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published
in July, 1977
Field Foundation, NY
Foreword by Harry M. Caudill
For more than a century the southern Appalachians have
fascinated Americans. An immense literature about the region has
accumulated and the territory has been studied by innumerable state and
federal agencies. At least five presidents--Lincoln, Theodore
Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and John Kennedy--have
toyed with the idea of reforming highland life and institutions through
programs of "regional uplift".
The Mountaineers achieved their first literary notice in a
tale by Edgar Allen Poe, who referred to them as a "fierce
and uncouth race of men". They continued without further
notice by authors, congressmen, and presidents until Fort Sumter.
Most of the huge territory lay in parts of states dominated by
secessionist sympathizers: Virginia, Kentucky, Maryland, Georgia,
Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Alabama. North and
South alike assumed that the mountaineers would join their lowland
brethren in defense of slavery and states rights but Poe's "fierce
and uncouth race" surprised all hands. A solid majority of
them gave resolute support to the Union, volunteering a hundred thousand
marksmen into the ranks of Northern infantry, Jackson County, Kentucky,
sent all its able-bodied men within the age-limits accepted by
recruiters.
Commanders whose armies fought across and amid the
Appalachians were profoundly disturbed by the deep and intractable
poverty into which most of the population had fallen within three
generations after Boone blazed the Wilderness Road. Their reports
alluded to the destitution again and again, and in 1863 Lincoln assured
General O. O. Howard, chief of his Freedmen and Refugees Bureau, that
federal assistance would be extended to the stricken region as soon as
the war ended. They were, said Lincoln, "a people whom the
world has long passed by and forgotten".
Lincoln was assassinated and the hill people were forgotten
for another generation. The first Roosevelt pondered a proposal to
settle them on federal lands in the West, with their highland acres
added to the national forests. Thirty years later his cousin,
Franklin Delano, saved the people from death by famine through relief
grub and work programs.
On the eve of Pearl Harbor a new proposal to settle a half million
mountaineers on western lands surfaced in Washington.
Senator George Norris and F.D.R. had teamed up with a frightened
Congress to create the Tennessee Valley Authority in 1933, surely one of
the boldest and most exciting efforts at regional betterment ever
undertaken by a government. The territory affected by this gigantic
enterprise lay entirely within the "Appalachian system," a territory
then eroded and wasted almost to bed-rock, the people as dispirited and
penniless as any who ever lived beneath the stars and stripes.
Between 1863 and 1960 the hills were industrialized in a titanic
convulsion that saw the world turn to coal as its prime source of
power. Coal heated houses and office building, energized mills, ships,
trains, power-plants, and factories. The valleys filled with multitudes
of people eager to dig the black carbon lumps. The, with equal
suddenness and caprice, the world forsook coal. More "modern" fuels
were embraced and the wheels were turned by hydro-electricity, oil, and
gas. Coal tipples and coal miners were jettisoned into rusty idleness.
When John Kennedy campaigned in West Virginia 1960 he was shocked by the
spectacle of a state--indeed an entire geographic region--that appeared
to be dying.
Out of Kennedy's dismay and Johnson's laudable concept of a "Great
Society" were spawned the Appalachian Regional Development Act of 1965
and the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. These enactments and their
"programs" then entered the southern Highlands along ideological trails
blazed long before by the Freedmen and Refugees Bureau, the New Deal and
its hydra-headed relief and labor projects, and the Tennessee Valley
Authority.
Jim Branscome knows the Southern Appalachians as few do. As a
working journalist he has spent a decade investigating and reporting on
the region's untouchables. He and the tiny Mountain Eagle (published
every Thursday, at Whitesburg, Kentucky) have told all who would listen
about the people who create and perpetuate Appalachia's social and
economic catastrophes.
Branscome wrote about the corruption of the United Mine Workers of
America while Tony Boyle and his murderous henchmen were safely
ensconced in their Washington citadel. He detailed the ruinous
transformation that had cover over the TVA and the agency's policies
that had impoverished a hundred thousand coal miners, bankrupted scores
of mining companies, turned Appalachian mines into deadly sinks, ruined
whole mountain ranges, and layered the Authority's lakes with gigantic
flows of mud. He revealed it for what it has become--an immense,
government-owned power corporation whose directors seem often so
nineteenth century-like that, by comparison, Sam Insull would be
progressive, constructive, honest, and humane.
Similarly, Branscome reported frankly
and fully the few tiny triumphs and the many failures of Great Society
reform programs--VISTA, Job Corps, Community Action, and all the other
hastily conceived and grotesquely executed efforts to aid the Appalachia
of poverty without disturbing the rich Appalachia of coal, oil, gas,
railways, and pipelines.
If we lived in a logical world Jim Branscome would be a member of the
TVA's board of directors. Unfortunately the world is both illogical and
corrupt and, in consequence, his voice is not heard in official circles.
He has told a story the "established press" has, to its shame,
neglected to tell. Concisely and forcefully he has traced the history
and development of federal efforts to ease Appalachian poverty and
political weakness. He has described the failures at community, county,
state, and national levels that made these undertakings essential in the
first place, and the bureaucratic and legislative bumblings that
thwarted them of their purpose.
Southern and central Appalachia are
incredibly rich in resources that include a favorable geographic
location, abundant rainfall, a varied an fast-growing forest, immense
coal, oil, and gas deposits and important quantities of mica, gypsum,
talc, limestone, iron-ore, gneiss, grahamite, marble, and commercial
clays. yet it is the poorest part of America. The nation's five
poorest counties are in eastern Kentucky.
Have U.S. efforts to help the region
realize its true potential been a plus or a minus? It is hard to say
because steps forward are accompanied by steps backward. Certain it is
that developments in fuel markets mean infinitely more to most of the
people than all the bureaucratic machinations and presidential
decision-making put together.
Reading Branscome's analysis I was reminded of an observation made a
few years ago by a retired official in the Interior Department .
Between puffs on his pipe he allowed that, "Doing something in Washing
to help the people down in the hills is sort of like making love through
an inner-spring mattress. The planning baffling. The execution is
painful. The results are frustrating, and both parties are left in
despair."
Harry M. Caudill
Writer and Field Foundation Fellow |