Reformers to Radicals (7 page)

At the heart of these political problems was the way in which local school officials attempted to manipulate and control their employees. More often than not, the most qualified instructors departed the mountains, not just because of inadequate salaries, a Council newsletter claimed, but because the political machines endeavored to control their votes. Teachers will not be part of a system, the article concluded, “which demands either their votes or their jobs.” In Perry County, Kentucky, the Council member Grazia Combs reported, the “schools are staffed with untrained teachers and are kept there by the superintendents who want to perpetuate their tenure in office rather then educate the kids. Every major problem concerning education
in Eastern Kentucky can be traced to politics of the very lowest order. Superintendents do not want competent people . . . ; they want . . . ‘permit' teachers . . . who can deliver the votes of all the kinfolks on the creek in return for the ‘permit.'” Though the region badly needed qualified teachers, they would continue to be difficult to get “until we are able to do something about the type of leadership that is found in the county seats.”
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Competing with the view that identified political corruption as the source of the trouble were theories of the educational psychology of mountain children. Charles Drake, a Berea alumnus who went on to graduate school in education at Harvard University, carried a tremendous amount of influence with Perley Ayer and popularized these concepts in the CSM. While at Harvard, Drake uncovered research suggesting that mountain children experienced normal mental growth until about age six, when they entered elementary school. It was at this point, the study discovered, that their intellectual development began to slow down dramatically. Thus, the report determined, it was the school
environment
that influenced their ability to learn. If the schools were improved, Drake suggested, educational progress would result.
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Perhaps the combined influence of Drake and Cohen was enough to persuade Ayer to select the educational psychology paradigm as pinpointing the source of Appalachia's problems. More probably, it was the way in which the recommendations of these two complemented Ayer's cooperative philosophy that convinced the CSM leader to adopt this particular explanation. In any case, by accepting the reasoning of Drake and Cohen, Ayer made what was in the long term perhaps his most significant mistake. Rather than adopt a more combative or confrontational stance against the mounting evidence of malfeasance in the eastern Kentucky school systems—much of which was produced by Council members themselves, including the associate director, Jones—Ayer adhered to his conviction that all people “could be approached and touched by reason and right and that they would respond.” As a result, the Council began to move toward a position that identified Appalachian culture, and the poor educational system that it fostered, as the source of the mountaineers' impoverishment.
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Following an established pattern, Ayer was not content simply to define a problem. Action needed to follow definition, and other Council members felt the same way. In 1961, Stuart Faber, a member of the Board of Directors,
expressed his fear that the Council of the Southern Mountains was nothing more than a conference sponsor. Ayer himself, a couple of years later, admonished the Board to “get serious and dedicate yourself or quit.”
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Ayer, for his part, refused to quit. Utilizing Drake's connections in Massachusetts, the Council of the Southern Mountains embarked on a drive to make tangible improvements to the educational environment of Appalachian children. Supporting this venture were the good works of the people of Boston and Harvard University. In early 1961, shortly after President Kennedy suggested the establishment of a “Peace Corps,” an international service organization of the federal government that would send skilled, educated Americans to underdeveloped countries, Harvard students organized their own “Peace Team” for similar purposes. Drake contacted them with the hopes of persuading them to begin a book drive for central Appalachia. By providing better reading material in mountain schools, Drake believed, the educational level of the children would soon be elevated, and this would make a significant contribution to solving mountain problems. At its Board of Directors meeting that February, the CSM readily endorsed the proposed book project. According to the minutes of the meeting, the Board maintained that the book drive would improve on the “limited cultural experience” of rural Appalachian schoolchildren. In addition to the Harvard students' efforts, Boston's “Lend-a-Hand” Society also sent books to southern Appalachian schools.
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Response to the book drive in the counties in which the CSM worked was equally favorable. According to Loyal Jones, Rockcastle County, Kentucky, was an excellent starting point for the undertaking because those in charge of the schools there seemed “to have the good of their children at heart.” Further, students at Caney Creek Junior College (renamed Alice Lloyd Junior College in 1962) at Pippa Passes, Knott County, Kentucky, volunteered their time to distribute donated books. Marie Turner, the school superintendent of Breathitt County, Kentucky, willingly accepted books as well. To the east, across the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River, the Council member W. R. “Pop” Baley instituted “Operation Bookstrap” in Welch, McDowell County, West Virginia. Baley agreed with the environmental critique of mountain education outlined by Drake. He sought to have indigent mountain children improve their lives by enhancing their educational situation; the children would pull themselves up by their “bookstraps.”
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Additional Council efforts supplemented the book project. In April, for example, Dr. Louis Armstrong, the director of the Indian Springs School, Helena, Alabama, conducted a CSM-sponsored “youth workshop” at which he discussed the educational goals of the CSM. Of particular concern to Armstrong were the “great problems of bridging the gap between the group which has the knowledge, techniques, and skills and those who do not.” Second, the CSM community development specialist, Milton Ogle, in conjunction with the University of Kentucky's rural sociology program, sought to “maximize economic, social and personal development . . . [in mountain neighborhoods] through group action.” Again, the CSM stressed its partnership approach. The Council required the development specialist to cooperate with “existing organizational leadership” with the goal of “encouraging community organization for self-improvement,” which included adult education classes, public health work, and local leadership seminars.
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Keeping contact with the federal government alive, the Council of the Southern Mountains not only asked the Kennedys to deliver the first load of books for Operation Bookstrap but also, in a move that reinforced the perception of Appalachian backwardness, requested the presence of Peace Corps volunteers in the mountains. Actually, the Council hoped for the establishment of a domestic version of the organization that would operate in the southern Appalachians. At the end of 1962, the Council addressed Attorney General Robert Kennedy and his proposed National Service Corps (NSC) directly. This “was a pet project of Robert Kennedy” and exactly what the Council wanted. Kennedy envisioned the service corps to be a domestic type of Peace Corps. NSC volunteers would, after a brief training period, “work for a year in areas where human services were in critically short supply.”
