Building Resilience: Community-Based Development in Appalachia during the War on Poverty

Appalachian Volunteer Records, Special Collections and Archives, Hutchins Library, Berea College, Berea Kentucky

 

Building Resilience: Community-based Development in Appalachia during the War on Poverty Hannah Swernoff

May 7, 2016 Thesis Advisor: Reiko Hillyer

Honors Thesis Lewis and Clark College

This thesis is submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts in History

© 2016 Hannah Swernoff. All rights reserved.

   

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Table of Contents Preface ii

Acknowledgments v

Abstract vi

Chronology vii

Introduction 1

Appalachian America: A Contested Identity 3

Appalachia in Context: Historiography 9

Poverty in Prosperity: The Media and Rhetoric of Appalachian Poverty 13

The Government in Appalachia: The New Frontier, Great Society, and the War on 16

Poverty

Voices from the Mountains: Mountain Liberalism and “Local” Authors on Appalachian 22

Poverty

Community Action: Local Organizations’ Responses to Appalachian Poverty 30

Converging Ideologies: Interactions between Government Programming and Local 35

Organizations Addressing Rural Poverty

A Comprehensive Response to Poverty: The Lend-A-Hand Center 45

When Poverty was too much: Outmigration from Appalachia 52

Coal Miner’s Daughter: Appalachian Pride and Resistance 55

Epilogue: Looking Backwards and Thinking Forwards, Appalachia Today 57

Works Cited 63

   

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Preface

This paper began almost two years ago and has always been about trying to understand the

War on Poverty on local and individual levels. It has gone through many incarnations from then

until now, and still has a long way to go to fulfill my original intention of analyzing the War on

Poverty from eastern Kentuckians’ perspectives. It originally began as an attempt to figure out what

went into President Johnson’s famous War on Poverty picture of the President on the front porch

of a rural coal miner in eastern Kentucky.1 Then, it became analysis of President Johnson’s speeches

in Appalachia on his first “Poverty Tour” on April 24, 1964. Next, it turned into an attempt to

understand how national welfare and War on Poverty programming corresponded to international

developments during the Cold War.

Finally, the paper became an analysis of perceptions of rural white Appalachian poverty

during the 1960s. I filled this paper with as much information as I could about poverty and

development theories, existing historiography, various media and rhetorical depictions of poverty,

government reports, programs, and offices, literature from Appalachian authors themselves, and

information on community-based development efforts in Appalachia. In trying to untangle these

complex and deeply intertwined stories, I created somewhat false dichotomies of “good” and “bad,”

“internal” and “external,” to explain what I understood was happening in Appalachia and eastern

Kentucky during the 1950s and 1960s. These falsifications of difference only further obfuscated the

nuances of everyday life in Appalachia. Throughout my research, I have found other Appalachian

1 Thomas Fletcher, was an unemployed father of eight from rural Inez, Martin County, Kentucky. He lived in a tarpaper-covered three room shack on the banks of the Rock Castle Creek. Though once employed as a coal miner, and then a sawmill worker, he had earned only $400.00 in the past year. The Fletcher family survived off of monthly distributions of surplus food and two of his children had already dropped out of school. Lady Bird Johnson, A White House Diary (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), 121-122; Lyndon Baines Johnson, The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency 1963-1969 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), 79. In this project, I also found the follow-up correspondence between the Fletcher family and the White House, in which Thomas Fletcher’s wife, Mary Fletcher wrote to the White House and received signed memorabilia in return.  

   

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scholars expressing frustration at trying to study the complicated and convoluted nature of the War

on Poverty in Appalachia. It is hard to organize and write a thesis tag-lined with, “It’s complicated.”

During this incarnation of the paper, I was deeply attached to all of the information in my paper,

because to me, it seemed vital to understand everything that went into the creation of the historical

moment I was studying.

A little after turning in this draft, I was fortunate enough to visit eastern Kentucky to do

archival research at the Southern Appalachian Archives at Berea College and learn from and work

with community activists in Knox County, a region which I prominently focused on in my paper. In

the Southern Appalachian Archives at Berea College, I poured over notes, correspondences, and

other publications from the authors who I had previously studied from afar. I learned more about

what other Appalachians though of these authors, and how they fit into greater discourses of

Appalachian poverty. In Berea, I learned, through books and through experience, about the role of

class in aid efforts in Appalachia. Next, I travelled further east to Barbourville, the county seat of

Knox County. Knox County was an important test site for government programming during the

War on Poverty and also houses the Stinking Creek community and the Lend-A-Hand Center,

places I had learned about in earlier secondary source reading. In Barbourville, I learned from and

worked with community activists and scholars such as Kathryn Engle, a PhD candidate and Lend-A-

Hand Center scholar, as well as Irma Gall, founder of the Lend-A-Hand Center. I learned about

resilience and the intricacies of life in Appalachia from these women and continue to be amazed at

their commitment and endless passion to help others. What I learned during my trip to eastern

Kentucky helped me put human faces to the people I was studying and expanded my

understandings of Appalachian anti-poverty efforts during the 1960s.

If I had more time, I would expand my analysis of community-based anti-poverty efforts

during the War on Poverty. I think that it is easy to get caught up in the mainstream government and

   

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media narratives of American “crises” and it is vital to take a step back and look at how people were

actively responding to these issues on the ground. Therefore, I would further my analysis on the

Appalachian Volunteers, VISTA Volunteers, and the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968. The fact that

members of these groups were labeled as communists and charged with sedition further

demonstrate the ideological crisis of American consciousness that America faced in the 1960s.

If anything, I hope to portray with respect and dignity the lives of Appalachians who

committed themselves to eradicating poverty in their region during the 1960s.

   

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Acknowledgments This project has been years in the making and while I cannot acknowledge everyone who has been a part of the process, below are a few of the most noteworthy contributors. Christopher Banks, Jenna de Graffenried, and Allen Fisher at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Archive in Austin, Texas for sharing as much as they could about President Johnson’s April 24, 1964 visit to eastern Kentucky. Sharyn Mitchell and Harry Rice at the Southern Appalachian Archive at Berea College for going out of their way to provide me with more information than I could ever need about Appalachian poverty, both over email and in person. Parvaneh Abbaspour, E.J. Carter, and Dan Kelley of Watzek Library for not only helping me research but always checking in about my project and offering advice and support. The Student Academic Affairs Board at Lewis and Clark College who thought that there was something important in my research and let me spend a week researching in eastern Kentucky. Professor Mo Healy who nurtured this research as a Historical Materials project and encouraged my somewhat eccentric passions in researching Appalachia. Professor Kim Brodkin whose continual and genuine support, encouragement, and care has been invaluable to me as both a student and a person throughout this process. Professor Reiko Hillyer who sat me down spring of my first year and made me re-write an essay, line by line, to improve my writing. Years later, I would like to think that my writing has improved, in large part due to Professor Hillyer, who has also taught me so much about history and has been an incredible advisor. All faculty and staff on the fourth floor of Miller who put up with my presence day in and out. My friends, family, and adoring housemates who have been forced to listen to me talk about my thesis all the time. The students of HIST 450 and 490, especially Tyler Wayne Patterson, Caleb Diehl, Sten Eccles-Irwin, Lindsay Mulcahy, and Julia Withers, whose encouragement, feedback, shared struggles, and friendship have been invaluable. Patricia Gailey who opened up her home and stories to me in Berea, Kentucky. Kathryn Engle, Appalachian scholar and activist, who helped me navigate my place in eastern Kentucky and provided valuable research ideas, support, and companionship in Knox County. Lastly I want to acknowledge Peggy Kemner and Irma Gall, co-founders of the Lend-A-Hand Center in Walker, Knox County, Kentucky for their tireless work and passion in serving eastern Kentucky. Irma says that they were just at the right place at the right time, but there is something special about these two women which helped them meaningful impact Knox County

   

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Abstract This paper is an attempt at examining community-based development in Appalachia during the

1950s and 1960s. Stereotypes of Appalachians as backwards and hopeless gained momentum as the

government’s Appalachian-focused War on Poverty coincided with increasing media focus on the

region. Reliance on these cultural assumptions of lethargy and tragedy obfuscated Appalachians

long-term efforts at community-based development and resilience. Examining such efforts proves

that Appalachians saw themselves and their region differently than external commentators and saw

hope and potential in Appalachian-based development.

   

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Chronology 1855 Berea College founded 1873 Will Wallace Harney wrote about a “strange land and peculiar people” in Appalachia 1902 Hindman Settlement School founded 1913 Pine Mountain Settlement School founded Council of Southern Mountaineers formed 1918 Victory in World War I 1929 Great Depression began 1945 Allied victory in World War II: beginning of the “postwar” period 1950 Appalachian Fund created by northern industrialists 1958 John Kenneth Galbraith wrote The Affluent Society Peggy Kemner and Irma Gall founded the Lend-A-Hand Center in Knox County, Kentucky 1959 Oscar Lewis wrote Five Families 1960 Presidential candidate John F. Kennedy visited West Virginia, won presidential election

Conference of Appalachian Governors formed Knox County Development Agency formed

1961 Area Redevelopment Act passed 1962 Look Magazine article published Manpower Redevelopment Act passed Harry Caudill wrote Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area 1963 Christmas in Appalachia released by CBS Dwight MacDonald wrote “Our Invisible Poor”

President Kennedy assassinated 1964 President Johnson declared the War on Poverty

“Appalachia: A Report by the President’s Appalachian Regional Advisory Commission” published

Civil Rights Act passed Berea College Conference on Appalachian Development happened President Johnson went on the first “Poverty Tour” of Appalachia 1965 Economic Opportunity Act passed Voting Rights Act passed Appalachian Redevelopment Act passed

Knox County Economic Opportunity Council formed 1966 Appalachian Volunteers formed from the Council of Southern Mountains President Johnson formed the National Advisory Commission on Rural Poverty Jack Weller wrote Yesterday’s People: Life in Contemporary Appalachia 1967 John Fetterman wrote Stinking Creek: The Portrait of a Small Mountain Community

“A People Left Behind: A Report by the President’s National Advisory Commission on Rural Poverty” published

1968 “Rural Poverty: A Report by the President’s National Advisory Commission on Rural Poverty” published President Nixon elected

1969 Appalachian Volunteers dissolved Appalachia: Rich Land, Poor People released by NET Journals 1970 Deliverance the book published Loretta Lynn released “Coal Miner’s Daughter” 1972 Deliverance released President Nixon dissolved the Office of Economic Opportunity

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In 1972, four men fought and lost to nature in rural Appalachia in the movie Deliverance. This

movie, based on a book and subsequent screenplay by novelist, professor, eventual poet laureate of

the United States, and Georgia native, James Dickey, detailed the misadventures of four Atlanta

businessmen on a weekend trip into the vanishing wilderness of the untamed South. Many of the

businessmen’s difficulties arose after problematic

encounters with locals in northeastern Georgia. The men

described the mountaineers as backwards, inbred,

deficient, and savage, paralleling the characteristics of

individuals with the rough landscape they encountered

on this weekend canoe trip. The businessmen faced

injury, rape, and death in the woods: in the Appalachian

wilderness, these men lost their civility and regressed to

using bows and arrows to fight the perverted

backwoodsman.2 The book Deliverance was published in

1970 and the movie Deliverance was released in 1972, and

both topped charts and gained national fame.3

Something about man’s struggle in the wilderness struck

a chord with the nation and tapped into the public’s support of modernization against primitiveness

in a rapidly developing world. It is especially significant that Deliverance was set in northeastern

Georgia, squarely in Appalachia.4 Receiving national attention just a few years after President

2 Deliverance, directed by John Boorman (1972: Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video), Amazon video. 3 “Deliverance,” IMDb, accessed March 21, 2016, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068473/. 4 Appalachia is a term used to define 410 counties in thirteen states in and around the Appalachian mountain range. Those states are Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. Rudy Abramson and Jean Haskell, eds., Encyclopedia of Appalachia (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2006), xxi. European explorers co-opted the word “Appalachia,” from Apalachee, a group of Native Americans who lived in north Florida and southern Georgia. Chad Montrie, To Save a Land

Bill Gold, Deliverance, (US International, 1972), accessed March 21, 2016, http://fontsinuse.com/uses/4838/deliverance-1972-movie-posters.

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Johnson’s War on Poverty, this movie propelled tropes of the backwards and inbred mountaineer

which had been actively countered during the previous decade. The widespread success of

Deliverance, and its stereotyped perception of Appalachians, seemingly discredited the changing

national views of Appalachians in the 1960s and reduced the multifaceted lives of individuals in

economic desperation full of frustration and hope to a Hollywood blockbuster.

During the War on Poverty, social scientists and government officials struggled to make

sense of the persistence of poverty amid prosperity and focused their attention particularly on

Appalachia, a long-heralded center of American heritage. With faith in the liberal consensus—the

idea that the expansion of capitalism would benefit all Americans—these thinkers interpreted and

portrayed Appalachians as hopeless, static, and outside of time.5 While dramatizing the need to

address poverty in Appalachia, these government officials and social commentators failed to

appreciate Appalachians’ own understandings of and solutions to poverty. Local community-based

development efforts were often based out of Berea College in eastern Kentucky, and such programs

acknowledged that Appalachians felt stigmatized by external commentators and understood

themselves to be active participants in enacting change and capitalizing on potential in their region.

By studying these local efforts, we can better understand resilient, community-based development in

Appalachia during the War on Poverty. 6 This paper contextualizes Appalachian poverty in major

and a People: A History of Opposition to Surface Coal Mining in Appalachia (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 7.  5 For more information on the liberal consensus, see Godfrey Hodgson, The Myth of American Exceptionalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 92. 6 Policy makers and theorists codified community-based development as a response to urban renewal, a process where officials relocated businesses, used eminent domain to seize land, demolished buildings, and relocated individuals in the name of urban growth during the postwar period. City planners and corporate officials used urban renewal to marginalize minority groups and gentrify urban spaces on the basis of race, racism, and class. Aided by expansion in highways, officials intended for urban renewal to create space for growth and prosperity in modern cities. As more and more individuals found themselves disenfranchised through urban growth, communities bonded together to enact change and counter dominant trends. UNTERM, “Community Development,” United Nations, accessed February 14, 2016, http://unterm.un.org/. Engle, “To Lend a Hand,” 119. However, “community” held a different meaning in Appalachia. Historical authors of Appalachia wrote about the individualism and isolation of the mountains, and claimed that the lack of community was a defining factor of Appalachian society. Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Minds, 125; Weller, Yesterday’s People, 87-88. While Appalachian society did not necessarily fit in community developers’ ideas of community

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trends of the 1950s and 1960s such as the liberal consensus, welfare state, development strategies,

and community action to break down the accepted stereotypes of Appalachian poverty as static and

hopeless and prove that community-based development programs in the postwar period opposed

the dominant narratives of stasis and backwardness through community activism and opposition to

external programming.

Appalachian America: A Contested Identity

Outside commentators maintained that poverty

in Appalachia was exceptional in the United States during

the 1950s and 1960s due to the severity and

pervasiveness of economic underdevelopment in this

region.7 Many scholars and policy makers perceived an

inherent hopelessness in Appalachia as both the result of

and the cause of economic underdevelopment.8 In 1960s

due to historical and cultural developments, the basis and potential for community, and community-based development existed in the region. Later, I will focus on community-based development of the Lend-A-Hand Center in Walker, Knox County, Kentucky, which is in the Stinking Creek watershed. Appalachian scholar Kathryn Engle describes community in the Stinking Creek watershed, “with its long history of family interaction and social connections, though spread out…has the many social ties, kinship networks, associations, and stories necessary to form a community.” Engle, “To Lend a Hand,” 119. 7 In 1965, Andre Gunder Frank, sociologist and economic historian, distinguished between undeveloped and underdeveloped nations, explaining that most development theorists “fail to take account of the economic and other relations between the metropolis and its economic colonies throughout the history of the worldwide expansion and development of mercantilist and capitalist system.” Andre Gunder Frank, “The Development of Underdevelopment,” Monthly Review, September 1965, 27. Previously, scholars believed that a nation’s development was dependent on its own economic efforts and abilities. Frank broke with this accepted theory and asserted that capitalism has touched aspects of all societies and explained, “Underdevelopment is not due to the survival of archaic institutions and the existence of capital shortage in regions that have remained isolated from the stream of world history.” Ibid., 31. Instead, Frank theorized that capitalism was implicated in creating international underdevelopment, hindering nations and regions from economic growth. Frank’s assertion was significant because he proposed that capitalism was not always redemptive and that some places could function and thrive without capitalism as a dominant economic theory. While Frank focused his studies on Latin America, his theories can be and were applied internationally as well as to an internally underdeveloped area such as Appalachia. Frank complicates the liberal consensus and redemptive qualities of capitalism through his theory of underdevelopment and claims that capitalism is not the be-all end-all of development. 8 In this paper, I will not analyze the economic conditions of poverty in Appalachia. Though these economic conditions lay the foundation for government and media intervention, I will focus on the perceptions and not statistics of poverty. The poverty threshold was developed by Mollie Orshansky of the Social Security Administration during 1963 and 1964. She based the poverty threshold on the fact that average individuals spent one-third of their income on food and assumed that people living in impoverished conditions would cut back on food spending and non-food spending at the

Appalachian Regional Commission, Map of the Appalachian Region, Appalachian Regional Commission, October 8, 2008, accessed September 14, 2015, http://www.arc.gov/ appalachian_region/mapofappalachia.asp

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Appalachia, one in three people lived in poverty and the per capita income was 23% below the

national average.9 Knox County, Kentucky, the center of many community-based development

efforts, ranked 119th out of 120 counties in Kentucky for lowest per capita income, and Kentucky

as a whole was 46th out of 50 states in per capita income standards in the 60’s. In 1960, the per capita

income in Knox County was $501.00, and the per capita income in Kentucky was $1,573.00,

compared to the national average of $2,223.00. More than 64% of the population of Knox County

received some type of government welfare assistance, not counting medical aid, and in a year, a

quarter million Kentuckians were given 56,000,000 pounds of surplus foodstuff valued at

$13,000,000.10

Beginning at the end of the nineteenth century, social thinkers and external commentators

began differentiating the physical and cultural characteristics of Appalachia to designate the region as

separate from developing America.11 Cultural commentators used the term “hillbilly” to describe

white southern mountain people as an enduring American icon. Historian Anthony Harkins claims

that the “hillbilly” embodies ideas of both “otherness” and self-identification for Americans outside

the region. Because the “hillbilly” and mountaineer mentality represented tradition and heritage for

same rate. Moreover, Orshansky differentiated thresholds based on family size, location, and age. These initial calculations of the poverty threshold did not account for increases in general standards of living and were limited in their practical use. Gordon M. Fisher, “The Development and History of the Poverty Threshold,” Social Security Bulletin 55, no. 4 (Winter 1992), 3-14, in Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, “The Development and History of the U.S. Poverty Threshold—A Brief Overview,” U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, May 7, 2010, accessed December 10, 2015, https://aspe.hhs.gov/basic-report/development-and-history-us-poverty-thresholds-%E2%80%94-brief-overview. Moreover, I will not be analyzing urban centers in Appalachia. Though such centers did exist, rural poverty was a more noteworthy issue in Appalachia in the 1960s because this poverty in rural areas posed a greater threat to modern American identity and much more was written about rural poverty. 9 “ARC History,” Appalachian Regional Commission, accessed November 15, 2015, http://www.arc.gov/about/ archistory.asp. 10 John Fetterman, Stinking Creek: The Portrait of a Small Mountain Community (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1967), 29. 11 In 1873, Will Wallace Harney speculated that a specific cultural identity developed in Appalachia and that this identity set the region apart from the rest of the nation. In “A Strange Land and Peculiar People,” Harney wrote in a land of, “geographical and botanical curiosities,” “The natives of this region are characterized by market peculiarities of the anatomical frame.” Will Wallace Harney, “A Strange Land and Peculiar People,” Lippincott’s Magazine, 1873, 430-431.

