Interestingly, the Council’s first attempt to reform Appalachia happened not in the Southern mountains but in a Northern metropolis. Responding to concerns such as those outlined by Bodnar, the CSM, at the behest of the Mayor’s Friendly Relations Committee of Cincinnati,11 conducted its first “urban workshop” in 1959. Designed to acquaint city officials, social service workers, and the police with their new Appalachian neighbors, the urban workshops introduced urban professionals to a dysfunctional culture ill suited to city life. According to the historian Bruce Tucker, urban workshop speakers “described a society weak in institutional structures, lacking in political and social cohesion, deprived of material resources, and burdened by archaic family and religious customs.” Of the many criticisms offered by workshop speakers, two of the more significant were Appalachians’ “environmental circumstances,” which city workers needed to understand in order to “help . . . the mountain migrant,” and the notion that their highly individualistic, family-oriented culture prevented them, as one workshop speaker claimed, from realizing that “voluntary cooperation [was] required for urban living.” In short, Appalachians had no real sense of community. Overcoming these archaic burdens to community involvement, both in the city and in the mountains, became the goal of later-twentieth-century Appalachian reform. Because the source of the trouble was Appalachia, reformers looked to the mountains, hoping to change mountaineers before their inevitable arrival in the nation’s cities.12
Complementing the urban workshops, which stressed the “weak institutional structures” of mountaineers and reinforced the notion of an isolated Appalachia, were other sources, including major national newspapers and the Council itself, that reflected the belief in an urban-pluralist solution to mountain poverty. Writing in October 1963, the New York Times reporter Homer Bigart, in an article that reputedly motivated President Kennedy to lay the foundation of what would become the War on Poverty, exposed the poor housing, inadequate educational facilities, and, perhaps most important, the “native clannishness” that made mountaineers’ “adjustment to urban life painfully difficult.” Though he recognized corruption in local government, inadequate services, and chronic unemployment, Bigart concluded that the people, more than the social, political, and economic structures, needed a transformation.13
Commonly called Ayer’s “call to partnership,” the Council’s strategy closely resembled the pluralist theory that dominated the thinking of so many postwar Americans. Ayer argued that, in the mountains, every action had a “social consequence.” It was the Council’s job, he continued, to “bring together and relat[e] in effective cooperation all the positive interests and efforts in the area.” In that sense, Ayer considered the Council to be a coordinating body, not an action program, ensuring that all mountain citizens—individual and corporate—operated “in such a way that the quality of living [would be] improved in the area.” Far from naive concerning the devastating effects of the extractive industries, Ayer nonetheless sought to enlist them in his reform efforts. By representing a unified front of Appalachian interests, the Council of the Southern Mountains could increase the level of knowledge about mountain issues at all levels of society and influence potential government legislation and the resultant action.14
Ayer’s ideas about community development closely resembled the Council’s original “Program for the Mountains” outlined in 1925 in the very first issue of the organization’s official publication, Mountain Life and Work. Focusing on a “cooperative community development” idea, Ayer’s program too called for improved educational, recreational, and health facilities as well as enhanced economic opportunity for mountaineers.15 His conception of the Council and his conviction of what form welfare should take demonstrated how the organization sought to aid needy mountaineers. At the same time, he hoped to alter, or at least limit the adverse effects of, industrialization in the coalfields. Rooted in notions of traditional communal relationships, the “call to partnership” implored those with the time and resources to act selflessly for the benefit of the entire Appalachian South. Defined in terms of economic self-sufficiency, an egalitarian social structure, and the people’s “rel[iance] upon themselves and their neighbors for both the necessities and pleasures of life,” this traditional community ideal guided Ayer’s Council of the Southern Mountains.16
Religious principles, moreover, were fundamental to the CSM’s desire to effect positive change. These principles were, however, tempered by a strong sense of humanism and communal responsibility. The Council of the Southern Mountains, Ayer wrote to George Bidstrup, the director of the John C. Campbell Folk School, “serves the Appalachian South in a religiously motivated fellowship which has united leaders and efforts of almost every conceivable interest and diversity in one common cause.” It was essential “that the basic principles of religion and humanitarianism be kept alive and dominant in both policy and practice.” To Council members, these basic religious tenets and motivations did not imply the missionary zeal commonly attributed to them. Rather, the Council called on people—the wealthy, business interests, local and national governments, and even ordinary mountain residents—to work for Appalachian improvement. “Education and better living,” the Council member W. Ross Baley told the West Virginia Hillbilly, “are not the sole province of the church.”17
This religiously influenced, communal view placed the Council of the Southern Mountains squarely in line with other reform agents of the early 1960s, including the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Speaking for that organization, James Lawson, a civil rights leader from Nashville, declared that the SNCC “affirm[ed] the philosophy or religious ideal of nonviolence as the foundation of our purpose, the presupposition of our faith, and the manner of our action.” Part of the Judeo-Christian heritage, nonviolence sought “a social order of justice permeated by love. . . . Integration of human endeavor represents the crucial first step towards such a society. . . . Mutual regard cancels enmity. Justice for all overthrows injustice. The redemptive community supersedes systems of gross social immorality. . . . By appealing to conscience and standing on the moral nature of human existence, nonviolence nurtures the atmosphere in which reconciliation and justice become actual possibilities.”18 Substitute cooperation or partnership for nonviolence, and the philosophies of SNCC and the CSM are strikingly similar.
