Reformers to Radicals (38 page)

Following Governor Smith's lead, Governor Nunn rejected the application because it did not “clearly spell out the AVs' objectives,” and the board and staff members were not listed. The Appalachian Volunteers filed an amended application in early March. Before the application ever reached his desk, however, Nunn informed the state OEO office that he would not approve the second AV grant proposal. Because of this, the Kentucky OEO office never sent the AV application to him. As a result, the money set aside by the OEO to cover the grant never reached the Appalachian Volunteers. By June 1969, the Volunteers' executive director, David Walls, announced that, while the Volunteers would help with travel funds and act as a liaison with the various foundations from which they hoped to gain financial support, individual volunteers would need to raise the funds for their own specific projects themselves. Walls also informed the Volunteer staff that he had earmarked most of the remaining funds for administrative overhead until the antipoverty organization closed its books in the Prestonsburg office.
⁶⁵

With their backs against the wall and money due to run out by October 1, 1970, the Appalachian Volunteers played their last card. Claiming that the failure to send the second AV grant application to the governor and the denial of “reasonable notice and opportunity to be heard on the refusal to refund” violated the Economic Opportunity Act, they sued the OEO for funding early in January 1970. This action did little to help the Volunteers, and Walls himself resigned from the organization in May. The Appalachian Volunteers did not outlast the summer of 1970.
⁶⁶

Ironically, as the Appalachian Volunteers, Inc., withered away, many former staff members found their way back to the Council of the Southern Mountains. In a second irony, the Council, which was now a coalition of various “Commissions” such as the Community Action Commission and the Black Appalachian Commission, had reverted back to the loose, voluntary organizational structure that had characterized it in the 1910s and
1920s. This transformation was the result of the Council's 1969 annual conference, held at Fontana Dam Village, North Carolina. About a thousand people from all over the United States attended, and many of the issues that had caused havoc within the ranks of the Volunteers came to the fore. After the Council—in part under the influence of those returning AVs, but also as a result of what seemed to be a more politically motivated local populace—passed a resolution that allowed everyone attending, whether they were paid Council members or not, to vote, “conference participants established new commissions on Black Appalachians, Poor People's Self-Help, Aging, and Natural Resources.” The newly expanded membership also passed several resolutions of a highly political nature, including calls for a guaranteed annual income and the immediate withdrawal of American troops from Southeast Asia. Even the leadership of the CSM had changed. By the summer of 1970, David Walls, the former AV director, had become a commanding presence within the Council of the Southern Mountains.
⁶⁷

At the next annual conference in 1970, held at Lake Junaluska, North Carolina, the CSM further felt the influence of this activism. Indicative of the prevailing attitude at the Junaluska conference was a resolution made by the Youth Commission stating that the “defined operational goal of the Council of the Southern Mountains should be the democratic public control of Appalachia's natural resources, basic energy development and transportation, emphasizing decentralization, democratic community and workers' control.” As some members of the Board of Directors embraced this statement and others emphasized “the need for social change” and “social action,” Loyal Jones, who had replaced Ayer as the executive director of the more moderate Council in late 1966, resigned on June 1, 1970. He was not the only member to leave as a result of what some referred to as the “socialistic, if not . . . communist stand” taken by the CSM.
⁶⁸

Although the Council expressed regret over Jones's resignation, it continued to move toward a more radical stance. “New blood,” the
Berea College Pinnacle
announced in May 1970, “is beginning to flow in the veins of social revolution in Appalachia.” There were hopes, the article continued, that this new “era” would be the “most . . . radical in the Council's history.” This loosely organized coalition of diverse interests actually accomplished much without the money and support it had under Ayer and Jones. Operating
out of Clintwood, Virginia, the CSM found, however, that its highly politicized agenda severely restricted its base of support, and it never enjoyed the status it had had in the 1960s. Finally, in 1989, after working for change in the Appalachian South for seventy-six years, the Council of the Southern Mountains officially disbanded.
⁶⁹

 

In truth, controversy—from the grassroots level of mountain communities to the remote marble canyons of a giant federal bureaucracy—has been as much a hallmark of the AV's as the programs the organization says it conducts in the Appalachian mountains.

—Richard Boyd, “Appy Volunteers
Are Accustomed to Controversy”

This attempt to integrate the Appalachian South into urban, mainstream America, in many ways an “unfinished revolution,” as Eric Foner described the situation in the South after 1877, was decidedly problematic. Nevertheless, this episode in Appalachian history provides insights into the nature of liberal reform, of change, of change agents, and of those in the coal-fields who opposed them during the 1960s. These lessons would also apply to the struggles that characterized the War on Poverty in other regions of the United States. Ever since Appalachia's first attempted “reconstruction,” which came at the hands of the local color writers, the settlement school workers, and the Northern industrial conquest of the region in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, government agencies, local elites, and outside interest groups have dominated “legitimate” change in Appalachia—that is, change interpreted as beneficial. From settlement school teachers to antipoverty warriors, those who came to “save” the mountaineers viewed their subjects as quaint, yet helpless and ignorant at best, and violent and resistant to improvement at worst. Rooted in the perceptions of rural mountaineers held by most Americans, the ideas and conceptions that reformers brought with them to their job betrayed the fact that these outsiders in Appalachia saw the Appalachians themselves as outsiders. While most histories, either popular or scholarly, of the region portray the mountaineers as the ones to perpetuate the insider/outsider dichotomy, a closer look reveals that, in many cases, including the War on Poverty, it was the activists who saw the mountaineers as outsiders because they did not represent
what the outside world considered normative. Reporting in the
New York Times
on the Harlan County mine war of the early 1930s, for example, Malcolm Ross perpetuated that disparaging image when he noted that Appalachians were inherently unfit for industrial work: “The coal diggers of the Appalachian mine fields are mountaineers by birth and miners by accident. . . . Whether they escape into the scrubby back district or whether they remain miners, the mountain character of this unadapted people is the most important thing about them. It will not do well to catalogue them as ‘mine labor.'” “The mountaineer-miner is a salty individual,” he continued, “prejudiced, ignorant, and usually owning a personal charm matched only by his irresponsibility.”
¹