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white America, many felt drawn to this internal other. 12 Yet other Americans were also resistant to

identifying with Appalachia because the region appeared to be developmentally stagnant and seemed

antithetical to modern America. This contested identity of self and other would haunt Appalachia

throughout time, making it a region in but not of America.13

Another contradiction of Appalachia was the rich land and poor people. Leading up to the

Civil War, northern industrialists were interested in

Appalachian timber and began buying land from small rural

farmers. Innovations in steam technology and an influx of

railroads coincided with the rise of coal mining industries

and many Appalachians began to work for northern coal

companies and moved to company towns. Following World

War II, however, coal-mining companies began relying more

heavily upon forms of surface mining and mechanized labor

12 Harkins explained the positive and negative associations of both connotations: positive “pioneer family spirit; strong family and kin networks ruled by benevolent patriarchs; a clear sense of gender roles; a closeness to nature and the land; authenticity and purity; rugged individualism and a powerful sense of self; and the ‘horse sense’ of average people as opposed to scientific and bureaucratic ways of thinking.” Negative: “the pioneer spirit could also reflect social and economic backwardness; strong kin connections might mean interbreeding, domestic violence, and bloody feuds; rugged individualism could also be interpreted as stubbornness and an inability to adapt to changing conditions; closeness to nature could stand for primitiveness, savagery, and sexual promiscuity; and purity and common sense might actually indicate ignorance and a reliance on unscientific and dangerous childrearing, medical, dietary, and religious practices.” Anthony Harkins, Hillbilly a Cultural History of an American Icon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 7. 13 Henry D. Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870-1920 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), 57. Shapiro prefaced his book with extrapolations on this idea of internal otherness and the construction of Appalachian identity and claimed, “This is not a history of Appalachia. It is a history of the idea of Appalachia, and hence of the invention of Appalachia. It attempts to examine the origins and consequences of the idea that the mountainous portions of eight or nine southern states form a coherent region inhabited by an [sic] homogenous population possessing a uniform culture. It argues that the emergence of this idea, between 1870 and 1900, involved an attempt to understand reality, or more precisely reality perceived in a particular way from a particular point of view, and it seeks to explicate the manner in which the idea of Appalachia came to be used as a way of dealing with the “strange land and peculiar people” of the southern mountains. It is thus a history of America and of the American consciousness, for its concern is with the attempts of Americans to understand the nature and meaning of their civilization, and to develop modes of action which to them seem consonant with this understanding. And as such it is itself an attempt to understand the nature and meaning of American civilization, and hence part of a larger work in which Americans have been engaged for some two hundred years.” Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind, ix.

Billy Davis, Kentucky’s Ravaged Landscape (Breathitt County), Courier-Journal and Louisville Times, Appalachian Kentucky: An Exploited Region, 1971.

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and began to withdraw capital investment from the region.14 Explosives, augers, and bulldozers

replaced Appalachians in the coal mines and, as the demand for coal declined, small mining

operations could no longer sustain themselves. Local workers were left physically harmed,

unemployed, and with a depleted natural landscape.15 Industrialists and the extractive coal industry

effectively removed an economic base, as well as raw materials, from Appalachia. Appalachian

authors reflected on this extraction of materials in constructing the “rich land, poor people,”

paradox, commenting on the historical injustice that had been done to their region’s land and

economic base.

Lastly, there was the paradox of government intervention and dependence in twentieth

century Appalachia.16 In the 1950s and 1960s, outside observers commented that the combination of

rugged individualism and frontier mentality in Appalachia inspired settlers to be self-sufficient and

autonomous from government intervention. Government officials provided the opportunity for

jobs, without addressing the limited job market or structural roadblocks that Appalachians faced

14 Surface coal mining, often called “strip mining,” refers to area mining, contour mining, auger mining, and mountaintop removal, in which land was removed in order to expose more coal and thus increase profits. This type of mining relied upon mechanized labor over human labor and had severe economic and environmental consequences such as erosion damage and water pollution. Montrie, To Save a Land and a People, 17. 15 R.C. Langman, Appalachian Kentucky: An Exploited Region (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson Limited, 1971), 81. 16 On May 25, 1961 in a special message to Congress, President John F. Kennedy claimed, “Large scale unemployment during a recession is bad enough, but large scale unemployment during a period of prosperity would be intolerable,” explaining his support of job creation programs. John Fitzgerald Kennedy, “Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs,” (Washington D.C., May 25, 1961) in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, John F. Kennedy, Containing the Public Messages, Speeches, and Statements of the President, 1961: January 20-December 31, 1961 (Washington D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1962), 398. Legislators developed the Manpower Training and Development Act as a response to the rampant unemployment of predominately young white men due to automation and technical change. Gladys Roth Kremen, “MDTA: The Origins of the Manpower Training and Development Act,” United States Department of Labor, 1974, accessed November 20, 2015, http://www.dol.gov/dol/aboutdol/history/mono-mdtatext.htm. Government officials cited the high costs of building highways and relative isolation of Appalachia as reasons to not invest transportation infrastructure in Appalachia. The President’s Appalachian Regional Commission and the Conference of Appalachian Governors eventually persuaded Congress to pass the Appalachian Development Highway System as a part of the Appalachian Regional Development Act in 1965. The purpose of the highway system was to, “generate economic development in previously isolated areas, supplement the interstate system, connect Appalachia to the interstate system, and provide access to areas within the Region as well as to markets in the rest of the nation.” “Appalachian Development Highway System,” Appalachian Regional Commission, accessed March 12, 2016, http://www.arc.gov/adhs. While officials rooted the WPA and other programming during the Great Depression in the 1930s in job creation and direct aid, policy makers in the 1960s focused on training above employment.

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such as limited education and infrastructure. Appalachians’ dependence on external aid challenged

not only ideas of Appalachian individualism but also caused many commentators to question their

idealized perception of Appalachia as a place of heritage in American ideology.

Missing from historical debates about these paradoxes of Appalachian development are

discussions of local efforts to counteract the supposedly negative aspects of Appalachian society.

While there were serious structurally-based political, economic, and social problems limiting

Appalachian regional development, community activists worked to develop their region starting at

the end of the nineteenth century and well throughout the twentieth century. Local colleges and

settlement schools, celebrations of the folk arts and crafts, and outward resistance against the coal

industry and environmental desecration were major parts of modern Appalachian development.17

The prevailing historical narrative of Appalachian identity relied on external commentators’

stereotypes of the region, which failed to recognize local development efforts and community voice.

In discussing the narratives of Appalachia in the United States, it is important to note that

stereotypes and not necessarily the actual characteristics of Appalachians influence government and

media perceptions of the region. In the 1960s, these contested identities converged as the nation

“rediscovered” poverty in the United States, especially in Appalachia. Ronald Eller, Appalachian

historian and former director of the University of Kentucky Appalachian Studies Center, claims,

“The rediscovery of the region fed on old stereotypes and outdated images, but the new

commentaries spoke as much to the anxieties confronting the larger society as they did to the

political and economic problems of the mountains.”18 Tropes of Appalachian poverty portrayed the

17 Major texts on Appalachian-based development are Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind, 1978 and two texts by David E. Whisnant, professor of English, American, and folklore studies: All that is Native & Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region, (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009) and Modernizing the Mountaineer: People, Power, and Planning in Appalachia, (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1994); as well as Montrie, To Save a Land and a People, 2003. 18 Eller, Uneven Ground, 62.

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region as depressed, lacking hope, and populated by backwards people who seemed to have missed

the rise of modernity and capitalism, rendering the region outside of postwar America. By portraying

poverty as a cyclical condition rooted in individual responsibility, however, reporters and officials

situated Appalachia outside of “modern” America rather than perceiving the region’s poverty as a

failure of capitalism. David Whisnant, Appalachian scholar, further describes,

Cultural values and assumptions turn out to have controlled the development process in Appalachia an astonishing number of its aspects. Of profoundest importance is the fact that the cultural values and predispositions shared by most planners and development agency bureaucrats have set the narrowest of limits upon their imagination; constricted the boundaries of their tolerance for social, economic, and political alternatives; and marked off the little that seemed to them ‘reasonable’ or ‘sensible’ from the much that did not thus the planning and development process turned out over and over again to be culturally narcissistic rather than imaginative and progressive.”19

Whisnant details the extent to which assumptions and stereotypes have impacted government

programming in Appalachia by limiting understandings of Appalachians who were working towards

growth. He laments the restraints that stereotypes placed on creative thought and the impact that

such limited programming has had on Appalachian development. Eller furthers these sentiments in

describing government programs which, “broadly held attitudes about progress within and outside

the region, attitudes that are grounded in the received assumptions about development that have

limited the dialogue and potential for alternative paths and outcomes.”20 Such constraints have

restricted conversations between external planners and Appalachian community-based developers

and curbed the potential for interactions and growth between different constituencies invested in

development. The disconnect between the cultural assumptions on which outside planners based

their programs and the realities of activism in Appalachia had significant consequences for

Appalachia development in the1960s.

19 Whisnant, Modernizing the Mountaineer, 267. 20 Eller, Uneven Ground, 5.

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Appalachia in Context: Historiography

In the 1960s, historians conceptualized a new way to examine history by analyzing events

and individuals from the “bottom up” or “labor” perspective, which, through a focus on the

formerly “invisible poor,” challenged the mainstream narratives of the past.21 Previous historians had

subscribed to ideas of “consensus history,” in which United States history was free from racial, class,

and gendered tensions and therefore unproblematic.22 Though the “bottom up” corrective is vital in

examining community-based responses to Appalachian poverty, it must be balanced with the “top

down” institutional perspectives to create a cohesive understanding of reactions to Appalachian

poverty in the 1960s. Many individuals and organizations in Appalachia during the 1960s negotiated

their experiences with government programming to flexibly address rural poverty from a “bottom

up” perspective. In examining this “bottom up” history, it is necessary to explore various the

historiographies of Appalachia in American consciousness, Appalachian history, Southern history,

the War on Poverty, American poverty in the 1960s, community-based development and community

action programs. While previous historians have touched upon these issues separately, rural white

Appalachian poverty has not adequately been contextualized within larger ideas about modernity,

Americanness, and community development in the postwar period.23 Studying Appalachia is

21 Historian Staughton Lynd claimed that “History from below is not, or should not be, merely description of hitherto invisible poor and oppressed people: it should challenge mainstream versions of the past.” Staughton Lynd, Doing History from the Bottom Up: On E.P. Thompson, Howard Zinn, and Rebuilding the Labor Movement from Below (Chicago: Haymarket, 2014), xi. Another historian, Thomas Humphrey, asserted that “historians who do history from below have heretofore only succeeded in pressing the authors of the master narrative, which largely ignores class and class struggle, to alter their stories slightly, or worse, to add another box for ‘the poor’ on the margins.” Thomas J. Humphrey, “Lease and the Laboring Classed in Revolutionary America,” in Class Matters: Early North America and the Atlantic World, ed. Simon Middleton and Billy G. Smith (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 183. These historians explained how history from below should not simply add stories of the oppressed to the dominant narrative but should revise the master narrative to include these stories as vital components of history. 22 Daniel Joseph Singal, “Beyond Consensus: Richard Hofstadter and American Historiography,” The American Historical Review 89, no. 4 (1984), 977. 23 Many of the aforementioned works were written in the mid to late twentieth century. It is important to note the dated nature of this literature because hindsight and current political, economic, and social developments are vital in any examination of history. With the fiftieth anniversary of the War on Poverty in 2014, many historians and thinkers are re-examining poverty in Appalachia to understand the long-term effects of government programming and public discourse.

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important because this region reflected evolving national ideas about rural poverty during the 1960s

and received specific outside attention.24

Most books written about Appalachia in American ideology and the creation of Appalachian

identity are focused on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.25 Authors of such works,

such as Henry Shapiro and David Whisnant, argue that an Appalachian identity was formed around

distinct political, economic, and social developments and that this identity embodied a variety of

cultural assumptions, from backwardness and inbredness to traditional American heritage. In

analyzing Appalachia exclusively in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these authors have

unwittingly frozen Appalachia in time and hindered more contemporary studies of the region. Those

historians who do focus on constructions of Appalachian identity in the mid to late twentieth

century usually focus on the stereotype of the “hillbilly” and its presence in popular culture and do

not discuss how the stereotype of the “hillbilly” inflected government and media discourse.26  

Further, historians who write about Appalachia beyond the early twentieth century, such as Ronald

Eller and Dwight Billings, often have a broad focus, and even those rare authors who focus on

poverty in Appalachia during the mid to late twentieth century do not pay attention to individual or

community experiences with poverty.27

Therefore, while some of these texts will be used solely as secondary sources, others will be both primary and secondary sources in this analysis. 24 Major Appalachian authors like Harry Caudill and Ronald Eller have asserted that there was increased government and media focus on the region in the 1960s. Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands, xii; Eller, Uneven Ground, 88. 25 Mary Beth Pudup, Dwight B. Billings, and Altina L. Waller, Appalachia in the Making: The Mountain South in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Henry D. Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870-1920 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1978); Richard Alan Straw and Tyler Blethen, High Mountains Rising: Appalachia in Time and Place (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004); David E. Whisnant, All That Is Native & Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). 26 Harkins, Hillbilly; and J.W. Williamson, Hillbillyland: What the Movies did to the Mountains and the Mountains did to the Movies (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). 27 Eller, Uneven Ground; and David S. Walls and John B. Stephenson, Appalachia in the Sixties: Decade of Reawakening (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1972).

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Southern history is based on the perceived differences between the South and the rest of the

United States and is related to Appalachian history both geographically and ideologically.28

Romanticized and fetishized, Southern history has been a fixture in American consciousness from

the late nineteenth century onwards. American Studies professor Jennifer Rae Greeson writes about

the Southern binary of, “simultaneously colonial and colonized,” explaining that exploitation in the

South makes it a region in but not always of America.29 Greeson continues to describe the South as

an, “internal other for the nation, an intrinsic part of the national body that is nonetheless

differentiated and held apart from the whole.”30 Greeson’s distinction of the South as an important

part of American history and consciousness yet exceptional within this narrative echoes claims made

by Appalachian scholars about the role of Appalachia in America and fits into this study’s

examination of Appalachia’s contested identity.31

Historians, economists, and policy makers studying the War on Poverty have mostly judged

the legislative and economic ramifications of this federal initiative.32 Many books about the War on

Poverty are compiled anthologies such as The War on Poverty: A New Grassroots History 1964-1980,

edited by Annelise Orleck and Lisa Gayle Hazirjian. The authors of this work examine the War on

Poverty in various locales and contextualize regional experiences within national developments,

opposing the dominant trends of economic and legislative analysis.33 Orleck and Hazirjian’s

28 It is important to understand that the South itself is a construct in American ideology. Throughout history, different geographic areas have been included in this construct and each different incarnation of the South holds different importance in American consciousness. See Jennifer Rae Greeson, Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), for more information about these constructs. 29 Ibid., 3. Furthermore, Henry Shapiro makes this exact same claim of Appalachia in Appalachia on our Minds, 1978. 30 Ibid., 1. 31 An important text about the exceptionality of Southern history is C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 History of the South, v. 9. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1951). Because southern exceptionalism was accepted at face value in the 1960s, I will be using it as a framework in my analysis. However, in more current times, scholars have begun to challenge the idea of southern exceptionalism. One such major text is Matthew D. Lassiter and Joseph Crespino, The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 32 Frank Stricker, Why America Lost the War on Poverty--And How to Win It (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). 33 Annelise Orleck and Lisa Gayle Hazirjian, War on Poverty: A New Grassroots History, 1964-1980 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 24. Another new, potentially promising text about the War on Poverty is Michael L. Gillette’s

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grassroots analysis approach a “bottom up” perspective on the War on Poverty but fail to address

the experiences of individual Appalachians and communities. Understanding the perceptions of the

War on Poverty in American identity is vital to contextualizing Appalachian poverty in the War on

Poverty during the 1960s.

