The new president had learned about the antipoverty discussions the day after the assassination, when Heller briefed him on his predecessor’s economic plans. Johnson quickly expressed interest in the initiative and instructed Heller to prepare a draft proposal. The informal Kennedy discussion group had evolved into an interdepartmental task force in October, but the conversations had produced little in the way of hard plans. Heller hurriedly pulled together a brief proposal for a small, experimental program of demonstration projects among carefully targeted groups, but when he and budget director Kermit Gordon presented the plan to the president in late December, Johnson declared it to be inadequate. The timid plan was not his kind of program. To the amazement of Heller and Gordon, the president wanted to put a poverty program in every community that wanted one and to bypass experimentation for direct action. The next day he announced to reporters that he would take up the fight against poverty in the next congressional session.48
Johnson’s motivation for making the antipoverty initiative a centerpiece in his Great Society agenda was as complex as the president himself. An old New Dealer, Johnson believed in government action to solve problems, and he had a strong, personal, if paternalistic, commitment to help the disadvantaged. Never an intellectual, he was uncomfortable around the liberal academics that Kennedy had welcomed into the White House, but he valued their respect and wanted to assert an image of himself as heir to Franklin Roosevelt. Above all, Johnson was the ultimate politician, who recognized the need to establish his own agenda while appearing to fulfill that of the slain president. More than the Kennedy advisors, Johnson understood the political benefits of government investment in local poverty programs, especially in the South, where white leaders were resisting federal civil rights pressures. Since Kennedy had not publicly announced a crusade against poverty, Johnson could present it as his own program. On January 8, 1964, in his first State of the Union address, Johnson declared “unconditional war on poverty in America” and appointed Kennedy’s brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver, to head a poverty task force to design a strategy for the campaign.
In the weeks following Kennedy’s assassination, political leaders from Appalachia continued to urge the new president to follow through on the Appalachian program as well. Governor Wally Barron of West Virginia wrote to Johnson soon after the funeral to familiarize him with the goals of the Conference of Appalachian Governors and the work of PARC. U.S. Representative Carl Perkins wrote his old friend about the problems facing his district in eastern Kentucky and recommended a program of public works similar to that being proposed by the Roosevelt commission. On December 13 Governor Breathitt, former governor Combs, Whisman, and Representative Perkins met with the president, recounted their conversations with Kennedy, and emphasized the need for action. Governor Barron sent a telegram to the president requesting a meeting with the Appalachian governors as soon as possible. On each occasion Johnson renewed his commitment to the program, but by the end of the year he still had not been formally briefed on the Appalachian initiative.49 John Sweeney, executive director of PARC, feared that these commitments still lacked “a passionate quality” rooted in Johnson’s own political agenda and that Johnson was committed to them only as part of the ex-president’s program.50
In the meantime PARC staff hurried to prepare the final draft of their report. A variety of special interest groups attempted to influence staff recommendations. Harry Caudill lobbied strongly for an organizational structure similar to that of the TVA and, along with the American Public Power Association, advocated the use of public funds to generate and sell electric power from water- and coal-powered generating plants that might be built in the region. The coal industry, upset with the relative paucity of attention given to coal resource development in early drafts, advocated greater infrastructure investment and the elimination of government policies it believed impeded the expansion of coal markets. The Forest Industries Council, while interested in making timber the centerpiece of Appalachian economic development, objected to recommendations that would establish cooperative timber development organizations in the region whose demonstration centers might compete with existing sawmills. Even the Bureau of the Budget objected to the proposed structure of the new commission, which it believed transferred too much authority to the states and impeded the president’s power to exercise responsibilities vested in him by the Constitution. PARC, however, resisted most of these lobbying efforts, and the final report adopted the majority of the ideas and strategies for a comprehensive development program that had been advocated by the Conference of Appalachian Governors since 1960.51
Appalachia: A Report by the President’s Appalachian Regional Commission was completed in February 1964, but political considerations delayed its release. Just as the Roosevelt commission was finishing its work, President Johnson and his aides were absorbed in planning for the 1964 presidential campaign, including preparations for the War on Poverty initiative. Sweeney and several Johnson advisors were concerned that the Appalachian program, now a holdover from the Kennedy administration, might appear to duplicate the new poverty program, and they favored delaying the release of the report until after the announcement of Johnson’s poverty initiative. Indeed, these concerns contributed to a greater emphasis in the final report on highways and other infrastructure than on health care, job training, education, and other human service programs. Whisman and other early advocates of the Appalachian program believed that investment in both the physical and human capacities of the region was essential to comprehensive development, but to distinguish the Appalachian program from the War on Poverty, PARC staff emphasized the long-term role of the new Appalachian commission in building public facilities for development while leaving the immediate goal of alleviating individual hardship to the new poverty agency. The Appalachian program, they argued, would not abandon its comprehensive development strategies but would initially emphasize infrastructure needs while coordinating its human development programs with those of the national poverty effort.52
Scheduling a date for the release of the report also proved to be complicated. Sweeney and his staff believed that the announcement of the Appalachian program should come only after Johnson’s declaration of the War on Poverty, and finding a day when the president, ten governors, and members of the commission could be present for the announcement was a challenge. The president’s staff hoped to schedule a meeting at the White House during the second week of April, but this failed because Undersecretary Roosevelt planned to be in India at that time. With concern mounting among the governors that the Eighty-eighth Congress might adjourn in July before any action could be taken on Appalachian legislation, Roosevelt presented the report to the president on April 9, 1964, before leaving for India and without a formal ceremony.
