A brief examination of a few of the activities funded by the Ford Foundation provides a revealing glimpse into how the Council’s Appalachian Volunteer project implemented the philosophy that guided its first two years. In Pike County, Kentucky, for example, the Council undertook an adult education program in cooperation with the county school superintendent’s office. In addition to its standard instructional aspects, the program contained a motivational component. That is, the CSM hoped “to induce in the adults the desire to learn and become aware of the value of education.” It articulated an identical goal for a project in Bledsoe County, Tennessee. Similarly, in Blackey, Letcher County, Kentucky, and Dry Creek, Raleigh County, West Virginia, the Council sought, through adult education and preschool programs, to foster “interest in education” in adults and “stimulate the learning desire” in children.21
This attempt to alter the mountaineers’ values—instilling in them an interest in and a desire for education—clearly exposes the culture of poverty model underlying the Volunteers’ efforts in the early 1960s. It was not so much that the mountaineers lacked a proper education as that they placed no value on learning. This, more than anything else, was what the Appalachian Volunteers hoped to change.
Included in the Ford Foundation program was funding for the placement of an American Friends Service Committee (AFSC)–VISA volunteer in Clay and Harlan counties, Kentucky. Under the VISA (Voluntary International Service Assignment) program, volunteers agreed to serve for a certain period of time (usually a year) in an underdeveloped foreign country. It is interesting that eastern Kentucky qualified for the AFSC-VISA program. Prior to the arrival of the VISA volunteer, two Council-sponsored volunteers visited Mill Creek, Clay County. The Council had high hopes for the Mill Creek project. In their report to the Ford Foundation, the CSM’s leaders referred to it as the “demonstration project for the Appalachian Volunteers.”22 Fortunately, much of the record of the Mill Creek project is extant. Rather than revealing an exemplary project, however, that record shows one replete with confusion and conflict. While the friction remained relatively minor, the project should have served as a cautionary tale for the AVs’ leaders.
The Council leaders chose Mill Creek because not one of its seventy adult residents had finished high school. Further, of the twenty-five children in the town under the age of sixteen, the CSM reported, most were two to five years behind their grade level. Complicating matters was the status of the teachers. According to Milton Ogle, who presented the Mill Creek proposal to the CSM and the Ford Foundation, all the teachers either had emergency certificates (teaching licenses usually given to less than fully qualified individuals to fill a position in a school where no regular teacher worked) or held regular certificates that had long ago expired. To remedy this deplorable situation, Ogle proposed that the CSM’s nascent AV-VISA project “bring to the community through Audio Visual Aids and a wide selection of books and records a modern educational experience that goes far beyond anything that has been attempted in a similar Eastern Kentucky community.” To supplement the academic effort, Ogle scheduled field trips to the state capitol at Frankfort, a manufacturing plant, and a state park. Organizations such as Berea College and the Kentucky Library Extension Service had already donated recordings and players, books, and films to the project. Rounding out the effort, a business in Manchester, the county seat, purchased basketballs and goals for the recreation portion of the project, and local families agreed to house the volunteers. Ogle requested that the Ford Foundation provide the last piece of the puzzle—$775 for the volunteers’ living expenses, school supplies (paper, paint, modeling clay), and field trip costs. The foundation readily obliged, and, in early June 1964, the Appalachian Volunteers established a permanent presence in eastern Kentucky.23
For the two CSM-sponsored AVs, the Mill Creek assignment began on June 8, 1964, and would last until the end of August. Throughout the summer, the Volunteers busied themselves with programs that would, they believed, end the mountaineers’ cycle of poverty, namely, running a summer school and leading field trips designed to broaden the experience of the impoverished mountain children. For example, during the week of June 15, 1964, a group of youngsters traveled to Frankfort to meet Governor Edward Breathitt. According to the AVs, this was the first time that many of them had been out of Clay County. Indicating support for the program, Breathitt praised the Appalachian Volunteers for turning their attention toward what really was the “primary target” in the fight against poverty, Appalachia’s human resources.24
The idea of broadening the experiences of isolated mountain children found adherents throughout the United States. One fervent supporter, Jack Ciaccio, an official in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare who later joined the OEO, asked the AVs to establish an out-of-town educational camp for the Mill Creek children. Flem Messer, a Clay County native and Volunteer staff member who helped organize the Mill Creek project, objected. Interestingly, Messer grounded his opposition to Ciaccio’s suggestion in the culture of the mountaineers. Implying the stereotypical clannishness and aversion to modern ways commonly associated with rural Appalachians, he noted: “I doubt if half of the parents who need to send their children [to the educational camp] would do so, especially if this means sending them to Lexington or other areas any distance from home.” Just as important, he argued, if the children’s educational experiences removed them from their community, “there would not be enough opportunity to deal with the parents and change their attitude [toward education].” “The parents,” he concluded, “need to be able to participate and change as their children do.”25
Volunteers certainly tried to generate and maintain interest in the project among the parents. In at least one volunteer’s eye, however, a cultural and generational gap was always present. “The parents were very cooperative,” claimed the AV. “They might not have understood the things I did, and sometimes they found them strange, but they were tolerant. . . . And we talked—talking takes them out of their environment and gets them interested in the world.” Children, on the other hand, openly embraced the Volunteers’ effort. Nevertheless, this did not make the job less challenging. Calling the children “healthy, intelligent, and enthusiastic,” that same volunteer reported that “they responded extremely well” to the lessons offered in the summer school. Yet there were “so many things they didn’t know because of their way of life.”26 As these statements reveal, overcoming the deficiencies of the mountaineers was as much the goal of the summer Appalachian Volunteers as was the purely educational effort.
