Uneven Ground (18 page)

Boone shared the belief that people were poor because they lacked political power, and he insisted that the CAAs of the War on Poverty include the “maximum feasible participation of residents of the areas and members of the groups served” to assure grassroots control. Other poverty ideologues in the Justice Department shared Boone's fear of “establishment” control of CAAs, especially in the segregationist South, and they were encouraged when Shriver appointed Jack Conway, a former Chicago labor organizer, as director of the Community Action division of the OEO. Conway had served as administrative assistant to United Auto Workers president Walter Reuther and shared Boone's commitment to organizing for political action. Boone subsequently became director of policy and programming in the new Community Action division.

Although empowering the poor became the mantra for a few key administrators within the OEO, most of the thinkers and planners who launched the War on Poverty initially saw community action as an organizational mechanism to improve service delivery and rehabilitate the poor into mainstream culture. Most liberal reformers of the period assumed that the poor lacked only the skills and behaviors necessary to succeed in modern society. What the disadvantaged needed to lift themselves out of poverty, they believed, were education and opportunity,
not political confrontation. The deficiencies of the poor could be addressed through behavior modification and job training programs rather than by the redistribution of wealth or political restructuring.

The assumption that poverty resulted from natural circumstances or the lack of personal motivation was deeply rooted in the American myth, but in the years following World War II, new behavioral science research added the proposition that poverty might be the product of certain cultural factors as well. Scholars had long recognized the cultural differences between “traditional” and “modern” societies and, in the early years of the century, had begun to document the folkways of American regions and minority groups. After the war some anthropologists developed the idea that certain group folkways, out of place in modern society, could also produce a “culture of poverty,” passed from one generation to another, that kept entire populations of people in cycles of despair. For a postwar generation of intellectuals confident in the primacy of middle-class values and in the benefits of modernization, the culture of poverty theory offered a convenient explanation for government to act as an agent of acculturation.

Emerging from the work of anthropologist Oscar Lewis, the culture of poverty model became a widely accepted explanation in the 1960s for the “underdevelopment” of certain “third world” societies and, by extension, of impoverished populations within the United States. In two best-selling books,
The Children of Sanchez
(1961) and
La Vida
(1966), Lewis argued that people from “primitive” cultures were not inferior to modern people; they just lacked the skills, habits, and attitudes necessary to achieve success in the modern world. Their traditional cultures perpetuated apathy, divisiveness, and resignation and reproduced underdevelopment rather than integration into the modern, market economy. Lewis identified a long list of deviant psychological traits that were perpetuated by the family within these cultures and prevented children from breaking out of poverty. In addition to jobs and job training, he suggested, programs of cultural intervention were required if the children of poor families were to take full advantage of changing conditions and opportunities in their lifetimes.
¹²

Although Lewis's research was based on fieldwork with families in Mexico and Puerto Rico, other scholars applied the culture of poverty
theory universally to the poor, including to southern blacks who had migrated to northern ghettoes and pockets of hillbilly poverty in Appalachia and the Ozarks. In 1962 North Carolina sociologist Rupert Vance wrote that the physical isolation that had created a distinct culture in Appalachia now was in danger of producing “a permanent culture of poverty” in the mountains unless the government intervened to raise the “goals and aspirations of the people.”
¹³
That same year Michael Harrington utilized the model in
The Other America
to suggest that the poor were like an “underdeveloped nation” within the United States.
¹⁴
This tendency to think about the poor as part of the third world not only allowed policy makers to see poverty as a universal condition that could be overcome by American-style “development” but also displaced responsibility for poverty onto the culture of the poor themselves. Later generations of scholars would reject the culture of poverty model as blaming the victim, but the theory played a powerful role in shaping many of the antipoverty programs of the late twentieth century.