The PARC report described Appalachia as “a region apart,” a land of geographical diversity and natural wealth that lagged behind the rest of the nation in measures of economic growth. Defining Appalachia broadly to include both the urban centers and the rural areas of ten contiguous states, the report made the case for a regional approach to common problems of distress and for a special national commitment to address those problems. While the most severe distress was concentrated in the rural, interior counties, even the urban-industrial centers of the region lagged behind their national counterparts. The realities of deprivation across Appalachia, the report noted, were reflected in measures of income, housing, education, and employment. The lack of urbanization and years of exploitation of natural resources without a return of wealth to local communities had left the region’s development “retarded” and unable to support the kinds of “social overhead capital” necessary to succeed in a modern economy. Poor roads, poor schools, inadequate health care, dilapidated housing, insufficient community facilities, and weak institutions were the results of the failure of the normal process of development in Appalachia, what the report called “a record of insufficiency—a history of traditional acts not performed, of Americ
an patterns not fulfilled.”53
To redress this legacy of neglect, PARC proposed that “a coordinated and adequately funded and sustained effort” be undertaken to restore the region’s economic vitality. The commission recommended action on a regional investment strategy in four priority areas and proposed the creation of a permanent agency to implement the effort. Emphasizing the need for simultaneous investment in both human and economic resource development, PARC called for legislation to increase access to and within the region, establish programs to more fully utilize the region’s natural resources, construct facilities to control and exploit the abundant rainfall of Appalachia, and create programs to provide immediate improvements in human resources. A comprehensive approach to the region’s problems was necessary. “Only a balanced, coordinated series of programs,” it emphasized, “can achieve the goals of this Commission and of the region.”54
Included among the PARC proposals were recommendations for a major Appalachian development highway system, regional airports, flood control and sewage management facilities, programs for pasture improvement and cooperative timber marketing, recreational tourism development, research into coal utilization and power production, and funds for vocational schools, health centers, and housing. The report looked to pending antipoverty legislation to expand programs in job training, secondary education, adult literacy, medical care, nutrition, and other human services, but it requested additional funding for these special programs in Appalachia. To coordinate these efforts, PARC called for the creation of a new independent agency, the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC), which would organize state, federal, and private efforts to develop the region, encourage multistate collaboration, and foster local community development and planning.
Experience had shown, the report concluded, that “the unique tangle of problems in Appalachia call for a uniquely tailored program and that neither the States alone nor the Federal Government alone are adequate to this challenge which involves them both so closely.” Rather than recommending a single plan for Appalachia, therefore, the commission proposed immediate actions to “attack the central strands of the regional knot” and a mechanism for suggesting new actions and developing new programs in the future. “In the years ahead,” the report observed, “the Appalachian program will be many programs, unified only by their singleness of focus: the introduction of Appalachia and its people into fully active membership in the American society.”55
To assure continuity of effort between the submission of the report by PARC and congressional action to establish the new commission, PARC recommended that the organization of state and federal agency representatives created to draft the report itself continue. Prior to the establishment of a new unit, the PARC staff would sustain cooperation, further inventory the region’s resources, and prepare detailed plans for the new development highway system, new water projects, training programs, and other public facilities. Consequently, Sweeney, Whisman, Harry Boswell of Maryland, Paul Crabtree of West Virginia, and other core staff continued to refine the program even while the proposed legislation was being debated on Capitol Hill.
Shortly after the release of the PARC report, President Johnson fulfilled President Kennedy’s promise to visit Appalachia and to meet again with the Appalachian governors. On the afternoon of April 24, 1964, the president flew to Huntington, West Virginia, and greeted a delegation that included Governors Breathitt and Barron, Senators Jennings Randolph and Robert Byrd of West Virginia, Senator John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky, U.S. Representative Carl Perkins of Kentucky, and U.S. Representative Ken Hechler of West Virginia. The trip was hastily arranged after Johnson suddenly decided to rally support for his War on Poverty by making two “poverty trips” to publicize the need for pending legislation. The first trip included stops in the Midwest, Pittsburgh, and central Appalachia and provided an opportunity to meet with the Appalachian governors who had been pressing him to follow up on the PARC report. Undertaken as a strategy to gain political ground for his own antipoverty program and to fulfill a promise by his predecessor, the trip to Appalachia changed Johnson’s perspective on the region and energized his own commitment to passing an Appalachian bill.
