High Mountains Rising (16 page)

27.
Shifflett,
Coal Towns
, 81–84. For a classic novel portraying a Kentucky farm woman's distaste for coal camp life, see James Still,
River of Earth
(1940; reprint, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1978).

28.
Joe William Trotter Jr.,
Coal, Class, and Color: Blacks in Southern West Virginia, 1915–32
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), chap. 3; Lewis, “Peasant to Proletarian,” 82.

29.
Lewis, “Peasant to Proletarian,” 86.

30.
Ibid., 88, quoted from James T. Lang, “The Negro Miner in West Virginia” (Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 1933), 126–27.

31.
Lewis, “Beyond Isolation,” 35–37; Margaret Ripley Wolfe, “Aliens in Southern Appalachia: Catholics in the Coal Camps, 1900–1940,”
Appalachian Heritage
6 (Winter 1978): 45; Kenneth R. Bailey, “A Judicious Mixture: Negroes and Immigrants in the West Virginia Mines, 1880–1917,”
West Virginia History
34 (1973): 141–63.

32.
Lewis,
Black Coal Miners in America
, 156; Wolfe, “Aliens in Southern Appalachia,” 43; Barry O'Connell, “Doc Boggs, Musician and Coal Miner,”
Appalachian Journal
1–2 (Autumn-Winter 1983–84): 44–57.

33.
Shaunna L. Scott,
Two Sides to Everything: The Cultural Construction of Class Consciousness in Harlan County, Kentucky
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 27–38. For a detailed study of the struggle to organize Harlan County, see John Hevener,
Which Side Are You On? The Harlan County Coal Miners, 1931–39
(1978; reprint, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002).

34.
Harry M. Caudill,
Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1962), 305–24.

35.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics,
Technological Change and Productivity in the Bituminous Coal Industry, 1920–1960
, Bulletin No. 1305 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1961); U.S. Bureau of the Census,
Characteristics of the Population
(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1950); U.S. Bureau of the Census,
Characteristics of the Population
(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1960; Keith Dix,
What's a Coal Miner to Do? The Mechanization of Coal Mining
(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988).

36.
U.S. Bureau of the Census,
Characteristics of the Population
(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1970); U.S. Bureau of the Census,
Characteristics of the Population
(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1980); U.S. Bureau of the Census,
Characteristics of the Population
(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1990); National Mining Association,
Coal Data 2000
(Washington, D.C.: National Mining Association, 2000), 11–19; U.S. Department of Commerce,
Statistical Abstract of the United States
(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 2000), 421; Paul Nyden, “A Collapse of Coal Employment: Why Are the Jobs Vanishing?”
Sunday Gazette-Mail
(Charleston, W.Va.), 15 Oct. 1989.

37.
James S. Brown and George A. Hillery Jr., “The Great Migration, 1940–1960,” in
The Southern Appalachian Region: A Survey
, ed. Thomas R. Ford (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1962), 54–78. See also Chad Berry,
Southern Migrants, Northern Exiles
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000); Phillip J. Obermiller, Thomas E. Wagner, and E. Bruce Tucker, eds.,
Appalachian Odyssey: Historical Perspectives on the Great Migration
(Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2000); Andrew M. Isserman, “Appalachia Then and Now: Update of ‘The Realities of Deprivation' Reported to the President in 1964,”
Journal of Appalachian Studies
3 (Spring 1997): 43–69.

6

The Great Depression

Paul Salstrom

The 1960s saw the growth of what was called the back-to-the-land movement. One part of that movement involved a group called the School of Living that had started in 1936 during the depths of the Great Depression to help people learn to support themselves from the land. In the 1960s the group was busy setting up rural apprenticeship programs. After leaving the apprenticeships, many of the younger participants bought land in Appalachia, where land prices (as of 1970) still ran as low as $17 an acre. In rural Appalachia, those new “homesteaders” found themselves welcomed by senior citizens who still knew how to harness horses, build log cabins, clear pastures, grow food and preserve it, find ginseng, bake bread, and do hundreds of other homesteading tasks. The young newcomers also found themselves grafted into Appalachia's local networks of daily borrowing and bartering (including exchanges of work). That neighborhood economic networking allowed a comfortable existence even if no one in the neighborhood had much money.
¹

If we step back from such details and look at the big picture, we can see the back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s and 1970s as part of a larger canvas. Many people who had grown up in the 1930s were economically traumatized by the Great Depression. When their own children became teenagers, they tried to indoctrinate them with materialistic play-it-safe values. But to their children (who were growing up in the affluent 1950s and 1960s), materialistic play-it-safe values made no sense.
²
The materialism of many suburban parents helped drive their children to seek “simplicity” in mountainous Appalachia and other rural retreats—where, to their surprise, they fell into the arms of “surrogate parents”—into the arms of senior rural farm folk who, like their parents, had also grown up in the 1930s (or in the 1920s, which in Appalachia were not very different).

But did not the Depression happen everywhere? How could its aftereffects drive youngsters away from their 1960s suburban parents but also turn mountain farmers into attractive role models for those same youngsters?

It happened because the youth of the 1960s perceived Appalachia as being very different from the rest of America. That is why the 1960s generation fell in love with Appalachia. In their eyes, Appalachia had backwoods credentials; it even had dropout credentials.

