In terms of health education, Ayer sponsored the “talking transparent women,” a traveling exhibit that taught about the inner workings of the human female. In June 1960, he dedicated $1,000 of CSM operating revenue to enable a health “field worker” to travel through eastern Kentucky in order to conduct health education lessons. Further, in May 1962, the Council helped host a “health fair” in Wolfe County, Kentucky. At this event, physicians tested for various diseases and administered inoculations to those who needed them. Additionally, there were demonstrations of proper food preparation and first aid along with advice on creating and adhering to a household budget.29
Members of the Council also fostered civic improvements in their own hometowns. This reflected one of the Council’s most important goals in the area of community development—creating local leadership. As part of its overall emphasis on educational and health improvements, the Council concentrated most of its efforts in or near the larger towns, including Hazard and London, in eastern Kentucky. In Laurel County, Council members worked to expand the county library and to improve the local hospital. They conducted a general “clean-up campaign” and a drive to administer the Sabin oral polio vaccine. Moreover, in the county seat, London, CSM members pushed for street repair and improvements to nearby Levi Jackson State Park. Similarly, in Perry County, Council members worked for a new health center, street and sidewalk improvements, and an upgraded sewage disposal plant.30
Underlying this somewhat limited activity was the ubiquitous lack of funds and an awareness of some of the fundamental problems in Appalachia. Though corporations provided the CSM with some revenue, the majority of its funding came from the Ford Foundation and the philanthropic Appalachian Fund. In November 1961, the Appalachian Fund announced a grant of $24,000 to the Council. According to the agreement, the CSM had to use nearly half this total ($10,000) for “economic development” and devote another $7,500 to health education. For its part, in January 1961 the Ford Foundation issued the Council of the Southern Mountains $35,000 to participate in the foundation’s “Great Cities–Gray Areas” program. Similar to the urban workshops, this project was supposed to help Appalachian out-migrants, mostly those displaced by the mechanization of the coal mines, who had relocated to Northern cities in search of work. Essentially, the Ford Foundation believed that these transplanted mountaineers, the “fightin’, feudin’, Southern hillbillies and their shootin’ cousins,” as the Chicago Sunday Tribune called them, were the cause of many of the urban problems in the North. In short, it hoped that the CSM could inform mayors, city councils, and government service agencies how to deal with their new, “culturally unique” residents.31
Working with the Gray Areas project may have been more problematic than it was worth. Not only did it draw Council efforts away from the mountains, but the incongruity of the maladjusted mountaineer in an urban ghetto posed a serious question for many in the CSM. Though many, from Bodnar to Harrington, had posed the question, the Gray Areas effort, more than any other, forced the CSM to actively face the issue of a dysfunctional Appalachian culture. Were Appalachians culturally unique? Why did they migrate? What more could be done to halt the flow north? In short, the Council had to ask itself one basic, fundamental question, one that it had not actually confronted thus far: What was the source of Appalachian poverty, and what was the best way of ending it?
After witnessing the unemployment caused by the combined effects of mechanization and the concomitant decline in the demand for coal for over a decade, Ayer and the CSM reasoned: “If opportunities could be made more available locally, many trained young people would stay here in the mountains and contribute their abilities to making a better life for those around them.”32 This conclusion presented the Council of the Southern Mountains with two tasks: creating opportunities and training young people. While one Council enthusiast advocated the development of a tourism industry along with a concerted effort to lobby the federal government to build defense contractor plants in eastern Kentucky, Ayer chose another path, one that allowed the Council to remain focused on areas in which it was already active—education and urban migration.33
Perhaps influenced by Eli Cohen, the executive secretary of the National Committee on Employment of Youth, who spoke before the CSM annual conference in 1961, Ayer tended to think that a strong commitment to educational improvement in Appalachian Kentucky would create the trained workforce that attracted industry. According to Cohen, whose address underscored the observations made by such commentators as Bodnar, the technological revolution of the postwar era was “drying up economic opportunity for rural youth” on the farm. Unfortunately, technological advancements also hurt the prospects for gainful employment in manufacturing. Available research indicated that “rural youngsters will be forced to decide between staying in rural areas and operating farms with net yearly incomes of less than $1500 or migrating to urban communities for employment for which most will be unprepared.”34
Implicit in Cohen’s analysis was the inadequacy of the rural mountaineers’ lifestyle, echoing a nearly century-old explanation of Appalachian poverty and “otherness.” Advancements in technology in the post–World War II era had rendered rural Appalachians “contemporary ancestors.” This label, first used in 1899 by the Berea College president William Goodell Frost, implied that the region’s rugged terrain had sheltered mountain residents from the influence of modern America and led to their destitution because of how their culture had evolved within the confines of the Appalachian Mountains. As a result, Appalachian residents, particularly those removed from the more urban county seats, retained their allegedly pure Scots-Irish heritage, their strict allegiance to family and clan, and folkways unchanged from frontier or Elizabethan times. This deviant culture, then, contributed to their impoverishment because of the way it conflicted with mainstream American notions of individualism, progress, and acquisitiveness. Ironically, the Council of the Southern Mountains, with its publication of Jack Weller’s Yesterday’s People in 1963, became yet another purveyor of the image of the Southern highlands as a culturally unique and backward region.35
