Uneven Ground (33 page)

Traditional models of development had assumed that growth would occur simultaneously in both core (urban) and peripheral (rural) areas, but growth pole theory required that infrastructure and social overhead investments concentrate in dominant population centers to maximize growth, rather than being dispersed to a larger geographic region. In Appalachia there were few growth centers (defined initially as areas with populations of 250,000 or more) except in the larger valleys and along the periphery of the region. Large areas, such as eastern Kentucky, had no major urban centers within the boundaries of the ARC.

Politicians in rural Appalachia therefore feared that this growth center strategy would divert critical resources for their depressed communities into cities on the edge of the region, and they were quick to rebuff the idea. In the first year of operation, the states rejected a proposal, prepared under contract with a California-based consulting firm, to concentrate ARC resources on industrial recruitment projects in major cities such as Birmingham, Knoxville, Charleston, and Pittsburgh rather than on the region's rural heartland. John Whisman from Kentucky, who was appointed as states cochair of the ARC in 1966, engaged in open dispute with Sweeney over the intent of the legislation: “The people in Washington take a look at Eastern Kentucky and then they go right across the whole business before they see anything that arouses their attention . . . a place that in their opinion has the capacity for growth. . . . There is a general feeling in this country that this is going to be a great urban nation and that everybody is going to live in the cities and that all the investments to make more jobs ought to be put in the cities and then you can move and go to the cities.”
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If national growth pole theory were applied to Appalachia, Whisman
argued, large areas of the region would be excluded from the benefits of ARC funding, especially hard-hit areas of central Appalachia. Despite these protests, significant nonhighway investments during the first four years of the ARC program flowed to major metropolitan centers, including more than $10 million each for Pittsburgh and Huntsville, Alabama, and more than $4 million each to Scranton, Pennsylvania; Cumberland, Maryland; Gadsden, Alabama; and Greenville, South Carolina.
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Under pressure from the governors, Whisman, Sweeney, and the commission staff eventually worked out a compromise that retained the essential elements of the growth center strategy but provided political flexibility for state ARC offices to invest in nonmetropolitan areas. Conceding that Perroux's central argument about the relationship between growth poles and hinterlands focused on the “fields of economic forces” of development rather than on a discrete point in geographic space, the planners devised a three-tiered model that permitted agency funds to flow to midsize cities and towns that lay along the developmental axes between metropolitan centers and rural hinterlands. This policy allowed the states to determine their own growth areas as defined by existing public services and labor market commuting patterns. In central Appalachia, these growth areas included clusters of smaller cities organized with surrounding rural counties into sixty local or area development districts. When connected to larger urban centers by good highways and transportation facilities, these second-tier cities could provide employment and services for remote hinterland populations within a fifty-mile radius, thus creating an integrated regional development plan within a larger national development system.
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As a result of this compromise between the technicians and the politicians, county seats and clusters of communities with populations over seven thousand became the focus of ARC development efforts. In addition to regional metropolitan centers, smaller municipalities such as Pikeville, Prestonsburg, Hazard, Asheville, Beckley, Johnson City, Parkersburg, and Bristol were now eligible to receive funding for water and sewer lines, industrial site access roads, and other infrastructure development projects. Categorical grants for education and health would be given priority to improve the labor pool in these communities
and to expand their role as regional service centers. Although the states were encouraged to concentrate their “human capital” investments in these high potential growth areas, the ARC code also permitted investments in health and vocational education infrastructure in more remote areas to enable the rural population to take advantage of the services and job opportunities to be developed in the growth centers. In fact, between 1965 and 1969, the commission allocated about 40 percent of its nonhighway funds to health and education projects in the rural hinterlands and concentrated the remainder in designated growth areas.
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The compromise over growth center policy allowed governors greater discretion in distributing ARC funds within their states, and it preserved the theory of growth pole development important to Washington bureaucrats. On one hand, the policy fulfilled the congressional mandate to invest in areas of greatest potential for growth and maintained the core-periphery concept of development between urban and rural places within Appalachia. On the other hand, by concentrating ARC resources in the smaller cities and expanding “big road” communities (while channeling limited assistance to severely distressed rural areas), the strategy also met the political needs of the governors, who benefited more from public expenditures in the voter-rich and politically powerful county seats than in remote rural communities.

Implicit in the ARC growth center strategy, of course, was the assumption that urban life represented the ultimate goal of regional development. For Widner and other senior professionals at the commission, economic growth was directly related to urbanization. As he explained at an ARC committee meeting in New York in 1967, “The progress of an area's economy depends to a very large extent upon the ability to provide the necessary range of services and concentration of labor force required by modern enterprise. In general, as an area's economy grows, it does so slowly until it reaches a critical mass of services, training, labor force, and public and private capital, all of which is vital to support most modern enterprise in an area.” At some stage, when such concentrations have built up, he added, “the costs of congestion also builds up, and development pushes outward into the surrounding hinterlands.”
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“The brutal truth,” Widner told
Harper's
in 1968, “is that America
now has only two choices: either (a) urbanization or (b) urbanization.” This meant that those working to improve the quality of life in Appalachia must give up “the old American dream . . . that [we] might return somehow to the pastoral life in country villages and small farms.” It also meant that little, dying towns in the mountains must “be encouraged to die faster” and that millions of rural mountaineers would “have to move away from their creek bottom corn patches and played-out mineheads.”
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They could migrate either to already overcrowded metropolitan areas, a prospect the ARC hoped to minimize, or to carefully planned, medium-size cities within or near the region.

