Reformers to Radicals (23 page)

Prial asserted that most county CAP officials “expressed considerable disappointment” in the training sessions administered by the CSM. Reflecting the “delivery of services” attitude of most county politicians, one local program director informed Prial: “We need hard-nosed information about preparing programs and submitting them, not a lot of vague stuff about
how to deal with people.” For his part, Prial believed “that the Council people had not really prepared an agenda or thought about what they wanted to say.” Though he admitted that the CSM's lines of communication were “invaluable” in establishing contacts in the mountains, he found virtually all leadership in the mountains, whether that of the Council or local elected officials, wanting. “I believe that someone is going to have to strongarm the power structures in the poor coal counties,” he summarized, “if anything is to be accomplished in the war on poverty.” Finally, because the political situation in the mountains precluded the replacement of the ineffective, uncaring local CAP directors, “they should be superceded as soon as possible by trained regional directors.” This regional director, responsible for three or four counties, would provide the OEO with “extremely close surveillance” of federally funded antipoverty projects in Appalachian Kentucky.
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Jack Ciaccio, the head of the OEO's mid-Atlantic office, which was responsible for the Kentucky programs, refused to take Prial's evaluation at face value. Ciaccio claimed that the report echoed the voices of two of the mountains' most persistent critics, Harry Caudill and Tom Gish, and did “not tell us anything we did not already know.” Moreover, while Prial made sweeping generalizations about the people and politics of the region, Ciaccio warned against such a practice: “There are differences among E. Ky. counties, among the people who make up the power structures, and among the people who live in the hollows. We have to get the facts on a county-by-county basis.” Though Caudill and Gish sounded the “clarion call . . . for sweeping and massive changes,” they had, Ciaccio felt, “little interest in the day-by-day changes that will add up to solid progress over the long run.” To caution against the ready acceptance of Caudill's (and Prial's) views, Ciaccio argued that Caudill represented the “opposition” that Prial maintained was missing in eastern Kentucky. In fact, this opposition was vice chairman of the Letcher County CAP. Indicating that Caudill had a disagreement with other members of the Letcher County agency, Ciaccio revealed that he had “threatened . . . to resign his position.” “Must the articulate opposition have a voice,” Ciaccio asked, “or complete control?”
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Ciaccio did not, however, reject Prial's report in its entirety. On the contrary, he readily admitted that the representatives of eastern Kentucky's public and private agencies—two of the three legs of the OEO's “stool”—on the local CAP boards were either “identical with the power structure in
E. Ky. communities, or . . . controlled by [it].” He further recognized: “If existing services are not improved, the war on poverty will be just a series of political plums for the local power structure. And existing services will be improved only if the poor are organized, and protest—
long and loud
—about the lousy job that is being done.”
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With the goal of circumventing the local power structures in the region, Ciaccio cited OEO policies that would, he hoped, lead to a “
diffusion of power
” in the Appalachian poverty program. Included in this plan was the funding of the Council of the Southern Mountains, the formation of multi-county CAPs (which the OEO believed would actually dilute local control), and the insistence that poor people be included on those programs' boards as a requirement for federal funding “even though we realize that in many cases the [poor] people selected are probably controlled.” These moves, Ciaccio maintained, would prevent a monopoly of antipoverty programs in the mountains and would help establish the “missing ingredient” or the third of the three legs of the stool—“organized opposition.” If need be, Ciaccio stated, the OEO “should be prepared to recognize a
neighborhood
organization as a CAA [community action agency], where the local power structure refuses to go along on resident participation.”
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In fact, Ciaccio did just that. According to an AV report, the Volunteers' organizing work in the community of Verda, in Harlan County, was so successful—even across racial lines—that the OEO funded the fledgling community organization independently of the already existing county CAP run by the county school superintendent. Though the Volunteers reveled in their accomplishment, the superintendent, they claimed, was determined to gain control of the Verda program. Ciaccio, nonetheless, supported this sort of action. “It is essential,” he argued, “to get meaningful resident participation in the development and conduct of CAP's in Eastern Kentucky. We want to go all out on this not only because it is what the law says and the agency preaches, but because it is the only way the cycle of poverty in Eastern Kentucky can be broken.”
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As the AVs continued their projects in the mountains, however, evidence supporting Prial's and Gish's perceptions trickled in. For example, near the middle of August 1966, a volunteer working in Fonde, Kentucky, wrote radiantly of the AV effort. “The AV program,” she stated, “is simply people—people getting to know people so that each is better off.” It was not
so important that the children of the community attain academic excellence or that adults learn better sanitary practices: “What matters is that in the exchange people come to have more confidence in themselves and in their own abilities to bring about beneficial change.” After returning to college for the fall semester, however, the Fonde volunteer's attitude changed dramatically. Responding to a questionnaire given to those who worked in the Kentucky mountains that summer, she expressed regret that she learned about the community's problems too late to help. She recalled “the anger and frustration that builds up inside of you when someone shares a problem with you—a problem that everyone says has no solution—but a problem that still eats into the joy of living: a lousy school teacher, a coal leasing company that in no way recognizes that human beings are living on its land[,] in its houses[,] in its town.”