From the Huntington airport, the First Family’s entourage traveled by helicopter to eastern Kentucky, where the president and Mrs. Johnson saw mountain poverty firsthand. Near Inez, in Martin County, they sat on the porch of an unemployed sawmill worker with eight children who survived on an income of four hundred dollars a year. In Paintsville they toured a job training facility for unemployed miners. Along the highway they greeted hundreds of schoolchildren, many in neat but well-worn clothes. The sights of poverty—barren and stripped hillsides, dilapidated housing, and poor roads—moved the president, and he promised to help the people of the mountains to become part of the Great Society. “We are not going to be satisfied,” he told a crowd on the courthouse steps in Paintsville, “until we have driven poverty underground, until we have found jobs for our people. We are not going to be satisfied until our people have decent housing, until our aged folks have medical care, until our people have equal rights.”56
The next day Johnson concluded his visit by meeting with the Council of Appalachian Governors in Huntington. Governors Tawes of Maryland, Sanders of Georgia, Sanford of North Carolina, Clement of Tennessee, and Harrison of Virginia joined Governors Breathitt and Barron in pressing the president for the Appalachian program. Only Governors George Wallace of Alabama and William Scranton of Pennsylvania were absent, and Governor Scranton had privately spoken to Johnson in favor of the bill at a Washington function a few days before. The president had come to Huntington to gather the governors’ support for his antipoverty legislation, but, according to John Sweeney, his attempts to talk about the War on Poverty were repeatedly shunted aside by the “unequivocal chirping” of the governors for the Appalachian program.57 Finally, the president declared his support for the Appalachian bill, but he wanted to delay any formal announcement until after the House Education and Labor Committee reported favorably on the Economic Opportunity Act (EOA), the antipoverty legislation. “No one expects,” Johnson told reporters as he left for Washington, “that this curse of centuries [poverty] can be wiped out in a few days or a few weeks or a few years. . . . But we intend to set the people of this region out on a bright highway of hope. . . . I hope to send a message to Congress in a few days to implement this program.”58
The administration delivered the Appalachian Regional Development Act (ARDA) to the Hill three days later, on April 28, 1964, but in the ensuing months, the act continued to flounder in the shadows of the War on Poverty and election-year politics. Sweeney and the PARC staff began to prepare draft legislation soon after the release of the PARC report. On the plane back to Washington after his meeting with the Appalachian governors, Johnson instructed Sweeney to work with Charles Schultze from the Bureau of the Budget to prepare an acceptable bill. Schultze had been part of Walter Heller’s original poverty discussion group and was concerned about both the scale and structure of the regional program. Sweeney assured the president that any legislation for Appalachia would concentrate, for the most part, on highways and infrastructure and would not interfere with any part of the poverty program currently before Congress.59
To avoid confusion with the EOA, the ARDA was submitted to the Senate and House public works committees rather than to the education and labor committees then considering the antipoverty legislation. The House began hearings on the bill in early May and the Senate in mid-June, but by July progress toward a vote had stalled. Both the House and the Senate were preoccupied in June and July with debates on the EOA and the Civil Rights Act and later with the political conventions and campaigns of the 1964 election. As the summer dragged on, supporters of the ARDA grew nervous that further delay would weaken the bill by opening the door to attacks from special interests.
The ARDA of 1964 contained most of the recommendations of the PARC report, and opponents of the bill quickly focu
sed on familiar criticisms: the structure of the new commission gave the federal government too much power in state affairs; the commission duplicated other federal programs and competed with private interests; there was no provision for generating public power for regional development; the program discriminated against other regions with conditions similar to those of Appalachia; and it would benefit more prosperous urban areas of the mountains as well as impoverished rural populations. Sweeney and other administration spokespersons were able to counter most of the criticisms by pointing to the uniqueness of the Appalachian problem, the need for region-wide planning, and the collaborative-federalist nature of the new commission, but one challenge proved more difficult.
The PARC report had recommended the creation of a federally chartered, mixed-ownership corporation to provide access to private money for local development projects. Although the Johnson administration supported the recommendation, many in Congress opposed it because it would have created a semi-independent agency outside normal legislative review. Many Republicans, moreover, objected to this proposed Appalachian development fund on the grounds that it unconstitutionally required government to become a stockholder in a private corporation. Indeed, Governor Scranton of Pennsylvania, a Republican, while strongly supporting the other recommendations of the PARC report, refused to sign the letter of transmittal by the Council of Appalachian Governors at the beginning of the report and instead submitted his own letter of endorsement, opposing the mixed-ownership corporation.60 Many in Congress also opposed this concept on the ground that “funds should be provided through legislative appropriation channels subject to congressional oversight” rather than through a permanent, independent corporation.61 Eventually, the administration dropped the development corporation idea, leaving the subsequent agency perpetually dependent on congressional reauthorization for funding.
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