Uneven Ground (14 page)

Chinitz's opinion that Appalachia's problems resulted from a lag in the natural stages of development was consistent with contemporary academic theories of economic growth and paralleled the ideas that Whisman had incorporated into
Program 60
and the “Declaration for Action Regarding the Appalachian Region” issued by the Conference of Appalachian Governors. American intellectuals and business leaders in the post–World War II years, drawing on their experience
in rebuilding Europe and Japan, were confident that the mobilization of government resources to build basic infrastructure could set an impoverished region on the road to development.

This confidence in the benefits of physical infrastructure development was reinforced by suggestions that PARC received from meetings with state officials and cooperating federal agencies. Department of Transportation officials, for example, were “only too willing to suggest a $1.2 billion program of regional and local-access roads to be financed largely by additional federal funds.”
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The states were clear that they wanted highways, resource development, and preferential treatment on federal grants. State and federal bureaucrats agreed that the problems of Appalachia resulted from a lack of basic infrastructure for development. In this manner, academic theories about the process of development came together with the professional interests of federal agency personnel and state political leadership to provide a common agenda for the region.

During the summer of 1963, Whisman and Sweeney organized PARC into five working teams, which began to draft recommendations on transportation, human resources, physical resources, water, and the organization of a permanent commission. In addition to Chinitz's academic advisors, more than three hundred individuals from various branches of government participated in the deliberations. At the end of October, a draft report was readied, and between November 12 and 20, the commission staff again toured the states, seeking responses to its preliminary recommendations. By this time the number of states to be included in the new program had increased to ten with the addition of Ohio and Georgia.

While PARC prepared to finalize its report, President Kennedy followed through on his commitment to tap existing federal programs for emergency relief in central Appalachia. Responding to Bigart's October
New York Times
article that exposed the hardships of Kentucky coal miners facing a “grim winter,”
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the president informed Walter Heller that he planned to include antipoverty legislation in the agenda for the next Congress. He also ordered a special winter relief program for the mountain coalfields that would serve as an advance demonstration of the special Appalachian initiative. Announced on November 14, 1963, the winter program included grants for food relief, home
repairs, education, and school lunch programs. The president also instructed the Army Corps of Engineers to accelerate work on a number of water projects to provide additional jobs, and he requested the Forest Service to redirect funds for timber stand improvement to hire unemployed youth. Finally, he asked the Department of Labor to create a special job training program for displaced coal miners.
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The following day, Kennedy telephoned his congratulations to the newly elected governor of Kentucky, Edward “Ned” Breathitt, and assured him that the White House would follow through on its commitment to Appalachia. PARC, he added, was about to complete its work, and Kennedy would be in touch with Governor Breathitt to set up a meeting on the Kentucky–West Virginia border to announce his support for an Appalachian commission. He would have his secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, call the governor's office with details shortly after he returned from a brief trip to Dallas, Texas.

The assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963, however, suspended plans to announce the Appalachian program and raised serious questions about the future of that initiative as well as that of the parallel antipoverty program being discussed by the Heller committee. Some observers feared that the Appalachian effort might die along with the slain president, since relations between Vice President Lyndon Johnson and PARC chair Roosevelt were strained at best, and Johnson had no particular knowledge of the region. At an Executive Office Building gathering on the evening before Kennedy's funeral, though, Johnson assured the nation's governors that he intended to complete everything on Kennedy's legislative agenda. Later that evening, Governor Breathitt and former governor Combs met privately with the new president in Johnson's vice presidential office. Recalling his election day conversation with Kennedy, Breathitt praised the work of Combs and other governors on the Appalachian program. Johnson responded that if the commitment had been made, he would carry it out along with other Kennedy proposals.

The new president had learned about the antipoverty discussions the day after the assassination, when Heller briefed him on his predecessor's economic plans. Johnson quickly expressed interest in the initiative and instructed Heller to prepare a draft proposal. The informal Kennedy discussion group had evolved into an interdepartmental task
force in October, but the conversations had produced little in the way of hard plans. Heller hurriedly pulled together a brief proposal for a small, experimental program of demonstration projects among carefully targeted groups, but when he and budget director Kermit Gordon presented the plan to the president in late December, Johnson declared it to be inadequate. The timid plan was not his kind of program. To the amazement of Heller and Gordon, the president wanted to put a poverty program in every community that wanted one and to bypass experimentation for direct action. The next day he announced to reporters that he would take up the fight against poverty in the next congressional session.
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Johnson's motivation for making the antipoverty initiative a centerpiece in his Great Society agenda was as complex as the president himself. An old New Dealer, Johnson believed in government action to solve problems, and he had a strong, personal, if paternalistic, commitment to help the disadvantaged. Never an intellectual, he was uncomfortable around the liberal academics that Kennedy had welcomed into the White House, but he valued their respect and wanted to assert an image of himself as heir to Franklin Roosevelt. Above all, Johnson was the ultimate politician, who recognized the need to establish his own agenda while appearing to fulfill that of the slain president. More than the Kennedy advisors, Johnson understood the political benefits of government investment in local poverty programs, especially in the South, where white leaders were resisting federal civil rights pressures. Since Kennedy had not publicly announced a crusade against poverty, Johnson could present it as his own program. On January 8, 1964, in his first State of the Union address, Johnson declared “unconditional war on poverty in America” and appointed Kennedy's brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver, to head a poverty task force to design a strategy for the campaign.