At its annual conference, the CSM promoted its own conception of a “redemptive community” in the Southern mountains. It recruited new members, educated those already active, and presented a united front in the battle against Appalachian poverty. Topics discussed at these yearly gatherings centered on educational concerns, health issues, and the recreational needs of mountain children. Interestingly, the broad base of participation envisioned by the Council provided the foundation for the organization’s reform efforts in the middle of the decade. Participation in the conferences was not limited to dues-paying members of the CSM; anyone believed able to contribute to the knowledge and understanding of the region received an invitation. Included in this group were governors, congressmen, and local college students, the latter because the Council had begun to attract the interest of an increasing number of young people. One young 1960 conference participant discovered: “I was not the only one interested in medicine and the nursing needs of mountain people. [The conference] helped me to really see where my people need my help the most.”19
Perhaps more significant, the conferences created a dialogue between the CSM and the federal government. Following John F. Kennedy’s promise of another “New Deal” for the depressed areas of Appalachia during the West Virginia primary of 1960 and the creation of the Area Redevelopment Administration (ARA) in May 1961, the Council actively sought federal participation in its programs. Calling on Kennedy to attend the fiftieth annual conference in 1962, the governor of Kentucky, Bert T. Combs, on behalf of the CSM, urged the president to openly support an organization that lived up to the challenge in his inaugural address: “Ask not what your count
ry can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” In its efforts to gain a presidential visit, the Council of the Southern Mountains won the support of many influential legislators, such as Congressman Carl Perkins of Kentucky’s eastern mountain district and Senator John Sherman Cooper, as well as of William Batt, the chief executive of the ARA. Perhaps most significant, the Council established a link with the politician most responsible for the reform efforts of the 1960s—Lyndon Baines Johnson, Kennedy’s vice president.20
Beyond the personal connections, finances remained a priority for the Council of the Southern Mountains, and the federal government’s seemingly growing financial commitment, as illustrated by the nascent ARA, to aid depressed areas, especially Appalachia, made a relationship with Washington extremely attractive. Despite the Council’s disadvantageous position, however, the mountain reformers refused to allow the national government to assume control over its efforts or to establish a simple charity approach to aid depressed areas. “I cannot bear the impression,” Ayer wrote to Assistant Secretary of State Brooks Hays, “that we are idle and helpless until saved by others.” Just because the people needed help, it did not follow that they should be seen as mere pawns by any group, including the CSM. Not the states, and not the Council, declared the CSM staff member Milton Ogle, but the people themselves “will have to assume the final responsibility of executing any program for regional betterment.” Part of that burden, again, was the coordination of all attempts to improve the lot of impoverished Appalachians. “We operate on the theory,” the executive director asserted, “that neither welfare nor education nor health interests nor economic development nor federal assumption of responsibility can . . . adequately meet the needs of this area . . . without adequate knowledge of and voluntary coordination with all other efforts at work in the same cause.”21 In Council members’ eyes, the CSM was the best-equipped vehicle to coordinate the activities of governments, churches, schools, and other mountain interests.
This open orientation, coupled with the desire to avoid a program of charity, significantly influenced Council membership, the activities of the organization, and its conception of welfare. It permitted the Council to actively solicit the support of those entities, such as extractive industries, that some believed were responsible for many of the region’s problems and required the membership to push the bounds of Southern mores. Recognizing that the coal industry was the backbone of the economy in most central Appalachian counties, and in adherence to its inclusive philosophy, the Council of the Southern Mountains hoped to minimize the destructive tendencies of mining by bringing operators to the discussion table under the banner of “humanitarian concerns.” Because membership in the Council meant acceptance of its philosophy—that of acting for the good of all in the region—coal companies who joined essentially promised to aid mountain reform. It was on the basis of this conception that Ayer solicited memberships from Island Creek Coal, the Turner-Elkhorn Mining Company, the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, and the American Electric Power Company of New York. At the same time, the CSM advocated measures to make mining a feasible means of making a living. His stance on strip mining, for example, highlighted the delicate balance that Ayer hoped to strike between the concerns of coal operators and the need for jobs in central Appalachia. Though he favored stronger anti-strip-mining legislation in the state, Ayer feared that, if only Kentucky, or only any one state, for that matter, passed such a law, the result would penalize that particular state and further encourage the “continu[ed] destruction of the countryside” in the others. Thus, he concluded, for strip-mining legislation to be effective, all political divisions in the central coalfields needed to be put aside and all interested parties would have to act in concert. The Council also hoped to attract the cooperation of operators by supporting the protection of jobs, reduced freight rates for and research on new uses for coal, and eminent domain for coal pipelines. Unfortunately, this drive appeared to be less successful than hoped. As late as 1964, Ayer lamented the “lack of people from private industry” participating in discussions about Appalachia’s problems. The Council, nevertheless, continued to believe throughout the decade that it could influence private interests to act on behalf of even the poorest mountaineer.22