Despite the tremendous cultural obstacles encountered, the Council of the Southern Mountains presented the summer portion of the Mill Creek project to the public as an overwhelming success. Covering the venture for the Louisville Courier-Journal, the reporter Jim Hampton recognized that a project such as this was difficult to assess because it produced few immediate results. Rather, the significance would not be felt for some time and would come from the “young minds brought alive, stirring from the lethargy induced by an existence circumscribed by the hills that surround Kentucky’s countless Mill Creeks.” In the end, it was the Appalachian Volunteers who “kindled the imaginations” of these poor mountain children. Moreover, the AVs pulled back the veil of “isolation and poverty” that kept the “settlement locked . . . in the mold of yesterday.” In this way, the Volunteers’ summer school was “unique among the efforts being made to lift Appalachia out of backwardness.”27
What is interesting about Hampton’s article is that it constitutes a graphic illustration of the way in which many Americans saw Appalachia, the region’s problems, and the solutions to those problems. In short, Hampton provides more information about modern America than about the Southern mountain region and its people. Propagating a view that was by the early 1960s nearly a century old, he characterizes Mill Creek as a “settlement” that was “locked” in the “mold of yesterday” and would clearly remain so until outsiders, representatives of the modern
world, intervened to “lift” it “out of backwardness.” Clearly, a setting such as Hampton’s Louisville represented better than anything Mill Creek had to offer proper American culture and values.
Surface confirmation at least that the community approved of the program arrived in early fall. Between September 1 and September 5, 1964, Messer received five letters of appreciation from town residents. While this alone may not be unusual, the style and form of the letters call into question their honesty. Each adhered to the same formula and addressed the same issues in the exact order. All five correspondents stated how much they enjoyed the teachers, how much the children learned, how all could now write their own names, and how they hoped that the Appalachian Volunteers would conduct a summer school at Mill Creek the next year. Of course, they may, in fact, have felt positively about the program. But it seems just as likely that they were coached and, thus, that their thanks were not sincere. Because the letters were dated after the two volunteers left, it is impossible to determine who guided their authors. Probably it was the emergency teacher who coordinated the effort.28
Unlike the first two volunteers, Carol Irons, the CSM-sponsored VISA volunteer, did not enter Clay County until the end of the summer, having committed herself to a year of work in Mill Creek starting early that fall. It is her experience that most directly calls into question the letter writers’ candor. Because Irons offered her time and talents to Appalachia, the AFSC relied heavily on the CSM’s Appalachian Volunteer program to instruct and guide her while she resided in Clay County. In this way, she was as much a representative of the AVs as she was of the AFSC. Throughout the autumn of 1964, Irons reported that she assisted people with only those things that they could have done on their own anyway, for example, driving them to doctor’s appointments in Manchester or helping them around their homes. This, however, was less than satisfying, and she informed Robert Sigmon, the director of the AFSC-VISA program, that she hoped to provide the community with services that they could not get otherwise and that, in order for her to do this, Mill Creek needed a community center. Originally, she had hoped to use the local church as a combination residence and project center, but the preacher balked at this idea. As a result, Irons lived with Amelia Messer, Flem Messer’s aunt, and pushed the idea of a new neighborhood center. This center would allow her to conduct what she considered to be two of the more important aspects of her program, a literacy project and instruction in healthier ways of cooking.29 Unfortunately, controversy surrounding the project—such as where to build the proposed community center and to what uses it would be put—spelled disaster for the Mill Creek project.
