Uneven Ground (15 page)

Included among the PARC proposals were recommendations for a major Appalachian development highway system, regional airports, flood control and sewage management facilities, programs for pasture improvement and cooperative timber marketing, recreational tourism development, research into coal utilization and power production, and funds for vocational schools, health centers, and housing. The report
looked to pending antipoverty legislation to expand programs in job training, secondary education, adult literacy, medical care, nutrition, and other human services, but it requested additional funding for these special programs in Appalachia. To coordinate these efforts, PARC called for the creation of a new independent agency, the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC), which would organize state, federal, and private efforts to develop the region, encourage multistate collaboration, and foster local community development and planning.

Experience had shown, the report concluded, that “the unique tangle of problems in Appalachia call for a uniquely tailored program and that neither the States alone nor the Federal Government alone are adequate to this challenge which involves them both so closely.” Rather than recommending a single plan for Appalachia, therefore, the commission proposed immediate actions to “attack the central strands of the regional knot” and a mechanism for suggesting new actions and developing new programs in the future. “In the years ahead,” the report observed, “the Appalachian program will be many programs, unified only by their singleness of focus: the introduction of Appalachia and its people into fully active membership in the American society.”
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To assure continuity of effort between the submission of the report by PARC and congressional action to establish the new commission, PARC recommended that the organization of state and federal agency representatives created to draft the report itself continue. Prior to the establishment of a new unit, the PARC staff would sustain cooperation, further inventory the region's resources, and prepare detailed plans for the new development highway system, new water projects, training programs, and other public facilities. Consequently, Sweeney, Whisman, Harry Boswell of Maryland, Paul Crabtree of West Virginia, and other core staff continued to refine the program even while the proposed legislation was being debated on Capitol Hill.

Shortly after the release of the PARC report, President Johnson fulfilled President Kennedy's promise to visit Appalachia and to meet again with the Appalachian governors. On the afternoon of April 24, 1964, the president flew to Huntington, West Virginia, and greeted a delegation that included Governors Breathitt and Barron, Senators Jennings Randolph and Robert Byrd of West Virginia, Senator John
Sherman Cooper of Kentucky, U.S. Representative Carl Perkins of Kentucky, and U.S. Representative Ken Hechler of West Virginia. The trip was hastily arranged after Johnson suddenly decided to rally support for his War on Poverty by making two “poverty trips” to publicize the need for pending legislation. The first trip included stops in the Midwest, Pittsburgh, and central Appalachia and provided an opportunity to meet with the Appalachian governors who had been pressing him to follow up on the PARC report. Undertaken as a strategy to gain political ground for his own antipoverty program and to fulfill a promise by his predecessor, the trip to Appalachia changed Johnson's perspective on the region and energized his own commitment to passing an Appalachian bill.

