High Mountains Rising (44 page)

Reaction against the War on Poverty by local officials and the growing
quagmire of the War in Vietnam eventually led to the decline of funding and the elimination of many antipoverty programs. Congress attached the Green Amendment to the 1967 reauthorization of the Economic Opportunity Act, requiring that community action agencies report to states or political subdivisions of states, effectively eliminating maximum feasible participation of the poor. Under President Richard Nixon, programs such as the Appalachian Volunteers lost their funding, and appropriations for other OEO initiatives declined. The agency itself was allowed to die in 1973. The War on Poverty was hardly a skirmish in Appalachia. Short-lived and underfunded, it failed to address the systemic structural problems that had nurtured poverty in the mountains. Nevertheless, the effort did provide hope and opportunities for thousands of individuals in the region, and it left a heritage of resistance that survives in some communities to the present.

The same midcentury confidence that motivated the antipoverty program also inspired the creation of the ARC. Conceived by regional leaders but modified by congressional politics and popular assumptions about poverty and about Appalachia, the ARC reflected the postwar generation's faith in its ability to shape a brighter future through technology and planning. Whereas the OEO battled to uplift individuals through human resource development, the ARC attacked regionwide economic disparity through the development of public infrastructure. According to the PARC Report, Appalachia was a region “set apart” by the absence of development, or at least the “underdevelopment” of the things that had made prosperity possible in the rest of the country. Regional leaders believed that mountain communities could be revitalized, like post-World War II Europe, through the strategic investment of public money in transportation and industrial facilities. What Appalachia needed most, they argued, was new roads and jobs. The task of the ARC was to oversee this regional Marshall Plan and bring Appalachia into the modern age.

Between 1965 and 2000, the ARC funneled more than $8 billion into economic development programs in Appalachia, making the initiative one of the largest regional development efforts ever undertaken in the United States. The majority of funding went into the construction of 3,000 miles of Appalachian corridor highways, but the ARC also helped to build vocational centers, health clinics, industrial parks, and water and sewer facilities. It was originally intended as a broad planning agency that would integrate human and physical development goals, but the enabling legislation limited the ARC's role in human resource development, and during the War on Poverty there was little coordination between the agency and the OEO. Even so, nonhighway or “area development” dollars did find their way into job training programs, housing, early childhood education, small
business development, and even the arts. As a joint federal and state partnership that included a system of multicounty local planning districts, the ARC was an experiment in government decision-making unmatched in any other part of the country.

From the outset the ARC proved to be controversial. By broadening the region to include more than 400 counties in thirteen states, Congress guaranteed that resources would be widely dispersed and coordinating regional programs difficult. Appropriations levels and investment strategies changed with each new administration in Washington and with each new gubernatorial term, but the political benefits of this system of multilevel patronage kept the ARC alive, even when national and presidential interest waned. Generous federal allocations and categorical grants in the 1960s provided some continuity in planning, but with the introduction of federal block grants in the Nixon administration, power to shape nonhighway investments shifted to the states. Gradually, regionwide strategic planning fell victim to inadequate funding and political whim. By the 1970s some governors had lost interest in the commission, and powerful members of Congress increasingly used ARC appropriations to earmark special projects to benefit their own districts.

The structure of the ARC itself proved to be its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. The “new federalism” reflected in the ARC partnership promised to encourage creativity and bottom-up planning, but the ARC decision-making process provided few opportunities for grassroots engagement. Governors had almost complete power to fund or reject projects passed on to them by state agencies or local development districts. Critics of the ARC accused the agency of turning the future of the region over to the very people who had despoiled the mountains in the first place: the natural resource development interests and the state and local politicians who supported them. The quality of local leadership and the effectiveness of local development districts varied greatly from state to state, and often the poorest communities had the weakest civic and technical capacity for planning.

Consequently, not every part of Appalachia benefited equally from ARC resources. Larger towns at the intersection of Appalachian corridor highways and counties closer to external metropolitan centers such as Atlanta and Pittsburgh tended to receive disproportionate shares of ARC dollars. This “growth center strategy” was incorporated into ARC legislation by national economists and by the Bureau of the Budget, who feared that resources would be squandered in poor rural areas where there was little hope for economic growth. Development, they believed, began in core, urban communities and trickled out to surrounding rural places. Rural people should be encouraged to move to better housing and job opportunities in
the city or should travel to new service centers or consolidated schools in nearby towns. Governors in central Appalachian states that had few large cities eventually were able to circumvent this policy by designating smaller towns and county seat communities as growth centers, but most ARC resources continued to flow to more populous and politically powerful counties. Efforts during the Carter administration to promote “balanced growth” largely ignored the most impoverished and remote rural communities. Owsley County, Kentucky, consistently one of the five poorest counties in the United States, received only $470,000 in ARC funding between 1965 and 1993.
³²

As the result of ARC development strategies, communities with the most political clout, strategic location, and technical capacity received the greatest benefits from federal investments. New access highways, water and sewer facilities, industrial parks, consolidated schools, and hospitals transformed mountain cities and county seat towns into modern middle-class Meccas. Improved public facilities, shopping centers, subdivisions, and chain stores attracted young professionals and tourists from outside of the region, and in some areas of Appalachia, ski resorts and second home developments heralded the arrival of the consumer culture, if not the prosperity, of the rest of America. Indeed, by 1980 a few counties on the periphery of the region had reached income parity with national averages, and some members of Congress were calling for an end to the ARC on the grounds that it had accomplished its mission.

