Uneven Ground (21 page)

Although university professors, college students, social activists, and middle-class professionals differed in their approaches to fighting poverty in Appalachia, they shared a collective movement culture that bound them in a common crusade. Most professed a faith in the American dream, valued the poor, appreciated participatory processes, and expected social justice. Many approached their work with a strong moral conviction to serve the disadvantaged, and more than a few were ordained clergy, lay leaders, or students from church-affiliated colleges and organizations. Indeed, the organized church had long played an important role in popularizing and addressing the human problems of the mountains, and the War on Poverty offered an opportunity for national denominations and spiritually motivated individuals to refocus their energies on the region. Not surprisingly, the response of the church to the War on Poverty was as diverse in Appalachia as was that of secular institutions, ranging from individual self-help initiatives to community development and resistance.

Southern Appalachia had been the focus of home mission work by major Christian denominations since the late nineteenth century, and national religious leaders drew on their history of launching mission churches and settlement schools in the mountains when they responded to the campaign against poverty. A gulf had existed for years between the indigenous churches of the region and mainstream denominations. Rural churches in Appalachia were small, having evolved as extensions of local communities and specific family groups, and they were typically informal and independent of national affiliations. The few mainline denominations (generally Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians) were usually clustered in the county seats, reflecting both the social aspirations of the mountain middle class and their greater ties to the national economy. Even the larger coal camp
churches, including Catholic missions, often owed their survival to the benevolence of the coal companies, and almost all avoided involvement in social conflict issues, preferring to concentrate on personal salvation rather than the social gospel.

Outside churches and nationally based religious organizations therefore took the lead in a second wave of home mission activities to the mountains after World War II. Like others before them, the latest missionaries blended the desire to provide humanitarian uplift in the form of education and health care with the hope of expanding their own denomination in the region. Denominational leaders had been active in the CSM since its founding in the 1920s, and after the war, participation in the council's spiritual life committee grew as many denominations established special managerial units to coordinate their revitalized mountain mission work. The Catholic Diocese of Covington, Kentucky, for instance, sent dozens of young priests into eastern Kentucky to establish new congregations, provide parochial education, and build rural hospitals. The Presbyterian Church (USA) created the West Virginia Mountain Project and sent seminary students to minister in poor and rural congregations during the summer. The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) launched a special “church in town and country” unit to expand human and spiritual services to communities in the Cumberland Plateau.
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Lutherans, American Baptists, Brethren, Episcopalians, Mennonites, and Quakers all organized special church divisions to coordinate charity and mission work in the mountains.

These denominational efforts provided a national network of urban congregations that supported evangelical work in the region, and under the leadership of Perley Ayer and Willis Weatherford, the CSM became the hub of efforts to expand the involvement of these congregations in mountain relief work as well. In some cases this meant raising monetary contributions for specific council projects or assisting mountain migrants in northern cities; in others it meant chaperoning suburban youngsters on weekend mission trips into mountain communities to remodel churches or restore dilapidated housing. With the rise of national concern about poverty in the 1960s, these programs established summer camps for needy children, book drives for schools and community centers, adult education and job training
programs, and, of course, emergency relief efforts to distribute truckloads of food and used clothing to help mountain families make it through the winter.

In 1963 this network of churches generated funds to rescue ten miners' hospitals that the UMWA planned to shut down in central Appalachia as a result of declining resources in the union's Health and Retirement Funds. Two years later, with the help of the National Council of Churches, eighteen denominations and religious organizations collaborated to form the Commission on Religion in Appalachia to coordinate ecumenical antipoverty programs in the region, provide continuing education for clergy, and “articulate the ethical considerations of business and industrial practices in Appalachia.”
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Church-sponsored antipoverty activities continued to reflect a wide range of philosophies and approaches, but by the end of the decade, church-supported organizers worked hand in hand with AVs, VISTA volunteers, and other poverty warriors. Some became more radicalized by their experiences and later played key roles in creating alternative, nonprofit community development corporations and in supporting citizen efforts to achieve land reform, economic justice, and environmental protection.

The broad diversity of religious responses to poverty in Appalachia was perhaps best reflected in the efforts of the Roman Catholic Church. Never a very large denomination in the mountains, the Catholic Church established a foothold in the region at the turn of the twentieth century in response to the arrival of European immigrants to the coalfields and other industrial areas. With the out-migration of many immigrant families during the Great Depression and the general abandonment of company support for churches and other coal camp institutions in the 1930s, the number of Catholics in the mountains declined until another generation of bishops undertook to grow new parishes in the region after World War II. Concentrating on small towns and county seats rather than coal camps, itinerant priests and nuns opened mission centers to serve the small Catholic population and to attract new congregants. Especially after the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s, these village parishes began to reach out to surrounding rural communities to provide social and spiritual services to the poor no matter what their religious affiliations.

This was the path, for example, followed by Father Ralph Beiting, who came to eastern Kentucky in 1950 and stayed to found one of the largest private antipoverty agencies in the country. Assigned by his bishop to establish a new parish in Madison and surrounding counties, Beiting eventually ventured deeper into the coalfields as a street preacher and witnessed firsthand the poverty that plagued the region. By the late 1950s, he began to build on his spiritual message with a growing concern for the material needs of the primarily non-Catholic population, and, from his base near Berea, the young priest became active in the burgeoning regional efforts to draw state and national attention to Appalachia's problems. In 1958 he purchased a youth camp in Garrard County and established a used clothing warehouse in Berea for the poor. During the early 1960s, Beiting's Christian Appalachian Project (CAP) developed a small farm support program and opened a Christmas wreath factory in nearby Jackson County. Father Beiting supported his initial efforts to fight poverty by raising donations and attracting volunteers through speaking engagements in Catholic schools and churches across the country.

