“The cumulative effects of the wrecking of a coal-filled mountain stagger the imagination,” he wrote in “The Rape of the Appalachians.” His article largely attends to the realities ushered forth by strip mining, including its toxic effects on vegetation, waterways, wildlife, and people. He spared no restraint in holding “absentee corporations” accountable for “the physical destruction of the land and the abject impoverishment of its people,” labeling the coal industry’s control of eastern Kentucky a relic of a “laissez-faire century.” Caudill quickly expanded his article into a book, which became 1963’s Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Distressed Area.
Just a year prior, socialist writer Michael Harrington had released an influential study of poverty, The Other America: Poverty in the United States. The book primed the nation and its politicians to seek out previously unacknowledged communities on the brink of economic annihilation. Dwight Macdonald, a cultural critic, summed up the collective response to Harrington’s work in the New Yorker by writing, “In the last year we seem to have suddenly awakened, rubbing our eyes like Rip Van Winkle, to the fact that massive poverty exists.” The extent of poverty, Macdonald commented, “is difficult to believe in the United States of 1963, but one has to make an effort, and it is now being made.”
Caudill became the spokesperson for Appalachia and a translator of white mountain poverty to the nation. Night Comes to the Cumberlands became a commercial success and the New York Times and other influential publications sent reporters to Kentucky to confirm Caudill’s descriptions of the region. Caudill often relied on romantic and problematic notions of Appalachia and its people to give his stories of regional exploitation their bite. He enjoyed the spotlight, taking visiting reporters on “poverty tours” near his Whitesburg home.
Almost everything about Caudill’s persona—his middle-class profession, his wholesome family life, and his eloquence—challenged dominant perceptions of the region. This is precisely why the press found him irresistible. The press embraced Caudill, much like Vance, because he could be both of the people and above the people. At his best, Caudill was a formidable enemy of the coal industry, leveraging his influence to expose and arrest the destruction of land by corporations. But he could also be vicious toward the poor, particularly after federal assistance came to the region.
Both Caudill and Vance set themselves to the task of drawing the nation’s attention away from social unrest and racial inequality at a particular moment in time and refocusing it instead on the conditions of white poverty. For Caudill, that moment was the War on Poverty, the popular name for the flurry of legislation adopted by the Johnson administration in the mid-1960s designed to combat both urban and rural poverty. Architects of this legislation intended solutions to poverty to be race-neutral, but the administration’s emphasis on Appalachian poverty provided many social reformers with problems that seemed, to their relief, far distant from those entwined with the civil rights movement.
Kennedy’s commitment to addressing Appalachia’s poverty became part of his legacy, adopted by the Johnson administration as part of the Great Society agenda, when the new president declared “an unconditional war on poverty in America.” In April 1964, Johnson traveled to Appalachia to fulfill Kennedy’s pledge to revisit the area. His “poverty tour” also included stops in Chicago and Pittsburgh, but the press images from Johnson’s stop in Martin County, Kentucky, provided the public relations magic that transformed the War on Poverty from a series of related legislation to an agenda with a deep moral purpose.
Black and white photographs of children playing in bare shacks, restless with hunger, and tended to by parents aged beyond their years, captivated the nation. Life magazine featured twelve pages of these images in the January 31, 1964, issue under the title “The Valley of Poverty.” Life intended the images to serve as an indictment of “a wealthy nation’s indifference.” “Their homes are shacks without plumbing or sanitation,” the article explained, “Their landscape is a man-made desolation of corrugated hills and hollows laced with polluted streams. The people, themselves—often disease-ridden and unschooled—are without jobs and even hope.”
These images worked, much like Elegy works today, by offering middle-class white viewers a glimpse into a world that feels both familiar and alien. This world unburdens the white viewer from the fatigue of thinking critically about race, a mercy expressed in Elegy in its dismissal of the “racial prism.” Poverty pictures allowed comfortable white Americans to consume the difference embedded in the images while believing they were engaging critically with pressing social issues. In 1964, this attention complemented the War on Poverty’s logic and design.
When people asked Adam Yarmolinsky, one of Johnson’s economic advisors, if the War on Poverty had a color, he responded, “Color it Appalachian if you are going to color it anything at all.” Appalachian historian John Alexander Williams notes, “The youthful volunteers who staffed the anti-poverty offices and community actions programs of the Kennedy-Johnson years were, like the religious and benevolent workers of the last century, fleeing events in the lowland South, namely the rise of Black Power…the liberal television commentators and welfare bureaucrats who displayed Appalachian poverty to the nation took obvious relish in the white skins and blue eyes of the region’s hungry children.”
The press rarely used images of poor Black Appalachians in their exposés of regional poverty. Public support for the War on Poverty depended on getting white, middle-class Americans to care about poverty, and projections of white poverty worked best in this regard. This led to an overabundance of images and stories about white poverty and, according to Ronald Eller, “helped establish a pattern of critical but superficial commentary that would sustain the image of Appalachia as a problem area for years to come.” Sound familiar?
