Uneven Ground (9 page)

Business leaders in the coalfields, for example, complained that economic conditions in the mountains were primarily a consequence of the ill health of the coal industry. The high cost of production—including labor, as a result of UMWA contracts—unfavorable freight rates, and the inroads of competing fuels had forced massive layoffs, they argued, and had contributed to the general economic despair. They noted that postwar foreign policy decisions had increased the flow of foreign oil into the United States, and “waste oil” had taken a large part of the energy market, further adding to the industry's woes. Given the “almost unlimited reserves” of top-grade coal that still lay within the region, coal country leaders called for government investment in the infrastructure of the mountains: dredging the major rivers, constructing dams to regulate water flow, and building modern highways to transport coal more cheaply to market. The new facilities and highways, some reasoned, might also attract tourists to the region.
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For a few observers, however, the opportunities and resources available in Appalachia were simply insufficient to support a large population under any circumstances. Some economists and a few regional leaders favored a policy that encouraged migration out of the mountains and advocated government programs that disseminated job
information to the unemployed and provided for the relocation of rural workers. Writing in 1958, economists B. H. Luebke and John Fraser Hart suggested that rural areas of Appalachia needed to “adjust the local economy to that of the nation” by encouraging the migration of individuals and communities to fill the labor needs of other areas of the country. “Economic betterment for the great majority of the people of the Southern Appalachians is not to be found in development of the meager resources of the local area,“ they wrote, “but in migration to other areas more richly endowed by nature and by man.” The export of surplus labor to the mill villages of the Carolinas and the automobile plants of the North would benefit not only Appalachia but the nation as a whole, which would “profit from more efficient allocation and utilization of its manpower.”
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The depopulation of the mountains had been advocated as early as the turn of the century as a means to “remake” the Appalachians by replacing the region's subsistence economy with a more “natural” system of timber culture. National leaders had defended the condemnation of mountain land for national forests after 1911, for national parks in the 1920s, and for TVA dams in the Great Depression as progressive steps that would help to eliminate the region's economic distress by forcing mountaineers to migrate to the cities and mill villages of the New South. Through relocation they would enjoy the advantages of social intercourse, school, and livelihood that village life afforded.
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Government-sponsored relocation, however, was as unappealing to most mountain residents in the 1950s as it had been in earlier decades. Such strategies assumed the superiority of urban living, ignored generations of family attachments to land and place, and abnegated the argument that free markets would bring the benefits of modernization to rural areas as well as to urban communities.

In the cold war environment of the 1950s, the failure of the free market in places like Appalachia was an embarrassment to the nation, and regional advocates increasingly looked for national solutions to Appalachia's problems. The new generation of state leaders who had come of age during the Depression and World War II was confident of government's ability to alleviate want and to mobilize for action. More and more, they called for the application of science, technology, and the organizational skills of government to rehabilitate the mountains.
“There is nothing wrong with hillbillies . . . that a strong dose of equal opportunity wouldn't cure,” wrote Charleston, West Virginia, journalist Harry Ernst and Berea College professor Charles Drake to the
Nation
in the spring of 1959. “What the Appalachian South desperately needs is a domestic Point Four program combining federal, state and local resources. Only with federal help—similar to the economic aid Uncle Sam sends to underdeveloped nations abroad—can the region receive its share of the national wealth.”
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Harry Caudill was among those who recommended the creation of a modernized version of the TVA—a southern mountain authority—that would plan for the region's future and provide electric power for the rest of the country. Through “enlightened government intervention under the auspices of careful planners,” Caudill declared, the hideous waste of the land and the cycle of poverty in Appalachia could be halted. He had little confidence in the ability of state and local political machines to produce significant changes on their own, since they were themselves allied with the interests that produced the problems. But an independent federal agency endowed with sufficient power and resources could set thousands of unemployed mountaineers to work reforesting the hills, building new consolidated schools, improving highways, and providing decent housing. If the United States could afford to subsidize autocratic but anti-Communist governments abroad, he asked, “Can we fail to spare the funds and efforts required to convert an island of destitution within our own country into a working, self-sustaining partner in the nation's freedom and progress?”
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The idea of a permanent organization to serve Appalachian development was not new. As early as 1951, George Mitchell of the CSM proposed the creation of an organization that would unite the mountain counties of eight southern states and represent their common interests in Congress.
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Mitchell hoped that a representative body of mountain state legislators, members of Congress, or organization heads might be brought together in an annual meeting to coordinate a long-range plan for the region, but the national political environment in the 1950s was not ready for a regional development program. Liberal Democrats in Congress passed two “depressed areas” bills during the decade to provide redevelopment grants to counties hard hit by
industrial unemployment, but these were both vetoed by President Eisenhower, who believed that economic development was best left to local governments and to the free market system.

When congressional efforts failed to provide funds for the recovery of depressed areas, regional leaders turned to the governors of the Appalachian states to act “individually and in concert” to develop solutions to the region's problems. In a resolution passed on February 7, 1959, the CSM petitioned the states of West Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, South Carolina, and Alabama to establish “an officially responsible interstate commission composed of citizen representatives” that would study the region as a whole and recommend common strategies to state planning and development boards.
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With the help of the council and a $250,000 grant from the Ford Foundation, Berea College launched a comprehensive survey of life and culture in the southern Appalachian region. Under the leadership of Berea College assistant to the president Willis Weatherford Sr. and University of Kentucky sociologist Thomas Ford, the survey would provide a scholarly base of information on which regional policy makers, church leaders, and others concerned with regional development might draw.
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Indeed, at the end of the decade, state and local planning initiatives were already underway in many southern Appalachian states. Beginning in the mid-1950s, state economic development boards increased their programs to recruit industries to mountain counties, and as the problems of flooding, poverty, and unemployment rose, these state efforts took on additional urgency. Several states, including Maryland, Georgia, and North Carolina, launched new initiatives to coordinate area-wide zoning and planning, but perhaps the most extensive effort to focus specifically on the problems of the mountain districts was undertaken in Kentucky. No other part of Appalachia more consistently epitomized the history and tragedies of the region than eastern Kentucky, and none was so devastated by economic stagnation, out-migration, and environmental depredation in the postwar years. The patterns of development and the political struggles to control the direction of development in Appalachian Kentucky were mirrored in other states, but Kentucky provides the most aggressive
example of state-initiated development efforts. Events in the commonwealth helped to set the stage for the emergence of a nationally coordinated program for all of Appalachia in the 1960s.

