Reformers to Radicals (25 page)

Ayer's admonition was a result of a disagreement with Fox over the degree of authority that the CSM and AV leaders should exercise over the personal conduct and morality of the volunteers. While Fox never denied that incidents such as those mentioned in the report had happened, he took the position that “[the] attitudes I have acquired about drinking, fornication, smoking, [and] birth control . . . must be as irrelevant as possible in the process of making the decisions which fall to me as a working professional.” He argued that “whether the men concerned [were] alcoholics, teetotalers, swordsmen or celibates” was not his concern, as long as they performed their jobs. As in the U.S. Army, “Saturday night, away from the front, belongs to the private man.” Unless the actions in question harmed the Volunteer program, he concluded, “I cannot, as a professional, call forth a moral code and lay on its wrath.”
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Ayer disagreed. A person's attitude, he believed, was inherently relevant to his job, especially when that job was as a Council employee. “The personal character values by which all these people are guided,” he claimed, “have a direct relationship to their responsibility and effectiveness and therefore their employability by the Council.” Ayer asserted that the Appalachian Volunteers were, by the very nature of their work, on the job every hour of every day, and he insisted that the leadership must “take firm and uncompromising steps” to ensure that further “moral disintegration” did not occur.
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While the debate over Volunteer morality raged, Ayer's concept of the Council's philosophy was hit with yet another broadside. This second blow not only breached the CSM's morality standard, but it also violated the call for cooperative efforts in reform. Following their AV training, two VISTA volunteers (and former Berea College students) “of unquestioned integrity and personal dedication” presented the CSM with five pages of grievances
against the AVs. These complaints ran from charges of graft to Volunteer advocacy of revolt against local governments. According to these volunteers, their trainers told them that “Berea [College] treats its employees as servants and that the poor are held in servile stations in order to enrich the college coffers.” In addition, the trainees noted that, while the college administration controlled the local CAP and excluded the poor, they, under their AV supervisors, were to “purge the rottenness that now existed”: “The poor, under direction of the AVs, were going to revolt and overthrow the powers that be. . . . We also learned that we must hate (1) VISTA Washington Feds, (2) our CAP's, (3) the professionals in our area.” Finally, the Volunteer trainers informed their charges that “all CAPS were rat finks and were to be worked against.” No such program was “worth spitting on, much less merit cooperation.”
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Learning whom to hate was only the beginning, according to these two unnamed sources. The Volunteers, they claimed, also wanted the funds allocated to the VISTA volunteers for training purposes: “We were asked to sign a statement saying we used all the money VISTA Washington allotted us for training and then turn the money over to the Appalachian Volunteers so that they could do their good works. . . . They over looked the fact that the money was scheduled to go back to Washington.” After being called “money grabbing bigots” by their AV trainers, the two “conceded to put the money in a trust fund for un-wed mothers—in the name of the wife of one of the AV staff members, of course”: “Whether the project is good or bad, there is still the element of misappropriation of funds. . . . The money was supposed to go back to VISTA Washington.”
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Alcohol played a role in this indictment as well. “Then came Saturday and the beer blast,” the volunteers reported, “held in a private home in Bristol.” Admittedly, “a few” VISTA volunteers had beer. More to the point, however: “The AVs arrived with bottles sticking out of every pocket. . . . They marched in and proceeded to drape themselves across every girl in the room. . . . From there on they really impressed Bristol.” According to the complaint, the volunteers “paraded through the hotel [lobby] swinging their bottles and slapping the gals on the fanny.” This sort of debauchery continued at the trainees' “graduation.” The AVs forced a party on the VISTA volunteers, singing “bawdy songs” while “the kissing of the VISTA girls by the AV boys proceeded with vigor.” “We were really
glad,” they announced, that this finally “ended our little tour de farce with AVs.”
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While these statements offended the sensibilities of Perley Ayer, equally disturbing was the undercurrent of superiority that the two VISTA critics noticed in the Volunteers. As they put it: “The poor folks' children were there watching [the volunteers on an unspecified project] but the AVs treated them like lepers or something.” The VISTA trainees claimed that they did not want to degrade the AV organization but warned that it needed more careful supervision and that “the quality of the person and their motives” required a greater examination “before turning them loose on the defenseless mountain folk.” At one training session, the informants recalled, the Volunteer instructor began “to expound and glorify the AV field work as Christ-like and all goodness and mercy.” “Another facet I did not appreciate,” the trainees continued, “was that all through our training the AVs were set up as the great and glorious saviors of the economically crucified.” In the end, they summarized, “[we] can't help but be critical of our training.”