Reformers, photographers, the press, and politicians flocked to Appalachia to find the form of poverty they needed and wanted to see. The peculiar privilege of serving as the face of poverty had benefits—the Appalachian Regional Commission is in many ways a success story. But it also created a new consumer demand for sensational stories that helped the nation form opinions about who they imagined the deserving and undeserving poor to be. The War on Poverty did not succeed in coaxing the nation from its prejudices, but it proved that the poverty industry—capturing visual or graphic images of poverty, serving as a politician tasked with administering federal aid—could be profitable.
Although attitudes toward Appalachian poverty were highly problematic, they often appeared benevolent compared to attitudes toward African American poverty. The Moynihan Report of 1965, to use just one example, remains a particularly searing, biased, and unfair indictment of African American families. The Department of Labor commissioned the report from sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan and intended to use his findings in the development of War on Poverty economic policy. The resulting study, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, is a remarkable example of the culture of poverty framework in action.
Moynihan concluded that the foundations of the nation’s African American family were so weak, there was nothing but a “tangle of pathology” in place of a social structure. Every quality that was idealized in the world white middle-class families inhabited was absent in Black families. Black fathers were either not present or emasculated by bread-winning Black mothers, a perverse phenomenon that primed young children, particularly boys, for a life of low ambition, drugs, and crime. Moynihan’s report had little utility for the Johnson administration after civil rights activists denounced it. But conservative politicians and intellectuals resurrected it in the 1970s and 80s. They used Moynihan’s findings—now stacked against a decade’s worth of social trends ripe for malleable interpretation—to argue that public assistance programs did more to undermine Black family life than improve it.
You might be asking, “Why does Hillbilly Elegy sound kind of like the Moynihan Report?” One reason is that white Appalachians became persona no
n grata after the War on Poverty failed. The nation began to see them as individuals who had absorbed an unprecedented amount of federal aid and done nothing with it except continue to be poor. Hillbillies had wasted taxpayer money, a cardinal sin that placed them in the ranks of the undeserving poor, an often racialized category that nevertheless has always welcomed white individuals thought to be, as Caudill once said, the “dregs” of society.
The other reason Elegy sounds like the Moynihan Report is that the white people who are outspoken in their beliefs about the culture of poverty simply don’t count poor white Appalachians as part of their tribe. As Elegy makes clear, it’s satisfying to imagine us as a different culture, even a different genetic specimen, than “good” white people. Just look at headlines proclaiming us to be “members of America’s forgotten tribe” if you want to understand how easy it is to naturalize this outlook. Both of these asinine positions, unfortunately, came to reshape Caudill’s thinking about Appalachia and its problems.
The same year that Moynihan completed his report, a new leader in the American eugenics movement emerged. “Is the quality of the U.S. population declining?” asked Stanford scientist William Shockley in a November 1965 edition of U.S. News and World Reports. After clarifying that he was not speaking of individuals who are “substantially retarded” and do “very little breeding,” Shockley explained, “The real cause of worry is people of somewhat higher ability but still, say, near the bottom of the population in the ability to reason and plan ahead…not only are they dull but they need help to survive. Most cannot advance and some are a threat to other people.”
Asked what role genetics played in high incidences of “Negroes on crime and welfare relief rolls,” Shockley answered that “if you look at the median Negro I.Q., it almost always turns out to be not as good as the median white I.Q….is there an imbalance in the reproduction of superior and inferior strains? This we do not know.” With the help of wealthy benefactors, Shockley would make it his mission to find out.
The L.A. Times wrote of him, “Shockley strayed well beyond the confines of established genetics into the shoals of eugenics. He suggested that welfare and relief programs prevented natural selection from killing off ‘the bottom of the population’: ‘with improvements to technology…inferior strains have increased chances for survival and reproduction at the same time birth control has tended to reduce family size among superior elements.’”
By the 1970s, Shockley had been largely disowned by the mainstream scientific community. Although he continued to advance his theories, he was incredibly sensitive to accusations that he was a racist. In 1974, for example, he debated the African American psychiatrist Frances Cress Welsing. It was a mortifying experience for Shockley in which he attempted to refute any racist underpinnings in his obsession with eugenics. He preferred to label himself a “raceologist,” an objective observer of the differences between races.
It’s here that we re-discover Caudill, disillusioned by the failures of the War on Poverty. Rather than stimulating the ambition of Appalachians, Caudill believed that a decade of government assistance had only rendered mountain people more complacent and dependent on social welfare. He became convinced this dependency had something to do with their defective genes. In Night Comes to the Cumberlands, shared ethnic ancestry within Appalachia gave the region a sense of romantic and noble mystery. A decade later it was, to Caudill, a source of the region’s woe.
BRAIN DRAIN
Caudill began to follow Shockley’s career closely, clipping newspaper articles about his work. In 1974, he sent Shockley a fan letter in which he confessed, “The poverty that is associated with our region is accompanied by passivity and dependence and I see no present hope for allaying it. I have come full circle in my thinking and have reluctantly concluded that the poverty that called into being the Appalachian Regional Commission is largely genetic in origin and is largely irreducible.”
