Uneven Ground (41 page)

Despite the booming national economy in the 1990s, rural Appalachian communities struggled to keep pace with changing global markets. The decline of coal mining and manufacturing employment and the loss of supplemental income from tobacco farming left rural mountain families with few options in an era of rising consumption and technological change. Some families opted to commute long distances to service and trade jobs in regional growth centers. The new interstate
and Appalachian corridor highways were clogged each morning and evening with workers from rural communities streaming to and from low-paying jobs elsewhere. Other mountain families chose to subsist on Social Security or disability assistance in hollows and coves that were populated more and more by older residents. Many individuals, especially the young, migrated permanently to the education, employment, and social opportunities of distant cities.

Government policies that encouraged short-term growth at the expense of more sustainable development, that facilitated investment in some communities over others, and that allowed a few private interests to feed liberally at the public trough continued to fuel the growing inequities between the new and the old Appalachia. Rather than investing limited public resources in community-based educational improvement, sustainable agriculture, small-business enhancement, and the development of a regionally integrated economy, policy makers diverted millions of dollars to the creation of jobs that were disappearing in the rest of the nation. Rather than focusing civic energies on the improvement of housing, higher education, culture, recreation, and health facilities that would enhance the quality of life for local workers and encourage creativity and entrepreneurship, leaders continued to look to external models of development that perpetuated old dependences on outside markets and absentee capital.

At one level, of course, government growth strategies achieved measurable success. Poverty rates for the ARC region as a whole were cut in half between 1960 and 2000, and the gap in per capita income between Appalachia and the rest of the country narrowed. In 1960 nearly one-third of the region's residents lived in poverty, compared with one-fifth of all Americans; by 2000 poverty rates in Appalachia had declined to a regional average of only 13.6 percent, compared with 12.3 percent for the rest of the nation. Per capita income in the Appalachian region at the turn of the twenty-first century reached almost 84 percent of the national average, unemployment rates declined, and the number of severely distressed counties fell from 223 to 89.
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With equally impressive improvements in the number of health care and education facilities, government agencies such as the ARC were proud to point to the evidence of progress that had been made in reducing the gap between Appalachia and the rest of the nation.

These cumulative data, however, obscured the reality of economic differences within the region. Measures of economic distress improved significantly across the United States between 1960 and 2000, but improvements in central Appalachia lagged behind the rest of Appalachia and the nation. While poverty rates in northern and southern Appalachia were only 12.8 percent in 2000, slightly above the national average of 12.3 percent, rates in the heart of Appalachia were 22.1 percent, almost twice the national average. Eastern Kentucky and southern West Virginia contained five of the poorest twenty-five counties in the United States, counties where one in three residents lived below the poverty level. In Martin County, Kentucky, for example, where President Johnson had tried to rouse support for the War on Poverty in 1964, the per capita income had risen from 34 percent to 55 percent of the national level. The majority of the counties on the ARC distressed counties list were in central Appalachia, and eighty-five of the counties that were economically distressed in 1960 were still listed as distressed four decades later. In contrast, Appalachian sections of six ARC states (Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, and South Carolina) had poverty rates in 2000 that were lower than those of the non-Appalachian counties in their states.
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Appalachia was still one of the poorest places in the United States, and the deepest and most persistent poverty was still concentrated in the core of the region in amounts that far exceeded national averages.

