Uneven Ground (34 page)

In its first four years of operation, the ARC gained a reputation in Washington for getting things done quickly by cutting through established bureaucratic procedures and making resources available to initiate funding from other agencies. The commission's seventy-person staff of planners, direct access to the governors, and system of local development districts composed of elected officials provided a structure for coordinating multiagency responses to crises and complex projects. This was especially evident after the tragic collapse of the Silver Bridge across the Ohio River in 1967. By rapidly bringing together the personnel of transportation and public works committees from the states involved (Ohio and West Virginia) and pressuring the Army Corp of Engineers, the ARC staff was able to begin the reconstruction of the bridge within three weeks. Normal bureaucratic procedures would have taken up to six years.
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The best example of ARC capacity, energy, and goals during these early years, however, was the Pikeville cut-through project in Pike County, Kentucky. Pikeville was one of the designated growth centers in eastern Kentucky. Although it was the hub of central Appalachian banking and coal interests, it was plagued by almost annual flooding of the downtown business district from the waters of the Levisa Fork of the Big Sandy River. Pikeville was located on a narrow neck of land formed by a loop in the river, and the main line of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad ran right through the middle of the town. Beginning in 1969, the ARC coordinated an effort involving fourteen government agencies to reroute the river through a massive cut in the mountainside to get the waterway, the railroad, and the highway out of the downtown area and open the recovered land to urban redevelopment. The commission initiated the early planning and engineering studies and
facilitated the efforts of state and local officials—led by Pikeville mayor William Hambley—to garner federal construction funds. In 1970 the City of Pikeville received the first of more than $21 million of federal grants for the cut-through project, which rivaled the building of the Panama Canal in the amount of earth that had to be removed. The railroad tunnel under the mountain opened in 1978, the river relocation was completed in 1980, and the new highway was opened in 1987.
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By the turn of the century, as a result in part of the efforts of the ARC, Pikeville had grown into a modern, comprehensive service center.

The role of the ARC as a catalyst for planning and interagency cooperation increasingly engaged the agency in program expansion. As challenges to the War on Poverty began to undercut the OEO and led to its eventual demise, the ARC placed greater emphasis on human capacity development as part of its comprehensive mission. In 1968 Congress authorized the commission to provide technical assistance to local governments and nonprofit organizations that wished to apply for federal housing grants, and the agency launched a major initiative to improve early childhood development and nutrition programs. With the election of Richard Nixon to the presidency, the commission responded to the new emphasis on revenue sharing by facilitating gubernatorial interest in preschool education, occupational rehabilitation, and job training. The 1969 and 1971 acts reauthorizing the ARC extended its flexibility even more by allowing demonstration grants for program operations in work-related areas of health care and education.
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The Nixon administration at first expressed little interest in the ARC, giving rise to fears that it might be abolished along with other Kennedy-Johnson initiatives, but after meeting with the Appalachian governors in Louisville on his way to the baseball All-Star Game in St. Louis, the president endorsed the agency as an example of his new federalism. Adopting a strategy that would save the commission from several subsequent efforts to kill it, the governors convinced Nixon that the ARC was a model of state-federal cooperation, a unique agency that received bipartisan support in both the region and Congress. The elimination of specific funding categories for nonhighway allocations in the 1971 reauthorization act, moreover, provided the governors with more flexible funding in the form of block grants, free from
the controls of state legislatures. The Appalachian highway program relieved pressure on state transportation funds to build expensive mountain highways, increasing the resources available for other parts of the state, and the governors wielded almost unlimited power to distribute ARC nonhighway funds allocated for their states.

In 1971 President Nixon appointed Donald W. Whitehead as the federal cochair of the ARC. Whitehead was a Massachusetts lawyer and had been northeast field director for Nixon's 1968 campaign. He had come to the commission in 1970 as general counsel with little knowledge of the region or of the ARC. A forceful and assertive leader, Whitehead became a strong advocate for the agency in an administration consumed first by the Vietnam War and later by Watergate. During his six years at the ARC, he pressed the governors to commit to a single regional development plan rather than to thirteen state plans, and he oversaw a major reorganization of the commission itself. However, his self-confident style and his tendency to see the ARC as just another Washington line agency rather than a federal-state collaborative stirred tension within the commission, especially among some of the senior staff.

Since 1965 the ARC had evolved as a bureaucracy, complete with competing personalities and loyalties. The staff of young professionals, mostly from the Washington area, had grown in confidence and ability to manage projects in the ever changing political environment of the states. By the early 1970s, the governors' enthusiasm for fighting poverty in Appalachia had waned, and the frequent turnover of their ARC alternates and representatives hindered continuity in programming and reduced the level of long-range planning for development. The Washington-based ARC staff provided the only region-wide and systemic perspective to the commission process. John Whisman embodied the institutional memory of the agency and, with the decline of involvement of the governors, acquired increasing power as the states' representative on the ARC executive committee.

