Reformers to Radicals

by Thomas Kiffmeyer

  The federal government’s War on Poverty merely perpetuated this misconception. As the centerpiece of the Economic Opportunity Act, the community action programs (CAPs), at least two-thirds of the boards of which were populated by representatives of public and private local interests, guided as they were by the vague notion of the “maximum feasible participation of the poor,” guaranteed yet another top-down reform effort in the coalfields. By mandating the participation of local private and public concerns, both dominated by the coal industry in Appalachian Kentucky, the federal government ensured that local CAP boards would at least uphold, if not resolidify, the status quo. In short, the federal program’s approach to ending poverty played into the hands of those who controlled eastern Kentucky’s natural and political resources and, in essence, asked the poor to participate in their own exploitation.3

  By May 1966, however, the AVs did find a new explanation—colonialism—for the dire conditions that they witnessed in the Southern mountains. This new interpretation demanded new tactics, and, for the Appalachian Volunteers, the solution was open confrontation with the colonizers and their local allies. In essence, the AVs finally realized that rooting the region’s problems in a simple construction such as education did not take into consideration the social, political, and economic context in which that education took place. Many volunteers, moreover, began to question the validity of American democracy in the region and, instead of working within existing political structures, decided to step outside the established system and engage it in battle. Of course, on one level this called for the creation of new institutions—and new hierarchies—to administer those battles.

  As the Volunteers prepared for their confrontation with the powers of the coalfields, they unfortunately retained the paternalistic notions that had driven them since their organization’s inception more than two years earlier. After May 1966, rather than exhibiting themselves as models of “proper living,” the AVs became–especially in the case of the Vietnam War—“Appalachian spokesmen” for the poor. Impoverished mountaineers, they believed, needed Volunteer assistance if they were to succeed in the war against colonial oppression. The AV “recruiter” and participant Harold Kwalwasser wrote from Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, warning about those poor with whom the AVs worked who aspired to attain “middle class” status in American society. In reference to one mountaineer in particular Kwalwasser noted:

  Carl and the other really bright people we have working for us and hope to have working with us are upwardly mobile socially. They have good heads on their shoulders and they know it. Moreover, as they move into positions of trust and status, their feelings are confirmed. That means to them that they are on their way up, toward the middle class and the ideal way of American life, Obviously it is a great thing and one of their most longed for goals is to be middle class Americans. They therefore want to act like middle class Americans and will internalize all the values of the middle class. And not only will they internalize them, but they will hold on to them with greater strength than a normal middle class person because it is important that they act middle class-like since their economic position does not totally justify their claim to belonging. In other words in so far as the middle class is identified with laissez faire economic doctrine then these people, like Carl, will come to believe in it. That means that things like welfare . . . are viewed with distaste.

  According to Kwalwasser, this new “Appalachian attitude” had dire implications for the Volunteers should these middle-class aspirants “ever accede to power in the hills.” “They obviously need government help,” Kwalwasser contended, “and I hope they know it.” Unfortunately, he warned, this middle-class attitude would force them to reject the help they so desperately need: “And if you disagree about calling [the rejection of aid] all the cause of middle classism, then call it mountain independence and you get the same answer.”4 Thus, even as the Volunteers rejected a cultural explanation of mountain poverty, notions of superiority remained within the organization.

  Yet another example of the Appalachian Volunteers’ rejection of an antipoverty program that truly called for the establishment of a bottom-up approach to solving the region’s ills was the ready abandonment of the basic tenet on which the organization was founded—local people helping each other. When, after VISTA volunteers and non-Appalachians entered their ranks and openly confronted the established system, the antipoverty group was left vulnerable to charges of outside domination or of being outside agitators. While, as an organization, the AVs never were Communists or actually radical, a significant number were not Appalachian either. The fantastic charges of subversion notwithstanding, when witnesses testified before the Kentucky Un-American Activities Committee (KUAC) that outsiders were present in the hollows, their charges were plausible. In the hands of savvy Pikeville politicians, who then used the insider/outsider dichotomy in the more familiar fashion, the leap from outside origin to outside ideology was easy.

