High Mountains Rising (18 page)

 

The National Recovery Administration . . . [has] so encouraged the business people of this country that they are setting about their affairs with renewed energy. . . . The manufacturer, with his employees working full-time, is engaged in producing commodities and articles for the use of the people of this country. Wholesale places are stocked with the manufacturer's goods. Retail places are ready for the goods to be placed upon their shelves to be sold to the people of this country. There must be placed within the reach of the people in the rural sections of our country purchasing power before this problem will be solved, and that is the situation with which the Federal Government is wrestling.
³³

And the government did solve that problem, creating worse problems in the process. The government did place purchasing power “within the reach of the people in the rural sections of our country” even if they had never had purchasing power before. In West Virginia's Lincoln County, 84 percent of families were receiving welfare as of July 1933.
³⁴

Over the winter of 1933–34, many of those families had someone working for the Civil Works Administration (CWA) for forty-five cents an hour, with some at $1.10 an hour. CWA created work projects for only five and a half months, but July 1934 again found a majority of Lincoln County's
families back on nonwork welfare, with the state welfare office explaining that the county welfare office, after CWA ended, had “reinstated [hundreds of families] who were not strictly eligible for relief.”
³⁵
The state welfare head explained to Harry Hopkins (the national welfare head) that local relief workers in “some counties have not investigated in six months. They keep sending checks week after week to the same people.”
³⁶

And so it continued year after year. A social worker in eastern Kentucky reported in 1935 that “the recipients think that. . . they should all share equally in the relief funds.” But ominously she also reported that “most employers will not hire persons who have been on relief for extended periods.”
³⁷

Yes, purchasing power was indeed being put within the reach of rural people, and after having been denied it during the Great Drought, when they really needed it, many of them were willing to accept it during the Depression even if they did not need it. As a rural storekeeper in West Virginia's Lincoln County put it, “It was the WPA that started farming on its downhill path all around here. The WPA paid farmers to work on the roads, and work on this and that, till they started counting on that money and neglecting their land.”
³⁸

After the New Deal started, the number of farms in central Appalachia that saw enough farming for the Census to count them as farms fell. Before the New Deal, from 1929 to 1934, that number had risen 35 percent. But then from 1934 to 1939 it fell back down again by 5.6 percent.
³⁹
Welfare was replacing subsistence farming.

Then World War II broke out. Germany invaded Poland, and England and France honored their commitment to Poland by declaring war on Germany. An old-timer from Lincoln County tells what happened then: “People, I was raised in this country during the Depression. . . . In 1940 me and my brother bought an old truck—the war broke out—we moved people out of Lincoln County, out of these hills, by the truckloads—to Logan [County] to the mines, to Cabell County to industry.”
⁴⁰
People whom the New Deal had habituated to cash income left their mountain farms in droves when World War II began creating an acute labor shortage in the mainstream economy (and when welfare was simultaneously being cut off). From 1940 to 1960, the net migration away from Appalachia was 1.7 million people.
⁴¹

In a nutshell, the more Appalachia's people had earlier contributed to the economy of the United States by growing much of their own food (even in coal towns) and thereby providing abundant and cheap labor, the more they had to pay later, after 1940, by having to migrate away from home.

Some readers may think of leaving behind a rural home as progress, but the future is unpredictable. The more commercialized our sources of
livelihood are and the more specialized our skills are, the worse we will probably fare in any future economic collapse.
⁴²

NOTES

1.
Patricia D. Beaver,
Rural Community in the Appalachian South
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986), chap. 5; Paul Salstrom, “Neonatives: Back to the Land in Appalachia's 1970s,”
Appalachian Journal
30:4 (Summer 2003), 308–323.

2.
William Strauss and Neil Howe,
Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584–2069
(New York: William Morrow, 1991), 27–30, 261–316, 384–89.

3.
“Regional Distribution and Description of Self-Sufficing Farms,” n.d., Bureau of Agricultural Economics records (hereafter BAE records), RG 83, National Archives, Washington, D.C.; General Correspondence, 1923–1946 (entry 19), 1941–1946, box 664, folder: “Study—Subsistence Homesteads.” As to Appalachia comprising only 3 percent of the United States, note that the BAE's definition of Appalachia included only 205 counties.

