Reformers to Radicals

by Thomas Kiffmeyer

  Because he was from Clay County, Messer claimed that he “had a better ‘feel’ . . . for the area [than outsiders did], . . . an ability, perhaps, to relate to some of the [mountain] middle class that some of the outsiders didn’t.” Though he claimed that this “ability” did not automatically translate into a completely different point of view, his “refusal to idealize poor people” and his desire to include “discontented middle-class people” in the reform program—something that was in keeping with the overall, inclusive approach of the Council of the Southern Mountains (CSM)—made Messer, as he later asserted, “the conservative of the group.” Perhaps this is how he “created” problems for Carol Irons in Mill Creek; his attempts at inclusion resulted only in confusion and animosity. Still, despite the fact that he believed himself more sensitive than outsiders to local concerns, Messer was not necessarily opposed to their presence among the Appalachian Volunteers. On the contrary, he argued that they can benefit any reform effort. “There is a point,” he contended, “when local control is concentrated in such disproportion between the poor and non-poor that you have to have outside influence, and it can be missionary.”2

  Rivel fulfilled both of Messer’s change-agent criteria. As a graduate of the Methodist Church–affiliated Union College, he had at least been exposed to some degree of the “missionary” zeal of that organization. As a student at Union, Rivel participated in “church camps” and led a youth group that, even before the onset of the War on Poverty, undertook reform-activist activities similar to those that characterized the early AV projects. Though he was committed to such activities, he later recalled: “As we took projects out, the hardest thing we had to do . . . was to get kids from east Kentucky to participate. Guys from Ohio and New York . . . wanted to go, but we couldn’t get many kids from the eastern part of Kentucky. . . . Students from the mountains just didn’t seem to want to go back.” Was it Rivel’s failure to recruit enough Appalachian students that precipitated the influx of VISTA volunteers and nonnative AVs—those with “personal experience in the outside world,” as the AVs’ own literature described them—that descended on the mountains?3

  Just as the biblical Walls of Jericho came down on the Canaanites, “the outside world” certainly did crash down on the mountaineers in 1965. Buoyed by extreme confidence and a federal grant, the Appalachian Volunteers entered an eastern Kentucky that they saw as an unspoiled, untapped, primitive reserve in which they could build a brave new world. As the text of a proposed Council fund-raising brochure promised, a vast region “designed, built and developed in accord with Space Age concepts is within reach.” Even the stereotypes that characterized “yesterday’s people” and originally motivated the Volunteer effort were somehow dismissed. “Training centers and industrial establishments turning on the concept of automation are possible here without the handicaps of traditionalism in either the minds of the people or the architecture and tooling of production facilities.” Ignoring the steep hills and narrow valleys, the Council argued: “The wheel-hub type city . . . need not be brought over into the mountain region. Instead the city of modern design that responds to present-day living conditions could characterize the region.” The CSM proposed other theoretical developments that reflected both an idyllic Appalachian past and an unfettered future: a high speed rail system would not have to deal with preexisting rights-of-way, and a mountain multimedia broadcasting network would produce “quality programming” of “artistic excellence and intrinsic value.” In short, Appalachia was the artist’s blank canvas, and the Volunteers could, with the aid and support of the rest of America, turn the region into that elusive city on the hill.4

  Growing support among both private concerns and Kentucky college students bolstered this vision. Corporate contributions also increased. The Voit Rubber Company, for example, donated one hundred basketballs, one hundred softballs, fifty playground balls, six footballs, and six soccer balls to the Volunteer enrichment program. Furthermore, the AV chapters at Ashland Community College, Georgetown College, and Transylvania University (the latter two in the Lexington–Bluegrass region area) reported increased interest in the program. Believing that the AVs were the answer to the problems outlined in Michael Harrington’s The Other America, Ogle invited the noted journalist to address the Appalachian Volunteers at the organization’s spring meeting.5

  Underneath this exuberance, however, was growing doubt about the cause of poverty in the Southern mountains. Soliciting the donation of vehicles suitable to the difficult terrain, Ogle attempted to explain the conditions the Volunteers encountered in eastern Kentucky to the Ford Motor Company. “The mountaineers,” he wrote to Henry Ford II, “long ago drifted away from the main current of American life and were subsequently forgotten by the bustling world outside the hills.” While this sentence reveals that Ogle remained firmly positioned in the culture of poverty camp, the one that follows offers a new explanation for the situation in which the mountaineers found themselves: “Their traditional mode of life has been destroyed by the inroads of the machine age; now they must learn the ways of the twentieth century.” The mountaineers’ “traditional mode of life” was, at one point, viable—but only until the introduction of automation. The solution, nonetheless, stays the same. The mountaineers’ must “learn the ways of the twentieth century”—from the AVs. In the end, the methods through which the Appalachian Volunteers hoped to end poverty in the hills were unchanged.6

  This consistency translated into the continued focus on ending Appalachian poverty through school renovation and enrichment. Reporting to Ayer, the AV staff member Thomas Rhodenbaugh reiterated the organization’s stance. Renovation continued to be important, Rhodenbaugh argued, because the horrid conditions of the schoolhouses reinforced “the handicaps inflicted on the children by their background and surroundings,” while curriculum enhancement improved “the mountain children’s chances of taking part of the modern world.”7