  As the split within the ranks over the decision to fire Mulloy revealed, a significant number of AVs ultimately rejected any input from those they sought to help. Their desire to make the war a Volunteer and Appalachian issue—even after “14 out of the 17 of the east Kentuckians present at [an AV] staff meeting indicated they did not want to defend Joe’s refusal to be inducted”—revealed (once again) the belief that Appalachians could not recognize those issues that were most important to them and that local people needed—as Kwalwasser, among others, declared—the Volunteers’ leadership. Though many AVs sought to keep the Vietnam War out of the antipoverty dialogue, in Appalachian Kentucky this incident had a profound effect on the War on Poverty. First, the issue split the Appalachian Volunteers, an organization that was already weakened by the sedition charges pressed earlier that year and that would soon face KUAC. Second, Mulloy’s and his supporters’ stance discredited the Appalachian Volunteers, as a whole, with many mountain residents. As John Dittmer persuasively argues, the willing and active participation of local people was absolutely critical to the success of any social movement.5

  Nevertheless, the fact that the most serious attacks on the AVs happened in Pike County, one of the state’s leading coal-producing counties, points to the accuracy of the Volunteers’ final analysis of eastern Kentucky’s problems and the fundamental flaw in the three-legged structure of the CAPs. Coal operators, with the willing support of the local authorities, dominated the lives of the region’s poor for their own gain. Equally important, however, the fatal attacks on the antipoverty group in that county demonstrated how far dominant groups will go to prevent or influence change and just how unbalanced—socially, politically, and economically—the antagonistic forces of reform and regime maintenance are in Appalachia and the United States as a whole. Such willingness to exploit postwar fears of communism, to manipulate the judicial system, and to use the force of the state in order to further a private agenda should cause us to reevaluate just who the radicals were in the 1960s.

  As the president of the Independent Coal Operators Association and the Pikeville Chamber of Commerce and a resident of one of Kentucky’s largest coal-producing counties, Robert Holcomb had the most to lose had the AVs succeeded. On this level, the Pike County experience was unique. Nevertheless, that the Volunteers threatened the local political machines was not unique to Pike County or even the eastern Kentucky coalfields generally. In December 1966, an AV tried to organize a parent-teacher association for the Blue Springs school in Rockcastle County. One of the goals of the nascent PTA was to wrap and distribute Christmas gifts donated by a New York woman to Blue Springs through the AV organization. The county Board of Education, however, denied the AVs access to the school, and “A Tax Paying Citizen” sent a derisive letter to the Blue Springs benefactor. The author of that letter claimed that the AVs were “trying hard to tear down what many of the great people of this community have worked hard for years to build” and that “most of our people are solid, hard working, God fearing, and are not ready for S
ocialism and/or Dictatorship.”6

  Furthermore, the mountain reformers most definitely failed to recognize the strength and resiliency of the local county power structures. In their confrontations with local government, the AVs became embroiled in the struggle “over who are going to be the generals and who will be the privates” in the War on Poverty. Again, the top-down nature of the War on Poverty prevailed. This contest for leadership was, ultimately, between the Appalachian Volunteers and the county governments. Ironically, the poor, who were supposed to be equal participants, instead became the targets of the war. In most American towns and cities, Daniel Moynihan stated as early as 1969 in Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding, “to a pronounced degree events . . . are influenced by a fairly small number of men in banks and law firms.” These people “outwait [an antagonist] anytime if that individual is dependent on the House of Representatives and the General Accounting Office to stay in business.” Thus, right or wrong, the poverty programs were of secondary importance to the wishes of the “tough power brokers” of any locale. Add coal operators to Moynihan’s list of bankers and lawyers, and the result is the situation faced by the Volunteers.7

