Uneven Ground (32 page)

Roses Creek, Tennessee, 1972
(Warren Brunner)

Surface Mine, 1985
(Warren Brunner)

Drag Line at a Mountain Surface Mine, 1985
(Warren Brunner)

Grundy, Virginia, 2007
(Richard Copeland III)

The New Appalachia, 2007
(Richard Copeland III)

Fines Creek Valley, Haywood County, North Carolina, 2007
(Ronald D Eller)

The modern American faith in technology and growth was nowhere more evident than in the programs of the ARC. Just as the OEO attempted to alleviate Appalachian otherness by modernizing mountain culture, the ARC sought to bring the promise of a modern economy to the mountains. Confidence in American capitalism and faith in science, technology, and public planning convinced most postwar policy makers that growth produced prosperity and that economic expansion could be managed to create better communities. For the designers of the legislation that created the ARC, the construction of “developmental” highways, vocational schools, health facilities, and other public infrastructure would help to link the mountains more directly to national markets, a process that would in turn promote growth and prosperity in the lagging region. As much as any other Great Society program, the ARC played a vital role in the modernization of Appalachia during the decades after the waning of the antipoverty crusade.

Unique among Great Society programs, the ARC was designed as a partnership between state and federal governments, and thus it represented an experiment at two levels. The commission's shared decision-making process distributed power among thirteen governors and the White House, anticipating the new federalism that would characterize government programs in the 1970s. Administered by a cadre of confident young bureaucrats and professional planners, the ARC was also a model for the new science of planned regional development. As such, it was the first agency to apply economic growth theory to public investments in underdeveloped areas within the United States. A domestic version of the Marshall Plan, the ARC was both an expression
of American political culture in the postwar years and a sign of popular confidence in the ability of science and technology to produce the good life.

Like the OEO, the ARC owed its intellectual origins to theories of human and economic development that emerged in the social sciences following World War II. Whereas the framers of the War on Poverty utilized behavioral theory to design a strategy for assimilating mountain culture into mainstream culture, the ARC tapped the ideas of economists and planners to bring the region's lagging economy into line with national markets and expanding consumer services. Not surprisingly, American economists disagreed on the way to manage the postwar economy. Some believed that government should intervene in a limited way to maintain balance, stability, and security in a mature economy. Others were strong advocates of aggressive government action to promote steady growth through policies that maximized production, consumption, and full employment. Growth theory was ratified in the Employment Act of 1946, which made the pursuit of full employment and maximum production official government policy, and it was institutionalized in the creation that year of the president's Council of Economic Advisors.

The emphasis on growth rather than on economic stability reflected the tremendous outburst of national optimism after World War II and was fueled by the emergence of the consumer culture in the 1950s. In contrast to the economy of scarcity of the Depression era, the postwar economy of abundance appeared to promise a better life for everyone, without the political problems of redistributing limited wealth. Advocates of growth theory believed that government should work aggressively to increase the nation's productivity and that rising productivity, rather than structural reform, would reduce conflict over issues of social equity. As economic historian Robert Collins has observed, policy makers turned to the social sciences “to move issues of social strife out of the political arena and into the court of scientific analysis.” They assumed that rising demand for new consumer products would stimulate further growth, and the cycle of demand and consumption would benefit everyone. In this way “economic growthmanship” expressed the ascendant values of the modern consumer culture and appealed to business, labor, and middle-class voters alike.
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In 1960 growth became one of the central mantras of John F. Kennedy's New Frontier. Under the leadership of Walter Heller, Kermit Gordon, and other growth theory economists, the Council of Economic Advisors emerged as the leading proponent within the administration of utilizing government resources to promote economic expansion. Even the War on Poverty was based on the promise of economic growth. As Walter Lippmann observed in March 1964, “A generation ago it would have been taken for granted that a war on poverty meant taxing money away from the haves and . . . turning it over to the have nots. . . . But in this generation . . . a revolutionary idea has taken hold. The size of the pie can be increased by invention, organization, capital investment, and fiscal policy, and then a whole society, not just one part of it, will grow richer.”
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For Heller and other economists, the goal of the OEO and the ARC in Appalachia was not only to increase the per capita income of the region but to change the region's culture and economy so that it could contribute to, and benefit from, national growth.

Expansion of the region's economy was always the primary goal of the Appalachian Regional Development Act. The Appalachian governors who initiated the legislation distinguished between temporary aid for relief from unemployment and permanent investments for development. Appalachia, they argued, was underdeveloped and needed the infrastructure—including highways, factories, schools, and water systems—to sustain a modern economy and lifestyle. Determining how best to promote development, however, involved a contentious and highly politicized debate. As defined by Congress, Appalachia was a diverse region, and the political needs of thirteen governors militated against any single strategy or regional plan. Consequently, the early policy struggles within the ARC focused on investment strategies to achieve regionally measurable growth rather than on issues of social equity or on the cultural and environmental consequences of development itself.

At the center of the ARC debate about regional growth was a single sentence added to the second ARDA before its passage in 1965. To placate key economic advisors on the White House staff, PARC executive director John Sweeney attached language mandating that public
investments made in the region under the act concentrate in areas where there was significant potential for future growth. Added because of budgetary fears that it would waste limited federal resources to attempt to address the problems of every small community in such a vast region, the sentence also reflected the prevailing philosophy of most national economists that growth started at growth poles (urban areas) and filtered outward to peripheral rural communities along developmental axes (highways) that connected rural people to urban services. This concept of growth center development took on special significance within the ARC process after strong advocates of growth theory were appointed to head the commission. Sweeney, formerly an economist with the Department of Commerce, became the ARC's first federal cochair; Ralph Widner, a Pennsylvania urban and regional planner, became executive director; and Monroe Newman, an economist out of Penn State University, became chief economist.

Introduced to American economists and regional planners in 1963 and 1964 just as the PARC staff was drafting the Appalachian legislation, growth pole theory heavily influenced the drafting of the ARC management code and subsequent development strategies.
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Building on the work of French economist François Perroux, American planners suggested that the most efficient policy for public investment aimed at spurring national economic growth was the concentration of resources in the few expanding metropolitan centers that demonstrated the greatest potential for growth. These centers would be linked with each other and with smaller “urban growth complexes” by a modern transportation network that would provide access to jobs and public services to the surrounding rural “hinterland.” Furthermore, the identification and support of a few “leading regions” (based on their comparative potential for growth) would allow these areas to reach a “critical size” that would sustain development and knit the entire nation into “a single, unified economy, culture, and urban system.”
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When applied to Appalachia, this national development strategy had significant policy implications. As Widner recalled, “One of the major arguments used to oppose a special regional development program for Appalachia . . . was the fact that the region is filled with thousands of tiny, dying mining camps and rural communities. A program for the region would be doomed to fail . . . if the regional effort
was intended to resuscitate all of them through haphazard distribution of Federal largesse.”
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The solution, Sweeney told
U.S. News and World Report
shortly after the passage of the ARDA, was to “concentrate all of the [ARC] spending for economic development in places where the growth potential is greatest. . . . Ignore the pockets of poverty and unemployment scattered in inaccessible hollows all over the area . . . and build a network of roads so that the poor and unemployed can get out of their inaccessible hollows and commute to new jobs in or near the cities.”
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