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As AV members attempted follow-ups in counties where they had performed work, they came across schools that had in a very brief period of time become run-down again and communities no better off than before. After the Fonde volunteer revisited that community, she issued a statement that evidently reflected the thoughts of many AVs in 1966:

Fonde can be a pretty rough place; in three hours I learned: One boy flew off in the mines and hit his father with a board . . . ; one of the girls is pregnant and unmarried; Richard still beats Christeen; Dave . . . received the results of the Health Department's test—all three wells were unsafe . . . ; kids still don't have shoes; the people aren't holding community meetings any more; Mr. . . . still drinks up the welfare money. Another 6th grade girl has “quit coming” to school. . . . There's not a lot of surface joy in Fonde. . . . Sometimes I wonder about the real value of AV's in places like Fonde. There are so many problems we're not the solution to. I see Dick's point when he says we by-passed the big problems . . . and threw a lot of time, money and effort into little things that don't amount to no more than memories of good times spent together. . . . I get discouraged when I think of places like [this] because you know what we're doing? We're supplying candles when the house needs to be wired for electricity.
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Fonde was not the only community to experience hard times despite the War on Poverty. When asked by the Volunteers what could be done to improve their community, residents of Weeksbury, in Letcher County, revealed how Appalachian landownership patterns perpetuated poverty. “One thing hurts here,” one community member announced, “that the companies owns a lot of land. Like where someone would want to clear out a pasture land to raise cattle, well these [coal companies] owns most of them and they won't agree to sell at no price, so thats holding up things that could happen.”
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Another critic of the present state of the War on Poverty in Appalachia, the AV-trained VISTA volunteer Ellen Weisman, stationed in Clay County, West Virginia, decried the OEO guidelines that required resident participation in CAPs: “Its what we call a farce. Resident participation! Who writes the . . . programs?” she asked rhetorically. Insinuating that the poor with whom she worked had no idea how to conduct themselves at a board meeting or how to formulate an antipoverty plan, she informed Dan Fox: “If the poor knew how to eliminate poverty they wouldn't be poor.” Ignorance and apathy born of the fear of the powerful characterized West Virginia's impoverished people, she believed, and the reformers needed to strive for real, fundamental change. “To attack poverty,” she wrote Fox, “means to attack the status quo[,] meaning an attack on the local power structure! Does the local power structure want this?”
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Even her attempts at organizing the poor, Weisman declared, were “farcical.” Highlighting the quiescence she found among the mountaineers, she noted that, when she told the people they “‘must all work together,'” “they wonder what the hell for because if [the local politicians] don't profit by what they want they don't get it anyway because they have no way to apply pressure besides a petition that will be filed away.” Her frustrating experiences finally caused Weisman to leave her assignment a month early. She did not feel that she had accomplished much during her time in Clay County: “Certainly 4 weeks will not make any difference . . . [and] I do feel guilty about staying. . . . I don't feel honest to myself wasting all that time [and] energy. As for Wash[ington] or the Clay Co. Dev[lopment] Corp[.] is concerned,” she closed, “I am . . . car[e]less. They never lived up to their commitment to me.”
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Others went even further, condemning the Band-Aid approach of not
only the Council but the OEO as well. Reporting from Verda, the AV field coordinator Steve Daugherty decried the “obvious paradox” of trying to end poverty “without disturbing the present situation.” Frustrated by the county superintendent, who also ran the local CAP and controlled the allocation of federal funds in Harlan County, Daugherty reasoned that, to be effective, the War on Poverty required a “basic reorganization, an abolition . . . of those institutions which initially led to the impoverishment . . . of the Appalachian people.” According to Daugherty, James Cawood, the superintendent and chairman of the Harlan CAP board, and Claude Dozier, the CAP's director, wrote OEO proposals for Verda that ignored the community's expressed wishes and concerns. Further, the extended system of patronage provided by the school system, Cawood's and Dozier's positions with the county CAP, and their ability to weave their way through the OEO's bureaucratic obstacles limited the choices available to the people of Verda when, for example, Dozier ignored requests for better roads and instead sought to build a community center that no one wanted. “Persons with a vested interest in the status quo,” Daugherty concluded, “have a notoriously poor record in initiating change.” The federal antipoverty effort, he continued, simply “strengthen[ed] one of the most insidious forces of oppression in eastern Kentucky.” These experiences, according to one activist, “radicalized” Ogle and the AVs, who now realized that school repairs only made the situation more profitable for a corrupt system. Volunteer renovation projects did nothing but save local politicians money.
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Having come to the position that the horrid situation in the mountains could be attributed to the local political system, the Appalachian Volunteers decided to change course and organize the people around such issues as school system reform, welfare rights, and anti-strip-mining legislation. Confrontation became the new AV strategy. Through this new approach, the AVs sought to undermine the entrenched interests in eastern Kentucky—the coal companies and the political system—in order to effect substantial structural change.
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Warning against abandoning the traditional Council philosophy of cooperation, Ayer informed all members of the Council staff: “Our service projects are possible mainly because donors and authorities trust our wisdom and integrity. These, in turn, rest firmly on the basic concept and philosophy of the Council. If this is abandoned or adulterated we will have
disqualified our Council for public trust.” “This can happen,” he cautioned, “by carelessness, by credit seeking, by surrender to expediency.” The desire to confront rather than to cooperate with local county officials was such a “surrender to expediency,” straining the overall CSM approach to reform, and, in Ayer's mind, jeopardizing the overall effectiveness of the Council. While Ayer recognized that the county judges and school superintendents were “rogues,” he also understood that, with the OEO's “three-legged stool” approach, “you've got to deal with them.”
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The Appalachian Volunteers wanted to “deal” with county officials, but not in the ways Ayer thought appropriate. Believing that nearly absolute political control by a few public officials rendered the majority of mountaineers voiceless, the AVs maintained that the oppressed could not effectively fight for their rights without “the necessary aid coming from outside the county.” This aid was the AVs and their VISTA allies. As new VISTA and AV recruits entered the activists' ranks, this attitude toward mountain county governments became part of the training they received. It also became a source of conflict between the Appalachian Volunteers and its parent organization, the Council of the Southern Mountains.
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