Bigart, however, did not stop with the indictment of the miners’ way of life. He also investigated the conditions of the schools and the politics behind those conditions. On Gilbert’s Creek, in Leslie County, Kentucky, was a school so dilapidated that it was “unfit for cattle.” Equally disturbing was the failure of the federally sponsored school lunch program. This program, designed to provide a nourishing lunch to schoolchildren who could not afford one, had no impact in the rural schools of Leslie County, for two reasons: the county lacked the funds to collect and distribute government surplus, and few schools had the facilities (kitchens, running water, power) to prepare food properly anyway. In Letcher County, the health officer reported that he had seen children eating dirt and that 85 percent of children in the county were underweight; in Leslie County, three-fourths of the children had intestinal parasites.49
Supposedly in response to Caudill’s and Bigart’s work, President Kennedy, in October 1963, conceived of what he termed a “crash program” to help the residents of southern Appalachia. At last he began to make good on the promises he had made during campaign trips to West Virginia during the 1960 presidential campaign, at which time he had witnessed firsthand the hardships the residents of southern Appalachia had to face.50 When the then senator entered the West Virginia primary, he faced an enormous task. Not only did he have to diffuse the issue of his Catholicism in this Bible Belt state, but he also had to outmaneuver the well-known Democrat and liberal leader Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota. During his blitz of the Mountain State in May 1960, Kennedy found the issue that endeared him to the people of the state—the unemployment and poverty that he saw among the former Appalachian coal miners. In “a dazzling achievement that assured his nomination” at the July Democratic convention, Kennedy destroyed Humphrey in West Virginia and became the favorite in the upcoming presidential contest.51
Eastern Kentucky, not West Virginia, however, was the CSM’s focus. Appalachian Kentucky was one of the poorest areas in southern Appalachia in the early 1960s. According to the CSM’s own information, one-third of the people living there were on some kind of public assistance, and 85 percent lived in substandard housing. The median education level for adults was 8.05 years of school. While 68 percent of all Kentucky children never finished high school, this figure was even higher for eastern Kentucky. The median family income was also well below the poverty line in 1963 and $3,600 below the national median level.52
Kennedy originally placed his program under the guidance of the President’s Appalachian Regional Commission (PARC), established in April 1963. Headed by Secretary of Commerce Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., PARC had as its mandate to formulate a “comprehensive action program” of federal aid for regional economic development. As designed, the commission was to cooperate with state officials in the central Appalachian highlands in the development of the region’s tourist potential, natural resources, water power, and human resources through industrial development. These proposals, nevertheless, did nothing to ease the urgency that motivated Bigart’s article. More important, especially from the Council’s perspective, PARC failed to do anything about Appalachia’s problems as late as December 1963.53
While PARC busily planned, the Council asserted its leadership role and designed as a winter emergency program its own “Eastern Kentucky Crash Program.” The CSM hoped to refurbish rural mountain homes and help impoverished mountaineers cope with the coming winter. Ayer announced that the Council of the Southern Mountains would “continue its major—and historic—role of coordination of voluntary action directed toward the best interests of the people of the Appalachian South.” Integral to the Council’s view of the crash program was the use of a volunteer labor force. While Kentucky state officials involved in the planning of the winterization effort did not feel that volunteers could be mobilized in time to be utilized effectively, the Council had, by mid-December, already recruited and “made [a] moral commitment to hundreds of students,” and Ayer believed that the CSM must “make some constructive use of at least some of [them].” Ultimately, the Council hoped that it could establish, and make available to any future PARC program, a permanent pool of volunteer labor in Appalachia.54
Some members of the White House staff agreed that residents who were to benefit from the program should actively participate rather than just be passive recipients. Pursuant to this goal, Richard Boone brought his ideas from his work on the NSC to the CSM community development specialist Milton Ogle. The two worked together to find a way in which continuing benefits could be realized through the efforts of the proposed Eastern Kentucky Crash Program.55
