Uneven Ground (29 page)

Inequities in the tax structure led activists from the Appalachian
Alliance and local concerned citizens to form a coalition to challenge Kentucky's tax system, including property tax rates and the distribution of severance tax revenues. In 1981 they formed the Kentucky Fair Tax Coalition (KFTC), which unsuccessfully lobbied the Kentucky legislature to raise unmined mineral taxes but eventually won a state supreme court decision that unmined minerals should be taxed no differently than other real property. The following year, the coalition became a citizen-based membership organization and changed its name to Kentuckians for the Commonwealth. In time, KFTC would become one of the largest grassroots organizations in Appalachia and would expand the fight for fair taxation to include challenges to the broad form deed, which many activists saw as the worst example of coalfield injustice. After the statewide Save Our Homeplace campaign in 1988, the citizens of Kentucky finally passed a constitutional amendment effectively limiting the power of coal companies to mine without the consent of the landowner and requiring companies to pay for damages caused by mining.
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The revolution within the CSM and the emergence of regional organizations such as the Appalachian Alliance, the Human/Economic Appalachian Development Corporation, and KFTC reflected the metamorphosis of the War on Poverty in Appalachia by the early 1970s. What had begun as a nationally initiated and locally fought campaign to bring poor people into the mainstream of modern American life had stirred a collective response in Appalachia that not only redefined regional identity but cast the social and economic troubles of the mountains in a broader context. For the remainder of the twentieth century, Appalachia would endure not only as a socioeconomic problem area—a persistent reminder of the failure of the national War on Poverty—but as a battleground for American values. Conflicts over environmental quality, welfare reform, public decision making, and economic development would continue to divide mountain communities as they did the rest of the nation, but a new regional consciousness would make those battles especially intense in the mountains and increasingly portentous for the rest of America.

Nurtured by growing networks of indigenous people, former poverty warriors, and young professionals, a new regional consciousness
emerged in the mountains that challenged prevailing assumptions about the otherness of Appalachia and about the process of development as well. The Appalachian movement, of course, reflected a mosaic of contributions and political philosophies. Even the mountain middle class, which had initially rejected the word “Appalachia” because of its connection with poverty, increasingly accepted the label as a useful marketing strategy for countercultural products and applied it to businesses, organizations, and even furniture styles. University scholars, especially in the social sciences, gained long denied recognition for their study of mountain life and culture, and academic presses vied for manuscripts on regional topics. The demand for Appalachian artists and musicians mushroomed, and regional colleges introduced courses in Appalachian studies to accompany those in African American studies, women's studies, and other innovative fields.

But the heart of the Appalachian studies movement lay in the young activists who remained in the mountains after the collapse of the antipoverty crusade and continued to fight for social justice and change. Not only did these college students and former poverty warriors discard cultural stereotypes in favor of structural explanations of mountain poverty, but many also rejected the idea of progress implicit in American models of development in the post–World War II period. Like the counterculture movement that swept the rest of the country, the new Appalachian regionalism evolved from both the cultural and the political radicalism of the Vietnam War era and reflected as much a desire to change the course of the nation as it did a determination to escape assimilation.

In many ways the burgeoning Appalachian movement was anti-modern, defending traditional lifestyles and romanticizing Appalachian culture. Some of the former poverty warriors openly abandoned the emerging consumer society and sought to return to the land on individual homesteads or communes. These “back to the landers” cherished simplicity and found meaning in the old-time ballads and handcrafts. Some formed lasting friendships with neighboring poor families who, out of economic necessity, preserved the old ways. Thousands of native Appalachians rediscovered their own heritage and gained new pride in place and family ties. In an era of rapid social change and rising ethnic consciousness, Appalachians old and new
discovered their roots and came together to defend their people from assault.

At its core, however, the regional movement represented a thoroughly modern effort to protect human rights and to spread the promises of security and freedom from want to a larger community of people. While they feared that public institutions and government were easily co-opted by private interests, mountain radicals and reformers shared a common faith in the democratic traditions of fairness, self-determination, and justice. They opposed the concentration of wealth and political power in the hands of the few and accused business leaders of putting profits before the common wealth of the community. They favored government intervention to regulate the abuses of corporations and looked to expand government services, but they also sought to preserve private property rights when family farms were threatened by corporate greed or public development. They believed that “good government” could conserve the land and sustain the people through civic engagement and community-based economic enterprise. The problem in Appalachia, they came to agree, was not poverty or strip mining or health care alone; it was a pattern of corruption that had tainted the whole system.

Many of the strongest advocates of the new regionalism were students or young intellectuals associated with colleges and universities serving Appalachia, and they were quick to link the injustices of the mountains to global struggles against racism, imperialism, and corporate capitalism. The War on Poverty always had an important academic component. The theories of human behavior and economic development that drove government programs in the region came out of institutions of higher education, as did many of the volunteers in the antipoverty crusade. Training sessions for AVs, VISTA volunteers, and other poverty workers were frequently held on university campuses, and in many mountain communities the local college provided the only public space for community forums and workshops.

