Reformers to Radicals (9 page)

 

The great national emphasis and interest in Eastern Kentucky, the Appalachians, depressed areas and pockets of poverty largely is a thing of the past. . . . The average citizen in the United States, if he thinks about Appalachia at all this summer, thinks that the problems are being handled—that there is no reason for him to be particularly concerned.

—Thomas S. Gish, editor of the
Whitesburg, KY,
Mountain Eagle
, in a speech delivered before
the Council of the Southern Mountains on July 14, 1964

Born in Floyd County, Virginia, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Milton Ogle graduated from Berea College in 1955. Following a short tenure as a math teacher in McDowell County, North Carolina, Ogle returned to Berea to administer the college's broom factory. He enjoyed his job, which allowed him to interact with people from all over the region. It helped him, moreover, appreciate the role that Berea College played in the Southern mountains. “Berea was really good,” he recalled in 1991, “at . . . taking in people that had been by-passed by the non-system of education that existed then in Appalachia and helping them to get over the hurdles . . . that they couldn't get over in their own communities.” This attitude remained with Ogle after he began, in 1959, to work with the Council of the Southern Mountains (CSM) and, by 1963, the Appalachian Volunteers (AVs). Looking back on his reform efforts in the 1960s, he contended that the overall CSM/AV goal was to show “how people could be involved in things that affected their lives.” The question, however, turned on what those “things” were. When
Ogle and the CSM began to send volunteers into the region, he had to answer that very question. Most probably, his view of the region's educational “non-system” influenced his response. Still, though he was born in the region and had a quality education, a wealth of experience, and an impressive array of connections that stretched all the way to Washington, DC, that did not mean that he knew exactly how to initiate effective reform. He should have realized this even before he led the Appalachian Volunteers into the War on Poverty since he well knew that “knowledge and wisdom, far from being the same, often have no connection.”
¹

In reality, when those first student volunteers traveled to Harlan County early in the winter of 1964, the CSM had access to many sources seeking to explain the cause of Appalachian poverty. The two most influential and enduring explanations were the “culture of poverty” and the “colonialism” models, both rooted in the late nineteenth century. While the former portrayed the mountaineers' culture, mores, and value system as antiquated and inferior to that of “modern Americans,” the latter viewed Appalachians as exploited and victimized by outside industrial giants that extracted the region's wealth and then absolved themselves of any blame for the mountaineers' subsequent problems by citing the mountaineers' own shortcomings as the source of the region's problems.
²

Not surprisingly, these divergent interpretations of Appalachian poverty suggested their own solutions. On the one hand, the colonization argument contended that the poor must confront the status quo and diligently work to alter power relationships if they ever were to reassert themselves. Conflict was the hallmark of this philosophy. Proponents of the culture of poverty model, however, stressed efforts “to end the ignorance and fatalism of the Appalachian poor, stimulate economic development, and align the region economically and culturally with the rest of the nation.” Not only does this imply the superiority of industrial America's values, but it also suggests that, once given the choice, Appalachians would readily recognize that superiority and adopt middle-class ways.
³

Because the cultural model implied the health and desirability of the American political, economic, and social systems—that poverty was the result, not of inequities in the country's social, economic, or political structures, but of isolation or individual maladjustment—Ayer's espousal of this view placed the Council firmly in line with the thinking of most Americans
in the post–World War II era. Indeed, Vice President Lyndon Johnson believed that the “inevitability of the endless cycle of poverty” was grounded in “the lack of specific training, . . . the neglect of the educational needs of our young, [and] the inadequacy of health care.” This view dominated those who planned and administered the reform efforts of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.
⁴
These national efforts finally began with the Area Redevelopment Administration (ARA).

Though the ARA was not created until the early 1960s, the concept behind it had been in existence in Congress in one form or another since 1955. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his economic report in January of that year, suggested that the national government help bring about “high and stable levels of employment in the nation at large.” Initially presented to the national legislature by Democrats, including Senator John F. Kennedy, on the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee that July, the package originally included a public works program, long-term credit for new industry, technical assistance, retraining of jobless workers, and allowances, similar to unemployment insurance, for those in the retraining program. (Six years later, when the act finally became law, these features were still included, though in a somewhat modified form.) Unfortunately, the Area Redevelopment bill never became legislative reality during the Eisenhower years. Two presidential vetoes and partisan politics prevented its enactment.
⁵

One of Kennedy's first acts as president, however, was to reintroduce the Area Redevelopment legislation and appoint a task force to study poverty, dramatize the need for area redevelopment, and cultivate public support for the bill. While endorsing Kennedy's proposal as it stood, the task force also recommended other measures. It argued that distress could be alleviated “through expanded food distribution programs, temporary extension of unemployment benefits and broadening of public assistance.” Moreover, it sought special provisions for federal aid to education in depressed areas. In addition, the task force recommended “funds for access roads, supplemental expenditures for [the] development of natural resources, and a regional commission to coordinate the various activities into a ‘broad regional development program.'” With forty-three cosponsors in Congress, Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois introduced the measure on the first day of the 1961 legislative session, and, with the popular president's backing, the bill cleared both houses of Congress in early 1961. This act, in essence, was Kennedy's
plan for depressed areas, particularly Appalachia.
⁶
Tragically, the president did not live to see his aspirations for the poor of southern Appalachia put into practice. His assassination in November 1963 elevated Lyndon Baines Johnson to the presidency. Johnson, formerly a Texas senator and Senate majority leader, was a likely individual to continue his predecessor's relief efforts.
⁷

