Reformers to Radicals

by Thomas Kiffmeyer

  In reality, when those first student volunteers traveled to Harlan County early in the winter of 1964, the CSM had access to many sources seeking to explain the cause of Appalachian poverty. The two most influential and enduring explanations were the “culture of poverty” and the “colonialism” models, both rooted in the late nineteenth century. While the former portrayed the mountaineers’ culture, mores, and value system as antiquated and inferior to that of “modern Americans,” the latter viewed Appalachians as exploited and victimized by outside industrial giants that extracted the region’s wealth and then absolved themselves of any blame for the mountaineers’ subsequent problems by citing the mountaineers’ own shortcomings as the source of the region’s problems.2

  Not surprisingly, these divergent interpretations of Appalachian poverty suggested their own solutions. On the one hand, the colonization argument contended that the poor must confront the status quo and diligently work to alter power relationships if they ever were to reassert themselves. Conflict was the hallmark of this philosophy. Proponents of the culture of poverty model, however, stressed efforts “to end the ignorance and fatalism of the Appalachian poor, stimulate economic development, and align the region economically and culturally with the rest of the nation.” Not only does this imply the superiority of industrial America’s values, but it also suggests that, once given the choice, Appalachians would readily recognize that superiority and adopt middle-class ways.3

  Because the cultural model implied the health and desirability of the American political, economic, and social systems—that poverty was the result, not of inequities in the country’s social, economic, or political structures, but of isolation or individual maladjustment—Ayer’s espousal of this view placed the Council firmly in line with the thinking of most Americans in the post–World War II era. Indeed, Vice President Lyndon Johnson believed that the “inevitability of the endless cycle of poverty” was grounded in “the lack of specific training, . . . the neglect of the educational needs of our young, [and] the inadequacy of health care.” This view dominated those who planned and administered the reform efforts of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.4 These national efforts finally began with the Area Redevelopment Administration (ARA).

  Though the ARA was not created until the early 1960s, the concept behind it had been in existence in Congress in one form or another since 1955. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his economic report in January of that year, suggested that the national government help bring about “high and stable levels of employment in the nation at large.” Initially presented to the national legislature by Democrats, including Senator John F. Kennedy, on the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee that July, the package originally included a public works program, long-term credit for new industry, technical assistance, retraining of jobless workers, and allowances, similar to unemployment insurance, for those in the retraining program. (Six years later, when the act finally became law, these features were still included, though in a somewhat modified form.) Unfortunately, the Area Redevelopment bill never became legislative reality during the Eisenhower years. Two presidential vetoes and partisan politics prevented its enactment.5

  One of Kennedy’s first acts as president, however, was to reintroduce the Area Redevelopment legislation and appoint a task force to study poverty, dramatize the need for area redevelopment, and cultivate public support for the bill. While endorsing Kennedy’s proposal as it stood, the task force also recommended other measures. It argued that distress could be alleviated “through expanded food distribution programs, temporary extension of unemployment benefits and broadening of public assistance.” Moreover, it sought special provisions for federal aid to education in depressed areas. In addition, the task force recommended “funds for access roads, supplemental expenditures for [the] development of natural resources, and a regional commission to coordinate the various activities into a ‘broad regional development program.’” With forty-three cosponsors in Congress, Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois introduced the measure on the first day of the 1961 legislative session, and, with the popular president’s backing, the bill cleared both houses of Congress in early 1961. This act, in essence, was Kennedy’s plan for depressed areas, particularly Appalachia.6 Tragically, the president did not live to see his aspirations for the poor of southern Appalachia put into practice. His assassination in November 1963 elevated Lyndon Baines Johnson to the presidency. Johnson, formerly a Texas senator and Senate majority leader, was a likely individual to continue his predecessor’s relief efforts.7

  On his first day as president, Johnson met with Walter Heller, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. Heller informed Johnson that, three days prior to the assassination, he had spoken with Kennedy about incipient plans for a national poverty relief effort. Kennedy, Heller declared, wanted an antipoverty measure for his 1964 legislative agenda. Heller wished to know whether the new president favored a continuation of such work. After a few moments of thought, Johnson responded: “I’m sympathetic. Go ahead. Give it the highest priority. Push it ahead full tilt.” The new president further decided to make the emerging antipoverty idea part of the national, not just the congressional, agenda. Therefore, he took Kennedy’s program further, in terms of both rhetoric and action. This “administration today, here and now,” he said during his State of the Union address on January 8, 1964, “declares unconditional war on poverty in America, and I urge this Congress and all Americans to join with me in that effort.” Moreover, he targeted a specific area: “We will launch a special effort in the chronically distressed areas of Appalachia.”8

