by Steven Stoll
In Stone Age Economics (1974), Sahlins contended that hunter-gatherers enjoyed greater plenty and leisure than those who struggled to subsist under capitalism. His chapter “The Original Affluent Society” riffed on the title of one of the most popular books written by an economist, John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society (1958). Sahlins based his conclusions on fieldwork he conducted in Fiji and Hawaii. His project was to turn the entire notion of affluence on its head.
One-third to one-half of humanity are said to go to bed hungry every night. In the Old Stone Age the fraction must have been much smaller. This is the era of hunger unprecedented. Now, in the time of the greatest technical power, is starvation an institution. Reverse another venerable formula: the amount of hunger increases relatively and absolutely with the evolution of culture … This paradox is my whole point. Hunters and gatherers have by force of circumstances an objectively low standard of living. But taken as their objective, and given their adequate means of production, all the people’s material wants usually can be easily satisfied. The evolution of economy has known, then, two contradictory movements: enriching but at the same time impoverishing, appropriating in relation to nature but expropriating in relation to man … The world’s most primitive people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization. It has grown with civilization, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation—that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo.
He overstated his point. Stone Age hunter-gatherers lived in every imaginable climatic condition. They sometimes died of cold and starvation, punctuated by periods of warmth and abundance. There is no simple moral we can draw from a period of 3 million years. But in Sahlins’s litany we hear the voices of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Paine (in Agrarian Justice), Karl Polanyi, Karl Marx, and A. V. Chayanov. We see the argument made by back-to-the-land advocates like Helen and Scott Nearing. And we find the essence of what would emerge as the study of economic anthropology and political ecology. One of the basic insights of political ecology is that poverty is not the lack of things that people had never known but a social relation in which people are deprived of the means of subsistence.17
A more subtle indictment appeared in 1971, one that comes closer to the problems embedded in economic development. Its author was James P. Grant, who had just finished a term as assistant administrator of the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID. Writing in Foreign Affairs, Grant warned of “a new phenomenon in the developing world … marginal men,” or people with no clear pathway to employment as they reached adulthood. The number of unemployed in Latin America had doubled from 1950 to 1956 to 11.1 percent, with up to 20 percent “increasingly common” elsewhere in the world. An apparent surge in population terrified policymakers and inspired books like Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb, published in 1968.
Grant worried. The rich in the poor countries benefited at the expense of the poor. The foreign luxury goods they bought sent currency to the rich countries. Nothing seemed to work to employ the rising masses at steady wages. Even attempts at manufacturing backfired. Grant saw textiles and shoes from struggling nations arriving in the United States, where they competed with domestic products. The 1970s now seems like a distant epoch, before American corporations moved their factories to China and Mexico. Back then, domestic manufacturers responded to less expensive imports by pressing on American workers to accept lower wages. Unions demanded tariffs that would make the foreign products more expensive, limit consumption, and protect their jobs. Both trends resulted in diminished exports from the poor countries and more unemployment.18
Grant wondered if smallholders could exist side by side with industrial agriculture, in enclaves where peasants would plant Green Revolution seeds: “The same economic forces active in industry in such countries as Mexico, India and Pakistan are subsidizing tractors and combines which are displacing the agricultural laborer. As an alternative to the rapid mechanization of agriculture, several countries have developed a system of agriculture centered on small-holders able to use the new seed varieties, small machinery and fertilizer, demonstrating that it can be profitable and create more jobs.” This was once the stated goal of the foundations that initiated the Green Revolution. Grant suggested that they return to policy objectives that they had left behind. Unlike Grant, however, the scientists and administrators behind IR-8 understood the technological and economic demands of the seeds themselves. They fully believed that new seeds called for new farmers. Finally, Grant referred to Green Revolution varieties as labor intensive, meaning that they would employ more people. He was right, in a sense, but the technological “package” in which the seeds found their way into the ground included tractors and combines. Miracle wheat and rice turned out to be energy intensive. They used more petroleum fuel and less human muscle than any plants before in human history.19
Grant’s essay suggests something that seems to have been commonplace among well-meaning experts of his time. He looked for a way that would have allowed smallholders to function within or alongside high-modernist farming. His overall solution to the problem of employment and poverty consisted of foreign investment, leading to wage-earning industries and exports, leading to higher standards of living, even though he knew that contradictions within the global economy made that outcome unlikely. Not every development policy has reflected the assumptions of capitalism. But the dominant view of the World Bank and other international lenders holds that poverty comes from economic isolation and that development brings peasants into a mutually beneficial relationship with the larger world through commodity production. But poverty has also come from the forced inclusion of smallholders in the global economy, from colonial extraction, structured indebtedness, and dispossession. Nonetheless, most development thought insists that the poor and hungry of the world—people who once took care of most of their own needs by farming and trading in once robust environments—will be saved by somewhat different versions of the same thinking that made them poor in the first place.
