Uneven Ground (26 page)

Following a meeting on the evening of August 11, 1967, attended by Ratliff as well as the presidents of the local chamber of commerce and the coal operators' association and the director of the Big Sandy Community Action Program, the county sheriff and fifteen others raided the homes of the Mulloys and the McSurelys and arrested Joe Mulloy and Alan and Margaret McSurely on charges of sedition based on a 1920s state statute that had long since been declared illegal. This posse confiscated from the activists' homes books and other printed materials that Ratliff later labeled “a Communist library out of this world.” The subversive texts included Karl Marx's
Das Kapital
, Barry Goldwater's
The Conscience of a Conservative
, the Holy Bible,
Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung
, and Adam Smith's
The Wealth of Nations
.
³²
The following day, Ratliff told reporters that county officials
had decided to act on the McSurelys after “seeing a parade of strange looking visitors at their house, some coming in buses from places as far away as California.” He indicated that he feared that poverty workers were organizing Chinese-like “Red Guards” in the mountains “to promote causes aimed at downgrading and maybe overthrowing the Government.” The material taken during the raids, he concluded, was evidence of how the subversives planned “to take over Pike County from the power structure and put it in the hands of the poor.”
³³

Joe Mulloy posted bail soon after his arrest, but the McSurelys spent the next week in the Pike County jail. Within days, Carl and Anne Braden, coordinators of the SCEF in Louisville, visited the McSurelys and were also arrested and charged with sedition. The Bradens had been charged with the same sedition law thirteen years earlier when they sold their Louisville home to an African American man in violation of local Jim Crow ordinances, and Ratliff believed that adding them as defendants would tie the Pike County arrests to a statewide conspiracy that targeted civil rights, antiwar, and antipoverty activists. A month later, a three-judge federal court dismissed the indictments by the Pike County grand jury on the grounds that the sedition statute was unconstitutional.

The court decision did not end matters for either the Mulloys or the McSurelys, however. The day after his arrest, Joe Mulloy received notice from the Louisville draft board that his 2-A deferment had been revoked and he had been denied conscientious objector status. When he decided to resist induction into the army, the leadership of the AV fired him, fearing that additional harm would come to the organization and its mission from further publicity regarding Mulloy's opposition to the Vietnam War and the draft. He temporarily left the mountains to work for the SCEF and to appeal his draft status, but he eventually returned to work in the mines in West Virginia and to fight for improved health benefits for miners.
³⁴

The McSurelys were caught up in a fifteen-year national battle with Senator John McClellan of Arkansas over the confiscation and use of their personal papers in McClellan's red-baiting campaign against liberals and civil rights activists. After their Pike County home was bombed in December 1968, threatening the life of their one-year-old
son, the McSurelys left the mountains, never to return. The courts eventually ruled that the warrant used in the raid on their house and the seizure of their personal property in 1967 violated the Fourth Amendment. In 1982 a U.S. district court in Washington DC awarded them $1.6 million in damages from Thomas Ratliff and from the estate of Senator McClellan for violating their constitutional rights.
³⁵

Just before the McSurelys were driven from Pike County, perhaps the most bizarre spectacle of the eastern Kentucky poverty wars occurred when a committee of the Kentucky legislature held hearings to ferret out Communists and other subversives in the commonwealth. The Kentucky Un-American Activities Committee (KUAC) was established in the spring of 1968 at the request of newly elected Republican governor Louis Nunn “to investigate the activities of groups and organizations which have as their objectives . . . the overthrow or destruction of the Commonwealth of Kentucky by force, violence, or other unlawful means.” Nunn had promised, if elected, to rid Kentucky of subversive groups such as the SCEF and the AV, and the hearings in Pikeville were designed to draw public attention to the threat posed by such groups. Most Kentuckians understood that the conservative, bipartisan bill that created KUAC was designed to intimidate civil rights advocates and rebellious youth. “This state has become a headquarters for subversion,” cautioned one Republican legislator. “Communists are working all around us.” Her Democratic colleague warned, “Hippies and beatniks and assorted reds and pinks are right in our midst.”
³⁶