Lewis, Harrington, and other leading advocates of the culture of poverty participated in the Shriver planning meetings to design the War on Poverty, and almost every program administered by the OEO reflected the theory. The Job Corps, for example, although it was one of the administration's few concessions to calls for a massive job training program, was essentially an education program whose primary goal was to teach young people how to apply for jobs. Senior Johnson administration officials referred to OEO employment programs like the Job Corps and state-sponsored efforts like Kentucky's “Happy Pappy” program for unemployed fathers as “our charm school” because they were based on assumptions “that people who didn't fit the established culture didn't get jobs.”
¹⁵
Educational programs such as Head Start, after-school enrichment, VISTA, and homemaker skills training were designed to change the behavior of families, raise the expectations of youth, and prepare adults for jobs in the new economy. Even the participation of the poor in CAAs was deemed by many OEO administrators as just another tool to acculturate the poor into the value system and behaviors of the middle class, since most CAAs, they assumed, would be operated under the aegis of the local government.
¹⁶

The culture of poverty model fit the popular idea of Appalachia
flawlessly. Not only was mountain culture considered to be a remnant of the American past, but now the region's socioeconomic problems also could be attributed to that backward culture. After all, according to popular myth, the region was inhabited by old-stock Americans who, in the words of British historian Arnold Toynbee, had simply “acquired civilization and then lost it.”
¹⁷
For many intellectuals and poverty warriors of the 1960s, Appalachia needed only to be redeemed from government neglect and geographic isolation. Once the mountaineers were returned to the cultural mainstream, the problem of poverty in the region would be alleviated without any significant restructuring of the political and economic system.

Indeed, one popular monograph distributed to poverty workers throughout Appalachia during the War on Poverty labeled Appalachians as “yesterday's people” and contrasted their anachronistic folk culture with that of modern, middle-class Americans. Written by Jack Weller, a New York–born Presbyterian minister who borrowed heavily from Oscar Lewis's ideas, the book found mountain people to be fatalistic, person oriented, present minded, and individualistic in a world given to reason, accumulation, community organizations, and faith in the future. The “personality” and “general tendencies of behavior in the mountaineer,” Weller suggested, had ill prepared the mountain people for life in the modern world. “The greatest challenge of Appalachia, and the most difficult,” he claimed, “is its people.”
¹⁸

Bolstered by an introduction from sociologist Rupert Vance and a foreword by Appalachian advocate Harry Caudill, the volume implied that “to change the mountains is to change the mountain personality,” as Vance put it.
¹⁹
Weller himself did not consider the traditional mountain subculture to be wrong, only different, but it was an easy step for readers to conclude that cultural difference was the cause of mountain poverty. Endorsed, moreover, by the CSM and published by the University of Kentucky Press, the monograph linked the academic ideas of the culture of poverty with popular images of Appalachian otherness to provide an intellectual framework for regional uplift programs. Weller's book became a working manual for hundreds of antipoverty warriors and one of the most popular volumes on Appalachia in the 1960s.

As the OEO prepared to launch its assault on poverty in the mountains, it therefore did so from a position narrowed by politics, conflicting
strategies, and misguided assumptions. Pressured by political expediency, antipoverty planners turned to untested theories and experimental urban programs to design a universal and practical strategy for change. Denied the option of direct income transfers of wealth to the poor, they relied on the latest academic theories of human capital development to provide a bridge for the assimilation of the poor into the cultural mainstream. Divided over the meanings of community action and local control, they initiated a process for change that pitted disparate forces and incompatible ideas against each other in a volatile environment and in unpredictable times. Initially an important symbol of the paradox of poverty in America, Appalachia became a critical testing ground for academic theories and popular ideas about government intervention on behalf of the poor. Already rent by decades of exploitation, corruption, and greed, the region also became a battleground for the political struggles and the alternative social visions that divided the Great Society itself.