By that point in his career, Shockley was openly advocating coercive sterilization for the “genetically unfit.” It appears that he saw in Caudill’s letter the potential to once again attempt to mitigate his racism by examining dysgenics, the spread of defective genes, in a predominately white population. Hoping to pilot a study that would legitimize his research and lead to federal funding for his sterilization program, Shockley agreed to meet Caudill in Kentucky to discuss the genetic fitness of white Appalachians.
The two men called their meeting the “Whitesburg Conference.” It took place at Caudill’s home and members of Shockley’s inner circle attended, including J.W. Kirkpatrick, a Ku Klux Klan financier, and Robert Travis Osborne, a segregationist. Their agenda, outlined earlier by Kirkpatrick, was to establish a pilot program in Whitesburg to “test a limited number of people representative of a group of a couple of generations of mountaineers with apparent low intelligence to determine if dysgenics is taking place.” There seemed to be little doubt among participants that the study would yield their desired results. If all went according to plan, Kirkpatrick shared, “the sterilization plan will be an outgrowth of the pilot program and can be implemented at some point after the pilot program has been completed and evaluated.”
“As I remember Harry Caudill repeated several times his grave concern that welfare programs in Appalachia which were intended to rehabilitate the people into more productive members of society were not going to be fruitful because of the brain drain,” Kilpatrick wrote. “If extensive research confirms that observation, then there should be drastic revisions in the projects for welfare and rehabilitation now being carried out…as well as further consideration to Dr. Shockley’s proposal of sterilization on a voluntary basis for money.”
After the conference, Caudill repeated his recommendations to Shockley in a follow-up letter. Apparently the people of Appalachia, although deemed unfit by Caudill, were intelligent enough to understand the often sinister purposes of intelligence testing because much of Caudill’s advice concerned how to not raise suspicions about the true nature of the study. “I suggested that we avoid the term ‘intelligence test’ simply because by doing so we might avoid some critical and troublesome newspaper publicity,” he wrote, identifying a particular county where people “are breeding down to idiocy.” He offered suggestions that sound very close to an endorsement of bribery to bring school officials on board by engaging them as paid consultants. This was, in essence, how much of the research in Hollow Folk took place as well.
Fortunately, funding for the study and subsequent sterilization programs did not materialize and Shockley and Caudill never met again. For some time, however, Caudill continued to correspond with Shockley and other eugenicists, including Nathaniel Hirsch. Caudill wrote to Hirsch months after the Whitesburg Conference that “during the Johnson years when anti-poverty programs were in vogue I once told a federal official that the best way to fight poverty would be to move an army camp into the region. My theory was that the soldiers would get the mountain girls pregnant to the everlasting benefit of the region as a whole. I still think the suggestion was sound.” One can believe he did indeed make such a remark. Night Comes to the Cumberlands is full of sexist descriptions of “rangy, narrow-minded, stubborn, and clannish” women who “continued to multiply with all the astounding efficiency which has marked their history in the Southern hills.”
It’s difficult to know what to make of Caudill’s early work in the region given his open association with eugenicists in his later life. Much in his correspondence with these individuals seems to indicate that he always felt this bias toward poor white mountaineers and simply adopted a more modern language, provided by dysgenics, to express his views. It isn’t hard to locate shadows of these beliefs in his older work. The Lexington-Herald Ledger revealed much of this correspondence publicly, drawn from Caudill’s personal papers housed at the University of Kentucky, during the fiftieth anniversary year of Night Comes to the Cumberlands in 2013. Caudill passed away in 1990, but his wife, Anne, called the publication of the c
orrespondence a deliberate attempt to “besmirch” her husband’s legacy by emphasizing a “minuscule” episode from his past.
Anne Caudill writes, “After further correspondence, he became dubious about the direction of the discourse and dropped it.” To put her framework in modern terms, Anne Caudill argued that her husband was simply engaging in the “marketplace of ideas” and, as part of his civic responsibility to his people, felt inclined to cast his net widely for solutions to their problems. Although she knew her husband better than we ever will or could, it must be noted that Harry Caudill wouldn’t be the last person to deflect a willingness to elevate problematic and dangerous theories in the service of encouraging self-help.
Shockley died an embarrassment in 1989, but certain aspects of his work and legacy live on. An organization called The Pioneer Fund provided financial assistance to Shockley’s non-profit Foundation for Research and Education of Eugenics and Dysgenics and publicized his work in white nationalist circles. Despite this wealthy benefactor, Shockley conducted surprisingly little scientific research and overspent his research grants on free speech crusades.
In the 1990s, The Pioneer Fund came under public scrutiny after it was revealed that a number of the sources used by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein for The Bell Curve were researchers affiliated with the organization. “Many of The Bell Curve’s most important assertions which establish casual links between IQ and social behavior, and IQ and race, are derived partially or totally from the Mankind Quarterly—Pioneer Fund scholarly circle,” wrote Charles Lane in the December 1994 issue of the New York Review of Books.
What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia Page 8