Under pressure from the governors, Whisman, Sweeney, and the commission staff eventually worked out a compromise that retained the essential elements of the growth center strategy but provided political flexibility for state ARC offices to invest in nonmetropolitan areas. Conceding that Perroux’s central argument about the relationship between growth poles and hinterlands focused on the “fields of economic forces” of development rather than on a discrete point in geographic space, the planners devised a three-tiered model that permitted agency funds to flow to midsize cities and towns that lay along the developmental axes between metropolitan centers and rural hinterlands. This policy allowed the states to determine their own growth areas as defined by existing public services and labor market commuting patterns. In central Appalachia, these growth areas included clusters of smaller cities organized with surrounding rural counties into sixty local or area development districts. When connected to larger urban centers by good highways and transportation facilities, these second-tier cities could provide employment and services for remote hinterland populations within a fifty-mile radius, thus creating an integrated regional development plan within a larger national development system.9
As a result of this compromise between the technicians and the politicians, county seats and clusters of communities with populations over seven thousand became the focus of ARC development efforts. In addition to regional metropolitan centers, smaller municipalities such as Pikeville, Prestonsburg, Hazard, Asheville, Beckley, Johnson City, Parkersburg, and Bristol were now eligible to receive funding for water and sewer lines, industrial site access roads, and other infrastructure development projects. Categorical grants for education and health would be given priority to improve the labor pool in these communities and to expand their role as regional service centers. Although the states were encouraged to concentrate their “human capital” investments in these high potential growth areas, the ARC code also permitted investments in health and vocational education infrastructure in more remote areas to enable the rural population to take advantage of the services and job opportunities to be developed in the growth centers. In fact, between 1965 and 1969, the commission allocated about 40 percent of its nonhighway funds to health and education projects in the rural hinterlands and concentrated the remainder in designated growth areas.10
The compromise over growth center policy allowed governors greater discretion in distributing ARC funds within their states, and it preserved the theory of growth pole development important to Washington bureaucrats. On one hand, the policy fulfilled the congressional mandate to invest in areas of greatest potential for growth and maintained the core-periphery concept of development between urban and rural places within Appalachia. On the other hand, by concentrating ARC resources in the smaller cities and expanding “big road” communities (while channeling limited assistance to severely distressed rural areas), the strategy also met the political needs of the governors, who benefited more from public expenditures in the voter-rich and politically powerful county seats than in remote rural communities.
Implicit in the ARC growth center strategy, of course, was the assumption that urban life represented the ultimate goal of regional development. For Widner and other senior professionals at the commission, economic growth was directly related to urbanization. As he explained at an ARC committee meeting in New York in 1967, “The progress of an area’s economy depends to a very large extent upon the ability to provide the necessary range of services and concentration of labor force required by modern enterprise. In general, as an area’s economy grows, it does so slowly until it reaches a critical mass of services, training, labor force, and public and private capital, all of which is vital to support most modern enterprise in an area.” At some stage, when such concentrations have built up, he added, “the costs of congestion also builds up, and development pushes outward into the surrounding hinterlands.”11
“The brutal truth,” Widner told Harper’s in 1968, “is that America now has only two choices: either (a) urbanization or (b) urbanization.” This meant that those working to improve the quality of life in Appalachia must give up “the old American dream . . . that [we] might return somehow to the pastoral life in country villages and small farms.” It also meant that little, dying towns in the mountains must “be encouraged to die faster” and that millions of rural mountaineers would “have to move away from their creek bottom corn patches and played-out mineheads.”12 They could migrate either to already overcrowded metropolitan areas, a prospect the ARC hoped to minimize, or to carefully planned, medium-size cities within or near the region.
Widner believed that, if the mountains were to keep pace with the rest of the country, the goal of development in Appalachia must be to “induce some degree of urbanization” in a region “substantially under-urbanized.” As late as 1970, a staff report to the commission suggested that the Appalachian program could achieve this objective by strengthening selectively those “urban centers, either existing or to be created, which on the basis of performance, location, and potential are the most likely ones to grow in urban service employment.”13 For northern Appalachia and extreme southern Appalachia, this meant the encouragement of growth and development of ARC counties near existing metropolitan centers, but for the Blue Ridge and central Appalachia, it meant the depopulation of rural communities and the movement of populations into selected growth areas that served as extensions of distant urban centers.