  This focus on “distressed areas” marked a shift in the nature of reform liberalism since the New Deal and, because these areas were exceptions to the general abundance characterizing life in the United States, reinforced the perception that equated distressed with aberrant. In the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had faced not an area but a country in economic crisis, and his New Deal sought to bolster American capitalism and, ultimately, create new jobs. In short, the New Deal concentrated on quantitative economic issues affecting the entire nation. Johnson assumed the presidency, however, during the relatively flush 1960s. Though the quantitative issues of poverty and civil rights were critical to the president’s position, just as important were such qualitative issues as educational, cultural, and political institutions and the sense of powerlessness that came from the sense of “anomie and estrangement” that those institutions engendered. In May 1964, speaking at the University of Michigan, Johnson declared: “The city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce, but the desire for beauty and hunger for community.” Two years later, he asserted: “In the midst of abundance modern man walks oppressed by forces which menace and confine the quality of his life, and which individual abundance alone will not overcome.” Johnson envisioned his “Great Society,” of which the War on Poverty was an integral part, as a way to prevail over these qualitative deficiencies. While this focus on quality, coupled with the move toward participatory democracy included in the Economic Opportunity Act, which actually launched the War on Poverty, moved the Great Society away from the much more quantitative focus of the New Deal, it failed to address the realities of life in the southern Appalachians. In this region, one ravaged by poverty and unemployment, the issues were—at least as far as many rural Appalachians were concerned—quantitative.9

  The federal government did support Johnson’s War on Poverty, and, on August 20, 1964, Congress passed the Economic Opportunity Act, a measure designed “to mobilize the human and financial resources of the Nation to combat poverty in the United States.” The act declared it “the policy of the United States to eliminate the paradox of poverty in the midst of plenty in this Nation by opening to everyone the opportunity for education and training, the opportunity to work, and the opportunity to live in decency and dignity.” “The United States can,” it continued, “achieve its full economic and social potential as a nation only
if every individual has the opportunity to contribute to the full extent of his capabilities and to participate in the workings of our society. . . . It is the purpose of this act to strengthen, supplement, and coordinate efforts in the furtherance of that policy.”10 In order to carry out these purposes, the act established the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) within the executive branch of the federal government. The OEO became the government organization that fought the War on Poverty, and it joined the fight in Appalachia in December 1964 with a grant to the Council of the Southern Mountains for its nascent Appalachian Volunteers program.11

  Ironically, conflict was far from the minds of those who planned for the war on poverty. Designed “to be a way in which all important segments of the community would mobilize all available resources to deal with local poverty,” the Community Action Program, the centerpiece of the War on Poverty, was, as program planners described it, a “three-legged stool” on which community consensus rested. The local political structure constituted the first leg of the stool, civic organizations and social agencies the second, and representatives of the poor the third. The Economic Opportunity Act mandated the “maximum feasible participation” of the poor, and, by that means, the OEO hoped to “encourag[e] the residents of poverty areas to take part in the work of community action programs.” In short, the OEO (again recalling Boone’s ideas concerning the National Service Corps) believed that the impoverished should help design their own programs.12

  The framers of the Economic Opportunity Act would have been extremely naive to think that this arrangement had the capacity to prevent any and all conflicts. On the contrary, they saw a certain degree of controversy as “inevitable and, in most cases, healthy.” Revealing a belief that friction was inevitable within the context of participatory pluralist democracy, Sanford Kravitz, the future associate director of the Community Action Program’s demonstration projects, argued that locally administered anti-poverty efforts “would ‘remain honest’ to [the act’s] purposes by inclusion of voices representing the poor.” John G. Wofford, who in 1964 became a staff assistant to the OEO’s director of operations, called community action a “painful, headlining process . . . toward local consensus.”13

  In the CSM’s and Ayer’s cooperative philosophy, the OEO found the manifestation of this balance between conflict and consensus. Ayer reinforced his philosophical stance, reflecting the prevailing ideas about how the country’s political system worked, and graphically demonstrating how the federal government’s conception of how poverty should be fought coincided with Council policy. In a letter to the OEO, Ayer stated that the CSM incorporated “all segments of society: public and private; dominant and dependent; . . . affluent . . . as well as poor.” He elaborated elsewhere: “The CSM hopes to encourage people to do whatever they need to do.”14

