Reformers to Radicals
Page 16
A volunteer in Leslie County decided to take a more confrontational approach to the emerging AV problems. Instead of simply complaining to his AV supervisors, P. D. Merrill made his complaints public. “What are we fighting,” Merrill wrote to the Leslie County News, “poverty or the poor?” He went on to attack those who believed that the poor could not work effectively in the poverty program because they were either too lazy or too unintelligent to prevent themselves from being “manipulated by the power hungry politicians.” Merrill’s meaning was clear. It was not a lack of intelligence that precipitated the political manipulation of the mountain people but ignorance, an ignorance perpetuated by politicians. Offering an example, Merrill claimed that the Leslie County Development Association Board of Directors failed to provide all association members with copies of the articles of incorporation and, thereby, prevented the poor from comprehending how the organization operated. Moreover, the board also initiated projects that were not “sensitive to the feelings of the people with whom they were dealing.”55
Even if the individuals who ran the county CAP had the real interests of the impoverished at heart, Merrill concluded, their practice of excluding the poor from participating in the administration of their projects was wrong. With the aim of remedying this, Merrill took the unprecedented step, especially in light of the Council’s cooperative philosophy, of trying to tell a local agency how to operate. The articles of incorporation of the Leslie County CAP should, he contended, be amended so that it would be “mandatory” for there to be on the board representatives from each neighborhood in the county, representatives “whose annual income is less than $4,000.”56
In a letter to Dan Fox, the AV director of field operations, Merrill confessed that his statement to the newspaper was “calculated to affect the more educated leaders of the county.” “Though it was not the success that I hoped it would be,” he lamented, “it did create quite a bit of conversation.” Given the AVs’ conception of the lack of education in the mountains, there was no doubt that the “more educated leaders” whom Merrill targeted were public officials and business leaders in the county seat.57
Though the Appalachian Volunteers experienced mounting difficulties with local and county officials in 1965 and 1966, this situation was not unique to eastern Kentucky. As Allen Matusow has illustrated, local officials in cities such as Philadelphia, New York, and San Francisco fought tooth and nail to maximize their own control of and minimize the input of the poor into antipoverty programs. Matusow’s account does not consider the action of the poor themselves or any group, such as the Appalachian Volunteers, that worked on behalf of the poor, but it does raise important issues of self-interest.58
While certain powerful local individuals may have sought to enhance their own positions, evidence suggests that some county superintendents were genuinely less than pleased with how participants in the AV program depicted eastern Kentucky. In a national magazine, the Volunteer field representative Thomas Rhodenbaugh described the educational system in the region as a “dull, dry, and monotonous” experience that failed to address the needs of the people. He also suggested that the political system in the mountains failed to live up to the American ideal. “The [AV] program is a vehicle,” he claimed, “upon which people can begin seeing their own needs in the light of the twentieth century and co-operatively work together to satisfy some of those needs.” “This process,” he concluded, “has as a goal co-operation and the restoration of grass roots democracy.”59
Rhodenbaugh’s comments may have reflected the position held by many on the AV staff, but such publicity did not endear the program to county boards of education. By 1965, AV leaders required that all publicity issued by any individual or group operating in the mountains under the AV banner be cleared with the Berea office. This decision was made in reaction to experiences with “people coming into the area who mean well but because of published articles in newspapers and magazines, some of the good that they did . . . was more or less undone by the negative reaction toward publicity concerning conditions in the area.” Because of all the national attention already focused on the Appalachian region, this sort of unofficial publicity “tends to take the extreme, leaving the impression that somebody or some particular school system or county officials are to blame.” As the Appalachian Volunteers were beginning to discover, an antagonistic county government spelled trouble for their reform efforts.60
Unwanted publicity, as the January 1965 Wilmington College project illustrated, was already a source of friction between the Appalachian Volunteer organization and some county superintendents. Moreover, it caused problems between AV leaders and the campus chapters. In March 1965, the University of Kentucky’s campus newspaper, the Kentucky Kernel, published a story about the antipoverty efforts of its campus chapter in Knox, Elliott, and Floyd counties. After recounting the work they had done renovating buildings and improving playgrounds, the participants assigned blame for the conditions they encountered, singling out, for example, the “unqualified” teacher at the Bruin School in Elliott County and “apathy on the part of the teachers at Ligon School” in Floyd County. It was the latter, they contended, that “allowed the new concrete building to become run down and filthy.” Without follow-up work, they concluded, their work at Ligon School “will have accomplished little.”61