Other scholars have historicized and contextualized poverty as a concept within American

society. Michael Katz, social theorist and professor of American history, synthesizes American’s

moralistic understandings of poverty: “poor people think, feel, and act in ways unlike middle-class

Americans. Their poverty is to some a degree a matter of personal responsibility, and its alleviation

requires personal transformation, such as the acquisition of skills, commitment to the work ethic, or

the practice of chastity.”34 Katz’s books, The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on

Welfare and The “Underclass” Debate: Views from History, investigate ideological assumptions about

poverty and the consequences that these ideas had on welfare programming in America.35 Katz’s

explorations and historical framing of the moral implications of poverty provide important

background for analyzing Appalachian poverty in the 1960s and contextualizes the ideological

debate surrounding welfare programming in Appalachia and beyond.

Scholars writing the historiographies of community action and community-based

development in postwar America have varied and contested ideas about the success of these

programs. Community Action Agencies and Programs were some of the most debated aspects of

the War on Poverty and thus the history of such programs are contentious, with some authors

Launching the War on Poverty: An Oral History. Yet all of the voices represented in this book are from the so-called government “warriors” of poverty programming. While Gillette’s perspective provides a more humanistic view on a colossal government undertaking, it still fails to address the lives of individuals and communities that were drastically impacted by poverty programming. Michael L. Gillette, Launching the War on Poverty: An Oral History, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 34 Michael B. Katz, The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989), 7. 35 Ibid., 3.

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arguing that the programs were successful and others decrying their failure.36 Other authors who

write about community-based development in Appalachia often focus on late-twentieth century

efforts against the coal industry or environmental ruin and do not focus on economic inequality

efforts.37 Studying anti-poverty community-based development efforts in Appalachia as well as

Community Action Agencies in the region adds to the historical narrative of community activism

during the War on Poverty and in Appalachia during the 1960s.

Poverty in Prosperity: The Media and Rhetoric of Appalachian Poverty

In the 1950s and 1960s, media coverage of Appalachia surged as reporters rushed to

Appalachia to cover rural poverty, the “human interest” story that fascinated the nation. 38 Writers

perceived Appalachian poverty and the Appalachian people as depressed, passive, and static and

filled the media with rhetoric and images that supported these tropes. Such media coverage and

rhetoric propagated limited and stereotyped images of Appalachia as hopeless, which influenced

both the nation’s view of Appalachia and Appalachians’ perceptions of themselves. This media

espousal of problematic images restricted productive government and external aid work because

individuals were influenced by such stereotypes and developed limited notions about the potential

for growth in Appalachia.

36 Noel A. Cazenave, Impossible Democracy: The Unlikely Success of the War on Poverty Community Action Programs (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007); Daniel P. Moynihan, Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding: Community Action in the War on Poverty (New York: The Free Press, 1969). 37 Joyce M. Barry, Standing Our Ground: Women, Environmental Justice, and the Fight to End Mountaintop Removal (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2012); Silas House and Howard, Jason, Something's Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2009); Michele Morrone and Geoffrey L. Buckley, Mountains of Injustice: Social and Environmental Justice in Appalachia (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2011). 38 Ibid., 88.    

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One of the earliest media exposés was “Portrait of an Underdeveloped Country,” published

on December 4, 1962 by Look Magazine. Punctuated with images of individuals covered in dirt

staring at the ground, the authors of this article brought Appalachia into the spotlight of modern

America. Appropriating journalist Michael Harrington’s rhetoric

of the “other America,” these authors framed as a distinct nation

within the United States and explained that the United States

must be invested in the “internal other,” Appalachia.39 The

reporters contextualize Appalachia in 1960s America: “In the

heartland of the richest and most successful nation of all time,

there is a vast and often-forgotten zone of stubborn economic

deprivation,” and, “all of them [Appalachians] maintain a

subculture of misery whose very existence seems fantastic—

even ridiculous—in the “soaring sixties.”40 This designation of

Appalachia outside of America limited the public’s potential for empathy and connection to the

region and maintained that Appalachia’s existence as a region was beyond the scope of modern

America. The authors continued, “People in this backwards land are oppressed by overpopulation

and underemployment, by sheer neglect, ignorance, and despair. No less than Latin Americans or

Africans, they can use more American aid.”41 Through this comparison between Appalachians and

externally colonized people, the authors asserted that colonialism and exploitation models of the

39 In 1962, journalist Michael Harrington wrote The Other America: Poverty in the United States and claimed that poverty in 1960s America was, “invisible and new, and both these factors make it more tenacious.” Michael Harrington, The Other America; Poverty in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 14. Harrington further claimed that poverty resided in “invisible America;” “Here are the unskilled workers, the migrant farm workers, the aged, the minorities, and all the others who live in the economic underworld of American life.” Ibid., 2. Furthermore, Harrington’s book was the focus of a famous book review by Dwight MacDonald for the New Yorker. Even if the American public did not read Harrington’s two-hundred-page text, many individuals were exposed to MacDonald’s review, which detailed conditions of poverty in postwar America. Dwight MacDonald, “Our Invisible Poor,” The New Yorker, January 19, 1963. 40 “Portrait of an Underdeveloped Country,” Look Magazine 26, no. 25 (December 4, 1962), 29, 32.  41 Ibid., 25.

Portrait of an Underdeveloped Country,” Look Magazine 26, no. 25, (December 4, 1962), 25.

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1960s were applicable within the United States.42 By othering Appalachia, the authors remove

Appalachia from the context of modern America, reduce the population to be secondary citizens,

and limit the framework in which the nation views Appalachians in America.

Beyond differentiating Appalachia as a region, these reporters discussed the role of image in

constructing an Appalachian identity. While they perpetuated fatalistic imagery of Appalachian

people, these authors acknowledged the problems with such images of Appalachian poverty. They

wrote, “But some mountain folk complain that the preoccupation with image-making tends to

obscure public understanding of the depth of chronic local problems.” They claimed that fatalistic

imagery had the potential to hinder full understanding of conditions in Appalachia and continued,

“Many Appalachian citizens are frankly torn by the knowledge that the truth about their conditions

must be told in order to get attention in hard-of-hearing Washington circles. They also fear that the

truth itself can discourage industrialists investigating sites for new plants.”43 By recognizing the

problems with static and depressing images of Appalachia, these authors almost forecasted the

troubling changes in perceptions of Appalachia that came with increased media coverage.44

42 During the 1960s, some scholars argued that Appalachia functioned as a colony within American society and this colonial relationship lead to economic underdevelopment in the region. Donald Askin, Linda Johnson, and Helen Matthews Lewis expound on this theory in their edited book, Colonialism in Modern America: The Appalachian Case. The authors featured in this text argue that the depressive conditions in Appalachia were the result of “external” domination by other regions of the United States. Even if the authors were sympathetic to Appalachians, framing Appalachia as a colony painted the region as culturally different and antithetical to postwar American trends of progress and modernity. 43 Ibid., 32, 33. 44 Both historical and modern scholars have noted that images of poverty and desperation can have both positive and negative impacts in enacting change. In one sense, increased attention to a region can inspire further governmental or volunteer action. On the other hand, such images can reaffirm the marginalization that put individuals in difficult circumstances in the first place. Scholars have noted that images of Appalachia were extraordinarily depressing and influenced external actions and internal responses. Moreover, other scholars have linked images and individuals’ perceptions of such images directly to the construction of internal identities and senses of self. Therefore, it is important to study the images of Appalachian poverty in the 1960s because such imagery influenced outside perceptions and internal identifications. Gloria So, “From “Pockets of Poverty” to Potential Prosperity in Appalachia: Examining Mass Media Narratives of Poverty Stereotypes in Appalachia,” Elon Journal of Undergraduate Research in Communications, 5, no. 2 (2014), accessed March 17, 2016, http://www.studentpulse.com/articles/1041/3/from-pockets-of-poverty-to-potential-prosperity-in-appalachia-examining-mass-media-narratives-of-poverty-stereotypes-in-appalachia.

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Though this article is only one example of media depictions of Appalachian poverty,

hundreds if not thousands of new stories were published locally and nationally in the 1960s detailing

the depressive conditions of Appalachian poverty in America. News contributors sensationalized

Appalachian poverty to essentialize the people living there and to portray the region as distinct from

the rest of the nation. Journalist othering depictions of Appalachia hampered understandings of

opportunity for development the region, barred empathetic connections to Appalachia, and

propelled problematic stereotypes of backwardness and lethargy into mainstream American

discourse.

The Government in Appalachia: The New Frontier, Great Society, and the War on Poverty

As reporters and journalists “rediscovered” Appalachia as an impoverished region in the

United States, government officials also began to focus their legislative efforts in Appalachia. Many

historians claim that John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign visit to West Virginia first

brought governmental attention to poverty in Appalachia, and thus lay the groundwork for the

Appalachian focus of poverty legislation during the 1960s.45 Such legislation represented a “top

down” approach to anti-poverty legislation as government officials examined institutional and

statistical implications of poverty, disregarding personal and community experiences with poverty

and placed faith in the liberal consensus and redemptive powers of capitalism in development.

In the early 1960s, President Kennedy promised a “New Frontier” for postwar American

society that would challenge the nation to develop in all aspects, especially economically. Kennedy’s

visit to West Virginia influenced two major pieces of “New Frontier” legislation: the Area

Redevelopment Act of 1961 and the Manpower Training and Development Act of 1962, which were

45 Eller, Uneven Ground, 53.

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aimed at eradicating poverty through infrastructural development and training.46 Moreover, during

Kennedy’s presidency, governors of Appalachian states came together in 1960 to form the

Conference of Appalachian Governors to eliminate poverty in their region. President Kennedy

recognized this group and formally created the President’s Appalachian Regional Commission in

1963.47 He chose Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., whom Kennedy had campaigned in West Virginia with,

to head the commission and tasked the group to collect data on human capital, transportation, and

physical resources in Appalachia.48 Tragically, amidst this nascent programming, President Kennedy

was assassinated on November 22, 1963.

Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson immediately assumed responsibilities for the nation and

many of the projects his predecessor had been working on, including poverty programming. In his

first State of the Union address on January 8, 1964, President Johnson famously proclaimed, “This

administration, here and now, declares an unconditional war on poverty in America.”49 The War on

Poverty was a series of federal initiatives that addressed poverty through specific political, economic,

and social legislation.50 Historian Ronald Eller describes Johnson, an old New Dealer’s, commitment

to anti-poverty programming: “He had a strong personal, if paternalistic, commitment to help the

disadvantaged,” and, “his faith in the ability of economic growth to reduce the levels of poverty was

matched only by his confidence in the capacity of government to produce growth.”51 Johnson’s

46 “Chapter 6: Eras of the New Frontier and the Great Society, 1961-1969,” United States Department of Labor, accessed November 20, 2015, http://www.dol.gov/dol/aboutdol/history/dolchp06.htm; Kremen, “MDTA: The Origins of the Manpower Training and Development Act,” http://www.dol.gov/dol/aboutdol/history/mono-mdtatext.htm. 47 “ARC History,” Appalachian Regional Commission, accessed November 15, 2015, http://www.arc.gov/about/ archistory.asp. 48 Eller, Uneven Ground, 72. 49 Lyndon Baines Johnson, “Annual Message to Congress on the State of the Union,” (Washington D.C., January 8, 1964) in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, Lyndon B. Johnson, Containing the Public Messages, Speeches, and Statements of the President, 1963-64 (in two books): Book 1-November 22, 1963 to June 30, 1964 (Washington D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1965), 112. 50 Important legislation included the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Economic Opportunity Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, as well as acts related to education, healthcare, and public housing. Orleck and Hazirjian, eds., The War on Poverty, 3. 51 The New Deal was a federal initiative by the Roosevelt administration in the 1930s that was a response to the Great Depression. The main focus of the “New Deal” was manpower development and a young Lyndon Johnson served as a

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optimism in the liberal consensus, or the spectacular growth potential of the American economy and

capitalism, facilitated his commitment to eliminating poverty in the United States in the 1960s.

President Johnson’s official declaration of war in 1964 set off a wave of government reports

and commissions purposed with studying Appalachian poverty. The first report published was

“Appalachia: A Report by the President’s Appalachian Regional Commission, 1964,” in which the

authors famously claimed, “Appalachia is a region apart—geographically and statistically.”52 The

authors of this report, supported by the Conference of Appalachian Governors and officials

associated with the Area Redevelopment Act, drew from internal colonization and regional

development theories to highlighted the perceived social and developmental uniqueness of

Appalachia within America. In 1965, the President’s Appalachian Regional Commission became the

Appalachian Regional Commission, as designated by the Appalachian Regional Development Act of

1965, and continued to create regional development programming in the region.53 President Johnson

formed the National Advisory Commission on Rural Poverty (NACRP) in 1966 to address rural

poverty in the United States. NACRP members held hearings in Tuscan, Arizona; Memphis,

Tennessee; and Washington D.C. and compiled hearing notes and academic studies into two reports,

“A People Left Behind” in 1967 and “Rural Poverty in the United States” in 1968. In “A People

Left Behind,” the authors asserted, “This report is about a problem which many in the United States

do not realize exists. The problem is rural poverty.” 54 Using dramatic language, the authors of this

report differentiated Appalachia and other rural areas both economically and developmentally from

the rest of the United States. Furthermore, the authors described their understandings of community

director of a local New Deal manpower training initiative. Charles Peters, Lyndon B. Johnson (New York: Times Books Henry Holt, 2010), 8.; Eller, Uneven Ground, 76, 88. 52 President’s Appalachian Regional Commission, “Appalachia,” 1964, xv. 53 “About ARC,” Appalachian Regional Commission, accessed November 5, 2015, http://www.arc.gov.about/ind ex.asp. 54 National Advisory Commission on Rural Poverty, “The People Left Behind: A Report by the President’s National Advisory Commission on Rural Poverty, 1967.” Edward T. Breathitt, Washington D.C., 1967, accessed September 23, 2015, http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED016543.pdf.

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development in rural areas, “the community in rural poverty areas has all but disappeared as an

effective institution.”55 Without ever analyzing or discussing local efforts, authors of this

government report write off the existence and efforts of community-based development. Moreover,

in the 1968 report, “Rural Poverty,” the authors used economic theory to describe internal

colonization in rural areas. They described the role of Appalachia in the national and international

economy through a metaphor of supply and demand, explaining that Appalachia represented a

supply that no one demanded. Through this analysis, the authors continued to describe Appalachia

as an underdeveloped colony inside the United States.56 In relying on tropes of underdevelopment in

Appalachia and failing to recognize local activist efforts, authors of these government reports limited

their and others’ understandings of Appalachian poverty and hindered the nation’s ability to create

programming that adapted to changing conditions and potential for growth in Appalachia.

Government reports on Appalachia in the 1960s, while detailed surveys of the region, relied

on cultural assumptions to bolster their own analysis of Appalachian poverty. This reliance on

stereotyped images and analyses of Appalachian poverty perpetuated a limited understanding of

lived conditions in Appalachia and discredited community-based responses to poverty already extant

in Appalachia. Though local organizations recognized the poverty in their region and set up

programming to counter economic depravity long before the 1960s, their efforts were ignored in the

face of large-scale government action. It is vital to examine these community-based development

efforts to understand the adaptability of local individuals opposing poverty and how such local

individuals broke with the paradigmatic script of hopelessness and inaction in postwar Appalachia.

55 Ibid., x. 56 National Advisory Commission on Rural Poverty, “Rural Poverty in the United States: A Report by the President’s National Advisory Commission on Rural Poverty, 1968,” U.S. Department of Health, Welfare, and Education, Washington D.C., 1968, accessed December 20, 2016, http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED078985, 130-140.

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In 1964 and 1965President Johnson embarked on two “Poverty Tours” of Appalachia to

examine this postwar rural poverty for himself. On April

24, 1964, President Johnson posed for a famous photo

on the front porch of Thomas Fletcher’s house in Inez,

Martin County, Kentucky, where the President spoke

with Fletcher, an unemployed coal miner living off of

welfare checks, about his experiences with Appalachian

poverty.57 For the people of eastern Kentucky and of the

nation, President Johnson’s visit signified the importance

that Appalachia had in the War on Poverty and American consciousness in the postwar period.

One of the most controversial and significant aspects of President Johnson’s War on

Poverty were Community Action Agencies which ran Community Action Programs. Over one

thousand Community Action Agencies and Programs brought federal dollars to the local level and

encouraged local investment in national programming. The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964

created the Office of Economic Opportunity, declared that CAAs and CAPs must encourage,

“maximum feasible participation,” urging as many local individuals as possible to participate in

community-based development.58 These agencies were meant to function as community centers with

57 President Johnson began his day in Chicago, Illinois, then made formal remarks at the Lulu V. Cline School in South Bend Indiana; the League of Women Voters and Steelworkers Union Hall in Pittsburgh; the Mayo State Vocational School and Johnson County Courthouse in Paintsville, Kentucky; and the Airport in Huntington, West Virginia. “President Lyndon B. Johnson Daily Diary,” (April 24, 1964), LBJ Presidential Library, accessed September 30, 2014, http://www.lbjlibrary.net/collections/daily-diary.html. Thomas Fletcher was an unemployed father of eight from rural Inez, Martin County, Kentucky. He lived in a tarpaper-covered three room shack on the banks of the Rock Castle Creek. Though once employed as a coal miner, and then a sawmill worker, he had earned only $400 in the past year. The Fletcher family survived off of monthly distributions of surplus food and two of his children had already dropped out of school. Lady Bird Johnson, A White House Diary (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), 121-122; and Lyndon Baines Johnson, The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency 1963-1969 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), 79. The most famous picture from the War on Poverty was taken on Thomas Fletcher’s front porch of a somber President Johnson surrounded by people living in poverty. This image became emblematic of Appalachian poverty, and the War on Poverty as a whole, and continues to circulate today. 58 Gillette, Launching the War on Poverty, xix.

