Uneven Ground (35 page)

An alternative vision for Appalachia, however, eluded the ARC. The Nixon administration continued to pursue a national policy of economic growth while shifting administrative control and revenues back to the states. The ARC approach to project management was consistent with White House goals, and the nonhighway budget of the agency survived unscathed, averaging around $300 million annually throughout the decade. Despite the demise of the War on Poverty, federal spending for entitlement programs (food stamps, Medicaid, and Social Security) increased 76 percent in the 1970s as the nation shifted its attention from eradicating poverty to managing the welfare system. The portion of the total ARC allocation dedicated to nonhighway projects increased by 20 percent as well.
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Growth in federal transfer payments and infrastructure expenditures contributed to a resurgence of economic activity in the mountains between 1965 and 1975, providing at least statistical evidence that progress was being made in alleviating mountain poverty. Per capita income in the region increased from 78 percent of the national average in 1965 to almost 83 percent in 1974. Unemployment and poverty rates declined, and housing stock, educational attainment, and infant mortality rates improved. Central Appalachia continued to lag far behind the rest of the country in most socioeconomic measures, but even there, personal income grew from 52 percent of the national
average to 65 percent in the decade after the passage of the ARDA. The migration of people out of the region slowed and even reversed in some counties.
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Part of this economic activity was attributable to the recovery of the coal industry. Coal production had begun to rise in the late 1960s, but demand for Appalachian coal skyrocketed after the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) raised the price of oil by 400 percent in protest of American support for Israel after the 1973 Yom Kippur War. While inflation soared throughout the rest of the country, spurring a business recession in 1975, the coalfields boomed again as they had done periodically since the turn of the century. Coal exports more than doubled by the end of the decade, bringing new jobs, in-migration, and small-business growth. The boom would collapse with the restoration of world oil production levels in the early 1980s, but the energy crisis temporarily restored faith in natural resource development as a private sector cure for Appalachia's problems.

At the same time that rising government expenditures and the recovery of the coal industry diverted attention from the persistent inequities and weaknesses of the mountain economy, other forces, deeply rooted in the environmental movement and in the War on Poverty of the 1960s, combined to challenge the prevailing devotion to “more” and to question the ARC approach to development. By the mid-1970s, substantial numbers of Americans had become disenchanted with the moral direction of a government that had produced the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal and with an economic system that seemed to reward greed and unrestrained consumption. Building on a movement that began in Britain, intellectuals and scholars within the United States increasingly questioned the limits of growth and the environmental and social costs of technology. Adding their voices to the work of British scholars like Peter Laslett (
The World We Have Lost
) and E. F. Schumacher (
Small Is Beautiful
), American critics such as Wendell Berry (
The Unsettling of America
), Rachel Carson (
Silent Spring
), Robert Bellah (
Habits of the Heart
), and others rejected the idea of growth-based development and led an ever widening reaction to consumerism.

In Appalachia, as in the rest of the country, the new movement represented a shift in values that revealed a different way of thinking about land, quality of life, and the meaning of progress. Regional activists,
fresh from the political wars against poverty and racial injustice, turned their attention in the 1970s to the abolition of strip mining, the improvement of health and working conditions for miners and textile workers, the protection of mountain forests from clear-cutting, and the defense of family farms from the construction of hydroelectric facilities and the expansion of national parks. Likewise regional scholars rejected the notion of Appalachian exceptionalism and recast the region's recent history and culture as the consequence of the same modernization and unbridled development that had shaped the rest of the nation. What Appalachia needed in the future, they argued, was not more growth but a different kind of development.

Although traditional mountain lifestyles offered alternatives to the postwar culture of consumption, the rejection of growth-based strategies for progress in Appalachia reflected more than romantic nostalgia for a simpler past. In contrast to the self-absorption and escapism of much of the hippie culture, much of the counterculture movement in the mountains was grounded in conventional American values of economic and social justice, cooperation, tolerance, respect for family and community, and a spiritual sense of land as place rather than commodity. The same organizations that opposed unregulated second-home development in western North Carolina supported striking miners in eastern Kentucky and farm families fighting federal land condemnation in southwest Virginia. Groups like the new CSM and the Appalachian Alliance rallied members in opposition to strip mining, gender discrimination in coal employment, brown lung disease among textile workers, and the concentration of absentee landownership in the coalfields and the Blue Ridge.

As a result of these contrasting visions for the good life, much of the public discourse about the future of Appalachia in the late 1970s focused on achieving a balance between economic growth and environmental quality. On the one hand, Appalachia needed jobs and economic expansion to lift its people out of poverty. The region needed to increase the production of its mines and mills, encourage tourism and second-home development, and attract branch manufacturing plants that could increase the local tax base and provide revenue for schools and roads. On the other hand, economic development should not destroy the landscape, exploit the people, or threaten traditional values.
Growth should be limited and development sustainable to protect the natural and human assets of the region.

With the election of Jimmy Carter to the presidency in 1976, balanced growth became the national objective of an administration elected to restore moral direction to a nation struggling with inflation, unemployment, and energy challenges. Appalachian leaders assumed major roles in the national effort to find a middle path between economic growth and environmental protection, between consumption and conservation. Responding, for example, to the national energy crisis and to growing pressure to end surface mining in the mountains, the Senate Environment and Public Works committee, chaired by West Virginia's Jennings Randolph, called in 1976 for a national conference on balanced growth. Two years later, President Carter's secretary of commerce, Juanita Kreps, a native of western North Carolina, organized the White House Conference on Balanced National Growth and Economic Development. Chaired by West Virginia governor Jay Rockefeller, the gathering brought more than five hundred delegates to Washington DC and spawned several smaller, regional conferences, including one in Charleston, West Virginia, sponsored by the ARC.