The three-day hearing also dramatized the social divisions that had split Pike and other mountain counties as a result of the War on Poverty. Nowhere were the contrasting visions of the rich and the poor, the powerful and the powerless, the old and the new more vivid than between Pikeville and Poor Bottom. Nowhere was the threat of community action taken more seriously than among the coal magnates of Pike County. Under fire from both Frankfort and Washington, the AV leadership chose not to testify before the KUAC “witch hunt,” but local AV employee Edith Easterling scolded the committee for “conspiring against poor people.” She related that she had been labeled a Communist in her own community because of her work with the poor;
her life had been threatened and her windows shot out. When asked whether she was in fact a Communist, she replied, “I am a Republican, and who ever seen a Communist Republican?” Reverend James Hamilton defended the AVs as “the nicest bunch of young people we ever had in the community,” but a group of conservative college students at Pikeville College complained that the growing institution was becoming “too liberal” and that some of the new faculty were encouraging “opposition to the draft, the War in Vietnam, and the local established leadership.”
³⁷

The most symbolic exchange, however, came from antagonists Alan McSurely and Thomas Ratliff. Speaking on a radio broadcast the night before one of the hearings, McSurely asserted that a “courthouse gang organized to work for a few coalmine operators” ran Pike County and that even though some persons in power “had the impression that it is illegal to work for peaceful change in government. . . . It is not wrong. It is not illegal.” Ratliff countered the next day that if McSurely and his friends called “on Russian tanks to help them conquer Pike County, I intend to appeal to Mayor Daley of Chicago and [former Alabama] Governor George Wallace for help in defending Pike County.”
³⁸
The lines against change were drawn in Appalachia just as they were in the rest of the nation.

Little came of the KUAC hearings. By the time the committee finished its work in Pike County, the future of the AV and the War on Poverty in Appalachia was already determined. Under pressure to rein in the Community Action division of the OEO, Sargent Shriver terminated funding for the AV shortly after the arrest of Mulloy in 1967, and he cut back drastically on the number of VISTA volunteers sent to the region. U.S. Representative Carl Perkins of eastern Kentucky was able to salvage the OEO with the adoption of the Green amendment, requiring all community action funds to be administered through a local or state government agency, but the long-term survival of the agency was in doubt. Many AVs and VISTA volunteers drifted away from Appalachia, but a significant number remained in the mountains and assumed leadership roles in emerging regional battles with government and corporate interests. Some found jobs with nonprofit organizations; others settled into academia or arts programming; still
others took jobs as teachers, miners, or social workers. For them, the struggle for the land and people continued without the hope of significant federal support.

Even before the KUAC hearings in October 1968, however, critics had begun to question whether the War on Poverty had accomplished anything in the mountains. A scathing evaluation of antipoverty programs published in the January 1968 issue of
Saturday Review
maintained that Appalachia was still the “forgotten land.” Reporter Peter Schrag noted that, in the seven years since John F. Kennedy had drawn national attention to the region, “grand solutions have soured into new problems, the exploitation of land and people continues, and even the best and most hopeful efforts are jeopardized by a war 10,000 miles away and by ugly political machines all too close to home.”
³⁹
The following month, Senator Robert Kennedy toured eastern Kentucky for the Senate Subcommittee on Employment, Manpower, and Poverty and found conditions in the mountains that were, in his words, “intolerable, unacceptable, and unsatisfactory.”
⁴⁰

Both Kennedy and Schrag complained of widespread disillusionment and dissatisfaction with current efforts to fight poverty. Kennedy heard witness after witness describe manpower programs that didn't provide enough work, welfare programs that didn't provide enough help, and food programs that didn't provide enough food. The editor of the
Whitesburg (Kentucky) Mountain Eagle
told Schrag that the “bare gut essentials are now being met,” but the existing poverty programs served only to hide the real misery. The “limited and reluctant mandate” of the War on Poverty, Schrag concluded, had made poverty “bearable” and “invisible” in Appalachia, but it had failed to change the “vested interests” that dominated the region.
⁴¹

In a prepared statement read before the Kennedy subcommittee, Harry Caudill recounted the history of exploitation in Appalachia that had produced some of America's most prosperous corporations and some of its poorest people. He described communities impoverished by low taxes, inadequate public services, backward schools, massive unemployment, and destructive mining practices, and he ridiculed the profits of absentee-owned mining companies who paid few local taxes
but “cleared more than 61 percent of gross receipts” after the payment of operating expenses. The champion of mountain activists then called on the subcommittee to support federal legislation outlawing surface mining on steep slopes, establishing a national severance tax on minerals to be used for “human development” programs in coal counties, and creating federal job programs that would make the government the employer of last resort.
⁴²

