Uneven Ground (38 page)

The downturn in the Appalachian economy represented more than just another bust in the long boom-and-bust cycle that had shaped the history of the region for more than a century. The new unemployment was structural, and jobs in coal mining, primary metals, textiles, and other industries would never return. Appalachia was caught in the middle of a larger transformation in the national economy. The old Appalachian economy was based on extractive resources and mature industry, but the postindustrial revolution pushed low-wage manufacturing jobs to Asia and Latin America while coal production shifted to lower-cost mines in the American West. The introduction of longwall mining equipment and new mountaintop removal techniques displaced thousands of skilled Appalachian underground miners. In 1981 and 1982 alone, the Appalachian region lost two and a half manufacturing jobs for every one it had gained in the 1970s.
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The new service sector jobs paid only a fraction of the wages of manufacturing and unionized mining and usually provided no health benefits.

The recession in the mountain economy was only one part of the double whammy that struck most Appalachian states in the 1980s. Although the core social programs of the New Deal and Great Society survived the Reagan budget cuts, programs such as food stamps, job training, school lunches, and early childhood education received significant reductions in federal support, leaving it up to the states to manage the delivery of services from state revenues and block grants. West Virginia was hit especially hard by the reductions, ranking second in the United States in the loss of federal aid with total cuts of $1.8
billion between 1982 and 1986.
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With a small tax base and few financial reserves, state government officials cut support for public schools, delayed Medicaid payments to health providers, and canceled community infrastructure projects. Almost bankrupt and mired in poverty and political corruption, the Mountain State was ignominiously labeled a “state of despair” by the
Wall Street Journal
in the fall of 1989.
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The situation was equally dire in other parts of central Appalachia. A series of articles in the
Knoxville News-Sentinel
in 1985 described Appalachian east Tennessee as a “land of pain and poverty,” a place where official unemployment was as high as 23 percent and transfer payments (such as Social Security, black lung, and Aid to Families with Dependent Children) amounted to 21 percent of personal income. Reporter Fred Brown described inadequate housing conditions, poor sanitation, and “desperate families” who were barely able to fight off “the beast of hunger” in communities that had changed little since the days of the War on Poverty.
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A year later, an investigation in the coalfields of southwest Virginia for the Commission on Religion in Appalachia found similar conditions, and the author professed little hope for the region's young people despite the recovery of the national economy. Mechanization and internationalization of area coal mines had reduced the number of operating mines by a third, and the new industrial parks built to attract industry had failed to provide enough low-wage jobs to replace those lost in mining. Unemployment in southwest Virginia averaged 20 percent, and the proportion of seventeen- to twenty-four-year-olds who had dropped out of high school was 38 percent, one of the highest in the nation. Whereas the economies in valley towns like Bristol, Johnson City, and Kingsport were better, the young people of the interior rural coal counties faced a bleak future—or the difficult choice of out-migration.
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The contrast between economic opportunities in the cities and those in surrounding rural counties mirrored the growing gap between rural and urban places within Appalachia. A study released by the University of Kentucky Appalachian Center in 1994 found not only that Appalachian Kentucky as a whole had fallen further behind the rest of the commonwealth in the 1980s but also that poverty was concentrated in certain places within the mountains. According to 1990 data, twenty-nine of the thirty poorest counties in Kentucky were in eastern Kentucky,
and thirty-eight of the forty-nine ARC counties in the commonwealth were officially listed as distressed. Between 1980 and 1990, per capita income in Appalachian Kentucky declined from 67 to 60 percent of the national average, and almost one in three citizens of the region lived below the nationally established poverty level.
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The study revealed that rates of poverty were higher than the national average across eastern Kentucky, but distress was more severe in the ten interior counties than in peripheral counties along Interstates 64 and 75 and in coal-producing counties along the state's eastern border. The peripheral counties contained growth centers, such as Pikeville, Prestonsburg, Paintsville, Hazard, Harlan, London, Corbin, Richmond, and Winchester, where poverty was high but less pervasive. The group of ten interior counties, stretching from Morgan in the north to McCreary in the south, was overwhelmingly rural and contained some of the highest concentrations of America's persistently poor people. Although the extremes of poverty had been ameliorated, little had changed on a comparative basis in these counties since the 1960s. Together the counties had an average poverty rate of 42 percent and a per capita income of less than $6,500, compared to a national average of $17,500. Clustered within these counties, moreover, were communities of even greater distress that crossed county boundaries. Examination of subcounty census tract data revealed communities lying along the edges of these severely distressed counties that contained poverty rates from 46 to 63 percent, child poverty rates averaging more than 54 percent, and unofficial unemployment rates of more than 50 percent. In these poorest of poor communities, only one in three citizens had completed high school, nine out of ten children in female-headed households lived below the poverty level, and 26 percent of residents lived in trailers, compared with 1 percent of people in the state as a whole.

