Reformers to Radicals (2 page)

The period during which the Appalachian Volunteers existed certainly was a time of change. Young Americans in particular, overcome with self-confidence precipitated by the victory in World War II and the subsequent economic boom of the 1950s, truly believed that they could solve the nation's social problems. Blessed with university educations, a material culture that featured products and technologies unimaginable just a few years earlier, and rising levels of personal affluence, baby boomers—nearly 20
percent of the U.S. population in 1960—maintained that they and their government had, according to the historian James Patterson, “the knowledge and the resources to create a progressive, advanced society like none before in human history.” Calling the twenty-five years following the end of the war a period of “grand expectations,” Patterson observed that optimism “lay at the heart of American liberalism in the sixties.”
³

While Americans' confidence came from success in the war and the growing economy, their conscience came from a small but growing cadre of critics. Perhaps most influential was Michael Harrington. His
The Other America
, published in 1962, exposed what he called the nation's “invisible” problem—poverty. Buried in inner-city ghettos under mountainous skyscrapers of glass and steel, and hidden in the country's “forgotten” regions, including Appalachia, as many as 50 million citizens, Harrington argued, felt the grip of poverty. His was not the only voice raised. While individuals such as Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. contributed significantly to the beginning of the modern struggle for civil rights and brought racial discrimination to the nation's attention, it was the spontaneous actions of four African American college students from North Carolina A&T in Greensboro that, on February 1, 1960, precipitated the national “movement.” After purchasing a few items at the local Woolworth's, the four sat down at the lunch counter and ordered coffee. The store's refusal to serve them highlighted the pervasiveness of discrimination in the country. How, young Americans, black and white, asked, could these problems exist in their country? The United States had, after all, just defeated fascism and stood as the protector and guarantor of freedom and democracy in the face of a growing Communist threat. Its economy, moreover, generated more wealth than did that of any other nation on the planet. These two issues—poverty and discrimination—because they directly countered those sources of confidence, became the new enemies, threats to the real America that needed the same degree of attention that the country had given its wartime enemies in the 1940s. Nothing short of the heart and soul of the United States was at stake.
⁴

Young America entered the fray through a variety of organizations. In the South, many blacks, but also some whites such as the Alabama native Bob Zellner, joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), commonly referred to as “Snick.” Founded in 1960 as a direct result of the Greensboro sit-in, SNCC “became a community for a small but growing
number of idealist activists, whites as well as blacks.” A predominately African American organization, it welcomed, in the early years of its existence, any and all support in its “grassroots efforts to overcome racial oppression.” Northern white students created their own vehicle for change: Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Rising Phoenix-like from the student wing of the languid League for Industrial Democracy, SDS offered a biting critique of the United States in its 1962 declaration called the “Port Huron Statement.” Issued following a meeting of some sixty SDS participants at Port Huron, Michigan, the “Statement” expressed concern over nuclear weapons proliferation and the denial of civil rights to Southern blacks. Nevertheless, it also echoed a fundamental belief in democracy, the principle that differentiated the United States from all other nations. In the early years of the decade, then, both organizations, SNCC and SDS, sought the same basic goal, the integration of African Americans into American society so that the blessing of the nation could be extended to each and every citizen.
⁵

Relative latecomers to the “movement” were the poverty warriors. Though charitable institutions, such as the American Friends Service Committee and other religious organizations, had always maintained a presence in the country's impoverished areas, a concerted, national effort to deal with this problem did not begin until President Johnson launched his antipoverty crusade in 1964. Equipped with the same confidence and conscience as their civil rights counterparts, young Americans joined organizations such as Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) and the Appalachian Volunteers and relocated to economically depressed areas for periods as short as a weekend or as long as a year, hoping to improve the lives of their beneficiaries. Through remedial academic instruction, health education, job training, and home and school refurbishing, the poverty warriors thought that they could bring that affluence from which they came to the nation's poor. Like the civil rights activists, they had as their goal “integration.” They believed that if they overcame the obstacles to integration—which to the initial reformers in rural Appalachia, for example, included a dysfunctional culture, an inadequate education system, and geographic isolation—then poverty would disappear from the land. As the battle against want in the nation progressed, however, this notion of integration took a different form. Rather than simply immersing the poor in a “mainstream” culture and environment, the poverty warriors undertook to integrate them more fully in
the nation's political and social dialogue, explore and then explain to them the root causes of poverty, and suggest alternative paths—often different than those proffered by the local, state, and national administrators of the War on Poverty. This new version of integration, then, also offered a critique of the country's prevailing social, political, and economic structures, and this assessment located the cause of poverty in inequities in the nation's political economy, as opposed to “cultural deficiencies.”
⁶

When the antipoverty activists began to question the fundamental causes of poverty and to move away from conventional explanations that focused on the shortcoming of individuals, their thoughts and actions resembled those of their counterparts in the civil rights struggle. In his study of SNCC, Clayborne Carson traces the evolution of an organization that, through such efforts as “Freedom Summer,” attempted to integrate Southern blacks into the American political mainstream. Though SNCC took the lead by moving to areas, such as rural Mississippi, where few civil rights workers ventured, the goal still was political integration. Following Lyndon Johnson's rejection of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, a freely elected delegation from that state to the Democratic National Convention in 1964, however, SNCC workers began to question the efficacy of working with mainstream American liberals. “They also questioned,” Carson observed, “whether their remaining goals could be best achieved through continued confrontation with existing institutions or through the building of alternative institutions controlled by the poor and powerless.” Unfortunately, these alternative organizations often led to internecine conflicts over leadership, direction, and issues. The Appalachian Volunteers, for example—under attack by antireform forces, and weakened by internal strife—like their SNCC brethren, “withered in the face of the same tactics of subtle cooptation and ruthless repression that stifled the entire black struggle.”
⁷