4.
U.S. Census of 1930,
Agriculture
, vol. 4 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1932), 873. Life on a typical Appalachian subsistence farm about 1930 is described in detail by James Orville Hill, “The Hill Farm: Making a Living from Mountain Land,”
Goldenseal
15:2 (Summer 1989): 18–30.

5.
U.S. Census of Agriculture: 1935
, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1936), part 2, county table 1, 428–32, 558–67, 594–601. The census-takers were supposed to count as a “farm” one or more tracts of land that were farmed as a single economic unit and that either were at least three acres in size or else produced at least $250 worth of agricultural products in the pre-census year. U.S. Census of 1930,
Agriculture
, 1:1. That “$250 worth of agricultural products” would be worth about $3,000 today.

6.
Gillian Mace Berman, Melissa Conley, and Barbara J. Howe,
The Monongahela National Forest, 1915–1990
(Morgantown: West Virginia University, Public History Program, Mar. 1992), 53–54; Harvey O. Van Horn, Morgantown, W.Va., conversation with the author, May 25, 1991.

7.
Nan Elizabeth Woodruff, As
Rare as Rain: Federal Relief in the Great Southern Drought of 1930–31
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), chap. 8.

8.
Robert S. Weise,
Grasping at Independence: Debt, Male Authority, and Mineral Rights in Appalachian Kentucky, 1850–1915
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2001), chaps. 8–9.

9.
David Alan Corbin,
Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields: Southern West Virginia Miners, 1880–1922
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 33–35, 123–24; Ronald L. Lewis,
Transforming the Appalachian Countryside: Railroads, Deforestation, and Social Change in West Virginia, 1880–1920
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), chap. 9.

10.
The Black Diamond
(coal industry journal) 60:25 (June 22 1918): 554. In the early 1900s, home gardens provided an estimated 10 to 20 percent of West Virginia miners' total income. Paul Salstrom,
Appalachia's Path to Dependency: Rethinking
a Region's Economic History, 1730–1940
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994), 63.

11.
Woodruff, As
Rare as Rain
, x, 140, 151–55.

12.
Ibid., x, 140, and chaps. 5 and 8.

13.
Martin Cherniack,
The Hawk's Nest Incident: America's Worst Industrial Disaster
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986), 28, 33, 39, 41, 46, 73, 92, 98, 104, 106–8, 150–70; “Editorial: Lessons Learned Hard and Long Shouldn't Be Forgotten,”
Engineering News-Record
Vol. 245, no. 16 (Nov. 2000), p. 96.

14.
Charles McGhee, “Our Farmers Return to Pioneer Acts in Fighting Depression,”
The Lincoln [County] Republican
, May 25, 1933, p. 1.

15.
Jane S. Becker,
Selling Tradition: Appalachia and the Construction of an American Folk, 1930–1940
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 127. Such home-based work continues today throughout the mountains. It is analyzed economically by Ann M. Oberhauser, Amy Pratt, and Anne-Marie Turnage, “Unraveling Appalachia's Rural Economy: The Case of a Flexible Manufacturing Network,”
Journal of Appalachian Studies
7:1 (Spring 2001): 19–45.

16.
Becker,
Selling Tradition
, 13, 143–44, chap. 7, and epilogue.

17.
A new twist was added later (in 1992) when the Smithsonian Institution sold the rights to reproduce its “American folk quilts” to an import company, which had the quilts mass-produced by cheap labor in China and marketed back in the United States. See ibid., 1.

18.
Ibid., chap. 4.

19.
Paul K. Conkin,
Tomorrow a New World: The New Deal's Community Program
(1959; reprint, New York: De Capo Press, 1976). On Eastern Kentucky's Sublimity Farms co-op community, see George T. Blakey,
Hard Times and New Deal in Kentucky, 1929–1939
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986), 127–29.

20.
David B. Danbom,
Born in the Country: A History of Rural America
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), chap. 10; Salstrom,
Appalachia's Path to Dependency
, 98–106.

