Uneven Ground

by Ronald D. Eller

  Nowhere were these cultural conflicts more apparent than in the schools. Opportunities for formal education were limited in the mountains, and there were few incentives for the children of coal miners to complete school. Consequently, some migrant families placed little value on school attendance and performance. In the mountains, children were given greater freedom to roam and play with friends, but in city streets and schools, such activities led to trouble and delinquency. Appalachian children often lagged behind fellow students in academic achievement and were shy and reticent in the classroom. Many urban teachers had difficulty understanding Appalachian dialects and knew little of mountain culture and heritage, except for popular stereotypes. Students were quick to recognize condescension toward themselves, their families, and their culture. Parents had little experience with bureaucracies and were reluctant to become involved in the schools and in community improvement organizations. It is not surprising that dropout rates were higher among Appalachian students than among other urban groups.34

  Nevertheless, despite economic and cultural barriers, a majority of migrants eventually made successful transitions to urban life. Those same factors that made them different in the new setting—cultural traditions and strong family ties—also provided strength and support to overcome adversity. Migrants who brought higher levels of education or some technical skills to the city were among the first to achieve stable employment and upward mobility. In time, thousands of fellow migrants followed them into the middle-class suburbs, becoming part of a growing, invisible minority of urban Appalachians. A study of West Virginia migrants in Cleveland in the mid-1960s found more former mountain residents living in the suburbs than in the Appalachian ghetto.35 Certainly the folks back home in the mountains were conscious of this success, since they continued to leave for the cities in growing numbers.

  It was the inner-city ghettos, however, that attracted the attention of journalists and drew the concern of local officials and social welfare professionals to the plight of the Appalachian migrants. As early as the 1950s, some urban governments began to organize special study commissions and to hold workshops to address the problems created by the great migration. In 1954, for example, the Mayor’s Friendly Relations Committee and the Social Service Association of Greater Cincinnati sponsored a special workshop that focused on migrants in that city. The workshop was attended by over two hundred social workers, teachers, personnel managers, city officials, and church and civic leaders and featured a lecture on the southern Appalachian people by a sociology professor from Berea College.36

  Near the end of the decade, the Council of the Southern Mountains (CSM), a Berea-based association of educators and social workers, began to hold workshops in cities across the Midwest to help northern professionals “gain a better understanding of the mountain people and their background.” With funding from the Ford Foundation, the council established a network of civic leaders from Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Akron, Columbus, Dayton, and Cincinnati who traveled to Berea for a three-week training course and a tour of the region. These efforts not only helped to organize programs to improve the “urban adjustment of southern Appalachian migrants” but increasingly drew national attention to the worsening economic crisis in the mountains.37

  As larger numbers of families joined the exodus from Appalachia, community leaders, educators, and politicians in the region began to struggle with the loss of population and deteriorating economic conditions. The emigration of young adults that began during the war reached its peak in the 1950s, when more than a million people left the region. Rural communities throughout the mountains experienced population decline, but the losses in central Appalachia were especially severe. Eastern Kentucky suffered a loss of a quarter of a million residents in the 1940s, and West Virginia exceeded this number over the next decade with a net loss of more than 400,000 residents. Together the two states lost 1.2 million people between 1940 and 1960. The losses during the 1950s in Appalachian Kentucky accounted for almost 35 percent of the population in eastern Kentucky. The loss rate in West Virginia was more than 25 percent.38

  The rates of population decline were even more alarming given the traditionally high birth rates in Appalachia and the expanding population in the rest of the country. Birth rates in the mountains had long exceeded the national average. Throughout most of the first half of the twentieth century, natural population increases had helped to balance emigration, but in 1957 birth rates in southern Appalachia began to decline. By 1960 migration out of the region exceeded the natural increase by more than 12 percent, and in Kentucky the figure was almost 50 percent. Nor was the population decline of the 1950s limited to rural areas, as it had been in the 1940s. Appalachian small towns and growth centers such as Huntington, Charleston, Knoxville, and Asheville also lost population during a decade when other metropolitan areas in the United States were growing and the national population increased by almost 20 percent.39

  The movement of people out of Appalachia was a symptom of the deeper economic and social problems that had settled over the region in the years since the Depression. The mechanization of coal mining displaced thousands of families in the coalfields, but unemployment, poverty, and welfare dependence became a way of life in communities throughout the region. The decline of farming, for example, pushed families off the land across most of Appalachia. Mountain agriculture had languished since the turn of the century, when industrialization altered traditional land use practices and local market patterns. After the war, this decline continued at an even more rapid pace. Between 1950 and 1960, half of the farmers and farm laborers in Appalachia left the land. By the end of the decade, only about 6 percent of the mountain population was employed full time in agriculture.40

  The loss of the farm population in the 1950s completed the region’s transformation to public work that had begun at the turn of the century. The number of full-time farmers was drastically reduced as some people fled the region and others searched for part-time work off the farm. With the coming of consumer society and the emergence of national marketing networks, many of the familiar elements of the old family farm were replaced by symbols of the new age. Orchards and beehives, mules and milk cows gave way to store-bought goods, tractors, trucks, and automobiles. The once prominent livestock industry all but disappeared with the elimination of woodlands for pasturage as a result of mining, logging, and absentee land ownership. Now more dependent on row cropping, most mountain farms were unable to compete with larger, flatland farms for national markets.