  Encouraging people to do “what they need to do” was the purpose of an Appalachian Volunteers organizational meeting held at the Pine Mountain Settlement School at the end of January 1964. Of the nineteen colleges invited, representatives of sixteen attended. The meeting’s agenda endorsed a permanent regional organization of student volunteers and proposed short- and long-term plans for the newly formed organization. On the basis of the favorable results of the initial school renovation project, the participants decided to continue working to improve the physical conditions of the one- and two-room schools throughout the region. However, the Council of the Southern Mountains felt that school refurbishing was not enough, and it argued for a program of curriculum enrichment. Academic enrichment was just as important as schoolhouse improvements. Interesting activities, the CSM reasoned, would attract the community’s school-age children and, perhaps, encourage them to complete their education. Thus, in addition to its plans to offer through its enrichment program health education and recreational activities, the CSM hoped to bring in foreign exchange students who attended nearby colleges, such as the University of Kentucky, to describe what life was like outside the United States. While its long-term vision essentially remained limited to school-based programs, the Council did make a few minor adjustments. For example, it included tutors for adults as well as children and Volunteer-operated bookmobiles in its plans. In time, the Council hoped to develop, in conjunction with local leaders, a total community development program that would include public health and sanitation components. Perhaps as a result of the successful school repair project, the participants at Pine Mountain further suggested that students could also help homeowners repair their houses.15

  Organization and recruitment of the actual volunteers was also important. CSM leaders determined that each college should have a campus chapter of the Appalachian Volunteers. Most probably, they based this idea on an organization already in existence at Berea College—Campus Action for Mountain Progress (CAMP). Concerned Berea College students had created CAMP during the spring semester of 1960 in order “to aid in motivating economic, educational, and recreational development in Southern Appalachia; to study specific problems concerning the mountain region; and to render services whenever possible to civic and religious organizations interested in the mountain region.” This purpose, CAMP believed, was very similar to the purpose of Berea College (and, of course, the Council of the Southern Mountains), which was to “contribut[e] to the spiritual and material welfare of the mountain region of the South.” Economic conditions were so severe in the Southern mountains, CAMP maintained, that its organization was needed and would exist for a long time.16

  Led by future Appalachian Volunteer staff member Phil Conn, CAMP was one of the more active clubs on the Berea College campus. Representatives of the organization had attended the annual conference of the Council of the Southern Mountains in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, in early 1963, and, in October of that year, Ayer urged the CSM’s Youth Committee to advocate the creation of CAMP chapters on all the college campuses in and near the southern Appalachian region. CAMP members had also initiated a clothing drive for the victims of floods in eastern Kentucky, working closely with the Council of the Southern Mountains when it came time to distribute what they had collected. All things considered, this was the most likely organization for the CSM to use as a model for its campus chapters.17

  About two months later, on March 14, 1964, the Appalachian Volunteers became official with the adoption of a set of bylaws at the second organizational meeting, held in Berea. According to those bylaws, the AVs’ goals reflected the country’s assumptions about welfare, dependency, and pluralism. First, the Volunteers wanted to “involve the citizens of the region in the process of meeting community needs by providing capable and highly motivated people to assist in projects in areas such as education, health, recreation, and human welfare.” Second, they hoped to establish an organizational base “through which students can assist their fellow citizens.” These two goals made possible the third: “to initiate programs which look to lasting solutions of the region’s problems.” Milton Ogle, who became the CSM’s Appalachian Volunteer program director in 1964, condensed the mission of the nascent reform organization into basic terms when he stated: “Deprived people cannot be helped; they must help themselves.”18

  With the creation of a program that so dramatically put into practice the conception of self-help on the local level, the Council further ingratiated itself with the nation’s leaders. Even before that first meeting at Pine Mountain had concluded, both the head of the Small Business Administration and President Johnson expressed their support for the antipoverty program. “Your goals,” Johnson stated in a telegram to Ogle, “to involve the residents of the region in the development process; to provide a vehicle through which students and others can help those in need; and to demonstrate to the nation the efficiency of the self help process . . . are most gratifying to me.” The president also implored Ogle to take control of the efforts to end poverty in Appalachia: “I am looking to you for leadership in demonstrating new and creative ways of using volunteers to help relieve conditions of rural poverty, . . . teachin
g, providing recreational outlets, better health facilities, helping prevent . . . entry into poverty.” While the work already completed in Harlan County impressed the chief executive, more astonishing in his eyes was the inclusion of “the vigor and idealism of youth . . . in a great cooperative effort of public and private agencies.”19

  Fortunately for the Council, Johnson’s support was not limited to rhetoric. On the contrary, the president followed his words with funds. Even prior to the formation of the OEO, the Council’s AV effort received $50,000, spread over a six-month period, from the ARA. Private funding for the AV effort also materialized. That same year, the Ford Foundation issued a grant of over $33,000 to the CSM for “special projects” that would be conducted by the Appalachian Volunteers in the many one-room schools in the Southern mountains. These projects included adult education, tutoring, and scholarships designed to help poor mountain children stay in school. The foundation also provided Ogle and the CSM’s Appalachian Volunteer program with about $2,000 in administrative funds. With this money, Ogle could defray the cost of recruiting college volunteers and help pay the salary of a field director.20