Though faced with, and actually part of, a long history that blamed Appalachia and Appalachians for the region’s problems, the Council did realize the tremendous obstacle that it had to overcome. Any attempt to create a trained workforce in the mountains, the Council then thought, would effectively eliminate the derogatory label ancestors, create employment opportunities, and, finally, attract industry. All these potential results, however, hinged on improving education in the mountains, and the CSM had two alternatives at its disposal. The first of these called into question the efficacy of the school systems themselves. While one Council supporter alerted the organization’s leadership to “irregularities” in the Pike County school superintendent’s office, other education reform advocates, including important Council administrators, went further. Writing to the noted Appalachian novelist Harriette Arnow in 1961, the Council’s assistant executive director, Loyal Jones, broached the subject of education, stating: “With our local county set up we still have the crookedness, graft, and poor instruction which Kentucky has been saddled with for so many years.” Jones reiterated this sentiment to Allen Trout of the Louisville Courier-Journal. “I am pretty sure that most . . . people do not really understand the political situation here in Kentucky and some of the other mountain states,” he declared, “and cannot really understand why we do not do things better than we do.”36
At the heart of these political problems was the way in which local school officials attempted to manipulate and control their employees. More often than not, the most qualified instructors departed the mountains, not just because of inadequate salaries, a Council newsletter claimed, but because the political machines endeavored to control their votes. Teachers will not be part of a system, the article concluded, “which demands either their votes or their jobs.” In Perry County, Kentucky, the Council member Grazia Combs reported, the “schools are staffed with
untrained teachers and are kept there by the superintendents who want to perpetuate their tenure in office rather then educate the kids. Every major problem concerning education in Eastern Kentucky can be traced to politics of the very lowest order. Superintendents do not want competent people . . . ; they want . . . ‘permit’ teachers . . . who can deliver the votes of all the kinfolks on the creek in return for the ‘permit.’” Though the region badly needed qualified teachers, they would continue to be difficult to get “until we are able to do something about the type of leadership that is found in the county seats.”37
Competing with the view that identified political corruption as the source of the trouble were theories of the educational psychology of mountain children. Charles Drake, a Berea alumnus who went on to graduate school in education at Harvard University, carried a tremendous amount of influence with Perley Ayer and popularized these concepts in the CSM. While at Harvard, Drake uncovered research suggesting that mountain children experienced normal mental growth until about age six, when they entered elementary school. It was at this point, the study discovered, that their intellectual development began to slow down dramatically. Thus, the report determined, it was the school environment that influenced their ability to learn. If the schools were improved, Drake suggested, educational progress would result.38
Perhaps the combined influence of Drake and Cohen was enough to persuade Ayer to select the educational psychology paradigm as pinpointing the source of Appalachia’s problems. More probably, it was the way in which the recommendations of these two complemented Ayer’s cooperative philosophy that convinced the CSM leader to adopt this particular explanation. In any case, by accepting the reasoning of Drake and Cohen, Ayer made what was in the long term perhaps his most significant mistake. Rather than adopt a more combative or confrontational stance against the mounting evidence of malfeasance in the eastern Kentucky school systems—much of which was produced by Council members themselves, including the associate director, Jones—Ayer adhered to his conviction that all people “could be approached and touched by reason and right and that they would respond.” As a result, the Council began to move toward a position that identified Appalachian culture, and the poor educational system that it fostered, as the source of the mountaineers’ impoverishment.39
Following an established pattern, Ayer was not content simply to define a problem. Action needed to follow definition, and other Council members felt the same way. In 1961, Stuart Faber, a member of the Board of Directors, expressed his fear that the Council of the Southern Mountains was nothing more than a conference sponsor. Ayer himself, a couple of years later, admonished the Board to “get serious and dedicate yourself or quit.”40
Ayer, for his part, refused to quit. Utilizing Drake’s connections in Massachusetts, the Council of the Southern Mountains embarked on a drive to make tangible improvements to the educational environment of Appalachian children. Supporting this venture were the good works of the people of Boston and Harvard University. In early 1961, shortly after President Kennedy suggested the establishment of a “Peace Corps,” an international service organization of the federal government that would send skilled, educated Americans to underdeveloped countries, Harvard students organized their own “Peace Team” for similar purposes. Drake contacted them with the hopes of persuading them to begin a book drive for central Appalachia. By providing better reading material in mountain schools, Drake believed, the educational level of the children would soon be elevated, and this would make a significant contribution to solving mountain problems. At its Board of Directors meeting that February, the CSM readily endorsed the proposed book project. According to the minutes of the meeting, the Board maintained that the book drive would improve on the “limited cultural experience” of rural Appalachian schoolchildren. In addition to the Harvard students’ efforts, Boston’s “Lend-a-Hand” Society also sent books to southern Appalachian schools.41