Public response in the commonwealth to rising poverty levels in eastern Kentucky came from two arenas: state government and a loose network of leaders from industry, higher education, civic organizations, and the CSM. As early as 1953, Governor Lawrence Wetherby attempted to draw the TVA's attention to the “economic wreckage” of eastern Kentucky, and his successor, A. B. “Happy” Chandler, campaigned on a promise to revive the region's economy by finding new uses and new markets for coal, eliminating transportation barriers to Kentucky coal, diversifying sources of employment in forestry and tourism, and improving the road system.
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In 1956 the Kentucky Agricultural and Industrial Development Board contracted with an Illinois research firm to assess the condition of Kentucky's coal, timber, and other resources and to recommend new possibilities for industrial growth. After the disastrous floods in the winter of 1956–1957, the state commissioned a Rhode Island firm to conduct the Eastern Kentucky Flood Rehabilitation Study to analyze the immediate problems caused by the floods and to identify the long-term barriers to economic development. In the summer of 1957, the Kentucky Department of Economic Development combined the recommendations of these studies into a report identifying possible action programs for eastern Kentucky.
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While the state was undertaking its analyses of the problems, independent efforts were also underway to mobilize private sector leadership. Berea College's Willis Weatherford convened an interdenominational meeting of church workers in 1956 to discuss collective action to alleviate Appalachia's distress, and in the same year the Kentucky Junior Chamber of Commerce, or Jaycees, launched an initiative designed to involve eastern Kentucky civic clubs in local community development work. Jaycee president John D. Whisman hoped to revive languishing chapters in the mountains while helping to improve economic and social conditions in his native region. After conducting an inventory of community problems, each Jaycee chapter would undertake specific projects to address local needs. Whisman believed that
the severity of the problems demanded area cooperation in planning programs that would be implemented at the community level, and he called a joint meeting of Jaycee officers and regional leaders from business, government, and industry to advise local chapters on possible projects. In September 1956 this group formed the Eastern Kentucky Regional Development Council. Made up of representatives from the Jaycees, other civic organizations, business and industry, state development organizations, and state government agencies, the development council was designed to act as an advisory board to civic organizations in the region and to formulate a program of long-range development objectives.
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The efforts of state government officials and private leaders came together the following summer when the Kentucky Department of Economic Development released its Action Plan for Eastern Kentucky. One of the recommendations of the plan called for the creation of a permanent citizens' regional development commission, with objectives similar to those of the development council but with official status as an agency of state government. This commission was to advise state and local policy makers on comprehensive strategies for floodplain protection, the improvement of emergency relief services, and planning for transportation and infrastructure improvements. Following the 1957 floods, acting governor Harry Lee Waterfield, perhaps desiring to ingratiate himself with eastern Kentucky voters for the next election, appointed the nine-member Eastern Kentucky Regional Planning Commission and promised state support for staffing and program development.

The new commission was chaired by B. F. Reed, an eastern Kentucky coal operator, and included four representatives from the coal, oil, and gas industries, as well as a real estate developer, a newspaper editor, a physician, and one representative each from higher education and religion. All of the members of the commission had been active in Whisman's development council.
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Although the new body included the two-hundred-member citizens' advisory committee, the commission itself was dominated by business and industry interests, especially those connected to coal and land development. Its initial agenda was to assist communities with applications for federal disaster relief, but the commissioners were also expected to recommend legislation to establish
new county-wide and area planning authorities and to develop a long-term strategy for diversifying the mountain economy. After a slow start, the commission hired Whisman as its executive director in the spring of 1958. Whisman brought new energy to the commission and increasingly shifted its work from the immediate crises of flood relief and rising unemployment to long-term planning for “strategic area development.”

Whisman and the Eastern Kentucky Regional Planning Commission represented a growing confidence in the ability of state government to foster economic development by encouraging public and private sector cooperation and planning. Drawing on his experiences during World War II and his successful efforts to organize a community development program for the Jaycees, Whisman envisioned a comprehensive, two-front campaign in eastern Kentucky that would integrate improvements in physical infrastructure (roads, water systems, and industrial sites) and progress in building human capacity (education, job training, and housing) into a strategy for “total development.” By mobilizing all levels of government and increasing civic participation among community leaders, he believed, the new commission could create a planning process that would bring together the resources and energy necessary to overcome Appalachia's deficiencies. Whisman defined the plight of eastern Kentucky and the rest of Appalachia as that of an “underdeveloped region” where “unrealized potential [was] yet to be developed.” Unlike other areas of the country that were temporarily depressed because of unemployment and current market trends, an underdeveloped region, he argued, was “a region in which economic facilities, such as roads and transportation systems, utilities, water control systems, schools, markets or industrial operations have not been sufficiently developed to serve its population or to allow its people to provide themselves with gainful employment or adequate standards of living.” In Whisman's mind, Appalachia's problems were primarily resource deficiencies, both physical and human, that had resulted from isolation, and he called on regional leaders to collaborate and identify strategies that would build the facilities necessary to generate development.
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