At the end of Caudill's statement, David Zegeer, general manager of the local Beth-Elkhorn Corporation mine, asked to speak in rebuttal and provided another vivid example of how far the philosophical gap over the Great Society had widened in the mountains. While he agreed with Caudill that the area's main problem was a lack of good roads to attract industry, he found that much of the testimony seemed to indicate that industry was bad. “Bethlehem Steel [parent company of Beth-Elkhorn] coming here was one of the finest things that has happened in this area,” he countered. It paid half a million dollars in taxes each year, provided employment for 850 people, and contributed almost a million dollars to the UMWA Health and Retirement Funds.
⁴³
“I think this area should be very happy that corporations such as ours are here. They are good companies, honorable companies. If we are wrong in mining coal in eastern Kentucky, and if we are wrong in what is going on in Appalachia as far as industry is concerned, then I think this whole country is based on the wrong philosophy. To do it any other way, you are just talking about socialism. So if what we are doing is wrong, then this whole country is wrong.”
⁴⁴

The Kennedy tour and the KUAC hearings the following fall marked a turning point in the War on Poverty in Appalachia. With the election of Republican Richard Nixon to the presidency, government focus shifted from fighting the causes of poverty, whatever they might be, to managing the growing welfare system. Under Donald Rumsfeld, Nixon's nominee to head the OEO, most of the operating programs of the agency (including Head Start, Job Corps, and neighborhood health centers) were spun off to other departments. Funds for the Community Action division were gutted, and the OEO itself was abolished in 1973. For Nixon and for subsequent presidents, the problem in Appalachia and other poor places was how to reduce the tax burden from
growing transfer payments to the poor rather than how to reform the economic and social system that had produced the region's distress. From the government's perspective, the War on Poverty was dead.

The decline of community action grants and the suppression of outside poverty workers in Appalachia, however, did not end the battles over control of federal dollars or the confrontations over land use, politics, or human services in the region. Partisan groups continued to fight over the spoils of federal largesse, and social service providers, researchers, and administrators continued to vie for special funds designated to address the “Appalachian problem.” If the War on Poverty did nothing else, it expanded the number of mountain professionals who provided health care, education, and legal services in county seats. Some of the new professionals used their skills on behalf of the poor families they served; others simply prospered on the growing buffet of government assistance programs. Rising federal transfer payments and construction projects also enriched the holdings of local banks and the commerce of small businesses, many of which were owned by politicians who benefited directly and indirectly from the federal funds. “For all their ignorance and isolation,” chided Peter Schrag, “the economic and political interests of Appalachia have a highly developed knack for using outside help to perpetuate the existing structure and the condition of dependency.”
⁴⁵

Even as federal expenditures for the War on Poverty were declining, elites fought over control of poverty dollars. Authority over public housing and economic development programs became as important as control of county roads and schools, and local political machines clashed with state and even federal authorities to maintain their influence. When Governor Nunn, for example, vetoed OEO funds for the Middle Kentucky River Area Development Council in 1969, he met stiff resistance from Democratic representative Carl Perkins and from the powerful Turner family that had run Breathitt County, Kentucky, politics for forty years. Turner patriarch Circuit Judge Ervine Turner had dominated Breathitt County since the days of the New Deal; his wife Marie was county superintendent of schools; their daughter Treva Turner Howell ran the area development council's poverty program; and their son-in-law Jeff Davis Howell was chair of the county Democratic Party. The Turner family owned one of the two largest banks in
the county seat, Jackson, and their Republican opponents, the Smiths, owned the other. Despite efforts by Treva Turner Howell to attribute Governor Nunn's actions to a partisan appeal for Republican votes, reporters who covered the conflict recognized that the real feud was not over political patronage but over control of the economic benefits generated by federal expenditures in the county.
⁴⁶
Not only had government programs enlarged the number of politically dependent jobs, but Medicare and Medicaid had proven to be a boon for local druggists and physicians. Grocers welcomed expanding food stamp programs, and checks for welfare, disability, and retirement flooded into county banks each month. Those who controlled access to the burgeoning transfer payments for the poor and to mushrooming federal grants for infrastructure development in distressed counties could influence the location and character of lucrative government “investments” in their communities. For some Appalachian elites, managing poverty was more acceptable than fighting it and sometimes more rewarding.