Response to the book drive in the counties in which the CSM worked was equally favorable. According to Loyal Jones, Rockcastle County, Kentucky, was an excellent starting point for the undertaking because those in charge of the schools there seemed “to have the good of their children at heart.” Further, students at Caney Creek Junior College (renamed Alice Lloyd Junior College in 1962) at Pippa Passes, Knott County, Kentucky, volunteered their time to distribute donated books. Marie Turner, the school superintendent of Breathitt County, Kentucky, willingly accepted books as well. To the east, across the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River, the Council member W. R. “Pop” Baley instituted “Operation Bookstrap” in Welch, McDowell County, West Virginia. Baley agreed with the environmental critique of mountain education outlined by Drake. He sought to have indigent mountain children improve their lives by enhancing their educational situation; the children would pull themselves up by their “bookstraps.”42
Additional Council efforts supplemented the book project. In April, for example, Dr. Louis Armstrong, the director of the Indian Springs School, Helena, Alabama, conducted a CSM-sponsored “youth workshop” at which he discussed the educational goals of the CSM. Of particular concern to Armstrong were the “great problems of bridging the gap between the group which has the knowledge, techniques, and skills and those who do not.” Second, the CSM community development specialist, Milton Ogle, in conjunction with the University of Kentucky’s rural sociology program, sought to “maximize economic, social and personal development . . . [in mountain neighborhoods] through group action.” Again, the CSM stressed its partnership approach. The Council required the development specialist to cooperate with “existing organizational leadership” with the goal of “encouraging community organization for self-improvement,” which included adult education classes, public health work, and local leadership seminars.43
Keeping contact with the federal government alive, the Council of the Southern Mountains not only asked the Kennedys to deliver the first load of books for Operation Bookstrap but also, in a move that reinforced the perception of Appalachian backwardness, requested the presence of Peace Corps volunteers in the mountains. Actually, the Council hoped for the establishment of a domestic version of the organization that would operate in the southern Appalachians. At the end of 1962, the Council addressed Attorney General Robert Kennedy and his proposed National Service Corps (NSC) directly. This “was a pet project of Robert Kennedy” and exactly what the Council wanted. Kennedy envisioned the service corps to be a domestic type of Peace Corps. NSC volunteers would, after a brief training period, “work for a year in areas where human services were in critically short supply.”44
Not surprising, the Council’s request received a welcome response from Richard Boone, a sociologist in the U.S. Justice Department, whose assignment was to make the NSC a reality. Boone believed that NSC projects should be “conceived by local people and leave behind men and women capable of carrying on by themselves” after the NSC had completed its mission. Recognizing how the philosophy of the Council of the Southern Mountains coincided with his, Boone wrote to Ayer, stating: “[The attorney general’s office is] interested in making use of your long personal experience in addressing the needs of the Appalachian South.” Further: “We would like to take this opportunity to begin exploration with you . . . possible roles that ‘corpsmen’ might play in working with local residents in meeting immediate needs and addressing the potentials inherent to the area.”45
Unfortunately, the House of Representatives failed to pass the NSC bill. Other events, however, served to endear Ayer and the Council to the Kennedy administration. The first of these was the publication of Harry Caudill’s Night Comes to the Cumberlands. Decrying the horrid conditions in which mountain people lived, Caudill provided the nation with what he claimed were vivid descriptions of Appalachian reality. Following shortly after Caudill’s book was Homer Bigart’s New York Times article “Kentucky Miners: A Grim Winter.” As the subtitle made clear, Bigart, like Caudill, detailed the “poverty, squalor and idleness” that “pre
vailed” in the region surrounding Whitesburg, Kentucky.46
“Tens of thousands of unemployed miners,” Bigart reported, “face[d] another winter of idleness and grinding poverty.” “Replaced by machines,” these former miners kept body and soul together by virtue of “government handouts,” and three generations of welfare recipients “resulted in a whipped, dispirited community.” Sounding like a CSM member himself, Bigart declared that the present system had “eroded the self-respect of the mountain people.” He even noted that strip mining had further hurt both the environment and the chances of the people for gainful employment in the region. Moreover, he printed Harry Caudill’s statements before a CSM meeting, deploring the “massive doling out of federal welfare money [that had] financed and now sustains a dozen or more crafty, amoral, merciless, and highly effective political machines” that “will oppose by every available means any effort to restore the people to productivity and self reliance.” Yet he stopped short of calling for political reform in central Appalachia. Rather, he decided that “the erosion of the character of the people [was] more fearsome than the despoiling of the mountains” and that the abject poverty experienced by rural mountaineers was a “manifestation of . . . government neglect.”47
Then, echoing Cohen’s speech to the Council in 1961, Bigart attacked the educational system in eastern Kentucky and the mountaineer culture. “Escape to the city is not easy,” he stated, “for the average miner has no skill for other jobs. He is deficient in education.” Bigart noted that, as we have seen, the problems with the education system could be attributed to the enormous political power of the local school superintendents—who controlled the largest payroll in their counties. Moreover, he continued, the mountaineer’s “native clannishness makes adjustment to urban life painfully difficult,” while “the low educational standards of the people are a major obstacle to the location of new industry.”48
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