Such measures of economic well-being also obscured social inequalities that cut across the region. Throughout Appalachia the income gap between rural communities and metropolitan communities widened significantly. Most of the new jobs that came to the mountains in the late twentieth century were in services, retail trade, and government, and the majority of these were located in or adjacent to the metropolitan areas, the growth centers connected by ARC corridors and interstate highways. Family income in rural Appalachia in 1999 averaged only 70 percent of that in metropolitan areas of the region and 65 percent of family income in the United States.
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Like the rest of the country, moreover, the gap between the rich and the poor grew substantially in the last decades of the century, as those with greater access to education, capital, and political power prospered in the growing service and retail centers of the region. Most
evident in the nonmetropolitan counties adjacent to major cities and in the tourist-based counties of the Blue Ridge, the new mountain professional class thrived on the expansion and relocation of education, health, retail, and government services in the larger towns. In some places a growing population of nonnative retirees added to the income disparity, further increasing the demand for public services and driving up land values in rural areas. The gated housing developments, ethnic restaurants, BMWs, and Volvos that one could increasingly find in some mountain counties were ever present reminders of the gap between those with the resources to succeed in the new Appalachia and those without them. According to a study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, in West Virginia the incomes of the richest families climbed substantially between 1980 and 2000, while the incomes of the middle- and lower-income families saw only modest increases. The growth in income inequality between the richest 20 percent and the poorest 20 percent of the population in the Mountain State was the sixth largest in the nation.
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Women and children carried the heaviest burden of poverty and income disparity. Although mountain women were quick to take advantage of the job training programs and community college facilities, many of the new jobs that opened up in the service sector paid low wages and were usually located far from workers' home communities. Child care was difficult to find, public transportation nonexistent, and maintaining a car expensive. Women in Appalachia, as elsewhere, had substantially lower incomes than men, earning on average about two-thirds of men's income. The highest poverty rates in the region were among female-headed households. In the most persistently distressed counties of central Appalachia, nearly 70 percent of female-headed households with children under six years old had incomes below the national poverty level in 2000.
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When Congress enacted welfare reform legislation in 1996 with the goal of moving individuals from welfare to work, the initiative was met with widespread skepticism in Appalachia. Low educational levels, the lack of available jobs, and the distances to child care and other public services made the implementation of the act difficult in most rural mountain communities, where poverty and disability rates were already high. Despite these challenges, welfare caseloads were reduced
by over 70 percent in Appalachia over the next decade as thousands of families were squeezed into an already glutted workforce or onto government disability programs such as Supplemental Security Income. The lack of available jobs and the migration of public services to the larger towns and villages placed a double burden on the rural poor, contributing to the persistently high rates of unemployment, underemployment, and poverty.
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Efforts by public and private agencies to ease poverty and income disparity in Appalachia met with some success in the 1990s. Under the leadership of Jesse White, the ARC adopted policies to encourage local entrepreneurship, job training programs, and the clustering of higher-tech industries that would advance regional competitiveness in the global economy and wean policy makers from their reliance on branch plant recruitment. The Ford Foundation launched a $10 million national effort, the Rural Community College Initiative, to help a dozen community colleges in Appalachia, the Delta, the Southwest, and Native American communities to become catalysts for local community development. A number of small, nonprofit organizations established programs to train and support local entrepreneurs, and one, the New Opportunity School for Women, won national recognition for its efforts to improve the educational, employment, and financial status of low-income Appalachian women. Such programs expanded the income potential for hundreds of individuals across the region, but they were usually underfunded, and they failed to alter traditional structures and patterns of development in the most distressed counties. By the turn of the century, for example, there was only one facility in all of central Appalachia designed to incubate small businesses and encourage creativity, in contrast to dozens that had been established in the more affluent northern and southern sections of the region.

The uneven benefits of economic development not only limited the opportunities for some individuals but narrowed the options for alternative patterns of community development as well. The absence of public and private initiatives to encourage locally owned small businesses and the marketing of regionally produced goods and services left mountain communities even more tied to global markets than they had been earlier in the century. Policies that recruited outside industries and utilized former mine sites for megacorporate chains such as
Wal-Mart not only facilitated the transfer of wealth out of the region, contributing to the decline of smaller, community-based businesses, but also drained public resources that might have nurtured local entrepreneurs and encouraged innovative, sustainable alternatives to the delivery of goods and services. In a region desperate for better housing, health care, education, and cultural amenities, community-based solutions for development were often bypassed in favor of externally controlled businesses and institutions that were more interested in growth than development.