  In 1954 only one in three Appalachian farms had running water and indoor plumbing, but over half had access to an automobile, and 92 percent had electricity. Because the mountain terrain was less conducive to the operation of tractors and other modern farm machinery, only about a third of the farms had tractors. The primary cash crop in many mountain counties was tobacco, which was labor intensive and could be raised on an acre or two of bottomland, but even this crop was dependent on government quotas to maintain market prices. The average southern Appalachian farm at midcentury contained less than eighty-one acres, with only fifteen acres of productive cropland. In the more rugged areas, from southern West Virginia through western North Carolina, the average was less than fifty-five acres.41

  In some counties the movement off the land in the 1950s was so profound that it almost eliminated farming altogether. Forty counties in eastern Kentucky and West Virginia lost more than 70 percent of their farm population. Leslie County, Kentucky, lost 98 percent of its farmers and was left with only 20 full-time farms at the end of the decade. Harlan County, Kentucky, with a population of 51,000, had only 112 farmers, a loss of 82 percent. Mingo County, West Virginia, was left with only 32 full-time farmers; McDowell County, West Virginia, with 40; and Logan County, West Virginia, with 66. Even heavily agricultural counties in the Blue Ridge suffered major losses of the farm population. Ashe and Madison counties in North Carolina lost more than 2,000 farms each, and the number of farmers in Swain County was r
educed by 80 percent. Carter and Campbell counties in Tennessee each lost about 40 percent of their full-time farms.42

  Many traditional forms of off-farm employment in Appalachia declined as well during the 1950s, including logging, furniture manufacturing, railroads, and textile production.43 Although the number of manufacturing establishments increased in northern Alabama and in some metropolitan areas of Georgia and North Carolina, rural Appalachian counties as a whole did not benefit from the expanding national business climate of the Eisenhower years and fell even further behind the nation and the non-Appalachian portions of their states. Eastern Kentucky, for example, failed by a considerable margin to keep pace with manufacturing growth both in Kentucky and in the nation as a whole. Between 1950 and 1955, manufacturing employment increased by almost 20 percent in Kentucky but by only 2 percent in eastern Kentucky. Of the thirty-five counties in the eastern portion of Kentucky, only six employed five hundred persons or more in manufacturing, and more than half of all the manufacturing jobs in the region were located in the industrialized Ashland area.44 The number of manufacturing establishments in West Virginia increased by only 8 percent in the 1950s, and in southwest Virginia (including the valley counties) by only 15 percent.45

  As a result of the limited growth of manufacturing in the region and declining employment opportunities in the mines and mills, unemployment increased dramatically throughout Appalachia. Official unemployment rates for the region hovered at almost twice the national average, and in the coalfields rates of three and four times that of the rest of the nation were common. Eastern Kentucky averaged close to 20 percent unemployment throughout the decade, and this did not include the thousands of individuals who had used up their unemployment benefits and simply dropped out of the labor force. Many more worked part time or in jobs not covered by unemployment compensation.

  Those who could find jobs often earned low wages and poor benefits. Annual per capita income in Appalachia averaged only $1,400 in 1960, more than a third lower than the national average, and many rural counties averaged less than $1,000. In Appalachian Kentucky the average annual per capita income was only $841. One in three families in Appalachia lived below the national poverty level of $3,000, in comparison with one in five families nationally. Almost 60 percent of families in Appalachian Kentucky, 42 percent of those in Appalachian Virginia, 40 percent of those in Appalachian North Carolina, and 39 percent of those in Appalachian Tennessee fell below the poverty level.46

  Low per capita income reflected a labor force that was largely uneducated. Despite decades of industrial development, schools in Appalachia were among the poorest in the nation. Only one in three Appalachians in 1960 over the age of twenty-five had finished high school, and almost 47 percent had less than an eighth-grade education. Only 17 percent in Kentucky had completed high school, 23 percent in Virginia, and 29 percent in North Carolina.47 Thousands of mountain children, especially in rural districts, were educated in graying, one- or two-room schoolhouses. Many lacked running water, central heat, and indoor toilets. School districts were often the largest employers in rural counties, and the schools became the political fiefdoms of local power brokers. Jobs as teachers, secretaries, and maintenance workers were doled out according to patronage rather than individual qualifications. Teachers were often uncertified, facilities allowed to deteriorate, and books and instructional materials scarce. Per pupil expenditures for education in Appalachia were about half those in the rest of the country.48 Levies on local property provided the bulk of financial support for the schools, but per capita assessments on property in the mountains averaged 38 percent less than comparable national assessments.49