The White House conferences on balanced growth, however, failed to resolve the inherent tensions over the goals of development. Although organizers hoped to achieve some compromise between unbounded growth and no growth, reaching agreement on the definition of “balance” proved to be impossible in an atmosphere where the real issues were wealth, power, and conflicting visions of the good life. Especially in Appalachia, the call for balanced growth opened old conflicts over landownership, land use, taxation, government regulation, and environmental quality. National priorities, as well, sometimes fueled bitter regional clashes, as when the demand for energy alternatives sparked a rise in coal production and inspired proposals to increase federal funding for research in coal technology.

Appalachian opponents of strip mining were angered further when national environmental groups compromised on the abolition of surface mining in the passage of the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977. They saw strategies to build a new national energy policy around coal as furthering the destruction of the mountains. Proposals that reduced American dependence on foreign oil by increasing
the production of coal, they argued, only shifted the real costs of energy consumption onto the people of the coalfields. Given the rising percentage of coal being produced by surface mining, they feared that Appalachia would become a “national sacrifice area.”
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Other coal country leaders, however, saw the adoption of a coal-based national energy policy as a boon for the region. Named to chair the President's Commission on Coal as well as the White House Conference on Balanced National Growth and Economic Development in 1978, Governor Rockefeller acknowledged that there were “environmental tradeoffs” to the increased consumption of coal but insisted that these costs had to be balanced against the goal of national energy independence. Appalachian coal mines, he suggested, were prepared to increase production by 100 million tons a year, and this prospect would help not only to reduce the national dependence on foreign oil but also to alleviate the unemployment of thousands of miners in his state. With current environmental regulations and new clean coal technologies, he added, coal could be burned responsibly and without dirty smokestack emissions.
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None of the conferences and commissions on balanced growth produced much consensus, but they did illuminate what Rockefeller described as “the incredible array of tensions involved with growth.”
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These conflicts intensified with the skyrocketing inflation and subsequent recession that followed yet another OPEC oil crisis in 1979–1981.

Despite these failures, the efforts by the Carter administration to achieve harmony on national economic policy opened a dialogue within the country about the limits of economic expansion. The president appeared to encourage, even welcome, debate. In Appalachia, community forums, academic conferences, and regional publications explored the prospects for more balanced development, and even the ARC appeared more flexible and open to alternative voices. Under Robert W. Scott, the former North Carolina governor whom Carter appointed as federal cochair of the ARC in 1977, the commission launched an early childhood basic skills education initiative, reached out to groups representing the elderly and women, and approved $4 million in aid to ease the financial problems of former UMWA hospitals in the coalfields. Scott's successor, Al Smith of Kentucky, supported a $100,000 grant to the Appalachian Alliance to study
landownership patterns in six Appalachian states and extended a research fellowship to longtime ARC critic Harry Caudill.
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Increased support for human development programs and greater flexibility in funding nontraditional organizations reflected a shift in national politics since the 1960s and a maturing of the ARC. Many of the commission's more creative programs came at the initiative of the federal cochair's office rather than at the request of the states, and the bulk of agency expenditures continued to be dedicated to the construction of highways and other infrastructure. The new policy initiatives, however, represented a limited retreat from the postwar confidence in growth and technology and a greater concern for diversity and inclusion. Despite the objections of South Carolina governor James Edwards, for example, who feared that an ARC bailout of health care institutions in the coalfields would inadvertently support a recent coal miners' strike, the central Appalachian ARC governors agreed, in an unprecedented vote, to provide aid for the operation of regional hospitals “used by everyone, including miners.”
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The commission also launched an initiative to speed up the processing of black lung disease claims and extended funding to help launch the Council of Appalachian Women.

The War on Poverty had expanded opportunities for the education and employment of women in the mountains, both at the entry level and in professional positions. The North Carolina–based Council of Appalachian Women promised to work on a wide variety of projects to meet the needs of mountain women, including research to determine how women could participate more fully in ARC programs, conferences and workshops to strengthen the Appalachian family, efforts to eliminate job discrimination in education and job training, initiatives to improve health and child care services, and the creation of a group insurance program and a credit union.
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The short-lived council was composed primarily of professional women, but it reflected shifting gender roles in the region, as did its sister organization in West Virginia, the Coal Employment Project. The latter assisted women in breaking down gender barriers to work in the mines, a historically male-dominated industry. With the help of the Coal Employment Project and other organizations, the number of women employed in Appalachian
coal mines grew from none in 1973 to more than 2,500 in 1979. Women miners continued to face harassment and discrimination in wages and work assignments, but the efforts of the Coal Employment Project represented the growing movement of women into the public workforce in Appalachia as in the rest of the country.
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Likewise, ARC support for research on landownership patterns in Appalachia echoed changing attitudes toward natural resource management and control. Recognition that absentee ownership had shaped much of Appalachia's tragic history of dependence was well known in the 1960s, but acknowledging the consequences of this “colonial” relationship was dangerous in government circles and could easily result in one's being labeled a radical or a Communist. A decade later, in a world where distant governments and energy cartels held America hostage, ownership and control of local resources were as genuine concerns for the long-term future of the region as were increased coal production and employment. Although the ARC failed to act on any of the recommendations that resulted from its pioneering study of landownership trends (a pattern common to almost all of the research funded by the agency), that the commission would underwrite such controversial research speaks to the comparative openness of the organization during the Carter years.