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AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT THEORY turned from matters abroad to those of the southern mountains in the 1960s. Here it confronted the same problem of using the assumptions of capitalism to solve problems created by capitalism. Extractive industry caused the diminution of its own basis. Labor demanded a greater share of the profit from the looting. Both sides were equally dependent on a single economically volatile and environmentally destructive commodity. By 1910, fewer than twenty years after William MacCorkle invited the coal and lumber companies to take what they wanted, West Virginia fell into a recession that predicted the Great Depression. Coal from Indiana, Southern Illinois, and Nova Scotia, regions with proximity to heavy industry or coastal cities, increasingly competed with the West Virginia product. Locomotives that burned diesel fuel reduced demand; so did more efficient boilers. Railroad expansion slowed down. Lower prices might have increased demand for coal, but that didn’t happen. When profits fell, companies cut wages and closed mines.
People who had been pulled out of the hollows ten or twenty or thirty years before found themselves scrounging around for something to eat and dry wood to burn in their tar paper shacks. The rush of industry had created some infrastructure, but bridges and houses thrown up hastily in the 1880s began to rot just when wages disappeared. Boom times returned briefly during the First World War, but it now looks like a reprieve before the slide into the unemployment and poverty that Eleanor Roosevelt saw when she visited Scotts Run a decade later. A few miners found homes in New Deal projects like Arthurdale, but many others left.20 The activist and journalist Anna Rochester described the ones who remained. “On such farms,” she wrote in 1940, “poor soils, poor livestock, poor seed, p
oor tools combine to hold down the productivity of the family’s labour … Extreme poverty, comparable to that of the poorest sharecropper, is all that the ‘self-sufficing’ farm can provide.”21
Even the black market in whiskey came under attack. The Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution made alcohol production illegal and brought federal agents to Appalachia. In December 1922, a posse of officers entered what The New York Times called the “rocky fastness” of Menifee County, Kentucky. They carried automatic rifles, pistols, and shotguns and had the goal of arresting the person or persons who had shot an agent ten times the day before, killing him. The moonshiners had shotguns of their own, loaded with nails and screws. They lived in caves and underground caverns where the evidence of their distilleries could not be detected. They were engaged in a kind of civil war in the hills between centralized and decentralized order, a never-ending Whiskey Rebellion that had at its core one of the last forms of household production available to many. In this particular battle, moonshiners and officers of the law fired two hundred rounds. When an agent died after being shot in the neck, the government men retreated. The Twenty-First Amendment ended Prohibition in 1933, but the people of the mountains were no better for it.22
Industrial work returned after the Second World War, but mining camps had not improved much since 1900. Many shanties had no running water. Only 45 percent of homes in central Appalachia had indoor plumbing in 1960. Seventy percent were heated with wood or coal. By the end of the decade, even with legislation related to the War on Poverty in effect, 17.8 percent of households throughout Appalachia lived without enough food and in substandard housing. The gap between the mountains and the lowlands had never seemed wider, and it inspired writers to explain it.23
One of the most important works published after the Depression drew attention to the persistence of human suffering in Appalachia and gave context to a region apparently neglected by the United States. In Night Comes to the Cumberlands (1962), the journalist Harry Caudill relied on the old language of strangeness in isolation, calling mountain people “as cynical, hardened and bitter a lot as can be imagined outside prison walls … illiterate, uncouth and hard-drinking.” He dwelled on their superstitions and familiarity with the devil, all suggesting that they existed outside Christian civilization. The historian John Alexander Williams argues that Caudill’s view worked against his better intentions. Stereotypical grotesqueness “gave readers permission to blame the mountain people themselves for their circumstances.”