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Swayed by such evidence, Ayer not surprisingly believed that the situation would only deteriorate if the Appalachian Volunteers relocated to Bristol. He repeatedly asked Ogle not to move AV headquarters despite the board's approval, but Ogle persisted with the move regardless. Further, not one of the Volunteers made any attempt to address Ayer's other objections. This increasingly antagonistic situation came to a head as the AVs prepared for the 1966 summer project. On May 2, 1966, after he learned that Ogle and others “met secretly with members of the Board of directors to try to get [him] ‘retired,'” Ayer accused Ogle of “organizing a general staff rebellion.” Because of this, and “for the sake of the Council and its present and future effectiveness within its philosophy and total program,” Ayer fired Ogle and Fox. “Your first responsibility,” their original letter of appointment read, “will be to the philosophy and overall current purposes and program of the Council itself.” Their conduct in the recent past, Ayer informed them, breached the terms of their contract. The two top AV officials, Ayer believed, reneged on this most important obligation.
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Unfortunately, Ayer's actions did not resolve his troubles with the Volunteers. As a professional courtesy, he kept both men on the payroll until the end of the month, but both resigned the next day—along with the entire AV staff. The thirteen staff members who resigned did so in support
of Ogle and Fox but also in protest over Ayer's administrative style. “Mr. Ayer has violated the free and inquiring spirit implicit in the Council philosophy,” the staff contended, “by attempting to impose upon the rest of the staff his own exclusive system of values and his highly individualized conception of the Council's role.” Then, on May 3, 1966, Ogle, Fox, and their thirteen staff members created a nonprofit corporation called the Appalachian Volunteers, Inc.
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Initially, support for the independent Appalachian Volunteers appeared less than unanimous. Ayer informed the CSM Board of Directors that at first he believed Washington “would not fund the Appalachian Volunteers independent of the Council.” In a surprising move, however, Ayer immediately took the initial steps to ensure that the AVs would receive federal funds. He did everything in his power, he later claimed, to “expedite the transfer in order that their program [would] not be destroyed or damaged.”
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According to Loyal Jones, the CSM associate director, the OEO had hoped to keep the Volunteers under Council direction but was “forced” to fund the highly visible and successful program after Ayer relieved Fox and Ogle of their responsibilities. Jones, moreover, counseled the OEO to separate the AVs from the CSM immediately after the board approved the Volunteers' request to relocate to Bristol. He “didn't believe it would be possible . . . for the Council of the Southern Mountains to administer that project and be responsible for what they did” after the Volunteers transferred their headquarters. As amicably as possible, Ayer agreed to relinquish Council funds earmarked for the AV program.
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Public support among the Appalachian people for the Appalachian Volunteers, Inc., was, nevertheless, less than certain. Joe Barker, a native of Louisville, Tennessee, and longtime associate of the Council of the Southern Mountains, deplored the actions of the AVs. According to Barker, the focus of the War on Poverty should be on education, as the Council believed: “What can you do for young people with only some grade school education if you can't get them back in school? . . . I'm disgusted with poverty programs. And the actions of the volunteers disgusts me some more [and] opens a question whether such a group is capable or qualified to spend . . . public money. . . . The Council is one group I do believe in.”
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Beliefs, especially those that concerned the United States, its place in the world, and the nature of the country's democratic institutions, were important
to many citizens in the mid-1960s. As politics became increasingly radicalized in the late 1960s, many young people who were exposed to such influences permeated the ranks of the Appalachian Volunteers. New AV staff members and VISTA volunteers from across the country entered the mountains of eastern Kentucky, and their attitudes concerning the Vietnam War and their perceptions of American democracy influenced their feelings about the War on Poverty. As a result, the Appalachian Volunteers came in contact with other more militant groups, such as the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF), that operated in the mountain South. The SCEF issued a statement in September 1967 that was indicative of a new Appalachian Volunteer attitude. “So far the only answers the government has come up with,” it announced, “are make-work (‘weed cutting') programs that have no meaning, shipping people off to low paying city jobs, or sending them to Vietnam.”
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His socially and politically conservative background, particularly when it came to matters of personal behavior, along with the fact that his job involved administering and protecting the Council's fiscal health, prevented Ayer from embracing—or really understanding—this new attitude. He sought to continue his policy of political neutrality, which dated to the late 1950s. Had he adopted the AVs' new stance, perhaps the split between the two groups might never have happened. Given the demographic makeup of the AVs in 1966, the national attention focused on Appalachia by the War on Poverty, and the creation of VISTA, however, to have expected the group to remain unaffected by outside influences was naive at best.