Consistent with Council policy, Boone and Ogle believed that a program of charity would be insufficient and possibly damaging to the people of eastern Kentucky, and their proposal called on eastern Kentucky residents to work on their own community projects. This, they argued, would incorporate a sense of self-help and sensitivity to local needs and problems in the program. In addition, as Boone had argued concerning the NSC, they asserted that people who played an active part in the project would be more likely to continue working for improvements after federal assistance was withdrawn. “An emergency program of aid to Eastern Kentucky,” Boone and Ogle argued in “A Volunteer Component for the Eastern Kentucky Program,” issued in late 1963, “should involve the residents as participants in rendering as well as receiving aid. A program based on the traditional concept of charity—giving aid to enable subsistence, but without requiring a commitment by those receiving the aid—will not be complete. And aid based on the concept of charity tends to drive the poor more deeply into dependency.”56
The Council had high hopes for its role in the planned PARC effort. While the CSM staff truly believed in the importance of the principle of self-help, the use of volunteers was also high on the list of priorities. Volunteers could make the aid program more economically feasible by providing “sensitive and sophisticated manpower at virtually no cost to the government.” In addition, local people helping their neighbors could build into the program a means by which to gain great insight into the needs of each community. Those who could not help themselves, the Council’s report continued, could be able to say, “These are our own people who are helping us.” Local citizens who saw their neighbors working in the community might motivate some who remained untouched by one aid program after another. Finally, in a statement that revealed its awareness of the “lazy mountaineer” stereotype, the CSM contended that a volunteer program would show the nation that the people of Kentucky felt a vital commitment to their own development and a responsibility to take part in it.57
College students from nineteen eastern Kentucky colleges, easily motivated and mobilized, fulfilled the vital role of volunteers in the proposal. Local impoverished Appalachians, the CSM argued, would not consider these students to be outsiders. In addition, it insisted, many college students would have or would be receiving training through their academic courses of study that could benefit the program. Their participation in the effort, moreover, would bring the colleges and communities closer together. “Perhaps most important,” the Council concluded, “participation in this effort might encourage some of the students to remain in a region which desperately needs educated individuals.” Preliminary contact with eastern Kentucky’s institutions of higher learning confirmed the Council’s assessment as school administrators indicated an interest and a willingness on the part of their students to contribute their time and manpower. From this initial contact, more than three hundred students (including George Brosi) volunteered their services to the Eastern Kentucky Crash Program during the 1963–1964 Christmas vacation.58
On December 20, 1963, the Council of the Southern Mountains issued a policy statement in which it assumed virtual control of any and all Appalachian reform programs. With this, the CSM declared itself responsible for the “coordination of voluntary action directed toward the best interests of the people of the Appalachian South, and the most effective use of PARC serv
ices, when and if the PARC program is established.” According to its plan, the CSM selected twenty-five eastern Kentucky counties on the basis of three criteria: “the number of volunteers recruited,” “the extent of need in each locale,” and “the opportunity for success.” With the help of the CSM staff, Ogle then informed as many key local leaders as possible—including newspaper editors, politicians, businessmen, and labor leaders—about the proposed volunteer effort in order to “prepare them for contact by students during December” and “request their cooperation.” This strategy incorporated every facet of the Ayer philosophy: the program would involve virtually every part of the community, avoid pure handouts, offer local people the opportunity for input, broaden the horizons of rural mountaineers through contact with college students, and, finally, stimulate greater interest in education.59
Much of the actual work that took place during December 1963, however, concentrated on organization and preparation. Utilizing its contacts throughout the region, the CSM asked state and local officials in each county to inform Ogle of ways in which student volunteers might be useful. Local county institutions could use student volunteers in either existing or new programs. Initially, the program called for student volunteers to help distribute surplus food, assist in renovating individual homes, serve as tutors for both children and adults lacking needed academic skills, and aid those in need of medical attention. Organized in “county teams” (five volunteers in each of the twenty-five counties), and under the direction of the CSM, students followed the leads provided by the contacts and performed vital reconnaissance work. For five days of their Christmas