Misdeal in Appalachia

THE ATLANTIC

BY HARRY M. CAUDILL

APPALACHIA is a region as large as all Great Britain and the home of fifteen million Americans. Once, long ago, it was green and rich. For years it has been sick and now it is dying, a charity patient of affluent America.

Conscience-ridden by Appalachia’s old and numerous social and economic ills, the federal government has enacted into law the Appalachian Regional Development Act, a program two years in the drafting and hailed by its sponsors as the cure for Appalachia. The act is a grim hoax. It won’t restore Appalachia and its millions of poor to health and hope; more likely it will speed their descent into the depths of despond.

President Kennedy was deeply distressed by the destitution and demoralization lie encountered in West Virginia during the preferential primary in 1960. He created the President’s Appalachian Regional Commission (PARC), to consult with the governors of the eleven states having counties in the Appalachian Mountains and to formulate a regional program calculated to bring prosperity to the jaded highland communities.

There is every reason to believe that President Kennedy sincerely desired to aid the area and that President Johnson has come to share his concern. But both President Johnson and the Congress appear to have assumed that the commission’s recommendations as embodied in the act constitute a comprehensive redevelopment program. The assumption is unfounded, and both the President and the Congress have been sold a bill of shoddy goods.

The President’s Appalachian Regional Commission was headed by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., Undersecretary of Commerce. It held extensive hearings and made every effort to devise a program acceptable to the states involved. Unfortunately, the commission seems to have decided at an early date that gaining acceptance of the program by the governors was more important than finding effective solutions. To placate the governors, some of whom showed little initial enthusiasm for the project, the commission revived the hoary theory of nullification. Each state was authorized to veto any proposal which it deemed unsatisfactory, whether advanced by Washington or by another state. This new partnership arrangement, by which the federal government provides the lion’s share (80 percent) of the money and the state governments (whose historic dereliction brought about most of the trouble) get the lion’s share of the resulting political credit, was hailed by PARC and Appalachian congressmen as a significant advance in state-federal relationships.

The state-veto provision is of doubtful constitutionality. It is unlikely, however, that the veto will have to be invoked, because there is little in the planned program that could arouse the ire of a governor, let alone kindle hope in the thousands of impoverished mountaineers.

The redevelopment scheme produced by PARC is not only bland; it borders on the insignificant. Appalachia is a mammoth island of backwardness, and millions of its people are paupers. Impressive as it may appear to those who have to pay it in taxes, the $1 billion to be spent for the region’s supposed rehabilitation is little more than a drop of aid in a bucket of need.

ROVING reporters and probing television cameras have brought the face of Appalachian misery into every American living room. The bleak hillsides, the gray mining camps, the littered roadsides, the rickety houses, and the tattered, dispirited people have haunted millions. Shocked Americans everywhere have demanded that Appalachia be rescued by the government that found it possible to rescue Europe with the Marshall Plan and to nourish the once desolate Tennessee Valley through the TV A.

What most people may not Suspect is that Appalachia has two faces. They have seen the face of Appalachian poverty. The face of Appalachian affluence has remained discreetly out of view. Absenteeism and anonymity curtain the vast domain of giant corporations which own the region’s wealth.

The nation’s great steel and manufacturing corporations ■—including United States Steel, Inland Steel, Bethlehem Steel, Republic Steel, Jones & Laughlin, and International Harvester — own immense boundaries of coal, oil, gas, limestone, and other minerals, which were bought cheaply from their original owners nearly three quarters of a century ago and have been held ever since at little more than nominal taxation.

State and local taxing officials have bowed to the ancient argument that to impose fair levies on the extractive industries “will kill the goose that lays the golden egg.” For example, eight years ago Pittsburgh-Consolidation Goal Corporation sold a part of its eastern Kentucky holdings to a subsidiary of Bethlehem Steel. The purchase price was nearly $16 million, but the assessed valuation of the same property was less than $4 million. These corporations and their allies, the electric utilities, the railroads, the huge real estate corporations, and the coal-mining companies, have a gigantic stake in the status quo.

Not all state and local officials are uncaring about Appalachia’s ills, but in sum the state and local governments are little more than fronts for the absentee corporations which control the economic destinies of the region. The wealth —and it is almost immeasurable —is in “foreign” ownership as surely as are most of the riches of Central America.