Reaction to the Kernel article—by both the Volunteer staff and Floyd County—was swift. While the Volunteer staff member William Wells criticized the tone of the piece, the Floyd County superintendent Charles Clark informed Flem Messer that the Ligon staff no longer welcomed the Volunteers. Though Messer recognized that the “teachers were not appreciative of the negative publicity given to their school,” he urged Clark to meet with them and ask them to reconsider their stance. Clark agreed, but Messer reported that the AVs could only hope that Clark and the teachers would “come to a positive decision.”62
Problems with the state’s flagship university continued. Just over a year later, undoubtedly inspired by both the efforts of the War on Poverty in Appalachia and the activities of her fellow students, Judy Grisham, a Kernel columnist, visited southeastern Kentucky. What she reported and photographed angered the Volunteers. The people, she wrote, “live in a world of their own—a world consisting of themselves and their neighbors just over the hill”: “They know nothing else. Nor do they seem to care.” Outsiders, she continued, were “sickened by the unspeakable stench and unbelievable filth” that characterized the mountain homes she visited. The real tragedy, as one of her picture captions made clear, was the fact that the “children stay.”63
Though no one—not even the Volunteers—disputed the nature of Appalachian poverty, the images created by the article implied that the problem could not be solved—or that no one was seeking a solution. Grisham’s remarks particularly angered the AV staff member Jack Rivel. In response, Rivel wrote Grisham:
I cannot reach very far for the words necessary in explaining my feelings and that of others . . . here who have read the article but I suggest that maybe [y]ou can find them in the gutter. . . . We do not feel that you gave many [people] a chance when you visited the creek you wrote about. Sure it makes beautiful copy but how much greater a contribution could your words of wisdom have been if you had experienced more than just that which you wrote about—possibly a community meeting, using more of the sweat of your brow, . . . working with rural people as they renovate their school, as they improve their roads.64
Rivel intended his words to express his anger at one journalist, but they also illustrate the AV leaders’ frustration with their inability to control the dissemination of information about their own program. As the number of participants, particularly non-Appalachians, increased, the organization’s ability to control its members decreased. Such unwanted or ill-advised publicity was symptomatic of a much larger problem.
The experiences of two VISTA volunteers in Dorton, Bell County, Kentucky, are indicative of the AVs’ lack of control. Though the exact
circumstances are a mystery, the volunteers discovered, in March 1966, that the more influential citizens of Dorton did not want them present. “There are about 5–8 families out of 40,” Judy Thomas wrote Dan Fox, “who really want to push us out. But these are people who do carry weight and fear us because they are afraid we might upset their ‘safe’ position.” She also expressed her sense of abandonment when she indicated that VISTA volunteers “rarely have any outside [support] . . . in such situations.” Because Thomas’s fieldman, Jack Rivel, instructed her and Julia McKeon, Thomas’s fellow volunteer, to play it “very cool,” they remained but accomplished little.65
Two months after writing Fox, Thomas and McKeon contacted VISTA headquarters in Washington, DC, and asked to be released from the AV program. “We are now under the Council of the Southern Mountains (Appalachian Volunteers),” they informed the national office, “and wish to transfer to the Bell County Economic Opportunity Council, Inc.” They listed three reasons for their request: the “lack of communication with [their] present sponsor”; the fact that their work in Dorton was “blocked by the power group’s hostility”; and the belief that they could be of immediate use in the nearby city of Middlesborough.66
As the summer of 1966 approached, the Appalachian Volunteer program expanded dramatically in terms of participants but not necessarily in terms of their base of support. By early 1966, the patronage of local governments that the AV program enjoyed during its initial months of operation began to erode. As volunteers entered the mountains and assumed (or tried to assume) leadership roles by becoming teachers or serving as go-betweens connecting the local people with the county seat, indigenous local leaders both in the towns and in the outlying communities began to move against them.67 School superintendents in particular stalled if Volunteer initiatives did not in some way benefit them.