 

The message should be one of reform, self help, determination, and a vigorous fighting stand such as that assumed by the Southern Negro in his struggle for civil liberties.

I hope the Appalachian Volunteers will carry out this possibility and that they will become a great new force struggling for reform for the region's institutions and attitudes.

—Whitesburg attorney and CSM Board of Directors
member Harry Caudill to Milton Ogle, May 4, 1966

The Louisville native and University of Kentucky student Joe Mulloy, much like his counterpart, George Brosi, was unusually attentive for a Southern college student in the early 1960s. Though he did not readily recall President Johnson's declaration of a “war on poverty,” he was impressed by the civil rights movement, the Freedom Rides of 1963, and Freedom Summer in 1964. “That's the kinda stuff,” he later recounted, “I was listening to or paying attention to.” Then, at one point in 1964, Mulloy heard the Appalachian Volunteers (AVs) field representative Jack Rivel speak on campus. Rivel “made a good case for getting involved with things in our society and trying to be a part of the solution instead of being part of the problem.” Because its “focus . . . was working with school children,” the “student oriented program” about which Rivel spoke “impressed” Mulloy. As he remembered: “It was something I could do on a weekend and I could connect, somehow, with what was going on in the world.” Further, because, by the end of that calendar year, the federal government, through agencies such as the Area Development Administration and the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), looked to the nascent AV program as a model for reform efforts across the country, Mulloy “felt as if we were part of something bigger than just going out there on weekends.”
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Mulloy constructed a number of recreational areas and basketball goals, installed new windows and drywall, and painted a number of schoolhouses on these weekend projects. The Appalachian Volunteers, he stated, “assist[ed] local school boards, . . . supplying some things that everybody else in the state had, but because of the unemployment . . . counties in eastern Kentucky didn't have.” In addition, these relatively quick weekend efforts allowed the student volunteers to see the “concrete . . . physical result” of their work, and, thus, as other AVs recalled, it “provide[d] a meaningful experience” for the college students.
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After gaining some experience, Mulloy recalled, “we, the younger group of AVs,” began to disagree with the tack taken by the Council of the Southern Mountains (CSM). While the Council followed the course prescribed by those “conservative church-related” folks that Loyal Jones described, the AVs, who worked at the “furthest out places, . . . the most remote ‘head-of-the-holler,'” assumed a different approach. Though it was not “consciously decided upon or thought out,” this new direction “didn't blame the victim” the way, the AVs believed, the CSM did. Describing the new strategy as an “evolving thing,” Mulloy claimed that it grew from a “give and take process between us and the people we were working with.” “It was ‘do gooder' work is what we were doing—fixing up schoolhouses,” Mulloy recalled, “it was good, it was needed, but really the system should have provided for that.” It was a “band-aid on a cancer approach.” While the local people—those at the heads of the “holler”—appreciated the AVs' work, they told the reformers “during the long evening hours sitting around talking” that, “if you really want to help us, we got this bulldozer coming down this mountain, that's what we need some help on right now.” Mulloy continued: “I felt that I was radicalized or politicized or whatever by the people that lived in the mountains themselves—the natives. That's what started my consciousness.”
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Like Jones's decision to support Ayer, Mulloy's decision to act on his newfound “consciousness” proved significant for the future of the new Appalachian Volunteers and for the War on Poverty in Appalachia.