The power of the region’s economic overlords was demonstrated in the West Virginia legislature in 1953. Governor William Casey Marland struggled unsuccessfully to persuade the assembly to levy a general fund tax on the privilege of severing coal and other nonrenewable resources from the state. Today an indigent coal miner must pay a tax for the privilege of removing a loaf of bread from a grocer’s shelf, but the world’s largest steel corporation can remove trainloads of coal daily from the Appalachian hills without paying a tax for the right to do so.

Economically, Appalachia is little more than an internal colonial appendage of the industrial North and Midwest. Its plight is worse than that of a banana republic receiving U.S. foreign aid. Its exploitative economy generates much wealth and much poverty. The wealth flows to distant cities; the poverty accumulates at home. Tike Latin America, Appalachia can find no relief for its dilemma until there is far-reaching tax reform and an overhaul of the antiquated political structure. But here the parallel ends. In the Alliance for Progress program, Washington insists on LatinAmerican reform as the price of aid. For Appalachia, Washington has devised a plan of relief that will leave the old pattern unchanged. While the politicians can speak piously of Appalachian rejuvenation, they lack the guts to break the iron vise that grips the territory and its inhabitants. Any basic change in the situation would send wrathful reverberations through the boardrooms of dozens of huge firms.

PARC in its joint labors with the state governments discovered that whatever aimed at effective reorganization of the decrepit economy ran afoul of the entrenched absentee-owned interests and the political power structure which they dominate. So the search turned toward palliatives rattier than remedies. The commission decided to spend $840 million in five years on new highways and access roads. The construction of roads will make it even easier for the nonresident owners to market their minerals and timber. Roads are popular with the mountaineers, too, so more than 80 percent of the money could go for this one item with seemingly happy results.

The remaining funds are allocated at the rate of $41,000,000 for hospital construction, $28,000,000 for hospital maintenance, SI 6,000,000 for the building of vocational schools, $5,000,000 for development of timber stands, $6,000,000 for sewagetreatment systems, $36,500,000 for reclamation of strip-mined lands, and $2,400,000 for administration. None of these measures strikes at the real roots of Appalachia’s troubles. They will not restore health, because the malaise is too critical.

THE redevelopment program is noteworthy because of its glaring omissions. Appalachia is a beautiful country whose major resource is bituminous coal. Its wooded hills are stuffed with the fuel, and mining has shaped its tragic history. Any effort to revitalize this region without giving serious attention to the chaotic coal industry is nonsensical.

Until about 1948 coal was an immense industry, the counterpart of steel. As a mass employer, it was beset by oil and gas and advancing mining technology, and collapsed abruptly. Scores of coal companies were forced out of business in the 1950s, and those remaining in operation were compelled to mechanize to an astonishing degree. Thus hordes of industrial workmen were left stranded in the mining communities. They were men who had been educated for the mines; their communities were poorly built and were without decent schools, hospitals, or roads. In the last decade the jerrybuilt communities have turned into people-sties. The land is scarred with crumbling shacks, tipples, commissaries, and culm heaps. The demoralized people, long dependent on public assistance for their bread, have littered the roadsides and streams with countless automobile hulks and trash dumps, The creeks and rivers are recking sewers.

Many miners earn a subsistence living digging coal with hand tools from thin seams. These “doghole” operations lack the protection of the federal mine safety code and are in a hopeless competition with strip mines and the large mechanized pits. The land is being ripped apart by surface miners. Simply put, the region’s main source of income, its coal industry, borders on anarchy. PARC, however, blandly ignored this salient fact.

The commission might have recommended a giant cleanup campaign for Appalachia; without this, it is impossible to see how the morale of the people can be restored. Children growing up in the incredible squalor of the typical mining community fall naturally into the ruinous, sometimes rapacious habits of their elders. Yet the possibility of clearing away the befouled landscape was not even considered.

The rest of the nation has cause for alarm in the pollution constantly emanating from this tortured region. Some live hundred gigantic culm heaps —man-made mountains of mining wastes and lowgrade coal - containing millions of tons of fuel, are forever burning. Their acrid fumes cloak countless valleys. Simultaneously, billions of gallons of sulfuric acid water drain daily from unsealed mines and open coal auger holes. These nauseous contaminants must be restrained if Appalachia is to shed its grim reputation. A feeble start toward this goal is authorized by the legislation, but the task will be hard, and its ultimate cost will be high indeed.

