As a result of the limited growth of manufacturing in the region and declining employment opportunities in the mines and mills, unemployment increased dramatically throughout Appalachia. Official unemployment rates for the region hovered at almost twice the national average, and in the coalfields rates of three and four times that of the rest of the nation were common. Eastern Kentucky averaged close to 20 percent unemployment throughout the decade, and this did not include the thousands of individuals who had used up their unemployment benefits and simply dropped out of the labor force. Many more worked part time or in jobs not covered by unemployment compensation.
Those who could find jobs often earned low wages and poor benefits. Annual per capita income in Appalachia averaged only $1,400 in 1960, more than a third lower than the national average, and many rural counties averaged less than $1,000. In Appalachian Kentucky the average annual per capita income was only $841. One in three families in Appalachia lived below the national poverty level of $3,000, in comparison with one in five families nationally. Almost 60 percent of families in Appalachian Kentucky, 42 percent of those in Appalachian Virginia, 40 percent of those in Appalachian North Carolina, and 39 percent of those in Appalachian Tennessee fell below the poverty level.46
Low per capita income reflected a labor force that was largely uneducated. Despite decades of industrial development, schools in Appalachia were among the poorest in the nation. Only one in three Appalachians in 1960 over the age of twenty-five had finished high school, and almost 47 percent had less than an eighth-grade education. Only 17 percent in Kentucky had completed high school, 23 percent in Virginia, and 29 percent in North Carolina.47 Thousands of mountain children, especially in rural districts, were educated in graying, one- or two-room schoolhouses. Many lacked running water, central heat, and indoor toilets. School districts were often the largest employers in rural counties, and the schools became the political fiefdoms of local power brokers. Jobs as teachers, secretaries, and maintenance workers were doled out according to patronage rather than individual qualifications. Teachers were often uncertified, facilities allowed to deteriorate, and books and instructional materials scarce. Per pupil expenditures for education in Appalachia were about half those in the rest of the country.48 Levies on local property provided the bulk of financial support for the schools, but per capita assessments on property in the mountains averaged 38 percent less than comparable national assessments.49
Joblessness, low income, and poor education were reflected in depressed living standards throughout the region. At a time when suburban middle-class families were enjoying new homes with washing machines, televisions, showers, telephones, and other modern conveniences, many Appalachian families survived in aging houses with few amenities in rural areas or deteriorating company towns. At least 26 percent of Appalachian homes surveyed in the 1960 census needed “major repairs,” and 7.5 percent were “in such a dilapidated condition that they endangered the health and safety of the families,” more than one and a half times the national average. The best housing conditions were to be found in the metropolitan areas of the region, and the worst in the rural areas and neglected coal camps. Here almost one out of four homes had basic deficiencies in construction and plumbing, and one out of ten was found to be dilapidated. Almost 60 percent of the housing units in eastern Kentucky lacked indoor plumbing, 57 percent in Appalachian Virginia, and nearly 50 percent in western North Carolina. The median value of such housing was 27.7 percent below the national average.50
At the turn of the century, mountain families had traded the simple but relatively independent life of the family farm for dependence on a wage income in mines, mill villages, and other forms of public work. When those jobs disappeared, that dependence shifted to the state and federal governments as public welfare programs stepped in to prevent starvation and destitution. Federal relief programs of one kind or another supported almost half of the mountain population in the 1930s, but the deepening economic crisis of the 1950s further expanded welfare rolls and altered the fundamental character of dependence. During the Depression, public relief was viewed as a temporary measure that provided support until jobs opened again in the private sector. Except for Social Security, which extended benefits to the aged and disabled, the majority of New Deal relief strategies were work-related programs designed to provide assistance in return for labor on public projects. Most of these programs disappeared during the war, as war mobilization and an expanding national economy created new jobs.
By the 1950s, however, after three decades of declining job opportunities, many Appalachian families lost hope of ever finding work in their own communities, and an increasing number reluctantly turned to public assistance for survival. State governments attempted to respond to rising joblessness in their mountain counties by broadening qualifications for state-administered programs for the poor. Thousands of desperate families applied for disability benefits and Aid to Families with Dependent Children. In the coalfields retired union miners and their widows welcomed small pensions from the UMWA Health and Retirement Funds, while nonunion and middle-aged miners, unable to find employment anywhere, submitted disability claims for old injuries or new illnesses. On the first of each month, county seats and rural commodity distribution centers bustled with long lines of haggard men waiting to receive surplus food. A family of two adults and one or more children with a monthly income of $130 or less could receive twenty pounds of flour, ten pounds of cornmeal, nine pounds of rice, four pounds of butter, and ten pounds of cheese on which to sustain themselves.51
The new welfare system became a way of life for some mountain residents, who felt powerless to change their situation. A few justified their dependence by arguing that they had earned the benefits during earlier working years and were now entitled to the grants. Others were ashamed to be on the dole but believed that they had no other choice. Although government programs and handouts never reached most of the region’s poor, the rush to claim public assistance gave rise to the image of the “welfare malingerer” who searched for ways to falsify symptoms of illness to qualify for assistance. But most welfare recipients were desperate, and they saw the government grants as just another way to survive. “Nothing in the history of the mountain people,” wrote eastern Kentucky lawyer and historian Harry Caudill, “had conditioned them to receive such grants with gratitude or to use them with restraint. In a land in which huge corporations and their friends on judicial bench and in legislative hall had reduced the ordinary citizen to a status little better than that of a mere tenant-by-sufferance in his own home, the mountaineer had nurtured a cynicism toward government at all levels. The handouts were speedily recognized as a lode from which dollars could be mined more easily than from any coal seam.”52
It was perhaps inevitable that such a system would feed the already corrupt and feudal political structure in the mountains. Poor people easily fell victim to local politicians who controlled the distribution of commodities and monthly welfare checks. Mountain politics had always been paternalistic and family oriented, and when the big coal and timber corporations injected greater economic self-interest into the system, the old ways simply blended with the new political order. Years of life in company towns left many mountain residents dependent on the companies for their income and housing and thus subservient to company interests at the polls. As the outside corporations abandoned direct involvement in local politics and lost interest in the company towns, power in these feudal counties reverted to local families and to the political machines that sustained them. New Deal work programs were a boon to the local elite, who used federal relief programs to ensure their control over county politics. Depression-era politicians throughout the region held out the promise of a public job in return for the votes of the applicant and his or her kin.
The expansion of welfare programs in the 1950s revived this powerful patronage system and helped to broaden the power of the political machines. Artful use of public funds could control not only who received food and income for their families but which truck mine operator received a new road up the hollow to his mine and who was employed as a schoolteacher, bus driver, cook, or janitor in the local school. With such economic power, the politicians increased their