent instances in which we have been moderately successful” in organizing local people, Walls defended his position, declaring: “The local people, the ones on the battle line, decided the fate of the organization and themselves, rather than having the outsiders impose their decisions on the people of the mountains in the traditional pattern.”
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The decision split the Appalachian Volunteers. A significant number of those who voted against the firing resigned and accused the organization of “doing the politically expedient thing rather than facing a problem frankly and honestly.” Just as important, the volunteer Michael Clark argued, “firing Joe will not stop people from associating him with the AVs. He is and will remain an AV in the minds of most people and no purge or inquisition will change that fact.” Clark called on the Volunteers to support Mulloy because the draft notice was a direct response to the failure of the sedition case to rid eastern Kentucky of the Volunteers. The fieldman Steve Daugherty referred to Mulloy's firing as “a gutless, unprincipled decision made on the basis of expediency rather than justice.” The AV organization, he claimed, was “shot through with hypocrisy”: “It is an organization which self-righteously advocates the promotion of civil liberties in Eastern Kentucky and yet smothers and destroys unpopular opinions by members of its own staff.” Daugherty charged: “The administrative staff had already made the decision and was merely seeking rubber stamp approval.” In his letter of resignation, Tom Bethell claimed that the decision to terminate Mulloy as an Appalachian Volunteer showed “how miserably the Appalachian Volunteers organization fails to practice what it so insistently preaches”: “We
talk endlessly about educating people to make their own decisions about the issues that affect their lives. We do not stipulate that their decisions be popular or noncontroversial. To deny to a staff member the same thing that we ask him to teach is to make the entire Appalachian Volunteer's program meaningless—a sorry testimonial to hypocrisy.”
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Many Appalachian Volunteers supported Mulloy in his stance against the Vietnam War and believed that the organization as a whole should have adopted his particular position. Fourteen members of the Volunteer staff then working in West Virginia who did not attend the meeting at which Ogle fired Mulloy petitioned the AV administrative staff to reinstate Mulloy and threatened to sever their ties with the AVs and form their own independent version of the organization. A common theme running through all the opposition to the firing concerned the need of the Volunteers to be a “moral force” in the Kentucky mountains. Those who resigned maintained that these issues should be discussed with eastern Kentuckians as a whole and that the Volunteers were responsible for making mountaineers aware of the adverse impact on them of the war. “There may come a day,” Tom Bethell predicted, “when local people alone can govern Appalachia, or, before that, correct its endless ills. But that day isn't here yet.”
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Interestingly, these statements came
after
Walls had informed the Volunteers of how the people at Poor Bottom and Marrowbone Creek felt about Mulloy's decision. Edith Easterling herself, the most active and outspoken Appalachian Volunteer supporter in Pike County, answered most of the charges leveled by those who resigned. “Are we the A.V. thinking of ourselves or are we thinking of the community and people we are working with?” she asked. “As [for] myself, I feel like Joe has helped me a lot and as myself I am for Joe but I am not thinking of myself, I am thinking and speaking for the community people. I have talked to lots of people and they don't believe in the war but they think if you are called you should go.” Moreover, she claimed: “The people need the help that we get from the A.V.s and we could not work in Pike County if Joe stayed on here.”
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Easterling went on to detail what she thought the consequences would be if Mulloy attempted to continue working in the area: “I feel it would all go down if Joe stays. The day that the news came out about Joe not going into the army in Pike County, the Marrowbone Folk School in which Joe has helped get started had what looked like a shot put through the front
window. I don't want to spend my time trying to defend myself or the A.V., I want to work with the people. . . .
I noticed that the ones that wanted Joe to stay on was not local people
,” For an organization that professed to respect the wishes of the people, the Volunteers had been placed on shaky ground by those of its employees who chose to support Mulloy on the draft issue. This desire of some to “make Vietnam an issue” in eastern Kentucky flew in the face of what, as Easterling explained, many mountaineers believed about patriotism and duty. Even more significant, it exposed the attitudes of many staff members toward the people they professed to serve.
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The Appalachian Volunteers faced yet another challenge when, on March 27, 1968, the Pike County grand jury got its wish for a replacement of the state's sedition law. Three months after the controversy over the draft, Concurrent Resolution HR 84 passed the Kentucky General Assembly, and, with the support of Louie Nunn, the Republican governor, it established KUAC. Set up ostensibly to combat the “grave public dangers from enemies both within and without [the state's] boundaries” who operated “under the color of protection afforded by the Bill of Rights,” KUAC filled the void left by the ruling on Kentucky's sedition law. Section 1 of the resolution echoed the state's former sedition statutes: “Said committee shall study, investigate, and analyze all facts relating directly or indirectly to the subject expressed in the recitals of this resolution; to the activities of groups and organizations which have as their objectives or as part of their objectives the overthrow of the Commonwealth of Kentucky.” Though the state first used this piece of legislation to quell civil rights demonstrations in Louisville, Pike County officials believed that the Appalachian Volunteers unquestionably fit the description of an “enemy.”
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At the request of unspecified residents (the AVs believed it was Tom Ratliff, the sedition law prosecutor), KUAC announced that it would hold hearings in Pikeville in October 1968. According to the transcript of those hearings, some county residents accused the AVs of attempting to undermine a proposed public utility, the Marrowbone Creek Water District, because they argued that the tap-on fee was too expensive for the poor.