About thirty years later, the operative assumptions of the Council of the Southern Mountains (CSM) and the Appalachian Volunteers (AVs), especially during their first few years, professed a cultural explanation of the mountaineers' inadequacies that essentially mirrored Ross's. While the educational enhancement programs certainly held some benefit for mountain children, those efforts, and the generalizations the Volunteers made about rural Appalachians, especially in the training sessions held in Berea, revealed the AVs' preconceived ideas about mountaineers and the sources and causes of poverty. First, the reformers' generalizations about mountain schools and teachers transcended physical conditions and implied that virtually all rural mountaineers, adults as well as children, were insufficiently educated, unimaginative, unable to express themselves, and socially inadequate. The solution to these problems, the Council leadership and a significant number of volunteers believed, was an AV curriculum enhancement and school repair project that would bring the region to, and entice these seemingly deprived children to enter, the Volunteers' world. This perspective prevented the Volunteers themselves from delving beyond surface appearances or discovering their own class biases. In fact, this perspective precluded any sort of class or economic analysis. While they did understand that there was a connection between education and poverty, the Volunteers failed, at least through early 1966, to look beyond their own cultural limitations and consider why the education system was inadequate to the needs of the poor. They did not consider what purpose the mountain education system did serve or what type of education rural mountaineers, in fact, did have. The Council and the Volunteers accepted
the prevailing liberal notion of education (which still exists today) as the key to vanquishing want and blamed the victims for their own condition. The mountaineers were poor because they had no education, and, if they failed to get an education, it was their own fault that they remained poor. Questions concerning the economic or political environment do not enter into this simplified analysis, which confirmed the initial position taken by these latter-day mountain reformers. Because it focused on the poor rather than on poverty, this point of view revealed more about the reformers and their vision of the United States than it did about those whom modern society had left behind, and, until they unearthed deeper causes of poverty, renovation and enrichment efforts monopolized the Volunteers' activity in Kentucky's eastern coalfields.
²

The federal government's War on Poverty merely perpetuated this misconception. As the centerpiece of the Economic Opportunity Act, the community action programs (CAPs), at least two-thirds of the boards of which were populated by representatives of public and private local interests, guided as they were by the vague notion of the “maximum feasible participation of the poor,” guaranteed yet another top-down reform effort in the coalfields. By mandating the participation of local private and public concerns, both dominated by the coal industry in Appalachian Kentucky, the federal government ensured that local CAP boards would at least uphold, if not resolidify, the status quo. In short, the federal program's approach to ending poverty played into the hands of those who controlled eastern Kentucky's natural and political resources and, in essence, asked the poor to participate in their own exploitation.
³

By May 1966, however, the AVs did find a new explanation—colonialism—for the dire conditions that they witnessed in the Southern mountains. This new interpretation demanded new tactics, and, for the Appalachian Volunteers, the solution was open confrontation with the colonizers and their local allies. In essence, the AVs finally realized that rooting the region's problems in a simple construction such as
education
did not take into consideration the social, political, and economic context in which that education took place. Many volunteers, moreover, began to question the validity of American democracy in the region and, instead of working within existing political structures, decided to step outside the established system and engage it in battle. Of course, on one level this called for the
creation of new institutions—and new hierarchies—to administer those battles.

As the Volunteers prepared for their confrontation with the powers of the coalfields, they unfortunately retained the paternalistic notions that had driven them since their organization's inception more than two years earlier. After May 1966, rather than exhibiting themselves as models of “proper living,” the AVs became–especially in the case of the Vietnam War—“Appalachian spokesmen” for the poor. Impoverished mountaineers, they believed, needed Volunteer assistance if they were to succeed in the war against colonial oppression. The AV “recruiter” and participant Harold Kwalwasser wrote from Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, warning about those poor with whom the AVs worked who aspired to attain “middle class” status in American society. In reference to one mountaineer in particular Kwalwasser noted:

Carl and the other really bright people we have working
for us
and hope to have working with us are upwardly mobile socially. They have good heads on their shoulders and they know it. Moreover, as they move into positions of trust and status, their feelings are confirmed. That means to them that they are on their way up, toward the middle class and
the ideal way of American life
, Obviously it is a great thing and one of their most longed for goals is to be middle class Americans. They therefore want to act like middle class Americans and will internalize all the values of the middle class. And not only will they internalize them, but they will hold on to them with greater strength than a normal middle class person because it is important that they act middle class-like since their economic position does not totally justify their claim to belonging. In other words in so far as the middle class is identified with laissez faire economic doctrine then these people, like Carl, will come to believe in it. That means that things like welfare . . . are viewed with distaste.

According to Kwalwasser, this new “Appalachian attitude” had dire implications for the Volunteers should these middle-class aspirants “ever accede to power in the hills.” “They obviously need government help,” Kwalwasser
contended, “and I hope they know it.” Unfortunately, he warned, this middle-class attitude would force them to reject the help they so desperately need: “And if you disagree about calling [the rejection of aid] all the cause of middle classism, then call it mountain independence and you get the same answer.”
⁴
Thus, even as the Volunteers rejected a cultural explanation of mountain poverty, notions of superiority remained within the organization.