Reformers to Radicals

by Thomas Kiffmeyer

  46. Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands; Bigart, “Kentucky Miners.” On Bigart’s influence on the president, see Whisnant, Modernizing the Mountaineer, 94.

  47. Bigart, “Kentucky Miners.”

  48. Ibid.

  49. Ibid. Bigart also noted that nearby Pike County curtailed a school lunch program at Hellier owing to a shortage of funds.

  50. Appalachian Volunteers First Report, March 30, 1964, Appalachian Volunteers Papers (hereafter AV Papers), box 3, Southern Appalachian Archives, Hutchins Library, Berea College, Berea, KY; Untitled Report, n.d., AV Papers, box 8.

  51. Matusow, The Unraveling of America, 15 (quote). Perhaps the best account of the West Virginia primary is in White, The Making of the President, 1960, 96–114. Anderson (The Movement and the Sixties, 59) discusses Kennedy’s “fix-it social agenda”—which would “spread 1950s affluence and middle class status to all” and which he used during the campaign of 1960.

  52. Appalachian Volunteers First Report, March 30, 1964, AV Papers, box 3; Untitled Report, n.d., AV Papers, box 8.

  53. Whisnant, Modernizing the Mountaineer, 127–31 (on PARC), 128 (quote [from Whitesburg, KY, Mountain Eagle, March 12, 1964]). Sundquist, Politics and Policy, 102. On the CSM and its relation to PARC’s programs, see A Volunteer Component for the Eastern Kentucky Program, [1963], AV Papers, box 20; Policy Statement of the Council of the Southern Mountains, Inc., in Relation to the So-Called “Crash Program” of Emergency Relief of Federal, Regional and State Interests, December 20, 1963, CSM Papers, box 70; Appalachian Volunteers: First Year Working Draft, [1964], AV Papers, box 1.

  54. Policy Statement of the Council of the Southern Mountains, Inc., to the So-Called “Crash Program” of Emergency Relief of Federal, Regional, and State Interests, December 20, 1963, CSM Papers, box 70.

  55. Appalachian Volunteers First Report, March 30, 1964, AV Papers, box 3; Untitled Report, n.d., AV Papers, box 8.

  56. Untitled Report, n.d., AV Papers, box 8; A Volunteer Component for the Eastern Kentucky Program, [1963], sec. 1, Rationale for a Volunteer Program, AV Papers, box 20.

  57. A Volunteer Component for the Eastern Kentucky Program, [1963], sec. 1, Rationale for a Volunteer Program, AV Papers, box 20.

  58. These colleges included Asbury College, Wilmore; Asbury Theological Seminary, Wilmore; Alice Lloyd College, Pippa Passes; Berea College, Berea; Clearcreek Baptist School, Pineville; College of the Bible, Lexington; Cumberland College, Williamsburg; Eastern Kentucky State College, Richmond; Georgetown College, Georgetown; Lees Junior College, Jackson; Lindsey Wilson College, Columbia; Midway Junior College, Midway; Morehead State College, Morehead; Pikeville College, Pikeville; Southeast Christian College, Winchester; Sue Bennett College, London; Transylvania College, Lexington; Union College, Barbourville; and University of Kentucky, Lexington. A Volunteer Component for the Eastern Kentucky Program, [1963] (quote), AV Papers, box 20; Appalachian Volunteers First Report, March 30, 1964, AV Papers, box 3.

  59. Policy Statement of the Council of the Southern Mountains, Inc., to the So-Called “Crash Program” of Emergency Relief of Federal, Regional, and State Interests, December 20, 1963 (first quote), CSM Papers, box 70; A Volunteer Component for the Eastern Kentucky Program, [1963] (other quotes), AV Papers, box 20.

  60. A Volunteer Component for the Eastern Kentucky Program, [1963], AV Papers, box 20; Appalachian Volunteers First Report, March 30, 1964 (quote), AV Papers, box 3; Untitled Report, n.d., AV Papers, box 20.