The zooming American population gives Appalachia a genuine potential as a recreation area, but this potential is being aborted by the ravages of strip mining. New machines, including the giant rubber-tire high lifts now coming on the market, make it certain that surface mines will multiply and that their onslaught upon the land will quicken. A feeble gesture at alleviating this murder of the land is proposed in the legislation, but an amendment to the bill limits reclamation to publicly owned land. Since nearly all the torn earth is privately owned, the section dealing with strip mining is without practical meaning. According to the testimony of Pennsylvania Governor William Scranton, a quarter of a million acres of land in his state have already been ruined. Unless strip mining is prohibited in the near future, the coalfields will be churned into total wreckage.

The coal industry urgently needs a stable yearround market. Such a market is available, but PARC and Congress are ignoring it. The Edison Electric Institute has estimated that SI75 billion will have to be invested in new electricity-generating facilities within twenty years if a power shortage is to be averted. The trend in the electric-power industry is toward large mine-mouth generators, the power going to market by extra-high-voltage transmission lines. Such plants could be constructed in Appalachia with their power output carried cheaply and efficiently into all the great cities east of the Mississippi. The American Public Power Association the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, and a research group sponsored by Lockheed Space and Missile Company have concluded that these plants are feasible and that their product could be profitably marketed. And a small developmental royalty of perhaps one half mill per kilowatt hour produced would plow hundreds of millions of dollars back into regional facilities and services within a decade or two. Thus Appalachia could in large measure finance its own rehabilitation.

Such plants would make cheap power available everywhere in the Appalachian range. The lakes created to provide cooling water for the huge coalburning generators would curtail the ravages of floods, simultaneously supplying water for new industries which the low-cost electricity would attract to the area. As in the Tennessee Valley, the lakes would bring fishermen, sportsmen, and vacationers. The modern trinity — electricity, water, and fertilizer — which has wrought such miracles for the TVA, is sorely needed in the valleys of Appalachia, but PARC and the Congress refused to learn from the nation’s first great and successful attempt to rejuvenate a dying segment of the country.

To its credit, PARC considered electric-power development as a means of aiding the region’s economy and requested congressional authorization for a full-scale power study. The Congress, goaded by lobbyists for the private power interests, moved with alacrity in the opposite direction and expressly prohibited the use of Appalachian Redevelopment Funds for the generation, transmission, or sale of electricity. Thus Appalachia, a land of heavy rainfall and vast coal reserves, is denied the blessings of cheap power — blessings bestowed by federal action on the Tennessee Valley and most of the West.

THE great need of the Appalachian people is education. The schools everywhere are poor, often abominable. Most of America’s one-room schools are in highland counties, 40 percent of them in eastern Kentucky alone. The adult illiteracy rate is appallingly high. Teachers’ salaries average about $1000 per year under national averages, The best teachers moved away years ago. The states refuse to levy severance taxes on minerals for the support of the schools. New generations are born into the old relentless cycle of poor people, poor schools, poor job preparation, poor pay, more poor people. Yet except for a modest appropriation for vocational education, PARC made no recommendations for improvement of the public schools. As matters now stand, the Administration’s pending aid-to-education bill offers more longrange hope to the mountaineers than do PARC’s remedial measures.

Another notion that a serious program would have embraced is the concept of new towns. At least two thirds of the existing housing is dilapidated. Much of the populace is spread out in string towns that stretch up the winding creek valleys. Other tens of thousands are clustered in crumbling coal camps. All these communities lack adequate water supplies, and the available water is generally polluted. In fact, public health officials in one typical eastern Kentucky county recently estimated that 76 percent of the drinking water is “grossly contaminated.” It is practically impossible to service the communities with adequate public facilities. Student transportation alone is a backbreaking burden on the meager school systems. The roads are for the most part ribbons of mud, and if new ones are built, maintenance costs will be extremely high. The people spread out in this fashion years ago when “new ground” farming was their principal livelihood. Now farming is passé. Even the family vegetable garden is disappearing. No valid justification for living on rough and isolated creeks exists at the present time.

By every reasonable standard the people would be far better off living in towns, where the amenities of fife could be supplied at bearable costs. A few well-planned, solidly built, and strongly organized new municipalities would absorb much of the present dwindling population and would bring new talent into the region. Both the Atomic Energy Commission and the Tennessee Valley Authority have had experience in building new cities. Their experience could have been invaluable in any undertaking to organize, house, and service the Appalachian population properly. The “new town” concept was urged upon PARC as an obvious and much-needed remedial measure, but those bold planners wasted no thought upon it.