  In their dealings with the state Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), county CAPs, controlled by the special interests in the region, again exhibited and exerted the type of power that guaranteed their dominance. With the passage of the Green Amendment, in October 1967, which essentially gave local governments control over CAPs, this scenario became even more pronounced. The Office of Economic Opportunity, in essence, became subservient to county-administered CAPs. As the AV approach to ending poverty became increasingly confrontational, eighteen of twenty-four eastern Kentucky CAP directors had already, by September 1967 (even before the passage of the Green Amendment), exerted enough influence, utilizing their ready access to government organs, to prompt Al Whitehouse, the director of the Kentucky Office of Economic Opportunity, to proclaim that the CAPs were the “prime offensive weapon in the War on Poverty” and that cooperation with the AVs “prove[d] unworkable.” If the War on Poverty was to be won, he continued, the Volunteers must be “under the umbrella of [the CAPs].” Those refusing to work in harmony with the CAPs, White-house concluded, “just gotta go.”8

  Further, by relying on charges of sedition and accusing the AVs of un-American activities, the Pike County officials exercised agenda control using techniques that have a prominent place in Appalachian as well as American history. As John Gaventa shows in Power and Powerlessness, charges of communism seriously thwarted miners’ attempts to organize in the 1930s. Under the direction of local elites, the portrait of a Communist painted in the 1930s bears a striking resemblance to the image used by Ratliff and KUAC in the 1960s. During the union struggles, Gaventa showed that these elites identified six characteristics of Communists: they hated God, favored the destruction of property, encouraged racial and social equality, distributed revolutionary propaganda, sought to destroy representative government, and preached the overthrow of capitalism.9

  KUAC raised all these specters at the October hearings in Pikeville. Witnesses reported seeing pictures of blacks and whites together as well as the Volunteers’ desire to destroy the government and the money supply and to redistribute the wealth. Further, during both the sedition trial and the KUAC hearing, testimonies spoke of the vast amounts of “communist” literature found at the McSurely and Mulloy residences—the “communist library out of this world.”10

  A short example, again from the October KUAC hearing, illustrates that the county elite also used Gaventa’s first point: hatred of God. After being told that the committee would be interested in what a certain AV had to say about religion, one witness related the following: “[The AV] asked me a few questions, and well, I got the impression that he didn’t think there was any God and so I asked him if he thought there [was] and he said, ‘Yes [there has] been a creator at one time . . .’ well I got the impression that he thought there wasn’t any God anymore.”11

  In a manner similar to that of those attempting to stop the unions, KUAC and its cohorts tried to demonstrate that foreign, AV outsiders threatened the mountaineers’ way of life. Accepting the Volunteer point of view spelled certain doom for the Appalachian, and American, way of life.

  By coupling the sedition arrests with the KUAC hearing and utilizing the tried-and-true six-point Communist profile, the Pike County elite significantly augmented its position as the local power brokers by becoming “information brokers.” These information brokers, through a technique Gaventa calls the “mobilization of bias,” kept the issue of communism in front of the mountaineers for nearly eighteen months. Throughout this entire period, county officials forced the people to choose between the “Communists” and those individuals “fairly” and “legally” elected in a “democratic” system. Such phraseology effectively removed the choice from the people, presenting them with only one real alternative—to reject the AVs. While not resorting to overt force to subdue the activists, using monikers such as “communism,” Gaventa states, offers yet “more subtle means of discrediting discontent.”12

  Byrd’s declarations in the Senate, moreover, placed the AVs and their benefactor, the OEO, alongside the race riots, urban violence, student protests, and marches on the nation’s capital that, Allen Matusow argues, led to the “massive defection” of many Americans “from the liberalism that had guided the country since 1960.” Add to this list the AVs’ troubles in the latter part of the decade. First local officials labeled the Volunteers Communists. Then state officials questioned their loyalty. Finally, the Volunteers themselves—at least one of their number—refused to combat the Red menace. These events in the mountains had much the same impact locally as the marches and protests in the nation’s capital did nationally.13

