Reformers to Radicals

by Thomas Kiffmeyer

  Before the summer of 1968, the Appalachian Volunteers felt the effects of this turmoil. Reporting from West Virginia, David Biesmeyer informed the Volunteer staff that he witnessed a great amount of “demoralization and disorganization” among those operating in the Mountain State. As evidence of this depressed condition, Biesmeyer cited a “lack of knowledge and concern on the part of the staff as to what the other members of the staff are doing and the usual lack of agreement on goals and techniques”: “At least several members of the staff are talking of the demise of the AVs in West Virginia by the end of the summer and I believe this is a common assumption.” Many volunteers made “no plans for what they will be doing the next several weeks or months from now.” The following October, Biesmeyer informed the central office that, because the West Virginia AV project “was not approved for continued use of . . . funds after October 1,” “nearly all the staff had new jobs with other agencies.” Moreover: “The most viable CAPs in West Virginia—Raleigh and Mingo–will be taken over by the county courts, and . . . many of the really fine [local] organizers and leaders we have identified will be putting themselves and their work on the line as never before.”57

  Biesmeyer was one of those who found refuge in other agencies. By May 1969, he was the president of Designs for Rural Action. This West Virginia–based organization, through its “Knowledge Power” project, proposed to “demonstrate the utility of providing leaders of the poor with the skills in researching . . . and . . . dealing with their problems.” So poisonous was the atmosphere surrounding the War on Poverty by this time, however, that Biesmeyer’s new efforts met with the condemnation of at least one member of the state senate. Writing to the new Republican president, Richard Nixon, State Senator Neal Kingsolving called Designs for Rural Action a “dummy corporation” that operated “over the objections of our duly elected governor.” “To permit public funds to pass into private hands for such questionable purposes,” he continued, “without the approval and supervision of duly elected representatives of the people, is highly disruptive of good government and flies in the face of American tradition.”58

  In Kentucky, the situation was no different. By the end of 1968, the AV board of directors admitted that “active participation in its activities suffered severe blows by the sedition arrests in 1967 and the KUAC hearings in 1968.” The established rhetoric of the Appalachian Volunteers, however, remained. The AVs’ “primary role,” it was declared, was “the building of Appalachian poor people’s organizations for economic and political change.” These organizations would wreck “the political bases of southern demagogues locally and nationally” and “confront the colonial institutions of the region.”59

  Four years had now passed since the Appalachian Volunteers completed their first school renovation project in Harlan County, Kentucky. The energy, enthusiasm, and optimism characteristic of those early projects had long since dissipated; the organization now fought for survival. By the end of 1968, it had alienated every group—from its parent organization, the Council of the Southern Mountains, to its benefactor, the OEO—with which it had worked. A future that in 1964 looked so bright and promising was now dark and uncertain. “Where hundreds of volunteers had worked in the area in the past,” the Volunteers reported, “during the summer of 1968 the AVs carefully used the skills of only fifteen subsistence workers.”60

  Other than attempts to continue issue organizing, most AV activity reverted back to the service projects that were the hallmark of the organization’s early years. At this point, the AVs entered their forth and final phase, during which those most active in the overall AV program, people such as Edith Easterling and the community interns, were again Appalachians, not outsiders. They were not, however, necessarily volunteers. Instead, they were Volunteer employees. This last manifestation of the AVs was illustrated through the organization’s tenuous relationship with the Pike County Citizens Association (PCCA). Founded just prior to the sedition arrests in 1967, the PCCA was an attempt by the Volunteers to create a countywide base of support. By 1969, however, only residents of Marrowbone Creek participated in the group. The fact that the AVs hired the staff but required local people to accept full responsibility for the group was indicative of this new version of the Appalachian Volunteers. One exception to this shift was a legal services effort headed by the Yale-educated lawyer Howard Thorkelson. Focusing on issues such as black lung disease and welfare rights, even this program represented a change from the AVs’ issue-organizing days. While these questions remained crucial to both the Volunteers and local mountaineers, legal services, though adversarial, operated through the courts rather than through open confrontation. More significantly, the legal services effort represented a philosophical shift within the Volunteer organization. Instead of attacking the “corrupt system,” the AVs worked to remedy the plight of the poor through legal action within the system.61

  Included among the activities of the new local Appalachian Volunteers was the registration of indigent mountaineers on the county welfare roles so that they could receive such benefits as food stamps. Despite this effort, however, one AV mountaineer implied in his report that many people still had a difficult time receiving the benefits to which they were entitled. Other volunteers conducted projects reminiscent of the group’s early years. In Letcher County, the Volunteers sponsored two programs, a woodworking cooperative in Carcassonne and a low-cost housing project in Blackey, but they canceled a third slated for Kingdom Come because the people there had “heard so much talk about the AV’s” that the group found it “difficult to work there.” An AV economic consultant, Ben Poage, advised the Volunteers to select certain communities for demonstration greenhouse projects and woodworking cooperatives that specialized in the construction of stringed instruments and custom rifle stocks. Other volunteers undertook similar efforts. With AV help, the poor of Logan County, West Virginia, established a “very small” Aid to Dependent Children welfare-rights group, and other AV workers set up boys’ and girls’ basketball teams and held “socials” for local children on weekends. After the tremendous pressure brought to bear on them by the sedition affair, the antiwar episode, and the KUAC hearings, the Appalachian Volunteers returned to those programs that would generate the favorable publicity and exposure that they had enjoyed in 1964.62