vacation, they interviewed influential local citizens about possible tasks for a two-pronged (December 1963 and February–May 1964) emergency aid program. It was through the work of these reconnaissance teams that the CSM hoped to convince federal officials—specifically PARC—that a “volunteer component” was feasible and necessary in eastern Kentucky. As a result of this preliminary investigation, the CSM decided that, during the initial phases of the emergency program, volunteers could make the most significant impact by working on improving the physical conditions of rural schools. As the Council later reported: “Those involved in planning the program reasoned that, since a principal source of poverty lay in the schools, and since colleges might be especially sympathetic to a program which attacked poverty at this source, school based projects might be undertaken first.”60
According to the Council of the Southern Mountains, over one thousand one- and two-room schools accommodating 27,146 children, or 20.5 percent of the school-age population, operated in eastern Kentucky. Its college student investigators further provided a graphic description of the physical condition of these structures: “The typical one-room schoolhouse is a greying, wood frame building with ill fitting windows and cracked floors, which permit a constant rush of cold winter wind. Near the single pot-bellied stove children are uncomfortably hot; further away they must wear their coats. In many instances there is no toilet[.] (Of those 82 schools in Pike County, 37 have no toilet facilities.) There are eight grades in one room, but the ‘eighth graders’ are already considerably behind eighth graders in other parts of the nation.”61
Such reports suggested to Council leaders an obvious course of action—one that would, they believed, attract the favorable attention of every potential actor, from the federal government to local student volunteers, in the emerging Appalachian reform effort—a school “winterization” project. Thus, the first program called on students to make emergency repairs—for example, installing insulation and new flooring and applying fresh paint—to Appalachian Kentucky’s rural school buildings.62
The Council of the Southern Mountains worked vigorously that winter to obtain materials from private sources to realize the first project of the Eastern Kentucky Crash Program. Appeals went out to colleges, interested individuals, and corporations for supplies, services, and financial support. Then, in the second week of January 1964, two groups of students from Union College and the Cumberland Branch of the University of Kentucky, who called themselves “Appalachian Volunteers,” went out on the first projects on Upper Jones Creek in Harlan County, Kentucky. The students repaired broken windows and cracked doors and walls and painted the buildings inside and out. The War on Poverty in Appalachian Kentucky had begun.63
The initial effect that these student volunteers had on the schools was astounding. A letter from a Harlan County schoolteacher, included in the Appalachian Volunteers’ first report, thanked the AVs and asserted that they did “a very good job.” “I am sure,” she continued, “that my school children and I will enjoy school more. As I look around my school room this morning, I find that it has a pleasant look which it did not have before. I know the children will be able to study better and learn more.” The report also contained an excerpt of a letter from a child: “I very graciously thank you for fixing the schoolhouse and painting it. It looks better and I feel better when I’m in it. And I think you should do the same for other schools that are in the position that ours was. I’m sure they will appreciate it.”64
January was, indeed, an important month in eastern Kentucky, as the Council of the Southern Mountains took an important step in designing a more ambitious program for the Appalachian South. On January 15, 1964, Perley Ayer sent a letter to all eastern Kentucky college presidents inviting two students, one male, one female, along with a faculty adviser, to a January 24–25 meeting. This meeting, at which the CSM set up a permanent organization of volunteer services for eastern Kentucky and, eventually, all the central Appalachian coalfields, marked the actual beginning of the Appalachian Volunteers.65
The attitudes and activities of the Council of the Southern Mountains in the very early 1960s mirrored those it would employ in the initial stages of the War on Poverty. First of all, the Council stressed a volunteer effort that, combined with indigenous support, would alleviate the most obvious manifestations of want in the Southern mountains. Most of the needed volunteers, it hoped, would come from local colleges and universities. By utilizing the talents of local people, CSM programs would motivate mountaineers to help themselves, rather than rely on handouts or the good works of others.66 This would minimize that aspect of aid that was anathema to the CSM leaders–the tendency, as they saw it, of pure charity to drive recipients further into a state of dependency. In this way, the Council, under Ayer’s leadership, resembled a sort of latter-day New Deal organization.