Young America, nevertheless, was not the only agent for change in the years following World War II. Beginning immediately after Japan's surrender in August 1945, the Cold War caused many older Americans—those who had lived through the trauma of global conflict—to fear for their continued safety. In the “dual world” of the 1950s, in which one was in either the Soviet or the American camp, the “fall” of China to communism and the detonation of a nuclear device by the Soviet Union, both in 1949, heightened these fears. Just as the existence of poverty was an affront to
some Americans' sensibilities, Communist “successes” particularly frustrated the World War II generation. How could these nations, devastated by the recent war and technologically inferior, equal American successes in the scientific arena? Equally frightening was the extension of communism in Asia. Convinced of its monolithic nature, these Americans interpreted any and all “Red” advances as a loss for the free world. By the dawn of the 1950s, America believed that it faced a serious new threat to its freedom, a threat that would require it to match the vigilance, determination, and unity of its enemies.
⁸

America's view of the world as dominated by the two irreconcilable forces of freedom and communism was perhaps best expressed in the National Security Act and National Security Council Report 68 (NSC-68). Passed in 1947, the National Security Act expanded the powers of the president through the creation of the White House–controlled National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency. Set up to gather information and “perform other such functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the National Security Council may from time to time direct,” the CIA was yet another addition to the “centralized power of the State.” Written by the State Department official George Kennan in 1950, NSC-68 argued that “a defeat of free institutions anywhere is a defeat everywhere.” It also reflected the belief that the superior productive capacity of the United States (along with higher taxes but
not
true economic sacrifice) would enable the country to easily increase defense spending to the point where it could protect the entire free world. The United States thus embarked on a global strategy of “containing” communism wherever it existed.
⁹

More important than the finances involved, policy makers argued, a successful counter to the Soviet challenge “would require the mobilization of American society and the creation of a ‘consensus' that ‘sacrifice' and ‘unity' were necessary.” This sacrifice was, of course, personal and political, not just economic. Subjected to loyalty boards, the McCarran Act of 1950, the Communist Control Act of 1954, and “attorney general lists” that enumerated suspected political subversives, Americans saw their political freedoms severely restricted in the name of national security. While under presidents Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower the loyalty boards fired twenty-seven hundred federal employees for being associated with
“totalitarian” ideologies and through fear and intimidation caused another twelve thousand to resign, the McCarran Act required Communist Party members to register with the national government. When President Eisenhower signed the Communist Control Act, the government terminated “all rights, privileges, and immunities” of the Party. The country, moreover, “denied Communists their passports, terminated their social security and military disability payments, and deported those who were not citizens.”
¹⁰

It did not stop at the federal level. As “McCarthyism” took hold of the nation, Ohio State University restricted speakers, and the University of California fired those employees who refused to sign loyalty oaths. Institutions of higher learning, both large and small, across the country followed suit, and, in the early years of the Cold War, America's centers of learning were anything but a marketplace of ideas. In her study of the academy and anticommunism, Ellen Schrecker claims that over six hundred teachers and professors lost their jobs because they refused to sign loyalty oaths or bow to state laws or institutional pressure. Finally, many states, including Pennsylvania and Kentucky, enacted their own versions of these laws. Most important were state antisedition laws patterned after the federal Smith Act of 1940. With many linking any type of deviance with communism, fitting in rendered one immune from charges of disloyalty. Of course, those who advocated change—even the relatively modest changes of the first half of the 1960s—failed to fit the criteria for loyal citizens. Even more sinister were the activists of the later 1960s, those who openly questioned the country's economic and social institutions.
¹¹

At the dawn of the 1960s, these two opposing forces, one stressing increased state controls over dissidence and the other focusing on the nation's problems, dramatically clashed. Though their battlefields seem obvious to many, the nature and causes of the conflicts run deeper and are much more complex. Beyond the immediate issues of national security and the Communist threat, civil rights, and the war in Southeast Asia exist questions concerning the nature of American liberalism, the identification of the country's radicals, the role of local people in reform (or antireform) issues, the political uses of anticommunism, the methods of community development employed, and, especially in the case of Appalachia, Americans' image of themselves. These questions—essentially the same issues that civil rights scholars confront—place the Appalachian Volunteers and the War
on Poverty squarely within the context of the decade of the 1960s. Though the AVs operated in the southern mountain region, their experience reveals much about the nation's history. Essentially, they were American, not just Appalachian, activists.

Appalachia, nevertheless, was a natural battleground for the War on Poverty. Harboring some of the poorest counties in the United States, the Southern mountains long held the interest of reformers. In the 1890s, the local color movement—a literary movement that highlighted the deplorable living conditions of the people in the more remote sections of the mountains—brought national attention to the region, and women such as Katherine Pettit and May Stone founded settlement schools there. Modeled after their urban counterparts, including Hull House in Chicago, these turn-of-the-century mountain schools instructed students in proper living as well as academic subjects. Like their 1960s descendants, reformers designed these efforts to lift Appalachians out of their depressed conditions. Critical to the settlement school program, however, was the maintenance of those aspects of mountain culture that set it apart from the new immigrants, mostly Southern and Eastern Europeans, who were flooding into the United States at that time.
¹²