  Money was also very scarce as the last OEO grants, “originally made in 1967, were due to expire at the end of April 1968.” Because of extremely conservative spending measures on the part of the AVs, “substantial funds remained unused, [and] the program year was extended by three and six month periods through March, 1969.” Grants from private foundations such as the Field Foundation, the New World Foundation, and the Aaron Norman Fund helped the AVs operate at a reduced level after the OEO grant expired.63

  In August 1968, the Appalachian Volunteers submitted an application for refunding to the OEO for the calendar year 1969. After the OEO approved the application in December 1968, it sent it to Louie Nunn for his approval. Asking for only $116,116, an amount considerably smaller than previous grants, the AVs stated that they “voluntarily limited the application to this amount because they wanted to restrict their activities to the Cumberland Valley of Kentucky.” This restriction, however, did not seem to be voluntary. Douglas G. Robinson, the lawyer hired by the AVs to help them obtain money from the OEO, reported that he had doubts whether the OEO would accept this argument “since West Virginia Governor Smith told the OEO director unequivocally that he would no longer give his approval to AV programs in his state.”64

  Following Governor Smith’s lead, Governor Nunn rejected the application because it did not “clearly spell out the AVs’ objectives,” and the board and staff members were not listed. The Appalachian Volunteers filed an amended application in early March. Before the application ever reached his desk, however, Nunn informed the state OEO office that he would not approve the second AV grant proposal. Because of this, the Kentucky OEO office never sent the AV application to him. As a
result, the money set aside by the OEO to cover the grant never reached the Appalachian Volunteers. By June 1969, the Volunteers’ executive director, David Walls, announced that, while the Volunteers would help with travel funds and act as a liaison with the various foundations from which they hoped to gain financial support, individual volunteers would need to raise the funds for their own specific projects themselves. Walls also informed the Volunteer staff that he had earmarked most of the remaining funds for administrative overhead until the antipoverty organization closed its books in the Prestonsburg office.65

  With their backs against the wall and money due to run out by October 1, 1970, the Appalachian Volunteers played their last card. Claiming that the failure to send the second AV grant application to the governor and the denial of “reasonable notice and opportunity to be heard on the refusal to refund” violated the Economic Opportunity Act, they sued the OEO for funding early in January 1970. This action did little to help the Volunteers, and Walls himself resigned from the organization in May. The Appalachian Volunteers did not outlast the summer of 1970.66

  Ironically, as the Appalachian Volunteers, Inc., withered away, many former staff members found their way back to the Council of the Southern Mountains. In a second irony, the Council, which was now a coalition of various “Commissions” such as the Community Action Commission and the Black Appalachian Commission, had reverted back to the loose, voluntary organizational structure that had characterized it in the 1910s and 1920s. This transformation was the result of the Council’s 1969 annual conference, held at Fontana Dam Village, North Carolina. About a thousand people from all over the United States attended, and many of the issues that had caused havoc within the ranks of the Volunteers came to the fore. After the Council—in part under the influence of those returning AVs, but also as a result of what seemed to be a more politically motivated local populace—passed a resolution that allowed everyone attending, whether they were paid Council members or not, to vote, “conference participants established new commissions on Black Appalachians, Poor People’s Self-Help, Aging, and Natural Resources.” The newly expanded membership also passed several resolutions of a highly political nature, including calls for a guaranteed annual income and the immediate withdrawal of American troops from Southeast Asia. Even the leadership of the CSM had changed. By the summer of 1970, David Walls, the former AV director, had become a commanding presence within the Council of the Southern Mountains.67

  At the next annual conference in 1970, held at Lake Junaluska, North Carolina, the CSM further felt the influence of this activism. Indicative of the prevailing attitude at the Junaluska conference was a resolution made by the Youth Commission stating that the “defined operational goal of the Council of the Southern Mountains should be the democratic public control of Appalachia’s natural resources, basic energy development and transportation, emphasizing decentralization, democratic community and workers’ control.” As some members of the Board of Directors embraced this statement and others emphasized “the need for social change” and “social action,” Loyal Jones, who had replaced Ayer as the executive director of the more moderate Council in late 1966, resigned on June 1, 1970. He was not the only member to leave as a result of what some referred to as the “socialistic, if not . . . communist stand” taken by the CSM.68

