Uneven Ground (22 page)

Listening to the concerns of the poor, the former Glenmary Sisters helped to organize community-based programs that provided alternatives to the institutionally based services that were often controlled by local elites. Building strong partnerships, especially among the women of these poor communities, they organized community-controlled health clinics and community centers, which in turn led to the creation of child development and tutoring programs. In east Tennessee, Marie Cirillo and others organized a coalition of local women into the Mountain Women's Exchange, which launched a craft cooperative and thrift shops and later established a satellite college program whose courses were offered by nearby colleges under a curriculum controlled by the community itself. In southwest Virginia, Anne Leibig and other former nuns helped to organize community arts programs, small business co-ops, and eventually the Appalachian Community Development Corporation, one of the first nonprofit, community-controlled economic planning and fund-raising organizations in the region.

Nor did the sisters shy away from advocacy and social action. Together
with local citizens and with the assistance of students from Vanderbilt University, former Glenmary Sisters in Tennessee helped to form Save Our Cumberland Mountains, a 1,500-member environmental group that opposed strip mining and other land degradation. When they learned that many people in their poor counties were not receiving the social services to which they were legally entitled, the women began developing legal aid clinics and training local people to serve as legal advocates for the poor. In Wise County, Virginia, they helped to establish a legal support group, Concerned Citizens for Social and Economic Justice, and, through the Wise County Welfare Rights Organization, they worked with hundreds of people to get fair treatment from the local welfare department.
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Whereas efforts like those of the CAP and the CSM sought to supplement government programs that served the poor, the former nuns and their male and female counterparts from other denominations often bypassed government agencies to establish alternative businesses, clinics, schools, and other structures controlled by poor people themselves. Although they seldom engaged in political organizing in the manner that some young activists attempted to gain control of poverty agencies, school boards, and other county offices, these religious radicals challenged the values of a society that allowed corporate exploitation of land and natural resources to leave some mountain people impoverished and without basic human services. They acted to create community-based alternatives to existing structures and to confront those institutional structures on specific issues with community-based organizations and knowledge.

Like many of their secular counterparts among the AVs and VISTA volunteers, these more radical religious workers eventually rejected cultural explanations of poverty and became increasingly critical of the economic and political system that had produced the injustices they found in their communities. Living among the poor and listening to their concerns, they were convinced that the lack of a voice in local public policy decisions and dependence on local elites for jobs and services had left the poor powerless to control their own fate. Having rejected traditional, gendered structures in the church, religious workers questioned a corporate economic system that benefited the few at the expense of the common good. They increasingly found the
problems of the mountains to lie less in the values of the people than in the actions of the corporations, institutions, and politicians that controlled the land and public resources of the region.

Nothing reflected the distance between Father Beiting's self-help approach of Christian charity and the participatory, community-based strategies of the former Glenmary Sisters quite like the publication of the pastoral letter of the Catholic Bishops of Appalachia in 1975. Written and produced by the Catholic Committee of Appalachia, a group composed of former Glenmary Sisters and other religious activists, the letter reflected the sense of unity that these Catholic workers felt with the people of their rural communities and challenged fellow Christians throughout Appalachia and the country to work for social and economic justice in the region. Poignantly titled
This Land Is Home to Me
, the report described the industrial and corporate exploitation of the mountains and condemned the culture of greed and “maximization of profit” that left the land ravaged and the people powerless and poor. A problem for all of America, Appalachia was a symbol of the failed promise of technological development and the “conspicuous consumption” that had become an idol in the larger society. With no plea for money, no images of undernourished mountain children, the bishops' statement laid the blame for poverty in the region on corporate profits, human greed, and wasteful economic development. “Powerlessness in Appalachia,” the letter professed, could be overcome only through partnership with the poor, careful use of scientific resources, and community-based planning for future growth. The struggle for social justice in the mountains, the bishops concluded, was part of a larger struggle for justice in the world, and they encouraged Catholics in the region to investigate a wide range of issues, such as strip mining, land acquisition, the exploitation of cheap labor, occupational health and safety, union reform, taxation, cooperatives, education, tourism, and civic participation.
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Coming as it did at the end of the formal War on Poverty, the bishops' pastoral letter on Appalachia echoed the concerns and challenges that had emerged within mountain communities over the previous decade, and it revealed the great divide between the self-help efforts promoted
by government and private programs and the calls for structural reform, alternative development, and social justice being made by a growing number of activists and community leaders. Proponents of this more radical perspective, however, remained in the minority during the height of the War on Poverty. Most antipoverty programs sought to extend social services to the poor and accepted the idea that if the poor could be trained to think and act like middle-class Americans, they would be successfully absorbed into the larger society.

As long as local elites believed that the goal of antipoverty programs was acculturation, they welcomed the new resources that boosted village economies and promised hope for the poor. Like other postwar Americans, the mountain middle class was confident that science, technology, and free markets would eventually bring affluence to everyone and that it was only isolation from these modernizing forces that had prevented the region from participating in the national prosperity. The new public and nongovernmental programs brought a spate of young professionals to the region—doctors, nurses, caseworkers, teachers, technicians, and administrators—and with them the demand for better housing, medical care, highways, education, and consumer goods. The promise of participation in the Great Society also raised the expectations of the poor, and therein lay the hidden danger for those who benefited from the status quo.

