Ironically, the human and environmental destruction levied on Appalachia by surface mining was fed by a public agency created during the Depression to conserve the land and to promote economic recovery. The energy development policies of the TVA in the 1950s spurred demand for cheaper coal at a time when surface-mined coal was just beginning to enter the market. The TVA was established in 1933 to coordinate flood control, reforestation, and economic development along the Tennessee River and its tributaries, but by World War II the agency had moved away from many of its initial efforts at human development, conservation, and regional planning in favor of a policy that concentrated on the generation of cheap electric power for domestic use and industrial expansion. Anticipating future power demands in growing urban centers along the river and pressed by the cold war concerns of the Atomic Energy Commission for more power to fuel the uranium enrichment plants at Oak Ridge and Paducah, the TVA constructed seven of the world’s largest coal-fired power plants between 1949 and 1953 and created a huge market for cheap, locally produced coal.
The generation of electricity from coal rather than from hydroelectric facilities on TVA dams reflected the public utility’s commitment to cheap power as the centerpiece of its survival strategy in the conservative political environment of the 1950s. Armed with the development of new technologies that allowed for the efficient burning of low-grade coal, the TVA turned to lower-quality, surface-mined coal to fire its new generators. Although dirtier and often higher in sulfur content, surface-mined coal from Appalachia and western Kentucky could be delivered to the TVA furnaces at a fraction of the cost of deep-mined coal, and agency buyers quickly signed long-term contracts with the small, nonunion, and independent coal firms that had begun to strip the hills. The TVA’s cheap-power policy inspired other power companies to modernize their furnaces and to shift to the burning of low-cost coal rather than other fuels. This trend not only increased the amount of sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere, adding to future environmental problems from acid rain, but effectively revolutionized the steam coal market and further spurred the production of surface-mined coal throughout central Appalachia. By the end of the decade, the TVA itself had purchased the mining rights to almost 100,000 acres of coal in eastern Kentucky and east Tennessee, and power plants and other consumers across the Midwest had turned to burning cheap, surface-mined fuel.58 Thus the agency that had been created to conserve the soil and improve quality of life through cooperative regional planning contributed both directly and indirectly to the further desolation of the mountains.
Evidence of the tragic consequences of the TVA’s cheap-power policy came in 1957, when disastrous floods swept the central Appalachian coalfields. Following a week of almost steady rain, streams in southern West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and southwest Virginia roared out of their banks on January 29–30, 1957, inundating houses, stores, churches, and schools and killing fourteen people. As much as three inches of rain fell on the area in a twenty-four-hour period. Damage was estimated in the millions of dollars, and President Eisenhower declared the region a federal disaster area. The town of Pound, Virginia, was overwhelmed by twenty feet of water, and in the cities of Pikeville and Hazard, Kentucky, water reached the ceilings of Main Street stores. Rescue boats sailed over the tops of city streetlights. Rural roads were washed away, and deposits of sediment and piles of rocks and splintered trees ruined bottomland fields.59
The mountains had witnessed winter and spring “tides” before, but never with the destruction and loss of life of the 1957 floods. Strip mining and logging had ravaged much of the countryside in the most severely devastated counties, and now there was little vegetation on the hillsides to absorb the water from heavy rains. Surface mining, for example, had shredded tens of thousands of acres of land in Buchanan County, Virginia. “A bird’s-eye view of it,” wrote Harry Caudill, “reveals marooned and isolated farmhouses perched disconsolately on high pillars of dirt and stone. Towering high walls make access to them impossible. Much of the county’s total land surface has been stripped of vegetation and reduced to jumbles of stone and gullying spoil-banks.”60 Similar conditions existed in neighboring Wise County, Virginia, and Harlan, Letcher, Perry, and Pike counties in Kentucky. A subsequent assessment of the floods by the U.S. Forest Service blamed “poor logging practices” and the “effect of strip-mining” for the increased erosion and sedimentation that had caused the streams to clog and to “have less capacity to carry runoff.” The effects of strip mining “were clearly evident during and after the storm,“ and in the future, the report warned, “the conditions of the area will continue to get worse.”61
The winter floods of 1957 brought a growing clamor for solutions to the human and environmental tragedies in Appalachia. Journalists, educators, and state and local politicians had called for action to alleviate the economic plight of the region for years, but there was little consensus on the causes of Appalachia’s poverty or on the resolution of its complex problems. For some, the region’s “backwardness” was a result of geographic isolation and insufficient development of modern patterns of transportation and industry. For others, the problem lay in the culture of the mountain people themselves, a culture, they argued, that preserved anachronistic values and prevented people from lifting themselves out of poverty. One view looked to the development of the region’s physical infrastructure, its highways, water systems, and industrial parks. The other sought to uplift mountain residents through education and job training. Both perspectives favored the further integration of Appalachia into the economy and society of the rest of the nation. Both tended to define Appalachia’s problems as a lack of resources for development, either physical or cultural, rather than as the result of structural inequalities and the politics of development itself.
To resolve Appalachia’s distress, many educators and human service professionals, like those associated with the regional CSM, favored a broad program of educational enrichment and job training to help attract industries to rural communities and to enhance the success of Appalachian migrants in the cities. Modernizing Appalachian culture had been a goal of missionaries and educators in the region for decades, and the annual conference of the CSM provided a venue for leaders from across Appalachia to discuss the need for better schools, health services, improved recreation, and economic growth. At the heart of the council’s “program for the mountains” was the idea of “cooperative community development,” a strategy that had underpinned much of the benevolent work of private foundations, settlement schools, and some other educational institutions in Appalachia since the turn of the century. Combining elements of the progressive faith in science, education, efficient planning, and public-private partnerships, this philosophy challenged regional leaders to develop the human capacity of the mountains and to work together to find collaborative solutions to community problems.
Under the leadership of Perley F. Ayer, a rural sociologist from New Hampshire who assumed the role of executive director in 1951, the CSM became the largest organization of human service professionals within Appalachia and the leading proponent of human and community development strategies for regional improvement. During the 1950s, the council held workshops for teachers and urban social workers, sponsored tours of the region, and, after the 1957 floods, pressed state leadership across the region to undertake assessment and strategic planning initiatives for their mountain counties. Throughout its work, the council emphasized the importance of education, the capacity of the individual to overcome cultural and social barriers, the value of volunteerism in the community, and the role of schools as community-building institutions.62
Whereas members of the CSM focused their efforts on regional cooperation and on improving education, state and local leaders usually advocated economic growth through the expansion of industry and the identification of new uses and new markets for coal, timber, and other natural resources. Many business leaders and local politicians believed that the mountains had been victimized by the underdevelopment of resources that could generate more