  Although the Council expressed regret over Jones’s resignation, it continued to move toward a more radical stance. “New blood,” the Berea College Pinnacle announced in May 1970, “is beginning to flow in the veins of social revolution in Appalachia.” There were hopes, the article continued, that this new “era” would be the “most . . . radical in the Council’s history.” This loosely organized coalition of diverse interests actually accomplished much without the money and support it had under Ayer and Jones. Operating out of Clintwood, Virginia, the CSM found, however, that its highly politicized agenda severely restricted its base of support, and it never enjoyed the status it had had in the 1960s. Finally, in 1989, after working for change in the Appalachian South for seventy-six years, the Council of the Southern Mountains officially disbanded.69

  Conclusion

  Live to Fight Another Day

  In truth, controversy—from the grassroots level of mountain communities to the remote marble canyons of a giant federal bureaucracy—has been as much a hallmark of the AV’s as the programs the organization says it conducts in the Appalachian mountains.

  —Richard Boyd, “Appy Volunteers

  Are Accustomed to Controversy”

  This attempt to integrate the Appalachian South into urban, mainstream America, in many ways an “unfinished revolution,” as Eric Foner described the situation in the South after 1877, was decidedly problematic. Nevertheless, this episode in Appalachian history provides insights into the nature of liberal reform, of change, of change agents, and of those in the coal-fields who opposed them during the 1960s. These lessons would also apply to the struggles that characterized the War on Poverty in other regions of the United States. Ever since Appalachia’s first attempted “reconstruction,” which came at the hands of the local color writers, the settlement school workers, and the Northern industrial conquest of the region in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, government agencies, local elites, and outside interest groups have dominated “legitimate” change in Appalachia—that is, change interpreted as beneficial. From settlement school teachers to antipoverty warriors, those who came to “save” the mountaineers viewed their subjects as quaint, yet helpless and ignorant at best, and violent and resistant to improvement at worst. Rooted in the perceptions of rural mountaineers held by most Americans, the ideas and conceptions that reformers brought with them to their job betrayed the fact that these outsiders in Appalachia saw the Appalachians themselves as outsiders. While most histories, either popular or scholarly, of the region portray the mountaineers as the ones to perpetuate the insider/outsider dichotomy, a closer look reveals that, in many cases, including the War on Poverty, it was the activists who saw the mountaineers as outsiders because they did not represent what the outside world considered normative. Reporting in the New York Times on the Harlan County mine war of the early 1930s, for example, Malcolm Ross perpetuated that disparaging image when he noted that Appalachians were inherently unfit for industrial work: “The coal diggers of the Appalachian mine fields are mountaineers by birth and miners by accident. . . . Whether they escape into the scrubby back district or whether they remain miners, the mountain character of this unadapted people is the most important thing about them. It will not do well to catalogue them as ‘mine labor.’” “The mountaineer-miner is a salty individual,” he continued, “prejudiced, ignorant, and usually owning a personal charm matched only by his irresponsibility.”1

  About thirty years later, the operative assumptions of the Council of the Southern Mountains (CSM) and the Appalachian Volunteers (AVs), especially during their first few years, professed a cultural explanation of the mountaineers’ inadequacies that essentially mirrored Ross’s. While the educational enhancement programs certainly held some benefit for mountain children, those efforts, and the generalizations the Volunteers made about rural Appalachians, especially in the training sessions held in Berea, revealed the AVs’ preconceived ideas about mountaineers and the sources and causes of poverty. First, the reformers’ generalizations about mountain schools and teachers transcended physical conditions and implied that virtually all rural mountaineers, adults as well as children, were insufficiently educated, unimaginative, unable to express themselves, and socially inadequate. The solution to these problems, the Council leadership and a significant number of volunteers believed, was an AV curriculum enhancement and school repair project that would bring the region to, and entice these seemingly deprived children to enter, the Volunteers’ world. This perspective prevented the Volunteers themselves from delving beyond surface appearances or discovering their own class biases. In fact, this perspective precluded any sort of class or economic analysi
s. While they did understand that there was a connection between education and poverty, the Volunteers failed, at least through early 1966, to look beyond their own cultural limitations and consider why the education system was inadequate to the needs of the poor. They did not consider what purpose the mountain education system did serve or what type of education rural mountaineers, in fact, did have. The Council and the Volunteers accepted the prevailing liberal notion of education (which still exists today) as the key to vanquishing want and blamed the victims for their own condition. The mountaineers were poor because they had no education, and, if they failed to get an education, it was their own fault that they remained poor. Questions concerning the economic or political environment do not enter into this simplified analysis, which confirmed the initial position taken by these latter-day mountain reformers. Because it focused on the poor rather than on poverty, this point of view revealed more about the reformers and their vision of the United States than it did about those whom modern society had left behind, and, until they unearthed deeper causes of poverty, renovation and enrichment efforts monopolized the Volunteers’ activity in Kentucky’s eastern coalfields.2