From the Huntington airport, the First Family's entourage traveled by helicopter to eastern Kentucky, where the president and Mrs. Johnson saw mountain poverty firsthand. Near Inez, in Martin County, they sat on the porch of an unemployed sawmill worker with eight children who survived on an income of four hundred dollars a year. In Paintsville they toured a job training facility for unemployed miners. Along the highway they greeted hundreds of schoolchildren, many in neat but well-worn clothes. The sights of poverty—barren and stripped hillsides, dilapidated housing, and poor roads—moved the president, and he promised to help the people of the mountains to become part of the Great Society. “We are not going to be satisfied,” he told a crowd on the courthouse steps in Paintsville, “until we have driven poverty underground, until we have found jobs for our people. We are not going to be satisfied until our people have decent housing, until our aged folks have medical care, until our people have equal rights.”
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The next day Johnson concluded his visit by meeting with the Council of Appalachian Governors in Huntington. Governors Tawes of Maryland, Sanders of Georgia, Sanford of North Carolina, Clement of Tennessee, and Harrison of Virginia joined Governors Breathitt and Barron in pressing the president for the Appalachian program. Only Governors George Wallace of Alabama and William Scranton of Pennsylvania were absent, and Governor Scranton had privately spoken to Johnson in favor of the bill at a Washington function a few days before. The president had come to Huntington to gather the governors' support for his antipoverty legislation, but, according to John Sweeney,
his attempts to talk about the War on Poverty were repeatedly shunted aside by the “unequivocal chirping” of the governors for the Appalachian program.
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Finally, the president declared his support for the Appalachian bill, but he wanted to delay any formal announcement until after the House Education and Labor Committee reported favorably on the Economic Opportunity Act (EOA), the antipoverty legislation. “No one expects,” Johnson told reporters as he left for Washington, “that this curse of centuries [poverty] can be wiped out in a few days or a few weeks or a few years. . . . But we intend to set the people of this region out on a bright highway of hope. . . . I hope to send a message to Congress in a few days to implement this program.”
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The administration delivered the Appalachian Regional Development Act (ARDA) to the Hill three days later, on April 28, 1964, but in the ensuing months, the act continued to flounder in the shadows of the War on Poverty and election-year politics. Sweeney and the PARC staff began to prepare draft legislation soon after the release of the PARC report. On the plane back to Washington after his meeting with the Appalachian governors, Johnson instructed Sweeney to work with Charles Schultze from the Bureau of the Budget to prepare an acceptable bill. Schultze had been part of Walter Heller's original poverty discussion group and was concerned about both the scale and structure of the regional program. Sweeney assured the president that any legislation for Appalachia would concentrate, for the most part, on highways and infrastructure and would not interfere with any part of the poverty program currently before Congress.
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To avoid confusion with the EOA, the ARDA was submitted to the Senate and House public works committees rather than to the education and labor committees then considering the antipoverty legislation. The House began hearings on the bill in early May and the Senate in mid-June, but by July progress toward a vote had stalled. Both the House and the Senate were preoccupied in June and July with debates on the EOA and the Civil Rights Act and later with the political conventions and campaigns of the 1964 election. As the summer dragged on, supporters of the ARDA grew nervous that further delay would weaken the bill by opening the door to attacks from special interests.

The ARDA of 1964 contained most of the recommendations of the PARC report, and opponents of the bill quickly focused on familiar
criticisms: the structure of the new commission gave the federal government too much power in state affairs; the commission duplicated other federal programs and competed with private interests; there was no provision for generating public power for regional development; the program discriminated against other regions with conditions similar to those of Appalachia; and it would benefit more prosperous urban areas of the mountains as well as impoverished rural populations. Sweeney and other administration spokespersons were able to counter most of the criticisms by pointing to the uniqueness of the Appalachian problem, the need for region-wide planning, and the collaborative-federalist nature of the new commission, but one challenge proved more difficult.

The PARC report had recommended the creation of a federally chartered, mixed-ownership corporation to provide access to private money for local development projects. Although the Johnson administration supported the recommendation, many in Congress opposed it because it would have created a semi-independent agency outside normal legislative review. Many Republicans, moreover, objected to this proposed Appalachian development fund on the grounds that it unconstitutionally required government to become a stockholder in a private corporation. Indeed, Governor Scranton of Pennsylvania, a Republican, while strongly supporting the other recommendations of the PARC report, refused to sign the letter of transmittal by the Council of Appalachian Governors at the beginning of the report and instead submitted his own letter of endorsement, opposing the mixed-ownership corporation.
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Many in Congress also opposed this concept on the ground that “funds should be provided through legislative appropriation channels subject to congressional oversight” rather than through a permanent, independent corporation.
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Eventually, the administration dropped the development corporation idea, leaving the subsequent agency perpetually dependent on congressional reauthorization for funding.

To boost congressional support for the bill, the Johnson administration expanded the region to be served by the ARDA, adding Ohio and South Carolina to the original nine states covered by the PARC report. Ohio governor James Rhodes originally opposed his state's participation in the program, preferring a heavy investment of state
funds for highways and other improvements in the Ohio Appalachian counties to federal intervention. Encouraged to reconsider by fellow Republican Scranton and by growing pressure from Ohio's congressional delegation and from local officials in southeast Ohio, Rhodes acquiesced. South Carolina under Governor Ernest Hollings also had declined to participate in the Council of Appalachian Governors, but its new governor, Donald Russell, requested that the state be added to the ARDA in June, and the president eagerly agreed.