  In the end the defeat of the Appalachian Volunteers resulted not from their faults alone—myriad though these may have been—but from the political and social resources mobilized against them by a local county power structure seeking to solidify and maintain the status quo. Because their focus shifted from a self-help to a confrontational, issue-organizing approach, the AVs, on one level, had no one to blame but themselves for antagonizing the local county governments. However, they truly believed that they acted in accordance with the terms of the Economic Opportunity Act, especially the “maximum feasible participation” clause. Though able to gain support among some of the mountaineers, they alienated others and, thus, were unsuccessful in overcoming those individuals who, through manipulation, coercion, and control of political resources, held the region firmly in their grasp.

  Of course, the hold that the local power/information brokers had was not as tight as they believed, and some of that power certainly slipped through their fingers. These were perhaps the same people that Kwalwasser thought rejected the Volunteers’ aid. Though, by 1970, the Appalachian Volunteers were gone and the official War on Poverty was all but over, the Council of the Southern Mountains attempted, at its Fontana and Junaluska conferences, to reestablish itself. Rejecting the old Council “because of its role in the sixties as facilitator of other people’s programs . . . especially the government’s antipoverty programs,” the new CSM also cast off the “outside young activists” who came along with those programs. From this point, the organization declared, the Council would be administered by “real mountain community leaders.”14

  Notes

  The following abbreviations are used throughout the notes:

  AV Papers

  Appalachian Volunteers Papers

  AV Papers, Part II

  Appalachian Volunteers Papers, Part II

  CSM Papers

  Council of the Southern Mountains Papers, 1913–1970

  FFGF

  Ford Foundation Grants Files

  OEO Papers

  Office of Economic Opportunity Papers

  WOP Oral History Project

  War on Poverty in Appalachian Kentucky Oral History Project

  Introduction


  1. Oral History Interview with Joe Mulloy, November 10, 1990, Huntington, WV, War on Poverty in Appalachian Kentucky Oral History Project (hereafter WOP Oral History Project), Margaret I. King Library, University of Kentucky, Lexington.

  2. On Kennedy’s primary campaign promise, see The Speeches of Senator John F. Kennedy, 376. On the origins of the Appalachian Volunteers, see Kiffmeyer, “From Self-Help to Sedition”; Whisnant, Modernizing the Mountaineer, esp. chap. 7; Glen, “The War on Poverty in Appalachia”; and Horton, “The Appalachian Volunteers.”

  3. Patterson, Grand Expectations, 451–52, 535.

  4. Harrington, The Other America; Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties, 43–44; Carson, In Struggle,

  5. Carson, In Struggle, 1. On SDS, see esp. Sale, SDS; and Zinn, SNCC, See also Boyer, Promises to Keep, 254–74; and Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties,

  6. Glen, “The War on Poverty in Appalachia”; Kiffmeyer, “From Self-Help to Sedition,” 65–74.

  7. Carson, In Struggle, 3 (quotes). On Freedom Summer, see also McAdam, Freedom Summer,

  8. See Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties, esp. the introduction and chap. 1.

  9. National Security Act quoted in Patterson, Grand Expectations, 133. NSC-68 quoted in Powaski, The Cold War, 85. On containment policy during the postwar era, see Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 94; and Patterson, Grand Expectations, 176–78.

  10. Powaski, The Cold War, 85 (first quote); Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties, 9 (other quotes). See also Patterson, Grand Expectations, 240 (Mc-Carran Act).

  11. For an in-depth examination of anticommunism and the academy, see Schrecker, No Ivory Tower, See also Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties, 11–12.

  12. On the local color movement in Appalachia, see Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind, For the selectivity of these early reformers, see Whisnant, All That Is Native and Fine; and Forderhase, “Eve Returns to the Garden.”