Uneven Ground (3 page)

My first book,
Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: The Industrialization of the Appalachian South, 1880–1930
, rejected the notion that the problems of the region were the product of a peculiar mountain culture and a different history and found instead that the region's distress was rooted deeply in the very process of private industrial development that had created modern America. As director of the University of Kentucky Appalachian Center for sixteen years, I worked with local leaders, state policy makers, and national planners to transfer the lessons of that development history into public policy affecting the region. Too often, however, I found not only that research and experience were ignored in the drama of political decision making (a fact that should come as no surprise to historians) but that the assumptions about change that guided policy toward Appalachia were based on a limited range of alternatives and visions of the good life. Appalachia was not different from the rest of America; it was in fact a mirror of what the nation was becoming. To challenge those assumptions was in some circles almost un-American.

This book therefore examines the politics of development in Appalachia since 1945 with an eye toward exploring the idea of progress as it has evolved in modern America itself. The story of Appalachia's struggle to overcome poverty, to live in harmony with the land, and to respect the diversity of cultures and the value of community is an American story. Since World War II, during my lifetime, Appalachia has undergone dramatic change. The long lines of unemployed men at government commodity distribution centers have given way to lines of commuters in Wal-Mart superstores acquiring the latest consumer
products of a world economy. The dilapidated schools, poor housing, and inadequate health care that led my parents to briefly leave the mountains in the 1950s for a better life in northern cities have been replaced by modern facilities and services that provide access to the latest technology and knowledge within fifty miles of every mountain resident. Superhighways make it easier to get into and out of the region, and bustling suburban centers have emerged throughout the mountains, looking much like their retail-based counterparts elsewhere in America. Yet, as in the nation as a whole, these changes have come at a tremendous cost to the environment, at the displacement of millions of rural residents, and at the loss of traditional values and cultures. The diversity that is modern Appalachia belies a growing gap between the rich and the poor, and it ignores the continuing sacrifice of Appalachian resources and people for the comfort and prosperity of the rest of the nation.

Much of the change that has come to Appalachia is the result of well-intentioned government planning to promote growth and assimilation. Programs such as the War on Poverty and the Appalachian Regional Development Act reflect broadly held attitudes about progress within and outside the region, attitudes that are grounded in the received assumptions about development that have limited the dialogue and potential for alternative paths and outcomes. Too often, for example, we have mistaken growth for development, change for progress. Indeed, growth has become central to the American idea of development. Attainment of the good life, we assume, is dependent upon the continued expansion of markets, transportation and communication networks, mass culture, urban centers, and consumer demand. Economic growth may indeed generate employment opportunities, but if those jobs provide low wages and few health benefits, they can reinforce conditions of dependence and powerlessness. New highways may increase commerce and access to services for some communities, but other communities, bypassed by the transportation improvements, can suffer displacement and decline. Expansion of mining and other extractive industries may produce short-term employment but, if unregulated, can leave environmental damage that may threaten the sustainability of communities and ecosystems for generations to come. Investments in some areas of the economy can benefit a small number
of individuals or places at the expense of others, and lifestyle enhancements for a few people may cause hardship and loss of meaning for other people.

Since World War II, moreover, we have assumed that the scientific management of growth could achieve progress in the mountains without requiring structural change in the distribution of wealth, the ownership and use of the land, or the control of the political system. Poverty could be eliminated by changing individual behavior and by tying people more directly to the market rather than confronting existing social and economic inequalities. This faith in the ability of technology and education to lift all boats has produced public institutions in Appalachia that look much like those in the rest of the nation, but those institutions continue to reflect regional disparities in social capital and political power. Since the goal of growth was a society that mirrored suburban, consumer America, development strategies in Appalachia further fragmented mountain society through the centralization of public services and retail facilities, the creation of class-segregated communities, and the generation of material symbols of individual success. The modernization of the mountains required the further integration of the region into the global marketplace and the subsequent weakening of local, producer-based economies. Although some aspects of local cultures were packaged and commodified for export, local community ties gave way to new, market-oriented identities, and in some places local residents themselves were displaced by newcomers tied to the land only by aesthetic and consumer values.

The mixed legacy of growth in Appalachia has also left its mark on the land and on human connections to the land. As a result of the rapid expansion of modern technologies after World War II, difficult terrain could be breached to promote commerce with the larger world. Streams could be relocated, rivers dammed, and hillsides developed for housing, recreation, and business use. Most of all, entire mountains and ranges of mountains could be leveled to extract their mineral resources and to create a landscape more suitable for manufacturing and retail expansion. Appalachian residents had always used the land for survival, and their knowledge of and intimacy with the land were based upon their use of it. Although some mountain residents may have developed a spiritual relationship to the land and an appreciation
for the natural environment, their connection with the place was more often linked to family and community ties rather than recognition of the relationship between their way of life and the landscape around them. Like other Americans, most Appalachians were quick to turn to more convenient lifestyles when the products of a modern economy expanded their choices. The growth-based economy, however, forever altered the landscape itself and physically separated families from the old intimacy with the land that had provided sustenance and meaning to life. Having failed to learn the environmental lessons of resource overdevelopment at the turn of the twentieth century, we continued to see the mountains (just as we saw mountain culture) as a barrier to progress, something to be overcome and its resources tapped in the name of growth.