  61. Appalachian Volunteers First Report, March 30, 1964, AV Papers, box 3.

  62. Ibid.

  63. Ibid. See also Oral History Interview with Jack Rivel, February 12, 1991, Berea, KY, WOP Oral History Project.

  64. Appalachian Volunteers First Report, March 30, 1964, AV Papers, box 3.

  65. Perley Ayer to [the Nineteen Presidents of Eastern Kentucky Colleges and Universities], January 15, 1964, AV Papers, box 1.

  66. The idea of using local people not simply as a means of obtaining labor but as a way of involving them in efforts on their own behalf and, ultimately, providing them a way of controlling their own lives, was not exclusive to the Council of the Southern Mountains. Students of the civil rights movement are now seeing that this idea was put into practice by other reform organizations of the era. In Bearing the Cross, e.g., Garrow successfully expands the movement beyond its most visible leaders. As such notables as Martin Luther King Jr. are woven into the overall fabric of the movement, local leaders like E. L. Doyle of Selma, Alabama, come into significance. More recently, Dittmer argued in Local People that, in Mississippi, indigenous people not only were most important but actually gave the movement shape and direction.

  67. See Harrington, The Other America; and Galbraith, The Affluent Society, For a critique of these works, see MacDonald, “Our Invisible Poor.”

  2. The Shot Heard Round the World

  1. Oral History Interview with Milton Ogle, April 5, 1991, Charleston, WV, WOP Oral History Project.

  2. Perhaps the best summation of these models is in Lewis, “Fatalism or the Coal Industry?” See also Lewis, Johnson, and Askins, eds., Colonialism in Modern America, Demonstrating the longevity and the attraction of the culture of poverty model in the 1960s is Weller’s Yesterday’s People,

  3. Lewis, “Fatalism or the Coal Industry?” Glen, “The War on Poverty in Appalachia,” 41 (quote).

  4. Johnson, The Vantage Point, 79, 70. Two of the better works on the liberalism of the 1960s are Matusow’s The Unraveling of America and Hodgson’s America in Our Time, Heath’s Decade of Disillusionment also provides a critical assessment of the liberalism of these two presidents. While Johnson was a latter-day New Dealer, Kennedy was, according to Heath, “trained in the tradition of noblesse oblige” (11). See also Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties; and Hamby, Liberalism and Its Challengers,

  5. For a legislative history of the Area Redevelopment Act of 1961, see Sundquist, Politics and Policy, 57–85 (quote, 62).

  6. Ibid., 84 (quotes). See also Levitan, Federal Aid to Depressed Areas; and Parmet, JFK, 77.

  7. Lyndon Johnson began his public career in 1935 as the Texas administrator of the National Youth Administration (NYA), which operated under the umbrella of the Works Progress Administration. His experiences with the NYA exposed him to the problems of the young, the poor, and the unemployed. He then entered national politics, winning the 1937 congressional election in Texas’s Tenth District after having run as a fervent supporter of the New Deal. His first attempt at the Senate came in 1941, when the Texas senator Morris Sheppard died and a special election was held to fill the vacant seat. With the firm support of President Roosevelt, Johnson announced his candidacy. While he lost the election by a narrow margin, he had made his political position clear.

  Johnson again ran for the Senate in 1948, and this time the results were in his favor. Although he had to placate Texas conservatives, including those in the energy industry, to win the election, his ties with Roosevelt’s recovery programs were not that easily severed. Later in his Senate career, as majority leader, Johnson worked on his own party’s reform programs, such as Truman’s “Fair Deal” measures, and as vice president he supported Kennedy’s domestic reform policies. Thus, Johnson entered the White House with a long personal history of support for domestic reform. In fact, the period that his political career had spanned to date (1935–1963, from the New Deal to the Kennedy administration) had witnessed perhaps the greatest effort to solve the problems of poverty, by government and private citizens alike, ever to be attempted. Nevertheless, these concerns were limited and defined by that brand of American liberalism that dominated most reform thinkers in the Cold War era.