With the appointment of Whitehead, a struggle for control over the ARC ensued within the triumvirate at the head of the commission. Whisman and Whitehead clashed, leaving the executive director and the staff in the middle of a struggle between the states' representative and the federal cochair's office. Whitehead hoped to revitalize the direct
involvement of the governors in the decisions of the ARC and objected strenuously to Whisman's casting a single vote for all of the governors in the executive committee when there was no statutory authority for him to do so. As the father of the ARC and a major contributor to the PARC report, Whisman believed that the commission was straying from its original intent, especially on the matter of growth center development.
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The conflict was resolved when Whisman was forced to resign because of publicity surrounding minor violations of travel reimbursement procedures, but the dispute blackened the image of the commission and resulted in the reorganization of the agency in 1975.
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Under pressure from West Virginia senator Jennings Randolph, ARC's chief sponsor in the Senate, the 1975 ARDA reauthorization diminished the role of the states' Washington representative, required a quorum of the governors to be present to approve the annual budget, and obligated state alternates to be members of the governor's cabinet or personal staff. The reorganization eliminated the power struggle within the Washington offices of the commission, but it failed in the long run to engage the governors personally in the work of the ARC, and in subsequent years gubernatorial interest continued to decline along with federal allocations. The 1975 act did reapportion the division of ARC funds within the region to channel more resources to central Appalachia, but it continued to base the allocation primarily on population. Overall, a decade after the passage of the ARDA, 37 percent of ARC funds still flowed to northern Appalachia, 40 percent to southern Appalachia, and only 23 percent to central Appalachia.
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The reorganization of the commission and the adjustment of the allocation formula dramatized the challenge facing the ARC as it entered the post–Great Society era. Although conditions in the central part of Appalachia had generated national support for the creation of the commission, political necessity had extended the boundaries of the ARC far beyond the Appalachian heartland, and both politics and economic theory had concentrated most of its resources in the population centers of the northern and southern subregions. Critics in the media and in Congress increasingly pointed out the irrationality of a formula that allocated the fewest ARC dollars to the counties with the worst economic conditions, but few within the commission were willing
to confront the problem. Alvin Arnett, who replaced Widner as executive director in 1971, recalled, “As long as you kept Senators Eastland or Stennis of Mississippi happy with their little sewage treatment projects and Senator Robert Kennedy happy with his New York thruways, you just don't ask the other questions.”
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Even the minor reapportionment of funds in 1975 came after heated debate within the commission, since the northern and southern governors vigorously resisted shifting any part of their funds to the central region.

More and more, however, critics outside the ARC did ask the “other questions.” Detractors within the region had challenged the structure and goals of the Appalachian program from its inception. Harry Caudill called the ARDA “a grim hoax” that had little chance of restoring Appalachia to health because it failed to address the real economic and political problems of the region.
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Kentuckian Harriette Arnow, author of
The Dollmaker
, labeled the act a “tragedy” that had given “false hope to many who needed help the most.”
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Many anti-poverty activists saw the Appalachian program as “chiefly a boon for the rich and for entrenched political interests.” Five years after the ARC's creation,
New York Times
reporter Ben Franklin, writing for the
Louisville Courier-Journal
, found that low-income people in the sixty poorest counties in central Appalachia remained “almost untouched” by the commission's programs.
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By the early 1970s, the ARC had become a favored target of journalists and activists frustrated with the demise of the War on Poverty. The
Louisville Courier-Journal
, for example, ran a weeklong series on the commission in April 1973, concluding that it was a “boondoggle” that had become “just another pork dispenser, calloused to the human needs of the region it was created to serve.” Reporter Bill Peterson found that the ARC had “little measurable impact on the economy of Eastern Kentucky or the rest of central Appalachia” and that, despite the claims of its promoters, it had done “little to coordinate the efforts of other federal agencies in the region.” He noted that the thirteen states of the commission were more interested in their own individual improvement projects than in region-wide planning; the agency had ignored major regional problems like black lung disease, mine safety, and strip mining.
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The
Whitesburg (Kentucky) Mountain Eagle
accused the Washington-based
ARC staff of being out of touch with the real conditions in Appalachia. The outspoken paper claimed that commission leaders were planning the wholesale depopulation of large portions of the coalfields, including the resettlement of mining families into distant “new towns.”
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Even the ARC partnership was a facade, wrote Howard Bray, executive director of the Fund for Investigative Journalism in Washington DC, since the governors themselves “have had little to do with guiding the program.” The real source of ARC decision-making power, Bray suggested to readers of the
Progressive
magazine, was to be found in Congress, which was focused primarily on “bricks and mortar” projects that resounded to the benefit of individual members of Congress. “The Commission,” he determined, had “failed to come to grips with the true causes of much of the . . . distress that has plagued Appalachia for decades.”
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A group of young researchers came to similar conclusions when they issued
A Citizens' Handbook on the ARC
in 1974. Calling themselves the ARC Accountability Project, the authors endeavored to inform mountain residents of the failures of the agency in preparation for reauthorization hearings that the ARC was holding throughout the region—the first public forums in the commission's nine-year history. The investigators found the government program deficient in a number of areas: accountability, access, assumptions, and achievements. “The ARC was never structured to meet the needs of poor and working people,” they concluded. “Nor was it meant to benefit a truly representative base of Appalachia's citizenry. In virtually every one of its programs, the direct beneficiaries of ARC's development strategies are the already entrenched power structures.”
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Widely distributed among activists and academics,
A Citizens' Handbook on the ARC
summarized most of the criticisms of the ARC leveled by Caudill and others. The local and area development districts were dominated by nonrepresentative boards that comprised small-town mayors, county officials, and their appointed cronies. Easily controlled by area political machines, the development districts utilized the ARC funding process to enhance the political interests of local power brokers, and they provided “no mechanism for public access, redress, or accountability.” The commission's growth center strategy,
furthermore, exacerbated the poverty and depopulation of rural areas and facilitated the continued drain of wealth from the region by absentee industries. Education and health programs were designed to encourage out-migration from rural areas rather than to improve public services where people lived, and the ARC had failed to justify the expenditure of almost 80 percent of its budget on an uncompleted highway system. “The time has come to turn the authority of the Appalachian Regional Commission around or demand that it cease to exist,” recommended the researchers. “It is time for a different vision of regional resource development. It's time for a whole new set of goals which encourage a different sense of how to use resources to create job security, provide social services or otherwise contribute to a qualitatively different way of living.”
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