  Joblessness, low income, and poor education were reflected in depressed living standards throughout the region. At a time when suburban middle-class families were enjoying new homes with washing machines, televisions, showers, telephones, and other modern conveniences, many Appalachian families survived in aging houses with few amenities in rural areas or deteriorating company towns. At least 26 percent of Appalachian homes surveyed in the 1960 census needed “major repairs,” and 7.5 percent were “in such a dilapidated condition that they endangered the health and safety of the families,” more than one and a half times the national average. The best housing conditions were to be found in the metropolitan areas of the region, and the worst in the rural areas and neglected coal camps. Here almost one out of four homes had basic deficiencies in construction and plumbing, and one out of ten was found to be dilapidated. Almost 60 percent of the housing units in eastern Kentucky lacked indoor plumbing, 57 percent in Appalachian Virginia, and nearly 50 percent in western North Carolina. The median value of such housing was 27.7 percent below the national average.50

  At the turn of the century, mountain families had traded the simple but relatively independent life of the family farm for dependence on a wage income in mines, mill villages, and other forms of public work. When those jobs disappeared, that dependence shifted to the state and federal governments as public welfare programs stepped in to prevent starvation and destitution. Federal relief programs of one kind or another supported almost half of the mountain population in the 1930s, but the deepening economic crisis of the 1950s further expanded welfare rolls and altered the fundamental character of dependence. During the Depression, public relief was viewed as a temporary measure that provided support until jobs opened again in the private sector. Except for Social Security, which extended benefits to the aged and disabled, the majority of New Deal relief strategies were work-related programs designed to provide assistance in return for labor on public projects. Most of these programs disappeared during the war, as war mobilization and an expanding national economy created new jobs.

  By the 1950s, however, after three decades of declining job opportunities, many Appalachian families lost hope of ever finding work in their own communities, and an increasing number reluctantly turned to public assistance for survival. State governments attempted to respond to rising joblessness in their mountain counties by broadening qualifications for state-administered programs for the poor. Thousands of desperate families applied for disability benefits and Aid to Families with Dependent Children. In the coalfields retired union miners and their widows welcomed small pensions from the UMWA Health and Retirement Funds, while nonunion and middle-aged miners, unable to find employment anywhere, submitted disability claims for old injuries or new illnesses. On the first of each month, county seats and rural commodity distribution centers bustled with long lines of haggard men waiting to receive surplus food. A family of two adults and one or more children with a monthly income of $130 or less could receive twenty pounds of flour, ten pounds of cornmeal, nine pounds of rice, four pounds of butter, and ten pounds of cheese on which to sustain themselves.51

  The new welfare system became a way of life for some mountain residents, who felt powerless to change their situation. A few justified their dependence by arguing that they had earned the benefits during earlier working years and were now entitled to the grants. Others were ashamed to be on the dole but believed that they had no other choice. Although government programs and handouts never reached most of the region’s poor, the rush to claim public assistance gave rise to the image of the “welfare malingerer” who searched for ways to falsify symptoms of illness to qualify for assistance. But most welfare recipients were desperate, and they saw the government grants as just another way to survive. “Nothing in the history of the mountain people,” wrote eastern Kentucky lawyer and historian Harry Caudill, “had conditioned them to receive such grants with gratitude or to use them with restraint. In a land in which huge corporations and their friends on judicial bench and in legislative hall had reduced the ordinary citizen to a status little better than that of a mere tenant-by-sufferance in his own home, the mountaineer had nurtured a cynicism toward government at all levels. The handouts were speedily recognized as a lode from which dollars could be mined more easily than from any coal seam.”52

  It w
as perhaps inevitable that such a system would feed the already corrupt and feudal political structure in the mountains. Poor people easily fell victim to local politicians who controlled the distribution of commodities and monthly welfare checks. Mountain politics had always been paternalistic and family oriented, and when the big coal and timber corporations injected greater economic self-interest into the system, the old ways simply blended with the new political order. Years of life in company towns left many mountain residents dependent on the companies for their income and housing and thus subservient to company interests at the polls. As the outside corporations abandoned direct involvement in local politics and lost interest in the company towns, power in these feudal counties reverted to local families and to the political machines that sustained them. New Deal work programs were a boon to the local elite, who used federal relief programs to ensure their control over county politics. Depression-era politicians throughout the region held out the promise of a public job in return for the votes of the applicant and his or her kin.

  The expansion of welfare programs in the 1950s revived this powerful patronage system and helped to broaden the power of the political machines. Artful use of public funds could control not only who received food and income for their families but which truck mine operator received a new road up the hollow to his mine and who was employed as a schoolteacher, bus driver, cook, or janitor in the local school. With such economic power, the politicians increased their influence over local merchants, automobile dealers, contractors, and other small-business owners, creating a network of political and economic interests where a few individuals controlled the meager resources available to the entire community. In rural counties where a single family gained control of the county school board and the county government, domination was virtually complete.