The tendency to blame the land, environment, and culture of the mountains for the problems of Appalachia obscures our ability to understand the complexity of political and economic struggles within the region and diminishes our national dialogue on the meaning of progress and the most appropriate path to development. Many popular images continue to set off Appalachia against the rest of America. In doing so, they deny the presence of class and ideological differences that divide Appalachian communities. Many public policies are still based on the naive assumptions that poverty can be seriously addressed without structural change, that growth is good for everyone, that urban lifestyles and institutions are to be emulated, and that local and regional markets are not important in a global economy. Such assumptions weaken the democratic conversation about the goal of government and the quality of our lives. Faith in the ability of growth-based development alone to eliminate poverty, moreover, effectively disfranchises poorer people and rural people and further displaces our collective responsibilities for the land and for each other onto the vagaries of the market and onto the best intentions of bureaucrats. The development process is a value-laden political act, complete with winners and losers. As such, it necessitates public debate, challenging the way we understand progress and the way we see ourselves.

Much of the story of Appalachia describes the exploitation of the region at the hands of outside economic interests. Considerable research since the 1960s has documented the extent of absentee landownership
and corporate control of the Appalachian economy, but the development faith is not just something that has been imposed on the mountains from outside. As the pages that follow reveal, leaders from within Appalachia were among the first to call for government intervention programs to promote development and reduce poverty. Mountain residents themselves have been among the strongest advocates of growth, and they have engaged in some of the most callous exploitation of the land and of their fellow citizens that has befallen the region. If Appalachia's struggle with development has been uneven and has failed to meet our expectations and dreams, it is because Appalachia's problems are not those of Appalachia alone. They will not be solved in isolation from the dilemmas facing the rest of modern society. For that reason, we are all engaged in the struggle to define the good life in the mountains. We are all Appalachians.

“What crops do they raise in this country?” the officer asked. . . .

“Youngens,” she said. . . . “Youngens fer th wars and them factories.”

—Harriette Arnow,
The Dollmaker
(1954)

There was more than a little sarcasm in the reply of Harriette Arnow's fictional character to the soldier whose car she had stopped on a Kentucky mountain road during World War II. The upper Cumberland area, like most of Appalachia, was still an overwhelmingly rural place, rich in natural beauty and the cultural heritage of the frontier, but it had become a paradox on the American landscape, a rich land inhabited by a poor people. A region of small farms and scattered villages, Appalachia had been swept up by the tidal surge of industrialization that engulfed the United States in the years following the Civil War and had experienced unprecedented growth and economic change. Overwhelmed by an expanding market economy that altered land use patterns, social relationships, and the meaning of work, residents of the region were propelled into a new world of technology, science, and consumer capitalism. When the boom times gave way to depression, much of the old Appalachia survived, but much had fundamentally changed.

The great hillsides of hardwood timber, once among the most diverse and valuable forests in the world, had been cut over and denuded. The thick seams of coal, copper, mica, and other minerals had been sucked from the hills and shipped to the furnaces and factories of the
urban Northeast. Exposed and gouged, the soil on the hillsides had eroded and washed down, and many of the streams, once clear and free flowing, were filled with sediment and the refuse of men and machines. As Appalachia's human and natural resources were tapped to feed the needs of a modernizing nation, the small mountain homesteads that once nurtured large families through diverse forest agriculture had given way to hundreds of little mining camps and mill villages, company towns fed by company stores and governed by company rules. Thousands of families left their farms and migrated to the new industrial camps or to textile towns in the foothills of the region. Along with other rural Americans, mountain people were drawn to the promise of a better way of life, but the new economic order proved to be a shallow cup. The wealth generated by growth and by what mountain people called “public work” largely flowed out of the region, leaving much of the land devastated and many of its inhabitants dependent and poor.
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Rural mountain residents had always been close to the land, although that closeness was reflected more in strong ties to family and place than to any ethic to preserve the land. Hard work and large families were important not only to survival on the land but to shaping a way of life around it. Preindustrial mountain farms were family farms run by cooperation and by a strong sense of responsibility to each other. As a result, the extended family became a key social institution in the mountains, affecting not only the traditional economy but almost every aspect of mountain culture as well. With industrialization, the family and the land became even more important to survival. Family linkages provided opportunities for employment, migration, and fellowship, and working with the land continued to provide the primary means of survival, even though the ownership and use of the land had changed considerably.

When the collapse of the first great industrial boom came in the late 1920s, unemployed miners and mill hands struggled to return to the land and to an earlier way of life. Displaced industrial workers moved in with kin on smaller, marginal farms that had been saved from outside buyers at the turn of the century. Never highly productive units, especially in a growing national market and without the productive use of the woodlands, these overcrowded homesteads were even
less able to sustain the new population. In Knox County, Kentucky, for example, over a thousand families who had left earlier in the century to find jobs returned home in the 1930s, increasing the county's population by 30 percent.
²

During the Depression, thousands of mountain families crowded together to subsist on poor land or to survive on the dole or on government work programs. Those who were able to return to the family farm were fortunate, for many who remained in the now neglected coal camps faced unemployment, hunger, and disease. Almost half of the mountain population laid claim to some kind of public assistance during the Depression, and Appalachia emerged as one of the most impoverished regions in the nation.
³
The Resettlement Administration estimated that about one-fourth of the rural relief cases in the United States in 1935 were in the Appalachian South.
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Many mountain residents who had witnessed the arrival of the modern age and the transformation of the land and the economy faced the future with uncertainty and frustration. As one Tennessee mountain farmer lamented, “The real old mountaineer is a thing of the past, and what will finally take our place, God only knows.”
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