The mixed legacy of growth in Appalachia has also left its mark on the land and on human connections to the land. As a result of the rapid expansion of modern technologies after World War II, difficult terrain could be breached to promote commerce with the larger world. Streams could be relocated, rivers dammed, and hillsides developed for housing, recreation, and business use. Most of all, entire mountains and ranges of mountains could be leveled to extract their mineral resources and to create a landscape more suitable for manufacturing and retail expansion. Appalachian residents had always used the land for survival, and their knowledge of and intimacy with the land were based upon their use of it. Although some mountain residents may have developed a spiritual relationship to the land and an appreciation for the natural environment, their connection with the place was more often linked to family and community ties rather than recognition of the relationship between their way of life and the landscape around them. Like other Americans, most Appalachians were quick to turn to more convenient lifestyles when the products of a modern economy expanded their choices. The growth-based economy, however, forever altered the landscape itself and physically separated families from the old intimacy with the land that had provided sustenance and meaning to life. Having failed to learn the environmental lessons of resource overdevelopment at the turn of the twentieth century, we continued to see the mountains (just as we saw mountain culture) as a barrier to progress, something to be overcome and its resources tapped in the name of growth.
The tendency to blame the land, environment, and culture of the mountains for the problems of Appalachia obscures our ability to understand the complexity of political and economic struggles within the region and diminishes our national dialogue on the meaning of progress and the most appropriate path to development. Many popular images continue to set off Appalachia against the rest of America. In doing so, they deny the presence of class and ideological differences that divide Appalachian communities. Many public policies are still based on the naive assumptions that poverty can be seriously addressed without structural change, that growth is good for everyone, that urban lifestyles and institutions are to be emulated, and that local and regional markets are not important in a global economy. Such assumptions weaken the democratic conversation about the goal of government and the quality of our lives. Faith in the ability of growth-based development alone to eliminate poverty, moreover, effectively disfranchises poorer people and rural people and further displaces our collective responsibilities for the land and for each other onto the vagaries of the market and onto the best intentions of bureaucrats. The development process is a value-laden political act, complete with winners and losers. As such, it necessitates public debate, challenging the way we understand progress and the way we see ourselves.
Much of the story of Appalachia describes the exploitation of the region at the hands of outside economic interests. Considerable research since the 1960s has documented the extent of absentee landownership and corporate control of the Appalachian economy, but the development faith is not just something that has been imposed on the mountains from outside. As the pages that follow reveal, leaders from within Appalachia were among the first to call for government intervention programs to promote development and reduce poverty. Mountain residents themselves have been among the strongest advocates of growth, and they have engaged in some of the most callous exploitation of the land and of their fellow citizens that has befallen the region. If Appalachia’s struggle with development has been uneven and has failed to meet our expectations and dreams, it is because Appalachia’s problems are not those of Appalachia alone. They will not be solved in isolation from the dilemmas facing the rest of modern society. For that reason, we are all engaged in the struggle to define the good life in the mountains. We are all Appalachians.
1
RICH LAND — POOR PEOPLE
“What crops do they raise in this country?” the officer asked. . . .
“Youngens,” she said. . . . “Youngens fer th wars and them factories.”
—Harriette Arnow, The Dollmaker (1954)
There was more than a little sarcasm in the reply of Harriette Arnow’s fictional character to the soldier whose car she had stopped on a Kentucky mountain road during World War II. The upper Cumberland area, like most of Appalachia, was still an overwhelmingly rural place, rich in natural beauty and the cultural heritage of the frontier, but it had become a paradox on the American landscape, a rich land inhabited by a poor people. A region of small farms and scattered villages, Appalachia had been swept up by the tidal surge of industrialization that engulfed the United States in the years following the Civil War and had experienced unprecedented growth and economic change. Overwhelmed by an expanding market economy that altered land use patterns, social relationships, and the meaning of work, residents of the region were propelled into a new world of technology, science, and consumer capitalism. When the boom times gave way to depression, much of the old Appalachia survived, but much had fundamentally changed.
The great hillsides of hardwood timber, once among the most diverse and valuable forests in the world, had been cut over and denuded. The thick seams of coal, copper, mica, and other minerals had been sucked from the hills and shipped to the furnaces and factories of the urban Northeast. Exposed and gouged, the soil on the hillsides had eroded and washed down, and many of the streams, once clear and free flowing, were filled with sediment and the refuse of men and machines. As Appalachia’s human and natural resources were tapped to feed the needs of a modernizing nation, the small mountain homesteads that once nurtured large families through diverse forest agriculture had given way to hundreds of little mining camps and mill villages, company towns fed by company stores and governed by company rules. Thousands of families left their farms and migrated to the new industrial camps or to textile towns in the foothills of the region. Along with other rural Americans, mountain people were drawn to the promise of a better way of life, but the new economic order proved to be a shallow cup. The wealth generated by growth and by what mountain people called “public work” largely flowed out of the region, leaving much of the land devastated and many of its inhabitants dependent and poor.1
Rural mountain residents had always been close to the land, although that closeness was reflected more in strong ties to family and place than to any ethic to preserve the land. Hard work and large families were important not only to survival on the land but to shaping a way of life around it. Preindustrial mountain farms were family farms run by cooperation and by a strong sense of responsibility to each other. As a result, the extended family became a key social institution in the mountains, affecting not only the traditional economy but almost every aspect of mountain culture as well. With industrialization, the family and the land became even more important to survival. Family linkages provided opportunities for employment, migration, and fellowship, and working with the land continued to provide the primary means of survival, even though the ownership and use of the land had changed considerably.
When the collapse of the first great industrial boom came in the late 1920s, unemployed miners and mill hands struggled to return to the land and to an earlier way of life. Displaced industrial workers moved in with kin on smaller, marginal farms that had been saved from outside buyers at the turn of the century. Never highly productive units, especially in a growing national market and without the productive use of the woodlands, these overcrowded homesteads were even less able to sustain the new population. In Knox County, Kentucky, for example, over a thousand families who had left earlier in the century to