April 24, 1964, Inez, Kentucky, LBJ Presidential Library.

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a variety of programming to suit the various needs of local individuals.59 While such programming

had varied levels of success, the mere existence of Community Action Agencies and Programs was

significant because they demonstrated the government’s attempts at addressing poverty on a local

level. Historian Ronald Eller asserts that “CAAs were intended to serve as the vehicles for quickly

and directly channeling federal funds into local neighborhoods across the country. These nonprofit

agencies would prioritize community needs and receive grants for a wide range of educational and

cultural enrichment programs.”60 These programs would be vital in Appalachia, where regional and

community-based development models were used to counteract rural poverty.

Yet these government offices were limited in their abilities to flexibly adapt to region

concerns and did not address structural poverty in Appalachia. While CAAs and CAPs brought

federal funds to local communities, many Appalachians were disillusioned with these programs

because they felt that the government was ignoring their concerns about institutionalized

impediments such as job creation and investment in infrastructure. While local aid efforts developed

in Appalachia beginning in the 1890s did not necessarily address structural issues more than

governmental community action programs, individuals in Appalachia felt more connected to these

programs that better reflected the community in leadership and programming. At the turn of the

twentieth century, local aid efforts in Appalachia were mostly missions and settlement schools but in

the 1960s, individuals were looking to the government for more than just community centers. In

59 The purpose of the Community Action Programs in the government’s testing site of Knox County, Kentucky was as follows, “1. To provide centers which will maximize closeness of contact with persons in economically depressed areas and to minimize difficulties of isolation so that poverty can be combated at a “grass-roots” level. 2. To provide basic facilities which can be used for the economic, educational, recreational, social, and cultural development of the human resources in these communities. Poverty is not unidimensional, and therefore these facilities will serve as a center to reduce educational isolation, inexperience in social relations and community action, and cultural isolation. 3. To provide centers where local residents can plan and execute activities which meet their needs and interests. 4. To reinforce and develop the positive characteristics of culture in Appalachia—love of freedom (particularly individual freedom), personal honor, physical energy, religious faith, self-dependence, and clan loyalty. 5. To develop human resources in and with the current environment. 6. To provide locations where additional components can be based.” 7.2 Work Progress. (a) Purpose, CAP – 7, Conduct and Administration, file 11, box 16, series 5, John Fetterman Collection 1945-1975, Berea College, Berea, KY. 60 Eller, Uneven Ground, 95.  

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describing CAAs and CAPs, one resident of eastern Kentucky proclaimed, “Goddamit, those

horseshoes. I can pitch them at home. What you need is a job.”61 Large-scale government

programming in Appalachia supported capitalism as all redeeming and approached poverty from an

institutional or “top down” perspective that had little flexibility in responding to community needs.

Community Action Agencies and Programs epitomized these limited understandings of Appalachian

poverty and growth that were based on stereotypes of the region. Community-based developers and

those who wrote about such programming, however, addressed these local concerns about poverty

and created adaptive programming that fit community needs and created space for community

growth. The existence of and community investment in such programming validated Appalachians’

opposition to stereotypes of lethargy and depression and proves that Appalachians were invested in

anti-poverty programming and regional growth.

Voices from the Mountains: Mountain Liberalism and “Local” Authors on Appalachian

Poverty

While government officials and media commentators were espousing their own rhetoric and

imagery of poverty in Appalachia, writers from the region itself were also beginning to address the

poverty they saw close to home. Though many of these authors may have identified themselves as

Appalachians, it is important to note that there was a large class difference between Appalachians

writing about Appalachian poverty and Appalachians experiencing Appalachian poverty. For

instance, one of the main Appalachian authors of the 1960s, John Fetterman, received $250.00 after

simply signing the contract for his manuscript and another $500.00 for around twenty pages of

Stinking Creek, a book about poverty in Appalachia.62 That forward was significantly more than the

61 “Notes: Chapter XI, ‘The Do-gooders,’ 1966-67,” file 5, box 16, series 5, John Fetterman Collection,  1945-1975, Berea College, Berea, KY. 62 Elliott B. Macrae to John Fetterman, February 18, 1965, file 15, box 16, series 5, John Fetterman Collection, 1945-1975, Berea College, Berea Kentucky. James Ellison to John Fetterman, July 11, 1965, file 15, box 16, series 5, John Fetterman Collection, 1945-1975, Berea College, Berea Kentucky.

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$400.00 that Thomas Fletcher’s family of eight survived on in 1964 and the $501.00 annual per

capita income in Knox County in 1960.63 Historian Ronald Eller makes distinctions between

economic classes in the mountains and describes a new class of mountain liberals who act as a

bridge between middle-class American and Appalachia. Eller maintains that mountain liberalism was

caused by the middle classes’ contacts outside the region and access to education. Such liberalism,

according to Eller, imbued the middle class with ideas of progress and modernity that distinguished

them from their surroundings.64 He explains mountain liberalism as, “cultural condescension and a

lack of faith in the folk…[that] has burdened the history of American liberalism for generations and

has been a consummate part of the liberal tradition in the mountain.”65 Eller claims that these

connections indoctrinated the middle class with the postwar American ideals of modernity and

progress, separating them from the “folk.” These mountain liberals complicated the “top down” and

“bottom up” paradigm because they simultaneously wrote about Appalachian poverty that was not

their own and simultaneously represented the region on a national scale. Though Eller sometimes

uses mountain liberalism condescendingly, the term can apply to aid workers and volunteers in

Appalachia who connected with local individuals and the region as a whole. Though some of these

thinkers that Eller critiques were deeply committed to improving conditions in Appalachia, and

specifically eastern Kentucky, he argues that their upbringing and socialization profoundly

influenced their simultaneously “top down” and “bottom up” perspectives on regional poverty.

Many Appalachian authors who fit in this middle class, mountain liberal, college-educated

group wrote about their region in order to bring increased attention to Appalachia. While such

63 Lady Bird Johnson, A White House Diary, 121-122; Lyndon Baines Johnson, The Vantage Point, 79; Fetterman, Stinking Creek, 29. 64 Ronald D. Eller, “Harry Caudill and the Burden of Mountain Liberalism,” in Rick Simon, ed., Critical Essays in Appalachian Life and Culture: Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Appalachian Studies Conference (Boone, NC: Appalachian Consortium Press, 1982). While this mountain liberalism impacted bureaucrats and government officials, it is important to note that many individuals invited to this hearing to share their opinions of poverty in Appalachia were also in the middle class. 65 Ibid.  

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authors were well-intentioned, their efforts at portraying the conditions in Appalachia were often

fatalistic, and they failed to address individual opinions and differences in their region. Falling into

the trap described by the previous reporters of Appalachia, these authors oversold the poverty of

Appalachia at the expense of emphasizing the potential for development and change in the region.

Such authors earnestly tried to represent the region they lived in but often perpetuated tropes of

Appalachian poverty as static and hopeless without addressing local activism and development.

Often described as the most prolific and quintessential writer about Appalachia in the 1960s

and 1970s, Harry Caudill, born and raised Kentucky lawyer, legislator, and pseudo-historian, wrote

in a style that epitomized the culture of poverty framework, or the belief that poverty was a

pathological and cultural aspect of communities.66 Caudill’s Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A

Biography of a Depressed Region most succinctly represents his 1960s writings on Appalachia and was his

most famous work. With parts and chapters of his book entitled “Our Disinherited Forebearers,”

“Boom and Bust,” “Waste and Welfare,” “The Rape of Appalachia,” and “The Politics of Decay,”

Caudill used exorbitant sensational to describe Appalachian poverty.67 In describing 1960s

Appalachia, Caudill wrote, “The present crisis…[has] brought economic depression…and it lies like

a gray pall over the whole land.”68 Though this economic deprivation was sufficiently upsetting,

Caudill continued, “But a deeper tragedy lies in the depression of the spirit which has fallen upon so

many of the people, making them, for the moment at least, listless, hopeless, without ambition.”69

Beyond economic exploitation, Caudill bemoaned the cultural and emotional loss that the

66 In 1959, anthropologist Oscar Lewis asserted that a “culture of poverty” existed, in which, “Poverty becomes a dynamic factor which affects participation in the larger national culture and creates a subculture of its own.” Oscar Lewis, Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty (New York: Basic Books, 1959), 2. While Lewis asserted that the culture of poverty must not be applied within the United States because of the developmental superiority of the nation, he conceded that a culture of poverty may be applied to migrants, marginalized groups of people, and Southern poor whites. 67 Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands, Contents. 68 Ibid., 325. 69 Ibid.

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Appalachian people had allegedly suffered due to their backwards condition in modern America. He

justified this disheartening rhetoric by explaining that Appalachia functioned as a colony within the

United States, exploited for years and left without a sense of internal identity or economic

development. Caudill ended the introduction of this book with a story of when he was asked to be a

speaker at an eighth grade commencement in coal mining company town in 1960. As he described

this experience;

The seven graduates received their diplomas in the dilapidated two-room building which had sheltered two generations of their forebears. A shower sent a little torrent of water through the ancient roof onto one of the scarred desks. The worn windows rattled in their frames and the paper decorations which has been prepared by the seventh-graders fluttered in drafts admitted by the unpainted walls. Outside, the grassless playground lay in the shadow of an immense slate dump and was fringed by a cluster of ramshackle houses. One of the graduates had been orphaned by a mining accident, and the father of another wheezed and gasped with silicosis. The fathers of three others were jobless.70

Caudill conveyed a hopelessness situation and projected heart-wrenching desperation onto his

description of Appalachia. Though well-intentioned and deeply committed to eastern Kentucky and

Appalachia, Caudill’s rhetoric of abjection and scarcity froze Appalachia in time and portrayed the

local people as vessels of poverty. Caudill continued, “The little [graduation] ceremony was opened

with the singing of ‘America the Beautiful,’ our most stirring patriotic hymn. The irony of the words,

sung so lustily in such a setting, inspired the writing of this book.”71 These dichotomies of heritage

and progress, hope and hopelessness, characterize Caudill’s work. He used culture of poverty and

internal colonization theory to extradite Appalachians themselves from progress and differentiate

Appalachia as both within and beyond American. In doing so, Caudill perpetuated stereotypes of

Appalachia and underappreciated understandings of community-based development efforts and

potential for growth in Appalachia.

70 Ibid., xiii. 71 Ibid.

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Minister Jack Weller wrote Yesterday’s People: Life in Contemporary Appalachia in 1966 to

sociologically analyze the people and culture of Appalachia. Though Weller had no background in

sociology and was a northern transplant to eastern Kentucky, his text offered a surface-level,

theoretical analysis of the people in Appalachia. Rarely using the word “poverty” to describe

conditions in Appalachia, Weller explained that Appalachians have a peculiar “subculture” that

developed from centuries of isolation.72 He essentialized the Appalachian people through this

cultural condemnation and reduced individuals’ lives to sociological traits, claiming that “We [aid

worker] were strangers in our own country.” Weller continued, “We commonly assume that all of us

in America, wherever we live, have the same goals, the same ideals, the same drives, and that most

of these are oriented upward…But here I found…these assumptions did not hold.” 73 Weller was

72 Jack Weller, Yesterday’s People: Life in Contemporary Appalachia (Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1966), xvi. 73 “This realization came slowly to me-the realization that perhaps I was faced with a different way of life, a separate subculture based upon premises I was not aware of. Like most middle class Americans, I had always assumed that in our modern, mobile society we have a fairly homogenous culture and that, generally, what makes us different is our income. Of course, we are all familiar with the usual labels that the sociologists (professional and amateur) put on us: lower class, middle class, professional class, upper class. We even readily accept refinements of these divisions, but these are presumed to mark us off according to “style” of life, depending on how much income we have, how much education we desire, what section of town we live in, what kind of music and art and entertainment we allow ourselves to enjoy, and how we spend our vacations and leisure. We commonly assume that all of us in America, wherever we live, have the same goals, the same ideals, the same drives, and that most of these are oriented upward (“upward” usually means that toward a higher income and toward the style of life that higher income allows). But here I and the staff with whom I worked found these assumptions did not hold. We were strangers in our own country, among a people who did not seem to understand us and whom we did not seem to understand. Gradually we began to feel that our frustrations derived from our attempts to impose our own cultural assumptions on a people who did not share them. But how to understand this mountain culture? Although a plethora of books had been written on the mountaineer-romanticizing him, criticizing him, deriding him-none had really tried to do more than describe him, and this we could already do. So we stand before the mountaineer, utterly baffled by his peculiarities. Why isn’t he like us? Why doesn’t he respond as we do, think as we do, live as we do? What are his goals and hopes? Why, when he moves to the city and is exposed to all the opportunities of city life, dos he still cling to his mountain ways? There are many unkempt houses everywhere in Appalachia. Why doesn’t the mountain man care how his house looks to others? There are a multitude of children everywhere, unsupervised by any adults. Doesn’t the mountaineer care for his children? On warm days there are people on every porch, sitting back as if they had not a care in the world when everybody says they are so poor. Are these people really so lazy? Have they no ‘get up and go?’ And the central question of all is: Why are these folks living as they do, so contended that they do not seem even to want the help offered to them?” Ibid., 1-2. I am choosing to include this entire quotation because it not only summarizes Weller’s research questions but also provides a snapshot into his opinion of the region. Though Weller asserts that there are differences between Appalachian culture and the rest of America, he assumes that cultural progression is linear and reaches its zenith with mainstream America. While he goes on to analyze the culture of Appalachia on its own accord, it is vital to acknowledge the assumptions and framework Weller employs in his research.  

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taken aback by the fact that, according to his observations, Appalachians did not strive for progress

and development and lamented, “Why are these folks living as they do, so contended that they do

not seem to even want the help offered to them?”74 Weller could not seem to believe that

Appalachians were content with their lives and did not aspire to middle-class American goals.

Yet Weller also addressed what he saw as the mental and psychological impact of early War on

Poverty programming and welfare. He claimed, “Our system of welfare reinforces their plight, rather

than creatively trying to provide positive solutions.”75 Echoing other Appalachian thinkers

arguments about the stigmatization of poverty, Weller conceded that government programming

simply strengthened the hopelessness in Appalachia. While Weller condemned the lack of drive he

saw in Appalachians, he still recognized the stigma that external thinkers and programs placed upon

Appalachians living in poverty. Though Weller initially moved to Appalachia to help the

underserved, his sociological condemnation of people’s lives and abilities hindered his

understandings of lived experiences of potential and growth in Appalachia. Moreover, the popularity

of this text propelled stereotyped imagery of Appalachian people into mainstream discourse and

restricted the public’s perceptions of postwar Appalachian poverty and development.

The last major Appalachian exposé author was John Fetterman, author of Stinking Creek: The

Portrait of a Small Mountain Community, an analysis of one community in eastern Kentucky published

in 1972. Though Fetterman was not immune from the tendencies to essentialize poverty in the

1960s as a purely cultural phenomenon, his work began to demonstrate individuals’ perceptions of

poverty around them and the potential for growth in Appalachia. The simple fact that Fetterman

talked to individuals who lived in Appalachia and published more than just a few sentences of

individual opinions breaks with the dominant trends in writing about Appalachia. Moreover,

74 Ibid. 75 Ibid., 152.

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Fetterman organized his book based on people, events, and place; he profiled lives rather than

sociological categories. By portraying the conflict and ambition in Appalachia, instead of simply

labeling the region as hopeless, Fetterman attempted to tell the story of people’s lives situated in

time and place. He described his motivation to his publishers:

Then I would take a hollow—as neighborhoods up there are called. The one I have in mind is Stinking Creek in Knox County. It has everything—one-room schools, eroded land, poverty, some giving up, some fighting back, etc., and tell the story of Appalachia by zeroing in and going into detail on the folks of this hollow. How they react, how they live, what they say, how they look, dress, eat, sleep, make love, pass the time, work, loaf, talk, etc. All of the accounts so far just lump millions of people together under “poverty stricken” and ignore the big, intriguing differences in character and personality. Nothing has been said of the fact, for instance, that there is anger, some hope, etc.76

While Fetterman pointed out the easily sensationalized aspects of poverty in Stinking Creek, such as

one-room schools and erosion, he also shared his desire to expose the internal development in the

region. In the front matter of Stinking Creek, the publisher asserted, “‘By listening with some

compassion and reporting without bias, rather than categorizing, ‘experting’ or evaluating the

hillbilly, the book gives an honest look at the sights, sounds, smells of a hollow in Appalachia…it

spells out in detail just who these people are.”77 Though far from perfect, Fetterman’s microsomal

analysis of Appalachian individuals begins to portray both individuals’ support for and opposition

against anti-poverty programming in 1960s Appalachia and thus broke with the accepted

mainstream narrative of Appalachian poverty during the 1950s and 1960s.

