Uneven Ground. Ronald D Eller

it would appeal to rural whites in the South as well as to blacks and suburban liberals.³⁷

      As the Heller group began its meetings in the White House, spring rains in the mountains once again brought Appalachia to national attention. In mid-March 1963 back-to-back floods once more struck the Cumberland Plateau, causing rivers to pour out of their banks and displacing twenty-five thousand people from their homes. Coming within eight days of each other, the heavy rains caused more than $80 million in damage across fifty counties in the heart of the region. Although the work of the informal interagency committee on Appalachia expedited flood rehabilitation efforts among federal agencies, editorials throughout the region criticized the inadequate federal response. “The floods that are tearing the economic life out of the mountains are the direct and inevitable result of fifty years of federal neglect,” wrote the Louisville Courier-Journal. “Our people and our economy are tired, worn out, exhausted,” lamented the Whitesburg (KY) Mountain Eagle. “We do not have the money, the energy, or the willpower to dig ourselves out.”³⁸

      On March 29, 1963, Governor Bert Combs and his staff met with Ed McDermott, chief of the federal Office of Emergency Planning, and other White House aides to discuss specific actions on postflood problems. Along with a number of proposals for immediate action, Combs again emphasized the difficulty of “the dual emergency of Appalachia—the long standing economic emergency now compounded by the natural disaster emergency.” He also pointed out the proposal of the Appalachian governors for a special, comprehensive, and long-term Appalachian regional development program. Later the same day, McDermott met with the president, who expressed interest in the idea of an Appalachian program and agreed to add the subject to the agenda of an April 9 cabinet meeting originally scheduled to review the ARA. As a result of the president’s decision to include the special focus on the Appalachian problem, the Appalachian governors were invited to attend the cabinet meeting.³⁹

      Over the next week, John Whisman and Governor William Barron of West Virginia, who had succeeded Combs as chair of the Council of Appalachian Governors, coordinated arrangements for the meeting with the governors and their staffs. On the afternoon of April 9, five Appalachian governors—Combs of Kentucky, Barron of West Virginia, Tawes of Maryland, Frank Clement of Tennessee, and Albertis Harrison of Virginia—along with representatives of the governors of North Carolina and Pennsylvania, met with the president, his cabinet, and a number of agency heads in the Cabinet Room of the White House. Also in attendance were presidential aide Lee White, Walter Heller of the Council of Economic Advisors and the informal antipoverty discussion group, and Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., undersecretary of commerce.⁴⁰

      The president was delayed by a ceremony in the Rose Garden granting honorary citizenship to Winston Churchill. As those assembled awaited his arrival, Commerce Secretary Luther Hodges asked the other cabinet secretaries to begin reporting on the effectiveness of their departments’ programs in Appalachia. The theme was one that the governors had heard many times before. Labor Secretary William Wirts, for example, lamented the inability of job training programs under the Area Redevelopment Act and the Manpower Development and Training Act to alleviate the long-term problems of the region. Unless they could identify new kinds of businesses to receive trainees, he pointed out, Appalachian people would continue to be trained for jobs that were simply not there. Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman added that overall regional planning was desperately needed, but he could offer no suggestions for developing a comprehensive regional plan.⁴¹

      In the middle of Freeman’s remarks, President Kennedy arrived and assumed leadership of the meeting. The president welcomed the governors and reemphasized his deep concern for the economic problems of the Appalachian region. He noted that it had been a primary goal of his administration to reduce the immediate distress in the mountains and to help “build a solid economic basis on which the region could prosper.” But unemployment remained unacceptably high, and federal efforts through the ARA and other programs were “not making much progress in the sense of really biting into the long term unemployment.” Consequently, the president announced, he would take the following actions: First, he would direct his department heads to speed up current programs affecting Appalachia and to include more programs for the Appalachian region in their fiscal year 1965 budgets. Second, he would establish within the Department of Commerce a joint federal-state committee on the Appalachian region to develop a comprehensive program for regional economic development that would report back to him by January 1, 1964. This program would include recommendations for improving transportation facilities; providing education and job training; conducting research; developing water, mineral, and forest resources; and attracting tourists. Finally, he would seek to create an Appalachian development institute to serve as a nonfederal center for research and training on the economic problems of the region.⁴²

      After completing his remarks, Kennedy moved to a chair directly across from Combs while members of the cabinet and the governors discussed his proposals. Secretary Freeman resumed his comments, but everyone was watching the president as he pulled a sheet of note-paper from the table and wrote something. He then folded the paper into a little airplane and sent it gliding toward Combs, landing in front of the governor. The note read, “Bert, what do you really want?” Combs seized the opportunity and, in his formal remarks to the group, commented that the creation of a permanent federal-state regional agency would be the most important product of the president’s committee. “The more I come up here [to Washington],” he explained, “the more I believe we need a handle to work with. You cannot go to Commerce and then to Agriculture and then to HEW, and then go to all of these other agencies and get a great deal done unless you live up here. And I just don’t have the time to stay up here.” The other governors concurred.⁴³

      Kennedy’s choice to head the joint federal-state committee, the President’s Appalachian Regional Commission (PARC), was Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., who had campaigned with the president in West Virginia during the crucial 1960 primary. Once informed of his appointment to chair the commission, Roosevelt outlined the steps that he would take to achieve his goal. He asked each governor and each cabinet secretary to appoint a representative to the commission, which would begin its work with a tour of the state capitals to gather information and ideas for the development of the region. To assist him in drafting the final report, he selected John L. Sweeney from the Department of Commerce as executive director of the commission and appointed John Whisman to represent the states as executive secretary. Interestingly, he invited no members of the informal White House antipoverty group to serve on the commission.