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Not surprising, the Council's request received a welcome response from Richard Boone, a sociologist in the U.S. Justice Department, whose assignment was to make the NSC a reality. Boone believed that NSC projects should be “conceived by local people and leave behind men and women capable of carrying on by themselves” after the NSC had completed its mission. Recognizing how the philosophy of the Council of the Southern Mountains coincided with his, Boone wrote to Ayer, stating: “[The attorney general's office is] interested in making use of your long personal experience in addressing the needs of the Appalachian South.” Further: “We would like
to take this opportunity to begin exploration with you . . . possible roles that ‘corpsmen' might play in working with local residents in meeting immediate needs and addressing the potentials inherent to the area.”
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Unfortunately, the House of Representatives failed to pass the NSC bill. Other events, however, served to endear Ayer and the Council to the Kennedy administration. The first of these was the publication of Harry Caudill's
Night Comes to the Cumberlands
. Decrying the horrid conditions in which mountain people lived, Caudill provided the nation with what he claimed were vivid descriptions of Appalachian reality. Following shortly after Caudill's book was Homer Bigart's
New York Times
article “Kentucky Miners: A Grim Winter.” As the subtitle made clear, Bigart, like Caudill, detailed the “poverty, squalor and idleness” that “prevailed” in the region surrounding Whitesburg, Kentucky.
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“Tens of thousands of unemployed miners,” Bigart reported, “face[d] another winter of idleness and grinding poverty.” “Replaced by machines,” these former miners kept body and soul together by virtue of “government handouts,” and three generations of welfare recipients “resulted in a whipped, dispirited community.” Sounding like a CSM member himself, Bigart declared that the present system had “eroded the self-respect of the mountain people.” He even noted that strip mining had further hurt both the environment and the chances of the people for gainful employment in the region. Moreover, he printed Harry Caudill's statements before a CSM meeting, deploring the “massive doling out of federal welfare money [that had] financed and now sustains a dozen or more crafty, amoral, merciless, and highly effective political machines” that “will oppose by every available means any effort to restore the people to productivity and self reliance.” Yet he stopped short of calling for political reform in central Appalachia. Rather, he decided that “the erosion of the character of the people [was] more fearsome than the despoiling of the mountains” and that the abject poverty experienced by rural mountaineers was a “manifestation of . . . government neglect.”
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Then, echoing Cohen's speech to the Council in 1961, Bigart attacked the educational system in eastern Kentucky and the mountaineer culture. “Escape to the city is not easy,” he stated, “for the average miner has no skill for other jobs. He is deficient in education.” Bigart noted that, as we have seen, the problems with the education system could be attributed to
the enormous political power of the local school superintendents—who controlled the largest payroll in their counties. Moreover, he continued, the mountaineer's “native clannishness makes adjustment to urban life painfully difficult,” while “the low educational standards of the people are a major obstacle to the location of new industry.”
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Bigart, however, did not stop with the indictment of the miners' way of life. He also investigated the conditions of the schools and the politics behind those conditions. On Gilbert's Creek, in Leslie County, Kentucky, was a school so dilapidated that it was “unfit for cattle.” Equally disturbing was the failure of the federally sponsored school lunch program. This program, designed to provide a nourishing lunch to schoolchildren who could not afford one, had no impact in the rural schools of Leslie County, for two reasons: the county lacked the funds to collect and distribute government surplus, and few schools had the facilities (kitchens, running water, power) to prepare food properly anyway. In Letcher County, the health officer reported that he had seen children eating dirt and that 85 percent of children in the county were underweight; in Leslie County, three-fourths of the children had intestinal parasites.
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Supposedly in response to Caudill's and Bigart's work, President Kennedy, in October 1963, conceived of what he termed a “crash program” to help the residents of southern Appalachia. At last he began to make good on the promises he had made during campaign trips to West Virginia during the 1960 presidential campaign, at which time he had witnessed firsthand the hardships the residents of southern Appalachia had to face.
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When the then senator entered the West Virginia primary, he faced an enormous task. Not only did he have to diffuse the issue of his Catholicism in this Bible Belt state, but he also had to outmaneuver the well-known Democrat and liberal leader Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota. During his blitz of the Mountain State in May 1960, Kennedy found the issue that endeared him to the people of the state—the unemployment and poverty that he saw among the former Appalachian coal miners. In “a dazzling achievement that assured his nomination” at the July Democratic convention, Kennedy destroyed Humphrey in West Virginia and became the favorite in the upcoming presidential contest.
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Eastern Kentucky, not West Virginia, however, was the CSM's focus. Appalachian Kentucky was one of the poorest areas in southern Appalachia
in the early 1960s. According to the CSM's own information, one-third of the people living there were on some kind of public assistance, and 85 percent lived in substandard housing. The median education level for adults was 8.05 years of school. While 68 percent of all Kentucky children never finished high school, this figure was even higher for eastern Kentucky. The median family income was also well below the poverty line in 1963 and $3,600 below the national median level.
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Kennedy originally placed his program under the guidance of the President's Appalachian Regional Commission (PARC), established in April 1963. Headed by Secretary of Commerce Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., PARC had as its mandate to formulate a “comprehensive action program” of federal aid for regional economic development. As designed, the commission was to cooperate with state officials in the central Appalachian highlands in the development of the region's tourist potential, natural resources, water power, and human resources through industrial development. These proposals, nevertheless, did nothing to ease the urgency that motivated Bigart's article. More important, especially from the Council's perspective, PARC failed to do anything about Appalachia's problems as late as December 1963.
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