These two less urbanized parts of Appalachia would be developed to play alternative roles in a modern economy. The Blue Ridge and the Great Smoky Mountains, located between the large cities of the East Coast and the Midwest, would become “the playground of the future for metropolitan millions who live on either side,” and the Cumberland Plateau would be given over to natural resource development, its surplus labor force encouraged to move to “new towns” constructed along the Appalachian corridor highways or to commute to branch manufacturing plants in the smaller towns and villages. Extremely rural and remote counties would receive few ARC funds. In adopting this modified growth center strategy for the development of Appalachia, the commission staff assumed that the automobile and other technology had drastically changed the conditions under which rural people lived in the modern world and that rural parts of Appalachia had to adjust to this change. In the future, fewer people would be employed in agriculture and mining and more in manufacturing and service trades. In addition, thanks to the automobile and to the proposed Appalachian corridor highway system, people would be able to “reach jobs and services each day 20 miles or so away.”14
ARC investments in the most rural parts of Appalachia were therefore designed to prepare mountain people for life in the modern consumer world, if not to encourage them to migrate to distant cities or nearby growth areas. Despite that in central Appalachia fewer than one in six people lived in communities of more than 2,500, the objective of ARC development in the mountain heartland was to “accelerate urbanization” through improvements in transportation, health, and education.15 By investing public resources in health care, technical training, and higher education facilities, the commission hoped to build a skilled labor force that might attract new industries to the region, but it recognized that such investments might also “equip young people to leave the region for other parts of the country where economic opportunities were more attractive.”16 By constructing a modern transportation network and upgrading the Appalachian labor force, the ARC hoped to integrate the mountains and mountain people more directly into an emerging urban society.
Like the War on Poverty, the ARC was an experiment in social and economic change, rooted in prevailing assumptions about the modernization process itself. Highways and urban development were assumed to be the catalysts for prosperity, and science and technology provided the formula for success. Commission staff members were quick to apply the latest systems theory to the analysis of regional problems and to the adoption of intervention strategies. “Appalachia,” Ralph Widn
er admitted to a group of Washington DC engineers, “is something of a laboratory in which a new set of political, social, and economic principles is being tested pragmatically, but within the framework of our constitutional political system.”17
Although both the professional planners and the politicians agreed that the motivation for the experiment was growth, they frequently disagreed on how best to attain it. As ARC administrators acknowledged, Appalachia’s problems were more than technological. Achieving consensus in the political sphere would become a recurring challenge, and by the early 1970s, even the technicians conceded that “modernization of state and local governments in the region had to be encouraged.”18 The commission would have less success, however, in altering tax policies, encouraging democratic leadership, reforming public institutions, and confronting corruption than in bringing the facade of a modern economy to the mountains.
At its core, of course, the ARC was a political organization, and as such it responded to the vagaries of personality, partisanship, and power. Congress had rejected the model of a public corporation for the Appalachian program in favor of establishing a state-federal cooperative agency. Unlike the TVA, which possessed autonomous power to manage physical resources in the Tennessee River watershed, the ARC was designed as a comprehensive development organization responsible to the president, to thirteen governors, and ultimately to Congress. At every level of the ARC policy-making and planning processes, differences in values, philosophy, and self-interest intersected to influence programs and administrative strategies.
Theoretically, projects were to be proposed at the local level by area development districts, passed along to the state’s governor’s office for approval, and endorsed by the other governors and by the federal cochair, who represented the president. A jointly funded staff led by an executive director would then administer grants from funds appropriated by Congress. The ARC structure was more democratic than that of other federal agencies, although critics pointed out that the local development districts that initiated projects were not broadly representative or participatory and that Congress restricted funding to categorical grants in specific areas and occasionally attached allocations for special projects in the districts of powerful legislators.