The provision for building and financing hospitals is a patent absurdity. New hospitals can be built, and under some circumstances funds can be made available for their operation, but existing hospitals cannot be aided. Ten hospitals owned by Appalachian Regional Hospitals, Incorporated, were bought from the United Mine Workers of America’s Health and Welfare Fund with federal money advanced by the Area Redevelopment Administration. This nonprofit corporation has done an excellent job of administering the hospital chain, maintaining superb standards and paying union wages to its employees. It has begun to operate in the black despite a fantastically high charity load. Yet these institutions — the best public facilities in Appalachia — are threatened with extinction for lack of operating capital. The administrators of the Appalachian Regional Development Act will be powerless to aid them. They may be compelled to watch these immensely beneficial hospitals close for lack of funds while simultaneously financing the construction of others.

An effort to obtain an amendment beneficial to satisfactory existing hospitals brought stern admonitions from PARC and congressional sponsors of the act that no changes could be tolerated, not even so much as “a single comma.” However, when it came to another matter, Senator Robert Kennedy of New York was not deterred by such notions. His amendment to add thirteen relatively prosperous New York counties to Appalachia was promptly approved, and by legislative fiat the prosperous inhabitants of comparatively scrubbed upstate New York cities and towns became fellow sufferers with the miserable people of the Cumberland Plateau.

Paradoxically, not all of Appalachia is poor. There are “growth centers"’ within the region which are prosperous by national norms. In these areas — for example, Kingsport, Tennessee—industry has begun to diversify. Bank deposits are high. Schools, hospitals, libraries, and other public facilities and services are good by Appalachian standards. These islands of affluence in a sea of poverty grow as much by attracting people from other parts of America as by drawing highlanders out of the surrounding countryside. A cruel provision in the legislation requires all the development funds to be spent in such a manner as to expedite tine expansion of these fortunate centers of prosperity and growth. The fact that only a relative handful of mountaineers live there did not deter PARC’s planners. The growth of a few small cities will not affect the tens of thousands of people stranded in such abysmal backwaters as Hellier, Kentucky, and Stonega, Virginia.

Sorely needed is a plan of development based on the total environment of Appalachia, a plan that indexes and utilizes all its resources of people, soil, water, timber, and minerals to build a viable economy and a healthy social order for the entire territory. The accentuation of a spotty prosperity will make the rich wealthier still without alleviating the misery of the poor. This is a reversal of American policy in the development of the Tennessee Valley and of our great Western territories. Here is a new national policy which declares that when an American region falls into misfortune, only a few of the people and only a part of the land will be rescued, with the aid going to those who need it least.

What, then, will be the consequence of this loudly trumpeted legislation for putting more than $1 billion of taxpayers’ money into Appalachia? If we ask, in a paraphrase of John Kennedy, not what it will do for us but for our country, the answer has to be a dismal one. The future of Appalachia is bleak indeed. The absentee landlords are pillaging the countryside of its coal, oil, gas, and timber. With the exception of a few counties in Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and North Carolina, little of value is being manufactured anywhere in the huge territory. PARC’s scheme will accelerate the bleeding of resources without relieving the region’s most pressing ills. The hopes of the people have been stirred. Disillusionment is sure to follow. The old people are dying. The young are leaving. The middle-aged subsist on the dole. In the estimation of the corporations that control the resources, most of the inhabitants are simply superfluous. Their lands are worn out. They possess no skills that the nation needs. Perhaps if they are retrained, they, too, will go away and stop bothering the public conscience. Appalachia is becoming a dark island near the heart of America, peopled in large measure by benumbed human relics and totally despoiled of its natural resources.

Perhaps the superhighways the governors, PARC, and Congress have prescribed will bring some tourists to shake their heads sadly over this end result of man’s greed and folly. It has been said that Appalachia, like Rip Van Winkle, slept through an entire age. Its backwoods people went to sleep in the agricultural age and were little disturbed until the dawn of the age of cybernetics.

Perhaps so. In any event, those who had hoped for a meaningful Appalachian development program as far-reaching and revolutionary as was TVA thirty years ago have been bitterly disappointed. Unless Congress takes a new look at its number one trouble spot and unless the American public is aroused as the people of England were aroused over the fate of Wales forty years ago, Appalachia can go back to sleep — the sodden sleep of the impoverished, the embittered, and the hopeless.