Despite its seemingly boundless energy, however, the Council was restrained by its cooperative philosophy, which served to channel its efforts toward a type of community development that could be more accurately described as “facility development.” By improving impoverished mountaineers’ health, their recreational facilities, and, most important, their educational facilities, it would, it believed, improve immediately the situation in the region. Moreover, the CSM maintained, these developments would precipitate economic opportunity through the creation of a better-educated, healthier workforce.
Ultimately, however, it was the philosophical implications of the Council’s position that proved to be most significant. On a national stage, the CSM’s position was congruent with that of those who would plan the country’s domestic reform agenda. Rooted in a New Deal approach to the nation’s problems, these top-level strategists accepted the analysis offered by critics such as Harrington, Galbraith, Coles, and the emerging pluralist theorists and, thus, failed to consider the possibility that there were major flaws in American society. Harrington went so far as to blame poverty on the fact that the poor had no “lobbies” that could forward their interests and, thus, were effectively invisible. More immediately, the Council’s approach signified a cultural basis for the existence of poverty in the mountains. Poverty was not defined simply as a lack of material goods, adequate housing, or sufficient health care. Rather, echoing Galbraith’s analysis that poverty was curable, as evidenced by instances of people in remote, isolated areas who have mastered their enviro
nment and bettered their situation, it was in Appalachia at least considered to be the result of the region’s dysfunctional society. This society, with its aberrant culture isolated from the mainstream, fostered the undesirable traits, such as fatalism, a devaluation of education, and a lack of community spirit, that the Council of the Southern Mountains hoped to change through its Appalachian Volunteers program.67
2
The Shot Heard Round the World
The Battle for Mill Creek, Kentucky, and the Culture of Poverty
The great national emphasis and interest in Eastern Kentucky, the Appalachians, depressed areas and pockets of poverty largely is a thing of the past. . . . The average citizen in the United States, if he thinks about Appalachia at all this summer, thinks that the problems are being handled—that there is no reason for him to be particularly concerned.
—Thomas S. Gish, editor of the Whitesburg, KY,
Mountain Eagle, in a speech delivered before
the Council of the Southern Mountains on July 14, 1964
Born in Floyd County, Virginia, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Milton Ogle graduated from Berea College in 1955. Following a short tenure as a math teacher in McDowell County, North Carolina, Ogle returned to Berea to administer the college’s broom factory. He enjoyed his job, which allowed him to interact with people from all over the region. It helped him, moreover, appreciate the role that Berea College played in the Southern mountains. “Berea was really good,” he recalled in 1991, “at . . . taking in people that had been by-passed by the non-system of education that existed then in Appalachia and helping them to get over the hurdles . . . that they couldn’t get over in their own communities.” This attitude remained with Ogle after he began, in 1959, to work with the Council of the Southern Mountains (CSM) and, by 1963, the Appalachian Volunteers (AVs). Looking back on his reform efforts in the 1960s, he contended that the overall CSM/AV goal was to show “how people could be involved in things that affected their lives.” The question, however, turned on what those “things” were. When Ogle and the CSM began to send volunteers into the region, he had to answer that very question. Most probably, his view of the region’s educational “non-system” influenced his response. Still, though he was born in the region and had a quality education, a wealth of experience, and an impressive array of connections that stretched all the way to Washington, DC, that did not mean that he knew exactly how to initiate effective reform. He should have realized this even before he led the Appalachian Volunteers into the War on Poverty since he well knew that “knowledge and wisdom, far from being the same, often have no connection.”1
Reformers to Radicals Page 6