During the early years of the program, funding levels and enthusiasm for the initiative minimized policy disputes within the organization. Following the compromise over growth center strategies, the states, the federal cochair’s office, and the Washington-based staff worked together aggressively to implement the annual billion-dollar regional development strategy. By 1970 the commission had authorized the construction of almost 2,500 miles of the Appalachian Development Highway System and over 500 miles of access roads for airports, industrial sites, and schools. Although 80 percent of total ARC appropriations were designated for highway construction, between $200 million and $300 million annually was set aside during this period for nonhighway projects. In addition to funding water and sewer, mine reclamation (primarily in Pennsylvania), and solid waste projects, the commission provided supplemental funding to help construct 269 health facilities, 174 community colleges, and almost 300 vocational schools.19
In its first four years of operation, the ARC gained a reputation in Washington for getting things done quickly by cutting through established bureaucratic procedures and making resources available to initiate funding from other agencies. The commission’s seventy-person staff of planners, direct access to the governors, and system of local development districts composed of elected officials provided a structure for coordinating multiagency responses to crises and complex projects. This was especially evident after the tragic collapse of the Silver Bridge across the Ohio River in 1967. By rapidly bringing together the personnel of transportation and public works committees from the states involved (Ohio and West Virginia) and pressuring the Army Corp of Engineers, the ARC staff was able to begin the reconstruction of the bridge within three weeks. Normal bureaucratic procedures would have taken up to six years.20
The best example of ARC capacity, energy, and goals during these early years, however, was the Pikeville cut-through project in Pike County, Kentucky. Pikeville was one of the designated growth centers in eastern Kentucky. Although it was the hub of central Appalachian banking and coal interests, it was plagued by almost annual flooding of the downtown business district from the waters of the Levisa Fork of the Big Sandy River. Pikeville was located on a narrow neck of land formed by a loop in the river, and the main line of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad ran right through the middle of the town. Beginning in 1969, the ARC coordinated an effort involving fourteen government agencies to reroute the river through a massive cut in the mountainside to get the waterway, the railroad, and the highway out of the downtown area and open the recovered land to urban redevelopment. The commission initiated the early planning and engineering studies and facilitated the efforts of state and local officials—led by Pikeville mayor William Hambley—to garner federal construction funds. In 1970 the City of Pikeville received the first of more than $21 million of federal grants for the cut-through project, which rivaled the building of the Panama Canal in the amount of earth that had to be removed. The railroad tunnel under the mountain opened in 1978, the river relocation was completed in 1980, and the new highway was opened in 1987.21 By the turn of the century, as a result in part of the efforts of the ARC, Pikeville had grown into a modern, comprehensive service center.
The role of the ARC as a catalyst for planning and interagency cooperation increasingly engaged the agency in program expansion. As challenges to the War on Poverty began to undercut the OEO and led to its eventual demise, the ARC placed greater emphasis on human capacity development as part of its comprehensive mission. In 1968 Congress authorized the commission to provide technical assistance to local governments and nonprofit organizations that wished to apply for federal housing grants, and the agency launched a major initiative to improve early childhood development and nutrition programs. With the election of Richard Nixon to the presidency, the commission responded to the new emphasis on revenue sharing by facilitating gubernatorial interest in preschool education, occupational rehabilitation, and job training. The 1969 and 1971 acts reauthorizing the ARC extended its flexibility even more by allowing demonstration grants for program operations in work-related areas of health care and education.22
The Nixon administration at first expressed little interest in the ARC, giving rise to fears that it might be abolished along with other Kennedy-Johnson initiatives, but after meeting with the Appalachian governors in Louisville on his way to the baseball All-Star Game in St. Louis, the president endorsed the agency as an example of his new federalism. Adopting a strategy that would save the commission from several subsequent efforts to kill it, the governors convinced Nixon that the ARC was a model of state-federal cooperation, a unique agency that received bipartisan support in both the region and Congress. The elimination of specific funding categories for nonhighway allocations in the 1971 reauthorization act, moreover, provided the governors with more flexible funding in the form of block grants, free from the controls of state legislatures. The Appalachian highway program relieved pressure on state transportation funds to build expensive mountain highways, increasing the resources available for other parts of the state, and the governors wielded almost unlimited power to distribute ARC nonhighway funds allocated for their states.
In 1971 President Nixon appointed Donald W. Whitehead as the federal cochair of the ARC. Whitehead was a Massachusetts lawyer and had been northeast field director for Nixon’s 1968 campaign. He had come to the commission in 1970 as general counsel with little knowledge of the region or of the ARC. A forceful and assertive leader, Whitehead became a strong advocate for the agency in an administration consumed first by the Vietnam War and later by Watergate. During his six years at the ARC, he pressed the governors to commit to a single regional development plan rather than to thirteen state plans, and he oversaw a major reorganization of the
commission itself. However, his self-confident style and his tendency to see the ARC as just another Washington line agency rather than a federal-state collaborative stirred tension within the commission, especially among some of the senior staff.
Since 1965 the ARC had evolved as a bureaucracy, complete with competing personalities and loyalties. The staff of young professionals, mostly from the Washington area, had grown in confidence and ability to manage projects in the ever changing political environment of the states. By the early 1970s, the governors’ enthusiasm for fighting poverty in Appalachia had waned, and the frequent turnover of their ARC alternates and representatives hindered continuity in programming and reduced the level of long-range planning for development. The Washington-based ARC staff provided the only region-wide and systemic perspective to the commission process. John Whisman embodied the institutional memory of the agency and, with the decline of involvement of the governors, acquired increasing power as the states’ representative on the ARC executive committee.
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