Despite its intellectual assumptions about poverty and about Appalachia, the War on Poverty (like the civil rights movement) revived a dialogue about basic American values that inspired poor people and their advocates to challenge existing institutions and structures. The idea of community action itself unleashed an energy that local power brokers could not control, and the partnerships among citizens, poverty warriors, educated professionals, and youth soon posed a threat to powerful economic interests inside and outside the region. As federal resources poured into the mountains and as activists increasingly confronted what they perceived as injustice, a cultural and political struggle ensued over the direction of development and the meaning of the good life.

Although state and local leaders eventually succeeded in controlling OEO funds, community organizing and grassroots resistance continued
to grow in the mountains long after the agency's demise. Launched as an effort to reduce the cultural and economic distance between Appalachia and America, the crusade against poverty ultimately fueled a renaissance of Appalachian identity. It also fed a social movement within the region that voiced mounting concern about modernity, social justice, and the goals of the Great Society itself.

Controversy surrounded the War on Poverty from the beginning. In Appalachia, as in the nation's inner cities, the crusade kindled the flames of long smoldering dissent and eventually sparked a backlash of resistance from the old power brokers. Along with the civil rights movement and later the Vietnam War, the struggle to end poverty unmasked profound social divisions in America and in Appalachia.

Early popular enthusiasm for the campaign concealed a society of disparate values and competing conceptions of the American dream. Even the scholars and bureaucrats who designed the antipoverty program disagreed over the causes of poverty and the implementation of the EOA's most important provisions. Conservative politicians, always uneasy with the expansion of federal power, persistently challenged liberal assumptions about human engineering and the ability of government to solve social problems. Middle-class whites, proud of their own success in the drive for accumulation, resented the transfer of wealth to inner-city blacks and “shiftless” rural whites. State and local officials increasingly railed against a burgeoning Washington bureaucracy that threatened to bypass traditional leadership in favor of non-elected community organizers and academics. More and more young people questioned a political and economic system that resisted change and appeared to blame the poor for their own problems. Many of these misgivings about the Great Society would eventually erupt in the national turmoil over the Vietnam War, but the campaign to end poverty revealed just how deeply Americans differed in their visions of democracy and the good life.

Not long after the passage of the EOA, critics from the left and the right were attacking the antipoverty campaign as a muddled effort full of inefficiency and waste. The liberal
New Republic
described the early administration of the OEO as “organized bedlam” and accused Sargent Shriver's leadership team of not having a strategy for conquering poverty.
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Much of the confusion in the first year centered on the control of urban CAAs, which some big-city mayors saw as patronage pipelines to grease their own political machines. Inner-city blacks, on the other hand, supported by labor organizers and civil rights activists fresh from battles with segregationists in the South, envisioned the programs as opportunities to gain independence from the white power structure, and they demanded that the OEO live up to the promises of self-help and community empowerment. Confrontations between city officials and community organizers in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Newark, Syracuse, and other cities damaged the public perception of the OEO even as the campaign against poverty was getting off the ground.

Within a year of its creation, the OEO was already an embattled organization, and even the president considered dismantling the agency and scattering its programs to other departments. Most of the criticism centered on the Community Action division. In May 1965 the National Conference of Mayors quietly pressured the White House to prevent CAAs from organizing low-income residents for political action and asked it to recognize the legal responsibilities of local officials over the programs. Charles Schultze, Johnson's budget director, agreed and wrote to the president demanding that the OEO stop encouraging the politicization of the poor.
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Inner-city riots, violence in some Job Corps camps, and poor management decisions in a few OEO-sponsored organizations fueled public suspicions that the campaign was out of control. The weight of criticism from inside and outside the government pushed the OEO to pull back from its more aggressive, experimental initiatives and to concentrate on getting CAAs operating as coordinators of services for the poor. Within the OEO, advocates of maximum feasible involvement of the poor in the development and operation of local programs became increasingly frustrated. In August, six of Shriver's top aides left the agency to work in nongovernmental organizations that sought to empower low-income
people. Among these were Richard Boone and Sanford Kravitz, who had played important roles in creating the AV.
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The OEO survived the assaults of 1965 and even emerged with a small increase in its budget, but the attacks began to take their toll. Administrative zeal for the War on Poverty waned, and the president's attention shifted to concerns about inflation and the escalation of the war in Southeast Asia. By the annual congressional budget debates of 1966, outraged Democratic mayors across the country were in open rebellion that Washington was subsidizing “wars of civic subversion” by organizing the poor against them, and Republicans were questioning the rising costs of domestic and defense expenditures.
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With almost 200,000 combat troops in Vietnam, guns and butter were simply too much, conservatives claimed, and the nation would have to put wraps on the Great Society, especially the War on Poverty. Despite Shriver's efforts to point out the successes of OEO programs, pundits on the far left also condemned the campaign as “a bag of tricks” being played on the poor. Saul Alinsky, the Chicago organizer, labeled it “a prize piece of political pornography.”
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With liberals increasingly complaining that antipoverty efforts were too feeble, and with Republicans openly determined to dismantle the agency, the OEO barely survived budget negotiations in 1966. The controversial Community Action division took the biggest cuts in funding, and the agency quietly agreed to allow urban mayors to veto program proposals in their communities. This policy was formalized in 1967 when the Green amendment, offered by U.S. Representative Edith Green of Oregon, required that all CAAs be state or local entities under the authority of elected officials. Three years after the passage of the EOA, the War on Poverty struggled for congressional support, its energy sapped by changing national priorities and fundamental disagreements over strategies and goals.