  8. Johnson, The Vantage Point, 71 (first quote), and A Time for Action, 168, 170 (other quotes). On the Council of Economic Advisers under Heller, see esp. Matusow, The Unraveling of America, 120–23; and Johnson, The Vantage Point, 69–71.

  9. On “anomie and estrangement,” see Milkis and Mileur, eds.,
The Great Society and the High Tide of Liberalism, xiii. For the University of Michigan speech, see Public Papers of . . . Lyndon Baines Johnson, 1963–64, 1:704. For the other quotes, see Public Papers of . . . Lyndon Baines Johnson, 1966, 1:3–7. For a recent critical assessment of the Great Society and its impact on late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century liberalism, see Milkis and Mileur, eds., The Great Society and the High Tide of Liberalism,

  10. Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, Public Law 88-452, 78 Stat. 508.

  11. AV Board of Directors Meeting, 1965, University of Kentucky, Lexington, AV Papers, box 2.

  12. Wofford, “The Politics of Local Responsibility,” 79 (first quote); Yarmolinsky, “The Beginnings of OEO,” 49 (second quote); Kravitz, “The Community Action Program.” See also Glen, “The War on Poverty in Appalachia,” 42; and Matusow, The Unraveling of America, 243–45.

  13. Kravitz, “The Community Action Program,” 60 (second quote); Wofford, “The Politics of Local Responsibility,” 81 (first quote), 79 (third quote). For a discussion of how conflict aids pluralist societies, see Hirschman, “Social Conflicts as Pillars of Democratic Market Society.”

  14. Perley Ayer to Jack Ciaccio, May 28, 1966 (first quote), CSM Papers, box 129 (copy in AV Papers, box 5); Mountain Life and Work, 39 (Winter 1963): 58–59 (second quote). See also Glen, “The War on Poverty in Appalachia,” 44; and Whisnant, Modernizing the Mountaineer, 19.

  15. A Volunteer Component for the Eastern Kentucky Program, [1963], AV Papers, box 20.

  16. Roslea Johnson, President, CAMP, to Dr. Kenneth H. Thompson, Associate Dean, Berea College, May 15, 1963, AV Papers, box 20.

  17. Ibid.; Memorandum, Perley Ayer to Youth Committee of the CSM, October 11, 1963, CSM Papers, box 100.

  18. Appalachian Volunteers By-Laws, [March 1964], AV Papers, box 1; Horton, “The Appalachian Volunteers,” 48 (Ogle quote).

  19. Telegram, Lyndon Johnson to Milton Ogle, January 25, 1964 (quotes), AV Papers, box 32; Telegram, Eugene P. Foley, Small Business Administration, to Milton Ogle, January 25, 1964, AV Papers, box 32.

  20. CSM and ARA Contract for Grant Allocation, 1964, AV Papers, box 3; A Summary of “Special Projects” Aided by the Council of the Southern Mountains’ Ford Foundation Grant, 1964, AV Papers, box 20.

  21. A Summary of “Special Projects” Aided by the Council of the Southern Mountains’ Ford Foundation Grant, 1964, AV Papers, box 20.

  22. Ibid.

  23. Ibid.; Proposal to the Council of the Southern Mountains Educational Committee, Project Area, Mill Creek, Clay County, Kentucky, [ca. June 1964], AV Papers, box 28.

  24. Proposal to the Council of the Southern Mountains Educational Committee, Project Area, Mill Creek, Clay County, Kentucky, [ca. June 1964], AV Papers, box 28; Polly P. Gorman, Appointment Secretary for Governor Breathitt, to Flem Messer, June 8, 1964, AV Papers, box 28. See also “News of State Government,” State Office of Public Information, and Press Outlines 1, 2, 3, 4, June 1964, AV Papers, box 28.

  25. Flem Messer to Jack Ciaccio, Department of Health, Education and Welfare, July 28, 1964, AV Papers, box 28.

  26. Volunteer quoted in Hampton, “Volunteers Pioneer Classes at Mill Creek,” 4 (emphasis added).

  27. Ibid., 4.

  28. Mr. and Mrs. Lester Smith to [Flem] Messer, September 1, 1964, Gilbert Messer to Flem [Messer], September 2, 1964, Crit Gambrel to [Flem] Messer, September 4, 1964, Mr. and Mrs. Mitchell Messer to Flem [Messer], September 4, 1964, and Dave Hubbard to [Flem] Messer, September 5, 1964, AV Papers, box 28.