The Eighty-eighth Congress passed the EOA on August 7, 1964, just three months before the presidential election. Staff of the new OEA scrambled to set up programs and channel funds into communities as quickly as possible to maximize the political benefits of the new program before the fall elections, but launching the War on Poverty proved to be a challenge. Early designers of the antipoverty program had proposed to fund a limited number of startup projects and to provide for a lengthier planning and evaluation period, but politics and the massive scale of the billion-dollar national effort demanded swift results. President Johnson had raised awareness of the initiative during his poverty trips the previous April, but planners at the OEO found that organizing the poor to design and submit applications for federal assistance was slow. The agency distributed hundreds of brochures describing the new federal programs and urging local officials to establish CAAs and submit proposals to Washington. When applications dribbled in slowly, the staff turned to conventional organizations and institutions to launch demonstration projects as models for local action.

In Appalachia there was no shortage of service organizations, government planning agencies, and educational institutions eager to take up Washington's challenge on behalf of the poor. For decades the region
had drawn the attention of well-meaning missionaries, academics, social workers, philanthropists, and college students intent on understanding and/or resolving the otherness of the mountains. Many of these reformers were connected with each other through the CSM and other organizations that had been calling for government intervention in the region. Now, with the promise of federal funding, this network of people provided a ready vehicle for launching antipoverty initiatives in communities and institutions throughout the mountains. Although some programs of “national emphasis” filtered down from Washington and a few experimental, grassroots projects eventually bubbled up from the bottom, local and state governments, colleges and universities, and other institutions within Appalachia provided the organizational and communication structures for early poverty proposals.

Out of these institutions poured a generation with pent-up energy and idealism that transformed a medley of federal programs into a progressive, moral crusade. Interest in improving Appalachian life had grown among southern educators, church officials, planners, and social service providers since the early 1950s. Convinced of their ability to organize communities, overcome challenges, and uplift people, an army of social change agents swept up the hollows and coves after the passage of the EOA, bringing a flurry of public and private programs designed to address a host of community needs. Within a year, hundreds of CAAs, Head Start programs, job training centers, and other projects had been launched, serving almost every county of the region. Early projects established rural community centers, set up adult education programs, sponsored free health screenings, provided housing rehabilitation, and conducted summer reading programs in rural schools. Since most Appalachian counties qualified for 100 percent federal funding, initial grants were often utilized to hire professional staff whose job it was to manage the local, nonprofit CAA, organize constituencies, and develop new initiatives.

State and local governments across the region were eager to tap into the new source of federal dollars. Some states, like West Virginia, organized CAAs in almost every county to coordinate the delivery of expanded welfare services. Others converted existing economic development councils into nonprofit CAAs or created new, multicounty
agencies to develop programs for large rural areas. OEO grants went to local school boards, state councils of churches, and colleges and universities, and the CSM received several grants for region-wide initiatives, including one of the first national demonstration grants for a student voluntary service program, the Appalachian Volunteers. One of the first CAAs funded in North Carolina was WAMY, a four-county antipoverty program in the Blue Ridge created earlier by the North Carolina Fund, an original partner in the Ford Foundation's Gray Areas Program.

Despite having a common source of funding and shared program guidelines from the OEO, this plethora of local programs and structures did not represent any regionally or nationally coordinated strategy to fight poverty in Appalachia. Sargent Shriver's report to the president outlining the War on Poverty had recognized that poverty in Harlan County, Kentucky, was not the same as poverty in Harlem, New York, but “the program's design did nothing to address Appalachian problems as different from those of Harlem.”
²⁰
Resembling more a conflagration of scattered assaults and experimental incursions than a well-orchestrated battle, the war to end poverty in the mountains was waged on multiple levels, utilizing different tactics in each community, and it produced a wide range of responses from indigenous people. What gave the campaign a collective momentum and unity of spirit was the moral sense of outrage, hope, and mission that the legislation itself unleashed. For Appalachia, the War on Poverty was as much an attitude, a moral crusade, as a set of programs. Eventually, among a core group of young poverty warriors, this commitment to social justice and reform would evolve into a regional social movement that reached far beyond the work of the OEO.