Uneven Ground (16 page)

Concern about different strategies for development, however, was far from the minds of those who gathered in the Rose Garden on March 9 to witness the signing of the ARDA. For some in attendance—like John Whisman, Bert Combs, Harry Boswell, and Millard Tawes—the event was the culmination of five years of political negotiations at the state and federal levels. Conceived in the hopes and frustrations of a few Appalachian leaders, the idea for a regional commission was nurtured by intellectuals, planners, and state officials as a way to encourage cooperation and planning in a region long typified by government neglect and aimless growth. Others at the event were impressed by the unique ARC partnership, and they saw the commission as a prototype for a nationwide policy of strategic regional development, one that might link the greater resources of state and federal governments to the self-defined needs of local communities. Everyone hoped that the ARDA marked the dawn of a new era of national commitment to the problems of rural communities and distressed people.

As he signed the Appalachian bill, President Johnson observed that the objectives of the act were important, but its origins were equally significant. “Originated by the Governors of the Appalachian states, formed in close cooperation with the Federal Executive, approved and enacted by the Congress of all the people, this,” he observed, “is the
truest example of creative federalism in our times.” Pointing to the low per capita incomes, high poverty rates, low education levels, and heavy dependence on public assistance that plagued many Appalachian communities, the president acknowledged the challenges facing the new commission. “The bill that I will now sign will work no miracles overnight. Whether it works at all depends not upon the Federal Government alone, but the states and local governments as well.” Of all the legislative measures that he had received from Congress since becoming president, he concluded, “this measure today may well outlive others in its lasting contribution to the well being of our nation.”
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Passing the ARDA and the EOA marked a watershed for Appalachia and set the stage for government-sponsored intervention in the mountains for decades to come. Both initiatives were part of Johnson's blueprint for a Great Society that would extend the benefits of modern life to all Americans. As such, they mirrored the best intentions of a generation confident of its accomplishments and ready to apply scientific knowledge to the problems of the disadvantaged. “In your time,” Johnson told the graduates of the University of Michigan in May 1964, “we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society . . . a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.”
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A month earlier, the president had assured the people of Appalachia that the Great Society would not only bring jobs and higher incomes but the promise of dignity and opportunity as well.
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Conceived of idealism and compromise, the War on Poverty and the ARC were a mixture of popular ideas wrapped in the vagaries of the national politics and intellectual trends of their day. Both combined moral concern for the poor, practical expediency, and political self-interest to create a venue for change. Always a complex individual, Johnson himself reflected the multiple personalities that shaped the antipoverty agenda. The president clearly believed that he could use the power of his office to improve the lives of marginalized Americans. He was moved by the poverty he witnessed in Appalachia, but he also recognized the political value of hope and government largesse in an election year. Both of his “poverty trips” during the spring of 1964,
undertaken to gather support for the EOA, were carefully orchestrated to maximize political benefits and to reassure local Democrats that fighting poverty would be good for them and for the economy.
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Johnson was an ardent New Dealer, and his faith in the ability of economic growth to reduce the levels of poverty was matched only by his confidence in the capacity of government to produce growth. For postwar liberals there was nothing fundamentally wrong with the political and economic system that new roads, schools, and other public infrastructure could not correct.

Appalachia provided the ideal proving ground for this vision. Having played an important role in the rediscovery of poverty in America during the early 1960s, the region became the symbol of America's crusade to eliminate poverty after 1964. It was Homer Bigart's exposé of the plight of eastern Kentucky coal miners that moved John Kennedy to instruct his staff to prepare specific antipoverty legislation, and it was to central Appalachia that Lyndon Johnson came to dramatize that initiative. Certainly the roots of the War on Poverty were intertwined with the civil rights movement, urban decay, presidential politics, and the rising influence of social scientists in government, but Appalachia, with its contradictory images of American otherness, was at the center of that campaign. When asked whether the War on Poverty was designed specifically to help urban blacks, Adam Yarmolinsky, a key advisor to Kennedy and Johnson, commented that administration planners in 1963 paid less attention to the problems of the ghettoes than to Appalachia. “Color it Appalachian,” he concluded, “if you are going to color it anything at all.”
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As the antipoverty programs unfolded, moreover, Appalachia increasingly became the yardstick against which to measure government success in the War on Poverty. Not only was Appalachia on the front lines for the EOA, but it was also the only American region to receive a special program for infrastructure development. Consequently, media coverage of the region intensified between 1965 and 1968 as national correspondents flocked to the mountains to describe the battlefield and follow the poverty warriors up the hollows and into the fray. Broadcast journalists joined their print counterparts in utilizing Appalachia as a regular setting for commentary about the other America. Some decried the inadequate incomes of the region and criticized
the new programs for not providing sufficient jobs. Others disparaged the government efforts for not attacking the “culture of mountain poverty.”
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Almost all saw the region as a burden on an otherwise progressive nation.

Such accounts transposed Appalachia into a marketable media commodity and helped to establish a pattern of critical but superficial commentary that would sustain the image of Appalachia as a problem area for years to come. Even after the War on Poverty collapsed in 1972, periodic investigations of conditions in the mountains continued as standard fare for television, newspaper, and magazine editors. The ARC survived, but it became the subject of regular criticism as a symbol of political boondoggling and the government's failure to drive poverty from its door.