Much more disturbing, however, were the problems emerging within the AV ranks. The failure to control information about the program and the Volunteers’ perception of abandonment by the Council of the Southern Mountains hurt morale. At best, some volunteers, including those who wanted to continue their assignments in the mountains, sought other sponsors. At worst, they abandoned their assignments. The CSM’s War on Poverty in eastern Kentucky faced serious challenges on nearly every front, and the poverty warriors’ responses to those challenges created even greater conflict.
5
The New Model Army
The Appalachian Volunteers Splits from the Council of the Southern Mountains
Never have I seen so well organized, sensible and tactful an approach, based on really sensitive appreciation of the delicate relationship between people and those who come to “help” them. . . . [Do not change a thing, only] worry about losing what you have.
—Harvard psychologist and AV consultant
Robert Coles to Dan Fox, July 13, 1965
Thanks a lot. Until last week I was in a county with a lousy sponsor and eleven lousy Vistas. Then came along the four from Berea. We now have a lousy sponsor and 15 lousy Vistas. Let’s cure poverty by teaching remedial physics, weaving baskets and flirting with boys. Add that to a sponsor who is going to cure poverty by building art colonies in ruined coal towns and you end up with lousy letters from a depressed Vista.
—Clay County, WV, VISTA volunteer
Ellen Weisman to Dan Fox, October 11, 1965
By May 1966, Loyal Jones, the assistant director of the Council of the Southern Mountains (CSM), faced a serious conundrum. On the one hand, their accomplishments sparked in the Appalachian Volunteers (AVs) a desire to get closer to the heart of the mountains—by moving their headquarters to the city of Bristol, which straddled the Tennessee-Virginia border. From the organization’s founding, Jones admitted, the Council considered the idea of an independent Appalachian Volunteers. Moreover, recent experience had led some AV members to question the leadership of Ayer and the CSM. On the other hand, should the AVs leave, the CSM could lose control of its most visible, most notable effort in its long history. “As the War on Poverty heated up, and as more people became involved in it, . . . as projects became more controversial, particularly the Appalachian Volunteers,” Jones recalled, “I counseled the Office of Economic Opportunity to separate them from the Council.” Jones “didn’t believe” that, should the AVs relocate, “it would be possible . . . for the [CSM] to administer that project.”1
This was, unfortunately, not the only problem Jones faced at that time. A long-standing Council employee, Jones—a native of western North Carolina and, like many of his counterparts, a graduate of Berea College—first came to the CSM in 1958 to run the organization while the director, Perley Ayer, went on leave to study rural sociology. On Ayer’s return, Jones took up the position of assistant director. Though he may have been more sympathetic to the Volunteers’ emerging frustration with the War on Poverty than was the rest of the “far more conservative” CSM, Jones still had sympathy for Ayer’s administrative style. More just a naively “neutral stance,” Ayer’s “call to partnership,” Jones contended (paraphrasing David Lilienthal), got “everybody . . . involved . . . in a certain political sense and in an educational sense and at the end . . . they would feel that it was their program rather than somebody else’s.” Thus, the “call to partnership” actually “democratized programs” and gave all levels of society a sense of ownership, which, Jones believed, would ensure success. In the end, because Ayer had hired him, Jones threw his support behind the partnership philosophy. For its part, the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) favored having one of its signature programs attached to a relatively stable, “church-related, . . . old-line liberal organization.” These two decisions—one by Jones and one by the OEO—proved fateful for both the War on Poverty in Appalachia and the Council of the Southern Mountains.2