The expansion of higher education in the region during the 1960s and 1970s brought growing numbers of working-class students into the classroom and provided young people with critical access to new ideas and broader social movements. Most of the mountain activists, for example, were steadfast opponents of the Vietnam War, and they
connected their fight for regional justice with larger concerns about American actions throughout the third world. “The same values and national priorities which allow this country to inflict massive destruction upon the Vietnamese,” declared one Appalachian movement publication in 1971, “are responsible for poverty, cultural imperialism, and the attacks upon the land and people of Appalachia.”
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During the 1970s several Appalachian colleges established centers for Appalachian studies and developed curricula to support growing faculty and student interest in the region. Most of these programs offered coursework in Appalachian history, literature, and culture, preferring to study the region and its problems and avoid active engagement in controversial and politically divisive issues. Activists, however, gathered around a number of institutions and used them to support regional organizing initiatives. Clusters of Appalachian advocates developed around West Virginia University, Marshall University, the University of Kentucky, the labor and civil rights school at the Highlander Research and Education Center in Tennessee, and Don West's Appalachian South Folklife Center in southern West Virginia. Near Morgantown, West Virginia, for example, activists organized the People's Appalachian Research Collective to develop an Appalachian “action-study center” at WVU and to work with researchers at the university's Institute for Policy Studies.

Several former AVs settled into graduate study at the University of Kentucky and helped to establish the Appalachian Center in 1976. Appalachian centers were also created at Berea College (where there was an active group called Students for Appalachia), Mars Hill College, Pikeville College, and Appalachian State University, and regional studies programs were launched at Ohio University, Emory and Henry College, Lees College, Union College, Alice Lloyd College, and other institutions. Marshall University activists created the Appalachian Movement Press to promote the development of regional consciousness and, for a time, ran a cooperative labor school with Antioch College. In 1971 almost a dozen colleges and federal agencies in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia organized the Appalachian Consortium to encourage a better understanding of the region's history and culture.

Faculty on a number of campuses had begun teaching courses on
Appalachia in the 1960s, and following an initial Appalachian studies conference at Virginia's Clinch Valley College in 1970, research and teaching on Appalachia expanded on college campuses throughout the mountains. Academic interest culminated in a major gathering of regional advocates at the Cratis Williams Symposium at Appalachian State University in 1976, which led to the creation of the annual Appalachian Studies Conference in 1978. Relationships between institutionally based scholars and more radical community activists were cordial but tense from the first of these meetings. Reflecting their basic distrust of institutions and cultural (rather than political) definitions of the region, activists at the Clinch Valley College conference shouted to the more conservative academic participants, “You are the enemy.” Some radical intellectuals later warned unsuccessfully against the creation of an institutionalized Appalachian studies association.
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For Appalachian movement activists, the emergence of a regional studies industry threatened to use Appalachian people for personal and institutional gain in the same way that the region's labor and natural resources had been exploited for decades to benefit elite and predominantly external interests. They feared that the new regional consciousness would turn Appalachian culture into a commodity to be studied, bought, and sold in the consumer marketplace rather than an expression of fundamental conflicts within American politics and life. While they welcomed a more positive regional identity, their concerns lay in the challenges facing communities, the expansion of democratic processes, and the protection of individual rights. “For those of us who believe that the struggle is for the soul of man in a technological society,” wrote native activist James Branscome, “the resistance of Appalachian culture against assimilation into Middle America demands earnest, indeed prayerful, attention.”
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Veterans of the War on Poverty, many of whom would become college professors, lawyers, and journalists in the new Appalachia, would make every effort to see that the budding regionalism sustained that commitment.

The tension between more moderate regionalists and those who saw their role as agents of social change reflected the fundamental dilemma of the Great Society. Could the nation bring the benefits of postwar prosperity to minorities and disadvantaged populations without confronting the uneven ground on which that prosperity was built?
The history of the War on Poverty in the mountains suggested that mainstreaming the poor instead of altering the political and economic inequalities that caused dependence was a lesson in mutual frustration. Indeed, the antipoverty campaign designed to eliminate regional distinctiveness only generated a renaissance of regional identity that professed a vision for the good life different from that emerging in the rest of the “consumer republic.” Appalachia was at once the other America and the conscience of America.

“I used to think that what was needed was to bring mountain people into the economic mainstream,” wrote Michael Smathers in the closing years of the War on Poverty. “I thought it would be possible to do this and still preserve some of the positive, humanizing qualities of mountain cultures. I no longer think this is either possible or desirable. Our challenge is not to join mainstream America. It is to recreate a renewed and authentic form of what the mountains have always been. From the time that the first white settlers deliberately cut their ties with the coastal culture of colonial America to start a new life in this wilderness, the mountains have offered an alternative to mainstream America.” This alternative society, Smathers added, was nearer to being absorbed than it had ever been. The task before his generation was to renew this alternative and restore it to the nation. Americans might all need to learn a lesson from the mountains, he concluded:

While I was home last summer, I attended a celebration of historic Old Rugby in Morgan County, Tennessee. For a while that afternoon I sat in a yard listening to some musicians and speakers. Two flatland women were sitting on chairs in front of me, and one of them was being bothered by a long stem growing out of a plant behind her. There was nothing pretty about this stem. It was sort of ugly. It bore neither flowers nor leaves. But on the upper end it held two immature seedpods, and to me it represented life. The one woman complained to her friend about the nuisance of the stem, whereupon her friend leaned over and with some effort broke the stem.

That action seemed to me a typical response of technological society. If a flower bothers you, break it. If the environment restricts you, change it. If people get in your way, manipulate
them. I believe that the more typical mountain response in this situation would have been to move your chair—to adapt yourself rather than to manipulate your environment. It is a practice we all need to learn—to move our chairs before we use up the world and bury ourselves in our own waste.
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