High Mountains Rising (43 page)

The administration quietly delivered the Appalachian Regional Development Act (ARDA) to Congress on April 28, 1964, but the bill quickly foundered in the shadows of the Economic Opportunity Act (EOA), the heart of Johnson's War on Poverty. To avoid confusion, the ARDA was submitted to the public works committees rather than to the committees on education and labor, which were currently considering the antipoverty legislation. Hearings began in May. By July progress on a vote had stalled, and a recess for national party conventions furthered the delay. After Congress passed the EOA on August 20, Johnson added Ohio and South Carolina to the original nine states to be served by the Appalachian Act, but the ARDA
languished in the House because of opposition from representatives from outside Appalachia who questioned the wisdom of favoring development in one geographic region over another. Near the end of September the Senate passed its version of the bill, but the Eighty-Eighth Congress adjourned on October 3 without action on the ARDA in the House.

During the weeks between the election and the start of the new Congress, White House staff lobbied strongly for the ARDA and made further adjustments in the legislation that they hoped would facilitate its passage. New York was added to the list of participating states (and later Mississippi) to ensure the support of key legislators, and the administration promised to back the creation of similar regional development programs for other areas of the country. At Pennsylvania's request, $20 million in special funding was added for mine reclamation, and language was inserted declaring that public investments from the act “shall be concentrated in areas where there is significant potential for future growth, and where the expected return on public dollars invested will be the greatest.” This so-called “growth center policy” had been debated by PARC but was rejected by the governors who wanted greater flexibility in funding. It proved to be one of the more divisive issues to face the ARC in future years. With these adjustments, the ARDA sailed quickly through both the Senate and the House, and the president signed the bill into law on March 9, 1965.
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In his Rose Garden remarks before signing the Appalachian bill, President Johnson praised the act as “landmark legislation,” not only because it committed the nation to fulfilling the promise of “human dignity and destiny” in this “long neglected region” but because it reflected “close cooperation” between all levels of government. This measure, he believed, was “the truest example of creative federalism in our times.” The act set aside more than a billion dollars over five years for highways, health facilities, vocational education, and other programs of regional development and established the ARC to coordinate the effort. Administered jointly by a federal co-chair and by the thirteen Appalachian governors, the ARC became the only federal and state partnership of its kind. With no small amount of presidential hyperbole, Johnson announced “the end of an era of partisan cynicism towards human wants and misery. The dole is dead. The pork barrel is gone.”
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Neither the dole nor the pork barrel disappeared from public life with the passage of the ARDA. Indeed, critics argued that ARC, the EOA, and other programs of the Great Society era only fed the frenzy at the public trough. Without doubt the growth of federal funds over the next four decades fueled the engine of modernization in Appalachia, paving the way for the expansion of the mountain middle class and the arrival of the consumer society. Federal programs provided resources for the construction of
highways, schools, medical clinics, industrial parks, job training programs, and new community facilities that changed the mountains forever. They also funded social research, opened political machines to public scrutiny, raised expectations for human and environmental justice, and encouraged community-based organizations that helped to redefine the public dialogue.

Although often linked together, the EOA and the ARDA approached the problems of the region in different ways. One launched a national War on Poverty that applied universal tactics to fight poverty in urban and rural areas alike. The other established a partnership between local, state, and federal governments to channel designated federal resources to the strategic development of Appalachia alone. The EOA focused on the development of human capacity and failed to survive the 1960s, whereas the ARDA concentrated on building physical infrastructure and public facilities and lasted into the twenty-first century. Both claimed to value grassroots efforts to shape public policy: the EOA through a series of community action agencies that encouraged low-income participation and the ARDA through a system of local development districts and area plans. Each embraced national notions of progress and change, and each fell short of its potential.

The EOA was a complex mixture of New Deal-style relief programs and strategies borrowed from urban experiments in community action. Programs such as Head Start, the Job Corps, and Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) were designed to provide education, employment, and job training that might motivate people to lift themselves out of poverty. According to the prevailing philosophy, a lack of opportunity had confined people to pockets of poverty in the United States where a culture of poverty was passed down from one generation to the next. By raising expectations and opportunities, especially among the young, programs could acculturate poor people into the middle class and break the cycle of poverty.
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Investments in small businesses, cooperatives, legal services, and technical assistance for the poor would help uplift poor communities into the mainstream. In urban ghettos this involved integrating blacks into white schools, neighborhoods, and businesses. In Appalachia it implied breaking down the cultural isolation supposedly imposed by the mountains themselves and encouraging “Yesterday's People” to become more like middle-class Americans.
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Despite the assumption that poverty was essentially the result of cultural differences rather than political or economic conditions, those who designed the War on Poverty were determined that it would be fought at the local level. Title II of the EOA encouraged the creation of local community action agencies to coordinate neighborhood antipoverty efforts. Federal funding from the new Office of Economic Opportunity would bypass state and local governments and flow directly to these Community Action
Program (CAP) agencies. This policy would circumvent segregationist attempts in the South to set up all-white poverty programs, and it would encourage community organizing efforts modeled after successful urban rehabilitation programs that sought to empower minority poor through increased political action. The EOA required that low-income people themselves constitute a majority of board members on the new CAP agencies to ensure the “maximum feasible participation of the poor.”