In the shadows of this “New Appalachia,” however, were rural communities that were only marginally touched by the ARC highways and new public facilities. In the more remote areas of the mountains, traditional values and rural culture survived, despite the arrival of television and mass marketing. At the heart of the region remained a cluster of persistently poor counties whose education levels and per capita income still lagged far behind the rest of the country. When President Reagan attempted to abolish the ARC in 1981, these distressed counties became the focus of a finish-up program designed to extend the life of the ARC temporarily. The agency survived, but Congress reduced ARC funding to less than half of previous levels. With fewer resources, the ARC decided to set aside only 20 percent of its nonhighway allocations for the Distressed Counties Program and limited that funding to primarily water and sewer projects.

Therefore, in the 1980s the economic gap between distressed rural places and new service center communities in Appalachia actually increased as the nation shifted from an industrial to an information-based economy. Technological changes in the coal industry and the migration of low-wage manufacturing jobs to undeveloped countries left many rural communities
in central Appalachia with neither the physical infrastructure nor the human skills to weather the transition. More than one-fourth of Appalachian coalminers lost their jobs during the decade, and poverty rates in the region rose in comparison to the national average. Although the number of distressed counties in Appalachia declined dramatically between 1960 and 1980, that pattern reversed between 1980 and 1990 as out-migration, unemployment, and low incomes continued to plague rural areas. By the end of the century, more than one-quarter of the Appalachian counties that were listed as distressed in 1960 were still distressed four decades later.
³³

The expansion of the national economy in the 1990s spurred new energy in communities across Appalachia. With the support of President Clinton, who hoped to establish a similar regional development agency in the Delta South, the ARC drafted a new strategic plan for Appalachia that included an emphasis on building civic capacity, technology, and entrepreneurship rather than just industrial recruitment. The president personally toured the region in 1999 in an effort to draw national attention to the plight of distressed communities, but although it provided steady support, Congress did not significantly increase the agency's area development budget. Except in Kentucky and West Virginia, which contained the bulk of distressed counties, there appeared to be little interest from other Appalachian states for addressing the problems of poverty that had created the agency. As the twentieth century came to a close, the ARC's original goal of bringing all of Appalachia into the economic mainstream remained unfinished.

Like the War on Poverty, the ARC failed to address many of the rooted and complex problems that burdened mountain communities, but the commission and its staff in Washington did help to sustain a level of national visibility for Appalachia and to foster a sense of regionalism that other sections of the country could not match. Increasingly, communities from Pennsylvania to Alabama came to recognize the similarities of their problems and heritage, and they began to share a new regional identity that bridged old political boundaries. Even the term
Appalachia
, which was rarely used in the region before the 1960s, took on new pride and began to appear on everything from professional organizations to small businesses. A renaissance of Appalachian studies programs blossomed in mountain colleges and universities as scholars began to examine the region's problems and to teach Appalachian literature and history. In communities up and down the ridge, a spate of local festivals and museums mushroomed to celebrate mountain food, art, and traditional music. Just as the old Appalachia appeared to be slipping irretrievably into the mainstream, efforts to cling to a regional identity appeared to be growing.

Despite this new regionalism, Appalachia at the turn of the twenty-first
century looked much more like the rest of America than it had in 1940. Just as the arrival of railroads, textile mills, and coal camps had transformed rural mountain communities in the first half of the century, new highways, government programs, and telecommunications after World War II linked those communities even more closely to the national economy and culture. Some communities benefited more than others from the transformation, but the mountain economy and population were more diverse, and a new sense of regional identity encouraged pride in place and community. Although Appalachia continued to lag behind the rest of the nation in many socioeconomic measures, housing, health care, and educational opportunities had improved for most mountain families.

The transformation of mountain life did not come easily or without resistance. Nor did it alter the region completely, for many of the qualities and challenges that had shaped the Appalachian experience throughout the twentieth century survived to define its identity at the outset of the twenty-first. Absentee land ownership, sustainable land use, environmental quality, economic and racial justice, civic leadership, and smart growth continued to shape the public dialogue and to link Appalachia to the rest of the nation and the world. Modernization had swept over the mountains, leaving a residue of problems and promise. No strangers to change, mountain people faced a familiar dilemma: how to seize the best of the new age and yet retain the things that gave meaning to life on uneven ground.

NOTES

1.
“National Defense and Mountain Communities,”
Mountain Life and Work
18:4 (Winter 1942): 1–15.

2.
See Olaf F. Larson, “Wartime Migration and the Manpower Reserve on Farms in Eastern Kentucky,”
Rural Sociology
8:2 (June 1943): 148–61.

3.
See Jerry Wayne Napier, “Mines, Miners, and Machines: Coal Mine Mechanization and the Eastern Kentucky Coal Fields, 1890–1990” (Ph.D. diss., University of Kentucky, 1997) and Curtis Seltzer,
Fire in the Hole: Miners and Managers in the American Coal Industry
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985).

4.
George S. Mitchell, “Let's Unite the Pie,”
Mountain Life and Work
27:2 (1951): 19–20.

5.
See Glen Edward Taul, “Poverty, Development, and Government in Appalachia: Origins of the Appalachian Regional Commission” (Ph.D. diss., University of Kentucky, 2001), 42–89.

6.
Eastern Kentucky Regional Planning Commission,
Program 60;
John D. Whisman to Appalachian Commission Members, “Origin and Development of the Program, 1955–1975” (memo, 1976; copy in the author's possession).

7.
See, for example,
Louisville Courier-Journal
, Feb. 7, Feb. 15, Feb. 19, Mar. 10, and Mar. 12, 1960.