With the outbreak of the War on Poverty in 1964, Beiting incorporated the CAP as an independent nonprofit organization and expanded its service area to include eleven counties and a wide range of self-help programs. The CAP operated teen and child development centers, GED programs, workshops for handicapped adults, home repair programs, used clothing outlets, and family abuse shelters. Hundreds of weekend and summer volunteers were recruited from urban churches to work as counselors, advisors, and instructors in CAP youth camps and outreach centers. By the mid-1980s, the CAP was the largest nonprofit organization in the region, with 285 employees and an annual operating budget of more than $14 million. The organization managed eighty programs, touching an estimated ninety thousand people per year.
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Although the CAP was officially a nondenominational Christian organization, Father Beiting continued to serve as president and chair of the CAP board. To support his rapidly growing program, Beiting increased his speaking tours and developed a massive and effective direct-mail campaign that included a free copy of his book
God Can Move Mountains
. Beiting, his staff, and volunteers generally avoided
involvement in local politics and in the issue-based organizing that the AVs came to represent, preferring to focus their energies on self-help opportunities for individuals. Few in the region or outside questioned the value of the CAP's humanitarian services, which reached thousands of the most desperately poor, but critics increasingly questioned administrative overhead expenses and challenged the ethics of Beiting's fund-raising strategies. Still, as late as 1987, more than 80 percent of the CAP's annual budget went to salaries and other administrative costs.
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Even more controversial among some poverty warriors, however, was the CAP's use of regional stereotypes in direct mail, television commercials, and other fund-raising efforts. Missionaries, educators, and writers had utilized emotional imagery and heartrending personal stories for years to dramatize the continuing need for donations to sustain their work, but Beiting's successful use of this strategy in direct-mail fund-raising produced questions about paternalism and the misrepresentation of the region within and outside the organization. Appeals for donations almost always included images of frail and destitute children and stories of personal hardship related by Father Beiting, who was often identified by the more popular “Reverend Beiting” in mass mailings. Letters and accompanying literature described the people of the mountains as descendants of “our early American pioneers” who were “some of the most creative, dynamic people ever to grace this continent” but who had fallen under the yoke of poverty and, with just a little help, could make a better life for themselves. With imagery reminiscent of early local color writers, Beiting's personal stories told of a region rent by violence, ignorance, and feuding, where outside volunteers struggled resolutely to bring help.

Perhaps the most controversial example of this appeal was the Bobbie Sue letter, which set records in the direct-mail industry for both income generated and continuous years of use.
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Picturing a young girl standing on the porch of a ramshackle cabin and carrying her infant sibling on her hip, the letter introduced its readers to Bobbie Sue from Appalachia, who “through no fault of her own” had to “go to bed hungry many nights.” Produced by a Washington DC–area fund-raising firm, the appeal reinforced universal stereotypes of Appalachian destitution while portraying the mountaineers as noble and
long suffering, in need only of individual assistance and opportunity. “Through absolutely no fault of their own,” the letter posited, “they have had to endure a fantastically high rate of unemployment, miserable living conditions, and empty promise after empty promise. Nowhere else in America will you find fewer educational opportunities, poorer housing, or less medical care covering such a large area.”
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Despite these conditions, the letter concluded, the people of Appalachia had not lost hope, in part because of the work of the CAP, whose continued success depended on donations from “concerned Americans across the country.” The letter was “printed by Appalachian craftsmen” and signed by the Reverend Ralph Beiting.

The Bobbie Sue letter (and dozens like it from other organizations) reflected the compassion and concern that motivated the War on Poverty, but it also mirrored the national misunderstanding of Appalachia's history and problems. Like the service-oriented programs of most CAAs and the educational outreach programs of colleges and universities, the CAP avoided the larger structural problems of Appalachia's politics and economy and assumed that individuals could lift themselves out of poverty if given the opportunity and resources to change their behavior. Alleviating poverty, to many religious workers as well as to those in government and education, was a matter of individual and cultural change rather than societal transformation. Drawing on received images of Appalachian isolation and degeneracy to justify its programs, the CAP reinforced the popular idea of Appalachian otherness and limited its own ability to effect sustainable change. While meeting the critical and real needs of impoverished families, self-help organizations like the CAP failed to confront the realities of injustice and economic exploitation that continued to marginalize poor people.

Of course, some church-based poverty workers followed a different path. Like their secular counterparts in the AV, a few Catholic priests and nuns, especially after Vatican II, recognized the limitations of service-oriented strategies, and in time they adopted a more aggressive approach to community problems. Less burdened with the task of church building, individuals from religious orders such as the Glenmary Sisters were more likely to become enmeshed in rural community life and to utilize the community empowerment strategies of
liberation theology that were beginning to sweep the Catholic world. Sent to the mountains in the mid-1960s to “help rural people survive and maintain rural values so they might reinvigorate the church,” many of these workers left their religious orders to become permanent residents and activist leaders in communities across the region.
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Almost fifty Glenmary Sisters departed the order in 1967 to form their own experimental community in the mountains, and dozens of others left individually after reexamining their work in light of contemporary needs and issues. Freed from the restrictive, male-dominated rules of the church, these religious women became a powerful organizing force in communities throughout rural Appalachia, helping to set up health clinics, worker-owned businesses, homeless shelters, town water systems, arts programs, and scores of other community-based projects. Taking literally the call of Vatican II to be “in the world, acting on behalf of justice,” the former Glenmary Sisters took up residences in rural communities, established friendships with neighbors, listened to concerns at community gatherings, and visited the poor. Unlike other poverty warriors, they did not bring prepackaged projects but shared their skills, ideas, energy, and networks of friends and resources. In time, they gained the confidence of the community.
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