The idea that Appalachia deserved special attention as an internal example of the third world received further validation the following year with the publication of Caudill’s Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area. Probably the most widely read book ever written about Appalachia, Caudill’s passionate account of the human and environmental devastation wreaked by the coal industry on his native eastern Kentucky was a cry from the exploited heartland for government assistance to a desperate people. In a mixed narrative that combined images of cultural degeneracy and corporate abuse, Caudill decried the economic, political, and social blight that had settled over the mountains and called for the creation of a southern mountain authority, patterned after the TVA, to oversee regional development. “Idleness and waste are antipathetic to progress and growth,” he wrote, “and, unless the Cumberland Plateau is to remain an anchor dragging behind the rest of America, it—and the rest of the Southern Appalachians—must be rescued while there is yet time.”30
Caudill quickly became a popular and eloquent spokesperson for the region, spreading the story of Appalachian distress on television and before congressional committees. Journalists by the dozens visited his Whitesburg, Kentucky, home and, after absorbing the Caudill “treatment” over tea, were granted a personal tour of decaying coal camps and scarred hillsides. One Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter, Homer Bigart, wrote a moving series for the New York Times following his pilgrimage to Whitesburg that depicted a wasted landscape and a people so poor that children ate dirt out of the chinks of chimneys to ease their hunger.31 The series caught the attention of President Kennedy and helped to seal his commitment to antipoverty legislation for the 1964 Congress.
By the end of 1963, the image of Appalachia as a region of endemic poverty had settled once again in the popular mind.32 Regional scholars and policy makers alike utilized the image to build their cases for federal funding for uplift and development programs. Journalists and politicians outside the mountains exploited regional economic distress to gather public support for a national crusade on poverty. Ironically, within the mountains the idea of Appalachia as a problem region was not widely recognized except among academics and social reformers. The word “Appalachia” itself was seldom used by mountain residents, except in reference to the town of that name in southwest Virginia. Interestingly, as the region came to be identified with national poverty, many among the mountain middle class rejected the application of the term “Appalachia” to their own community, preferring to associate it with communities far removed from their own. For observers in the rest of the country, however, Appalachia was more than an embarrassment. It had become part of a national problem.
The swell of media attention on Appalachia in the early 1960s was part of a rising wave of concern for the country’s economy. The boom times of the 1950s had begun to falter a bit in the last years of that decade. Although Senator Kennedy had promised to get the nation “moving again” during the presidential campaign, the country’s economy continued to struggle throughout the first two years of the Kennedy administration. Unemployment remained unacceptably high, hovering around 7 percent, and in May 1962 the stock market fell to its lowest point since the inauguration. Unemployment and applications for public assistance continued to rise throughout Appalachia, where joblessness was twice the national average.
During the summer of 1962, desperate families in central Appalachia received an additional blow when the UMWA announced that it was revoking the cherished health cards on which many depended for medical care. The UMWA had established its Health and Retirement Funds to provide free health care and other benefits to miners and their families, and in 1954 the union had built ten state-of-the-art Miners Memorial hospitals in southern West Virginia, Virginia, and eastern Kentucky that provided medical care for a large percentage of families in the area. Now, however, declining revenues in its Health and Retirement Funds made it impossible for the union to sustain benefits for miners whose companies were no longer paying royalties into the funds. Most of the operators who defaulted on their forty-cent-perton royalty payment to the funds were small truck mine owners who had signed “sweetheart contracts” with the UMWA, allowing them to pay wages below the national contract. Declining coal markets in the early 1960s and competition from larger mechanized mines, however, led many of the struggling truck mines to cease their contributions to the funds. Miners in eastern Kentucky had accepted lower wages, but the loss of their family health cards was too much. They responded with a time-honored “wildcat strike” despite the union’s objections.
By September roving bands of pickets were moving from one small mine to another, attempting to shut down delinquent operations. When the UMWA announced in October that it intended to sell or close its hospitals in Kentucky and other Appalachian states, the frustration of out-of-work miners boiled over. The roving pickets movement soon degenerated into class warfare, with jobless families on one side and coal operators, businesspeople, and local government officials on the other. At times nearly five hundred miners caravanned to a small truck mine only to be dispersed by state police, armed company guards, and the local sheriff, who in Perry County was himself a coal operator. Arson, shootings, beatings, and the dynamiting of homes, trucks, tipples, and equipment soon forced Governor Combs to intervene in search of a truce, but only the heavy snow and icy roads of December quieted the violence.33
The lethargic national economy and rising labor unrest in the coalfields prompted President Kennedy to look for ways to stimulate business growth. A fiscal conservative who disliked deficit spending, the president settled on an across-the-board tax cut. Before announcing his decision, however, he asked Walter Heller, chair of his Council of Economic Advisors, to look into recent media estimates of the number of poor people in America. Kennedy anticipated opposition to tax reduction from liberal Democrats in Congress, and he was aware that a tax cut would leave him vulnerable to criticism that he was indifferent to poverty at a time of increasing popular concern for the poor. Prior to this time, poverty had not been a focal point for policy discussions in the Kennedy White House. Like many Americans, the president assumed that a rising economic tide would steadily reduce the size of the low-income population. The domestic programs of the New Frontier had concentrated on generating growth rather than on fighting poverty. As a tireless reader with a strong sense of social obligation to the disadvantaged, however, Kennedy was sensitive to the intellectual currents of his time, especially to suggestions that his administration was not meeting the country’s problems.34
In January 1963 the president read Dwight MacDonald’s lengthy review in the New Yorker of several recent studies of poverty, including Michael Harrington’s The Other America. MacDonald found ample evidence of persistent poverty within the United States, and he lambasted the Kennedy administration for neglecting “our invisible poor.” Ignoring the plight of the disadvantaged not only made us “feel uncomfortable,” he chided, but also challenged the general prosperity of the nation. Hidden in the midst of an otherwise rich country, the very poor could no longer be helped by economic expansion alone but must have government assistance lest they become permanently alienated from the rest of the society.35 Troubled by MacDonald’s criticism, Kennedy encouraged Heller to begin to identify antipoverty strategies that might be included in the domestic agenda for his 1964 reelection campaign.
The president’s tax cut languished in Congress during 1963, but his request to Heller generated considerable interest among a small group of Kennedy advisors. Heller invited other economists from the Council of Economic Advisors, including Robert Lampman and Kermit Gordon, to meet for informal Saturday discussions with colleagues from the Bureau of the Budget and the Labor, Justice, and Health, Education, and Welfare departments. Most of these advisors were economists like Heller, trained in the postwar Keynesian philosophy of government investment in the economy to sustain growth, but some, like Daniel Moynihan, were social scientists who believed in government intervention to rectify social