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In their efforts to secure cheaper water rates for the Marrowbone Creek residents, the Volunteers again engaged in behavior considered dangerous to the public good.

Though KUAC “invited” the Volunteers to appear, David Walls, who
became acting director following Ogle's resignation in September 1968, declined to make an appearance. Walls believed that the dispute over the tap-on fee should be “a matter for a Public Utilities Commission hearing, not a legislative investigation.” He continued: “We think nothing is more Un-American than labeling your opposition Communist in order to deny them the Constitutional rights of freedom of speech, freedom of association and assembly, as well as the right to petition government for redress of grievances.” No matter how accurately Walls portrayed this violation of civil liberties, he unwittingly played into the hands of his adversaries. The legislature had, after all, directed KUAC to weed out those individuals “hiding” behind the Bill of Rights. The Appalachian Volunteers fell into a trap that dated at least to the McCarthy era—they were guilty by denial.
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Despite AV protests labeling the effort a “red-baiting, witch hunting campaign,” the committee forged ahead with the scheduled hearings. Though KUAC asserted that it held “no preconceived views on the facts in Appalachia at the time” and that the members simply wanted to look into “certain problems in the Appalachian region of the state,” it spent much time scrutinizing Volunteer activities.
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KUAC discussed the water district controversy and also reexamined the sedition trial of the previous year. Throughout the investigation, KUAC accused the Volunteers of such relatively minor offenses as “aggravat[ing] political situations” and “caus[ing] a great deal of conflict, a great deal of confusion,” as well as leveling more serious charges, such as striving “to gain power and . . . control their government.” A committee witness insisted that an AV employee informed him that the AVs had Communists in the “Congress and Senate” and “would overthrow the government anyway in the next three years; that we would all be communist anyhow.”
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Others testified that the AVs sought the redistribution of wealth: “They believe that money ought to be taken from the rich and given to the poor.” Further, the nation's money supply would be undermined. One witness testified that “[an AV] said they was going to get rid of the money,” that “if they establish new money, everybody would be equal.” When rehashing the sedition arrests and the confiscation of material from the McSurely residence, the KUAC investigators asked witnesses such questions as, “Are you aware of the fact that in the material there was a plan to overtake the mountains in Kentucky?” and, “Did they make any statements to you as to how they were
going to overthrow the government?” Responding to this line of questioning, one witness affirmed: “There were just grounds for the action by the law enforcement officers of Pike County and . . . efforts [were] being made to subvert our government.”
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During the course of the hearing, KUAC portrayed the AVs as manipulating the poor, threatening the real interests of the mountaineers, and conspiring against the government.
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Perhaps the most damaging characteristic attributed to the Appalachian Volunteers by KUAC and its carefully chosen witnesses, however, was that they were outsiders espousing a foreign ideology. One witness who claimed to have happened to walk in on an AV meeting at the Marrowbone Folk School described the situation in these terms: “Well, I got up there, there were cars . . . from different states . . . one from Virginia and one from North Carolina and one from Washington . . . and . . . over there is a car from California and one from Chicago.” After she entered the building, she heard one man state: “Now this is what you comrades have to teach your children and you are asked to start teaching your children at the age of two.” At this point, the witness claimed, the group leader noticed a stranger in the room, and he stopped speaking while other AVs removed her from the meeting.
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Testimony of this sort helped KUAC exploit the AVs' ties to that “Communist training school,” the Highlander Folk School, where the Volunteers had held a number of meetings and retreats. Founded in 1932 as a training center for social activists, and located in Blount County, Tennessee, Highlander had had, virtually since its conception, to defend itself against charges of communism. Because the most recent attacks occurred between 1965 and 1968, Highlander experienced essentially the same problems that the AVs did and at essentially the same time. Though the school was geographically distant from the AVs, it was, for those mobilized against the mountain activists, ideologically much too close. With a long history of supposed Communist tendencies, Highlander, where “they . . . teach you to try to get people to understand [a different] way,” was also far from “patriotic” America. This association between the two organizations provided KUAC with additional “evidence” that, like Highlander, the AVs were Communist subversives.
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Additional witnesses supported the contention that the poverty workers were little more than troublesome outsiders. Regarding the people he
saw coming and going from the former McSurely residence in Pike County, the home's owner testified that the newcomers “explained to us that they were from different states. They [were] from Oregon . . . Florida, California, Maine.” Further, he attested: “They didn't clean up as we did, they didn't shave, they needed haircuts.” Most important, when he visited, the house was full of literature “on the Communist line”—“lots of books on Russia and some on China, . . . a picture of Khrushchev”—and pictures of “a white woman and colored children.” One witness even criticized the FBI for not running a security check on the people involved in the poverty programs. Accepting as fact that the AVs were positively seditious, he opined: “Such people as that working in these type programs is a liability to our nation . . . county and . . . state.” A third expressed his concern that the reformers' cause “was in sympathy with the communist way of life.” According to those activists with whom he had spoken, “They were going to educate the people and teach them to take . . . their part in politics and political life, [they] wanted them to stand up for their rights.” If the poverty programs were to work, he surmised, “they should work in cooperation with the Judge of the county and the officials.”
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