Reformers to Radicals (33 page)

In the fall of 1966, taking action of a more concrete form, the Volunteers backed a candidate for the Harlan County school board in opposition to the “county dictator,” James Cawood. Though their candidate lost, the AVs believed that they issued a “strong challenge to the Cawood political machine” and that they had established an organizational base as a result of the campaign. This was the foundation, they believed, “for the development of new skills in [the] democratic political process, [and for] true economic equality and power for the masses.” Having established this base and the HELL program, the Volunteers embarked on an effort to “break the control over the [community action] programs by the county school superintendents; programs which involved several thousand dollars worth of patronage.”
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In Floyd County, Volunteer efforts resembled both the past and the present orientation of the organization. In addition to conducting school repair, the AVs also helped found the Highway 979 Community Action Council (979 CAC), composed of representatives from twelve small communities along Highway 979. The 979 CAC started a local newspaper, the
Hawkeye
, which sought to break down the barriers of intercommunity communication. In June 1966, a group of citizens from the community of Mud Creek traveled to the state capital to discuss the community's water supply. According to an AV report, the water for Mud Creek came from open wells, at least 75 percent of which were contaminated. As a result of this meeting, Governor Breathitt declared Mud Creek an emergency area and provided OEO funds for the construction of a new water system. Others from the 979 CAC bypassed their local officials and went straight to the state capital. Representatives of Little Mud Creek and the Right Tolar school paid visits to the state highway commissioners' office and the state board of education to ask for better roads, better school buildings, and, most important, better teachers.
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Activities in Letcher County centered on the Volunteer outpost center at Carcassonne. High on the priority list was the creation of a welfare rights organization, but the Volunteers suddenly encountered the apathy so commonly
ascribed to mountain people—that same attitude the Volunteers were, they claimed, helping mountaineers overcome. “Development of any sort of welfare rights organization here is difficult and slow work,” the Volunteers claimed, “largely because very few welfare recipients have any prior experience at working together and because even fewer really expect to see any substantial improvement in welfare programs.” Despite the difficulties, the Volunteers continued organizing in Letcher with the support of the local AGSLP chapter. Unlike welfare reform, this issue of strip mining seemed to energize people. Those “who used to believe that nothing could be done to protect their land now realize they can do just that by acting together.” By functioning as a unit, the people in Letcher County could now come to grips with water pollution, soil erosion, and their legal rights.
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Welfare reform and politics also dominated Appalachian Volunteer activity in Pike County, one of the country's principal coal-producing counties. Responsible for Pike was the Wise County, Virginia, AV fieldman Joe Mulloy, who had moved to Pike County in 1967 and focused his activities on three broad topics—strip mining, welfare rights, and the Marrowbone Folk School. Located on Marrowbone Creek, the folk school was a rallying point for AV activity in the county. Shortly after their arrival in 1966, the Appalachian Volunteers charged the superintendent with “misuse of funds” and with selecting teachers for political reasons rather than on the basis of their qualifications. “Education in these counties,” the Volunteers announced, “is in need of total revamping.” Repeating a common theme, they accused the local CAP of working to maintain the status quo, as opposed to actually working to end poverty.
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While rhetoric dominated, activity did not lag. Edith Easterling, a lifelong resident of Poor Bottom, in Pike County, and an energetic AV intern, led a group of local residents to Frankfort in order to discuss education in the county. Though the group had arranged to meet the state superintendent, Harry Sparks, Sparks did not keep his appointment. Instead, the Poor Bottom contingent discussed among themselves how county politics dominated the school system. “We talked about our schools and how the teachers work under pressure,” Easterling reported to the Volunteers. “We also talked about politics and how they are played in our community. I worked for the Board of Education and the principal called me in and said ‘you vote like we say or you don't work here.' I did not vote like he said and I was not
hired back to work the following year.” Other teachers would “change their politics so they could go on working.” These complaints were not exclusive to teachers but came “also from local citizens.” “Can't we, as Americans get help so we can be free?” Easterling appealed.
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In the wake of these accomplishments, the Appalachian Volunteers entered the summer of 1967 feeling most potent. At a June 1967 Board of Directors meeting at Beckley, West Virginia, the antipoverty group made one of its most bold statements: “The board made a resolution that all people involved in community action should write letters to their congressmen and senators against elected officials making up or sitting on advisory boards concerned with poverty.” It further asserted that “the people should run their own affairs without some ‘joker' in a plush office telling people what they need, and what to do” and that either “more poor people should run for office or people who fairly reflect the feelings of those who elect them.”
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Strip mining, like politics, was again an important topic of discussion. Six months earlier, at their winter meeting in Huntington, West Virginia, the Volunteers had called for restrictions on strip mining on the grounds that it threatened personal property, “scenic spots,” and “recreation areas” and caused “extreme or severe pollution.” Calling it their “number 1 problem,” they proclaimed: “Stripping in these mountains should be outlawed.” Ogle added that everyone interested in central Appalachia “should work to abolish it.” Other board members suggested that the Volunteers help local residents establish their own utility districts that, unlike the Tennessee Valley Authority, would not use stripped coal. This, they hoped, would lead to the end of that mining method.
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The AVs also indicted the county-administered CAPs in eastern Kentucky. The CAP in Wolfe County, one participant stated, “don't want poor folks to get involved.” Someone from Breathitt County exclaimed: “All we get is promises.” Nancy Coles proclaimed that, because the Volunteers informed the poor about the Breathitt County CAP, it “won't have anything to do with [the AVs].” Gordon Meade of Floyd County asserted that the county CAP had concealed its activities from the poor: “AVs told us about CAP and that's what makes CAP mad.” The result: “They knock us down faster than they pick us up.” Summing up the situation, the Volunteers determined that county officials gave jobs to their relatives and that politicians,
in general, “by pass the poor and do what the middle class and high class of people want.” In the end, the poor resigned themselves to this situation. Don Turner, an AV intern from Breathitt County, declared: “They feel they can't ask the local CAP for help because they won't help them.”
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Realizing that school-based academic projects failed to address overwhelming problems, whether those problems were immediate or long term, the Appalachian Volunteers concluded that the region's complex political relationships operated to the detriment of those most in need of government services, the poor and the unemployed. While international energy corporations, including the American Association, in part controlled mountain politics, an indigenous political force nevertheless existed. In cooperation with major internationals, local political and economic power brokers emerged in the mountains in the 1950s and 1960s with the expansion of federally funded social service programs, such as social security, Medicaid, and the War on Poverty. Mechanization of the coal-mining industry and the rollback of United Mine Workers of America benefits in the late 1950s provided local elites with further opportunities to solidify their hold on power. As this native power structure attempted to bolster its position through control of the federal largesse provided by the Johnson administration, it faced open opposition from the Appalachian Volunteers. Through issue organizing, direct political campaigns against corrupt officials, and attempts to control local CAPs, the AVs challenged multinational conglomerates and, more important, the local politicos who exerted direct and overt control over the rural mountaineers of eastern Kentucky.