When we think of rural America, most of us probably visualize a straight road with huge crop fields on both sides and every so often a white farmhouse with a car and pickup in the driveway and lots of farm equipment out back. But that is not rural Appalachia. By the 1920s many farm families elsewhere in the United States were already creating that homogenized “modern” farmscape, but not Appalachia's farm families. Appalachia comprises only 3 percent of the land area of the United States, but the 1930 Census found one-third of America's “self-sufficing” farms tucked away there.
³
The Census defined self-sufficing farms as farms “where the value of the [home] farm products used by the family was 50 percent or more of the total value of all products of the farm.”
⁴
In Appalachia in 1930, about a million farm dwellers lived that way, far more than in any other region of the United States. Many of Appalachia's self-sufficing farm families brought in cash incomes of less than $100 a year (equivalent to about $1,150 today).

Some of those mountain farm families were so successfully self-sufficing that the Depression barely affected them. If some member of the family had previously been working for wages—perhaps in timber cutting or coalmining—that work probably shriveled after the stock-market crash of 1929. But if the family could still farm enough to support itself completely, it generally did so.

After the stock market crash of October 1929, when stocks lost more than a third of their value within a few weeks, the Great Depression swept the United States with numbing swiftness, and year by year it grew worse. By the winter of 1932–33, the U.S. gross national product had fallen almost by half, and farm families' average income had fallen by more than half. By that winter, at least one-fourth of all U.S. workers were unemployed, and many others worked only part-time.

Appalachia was especially hard-hit by the Depression because its two main products were lumber and coal. With construction down 78 percent, lumber was not in demand. And with few factories operating at their normal pace, demand for energy was way down, including demand for coal. Thus many of Appalachia's workers faced personal economic disaster, and that included hundreds of thousands of farm families who could not support themselves by simply operating their farms. The situation was especially grim in central Appalachia, the rugged coal-laden hills of western West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and east-central Tennessee. There the number of farms that were producing enough for the Census-takers to label them as a “farm” shot
up over 35 percent in the first five Depression years.
⁵
This happened mainly because thousands of people who had lost their jobs returned to their old home farms to try to eke out a living by subsistence farming.

And even the self-sufficient families that were not hurt much by the Depression were soon dealt a stunning blow by the Great Drought of 1930–31. That drought's driest belt ran west from Virginia across West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee to Arkansas. Annual precipitation dropped to 16 inches, and many rivers quit flowing. Some large towns laid their firehoses upriver from one pool to the next so they could at least get drinking water. In northern West Virginia, for example, both Morgantown and Elkins did so.
⁶
In Kentucky, undernourishment among pregnant women caused infant death rates to rise 10 percent in the last four months of 1930. Undernourishment also caused pneumonia and pellagra rates to multiply, along with outbreaks of smallpox, scarlet fever, typhoid, diphtheria, whooping cough, and the eye disease trachoma. In some areas starvation threatened. As the winter of 1930–31 began, Red Cross investigators in eastern Kentucky found distress caused by the drought at “almost unbelievable” levels and reported “a growing army of itinerants travelling on foot” in search of food. Meanwhile, the national Red Cross had closed down its relief programs in Kentucky and West Virginia as a way of stretching their supplies to last through midwinter. Then, when the Red Cross finally started distributing supplies again in January 1931, some of the county-level Red Cross chapters refused to pass the relief goods along to rural people, whom they were hoping would move elsewhere.
⁷

Those county-level Red Cross chapters were led by well-to-do business and professional people, members of what have been called Appalachia's “local power elites.” In earlier generations, their forebears had gained control over much of Appalachia's bounteous resources of coal and timber, but their wealth had been only in land. They had lacked enough money to finance railroads or the other infrastructure that large-scale mining and timbering required. So they had advertised Appalachia's vast coal and timber resources to the world along with its “cheap labor”: the labor of their poorer mountain neighbors. They wanted subsistence farmers to become wage earners and thereby to start contributing (as consumers) to the local cash economy. Members of the local elites became agents, lawyers, and managers for outside corporations, which then financed the region's large coalmines and timber operations, which did hire hundreds of thousands of mountain farmers, but at very low wages.
⁸
The wages were so low that, to make ends meet, those new coalminers and lumberjacks had to continue raising at least a few farm animals and growing large vegetable gardens.
⁹
And so they continued having lots of children to help do all the work.

That pattern of rural industrialization had grown by leaps and bounds in the late 1800s and early 1900s. By the 1920s, 70 percent of Appalachia's coalminers and their families lived in company towns, but they still had to keep some livestock and raise large gardens to make ends meet. In fact, many coal companies passed out free vegetable seeds and awarded prizes for the best gardens. That helped the companies keep their wage scales low and their profits high.
¹⁰
(Two-thirds of the cost of mining coal went into wages.)

When the Great Depression struck in 1929, and soon afterwards the Great Drought in 1930–31, members of the local elites felt that their counties contained “excess” population. They hoped that the dual blows of the Depression's unemployment and the Drought's crop failure would convince impoverished rural people to pack up and move somewhere else.
¹¹
President Herbert Hoover insisted that feeding hungry people should be handled by the Red Cross and local governments, but the national Red Cross was dragging its feet, hoping to force Hoover and Congress to tackle the huge relief job themselves. In Appalachia, national gridlock suited many of the local power elites just fine: They wanted to keep the amount of outside help so low that “excess” people would have to come out of their remote hollows and down off their remote ridges and leave the county.
¹²
It would take the New Deal's welfare blitz of federal money to convince such local leaders to let their desperate neighbors get some relief.