The intellectual and political currents that came together in the EOA and the ARC helped to focus national attention on Appalachia, but media sketches and government programs rarely addressed many of the underlying problems of the region. Bothered by the idea of poverty in an affluent society and confident that planning and economic growth could overcome the lack of material goods and transform a backward culture, correspondents and policy makers seldom questioned the equity of politics and economic relationships within the region. Poverty in Appalachia, they believed, was simply out of step with the rest of America and could be conquered by government investments in public infrastructure to open up markets and by the extension of opportunities for the poor to join the cultural mainstream.

It is difficult to separate the War on Poverty from the effusive confidence that permeated American society in the 1960s. Faith in the ability of economic expansion to produce abundance and a more equitable, just society seemed inherently logical. For a generation that had overcome the Depression, conquered fascism, and harnessed unprecedented technology, the future was brimming with opportunity. Lyndon Johnson hoped to tap this energy for change to extend the promise of American abundance to everyone, even those marginalized by race and class in urban ghettoes and by the accident of birth in rural places like Appalachia. Although much of Johnson's Great Society legislation was aimed at the educated middle class, with initiatives such as National Public Radio, endowments for the arts and humanities, land conservation, automobile safety, highway beautification, consumer protection, federal aid for education, and Medicare, it was the effort to eradicate poverty that reflected the era's highest goals and deepest failures.

Among the academics and policy makers who designed both the War on Poverty and the ARC, confidence in the ability of American society to build a more perfect world was deeply rooted in experience and faith. The triumph of wartime mobilization, the successful postwar reconstruction of Europe and Japan, and, above all, the unparalleled expansion of prosperity at home had convinced a generation of intellectuals that the American dream was not only possible but perhaps now widely attainable. The mass poverty of the Great Depression had been replaced by mass accumulation; Americans, in the words of postwar historian David Potter, had become a “people of plenty.”
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In the internationally competitive environment of the cold war, the nation's
steady growth in personal income and consumption appeared to confirm the popular consensus that American capitalism had found the path to abundance.

Within this ideology of certainty, there was no place for poverty and little excuse for economic failure. Prosperity, it was widely believed, was now the promise, if not the norm, for the majority of Americans. Among a growing cadre of intellectuals, scarcity became an anomaly, a “paradox” of the marginalized few. The minority poor were a separate group from most Americans, a “self-contained, culturally deprived social group.” Depressed areas of the country were now “poverty pockets” that rising affluence had left behind.
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This “other America” lacked access to the opportunities (education, jobs, etc.) that had allowed the rest of the nation to prosper. Isolated in ghettoes and rural enclaves, poor people lacked the skills and motivation necessary to get ahead in modern society. Increasingly, poverty was viewed as a deviant condition, the result of the deficits of poor people and poor places themselves, rather than as the product of inequities fostered by society or economic modernization. That millions of unskilled workers had been displaced by the same mechanization that produced the affordable goods of the consumer age was seen not as a structural flaw in the market economy but as an unfortunate by-product of progress and growth.

Even the most liberal economists of the 1960s viewed poverty as a deviation from the norm, something that would eventually be eliminated by continuous growth. Most leading economists by the late 1950s had accepted the Keynesian model of government-induced growth. National wealth, the argument went, was like a rising tide that lifted all boats. Indeed, John Kenneth Galbraith's popular critique of American opulence,
The Affluent Society
, acknowledged that expanding private wealth in the 1950s had failed to end poverty, but the Harvard economist was more concerned with the problems that the pursuit of growth had generated in the public sector, including inflation, pollution, deteriorating highways, and inner-city decay, than with inequality within the system itself. Government investment in the public sector, he reasoned, would not only get the nation moving again but eventually eliminate poverty as a “residual” problem. Galbraith and other growth theory economists carried their ideas into the Kennedy
White House, where these ideas came to dominate the president's Council of Economic Advisors. Concerned that lingering poverty and unemployment were signs of a stagnating market, they believed that stimulating the economy rather than attacking poverty was the administration's number one problem.

It would fall to a new generation of social scientists to raise concern for economic inequality to the level of a national movement. Influenced by the same political, economic, and cultural changes that shaped postwar economic theory, social scientists in the two decades after World War II also came to view poverty as an anomaly, but rather than linking this abnormality to flaws in the American system, they found the roots of poverty in the culture and social psychology of the poor themselves. This new “poverty knowledge” was an outgrowth of the reorganization and expansion of the social sciences in the 1940s, especially the emergence of applied behavioral science theories that placed greater emphasis on individual performance and on the application of scientific knowledge to a wide range of human social problems. Postwar behavioral scientists professed to provide insights into human motivation that offered all-too-easy solutions for enlightened policy makers concerned with developing the “human capital” necessary for modern economic growth.
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The behavioral sciences not only supplied a politically acceptable explanation for the “paradox” of poverty—the poor themselves were to blame—they also offered strategies for altering this destructive behavior without resorting to redistribution of wealth or to significant structural reform.

In the minds of cold war–era social scientists, moreover, the presence of poverty in the middle of affluent America was more than just a temporary consequence of economic stagnation. Persistent poverty challenged the optimistic assumptions that underlay the affluent society—the premise that the American path to affluence would eventually produce a unified, classless, and rich society. As Michael Harrington pointed out, the poor constituted a “separate culture, another nation, with its own way of life.” With the poor unable to participate in the consumer society, their numbers were not diminishing as the economists had implied. “They are a different kind of people,” he wrote. “They think and feel differently; they look upon a different America than the middle class looks upon.”
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For activist intellectuals such as
Harrington, the presence of the other America was an embarrassment and a threat to the larger society itself. Bringing these forgotten Americans into the mainstream, they argued, was the preeminent challenge facing their generation, and this, they admonished, would require a broad-based government initiative to redeem the poor.