Lastly, Fetterman differentiated his work through his analysis of community-based responses

to poverty in Appalachia. He devoted an entire chapter to examining the Lend-A-Hand Center in

Knox County, Kentucky, an NGO and community center in eastern Kentucky founded by two

northern women purposed with “lending a hand” to a community in need, and frankly discussed the

76 John Fetterman to James Ellison, December 30, 1964, file 14, box 16, series 5, John Fetterman Collection 1945-1975, Berea College, Berea, KY. 77 Fetterman, Stinking Creek, front matter.

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War on Poverty in Appalachia. Fetterman opened his section on the Lend-A-Hand Center with

scathing condemnations of volunteer work in postwar America: “No area such as Appalachia could

long escape gleeful discovery by the do-gooders, those fervent, tireless Americans among us who are

driven, as though by demons, to do unto others.” He continued to critique external aid in the area:

“So for decades, Appalachia has been done unto. The desolate hollows have swallowed up legions

of pious, prim, pathetic little men and women who have braved the wilderness to spread the

light…Appalachia is a Mecca for those driven—both by demons and by self guilt—to do unto

somebody, somehow.”78 As politicians and journalists touted national service as a means to bettering

the nation in the 1960s, Fetterman critiqued such volunteerism of 1960s and decried the fact that

Appalachia became a place to be “done unto” in American consciousness. Fetterman shared his

blunt opinions on aid work in Appalachia, denouncing such programs as benefiting the do-gooders

more than the region. Therefore, it is significant that Fetterman found the Lend-A-Hand Center

noteworthy amidst this deluge of Appalachian aid workers and called Lend-A-Hand founders, Peggy

Kemner and Irma Gall saints among sinners.79 Beyond condemning aid workers, Fetterman also

shared his unbridled opinion on federal programming in Appalachia and wrote, “The Great Society

has been solemnly pledged by Washington, and the timetable for its accomplishment is somewhat

more urgent than that of the Resurrection…The Great Society also appears to be better financed.”80

While Fetterman’s use of hyperbole to describe the War on Poverty and Great Society may seem

sarcastic, he truly opposed government intervention and large-scale, external volunteering in the

region. With the publication of the book rapidly approaching, Fetterman’s editor, Jim Ellison,

warned him, “sometimes the indignation seems to go overboard—that is true particularly when you

talk about conservationists, the do-gooders…everyone here who has read the manuscript feels that

78 Ibid., 163. 79 Ibid. 80 Ibid., 177.

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you tend to be overly critical of anyone who wants to help.”81 Regardless of Fetterman and Ellison’s

differences in political opinions, Ellison cautioned Fetterman about being too critical of volunteers

in Appalachia, “It is our feeling, after all, that a significant part of the audience for this book is the

very do-gooders that you rail at, and your unqualified statements about the Office of Economic

Opportunity and the Vista Volunteers certainly won’t endear you to them.”82 Fetterman’s

straightforward and personal perspective on government intervention regarding poverty in Stinking

Creek broke with the liberal consensus and supposedly redeeming powers of government.83 His

focus on individual experiences and local efforts were an attempt to present lived conditions in

Appalachia to the American public. Fetterman’s analysis of people’s contested opinions about living

in poverty in Appalachia, while far from unbiased, lays the groundwork for more in-depth analysis

of local organization’s reactions and responses to rural poverty in Appalachia during the 1960s.

Community Action: Local Organizations’ Responses to Appalachian Poverty

Many of these authors who wrote about conditions in Appalachia also worked with other

concerned citizens in local aid efforts to enact change. Such aid efforts, developed originally in the

early 1900s, surged in the 1960s as increased government focus on the area encouraged investments

of time and money. These efforts were different from the government’s Community Action

Agencies and Community Action Programs because of their flexibility to local needs and

incorporation of community developers into leadership positions. Community activists established a

81 James Ellison to John Fetterman. October 26, 1966, file 14, box 16, series 5, John Fetterman Collection 1945-1975, Berea College, Berea, KY. 82 Ibid. 83 Jim Ellison, John Fetterman’s editor at E.P. Dutton, suggested that Fetterman scale down his condemnations of the War on Poverty and aid efforts in Appalachia. Ellison wrote, “We both feel, though that sometimes the indignation seems to overboard – that is true particularly when you talk about conservationists and the do-gooders. You and I have discussed this on the phone and our point of view may differ but for all its worth, everyone here who had read the manuscript feels that you tend to be overly critical of anyone who wants to help. As a general rule going through the manuscript I would look very hard at this area – tone it down to employ a more sophisticated approach. It is our feeling, after all, that a significant part of the audience for this book is the very do-gooders that you rail at, and your unqualified statements about the Office of Economic Opportunity and the Vista Volunteers certainly won’t endear you to them.” Jim Ellison to John Fetterman, October 26, 1966, file 14, box 16, series 5, John Fetterman Collection 1945-1975, Berea College, Berea, Kentucky.

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variety of settlement schools, missions, volunteer organizations, and development agencies to

counter poverty in Appalachia from within the region itself, often working with Berea College in

eastern Kentucky.84

Founded in 1855 as a private liberal arts work college, Berea was the first college in the

South to be co-educational and admit

racial minorities. Though some of these

admittances were taken back during the

Civil War and subsequent

Reconstruction, the open nature of

Berea College has continued

throughout time.85 Picturesque brick

buildings and manicured lawns stand in

stark contrast to surrounding farmland

and the collegiate town center evokes northern college towns more than Southern Appalachia.86

Furthermore, the Berea College Mission statement begins, “Berea College, founded by ardent

abolitionists and radical reformers, continues today as an education institution still firmly rooted in

its historic purpose ‘to promote the cause of Christ’.”87 With this statement, Berea College re-affirms

its commitment to reform and change, supporting, “love over hate, human dignity and equality, and

84 While settlement schools and religious missions were an important part of Appalachian regional development, I will not focus on these programs in this paper.  85 “About Berea College: History,” Berea College, 2014, accessed March 9, 2016, https://www.berea.edu/about/ history/. 86 Personal observations, visit to Berea College in January 2016. Patricia Gailey, a woman who has lived her whole life in Appalachia and whose father taught at Berea College claims, “Berea is not Appalachia.” Patricia Gailey, personal communication, Berea, KY, January 5, 2016. The posh bookstores, cafes, open mic nights, and health food stores of Berea better fit in Portland than they do in eastern Kentucky. Moreover, these amenities stand in stark contrast with the Walmarts, Dollar Generals, and corner markets of the rest of the eastern Kentucky. 87 “Mission: The Great Commitments of Berea College,” Berea College, 2014, accessed May 4, 2016, https://www.berea.edu/about/mission/.

Author, Draper Building, January 4, 2016, Berea College, Berea, Madison County, Kentucky.

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peace with justice.”88 The college is committed to interracial education, Appalachian education, and

the equal education of men and women, and the two major constituencies at Berea College are,

“African-Americans freed by the American Civil War and “loyal” white mountaineers.”89 Committed

since the 1850s to equality in education and advancing the Appalachia region, Berea College was and

continues to be an important meeting and breeding ground for Appalachian development.90

The Council of Southern Mountains (CSM), originally called the Council of Southern

Mountain Workers, was founded in 1913 as a group for concerned citizens and mountain

missionaries gathering to discuss ideas, experiences, and inspiration. Headquartered in Berea,

Kentucky, and often working closely with Berea College, the CSM brought together staff and faculty

of mountain colleges and settlement schools, school administrators, agricultural extension workers,

mission workers and organizers, and students of Appalachian folk arts for conferences and shared

publications.91 In 1951, Perley Ayer, an instructor of sociology and agricultural extension at Berea

College, was appointed the first executive director of CSM.92 A 1962 education and community

welfare grant from the Ford Foundation gave the CSM an economic head start on Johnson’s

incoming War on Poverty.

In 1964, Milton Ogle, another CSM staff member, organized the Appalachian Volunteers

(AV), a volunteer corps of college-aged volunteers aimed at eradicating poverty and encouraging

88 Ibid. 89 “Our Motto,” Berea College, 2014, accessed May 4, 2016, https://www.berea.edu/about/our-motto/. 90 The Southern Appalachian Archives at Berea College house most of the important documents of people and groups who confronted poverty in Appalachia in the twentieth century. The authors of the Southern Appalachian Archives website state, “The Southern Appalachian Archives includes organizational records, personal papers, oral histories, and photographs that document the history and culture of the Southern Appalachian region.” Programs such as the Council of Southern Mountains, Appalachian Volunteers, and the Appalachian Fund have their archival materials at SAA. Moreover, authors such as Harry Caudill, Jack Weller, and John Fetterman all have extensive records in the Southern Appalachian Archives at Berea College. Hutchins Library, Special Collections and Archives, “Southern Appalachian Archives,” Berea College, 2009, accessed October 20, 2015,  http://community.berea.edu/hutchinslibrary/special collections/saarchives.asp. 91 Whisnant, Modernizing the Mountaineer, 1994. 92 “Guide to the Perley F. Ayer Papers,” Berea College, accessed January 27, 2016, http://community.berea. Edu/hutchinslibrary/specialcollections/saa21.asp.

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local service efforts. The AV was created at a meeting at the Hindman Settlement School in Harlan

County, Kentucky with representatives from the Kentucky Governor’s office, President’s

Appalachian Regional Commission, and various War on Poverty offices present to encourage

participation and provide monetary support.93 The Area Redevelopment Administration gave a grant

of $50,000 to the CSM in March 1964 to fund the first year of the AV. When the Office of

Economic Opportunity was created in fall 1964, AV applied for a Community Action Program

grant. The next year, AV partnered with the newly formed VISTA program (Volunteers in Service to

America) and continued to grow.94 While the AV were initially organized and focused, the program

soon radicalized in the eyes of the CSM and lost traction in the community.95 Historian Thomas

Kiffmeyer writes, “In the case of the Volunteers, though their analysis of the sources of Appalachian

poverty was headed in the right direction…they lost when they abandoned their focus on local

people, asserted their own agenda, and attempted a frontal assault on their more powerful

93 Settlement schools were another important form of community resistance in Appalachia. Founded in the early part of the twentieth century, these schools stressed education and traditional Appalachian folklore, arts, and crafts. An in-depth analysis of the Hindman Settlement School, one of the most famous settlement schools, can be found in David Whisnant, All That Is Native & Fine, 1978.  94 VISTA was conceptualized by President Kennedy and realized by President Johnson as a way to encourage volunteering among youth in America. VISTA volunteers can serve in a variety of ways, from healthcare and childcare to literacy programs and neighborhood watches. “VISTA…In Service To America,” Americorps VISTA, May 2006, accessed March 27, 2016, http://www.nationalservice.gov/sites/default/files/documents/06_0523_americorps_ vista_legacybook_0.pdf. 95 In 1969, NET Journal produced a film, Appalachia: Rich Land, Poor People, which was an exposé on the coal mining industry in Appalachia. Journalist interviewed unemployed coal miners, coal company employees, and local government officials as well as college-aged volunteers in the region fighting for the rights of unemployed miners. Protests were held by AV and VISTA workers who demanded rights for unemployed Appalachian workers and compared struggles in coal country to the Civil Rights movement throughout the United States. Some of these volunteers in Appalachia were charged with sedition, called communists, and ended up in legal troubles. These volunteers, most often travelling from out of state or out of region, asserted that the conditions in Appalachia were testament to the fact that the American system of wealth dispersal and equality was not working and claimed that cutbacks on welfare programming were attacking products of the system and not the cause of poverty itself. Appalachians came together in West Virginia in 1968 to campaign as poor people, regardless of race. This gathering was a part of the Poor People’s Campaign, founded in 1968 to fight for the rights of the economically depressed regardless of race or region. The Poor People’s Campaign or the PCC even camped out in Washington D.C. for almost a month in 1968 to secure rights for the economically disenfranchised. Jack Willis and Jay Freund, Appalachia: Rich Land, Poor People, (New York: NET, 1968), accessed March 13, 2016, https://archive.org/details/appalachiarichlandpoorpeople#.; Robert T. Chase, “Class Resurrection: The Poor People’s Campaign of 1968 and Resurrection City,” Essays in History: The Annual Journal Produced by the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia, 2012, accessed March 16, 2016, http://www.essaysinhistory.com/articles/2012/116.

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adversaries.”96 Kiffmeyer argues that the AV’s beliefs began to alienate their constituents and the

volunteers subsequently lost touch with the community through their “radical” and communist-

leaning activism. He asserts that AVs began to see poverty as a structural, and not individual issue,

and began organizing to counteract poverty on a national level. Though the AV’s story is different

than other aid groups in Appalachia in the 1960s, their experience is an example of how volunteer

efforts, whether locally or externally staffed, can lose sight of community needs and thus lose

traction in the community.

These individuals, communities, and academics working to serve the communities of eastern

Kentucky all required funding. Herbert Faber and Ruth McGurk Faber, Ohio industrialists behind

the invention of Formica, established the Appalachian Fund in 1950 to fund aid work in Appalachia.

Herbert Faber was so impressed by the loyalty and character of the Appalachian workers in his

Cincinnati factory and shocked when he heard of their living conditions that he established this fund

to improve the lives of his workers and their families.97 The fact that Faber observed hard work, as

opposed to stereotyped listlessness, in his Appalachian workers inspired him to create this fund to

support efforts that counteracted dominant stereotypes of Appalachians. The Appalachian Fund was

a crucial investor in Appalachian development programs in the 1960s and beyond. Faber’s

interactions with Appalachian workers challenged his pre-conceived notions of Appalachian’s

abilities and encouraged him to work against stereotypes of stasis and lethargy on a larger scale.

Many of these programs converged at the Berea College Conference on Appalachian

Development at Berea College on April 22-23, 1964, the day before President Johnson’s “Poverty

Tour” of the region. Speakers such as Harry Caudill; John Whisman, representative of the

96 Thomas Kiffmeyer, Reformers to Radicals: The Appalachian Volunteers and the War on Poverty (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2008), 14. 97 “Appalachian Fund: History and Mission,” Berea College, accessed February 1, 2016, http://www.berea.edu /appalachian-fund/history-and-mission/. The Appalachian Fund still exists and is run through Berea College.  

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Conference of Appalachian Governors; and Perley Ayer, executive director of the CSM, spoke to

individuals involved in various organizations about the possibility of development in Appalachia.

These regional leaders discussed the troubled economic and cultural history of Appalachia and

proposed developing human capital and economic infrastructure to alleviate the poverty in the

region.98 Caudill, Whisman, and Ayer proposed that be given the opportunity to develop, citing the

region’s industrial past and human capital potential as reasons for investment in Appalachia. While

no direct action was taken in response to the conference, it was an important meeting place for

locals invested in eradicating poverty in Appalachia. Moreover, this conference was significant

because its constituents countered the dominant narrative of hopeless Appalachia through their

physical gathering to discuss regional development as well as through the speaker’s emphasis on

potential and growth in the region. In 1964, mainstream media was espousing the stasis and fatalism

in Appalachia yet this convergence of local aid workers, concerned citizens, and academics at the

Berea College Conference on Appalachian Development proved that individuals were invested in

bettering Appalachia on their own terms.

Converging Ideologies: Interactions between Government Programming and Local

Organizations Addressing Rural Poverty

Like community-based developers, the Kennedy and Johnson administrations were also

committed to alleviating rural poverty in the 1950s and 1960s and created various government

programs and agencies to carry out this goal. In Appalachia, while much of this programming

approached poverty from a “top down” perspective, some programs allowed convergence between

government ideals and local realities. These programs complicated the “top down” and “bottom up”

paradigms of approaches to poverty because they created spaces for local individuals to interact with

98 “Conference on Appalachian Development,” Berea College, accessed January 4, 2016, http://digital.berea. edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/p15131coll4/id/5118/rec/2.

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institutional perspectives. Though there was limited flexibility in the actual programming, local

individuals took this opportunity voice their concerns and share their experiences and countered

mainstream narratives of inaction and fatalism in Appalachia.

As Appalachia was beginning to gain importance in national media, major figures in early

Appalachian politics and academics edited and published The Southern Appalachian Region: A Survey in

1962 to analyze Appalachian poverty. Though not officially a government document, the committee

behind this survey came together at a religious conference at Berea College in 1956 to better

religious programming by compiling accurate information about the social, economic, and cultural

conditions of Southern Appalachia.99 In their report, after detailing the different developments in

welfare programming from the Great Depression through the early New Frontier in Appalachia, the

authors commented on the unhealthy extent of government dependency in Appalachia. They stated,

“Since the Appalachian people are usually applauded for their individuality, self sufficiency, and

resourcefulness, the extent to which public assistance is viewed with favor in the Appalachian area is

rather surprising.”100 While government welfare was minimal in the early 1960s and despite the

alleged Appalachian qualities of individualism and self-reliance, important leaders in Appalachian

studies found that welfare and external aid were welcome concepts in early 1960s Appalachia.101 The

results of this survey indicate that, prior to the heightened media and governmental focus on

Appalachia in the later 1960s, Appalachians did not feel stigmatized by government officials or

journalists. Yet, as government and media presence in Appalachia intensified in the 1960s and the

nation grappled with the poverty amidst affluence, these commentators began stigmatizing and

victim-blaming the poor for reliance upon government and welfare programs.

99 Scholars behind The Southern Appalachian Region: A Survey were partially funded by the Ford Foundation and began their research of this “problem area” in 1958. “The Southern Appalachian Region: A Survey,” University Press of Kentucky, accessed January 20, 2016, http://www.kentuckypress.com/live/title_detail.php?titleid=4507#.VqCJWVMrJPM. 100 Ibid., 253. 101 Ibid., 13.

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The Knox County Economic Opportunity Office was the center of Knox County’s

Community Action Programs and existed at the intersection between government programming and

community-based responses to poverty.102 Local community and business leaders formed the Knox

County Development Agency in 1960 and worked to have local leaders develop Knox County.