Jones, however, was not the only poverty warrior at a crossroads. As the epigraphs to this chapter illustrate, the Appalachian Volunteers as an organization was in the midst of a metamorphosis. Contrary to Coles’s warning not to change a thing, by the start of 1966, it did not have to worry about losing what it had—that was already gone. The Volunteers were, as we have seen, no longer truly Appalachian, and the consequences for reform efforts in the region were profound. For one thing, the inclusion of more and more outsiders meant the importation of more and more ideas and mores that were foreign to Appalachia. Also, the Volunteers were increasingly willing to confront, rather than (as the CSM advocated) cooperate with, the local political establishment as they sought “to help adults in forming a community organization so that they may be better able to participate in their County Economic effort.” As county officials balked, the reformers faced a choice. They could accept the Council’s philosophy and follow the lead of county officials, or they could reject it and gird themselves for battle. As the AVs faced increasing opposition in the field and the CSM lost control of its young poverty warriors, the choice grew easier and easier. Change, then, was at the center of the Appalachian Volunteer experience in early 1966.3
Up to this point, the AVs believed that nearly every rural Appalachian welcomed them with open arms. Certainly, they maintained that this was true, despite growing evidence to the contrary of the Appalachians’ actual opinions. Some AV members began to feel that the inclusion of VISTA volunteers jeopardized AV efforts. However, individual VISTA volunteers were not the problem. The problem was the inflexibility of the “administratively centered program” that sponsored them. VISTA imposed on impoverished communities, one AV wrote, a set of “predetermined ideas from D.C.” The Volunteers’ efforts, by contrast, were characterized by their “understanding and feelings for the worth of every man,” while “government controlled programs view people by statistics.” Linking the AV and VISTA programs threatened that understanding. Further, few mountain residents recognized the Appalachian Volunteers as a government program. “Even though our major source of funds is OEO,” an unnamed AV concluded, “we are still separated from their failures. It would be awkward
for me to work in Eastern Kentucky if people realize that I was just another government employee there to help them.” This volunteer also worried about AVs training VISTA volunteers. If there were any “failures” on the part of these federally supported volunteers, the fault, the AV reasoned, would be perceived as resting with the Appalachian Volunteers. Ultimately, the AV member felt that the Appalachian Volunteers could continue to utilize federal money and VISTA personnel only as long as the tie between the AVs and VISTA went unrecognized.4
As AVs and VISTA volunteers worked through 1965 and into 1966, more and more AVs came to feel the same way, soured, perhaps, by experiences similar to that of Bill Wells, who in the spring of 1965 reported on an Elliott County woman who cooperated with the VISTA program because she expected monetary compensation. She had worked with the Volunteers, Wells believed, in the hope of getting herself out of financial difficulty (her own self-centered War on Poverty) and had become “dissatisfied with the community and with the Council for not showing her more material appreciation for the work she had been doing.” Such self-interest was hardly what the Appalachian Volunteers wanted motivating their acceptance by local communities.5
One observant AV member, reporting from the Leslie County community of Trace Fork, spelled out the damage inflicted on the organization by the inclusion of so many non-Appalachian Volunteers. “The very fact that a volunteer goes into a community to assist, a fact which is realized by everyone no matter how much it is avoided and played down by the [volunteer], degrades, threatens, and sometimes angers the mountain people.” The “college outsider,” the volunteer continued, “is viewed from the start as having a superior education and wider background.” In conclusion, the writer claimed, the mountaineer, “burdened by a feeling of inadequacy,” “tends to feel ill at ease, talk only when necessary—volunteering nothing—and feel disinclined to accept the outsider’s suggestions or his friendship.”6