I think more highly of Night Comes to the Cumberlands. Caudill captured the allure of the first mining camps (“Alabaster Cities”) and the people’s hopes for a higher standard of living. He followed the story into the immiseration of industrial life through the Depression and into the 1950s, condemning the “iron clutch of absentee corporations” and the arbitrary exercise of their power. After the book’s publication, Caudill kept Appalachia before the public, informing those with no sense of the hardship of seasonal employment, “This is what happens to a great industrial population when you abandon it, give it just enough food to keep it alive and tell it to go to hell.” He also gave one of the first descriptions of the environmental devastation of strip mining. “Masses of shattered stone, shale, slate and dirt are cast pell-mell down the hillside. The first to go are the thin remaining layer of fertile topsoil and such trees as still find sustenance in it. The uprooted trees are flung down the slopes by the first cut.”24
Night Comes to the Cumberlands and other reporting in newspapers and magazines spurred politicians to back reform. In November 1963, The New York Times announced, “U.S. Reveals Plan to Fight Appalachian Poverty.” Appalachia became the basis for a domestic development project, an infusion of money and attention into the southern mountains. Its bureaucratic title was the Appalachian Regional Commission. ARC strengthened the power of the people who operated it. Its top-down ethos stressed development on the largest scale with the conceit, popular among planners, that highway construction, commercial forestry, hydroelectric dams, and incentives for cattle ranchers would be good for everyone who lived in the mountains. Some of what ARC brought was good for them. It brought badly needed jobs. And it created an army of young volunteers from within the mountains that served as a regional peace corps. But ARC left unanswered the larger question of what happens to a region when its major industry sputters and disappears, only to reappear again when conditions favor it.25
The Commission’s first report announced stagnation and helplessness rather than offering a historical account of dispossession and immiseration, as Caudill did. “Graphs and tables can hardly relate the acutely personal story of a child in a remote valley, his horizons of opportunity limited to the enclosing hills; nor the despair of his father, who, idled by forces beyond his control and seeing no prospect of future employment, must live month in and month out with the vision of that child repeating his own history.” The Commission did not interpret Appalachia as a countryside like others in the United States, where people also struggled, but as an almost incomprehensible exception. “For in much of Appalachia, ‘rural’ comes with a difference; the rural scene is in fact unique. Rural in Appalachia does not mean a checkerboard of rich farms; instead, dense but narrow ribbons of bleak habitation wind along the valley roads and up the tributary hollows.” The report conceived of Appalachia as degenerate and left behind, and although the people had fallen into penury under extractive industry, it seemed that nothing but extractive industry could save them.26
John Gaventa countered this view with scholarly eloquence and political fearlessness, speaking directly to the Appalachian Regional Commission. After attending Vanderbilt University and completing a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford University, he joined the Highlander Research and Educational Center in New Market, Tennessee, in 1976. Highlander was founded during the Depression to teach social justice and civil rights. It educated a generation of activists, including Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. For four years, Gaventa and Bill Horton (with a team of more than sixty researchers) compiled a report on the concentration of land in eighty counties, covering 20 million acres, spanning six states. They revealed that coal-company capital brought stagnation, not human betterment. They revealed a correlation between corporate control and inadequate housing. Banks in coal counties couldn’t invest in home construction or other local improvements because the greater share of their deposits belonged to the companies. No sooner did that capital flow in than it flowed out, depriving banks of funds stable enough for community lending. As for the land, absentee individuals and corporations owned 75 percent of the survey area and 80 percent of the mineral acreage. Fifty private owners and ten government agencies owned 41 percent of the 20 million acres covered by the study.27
Citizens might have elected county and state officials to represent their interests. They might have imposed a referendum system to bypass a legislature in hock to the coal companies, as citizens did in California to circumvent the influence of the Southern Pacific Railroad. But that’s not what happened. Like the three stunned men in the story by G. D. McNeill who had grown up on Big Black, only to confront the obliteration of their childhood landscape, the people of Appalachia often lacked the institutional pathways for real redress and true representation.
In Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley (1982), Gaventa argued that the Appalachian Regional Commission, the agency created to further the region’s “development,” furthered the powerlessness of its people. One tactic involved offering a non-choice between candidates who offered a non-challenge to the existing order. In the Clear Fork Valley of northern Tennessee, ARC claimed to take on the problem of poverty and underdevelopment. But as Gaventa writes, “When confronted as to why the development district for sixteen east Tennessee counties had not dealt with problems caused by the corporate coal owners, its director replied, ‘The local election is coming up. That’s where you ought to be working to get your concerns represented.’” In
fact, ARC officials insisted on this stillborn process even though everyone involved knew that nothing would come of it. They knew that the declining authority of county boards meant that local government lacked the ways and means to improve local conditions.28
ARC did put people to work. It did reduce poverty throughout the region. Poverty fell by 4.2 percent between 1960 and 2000 relative to counties that did not receive federal money. It fell by 10 percent relative to a baseline set in 1960. Per capita income increased 4 percent faster in counties receiving aid than in those that did not. As recently as 2009, the World Bank praised ARC’s first report. More households acquired telephone service and plumbing. Fewer of them heated with coal and wood. But these gains were modest and uneven. Unemployment in 2000 was about the same as it was in 1970. Historians have remarked not about how much ARC accomplished, but how little. “If the 1965 act was so successful,” two scholars ask, “why does poverty persist in Appalachia?29
One reason might be that ARC regarded Appalachia as an underdeveloped country in need of foreign direct investment. The highways built under ARC made millions of acres accessible for mountaintop-removal mining, though extraction on that scale buries towns, poisons watersheds, and creates a landscape that looks more like the surface of Mercury than West Virginia—all this in order to return dividends to shareholders who would never see the effects of their investments. As the historian Paul Salstrom concludes, “To sacrifice a region’s economic base for short-term gains reveals a tragically deficient conception of the economy, conjoined in this case with almost total outside control.” Another reason simply comes down to an overreliance on a single volatile commodity. Coal has never delivered and will never deliver stability. The people who mine it and sell it will always feel every bump and plunge in its price. ARC did nothing to change Appalachia’s dependence on coal. On the contrary, its economic vision steadfastly refused to look beyond it.30