When members of the Knox County Development Agency heard about government funded

community centers as a part of the War on Poverty, they decided to apply for funding on September

21, 1964.103 Once funded, the board of the KCEOC toured all of the one-room schools in their

county to talk to teachers about the recently passed Economic Opportunity Act and share

information about the KCEOC and opportunities for applying for development funding in the

region.104 James Kendrick, a graduate student at the University of Indiana, was hired as the first

director of the KCEOC.105 Kendrick declared his support for economic opportunity in eastern

Kentucky and asserted, “Persons may appear lazy, passive, or anti-social. Yet some to these persons

have great potential. Challenging employment and responsibilities can produce dramatic changes in

the way a person acts.”106 While Kendrick relied upon some tropes of Appalachians as inactive and

backwards, he believed that creating opportunities in Appalachia had the potential to revitalize the

102 From here on out, my research will begin to focus more on the Stinking Creek watershed in Knox County, Kentucky, in the eastern part of the state. While some of the programming that I will be discussing will still address Appalachia as a region, others will focus more on the Knox County area and Stinking Creek. John Fetterman wrote an entire book titled, Stinking Creek: The Portrait of a Small Mountain Community about the region, and in this book he detailed community responses to poverty such as the Knox County Economic Opportunity Office and the Lend-A-Hand Center. Moreover, the Knox County Office of Economic Opportunity was one of two pilot Community Action Agencies in the United States and received more than 1200% its regional allotment. “Equipment Training Center County Under Act of 1964,” August 12, 1965, in file 11, box 16, series 5, John Fetterman Collection 1945-1975, Berea College, Berea, Kentucky. An analysis of the KCEOC is Paul Street, “Community Action in Appalachia: An Appraisal of the ‘War on Poverty’ in a Rural Setting of Southeastern Kentucky,” University of Kentucky, August 1968, accessed February 4, 2016, https://www.dropbox.com/sh/qpqxoyil08b6xee/AAA8h0ci_-7SayMImGihXZL2a/IntroductionUnit1.pdf?dl=0. 103 Union College, located in the county seat of Barbourville, also helped the KCDA secure governmental funding. Engle, “To Lend A Hand,” 129. 104 During this tour, the KCEOC ran into ran into Irma Gall, co-founder of the Lend-A-Hand private community center, at the Alex Creek School where she was teaching. Later on, Gall would be hired by the KCEOC to run the community action programs in Knox County. Engle, “To Lend A Hand,” 129. 105 Engle, “To Lend A Hand,” 133. 106 James Kendrick, “150 Employed Locally to Staff E.O. Council,” September 9, 1965, in file 11, box 16, series 5, John Fetterman Collection 1945-1975, Berea College, Berea, Kentucky.

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region. Drawing from the work of other local poverty response agencies, the KCEOC established

community centers in the old one-room schools and began work on various education, welfare,

community oriented, and healthcare projects. Though the KCEOC was an important resource for

both the government and the community to counter poverty, the organization had to follow strict

government standards and could not adapt well to changing conditions in eastern Kentucky.

A team of interdisciplinary researchers from the University of Kentucky who were funded

by the Office of Economic Opportunity compiled a report, “Community Action in Appalachia: An

Appraisal of the ‘War on Poverty’ in a Rural Setting of Southeastern Kentucky,” in 1968 to address

the productivity of the KCEOC. In the abstract, the authors noted the dissonance between those

staffing the programs and the Appalachians receiving aid and claimed, “Resident observers reported

that the cultural breach between ‘imported’ change agents and the Appalachian communities was a

considerable obstacle and that alignments rooted in indigenous factionalism and kinship patterns

appeared to affect greatly the direction a program must take to be effective.”107 The authors asserted

that Appalachians were inherently culturally different from other Americans and these perceived

differences fractured the relationship between government officials and Appalachians limited the

productivity and adaptability of government programs in Knox County. When making

recommendations for the future, the authors claimed that “those directing the program start with

the assumption in good faith that local community leaders are sincerely interested in overcoming

poverty (instead of assuming the opposite) and make the role of the professional staff explicitly one

of mediation among diverse community forces toward coordinating community-wide attacks upon

problems of poverty.”108 In analyzing the functionality of the KCEOC, the authors found that many

107 Paul Street, “Community Action in Appalachia: An Appraisal of the ‘War on Poverty’ in a Rural Setting of Southeastern Kentucky,” University of Kentucky, August 1968, accessed February 4, 2016, https://www.dropbox.com/sh/qpqxoyil08b6xee/AAA8h0ci_7SayMImGihXZL2a/IntroductionUnit1.pdf?dl=0. 108 Ibid.

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staff members stereotyped Appalachians and believed that local individuals did not want to

counteract poverty in their region. The authors found that government staff members relied on

cultural assumptions when working for CAAs and CAPs and failed to understand that Appalachians

also aspired to end poverty. Such a disconnect between government programming, even programs

intended to work with individuals and communities, and local needs represented the disjuncture

between “top down” and “bottom up” approaches to poverty and highlighted the need for further

community autonomy in anti-poverty programming.

Another interaction between government initiatives and local opinions happened at the

National Advisory Commission on Rural Poverty informal hearing in Berea, Kentucky. Kentucky

Governor Edward T. Breathitt, Berea College President Francis S. Hutchins and University of

Kentucky College President Thomas Ford were all members of President Johnson’s NACRP and

wanted to understand rural poverty in their own region before addressing the issue nationally and

decided to hold an informal hearing on rural poverty in Appalachia. Berea College President

Hutchins prefaced this hearing; “Mr. Ford and I thought it would be a good idea if we just had a

little private party of our own here at home, to see what we might learn. I have the feeling that I am

willing to provide a pipeline into the National Commission for my neighbors here…So, in inviting

you to come this morning, this is a totally informal meeting, no legal status.”109 Breathitt, Hutchins,

and Ford went on to question a variety of individuals from different counties in eastern Kentucky

about their experiences with “anything that relates to current economic life.”110 Throughout the

meeting, Breathitt, Hutchins, Ford were seemingly in disbelief about the actual conditions of the

region they represented: they could not seem to grasp the severity of the poverty in Appalachia and

109 “Introduction,” Meeting in connection with the National Advisory Commission on Rural Poverty, Alumni Memorial Building, Berea College, Francis S. Hutchins, Chairman, January 21, 1967, box 2, series 3, National Advisory Commission on Rural Poverty 1964-1967, Berea College, Berea, KY. 110 Ibid.

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argued with their guest and asked multiple follow up questions to grapple with the current economic

conditions in eastern Kentucky. They were shocked when one man announced, “Well, I’m thirty one

years old and I worked two weeks in Powell County in my life” and during a follow up question,

University of Kentucky President Ford exclaimed, “This just doesn’t make sense.”111 This hearing

allowed the middle and upper class academic liberals representing Appalachia on the national scale

to understand what life was actually like in their state. While the most impoverished voices were not

heard as a part of this hearing, the organizers worked to include a variety of individuals from all over

eastern Kentucky with different backgrounds and experiences with government programming and

local responses to poverty.112 This hearing represented an attempt at a community-based response

to poverty by combining government and personal perspectives to confront poverty in Appalachia.

The most informative aspects of this hearing were comments by Alvin Boggs, a

representative from the Pine Mountain Settlement School in Harlan County, Kentucky.113 Alvin L.

111 Shelby Wasson, Meeting in connection with the National Advisory Commission on Rural Poverty, Alumni Memorial Building, Berea College, Francis S. Hutchins, Chairman, January 21, 1967, National Advisory Commission on Rural Poverty 1964-1967, Box 2, Berea College, Berea, KY, 8.; Thomas Ford, Meeting in connection with the National Advisory Commission on Rural Poverty, Alumni Memorial Building, Berea College, Francis S. Hutchins, Chairman, January 21, 1967, box 2, series 3, National Advisory Commission on Rural Poverty 1964-1967, Berea College, Berea, KY, 28. 112 The participants were as follows: Francis S. Hutchins, President of Berea College, Chairman; Edward T. Breathitt, Governor of Kentucky; Thomas Ford, University of Kentucky; James Bobbitt, Berea College; Alvin Boggs, Pine Mountain Settlement School; David Brooks, Berea College; Isom Campbell, Ravenna, Kentucky; Mrs. Tom Cornett, Richmond, Kentucky; Miss Mary Dudley, Richmond, Kentucky; Walter Moores, Berea, Kentucky; Leonard Gallimore, Berea, Kentucky; Kate Ireland, Hyden, Kentucky; Robert Johnson, Ravenna, Kentucky; Miss Roslea Johnston, Ravenna, Kentucky; Mrs. Margie Jones, Stanton, Kentucky; O.L. Keener, Berea, Kentucky; Mrs. ___ Miller, Madison County; Robert Mower, Ravenna, Kentucky; Burton B. Rogers, Pine Mountain Settlement School; Richard Schneider, Buckhorn, Kentucky; Mrs. Joe (Te) Smith, Richmond, Kentucky; Mrs. Beulah Stamper, Cobhill, Kentucky; Charles Stewart, Stanton, Kentucky; Stanley Tipton, Winchester, Kentucky; Ruskin Townsend, Jr., Stanton, Kentucky; Shelby Wasson, Stanton, Kentucky; Thomas G. Watson, Cobhill, Kentucky; C.M. Wesley, Berea, Kentucky. Berea College Students: Irene Acord – junior; Bobby Wayne Burchette – sophomore; Nina Looney – freshman.” “List of Participants,” Meeting in connection with the National Advisory Commission on Rural Poverty, Alumni Memorial Building, Berea College, Francis S. Hutchins, Chairman, January 21, 1967, box 2, series 3, National Advisory Commission on Rural Poverty 1964-1967, Berea College, Berea, KY. 113  The Pine Mountain Settlement School was founded in 1913 as a boarding school for the remote and underserved children of southeastern Kentucky. It’s founder, William Creech Sr., was troubled by the, “lack of educational opportunities, and the prevalence of social problems and rampant disease,” and recruited women from outside the region to run the elementary, middle, and high school. One of these founders, Katherine Pettit, previously helped to found the famous Hindman Settlement School in eastern Kentucky based off of Progressive ideals as modeled in Jane Addam’s Hull House in Chicago and took these ideas with her to the Pine Mountain School. Still running today, the

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Boggs was an ordained minister and college graduate from eastern Kentucky and was first a teacher

and then director of the Pine Mountain Settlement School. The Pine Mountain School was an

educational institute in Harlan County dedicated to, “progressive education focused on cultural and

heritage preservation; environmental stewardship and agricultural development in the central

Appalachian region.”114 It was only fitting for Breathitt, Ford, and Hutchins to invite Boggs, who

was deeply involved in other local and state programs such as Boy Scouts, ministry, and local

development agencies, to their meeting on conditions and opportunities in Appalachia.115 Boggs was

primarily concerned with the mental and emotional implications of poverty programming on

individuals who were all of a sudden labeled as poor and destitute by the government. Though the

economic conditions in Appalachia were inexcusable in a developed nation, Boggs contested that

Appalachians did not consider themselves poor or impoverished. He offered a critique of Head

Start and other government funded school programs, claiming that the government asserted, “‘This

is for a certain class of people.’ This bothers me a lot…when this [programming] is merely aimed at

a certain group of people. It is an isolation that causes them to feel the stigma of this sense of

poverty.” Boggs described his own upbringing in rural Kentucky and asserted, “we never thought of

it as poverty…But I believe that if somebody had stuck me in a little group and said, ‘You are here

because you’re poor,’ it would have hurt me, perhaps beyond recovery.”116 Boggs clarified the

connection between the external labeling of the poor by outsiders and the internalizing of this

Pine Mountain School, “provides instruction in environmental education, Appalachian culture, and crafts to students and adults.” “History,” Pine Mountain Settlement School, accessed January 17, 2016, http://www.pinemountainsettlement school.com/history.php.; “History,” Hindman Settlement School, accessed January 17, 2016, https://www.hindman settlement.org/about/history/. More information about the Hindman Settlement School can be found in Whisnant, All That Is Native & Fine, 1978. 114 “Alvin Boggs,” Pine Mountain Settlement School Collection, accessed February 15, 2016, https://pinemountain settlement.net/?page_id=6333. 115 Ibid. 116 Alvin Boggs, Meeting in connection with the National Advisory Commission on Rural Poverty, Alumni Memorial Building, Berea College, Francis S. Hutchins, Chairman, January 21, 1967, box 2, series 3, National Advisory Commission on Rural Poverty 1964-1967, Berea College, Berea, KY, 25.

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identity by Appalachians and other impoverished people. According to Boggs, by telling individuals

that they were poor, the government forced individuals to bear the burden of being poor and only

redeemable by government salvation. This burden was even more onerous within the context of

modern, capitalistic America.

Yet Boggs offered a solution to this conundrum: “some of these programs could be aimed at

and carried out in such a way as to let those objects of these benefits be assimilated, and brought

into a working relation with others who have not been made to feel poor and rejected.”117 Boggs

asserted that the impoverished have been forsaken by the American people and government and

that integrating opinions of the poor into poverty programming would be beneficial and improve

their economic conditions. As Boggs explained, prior to enhanced government intervention in the

1960s, the people of Appalachia felt secure in their existence and economic state. While

unconventional in the face of modern postwar America, subsistence farming and a lack of indoor

plumbing were the norm of this region. Boggs’s acknowledgment of the shifting ideology of the

Appalachian people is noteworthy because many government depictions of the region often ignored

life in Appalachia prior to the War on Poverty and the opinions of individual Appalachians

themselves.

Other hearing participants also noted the changing government connotations about poverty

and its impact on individuals in Appalachia. Mrs. Tom Cornett from Richmond County described

the Appalachian people as “isolated and branded,” following increasing government intervention.118

Moreover, other participants commented on the stigma and cultural condescension they felt from

117 Ibid.  118 Mrs. Tom Cornett, Meeting in connection with the National Advisory Commission on Rural Poverty, Alumni Memorial Building, Berea College, Francis S. Hutchins, Chairman, January 21, 1967, box 2, series 3, National Advisory Commission on Rural Poverty 1964-1967, Berea College, Berea, KY, 41.

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institutional officials such as educators and administrators.119 In response to this reality, Robert

Mower from Ravenna in Clark County exclaimed, “So we must reduce these prejudices that these

teachers and superintendents and principals have with respect to these people, so they will be given

the advantage of moving along.”120 According to Mower, the Appalachian people had the extra

burden of working against stereotypes within the school system just to gain a decent education.

Robert Johnson, also from Ravenna, described the school system as one of pushouts instead of

dropouts. He claimed, “They [students] don’t’ have clothes, they don’t feel good. They go home and

stay home.” Johnson then spoke on behalf of the school system, “‘If you don’t meet our standards

and do as we want, we would rather not have you in the system’.”121 Johnson depicted a

phenomenon where the ideology of school administrators virtually pushed students out of school if

the students could not conform to the administrators perceived standards. Johnson countered the

dominant narrative of the uneducatable Appalachian by lamenting a system of shaming and

prejudice that barred Appalachians from education instead of ascribing school absences to perceived

cultural listlessness.

Later on during the hearing, Boggs shared more concerns about the emotional and mental

consequences that War on Poverty programming had for Appalachian individuals. While members

of the hearing were discussing the Appalachian paradox of rich land and poor people, Governor

Breathitt and President Ford were confused why the few extant coal miners were still suffering from

inadequate housing conditions. Mechanizing coal mining led industrialists to hire fewer but more

skilled coal technicians, putting regular coal miners out of their jobs. Yet those individuals still

119 These institutional officials fit into Eller’s condescending definition of mountain liberalism as those middle class individuals who work to separate themselves from the “folk.”  120 Robert Mower, Meeting in connection with the National Advisory Commission on Rural Poverty, Alumni Memorial Building, Berea College, Francis S. Hutchins, Chairman, January 21, 1967, box 2, series 3, National Advisory Commission on Rural Poverty 1964-1967, Berea College, Berea, KY, 34.  121 Robert Johnson, Meeting in connection with the National Advisory Commission on Rural Poverty, Alumni Memorial Building, Berea College, Francis S. Hutchins, Chairman, January 21, 1967, box 2, series 3, National Advisory Commission on Rural Poverty 1964-1967, Berea College, Berea, KY, 43.

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working for coal companies were no better off than other Appalachians. Boggs explained this

contradiction: “There is a sense of insecurity and even if a person does receive $52 a day, or $30 a

day, he is not sure that this is going to continue for the next week. And if that mine should close, he

wouldn’t feel like investing much in something that would tie him for a period of years.”122 Boggs

believed that the instability of life in the mountains, from changing employment to shifts in

government funding were implicated in the poor living conditions of people in Appalachia.

According to Boggs, the volatility of capitalism coupled with the lack of economic and industrial

development in Appalachia, and not cultural backwardness, led to this uncertainty in the mountains.

He continued to describe Appalachian’s mentality: “It is a way of life, a way of existence, and the

thought of personal ownership and the taxes that go with it, then the fears some of which are

unfounded ones, are things that prevent him from doing it.”123 While other scholars attributed these

failures to plan for the future to the long isolated cultural history of Appalachians, Boggs offered

concrete reasons how industry and the government cause these “cultural formations” that lead to

the seemingly desperate Appalachian experience.