In terms of Southern attitudes toward civil rights, Ayer’s belief that the Council remain open to all turned into a strong integrationist stance. According to Loyal Jones, the Council’s assistant executive secretary, when, in late 1963, Ayer learned that the Asheville, North Carolina, hotel that was to serve as the 1964 conference headquarters practiced segregation, he “hit the ciling [sic].” Using a segregated facility, Jones asserted, would be “compromising our principles.”23
Perhaps the most significant consequence of the open-door policy and its insistence that the people be involved in each reform effort was the Council’s emerging conception of welfare. Reminiscent of New Deal concerns over dependency, this, more than any other facet of the Council’s program, belied a purely charity orientation. In a statement to the CSM Board of Directors, Council leaders revealed their concern for both the plight of the mountaineer and what they feared was the Kennedy administration’s attitude toward aid. “There was never a time in our history of this country and the Appalachian South,” Ayer declared in 1963, “when so many people were in such great need—need of education appropriate to the time, need of earning opportunity, need of hope and realistic aspiration, need of leadership which involves them in the process of their own salvation versus an insidious and growing system of paternal care which results in greater and greater dependency—than at this moment.”24
Ayer’s appeal for responsible welfare was not limited to the Board of Directors. Invitations to the 1962 annual conference again went out to national officials, including those to Commerce Secretary Luther Hodges and Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Abraham Ribicoff, and revealed his apprehensions that the federal government would usurp the Council’s role in the region. After the two administration officials declined their invitations, an irritated Ayer wrote to Brooks Hays, complaining that he could not “understand how they can be as concerned as they are about revitalizing the impoverished masses . . . and not jump at this opportunity to discuss some of their principles.” After all, the Council had banded together “with the express purpose” of working at this very task “in partnership with the government rather than in a continuing state of dependency upon [it].” For his part, Hays agreed with Ayer’s argument that public assistance needed to be linked with efforts at “individual improvement in order to promote individual self-respect.”25
Failing with the executive branch, Ayer turned his attention toward Kentucky’s congressional delegation. Writing to Senator John Sherman Cooper and Congressman Carl Perkins, Ayer once more broached the subject of federally initiated aid to depressed areas. If Kennedy failed to include individual responsibility in his reform efforts, Ayer feared, he wrote Cooper, that, “inadvertently, we will give relief which merely keeps the carcass alive but erodes character.” Believing that rural development must begin with “people development,” Ayer called on Cooper to ask that a program that addressed the educational needs of a woefully undereducated Appalachian population be added to federal relief programs. Reiterating these ideas to John Whisman of the Eastern Kentucky Regional Planning Commission, the CSM leader argued: “Whatever we do must involve great numbers of individuals and must be something by means of which they can regain some of their individual value and independence, and not merely [create] a palliative situation.”26
The Council, moreover, was not content to just criticize or make suggestions. It backed up its words with ideas and plans for a comprehensive mountain aid package. First, Council leaders sought, through workshops and speeches at their conferences, to inspire young people from the mountains “to prepare themselves for service” in the Appalachian region. This, they reasoned, would stem migration north and help end welfare dependency. By creating a dedicated core of native mounta
ineers willing to work for solutions to the region’s problems, the Council would realize its hopes for a program that restored dignity and a sense of self-worth. Second, the CSM requested a grant from the Social Security Administration to initiate a project that would prove the viability of a broad welfare concept utilizing human development along with economic aid. Rather than offering simply a monthly check and a periodic visit from a social worker, the Council of the Southern Mountains sought to use a number of people, such as county extension agents, public health nurses, and county school officials, to establish an aid program that truly helped mountaineers. While the county agent would help welfare recipients improve home gardens, the nurse would teach sanitary techniques and birth control, and the schools would conduct classes geared toward making the undereducated more employable. This type of program, the CSM believed, would have three results: mountaineers would realize better living conditions; welfare recipients would face greater prospects for employment; and, most important, children, witnessing that education was the key to success, would gain the necessary motivation to stay in school.27
While the CSM itself lacked funds to administer such massive assistance measures on its own, it did what it could to help individual mountaineers, and it was in this way that it most resembled a charitable organization. Because of its many connections throughout the southern Appalachians, the Council facilitated the dissemination of donated material, such as clothes, vitamins, and shoes, to needy mountaineers. While less concerned with these types of handout efforts, the CSM still became the pipeline through which charitable donations flowed. It was not, in most cases, the entity that actually distributed the goods, but it did match requests from individual families or churches in the region with offers from the outside. Prior to the War on Poverty, for example, the Council helped distribute shoes and clothes to a family in Mount Sterling, Kentucky, and vitamins and toothpaste to Wise County, Virginia.28
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