Institutional autonomy was, nevertheless, only the beginning for the Appalachian Volunteers as it prepared for 1967. Rejecting the Council of the Southern Mountains and its cooperative approach to solving problems in the Appalachian coalfields, the AVs transformed themselves from a volunteer service association into a professional political organizing institution. Along with this metamorphosis came changes in personnel and strategy. Still, while their analysis of the region's problems shifted from a “cultural” explanation to one emphasizing the “colonial” relationship the mountains had with the rest of the country and, thus, itself required a quantitative solution to Appalachian problems, the Volunteers still spoke in terms of Appalachian “isolationism.” While, on the one hand, they began to understand the nature of the region's poverty, they still—as their descriptions of
“isolated” mountaineers and the “peculiar” world with which Volunteers would have to come to terms suggested—held the impoverished to be outside modern America. Somehow, the contradiction of the mountaineers being simultaneously victimized and isolated eluded the Appalachian Volunteers. Their failure to rectify this dichotomy, again, proved detrimental to their reform efforts.

 

That some employees of the Appalachian Volunteers and other federally financed anti-poverty programs have collaborated and cooperated with known communist organizers to help them organize and promote the violent overthrow of the constitutional government of Pike County. . . . That the contract of the A.V.s who are operat[ing] on a Federal Grant of $1,500,000 be immediately canceled.

—Report of the September 1967 Pike County Grand Jury

“Appalachia needed help. I can't say that they needed the War on Poverty,” Louie Nunn remembered in 1993, “but I think they got too much help. . . . They got food, they got medicine, they got everything that they needed and they didn't have to work for anything. Consequently they decided that they never would work.” Elected in 1967, Louie Nunn was the first Republican governor of Kentucky in twenty-four years. Running a campaign that stressed the social turmoil of the latter half of the decade, Nunn typified the desires of many who were, as the
Hazard Herald
stated, “tired of the beatniks, hippies, and civil righters” whom the “decent, law-abiding, constructive citizens who form the heart and conscience of our nation” saw as the source of that turmoil. Nunn claimed to have coined the term the
silent majority
, a phrase that figured significantly in Richard Nixon's 1968 presidential campaign, and, in many ways, his election foreshadowed the national conservative backlash against the reform efforts of the Johnson administration. Nevertheless, Nunn objected to the War on Poverty for reasons other than his conservative ideology. He believed that government at all levels—local, state, and federal—used the federal programs as a way to buy votes.
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According to Nunn: “There was a lot of pork-barrel legislation going on in [the War on Poverty]. And they started doing what I call mainlining—like a dope addict going into the vein.” The Democratic representative Carl Perkins (from the Seventh District, in southeastern Kentucky), in particular, though “probably well-intended,” “did more harm to the mountains of eastern Kentucky than any other single person”—“social and . . . economic harm”—because he used his seniority to “get programs through that were patterned primarily for the Appalachian area” and that “show[ed] how they were focusing in on specific areas.” Thus, Perkins got “legislation that fit [his] congressional district”: “Rather than poverty as a whole, they got down to where they had select areas of poverty and it was a vote getting process, . . . and everyone found an excuse to be needy, . . . so some of those programs were being used for political purposes and that's where I drew the line.” After Nunn raised objections to the War on Poverty, somebody from Perkins's district said: “‘Why hell governor, if you take that poverty away from us we won't have nothing left.' And that was about the attitude.”
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Because of that “attitude,” the “political purposes,” and the fact that the War on Poverty was “detrimental to the ‘morality' . . . of the community,” and because “the benefit ratio didn't begin to match the expenditure,” Nunn “thought the dollars could be better spent.” In response, he started CREATE, or Community Resources for Employment and Training Effort. Unlike what Nunn considered the handout, entitlement programs of the Johnson administration, CREATE attempted to prepare people for employment. Further, Nunn supported a state initiative, the Kentucky Un-American Activities Committee (KUAC), that, ultimately, questioned the patriotism of those seeking to end poverty and, in the end, contributed to the end of the Appalachian Volunteers (AVs). Interestingly, the AVs considered KUAC—created by both Democrats and Republicans—to be a political tool. Ironically, Nunn, for all his protestations against strict political maneuvering, “didn't see any harm in it”: “Hell, [it was] just like the wind blowing through the trees. It makes some noise today and tomorrow, . . . and sometimes they'll blow a few things out. . . . The rotten limbs will get blow off. . . . So let it blow through; if the rotten limbs fall out, well that's fine. If there aren't any rotten limbs, nothing gonna fall out.”
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