Appalachia became a front line in the campaign to end poverty. One of OEO's first demonstration grants went to Berea College in Kentucky for a student volunteer program called the Appalachian Volunteers (AVs). By the spring of 1965 more than a thousand college students had been recruited by the AVs to paint one-room schoolhouses and provide educational enrichment activities during spring break and summer vacations.
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Soon there were CAPs organized throughout the region, helping poor families get job training, health care, transportation, housing, and access to education and government nutrition programs. Enrollments in higher education mushroomed, especially in the new community colleges that were launched with other federal and state funds. Many regional colleges and universities received OEO grants for leadership programs and other outreach efforts. Traditional craft and agricultural cooperatives found new markets and support, and OEO funds even helped to nurture civic and cultural initiatives such as the indigenous arts company Appalshop Inc., launched by a group of young people from Whitesburg, Kentucky.
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Hope and optimism grew across the region as the new federal programs promised to relieve the worst of depressed conditions, and the involvement of young people helped to tap new energy and ideas. The number of professionals providing health care, education, and social services to poor communities burgeoned, and mountain county seat towns and villages began to pulse with an expanding middle class. Women who had seldom worked outside the home found new opportunities for employment in schools, day care centers, health clinics, and community organizations, and everywhere a spirit of collaboration brought people together to discuss community problems and plan for the future. College students who came to poor communities as AVs or VISTAs brought enthusiasm and idealism that reinforced the zeal of community organizers fresh from their struggles for social justice in the civil rights movement. It did not take long for many young activists to become disenchanted with cultural theories of poverty, and they increasingly encouraged the poor to organize their own political power around regional economic and environmental concerns.

Appalachia was a hotbed of social activism in the 1960s, and the War on
Poverty fueled the desire for change. Local groups organized demonstrations to improve low-income housing, school lunch programs, and rural health clinics. Poor people established welfare rights organizations and voter registration campaigns, and unemployed miners used roving picket lines to protest coal companies who refused to pay royalties to the union health and retirement fund. When corruption split the United Mine Workers (UMW), Appalachian miners formed their own reform organization, Miners for Democracy, and elected an eastern Kentucky miner, Arnold Miller, to the UMW presidency. With support from Congressman Ken Heckler and two West Virginia physicians, retired miners organized the Black Lung Association and lobbied for the passage of the 1969 national Coal Mine Health and Safety Act.

No battles were more divisive and bitter than those fought over the environment. As activists and reformers increasingly turned to political and historical explanations for the region's poverty, issues of land use and development became arenas of confrontation. Forest management practices, second-home development, hazardous waste disposal, and dam construction developed into rallying points for resistance throughout the region, but opposition to surface mining emerged as the most visible symbol of efforts to save the land and people from the more destructive consequences of modernization.

The practice of stripping the soil from the sides and tops of mountains to get at the coal began in the years after World War II and was fueled by new technologies and government policies. The introduction of diesel-powered bulldozers and huge screwlike augers made it possible to remove coal quickly and easily from ridge-side outcroppings, allowing small truck mine operators to compete successfully with larger underground mines. When the Tennessee Valley Authority turned to cheap, strip-mined coal in the 1950s to fuel its new electrical generating plants, surface mining in central Appalachia expanded rapidly. By the 1960s unregulated strip-mining had left thousands of acres of hillsides gouged and decapitated and hundreds of miles of streams polluted with acid runoff. Government scientists attributed much of the annual flood devastation that swept the region after 1957 to the effects of surface mining.
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For many residents of central Appalachia, the scars left on the land by strip-mining were only a symbol of the power of the coal industry over the lives of mountain people. Surface mining not only contributed to rising unemployment in the underground mines but also threatened the way of life for many mountaineers who struggled to survive on family homesteads. By relying on turn of the century “broad form deeds,” coal companies in Kentucky were able to mine farmland, destroy wells, pastures, and woods,
and even remove outbuildings and cemeteries from the land of families whose ancestors had sold their mineral rights. When elderly land owners such as the Widow Combs and Dan Gibson sought to protect their farms by sitting in front of the bulldozers, they were joined by college students and poverty warriors who brought organizing skills and media attention to a growing resistance movement.

Throughout the coalfields grassroots organizations such as Save Our Kentucky, Save Our Cumberland Mountains, and the Appalachian Coalition emerged to fight the coal industry and to call for the abolition of surface mining. Opponents of the industry picketed mines and company offices, sat down in front of mining equipment, and lobbied state governments to pass regulatory legislation. Eventually a coalition of local residents, students, environmentalists, and community organizers succeeded in the passage of compromise regulatory legislation at the national level. The 1977 Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act banned high walls and established minimum standards for mine reclamation, but it failed to abolish surface mining as a practice and did little to control mountaintop removal. The bill created a federal Office of Surface Mining but placed responsibility for enforcement primarily on the states. It was more than a decade (1988) before the Commonwealth of Kentucky passed a constitutional amendment abolishing the abuses of the broad form deed, and issues of environmental quality continued to plague the region through the turn of the twenty-first century.
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Opposition to surface mining was only one of the battles waged against the established order in the 1960s, and increasingly local political leaders began to react to the poverty warriors' efforts to organize the poor. Not only did most OEO funds bypass local government offices, thereby failing to benefit local politicians, but some CAP agencies also organized the poor to challenge local policies, question accepted economic relationships, and even run for school boards and other elected offices. As early as 1967 many local leaders saw the poverty program as a nuisance and the poverty warriors as an unwelcome threat to their control. AVs and VISTAs were quickly identified as “outside agitators” and even “communists,” and pressure was applied on state and federal bureaucrats to cut off funding for “uncooperative” programs. In Kentucky, the Kentucky Un-American Activities Committee held hearings on the activities of poverty workers in the eastern part of the state after local officials in Pike County raided the home of two volunteers and accused them of sedition for having a personal library that included the
Quotations of Chairman Mao.
Charges were later dismissed, but such redbaiting helped to discredit the efforts of young organizers in the minds of the mountain middle class.