  29. Robert Lee Sigmon to Milton Ogle, December 3, 1964, AV Papers, box 25; Quarterly Report, U.S. VISA Volunteer, Carol Irons, Mill Creek, Kentucky, October 9, 1964–December 21, 1964, AV Papers, box 25. See also Robert Lee Sigmon to Milton Ogle, December 3, 1964, CSM Papers, box 117.

  30. Robert Lee Sigmon to Milton Ogle, January 5, 1965, AV Papers, box 25. On the kindergarten program, see Carol Irons to Milton Ogle, July 30, 1965, and Quarterly Report—Terminal for Mill Creek Assignment, July 7, 1965, AV Papers, box 25.

  31. Carol Irons to Milton Ogle, February 1, 1965, Robert Lee Sigmon to Milton Ogle, February 2, 1965, Quarterly Report, U.S. VISA Volunteer, Carol Irons, Mill Creek, Kentucky, October 9, 1964–December 21, 1964 (quotes), and Carol Irons to Milton Ogle, May 31, 1965, AV Papers, box 25.

  32. Carol Irons to Milton Ogle, May 31, 1965, AV Papers, box 25.

  33. Loyal Jones to Robert Lee Sigmon, October 19, 1964 (first quote), CSM Papers, box 117; Quarterly Report, U.S. VISA Volunteer, Carol Irons, Mill Creek, Kentucky, October 9, 1964–December 21, 1964 (other quotes), AV Papers, box 25. To his credit, Messer admitted that he was a Clay County activist at the time of the Mill Creek project. See Oral History Interview with Flem Messer, September 26, 1990, Danville, KY, WOP Oral History Project.

  34. Carol Irons to Milton Ogle, February 1, 1965, AV Papers, box 25.

  35. Robert Lee Sigmon to Milton Ogle, February 2, 1965, Milton Ogle to Bob Sigmon, February 9, 1965, and Carol Irons to Milton Ogle, February 14, 1965, AV Papers, box 25.

  36. Carol Irons to Milton Ogle, February 21, 1965, and Carol Irons to Milton Ogle, March 6, 1965, AV Papers, box 25.

  37. Bob Sigmon to Milton Ogle, March 11, 1965, AV Papers, box 25.

  38. Ibid.

  39. Carol Irons to Milton Ogle, February 21, 1965, Carol Irons to Milton Ogle, March 6, 1965 (first quote), Carol Irons to Milton Ogle, March 21, 1965, and Carol Irons to Milton Ogle, February 27, 1965 (second quote), AV Papers, box 25.

  40. Carol Irons to Milton Ogle, April 18, 1965, Carol Irons to Milton Ogle, April 26, 1965, Carol Irons to Milton Ogle, May 2, 1965, and Carol Irons to Milton Ogle, May 8, 1965, AV Papers, box 25.

  41. Carol Irons to Milton Ogle, July 30, 1965, and Quarterly Report—Terminal for Mill Creek Assignment, July 7, 1965, AV Papers, box 25.

  42. Carol Irons to Milton Ogle, May 31, 1965, AV Papers, box 25.

  43. Carol Irons to Milton Ogle, May 31, 1965, Carol Irons to Milton Ogle, June 5, 1965, and Quarterly Report—Terminal for Mill Creek Assignment, July 7, 1965, AV Papers, box 25.