Geographic information system mapping of the patterns of distress in these communities identified a number of common characteristics that bound them together in poverty. Most of the poorest census tracts were located on the edges of their counties, far from the county seats and miles from regional growth centers. These clusters of communities were overwhelmingly rural and culturally traditional, although the economies of some were based on coal and others on
agriculture and logging. Almost all had witnessed the loss of local schools because of county-wide consolidation, and few had access to public water and sewer systems. Existing at the periphery of county political and economic life, they were the backyards of poor counties. Although these cross-county clusters often included natural geographic or social communities, their division among a number of small county government and service units further limited their development opportunities. Between 1965 and 1990, they had received lower per capita ARC expenditures than their urban counterparts, and their counties had received fewer ARC investments for community development than had their more populous and politically powerful neighbors. Over the twenty-five-year period, for example, Owsley County and Wolfe County—the two poorest counties in Kentucky and among the ten poorest counties in the United States—received ARC funding of only $472, 914 and $704,091 respectively. Conditions in Kentucky reflected the loss of momentum in the effort to bring economic growth to Appalachia, but they also reflected the mounting disparities between rural places and urban places and between traditional communities and more modern communities within the region. By 1990 the influence of ARC growth center strategies, structural shifts in the national economy, and the weight of local and national politics had combined to generate significant change in the mountains. For some communities, the construction of highways, industrial parks, shopping centers, hospitals, and education facilities had produced better economic conditions, and, despite the recession of the early 1980s, they continued to experience population growth and assimilation into the global economy. For others, less touched by government development programs and less prepared for the new economy, modernization brought increased dependence and fueled a further decline of community-based jobs and institutions.

Those communities that were located along the interstate and Appalachian corridor highway systems and were more integrated into the national market economy gradually regained their economic energy and joined the rest of the nation in the march to a postindustrial society. Some Appalachian towns and villages, especially those that functioned as regional government service centers, improved access to telecommunications and higher education and shared in the technological
boom that swept the country in the 1990s. Others expanded as amenity centers in response to tourism and second-home development. Those more remote communities in the coalfields and the rural areas, however, continued to suffer from high unemployment, environmental decay, poverty, and the loss of youth to out-migration. Increasingly, some parts of Appalachia looked just like any other suburban place in modern America, but many other places in the region continued to reflect the economic despair, if not the old lifestyles, that had set them apart in an earlier day.

The ARC weathered the storm of the Reagan budget cuts and was eventually reauthorized by Congress. Allocations to the regional agency, however, remained at only a fraction of their former levels and reflected the loss of national interest in poverty and in Appalachia. The ARC struggled throughout the 1990s to recover from reduced budgets and tepid presidential support. With its survival assured, the commission refocused its energies, pledging to complete the unfinished portions of the Appalachian highway system and to assist mountain communities in the transition to the new economy. In 1991 the ARC revised its code to authorize expenditures from the distressed counties allocation for education and other human service projects. Previously those expenditures had been limited to water and sewer investments. During the Clinton administration, the commission renewed its commitment to helping the distressed counties and, after some debate, increased the portion of its overall allocations dedicated to the distressed counties program.

As governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton had admired the structure and resources that the ARC provided for Appalachian development. As president he established the Mississippi Delta Commission to bring ARC-type development to his home region and appointed Jesse White, former head of the Southern Growth Policies Board, as federal cochair of the ARC. White, a Mississippi-born economist, attempted to revitalize the Appalachian program and established new regional initiatives to encourage entrepreneurship and telecommunications to better equip the region for the new economy. White also hoped to restore a commitment to the original ARC goal of regional planning by engaging the states in a comprehensive strategic planning process and by
sponsoring a series of economic development conferences. In 1996 the ARC produced its first regional strategic plan in more than twenty years, establishing goals in the areas of job creation, infrastructure development, health, highways, and education. For the first time in its history, the ARC also placed a priority on developing civic leadership in the mountains, although it allocated very limited resources to this goal.

Like other federal cochairs before him, White struggled to engage the active interest of the governors in the work of the ARC but failed to generate much enthusiasm for multistate planning. Except for the governors who served on an annually alternating basis as the states cochair, most governors delegated their ARC responsibilities to lower-level staff members, who were reluctant to take policy initiatives or endorse alternative or politically sensitive approaches to development. Among the general population of the region, the ARC remained a distant and almost unknown government agency.

With few resources and limited guidance coming from the states, the commission fell back into the mode of project management, building much-needed infrastructure and funding beneficial human service programs but providing little leadership to address the region's persisting social and economic problems. Even President Clinton's well-publicized trip to Appalachia in the summer of 1999 failed to generate significant new resources or development strategies for the region. Touring communities in eastern Kentucky in the manner of Lyndon Johnson more than thirty years earlier, Clinton attempted to rally support for his “new markets” initiative to stimulate private investment in distressed rural and inner-city areas. Despite the return of prosperity to the national economy, the number of officially distressed counties in Appalachia had grown from 60 in 1982 to 108 in 1999. Accompanied by Kentucky governor Paul Patton, several cabinet secretaries, and Jesse Jackson, Clinton hoped to attract support for his pending legislation and to renew Johnson's commitment to Appalachia.

The president's visit to Appalachia dramatized the dilemma facing the ARC and the region at the turn of the century: how to stem the widening gap between those mountain communities that were growing and those that were not. The ARC had helped to bring new roads, schools, health care facilities, water and sewer systems, and other improvements
to many in the region, but it had failed to eliminate the “hardcore pockets of poverty” that were, as one reporter noted, “seemingly oblivious to all efforts at improving their lot.”
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Throughout the region there were communities of people who were better educated, better fed, and better housed than their parents. Some counties on the fringes of the mountains had even attained socioeconomic levels above national averages, but there were as many places of despair, scarcity, and frustration.

The route of the president's journey into Appalachian Kentucky illustrated the disparity that divided Appalachia. Clinton's entourage of reporters, business leaders, and government dignitaries landed in Lexington before boarding helicopters for rural Jackson County. Among the crowd that met Air Force One in Lexington were many who had migrated from eastern Kentucky to the Bluegrass decades before in search of jobs and educational opportunities. A good number of the shopping centers, housing developments, and small businesses that had helped to turn the small university town into a growth center in the 1970s had been constructed with “coal money,” acquired by mountain entrepreneurs during the boom years and invested in Lexington, where the promise of financial return was greater than in the rural eastern Kentucky communities that had generated the wealth.