This bias in favor of traditional, market-based solutions to regional problems was not limited to state or federal policy makers; it also influenced the economic visions of local mountain elites and shaped their attitudes toward the poor. Most Appalachian leaders welcomed growth of any kind, hoped to replicate mainstream symbols of material progress in their own communities, and were defensive about media portrayals of Appalachia as backward and distressed. Having benefited directly from the government investments that had helped to create the new Appalachia, mountain business leaders and professionals were proud of the transformations that had reshaped their communities, and they were sometimes indignant at suggestions that Appalachia was still a land of the poor.

During President Clinton's visit to eastern Kentucky in 1999, the economic and ideological gap between the rich and the poor was manifest in the response of local leaders. Most dignitaries and public officials who met with the president were honored to have the nation's leader in the mountains promoting the need for private investment in Appalachia, but some were insulted that his visit was part of a poverty tour. “I'm a Republican, and I really think he did us a good honor,” Hazard mayor Bill Gorman told a
New York Times
reporter. “The greatest problem I've seen with people [in the mountains] is the lack of hope. You give them hope and they will conquer the world.” Gorman, who had been mayor for the past twenty-three years and whose brother was a leading banker and coal operator in the area, had invited the president two months earlier to visit Hazard to demonstrate how well Appalachia was doing in the new economy. “Appalachia has a lot of problems,” he informed reporters as they toured the local Wal-Mart and the new off-track betting facility, U Bet. “But the quality of life
here is no different than it is anywhere in the country.” Charlie Hammonds, another Hazard official, added, “We're just the same as most places.” But he worried that “the president spent a little too much time in places where the old stereotypes of Appalachia persists [
sic
]—on rural roads, out where families have little education or work.”
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The faith of local leaders in the potential of postwar models of growth ignored historical and systemic inequities that continued to divide the region. The truth, of course, was that too many Appalachian families still had inadequate education, little hope for employment, and insufficient health care, and the institutional structures that had evolved since the 1960s had done little to alter existing class and political relationships. The loss of jobs to mechanization and global competition and the rise of technology and a knowledge-based national economy left many older, uneducated farmers, miners, and unskilled workers with nowhere to turn. Opportunities expanded for individuals who were positioned to take advantage of the new economy, but the reduction in federal job training programs during the 1980s, the lack of start-up capital and technical assistance for small businesses, and the anxieties of interacting with impersonal bureaucracies in distant growth centers forced many rural residents to fall back on old survival skills and the support of the extended family.

The politics of growth in the mountains, who won and who lost as a result of government investments, was nowhere more evident than in the arenas of education and health care. Long a weakness in Appalachia, public education underwent revolutionary change as a result of state and federal initiatives in the post–World War II years. The region's schools were modernized and restructured at every level, and measures of education from literacy to college graduation rates improved. By 2000 the old one- and two-room country schools had been replaced throughout the mountains by new consolidated schools, and access to higher education had expanded with state and federal investments in community and technical colleges. The percentage of Appalachian adults who had completed high school rose steadily, reaching 77 percent in 2000, compared with 81 percent for the rest of the nation, and the percentage of those who had attained college degrees reached almost 18 percent, compared with 25 percent nationally. Educational
gains, however, like economic gains, were not distributed equally across the region. While metropolitan areas and the northern and southern subregions made gains that sometimes exceeded national averages, central Appalachia and rural areas throughout the mountains continued to trail far behind national averages. In 2000 only 64 percent of adults in central Appalachia and 65 percent of adults in rural areas within the region had completed high school. Moreover, the gap in postsecondary education levels between Appalachia and the United States actually increased as the rate of college graduates in the rest of the nation grew faster than that in Appalachia.
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The gain in college graduates was slowest in the coal counties and in other rural areas, in part because of the continued gap in per capita income in those communities but also because of the growing challenges of transportation and cultural alienation in the new education system.