The Southern Appalachian Survey, Knox County Office of Economic Opportunity, and the

National Advisory Commission on Rural Poverty informal hearing in Berea were three instances of

government programs coordinating with local efforts to address Appalachian poverty. Though

government officials were sometimes unable to comprehend community-based development efforts

in Appalachia or adapt to changing circumstances, the interactions of external programming with

locally-based responses to poverty represented efforts at bridging the gap between “top down” and

“bottom up” correctives. The opinions of community members such as Alvin Boggs exemplified the

fact that Appalachians felt differently about their circumstances than outsiders assumed and

122 Boggs, Meeting in connection with the National Advisory Commission on Rural Poverty, 28. 123 Ibid.

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countered the dominant narrative of hopelessness in Appalachia by adaptively engaging with locally-

based responses government structures to enact change and eradicate poverty.

A Comprehensive Response to Poverty: The Lend-A-Hand Center

The Lend-A-Hand Center in Walker, Knox County, Kentucky was the most versatile

community-based response to poverty in eastern Kentucky in the 1960s and actively countered the

dominant discourse about stasis and tragedy in Appalachia. This community center, established in

1958 by two northern transplants and functional until 2008, predated and outlived the government’s

War on Poverty.124 This organization and its founders worked with government programs to serve

various needs of the people of Knox County. Faith-based yet grounded in practicality, founders

Peggy Kemner and Irma Gall worked with and against the War on Poverty and government

programming to function as the epitome of integrated responses to poverty in postwar Appalachia

by combining government prescriptions, media perceptions, and personal experiences into flexible

action against rural poverty. These two women and their organization had a tremendous impact on

the community because they strived to understand both the difficulty and potential in Appalachia.

The fact that these women moved to Appalachia from other areas and their use of external

programming as well as local input demonstrate the importance of combining various approaches to

poverty to aid communities.

Born on May 26, 1930, Hannah Margaret (Peggy) Kemner grew up on a dairy farm and was

raised in the Eastern Pennsylvania Church of the Nazarene. After graduating with a degree in

biology in 1952 from Eastern Nazarene College in Quincy, Massachusetts, Kemner attended nursing

school at John Hopkins School of Nursing in Baltimore, Maryland. One year before she was

supposed to graduate, Kemner attended a lecture on campus by Mary C. Breckinridge, founder of

124 Irma Gall, Walk With Me: Lend-a-Hand (1958-2008) The Dream of Irma Gall and Peggy Kemner (self published: Kentucky, 2008).

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the Frontier Nursing Service, a healthcare provider and nurse midwife training program based in

eastern Kentucky.125 With newfound inspiration, Kemner graduated from Johns Hopkins in 1955

with a Bachelor of Science in Nursing degree and became a registered nurse. She then packed up her

bags and moved to eastern Kentucky to begin her residency with the Frontier Nursing Service,

eventually working at Flat Creek in Clay County.

Irma Gall was born on July 16, 1932 and was raised on a multipurpose farm in Indiana. She

was brought up in the Church of the Brethren and attended Manchester College and graduated with

a degree in Peace Studies in 1955 after taking some time off to do relief work in Germany. Many

congregants of the Church of the Brethren served with the Brethren Volunteer Service, and Gall’s

sister served in Clay County, Kentucky in 1952. A few years later, inspired by her sister’s time in

eastern Kentucky, Gall decided to move to the region to become a “self-supporting missionary”

outside of the Flat Creek Mission in Clay County.126

125 Engle, “To Lend A Hand,” 39-41. The Frontier Nursing Service (FNS) was founded in 1925 by prominent Kentuckian Mary Breckinridge. Taken aback by high maternal and infant mortality rates as well as by the death of her own two children, Breckinridge was concerned with rural women’s access to healthcare and set up her own medical centers and outposts in eastern Kentucky. In 1939, Breckinridge established a midwifery school to train nurse-midwives in rural nursing, and Peggy Kemner later trained at one such center in the 1950s. Though Mary Breckinridge passed away in 1965, FNS continues to serve the medical needs of eastern Kentucky today. Melanie Beals Goan, The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, Volume 22: Science and Medicine s.v. “Frontier Nursing Service,” Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012, accessed January 26, 2016. 126 The Flat Creek Mission is a Brethren Church in eastern Kentucky. Ibid., 42-43. “Flat Creek/Mud Lick Church,” Church of the Brethren, 2016, accessed March 20, 2016, http://www.brethren.org/church/30252-Flat-Creek.html? referrer=https://www.google.com/.

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After coming across each other in Clay County and noting the similarities in their interests,

Kemner and Gall decided to combine their work and create their own mission of sorts.127 However,

these two women faced various roadblocks in creating

their center: “There had to be money; there

had to be a doctor available ‘to back Peggy’; there had to

be a teaching job for Irma; and there had to be a

place.”128 Initially, individuals living in the Stinking Creek

area opposed the two women, who they called “the

nurses,” and resented the fact that outsiders intruding on

their community. However, Kemner and Gall’s

perseverance and continued commitment to bettering the

region eventually persuaded local individuals to accept

“the nurses” into their community. These women provided a variety of services to the people of

eastern Kentucky, from Bible classes and school teaching to midwifery, medicine, birth control and

even farming, 4-H, and shelter housing.129 Throughout this work, however, Fetterman argued that

“they [Kemner and Gall] agreed not to be an agency for passing out money, free food and clothing,

or free service, on the theory that greater respect would be obtained if patients paid for

something.”130 While these women founded LAH on their own accord, there was significant cross

over between Kemner and Gall’s professional interests and the government-run War on Poverty.

127 The Lend-A-Hand Center was not a religious mission and or not tied to any religious affiliation. Kemner and Gall grounded their organization in spirituality and taught non-denominational Bible study classes and camps at the center. Gall said that all religious orders, except for snake-handlers, were allowed to preach from the Lend-A-Hand Chapel. Gall, personal communication, Walker, KY, January 8, 2016.  128 Fetterman, Stinking Creek, 165. 129 A rich history of the Lend-A-Hand Center programs can be found in Engle, “To Lend A Hand”; Fetterman, Stinking Creek; and Gall, Walk With Me. 130 Fetterman, Stinking Creek, 167.

Peggy Kemner and Irma Gall, Knox Historical Museum: History and Genealogy Center.

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The Lend-A-Hand Center was unique because it was founded in 1958, six years before the

official declaration of the War on Poverty. While the living conditions in Appalachia were still

deplorable leading up to the 1960s, Gall described the absence of hopelessness in the mountains.

During the 1950s, Gall taught at a variety of one-room schools and claimed, “And we just did not

have a poverty feeling. I taught in five different one-room schools and at no time did you feel like,

oh, there were poor children in the school. And there were many children whose parents were on

welfare.”131 Yet, according to Gall, there was not widespread government dependence in the area.

She expanded on this idea:

The hopeless feeling that we don’t have enough, we won’t have enough food to get through the winter or we won’t, we don’t have, where do we turn to? There was not, there just wasn’t that feeling. And, at that time, there weren’t services to turn to. We had to do almost everything… But there was still not that feeling of, oh, the government owes us. Now that came, very definitely, came with the 60’s, with the War on Poverty. It came with that but it also came with Medicare, Medicaid, all these things were…Medicaid was here before, before the War on Poverty program, but you just couldn’t get on it, and sometimes we were frustrated.132

According to Gall, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, people were dissuaded from relying on the

government because it was difficult to secure external aid, and even if the government aid was

secure, people were unsure about the constancy of this welfare. Gall continued, “If you have the

kind of knowledge that your life is secure and is built on solid rock, then life is worthwhile and your

eyes are going to sparkle and you’re going to find joy in living even though you might not have

much. So that’s what we wanted to teach—that life could be full and rich, even if you didn’t have

131 Most of the quotations about the Lend-A-Hand Center will come from Gall because when I visited the center in January 2016, Kemner was ill, and had been for some time, and was unable to conduct long interviews or continue to work at the Center. Irma Gall, interview by author, Walker, KY, January 8, 2016. 132 In the early 1960s, Kemner and Gall worked with a young mother who was suffering from kidney failure. This woman had four or five children and walked many miles a day to get to and from the school where she prepared government sanctioned meals for children. Kemner and Gall took this woman and her children in and worked to register her with the welfare department and escorted her on various doctor and hospital visits. Unfortunately, this woman soon passed away, but six weeks after her death, Kemner and Gall received notice that the deceased woman could begin receiving welfare aid. Gall also sued social workers in the 1960s for failing to do their jobs and look after those in need. Ibid.  

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money and even if it seemed like the world was falling down all over you.”133 Echoing Boggs and

ideas from the NACRP hearing in Berea, Gall proposed that by helping people capitalize on their

own potential, she could inspire hope in eastern Kentucky and counter dominant stereotypes of

despondency in Appalachia.

Kemner, Gall, and LAH soon partnered with nascent War on Poverty programs to aid in

regional development. In January 1965, one year after the official declaration of the War on Poverty,

Gall was hired by the Knox County Office of Economic Opportunity to integrate the communities

on Stinking Creek through Community Action Programs.134 Like many others at the time, Kemner

and Gall enthusiastically embraced CAA’s as sites of development in growth in Appalachia. At the

CAA, Gall was tasked with “integrating” Stinking Creek. Gall defined “integration” as a means of

connecting people on Stinking Creek to each other: according to her, there were thirteen one-room

schools in the Stinking Creek area of Knox County and each school represented a distinct

community.135 Throughout this process of regional and community integration, Gall was able to

travel to Washington D.C. on a number of occasions to meet with Sargent Shriver, Dr. Martin

Luther King Jr., and other prominent War on Poverty officials and Civil Rights activists to discuss

rural poverty in Appalachia.136 As scholar and Lend-A-Hand volunteer Kathryn Engle notes, Gall’s

connections in the nation’s capital, along with her job at the KCEOC, “funded Lend-A-Hand

operations and boosted the income, connections, and status of the center.”137 Gall’s job with the

government was to staff and supervise the Early Childhood/Head Start program, the youth

programs, a health program, and men’s and women’s programs.138 At the same time, she served as

133 Engle, “To Lend A Hand,” 58. 134 Gall, Walk With Me, 55; Irma Gall, interview by author, Walker, KY, January 8, 2016. 135 Gall explains that the KCEOC used softball games between the different community centers as a major means of integration. Gall, Walk With Me, 55; Irma Gall, interview by author, Walker, KY, January 8, 2016. 136 Engle, “To Lend A Hand,” 134. Kathryn Engle, personal communication, Walker, KY, January 7, 2016 137 Engle, “To Lend A Hand,” 134. 138 Gall, Walk With Me, 56.

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director of the CSM from 1966 through 1968, directing anti-poverty programming and allocating

funding throughout the region.139 Kemner was in charge of the health program where, “health, self-

esteem and poverty were tied together; so, she tackled all three problems.”140 These women’s work

with government agencies and with their own community center was representative of the potential

for connection between local advocacy groups and government programming to counteract rural

poverty.

This integrated response to poverty was exemplified in the newsletter of the Messer

Community Action Center, located in one of the empty school rooms in Knox County. This

community center was funded by the KCEOC and was a Community Action Program aimed at

addressing poverty and community in eastern Kentucky. As Gall proclaimed in the first issue of the

Messer Community Action Center’s new letter, “The Reporter,” “The Community Center program

under the Economic Opportunity Council is a new idea for Knox County…But it is a real

opportunity to have some of the services and programs that could and should be ours…This is an

opportunity for us to help fashion our community into what we really want.”141 While the

community center was important in its own right as a place for people in the Stinking Creek region

to come together and work for its own betterment, the compounding of programs at this center is

astounding. Amid updates about the government programming such local VISTA volunteers and

the HeadStart program, the young people Fetterman profiled in Stinking Creek wrote humorous

stories about local developments, Gall discussed local community action and the KCEOC, and the

139 Engle, “To Lend A Hand,” 121.  140 Later, Kemner and Gall would work with the government through Medicare, Medicaid, and the Contracted Transportation Service, where LAH and volunteers transported community members to and from medical appointments. The main activity of the LAH from the 1970s through the 1990s was the Home Health Program, where “the nurses” and other volunteers did home health care for the people of Stinking Creek. Kemner and Gall merged their Home Health Program with the Knox County Health Department Home Health Agency in the 1990s and continued to work under the county’s jurisdiction, leaving behind a legacy of health care services in the Stinking Creek watershed. Ibid., 57, 61-62.  141 “The Reporter,” Messer Community Action Center, 1, no. 1 (July 1, 1965), file 11, box 16, series 5, John Fetterman Collection 1945-1975, Berea College, Berea, KY.

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Lend-A-Hand Center donated sports equipment. This seemingly idyllic scene of a community

rallying together was representative of the potential development following the convergence of

national efforts and local aid efforts in a small Appalachian community that broke with the accepted

narrative of lethargy and fatalism.

Following her work with the Messer Community Action Center, Gall became disillusioned

with the Johnson administration’s War on Poverty and Community Action Programs. According to

Gall, instead of allowing the community to take action, the government was simply imposing

national programming to be implemented at the local level. She continued, “We were expected to

solve the many poverty problems developed over the years in just a year or two. Since a lot of these

problems were dictated by our political structure, it was impossible for them to be solved overnight.

Consequently, instead of the local action groups devising programs, Washington began handing

down more and more ‘canned programs’ that they would pay for.”142 Gall was bothered by the lack

of local autonomy in these programs and worked to strike a balance between the limited local

response potential and larger structural issues. She continued, “I am aware that the local action

group was not equipped to handle the roads, sewer systems, bridges, and communication needs. We

welcomed the help of the Regional Appalachian Commission for these problems. But we were

learning to work with the state and other agencies in attracting new industry.”143 Instead of forsaking

all government programming, after she quit working for the KCEOC, Gall decided to align herself

and LAH more selectively with external welfare programming to enact aid on her own terms.

By creating adaptive programming that shifted with community needs, from health care to

education to community development, Kemner, Gall, and the LAH center worked with the

community and local needs to oppose rural poverty in Appalachia. In teaching literacy and academic

142 Gall, Walk With Me, 58. 143 Ibid. The Appalachian Regional Commission met with the Council of the Southern Mountains in the late 1960s in the basement of the chapel at Lend-A-Hand. Engle, “To Lend A Hand,” 121.

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skills, working to end food insecurity, providing a variety of medical aid including birth control,

running programming for youth and adults, as well as acting in the place of social services and local

law enforcement, Kemner and Gall provided both short term and long term resources to

Appalachia. Such community-based development countered media descriptions of the culture of

poverty and colonization by detailing the growth and adaptability of life and volunteer efforts in

Appalachia. In genuinely empathizing with and responding to the difficulties associated with poverty

in eastern Kentucky, Kemner and Gall countered government and media stereotypes of tragic

Appalachian poverty and created their own narrative of Appalachia as a place for development.

When Poverty was too much: Outmigration from Appalachia

While local organizations were countering Appalachian poverty on a variety of levels, other

thinkers were advocating for outmigration as a response to Appalachian poverty. Because job

prospects and general economic conditions in Appalachia were so dismal, many individuals chose to

temporarily or permanently migrate out of the area for employment. Appalachians moving out the

South to northern industrialized cities were an important contingent of the Great Migration of

Southerners to the North following World War II.144 But leaving Appalachia was a difficult decision

during the 1960s. Place, heritage, and kinship were important parts of Appalachia identity and

leaving these networks behind was a significant cultural deviation in Appalachia. Moreover,

departing from the connections of home for economic reasons or employment was seen an integral

part of development and capitalist and neoliberal thought. While development and rational

economic thinking were supposedly cornerstones of the postwar period, Appalachian’s reluctance to

permanently leave their home highlighted resistance against capitalism in Appalachia. Author John

Crowe Ransom described the interactions between development and home or nostalgia, stating,

144 James N. Gregory, The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America, (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).

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“the progressivist says in effect: Do not allow yourself to feel homesick; form no such powerful

attachments that you will feel a pain in cutting them loose; prepare your spirit to always be on the

move.”145 According to Ransom, in the progress of postwar America, connection to the past and

hope were contrary to the perpetual development of capitalism. Therefore, Appalachians’ resistance

to moving or difficulties adjusting in new urban centers were seen as aberrant from development in

America.

John Fetterman wrote about rural outmigration and the lives of Appalachians in urban and

industrialized environments. In a 1964 article for The National Observer titled “‘Man can make it up

here if he really tries’ Jimmy Dotson Looks for Better Days in Ghetto for Chicago Hillbillies,”

Fetterman asserted that Appalachian migrants were incongruous in urban America: “Jimmy’s flat,

twanging, mountain voice sounded strange and out of place, almost lost in the crashing din of…the

bubbling accents of the Japanese, the Puerto Rican, an occasional American Indian, and the Illinois-

born in uptown Chicago.”146 Reminiscent of the 1962 Look Magazine article, Fetterman contrasted

rural white individuals against racially disenfranchised groups in northern urban and industrial

centers. Also in 1964, Hal Bruno wrote “Chicago’s Hillbilly Ghetto” for The Reporter to analyze

Appalachians up north. He claimed, “They [Appalachians in urban environments] are

undernourished, uneducated, unwanted, and unable to cope with a society that does not understand

or want them…they have landed at the bottom of the pecking order, in the spot occupied by the

Negro back home.”147 These authors deplored how rural white Appalachians had almost as much

145 John Crowe Ransom, “Reconstructed but Unregenerate,” in Twelve Southerners, I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (Gloucester, MA: Harper and Row, 1976), 6. 146 John Fetterman, “‘Man can make it up here if he really tries’ Jimmy Dotson Looks for Better Days in Ghetto for Chicago Hillbillies,” The National Observer, August 17, 1964, file 13, box 16, series 5, John Fetterman Collection 1945-1975, Berea College, Berea, KY. 147 Hal Bruno, “Chicago’s Hillbilly Ghetto,” The Reporter, 1964, 29, file 13, box 16, series 5, John Fetterman Collection 1945-1975, Berea College, Berea, KY.