In the weeks following Kennedy's assassination, political leaders from Appalachia continued to urge the new president to follow through on the Appalachian program as well. Governor Wally Barron of West Virginia wrote to Johnson soon after the funeral to familiarize him with the goals of the Conference of Appalachian Governors and the work of PARC. U.S. Representative Carl Perkins wrote his old friend about the problems facing his district in eastern Kentucky and recommended
a program of public works similar to that being proposed by the Roosevelt commission. On December 13 Governor Breathitt, former governor Combs, Whisman, and Representative Perkins met with the president, recounted their conversations with Kennedy, and emphasized the need for action. Governor Barron sent a telegram to the president requesting a meeting with the Appalachian governors as soon as possible. On each occasion Johnson renewed his commitment to the program, but by the end of the year he still had not been formally briefed on the Appalachian initiative.
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John Sweeney, executive director of PARC, feared that these commitments still lacked “a passionate quality” rooted in Johnson's own political agenda and that Johnson was committed to them only as part of the ex-president's program.
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In the meantime PARC staff hurried to prepare the final draft of their report. A variety of special interest groups attempted to influence staff recommendations. Harry Caudill lobbied strongly for an organizational structure similar to that of the TVA and, along with the American Public Power Association, advocated the use of public funds to generate and sell electric power from water- and coal-powered generating plants that might be built in the region. The coal industry, upset with the relative paucity of attention given to coal resource development in early drafts, advocated greater infrastructure investment and the elimination of government policies it believed impeded the expansion of coal markets. The Forest Industries Council, while interested in making timber the centerpiece of Appalachian economic development, objected to recommendations that would establish cooperative timber development organizations in the region whose demonstration centers might compete with existing sawmills. Even the Bureau of the Budget objected to the proposed structure of the new commission, which it believed transferred too much authority to the states and impeded the president's power to exercise responsibilities vested in him by the Constitution. PARC, however, resisted most of these lobbying efforts, and the final report adopted the majority of the ideas and strategies for a comprehensive development program that had been advocated by the Conference of Appalachian Governors since 1960.
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Appalachia: A Report by the President's Appalachian Regional Commission
was completed in February 1964, but political considerations delayed its release. Just as the Roosevelt commission was finishing
its work, President Johnson and his aides were absorbed in planning for the 1964 presidential campaign, including preparations for the War on Poverty initiative. Sweeney and several Johnson advisors were concerned that the Appalachian program, now a holdover from the Kennedy administration, might appear to duplicate the new poverty program, and they favored delaying the release of the report until after the announcement of Johnson's poverty initiative. Indeed, these concerns contributed to a greater emphasis in the final report on highways and other infrastructure than on health care, job training, education, and other human service programs. Whisman and other early advocates of the Appalachian program believed that investment in both the physical and human capacities of the region was essential to comprehensive development, but to distinguish the Appalachian program from the War on Poverty, PARC staff emphasized the long-term role of the new Appalachian commission in building public facilities for development while leaving the immediate goal of alleviating individual hardship to the new poverty agency. The Appalachian program, they argued, would not abandon its comprehensive development strategies but would initially emphasize infrastructure needs while coordinating its human development programs with those of the national poverty effort.
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Scheduling a date for the release of the report also proved to be complicated. Sweeney and his staff believed that the announcement of the Appalachian program should come only after Johnson's declaration of the War on Poverty, and finding a day when the president, ten governors, and members of the commission could be present for the announcement was a challenge. The president's staff hoped to schedule a meeting at the White House during the second week of April, but this failed because Undersecretary Roosevelt planned to be in India at that time. With concern mounting among the governors that the Eighty-eighth Congress might adjourn in July before any action could be taken on Appalachian legislation, Roosevelt presented the report to the president on April 9, 1964, before leaving for India and without a formal ceremony.

The PARC report described Appalachia as “a region apart,” a land of geographical diversity and natural wealth that lagged behind the rest of the nation in measures of economic growth. Defining Appalachia
broadly to include both the urban centers and the rural areas of ten contiguous states, the report made the case for a regional approach to common problems of distress and for a special national commitment to address those problems. While the most severe distress was concentrated in the rural, interior counties, even the urban-industrial centers of the region lagged behind their national counterparts. The realities of deprivation across Appalachia, the report noted, were reflected in measures of income, housing, education, and employment. The lack of urbanization and years of exploitation of natural resources without a return of wealth to local communities had left the region's development “retarded” and unable to support the kinds of “social overhead capital” necessary to succeed in a modern economy. Poor roads, poor schools, inadequate health care, dilapidated housing, insufficient community facilities, and weak institutions were the results of the failure of the normal process of development in Appalachia, what the report called “a record of insufficiency—a history of traditional acts not performed, of American patterns not fulfilled.”
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To redress this legacy of neglect, PARC proposed that “a coordinated and adequately funded and sustained effort” be undertaken to restore the region's economic vitality. The commission recommended action on a regional investment strategy in four priority areas and proposed the creation of a permanent agency to implement the effort. Emphasizing the need for simultaneous investment in both human and economic resource development, PARC called for legislation to increase access to and within the region, establish programs to more fully utilize the region's natural resources, construct facilities to control and exploit the abundant rainfall of Appalachia, and create programs to provide immediate improvements in human resources. A comprehensive approach to the region's problems was necessary. “Only a balanced, coordinated series of programs,” it emphasized, “can achieve the goals of this Commission and of the region.”
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