21.
Rexford G. Tugwell,
Roosevelt's Revolution: The First Year
—
A Personal Perspective
(New York: Macmillan, 1977), 61–63, 294–95; Arthur Dahlberg,
When Capital Goes on Strike: How to Speed Up Spending
(New York: Harper and Bros., 1938), 109–12; Sidney Baldwin,
Poverty and Politics: The Rise and Decline of the Farm Security Administration
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 48–53.

22.
Michael M. Weinstein,
Recovery and Redistribution under the NIRA
(Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1980), 273–79; Weinstein, “Some Macroeconomic Impacts of the National Industrial Recovery Act, 1933–1935,” in
The Great Depression Revisited
, ed. Karl Brunner (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), 268–72.

23.
Willard E. Hotchkiss, F. G. Tryon, and Charlotte K. Warner,
Mechanization, Employment, and Output per Man in Bituminous Coal Mining
, Report No. E-9, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: WPA National Research Project, Aug. 1939), 1: presentation page, xxvi, 12; Jerry Bruce Thomas,
An Appalachian New Deal: West Virginia in the Great Depression
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 99.

24.
Paul Salstrom, “Appalachia's Path to Welfare Dependency, 1840–1940,” (Ph.D.
diss., Brandeis University, 1988), 296–305; Douglas Carl Abrams,
Conservative Constraints: North Carolina and the New Deal
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992), 128–29. By 1938, New Deal agencies had gone far toward creating their own autonomous economy separate from private enterprise. See A. J. Thomas (a WPA lawyer) to David K. Niles (WPA assistant administrator), Mar. 22, 1938, David K. Niles Papers, box 20, folder 129, Harry S. Truman Presidential Library, Independence, Mo.

25.
Vernon W. Ruttan, “The TVA and Regional Development,” in
TVA: Fifty Years of Grass-Roots Bureaucracy
, ed. Edwin C. Hargrove and Paul K. Conkin (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 155–57.

26.
Arthur E. Morgan,
The Making of the TVA
(Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1974), 62–63.

27.
What happened in the case of forestry was revealed by the TVA's chief forester in Edward C. M. Richards, “The Future of TVA Forestry,”
Journal of Forestry
36 (1938): 643–52.

28.
Quoted in Thomas K. McCraw,
Morgan vs. Lilienthal: The Feud within the TVA
(Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1970), 65.

29.
Quoted in John M. Glen,
Highlander: No Ordinary School
, 2d ed. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996), 27.

30.
See John Lozier and Ronald Althouse, “Social Enforcement of Behavior toward Elders in an Appalachian Mountain Settlement,”
The Gerontologist
14:1 (Feb. 1974): 69–80.

31.
More about the implications of voluntary reciprocity as an economic system is in Salstrom,
Appalachia's Path to Dependency
, chap. 3.

32.
Arthur E. Morgan, “Some Suggestions for a Program to Promote Better Opportunities for Rural Young People Especially in the Southern Highlands,” n.d., p. 2, box III B3, Arthur E. Morgan Papers, Antioch College Library, Yellow Springs, Ohio.

33.
H. G. Kump (gov. of West Virginia), “Address to a Regional Meeting of County Boards of Education,” Charleston, W.Va., July 21, 1933, in H. G. Kump,
State Papers and Public Addresses . . . March 4, 1933-January 18, 1937
(Charleston, W.Va.: Jarrett Printing, n.d.), 170.

34.
“West Virginia, July 1933: Counties Having Very High Percentage of Families on Relief Rolls,” in Federal Emergency Relief Administration records (hereafter cited as FERA records), RG 69, state files: West Virginia, box 312, special folder: Materials taken by Mr. Hopkins on his S.W. trip in August [1933], National Archives, Washington, D.C. Lincoln County was “60 percent agricultural,” meaning that 60 percent of its families lived on farms that had met, as of 1930, the census definition of a farm.

35.
FERA records, state files: West Virginia, box 311, folder 400. The average amount of relief payment per household per month in Lincoln County (as of May 1935) was $9.66. See
Monthly Bulletin on Relief Statistics
2:5 (May 1935), in box 312, folder 401. Today that $9.66 would be worth about $135.