  On January 4, 1965, three AV members arrived in Knott County for a five-day renovation and enrichment program at the Lick Branch school. They began the project with a basketball game to “break the ice.” Following the game, they divided the schoolchildren into three groups, with each volunteer serving as a leader, for a “current events” discussion. After this, one volunteer played banjo while the others danced with the children. This first day did contain an academic component—a wall map was hung in the school. The second day was much like the first. It began with a basketball game, but, because errant play usually resulted in the ball rolling into a nearby creek, the AVs spent a good part of the remainder of that day and the next constructing a fence around the court. In terms of enrichment, the children listened to classical music and then their own voices recorded by a tape recorder and then played back. The project ended with the installation of a washbasin in the school and a party for the community.8

  Both the AV representative, Joe Mulloy, and the student volunteers concluded that the Lick Branch project was a success. Everything, from the attitude of the town’s adults to the number of volunteers, worked in favor of the project. According to the college volunteers, the community’s adults eagerly shared their time, energy, tools, and equipment to help with the refurbishing efforts, while the small number of volunteers allowed the people to get to know each student visitor.9

  As with the previous school enrichment efforts, the apparent success of the Lick Branch project reinforced the Appalachian Volunteers’ belief in such programs. Their efforts, consequently, continued unabated for the next few months. Moreover, they began to plan for a weeklong project to take place over the upcoming spring break. Nevertheless, as the AVs gained in numbers over the winter months—averaging two hundred students per weekend in January—local participation dropped. When twelve Southeast Christian College students held an enrichment program in Jackson County, for example, only ten local children attended. Despite the low turnout, the Volunteers led games of “farmer-in-the-dell” and “hot potato,” and, through the use of
picture books, posters, and costumes, the “deprived” children went on a “tour” of Mexico. Afterward, the children performed a bullfight reenactment and listened to their visitors tell stories. Volunteers canceled enrichment activities in February 1965 at Hunting Fork and Vortex, both in Wolfe County, owing to the lack of local involvement. Also that month, at the Dry Fork school, again in Jackson County, Milton Ogle, who attended this planned enhancement project, had to search for children to see a slide show on South America.10

  Despite these setbacks, the Appalachian Volunteers remained undaunted. Criticizing their own project, Southeast Christian students suggested that the AVs play games of more interest to the mountain boys and that the children be grouped according to age during the storytelling period. Robin Buckner, a Georgetown College volunteer working at the Blue Springs school in Rockcastle County, reported a waning of interest as her enrichment program, which involved paper chains, storytelling, and a microscope demonstration, neared its end. She suggested that the AVs conclude each project with a “hootenanny” in order to keep the children’s attention levels high. Despite the drop in local interest, the Volunteers refused to give up on their efforts to enhance the experiences of those attending a “culturally deprived one-room school.”11

  In keeping with this commitment, the Appalachian Volunteers began to use Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) funds to hire additional staff, including an education consultant, J. Hoge T. Sutherland. At last, the Council had the organizational structure with which to fight the War on Poverty in the forty-four Appalachian counties of Kentucky. Yet, while a native of Appalachia, Ogle, continued to run the Appalachian Volunteers, the vast majority of his staff came from outside the region. Selected as Ogle’s assistant director was Gibbs Kinderman, a Harvard graduate and a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee worker in Mississippi. The new director of field operations, Dan Fox, came to the mountains via Harvard’s Psychology Department. Of the four field office directors, only one—Flem Messer, from Clay County—was a native mountaineer. Of the others, Jack Rivel of the Barbourville office was, as we have seen, a New Jersey native, William Wells, who operated out of Morehead, hailed from California, and Thomas Rhodenbaugh, the administrator of the AVs’ western Appalachian district, came from Akron, Ohio. Even as, throughout the year, the staff grew with the addition of fieldmen (each responsible for a few counties within each district), the Volunteers undercut the original premise of the institution—that of local people helping each other. For example, Mike Kline, Joe Mulloy, Steve Daugherty, and Doug Yarrow all joined the AV staff in 1965, and not one was from eastern Kentucky. Only one, Mulloy, was from anywhere in Kentucky, and he hailed from the state’s largest metropolis, Louisville. This “strange conglomeration of people,” as the CSM associate director Loyal Jones called them, represented an AV organization that was no longer indigenous to the mountains. More important, during 1965, the Appalachian Volunteers became larger and more visible than its parent body, the Council of the Southern Mountains.12

  While the high visibility of the Appalachian Volunteer program had a significant impact on the number and origins of those hoping to take part in the effort, it did not change, at least at this point, the AV approach to poverty. During the first quarter of 1965, fifteen University of Kentucky volunteers went to Hunting Fork and Vortex in Wolfe County and taught “the dirty and scantily dressed boys the fundamentals of basketball.” Volunteers from other college campuses held even more basketball games as well as “valentine making” parties; they read stories, “toured” such places as New Jersey, and sang French and Spanish songs. Enrichment activities such as these, the AVs believed, remained the answer to the region’s poverty.13