Responding to her desire to do more with her time in Mill Creek, Milton Ogle told Irons to let the community people lead, that is, to let the desires of those she was there to help dictate what actions she would take. Her focus, then, remained where that of the two departed AVs had been—on academics. After she finally gained permission to use the local church building, Irons conducted kindergarten classes for two hours each weekday throughout the fall and prepared for a community Christmas pageant. While these efforts achieved acceptable results, by the end of January 1965 problems had surfaced.30
On February 1, 1965, Irons wrote to Ogle about Flem Messer, the AV fieldman in Clay County. Her concern was Messer’s actions, both as a private citizen and as a representative of the CSM. Apparently, because she had permission to use the local church for her kindergarten classes, she was no longer a fervent advocate of the construction project. Messer, however, vigorously pushed for a community center to be built on land owned by his relatives and with only outside funding. Moreover, according to Irons, he “kept proposing more complicated plans,” with the result that the community “got bewildered” and withdrew its support for the project.31
While it is true that the reasoning behind Messer’s position is not entirely clear, his actions suggest certain motivations. The most obvious is that, should the community center be built on Messer family land with outside funding, the building would belong to the Messer family on the departure of the VISA volunteer. In fact, at the end of May, Irons reported that the community rejected the project for precisely that reason.32
Another motivation was Messer’s political ambitions. Independently of his work with the Council, Messer had become a political activist in Manchester. Specifically, he was a member of a citizens’ action group working toward improved education in the county. As most Council members would certainly attest, this was a worthy cause. Nonetheless, Messer’s involvement with it made Irons’s job even more difficult. As Loyal Jones described the situation: “The school superintendent and the political boss of Clay County . . . accused [Messer] of using his office with the Council to further his own private political ambitions. Thus the word was sent out . . . that local teachers and others should not work with the Appalachian Volunteers.” Evidence indicates not only that the “word” was sent out but also that it reached Mill Creek. In a report on her activities in late 1965, Irons expressed anxiety about Messer and his presence in Mill Creek. Though working with a “native” was, she felt, instrumental in getting situated at first, associating with that particular native had, “because of his political activities,” become a “handicap.”33
Messer, for his part, did not want to jeopardize Irons’s work. Hoping to ease the situation, he suggested to the CSM leadership that it terminate his official duties in Clay County and that he join the staff at the Berea headquarters. Tensions did diminish after Ayer and Ogle met with county officials, but this failed to ease Irons’s concerns. “At this time,” she wrote to Ogle in early 1965, “I am not sure that there is any value in my remaining in Mill Creek to work not just because [of] what has happened but because the past events indicate a trend in the future.”34
Irons’s troubles forced Robert Sigmon (the AFSC-VISA director) to question the leadership and supervision that the Appalachian Volunteers were providing. Since the early fall, Sigmon contended, “there has been a little confusion about direction and guidance.” Responding that he knew that “the indecisiveness in the community” and the “unsolicited ‘assistance’ . . . created some problems” in Mill Creek, Ogle tried to maintain closer contact with Irons, and she began to submit weekly reports to him. This arrangement did result in an improved relationship between the VISA volunteer, the AVs, and Mill Creek. On February 13, 1965, the community residents finally agreed to construct a “church education building.” A committee of religious and lay leaders worked on the details of its specific uses and its location. Moreover, Irons met with the local preacher to discuss her ideas on “certain methods of community development.” She also informed him of her objections to the plan for the new church building, yet both agreed to keep the best interests of the community at heart.35 Yet, from this not very high point, the situation began to deteriorate once again.
While it was not initially clear why Irons had come to object to a community building, her next few reports to Ogle contained a clue. After the townspeople approved the project, they waited for the preacher “to take definite steps for plans and funds.” Evidently, Irons feared that, if the structure was on church property, it would be not just part of the church but entirely the responsibility of the church—and, thus, not truly a community center, just as if it had been built on Messer family land. Confirmation that this was the case came in early March. By that time, Irons revealed to Ogle, the community “seem[ed] to have given up.” While the people of Mill Creek felt that a community center would solve all their problems, having voted on the issue they wanted to do nothing more than sit back and wait for someone—the preacher—to get the work done. When specific plans and resources failed to materialize, they simply resigned themselves to the project’s failure. This resignation significantly eroded Irons’s influence in the community. Residents would no longer discuss possible new projects with her, nor did they suggest new ideas. When at one point Irons herself introduced a new idea, “there [was],” she reported, “no reac
tion, no response.” Moreover, her proposal for a second summer school project met with only negative reactions.36
Perhaps the reasons why the Mill Creek community development project failed to live up to expectations, despite CSM attempts to ensure a smoothly run program, lay in the fact that neither the Council, the VISA volunteer, nor the townspeople had a clear notion of what they meant by community development. It is possible, for example, that Mill Creek wanted improvements made to its church more than it desired a community center. Unfortunately, the record provides no clear answer. In fact, Sigmon wrote to Ogle on this very subject. Revealing that he himself considered community development to be equivalent to educational improvement, Sigmon asked whether “it would be in the best interests of the assignment and the community if Carol could see her objectives extended to include something more than just ‘community development’”: “That is, would it be possible to define another . . . role to [her], say . . . as a teacher’s aide?” In short, the AFSC-VISA director asked the AVs to give the inexperienced volunteer a specific job rather than just sending her out into the field with the vague order to “develop the community.”37
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