  44. Quarterly Report—Terminal for Mill Creek Assignment, July 7, 1965, AV Papers, box 25.

  45. Hampton, “Volunteers Pioneer Classes at Mill Creek,” 4.

  46. Robert Lee Sigmon to Loyal Jones, March 10, 1965, AV Papers, box 25.

  47. Loyal Jones to Joe Powles, September 26, 1965, AV Papers, box 25.

  48. Loyal Jones to Robert Lee Sigmon, October 19, 1964, CSM Papers, box 117.

  3. A Splendid Little War

  1. Oral History Interview with Roslea Johnson, June 24, 1991, Des Moines, IA, WOP Oral History Project. (CSM records identify her as “Roselea,” but letters that she composed herself are signed “Roslea,” and the Berea College alumni directory lists her as “Roslea.” Hence, I use the latter throughout.) On Appalachian migration north in the 1940s, see esp. Berry, Southern Migrants, Northern Exiles,

  2. Oral History Interview with Roslea Johnson, June 24, 1991, Des Moines, IA, WOP Oral History Project.

  3. Ibid.

  4. Appalachian Volunteers: College Students Wage War on Poverty in Eastern Kentucky, [ca. 1964], AV Papers, box 39. The AVs claimed that Pike County had eighty-two one- and two-room schools, Perry fifty-eight, Knott forty-four, and Leslie fifty-six. Whisnant (Modernizing the Mountaineer, 187) specifies that Pike County had seventy-five dilapidated schools, Floyd sixty-four, Perry fifty-one, Clay forty-nine, and Leslie forty-eight. Appalachian Volunteers By-Laws, [March 1964] (quotes), AV Papers, box 1. Figures on the renovation projects and volunteers recruited are in Appalachian Volunteers: First Year Working Draft, [1964], AV Papers, box 1.

  5. Final Report on Contract No. CC 6120 between the U.S.A. and the Council of the Southern Mountains, Inc., [ca. March 1965] (all quotes), AV Papers, box 3. The twelve campuses on which AV chapters operated at the time of this report were Alice Lloyd College, Ashland Community College, Berea College, Cumberland College, Eastern Kentucky State College, Georgetown College, Pikev
ille College, Southeast Christian College, Transylvania University, the University of Kentucky, the University of Kentucky–Prestonsburg, and the the University of Kentucky–Southeast Center. Two other campus units formed immediately after the first meeting. They were located at Union College and Morehead State College. See Appalachian Volunteers First Report, March 30, 1964, AV Papers, box 3.

  6. On community organizing as the AVs’ ultimate goal, see Final Report on Contract No. CC 6120 between the U.S.A. and the Council of the Southern Mountains, Inc., [ca. March 1965], AV Papers, box 3. [Form Letter to Those] “Expressing Interest in the Work of the Council of the Southern Mountains,” [ca. 1965] (quote), AV Papers, box 23.

  7. Appalachian Volunteers Curriculum Enrichment, [1965], AV Papers, box 23.

  8. Ibid.

  9. Ibid. (emphasis added). As with other aspects of the AV program, what was considered “desirable” behavior was not specified. For a discussion of the “proper habits” that industrialists imposed on workers and their children in the early twentieth century, see Hennen, The Americanization of West Virginia,

  10. Appalachian Volunteers First Report, March 30, 1964, AV Papers, box 3.

  11. [Letter], To Those Undergraduates and Others Who Responded to the Appeal of the [CSM] for Volunteer Help in Meeting Current Crises of Need in Mountain Counties, December 28, 1963, AV Papers, box 1.

  12. Philip W. Conn to Harold Bennet, April 17, 1964, AV Papers, box 29.

  13. Perley Ayer to John Whisman, December 20, 1963, AV Papers, box 70.

  14. [Memorandum], Talk to Mark [Furstenburg]—[Milton] Ogle, n.d., AV Papers, box 1. Because this document appeared in the AV Papers, not the CSM Papers, it must have been generated just after the AV program—or at least the idea for the program—began. This would date it to late 1963 or, more likely, early 1964. According to one local newspaper, Whisman tried, as early as 1965, to “collect to himself the tight reins of control on all federal programs within Kentucky.” This included the state Office of Economic Opportunity programs, the Appalachian Regional Commission, and the ARA. See Whitesburg, KY, Mountain Eagle, November 11, 1965, 1. See also Whisnant, Modernizing the Mountaineer, 144.