Despite bipartisan support, however, the ARDA languished in the House because of opposition from representatives from outside Appalachia who questioned the wisdom of favoring development in one geographic region over another. Congress eventually passed the EOA on August 7, 1964, launching the War on Poverty, and on September 25 the Senate passed its version of the ARDA, but the Eighty-eighth Congress adjourned sine die on October 3, without action on the Appalachian bill in the House. The fate of the ARDA now lay in the fall elections, with the hope for a more favorable environment for regional development legislation in the House. To sustain the work of the PARC staff until the next session of Congress, President Johnson issued an executive order in late October establishing the Federal Development Planning Committee for Appalachia. Following Johnson's landslide victory in November, this committee prepared revised legislation to submit early in the new year.

On January 6, 1965, the ARDA was reintroduced in the Eighty-ninth Congress as Senate bill 3. Now a top priority for the Johnson administration, the bill emerged from the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee by the end of the month, and it passed the full Senate on February 1 with only minor amendments. Bipartisan, widespread support eased the bill through the Senate. Jennings Randolph of West Virginia, the bill's chief sponsor, chaired the committee hearings and received strong support on the floor from Republican Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania and from Robert Kennedy, the late president's brother. As a result of Pennsylvania's interest in mine reclamation, $20 million in special funding was added to the bill for the restoration of abandoned coal lands, and Senator Kennedy attached a provision allowing fourteen contiguous counties in New York to join the new commission.

In the House, the new Democratic majority acted quickly to vote the act out of committee on February 17, and, despite an attempt by opponents to recommit, the ARDA passed the House on March 3 by a vote of 257–165. To reassure House and Senate supporters still concerned about providing preferential treatment for Appalachia, the administration promised to support the creation of similar regional development programs for other areas of the country that suffered from economic distress. Proponents also argued that the bill represented “a redress of basic past shortcomings of federal spending policies in the Appalachian region” and that the special expenditures in Appalachia would benefit the entire nation, not just the participating states themselves.
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On March 9, 1965, less than a week after its passage in the House, President Johnson signed the ARDA into law.

The bill as enacted by the Eighty-ninth Congress included most of the recommendations of the PARC and was similar to the bill that had emerged from committee hearings in 1964, with a few important exceptions. Adding three states to the program resulted in the addition of five hundred miles to the local access roads program. The pasture improvement program, which had come under attack from midwestern members of Congress, was eliminated, as was the controversial Appalachian development corporation. The program for timber development was modified to limit planning and resource management services to nonprofit organizations so as not to compete with the existing timber industry. The secretary of the army was instructed to prepare a comprehensive plan for the development of water resources in the Appalachian region, and the secretary of agriculture was asked to convene an interagency federal task force for the purpose of recommending a long-range program for the reclamation and rehabilitation of strip- and surface-mined areas.

One small change was almost overlooked in the 1965 hearings, but it would have significant ramifications for the infant commission. Following the failure of the act to pass the House in October 1964, PARC director John Sweeney and Charles Schultze from the Bureau of the Budget added a sentence to the introductory paragraph of the 1965 ARDA declaring that “public investments made in the region under this Act shall be concentrated in areas where there is a significant potential for future growth, and where the expected return on public
dollars invested will be the greatest.” Federal representatives and some economists had discussed this “growth center” strategy during the initial meetings of the PARC, but state representatives and their governors who wanted greater flexibility in the distribution of development funds rejected the idea almost universally. Sweeney and Schultze, however, strongly believed that there would never be enough federal money to address the many problems of such a vast region and that political support in Congress would be stronger if resources were concentrated in less distressed areas of potential growth. An unpublished report commissioned by PARC from the Phantis Corporation also pointed to the difficulties of attracting industries to rural areas of Appalachia, which lacked basic infrastructure and human capital.
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Although it was ignored in the rush to secure enactment, this addition to the ARDA would open a recurring debate among policy makers in the early years of the ARC and would prove to be one of the more divisive issues facing the regional partnership.