On his first day as president, Johnson met with Walter Heller, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers. Heller informed Johnson that, three days prior to the assassination, he had spoken with Kennedy about incipient plans for a national poverty relief effort. Kennedy, Heller declared, wanted an antipoverty measure for his 1964 legislative agenda. Heller wished to know whether the new president favored a continuation of such work. After a few moments of thought, Johnson responded: “I'm sympathetic. Go ahead. Give it the highest priority. Push it ahead full tilt.” The new president further decided to make the emerging antipoverty idea part of the national, not just the congressional, agenda. Therefore, he took Kennedy's program further, in terms of both rhetoric and action. This “administration today, here and now,” he said during his State of the Union address on January 8, 1964, “declares unconditional war on poverty in America, and I urge this Congress and all Americans to join with me in that effort.” Moreover, he targeted a specific area: “We will launch a special effort in the chronically distressed areas of Appalachia.”
⁸

This focus on “distressed areas” marked a shift in the nature of reform liberalism since the New Deal and, because these areas were exceptions to the general abundance characterizing life in the United States, reinforced the perception that equated
distressed
with
aberrant
. In the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had faced not an area but a country in economic crisis, and his New Deal sought to bolster American capitalism and, ultimately, create new jobs. In short, the New Deal concentrated on
quantitative
economic issues affecting the entire nation. Johnson assumed the presidency, however, during the relatively flush 1960s. Though the quantitative issues of poverty and civil rights were critical to the president's position, just as important were such
qualitative
issues as educational, cultural, and political institutions and the sense of powerlessness that came from the sense of “anomie and estrangement” that those institutions engendered. In May 1964, speaking at the University of Michigan, Johnson declared: “The city
of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce, but the desire for beauty and hunger for community.” Two years later, he asserted: “In the midst of abundance modern man walks oppressed by forces which menace and confine the quality of his life, and which individual abundance alone will not overcome.” Johnson envisioned his “Great Society,” of which the War on Poverty was an integral part, as a way to prevail over these qualitative deficiencies. While this focus on quality, coupled with the move toward participatory democracy included in the Economic Opportunity Act, which actually launched the War on Poverty, moved the Great Society away from the much more quantitative focus of the New Deal, it failed to address the realities of life in the southern Appalachians. In this region, one ravaged by poverty and unemployment, the issues were—at least as far as many rural Appalachians were concerned—quantitative.
⁹

The federal government did support Johnson's War on Poverty, and, on August 20, 1964, Congress passed the Economic Opportunity Act, a measure designed “to mobilize the human and financial resources of the Nation to combat poverty in the United States.” The act declared it “the policy of the United States to eliminate the paradox of poverty in the midst of plenty in this Nation by opening to everyone the opportunity for education and training, the opportunity to work, and the opportunity to live in decency and dignity.” “The United States can,” it continued, “achieve its full economic and social potential as a nation only if every individual has the opportunity to contribute to the full extent of his capabilities and to participate in the workings of our society. . . . It is the purpose of this act to strengthen, supplement, and coordinate efforts in the furtherance of that policy.”
¹⁰
In order to carry out these purposes, the act established the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) within the executive branch of the federal government. The OEO became the government organization that fought the War on Poverty, and it joined the fight in Appalachia in December 1964 with a grant to the Council of the Southern Mountains for its nascent Appalachian Volunteers program.
¹¹

Ironically,
conflict
was far from the minds of those who planned for the
war
on poverty. Designed “to be a way in which all important segments of the community would mobilize all available resources to deal with local poverty,” the Community Action Program, the centerpiece of the War on Poverty, was, as program planners described it, a “three-legged stool” on
which community consensus rested. The local political structure constituted the first leg of the stool, civic organizations and social agencies the second, and representatives of the poor the third. The Economic Opportunity Act mandated the “maximum feasible participation” of the poor, and, by that means, the OEO hoped to “encourag[e] the residents of poverty areas to take part in the work of community action programs.” In short, the OEO (again recalling Boone's ideas concerning the National Service Corps) believed that the impoverished should help design their own programs.
¹²

The framers of the Economic Opportunity Act would have been extremely naive to think that this arrangement had the capacity to prevent any and all conflicts. On the contrary, they saw a certain degree of controversy as “inevitable and, in most cases, healthy.” Revealing a belief that friction was inevitable within the context of participatory pluralist democracy, Sanford Kravitz, the future associate director of the Community Action Program's demonstration projects, argued that locally administered anti-poverty efforts “would ‘remain honest' to [the act's] purposes by inclusion of voices representing the poor.” John G. Wofford, who in 1964 became a staff assistant to the OEO's director of operations, called community action a “painful, headlining process . . . toward local consensus.”
¹³

In the CSM's and Ayer's cooperative philosophy, the OEO found the manifestation of this balance between conflict and consensus. Ayer reinforced his philosophical stance, reflecting the prevailing ideas about how the country's political system worked, and graphically demonstrating how the federal government's conception of how poverty should be fought coincided with Council policy. In a letter to the OEO, Ayer stated that the CSM incorporated “
all segments
of society: public
and
private; dominant
and
dependent; . . . affluent . . . as well as poor.” He elaborated elsewhere: “The CSM hopes to encourage people to do whatever they need to do.”
¹⁴