Widner believed that, if the mountains were to keep pace with the rest of the country, the goal of development in Appalachia must be to “induce some degree of urbanization” in a region “substantially under-urbanized.” As late as 1970, a staff report to the commission suggested that the Appalachian program could achieve this objective by strengthening selectively those “urban centers, either existing or to be created, which on the basis of performance, location, and potential are the most likely ones to grow in urban service employment.”
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For northern Appalachia and extreme southern Appalachia, this meant the encouragement of growth and development of ARC counties near existing metropolitan centers, but for the Blue Ridge and central Appalachia, it meant the depopulation of rural communities and the movement of populations into selected growth areas that served as extensions of distant urban centers.

These two less urbanized parts of Appalachia would be developed to play alternative roles in a modern economy. The Blue Ridge and the Great Smoky Mountains, located between the large cities of the East Coast and the Midwest, would become “the playground of the future for metropolitan millions who live on either side,” and the Cumberland Plateau would be given over to natural resource development, its surplus labor force encouraged to move to “new towns” constructed along the Appalachian corridor highways or to commute to branch manufacturing plants in the smaller towns and villages. Extremely rural and remote counties would receive few ARC funds. In adopting this modified growth center strategy for the development of Appalachia, the commission staff assumed that the automobile and other technology had drastically changed the conditions under which rural
people lived in the modern world and that rural parts of Appalachia had to adjust to this change. In the future, fewer people would be employed in agriculture and mining and more in manufacturing and service trades. In addition, thanks to the automobile and to the proposed Appalachian corridor highway system, people would be able to “reach jobs and services each day 20 miles or so away.”
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ARC investments in the most rural parts of Appalachia were therefore designed to prepare mountain people for life in the modern consumer world, if not to encourage them to migrate to distant cities or nearby growth areas. Despite that in central Appalachia fewer than one in six people lived in communities of more than 2,500, the objective of ARC development in the mountain heartland was to “accelerate urbanization” through improvements in transportation, health, and education.
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By investing public resources in health care, technical training, and higher education facilities, the commission hoped to build a skilled labor force that might attract new industries to the region, but it recognized that such investments might also “equip young people to leave the region for other parts of the country where economic opportunities were more attractive.”
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By constructing a modern transportation network and upgrading the Appalachian labor force, the ARC hoped to integrate the mountains and mountain people more directly into an emerging urban society.

Like the War on Poverty, the ARC was an experiment in social and economic change, rooted in prevailing assumptions about the modernization process itself. Highways and urban development were assumed to be the catalysts for prosperity, and science and technology provided the formula for success. Commission staff members were quick to apply the latest systems theory to the analysis of regional problems and to the adoption of intervention strategies. “Appalachia,” Ralph Widner admitted to a group of Washington DC engineers, “is something of a laboratory in which a new set of political, social, and economic principles is being tested pragmatically, but within the framework of our constitutional political system.”
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Although both the professional planners and the politicians agreed that the motivation for the experiment was growth, they frequently disagreed on how best to attain it. As ARC administrators acknowledged, Appalachia's problems were more than technological. Achieving
consensus in the political sphere would become a recurring challenge, and by the early 1970s, even the technicians conceded that “modernization of state and local governments in the region had to be encouraged.”
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The commission would have less success, however, in altering tax policies, encouraging democratic leadership, reforming public institutions, and confronting corruption than in bringing the facade of a modern economy to the mountains.

At its core, of course, the ARC was a political organization, and as such it responded to the vagaries of personality, partisanship, and power. Congress had rejected the model of a public corporation for the Appalachian program in favor of establishing a state-federal cooperative agency. Unlike the TVA, which possessed autonomous power to manage physical resources in the Tennessee River watershed, the ARC was designed as a comprehensive development organization responsible to the president, to thirteen governors, and ultimately to Congress. At every level of the ARC policy-making and planning processes, differences in values, philosophy, and self-interest intersected to influence programs and administrative strategies.

Theoretically, projects were to be proposed at the local level by area development districts, passed along to the state's governor's office for approval, and endorsed by the other governors and by the federal cochair, who represented the president. A jointly funded staff led by an executive director would then administer grants from funds appropriated by Congress. The ARC structure was more democratic than that of other federal agencies, although critics pointed out that the local development districts that initiated projects were not broadly representative or participatory and that Congress restricted funding to categorical grants in specific areas and occasionally attached allocations for special projects in the districts of powerful legislators.

During the early years of the program, funding levels and enthusiasm for the initiative minimized policy disputes within the organization. Following the compromise over growth center strategies, the states, the federal cochair's office, and the Washington-based staff worked together aggressively to implement the annual billion-dollar regional development strategy. By 1970 the commission had authorized the construction of almost 2,500 miles of the Appalachian Development
Highway System and over 500 miles of access roads for airports, industrial sites, and schools. Although 80 percent of total ARC appropriations were designated for highway construction, between $200 million and $300 million annually was set aside during this period for nonhighway projects. In addition to funding water and sewer, mine reclamation (primarily in Pennsylvania), and solid waste projects, the commission provided supplemental funding to help construct 269 health facilities, 174 community colleges, and almost 300 vocational schools.
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