  In order to ensure that their program met the needs of the impoverished mountaineers, the Appalachian Volunteers sent Sutherland, their AV education consultant, into fourteen of eastern Kentucky’s counties to ask the people directly about their wants and concerns. Though traveling was difficult, especially during the winter months, this retired school superintendent from Virginia visited more than 130 homes in about fifty mountain communities. He contacted at least two families in each school, and this, Sutherland claimed, represented approximately 25 percent of the families in the target locales. Through this interview process, he discovered what the people wanted and made trenchant observations on the conditions that future volunteers would face in the Southern mountains.14

  Prior to their arrival in any particular county, Sutherland and his assistant, Roslea Johnson, queried the county school superintendent about which schools and teachers to visit and obtained directions to the school. By meeting rural teachers at their job sites, the two had an opportunity to examine the physical condition of the school as well as to get advice about which families to interview. These visits alerted the pupils that their parents and families might be interviewed and provided Sutherland with firsthand knowledge of each local school. Most disturbing to the former school official was the lack of sanitary facilities, which he emphasized in his written report: “[I] DID NOT FIND A SINGLE URINAL TROUGH IN BOY’S TOILET. . . . a few schools HAD NO TOILETS.” Interestingly, he made no mention of other items, such as leaky roofs, drafty windows, decaying walls, or the lack of teaching materials, that remained high on the AVs’ priority list.15

  As Sutherland moved from the schools to the homes, he apparently missed the worst of Appalachian poverty. Rather than speaking with unemployed miners, he spent the majority of his time with farmers, many of whom supplemented their income with jobs in nearby towns. In particular, they worked as school bus drivers and lunchroom cooks, jobs that the county school superintendent controlled. One family Sutherland interviewed actually employed four farmhands. Moreover, even though most of the adults had never attended high school, they still placed a high value on education for their children. “Many had children in high school or intended to send them [there],” Sutherland reported. “Some children were in college.”16

  Though Sutherland failed to come in contact with Appalachia’s poorest, his findings revealed that, despite his contention that the mountaineers needed to “learn what is most important—to put first things first,” their long-term concerns were remarkably congruent with those of the Appalachian Volunteers. “Interviews with Eastern Kentucky parents in small schools,” he wrote, “revealed some of the things they consider important [such] as education, . . . moral training, . . . [and] homemaking.” So too were their more immediate, short-term concerns: the need for improved schools, more playground facilities, improved roads (to facilitate bus service and, thus, education), and more jobs.17

  In certain ways, the Sutherland survey was a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Appalachian Volunteers began almost a year earlier with the hypothesis that mountaineers were undereducated and that, given the opportunity and the example, they would warmly welcome a better school environment. To test this supposition, the organization sent agents first to the county school superintendents, who were already quite familiar with the program, and then to the schools themselves, where the AV representatives told the teachers and students about the purpose of the visit. When he finally introduced himself to his subjects, Sutherland “stress[ed] the Appalachian Volunteers and school connection.” Even during the interviews themselves, as his assistant observed, “he became [the] teacher . . . more than [the] interviewer.” Furthermore, because the superintendents directed him to specific households and those households had prior warning of his visit, those individuals whom Sutherland interviewed probably told him exactly what he wanted to hear or, more probably, what the superintendents wanted him to hear.18

  Ignoring the extremely poor did not necessarily reflect suspicion on the part of the local superintendents toward the AVs. Rather, their hesitancy to send Sutherland to the most impoverished areas of their counties was probably a reaction to the growing national attention being paid to the region and its problems. In late December 1964, CBS News produced two special reports on impoverishment in eastern Kentucky, Depres
sed Area U.S.A. and the more famous Christmas in Appalachia. Both set out to find the worst that eastern Kentucky had to offer, and the powers that be in the region apparently became increasingly concerned about how the region and they themselves were being portrayed.

  Hosted by Charles Kuralt and filmed on Pert Creek, Letcher County, Kentucky, Christmas in Appalachia juxtaposed the immense poverty of the Appalachian coalfields with the spirit of joy and giving felt by most Americans during the holiday season. It showed many hardworking people who “lived in a country far removed from ours” and struggled to survive. Kuralt interviewed a number of local residents, asking them about, among other things, the local school. Again, all claimed to recognize the value of education and affirmed that they wanted their children in school. Despite scenes of coal cars “carrying the wealth of Appalachia away” and the “tour” of the abandoned town of Weeksbury, once “the trading center for this whole valley” where jobs could be had, the report never attempted to explain the cause of poverty, which, as Allen Batteau has pointed out, “was due to the coal-buying policies of the Tennessee Valley Authority, or how the electricity powering the viewers’ television sets came from cheap coal.” “[The report] showed a run down schoolhouse,” Batteau continued, “but it failed to explain that the inadequate fiscal structure of Letcher County was due to its domination by some large mineral interests.” Equally mystifying was the continued discussion of the mountaineers’ attitudes toward education. The report implied that all that was needed to bring these poor mountain folk out of that “country far removed,” rebuild the town of Weeksbury, and keep wealth in the region was a proper education. This belief, already embraced by the Appalachian Volunteers, took hold of the rest of America as well.19