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difficulty adjusting to urban life as racially disenfranchised groups.148 In response to stories such as

Fetterman’s and Bruno’s, volunteers created programs to ease the transitions of white rural

Appalachians to urban centers. One of the most innovative projects of the CSM was the Urban

Appalachian programs, run out of Berea College. Urban Appalachian programs brought northern

police officers, school teachers, and welfare administrators to seminars at Berea College to learn how

to interact with their Appalachian constituents and better the lives of lower class whites in cities.149

Such aid was representative of the potential power for change that came with the confluence of local

efforts with government officials and national discourse. Urban Appalachia programs were unique

148 Also see John Fetterman, “Mission to Appalachia: Berea Course helps Northerners Understand Migrants,” The Courier Journal, August 2, 1964, Louisville, KY, file 13, box 16, series 5, John Fetterman Collection 1945-1975, Berea College, Berea, KY. 149 At the same time that white Appalachians were moving north to industrial and urban centers, the urban crisis of the 1960s was developing. Historians claim that urban crisis was the deterioration of urban centers due to deindustrialization, suburbanization, and persistent racialized poverty. In the 1950s and 1960s, corporations and city planners moved industrial jobs out of metropolitan centers just as many white people were moving to the suburbs. Concurrently, many black individuals were migrated from the South to the North in pursuit of employment and opportunity as industry left the South. Liberals struggled to explain the persistence of poverty among black people in the urban North just as cultural interpretations of poverty came to be conventional wisdom. The most influential cultural explanation of persistent black poverty was Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s “tangle of pathology.” The 1965 internal government document titled, “The Black Family: The Case for National Action” shaped the public’s notions about blackness and urban problems. One of the authors, Daniel Patrick Moynihan claimed, “Three centuries of injustice have brought about deep-seated structural distortions in the life of the Negro American. At this point, the present tangle of pathology is capable of perpetuating itself without assistance from the white world. The cycle can be broken only if these distortions are set right.” The authors of this report asserted that the Negro family structure, broken by centuries of mistreatment by white Americans, was to blame for black poverty and that restructuring the black family was the only way to solve the urban crisis. Moynihan’s tendency to pathologize the black family fueled a growing hysteria about black people in urban spaces. Echoing the culture of poverty theory, Moynihan placed the responsibility for poverty on black people themselves rather than on structural and social oppression. Government and media officials attributed the violence and urban unrest that erupted in the late 1960s to this tangle of pathology and the urban crisis dominated mass media and pubic discourse throughout the 1960s. The 1965 Watts Riots and subsequent panic fanned these fears about pathological blackness in urban centers. In the case of urban unrest and urban poverty, observers applied culture of poverty ideas and internal colonization models to effectively blame black individuals for their own poverty. Recently, historians and scholars have revised the narrative of the urban crisis by more closely examining the role that racism played in the creation of this crisis. Some scholars now claim that the urban crisis was a racist process orchestrated by local officials to segregate housing and urban development and are working to expand understandings of the differing moralistic connotations of poverty in American ideology. An interesting project would be an analysis of the treatment of rural, white migrant workers compared to black workers in urban centers in the 1960s and the different understandings of poverty and responsibility in these communities. Jill A. Edy, Troubled Pasts: News and the Collective Memory of Social Unrest (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006); Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); United States, Department of Labor, Office of Policy Planning Research, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1965), 48; Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University, 1996), 3.

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and epitomized the adaptability of local programs to changing circumstances and their ability

response to various community needs locally and structurally.150

This and other efforts at Appalachian growth demonstrated the need for comprehensive

community-based development in response to rural Appalachian poverty. These programs

countered mainstream ideas about the perceived lethargy and backwardness in Appalachia that

supposedly limited internal development. By coordinating media perceptions, government

proscriptions, and personal opinions into flexible community-based development, local leaders and

aid workers were able to serve community needs, address national issues, and counter stereotypes of

Appalachia.

“Coal Miner’s Daughter:” Appalachian Pride and Resistance

In 1970, the same year the James Dickey published Deliverance, Kentucky-born and raised

country singer Loretta Lynn released her song, “Coal Miner’s Daughter.” In this chart-topping song,

Lynn harkened back to her childhood as a coal miner’s daughter on Butcher Holler in Johnson

County, Kentucky, and sang about pride in her upbringing in rural Kentucky151 This song bolstered

the career of Lynn, already well-known for her honky tonk and feminist-inspired songs, and lead to

an autobiography, Coal Miner’s Daughter in 1976, as well as an Academy Award winning film, Coal

Miner’s Daughter starring Sissy Spacek and Tommy Lee Jones.152 Like Dickey’s Deliverance, Lynn’s

connection to and stories of Appalachia garnered national attention and directed focus to the region.

Yet, unlike Dickey, Lynn’s pride and respect for Appalachia and the people who lived there

portrayed Appalachia in a different light on the national stage.

150 As a follow up to this programming, concerned citizens established the Urban Appalachian Council in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1973 to address the unique issues that Appalachians faced in urban centers. Phillip J. Obermiller and Thomas E. Wagner, Valuing Our Past, Creating Our Future: The Founding of the Urban Appalachian Council (Kentucky: Berea College Press, 1999).  151 “Bio,” Loretta Lynn, accessed April 29, 2016, http://www.lorettalynn.com/bio/. 152 “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” IMDb, accessed April 29, 2016, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080549/.  

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One of the most important features of “Coal Miner’s Daughter” was Lynn’s focus on the

hard work of Appalachians.153 She sang about her father working in the mines day after day or

hoeing corn in the fields to make enough money to support his family and described her mother’s

dedication in looking after eight children through washing their clothes or reading the Bible out loud

every night. She summarized, “We were poor but we had love…Yeah I’m proud to be a coal miner’s

daughter,” connecting pride with hard work and dedication in Appalachia.154 Lynn tied heritage with

work and noted that capitalism was implicit in Appalachian poverty. Though other thinkers asserted

that Appalachia had missed the rise of hard work and capitalism and was left behind in national

economic development, Lynn claimed that work was a defining feature of Appalachian society. Her

song is about post-industrial realities in Appalachia, not pre-industrial development in the region and

demonstrated the fact that Appalachians could be proud of their heritage and hope for development

in their region.

While external commentators and officials propelled stories of tragedy and hopelessness in

Appalachia during the 1960s, some local individuals actively opposed these labels and worked to

portray their region as a place of pride and potential. Historian Ronald Eller claims, “Too often for

153 “Well I was born a coal miner’s daughter / In a cabin on a hill in Butcher Holler We were poor but we had love / That’s one thing that daddy made sure of / He shoveled coal to make a poor man’s dollar My daddy worked all night in the Van Lear coal mine / All day long in the field hoeing corn Mommy rocked the babies at night/ And read the Bible by the coal oil light And everything would start all over come break of morn’ Daddy loved and raised eight kids on a miner’s pay / Mommy scrubbed our clothes on a washboard everyday Why I’ve seen her fingers bleed to complain there was no need / She’d smile in Mommy’s understanding way In the summertime we didn’t have shoes to wear / But in the wintertime we’d all get a brand new pair From a mail-order catalogue / Money made from selling a hog Daddy always managed to get the money somewhere Yeah I’m proud to be a coal miner’s daughter / I remember well the well where I drew water The work we’d done was hard / At night we’d sleep cause we were tired I never thought of ever leaving Butcher Holler Well a lot of things have changes since way back then / And it’s so good to be back home again Nothing much left but the floors / Nothing lives here anymore Except the memories of a coal miner’s daughter” Loretta Lynn, “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” video, accessed April 17, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9eHp7JJgq8. 154 Ibid.

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example, we have mistaken growth for development, change for progress.”155 While Appalachians’

own ideas about growth and potential in their region may have differed from external commentators

ideas, there is still validity in Appalachians construction of themselves. Community-based

development and community activism provided a method for Appalachians to counter stereotypes

of fatalism and tragedy and enact change and capitalize on potential in their region in order to

counteract poverty.

Epilogue: Looking Backwards and Thinking Forwards, Appalachia Today

The future of Appalachia is uncertain. While the 1960s brought heightened government,

media, and volunteer focus to the region, this specific treatment faded away beginning in 1968 with

the election of conservative Richard Nixon and the increased U.S. involvement in Vietnam.156

Appalachia soon fell back into obscurity except for the small but strong group of Appalachian

scholars devoted to studying the region. For most people today,

Appalachia continues to be in but not of America.

Just as in the 1960s, problematic images of Appalachian poverty

continue. A variety of documentary photography books have been

published in the last fifty years that continue to essentialize life in

Appalachia as depressed and backwards as it was in the 1960s.157 In the

fall of 2015, Vice Magazine sent photographer Bruce Gliden to spend

“Two Days in Appalachia,” and photograph the religious practices of

155 Eller, Uneven Ground, 5. 156 Though many welfare programs from the War on Poverty still exist, President Nixon largely dismantled the Office of Economic Opportunity, which was the main federal center of poverty legislation during the War on Poverty. Miller Center of Public Affairs, “Richard Nixon: Domestic Affairs,” University of Virginia, accessed March 27, 2016, http://millercenter.org/president/biography/nixon-domestic-affairs; Nicholas Lemann, “The Unfinished War,” The Atlantic, (January 1988), accessed March 26, 2016, http://www.theatlantic.com/past/politics/poverty/lemunf2.htm. 157 Rob Amber, Sodom Laurel Album (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Rory Kennedy, American Hollow 1st ed. (Boston: Bulfinch Press, 1999); Builder Levy, Images of Appalachian Coalfield (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989); Ken Light and Melanie Light, Coal Hollow: Photographs and Oral Histories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

Bruce Gliden, Two Days in Appalachia, July 8, 2015, Vice.

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the region. Another recent photography project is “Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down,”

a photo series by long-term Appalachian photographer Stacy Kranitz.158 These recent photographs

could have been taken during the 1960s as Gliden and Kranitz capture black and white stark images

of people, intentionally disembodied or taken out of context, to prove that poverty in Appalachia

has remained static and hopeless. Appalachian’s intentional distance themselves from these

contemporary photographic works, indicating the need for more local images and representations of

the area to counter images of hopelessness and tragedy.

A different project, “Looking at Appalachia” approaches Appalachian poverty from a

community-based perspective. The organization’s website asserts, “this new crowd sourced image

archive will serve as a reference that is defined by its people as

opposed to political legislation.”159 By intentional collecting

images taken by people from the region itself as opposed to

relying on stereotyped tropes of Appalachia, “Looking at

Appalachia” aims to show the variety, diversity, and hope in

Appalachia in the present day. Here, people are given an

opportunity to present themselves and their lives as they see

fit, choosing to share images of resiliency and potential to

contrast the narratives of lethargy and hopelessness in the area.

In 2008, Mindy Fetterman, daughter of John Fetterman and a journalist for USA Today,

returned to Stinking Creek to check in on the Lend-A-Hand Center. Her article, “Making a

Difference,” was an update on Gall and Kemner who have, in her words, “brought a social

revolution to the remote hollows of southeastern Kentucky…advocating [for] birth control, civil

158 Stacy Kranitz, “Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold Me Down,” Vice, December 8, 2015, accessed December 8, 2015, http://www.vice.com/read/aint-no-grave-gonna-hold-my-body-down-v22n12?utm_source=vicefbus. 159 “Overview,” Looking at Appalachia, accessed November 4, 2015, http://lookingatappalachia.org/overview.

Meg Wilson, Paint Lick, Garrard County, Kentucky, September 1, 2014, Looking at Appalachia.

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rights, education for women and healthcare.”160 In the article, Fetterman notes how Gall, Kemner,

and LAH have recently partnered with Grow Appalachia, an organization committed to ending food

insecurity by creating sustainable food programs in the region.161 Fetterman lauds Gall and Kemner

for their long-term efforts at community-based development and continued ability to address both

local and structural facets of poverty. Yet shortly after Fetterman’s visit, LAH drastically reduced its

services to the community because Kemner became ill. Volunteer service to LAH has declined in

recent years and the center turned their healthcare programming over to county officials. Recently,

Gall decided to sell LAH, either as just a farm or as a functioning organization. She is hoping that a

local college will buy up the land and use the existing structures as an Appalachian Studies Center.

By giving the land and reputation of LAH to a local school, Irma hopes to continue the legacy of

learning and lending a hand in Appalachia.162

Government intervention continues to be an important aspect of life in Appalachia. The

most recent improvement project to reach Appalachia is SOAR or Shaping Our Appalachian

Region. Founded in 2013 by former Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear and Kentucky Congressman

Hal Rogers, SOAR is intended to, “expand job creation, enhance regional opportunity, innovation,

and identity, improve the quality of life, and support all those working to achieve these goals in

Appalachian Kentucky.”163 Echoing 1960s government and community-based aid in Appalachia,

SOAR is the modern incarnation of War on Poverty aid ideology. While SOAR is working on

healthcare, environmental, and community-based initiatives, Broadband has replaced highways as

the single most important factor in Appalachian development. Current, reactionary conservative

Kentucky governor Matt Bevin has endorsed SOAR, which has recently partnered with the still

160 Mindy Fetterman, “‘The nurses’ birthed a better place at Stinking Creek,” USA Today, December 29, 2008, 2. 161 Ibid. 162 Irma Gall, personal communication, Walker, KY, January 7, 2016. 163 “Vision and Mission,” SOAR Shaping Our Appalachian Region, accessed February 10, 2016, http://soar-ky.org/about-soar/vision-mission/.

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extant Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) to promote Broadband as “Kentucky’s

information highway.”164 The problematic 1950s and 1960s focus on manpower development and

employment training has carried over to today, with policy makers still creating opportunities for

potential employment instead of creating jobs and infrastructure in the economically depressed

region.

Most recently, a new ideological war has replaced the War on Poverty in Appalachia: the

War on Drugs. Since the mid 1990s, drug overdose deaths have more than tripled throughout the

nation, and in recent years, West Virginia has had the highest drug overdose death rate in the

country.165 Prescription drugs are a large problem in Appalachia and OxyCotin has been degradingly

called “hillbilly heroin.”166 Moreover, heroin deaths have more than tripled in West Virginia in the

past five years, and other Appalachian states are close behind.167 While drug use and abuse are

caused by a variety of factors, reporters have argued that the economic conditions in Appalachia

account for much of the drug problem. Journalist Naomi Spencer writes, “One can almost see the

growth of drug addiction as if it were a contour map tracing the impact craters of coal mine and

steel plant closures throughout the region.”168 West Virginia has the highest rate of unemployment in

the country coupled with the lowest labor force participation and the dominant industries in the

state include coal mining, construction, and other labor intensive sectors which are associated with

high rates of on the job injuries and chronic pain. According to mainstream media, drug use and

addiction are now in the same class with poverty as an essentializing stereotype of Appalachian

164 “BSCTC Addresses SOAR Executive Board,” Floyd County Times (Floyd County, KY), February 9, 2016, accessed February 19, 2016, http://floydcountytimes.com/news/3443/bsctc-president-addresses-soar-executive-board. 165 Olga Khazan, “The New Heroin Epidemic,” The Atlantic, October 30, 2014, accessed February 17, 2016, http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/10/the-new-heroin-epidemic/382020/. 166 Karen Sodomick, “Fighting Addiction in Appalachia,” Phoenix House, April 29, 2014, accessed March 12, 2016, http://www.phoenixhouse.org/news-and-views/our-perspectives/addiction-in-appalachia/.  167 Ibid. 168 Naomi Spencer, “Layoffs Mount in West Virginia,” World Socialist Web Site, July 29, 2015, accessed February 19, 2016, https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/07/29/wvir-j29.html.  

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people. During the initial War on Drugs in the 1970s, officials flooded media with images of black

“crack babies” and “welfare queens” in a racist attempt to pathologize drug use, even though drug

use was actually decreasing in the late twentieth century. In current times however, drug use and

abuse carry very different moral connotations. The increasing visibility of white people using drugs

is causing a shift in rhetoric. Government and media commentators have begun to victimize instead

of pathologize white drug users. Political scientist Naomi Murakawa explains, “meth-related news

stories reference violent criminal activity far less frequently than do crack-related stories; instead,

representations of meth’s harm emphasize health detriments to the user, as well as environmental

damage, toxic byproducts, and fire risks associated with meth production.” She continues, “Even

photos of meth labs in abandoned barns hold a nostalgic sympathy for the end of prosperity in the

White American heartland.”169 Echoing earlier sentiments about the nostalgia inherent in

Appalachian poverty, Murakawa evokes the dichotomy of heritage and backwardness in

contemporary white rural problems.

So what does this all mean for Appalachia? As much as conditions have changed throughout

the late twentieth to early twenty first century, many problems remain in the region. Poverty is still a

major concern in Appalachia, and drug use and abuse, health problems, and environmental

degradation continue to alarm local and national thinkers. Government intervention has risen and

fallen in the region and the future of Appalachia is still unclear. According to current government

and media perceptions, Appalachia continues to be a region apart, in but not of America. If the

1960s are any example, comprehensive community responses are vital to development in the region.

By combining outside ideas and influences with local needs, community-based development

programs can respond with finesse to concerns such as poverty. The only way to deal with the

169 Naomi Murakawa, “Toothless: The Meth Epidemic, ‘Meth Mouth,’ and the Racial Construction of Drug Scares,” The DuBois Review Vol 8, 1 (2011), 223.

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future in Appalachia is to address the past. Despite his misgivings about government, media, and

community-based development in eastern Kentucky, in 1967, John Fetterman held out hope for

change in Appalachia. He ended his book, “But anyone must hope that the people who live along

Stinking Creek find what they are seeking…that they need not journey to Detroit of Cleveland or

Chicago to find it, but find it on Stinking Creek.”170

170 Fetterman, Stinking Creek, 192.

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