Often men were the first family members to leave for the city and the first to want to return home. Mountain men had always enjoyed relative freedom in the workplace, whether in the mines, in the woods, or on the farm, so the more disciplined and regimented environment of the factories and the strange, congested, and fast-paced lifestyle of the cities sometimes caused stress, frustration, and other difficulties with adjustment. Some men compensated for their situation by continuing to participate in traditional mountain male activities such as hunting, fishing, drinking, and gathering to tell stories and jokes, whereas others simply abandoned the city and returned home.
Women, on the other hand, often derived greater rewards from migration and were more reluctant to return to the hard life of the mountains. Unlike Gertie Nevels, the heroine of The Dollmaker who longed to return to nature and the land, many mountain women found their lives much easier as a result of the modern household appliances available in the city and the relative proximity of stores, schools, and neighbors. Not only did their children have greater opportunities for education and health care, they themselves had chances for employment unavailable in the mountains. For the first time in their lives, some mountain women found a degree of economic independence and security that was unknown in Appalachia.
Adjustment to life in the city, however, was not easy for many migrants. Living conditions varied from the cramped and decaying apartment buildings of the ghettos to the rows of working-class bungalows in industrial districts. New arrivals often crowded together with relatives until they could secure jobs and save enough money to set up housekeeping. Some inner-city landlords refused to rent to “hillbillies,” and those who did charged high rents for poor accommodations. In the Uptown slums of Chicago’s north side, for example, as many as seventy thousand Appalachians crowded together in deteriorating brick and gray stone apartment buildings that lined streets cluttered with abandoned cars and littered with trash and broken bottles.24
One West Virginia reporter described the “hostile world” that awaited mountain families in the Windy City. “Many migrants arrive in Chicago with only a worn out car,” he wrote. Needing cash to pay the rent and buy food, they were forced to take jobs as day laborers for agencies that “keep 40 percent of their pay as a fee,” and they had little choice but to seek housing in the most dilapidated buildings. A typical unit was home to a family that had recently moved to Chicago to find work: “Their halls, dirty and smelling of urine, are like dimly lit caves. Rotting wooden steps lead to the fourth floor, one bedroom apartment without window screens where a former Kanawha County woman, her husband and five children live.” Such apartments, he added, rented for thirty dollars a week and were surrounded by “buildings with their windows boarded up (what miners called Eisenhower curtains).” Drawn to Chicago by the hope for employment, these families found only “an unfriendly world of disappointment.”25
Those who were fortunate enough to find steady jobs often relocated to working-class neighborhoods near the factories where homes could be bought on a land contract with little money down. These communities were cleaner and less violent and offered a better environment to raise children. In these working-class neighborhoods, mountain migrants could listen to familiar music in hillbilly bars and attend revivals in evangelical churches that had followed their flocks to the North. Some of the middle-class and more educated migrants established formal social clubs that sponsored dinners, dances, and other activities. Usually named for the state from which the migrants had come, as in the cases of the West Virginia Society and the Eastern Kentucky Social Club, these clubs helped to ease assimilation into urban culture while preserving the memory of home.
Appalachian migrants everywhere met with resistance and prejudice from the local population. Pejorative stereotypes of Appalachia as a backward and degenerate place had become part of the national popular conception of the region since the turn of the century, and these negative images followed mountain migrants to the cities.26 Urban dwellers were quick to identify the newcomers as “hillbillies,” a term that they applied to anyone from the rural South, and they were threatened both by the ever growing numbers of migrants and by their apparent cultural differences. Convinced that Appalachians were ignorant, lazy, unclean, and sometimes immoral, community leaders bemoaned their arrival as “a sore to the city and a plague to themselves” and blamed them for rising crime, congestion, and a host of other urban maladies. “In my opinion they are worse than the colored,” complained a Chicago police captain. “They are vicious and knife happy. . . . I can’t say this publicly, but you’ll never improve the neighborhood until you get rid of them.”27
Using imagery similar to that applied to other migrant populations, especially African Americans from the Deep South, northerners developed a repertoire of ethnic hillbilly jokes that reflected deep-seated fears and a misunderstanding of mountain culture. Many of the jokes poked fun at the lack of education, sophistication, and resources of mountain migrants; others cruelly implied immorality and ignorance. One popular midwestern story, for example, involved a fundamentalist preacher who had moved to Cincinnati: “Did you know that the old country preacher was arrested? Yes, he was arrested for polluting the Ohio River. . . . He was baptizing hillbillies in the river.”28 Southern Appalachian migrants became known across the Midwest by a number of derogatory labels, including SAMs, hillbillies, snakes, briar hoppers, and ridge runners.
Though black migrants from the South experienced discrimination in part because of race and class, the predominantly white Appalachian migrants suffered discrimination primarily because of cultural differences—or at least what were perceived to be differences—that were rooted in class.29 Speech patterns, clothing, diet, religious practices, and even the closeness of the Appalachian family seemed to set the migrants apart from other urbanites. Frequent trips back home slowed their assimilation into urban communities and reinforced the image that they were only temporary residents. Indeed, some migrants returned to the mountains as soon as they had earned enough money in the city to keep them going in the rural area for a few months, only to return again when that money was depleted.30 Such patterns of movement frustrated landlords and employers alike and contributed to an image of the mountain migrants as irresponsible.
The values and cultural assumptions of many migrants conflicted with the modern definitions of success commonly found among the urban middle class. Describing migrants in Cincinnati in 1956, Roscoe Giffin observed, “There is reason to believe that the way of life of southern mountain people is marked by a strong tendency simply to accept one’s environment as it is rather than to strive for mastery over it.” This, he added, led to “a lack of strong identification with urban goals and standards of achievement.”31 According to commentators such as Giffin, Appalachian migrants tended to keep to themselves, to distrust public officials and government organizations, and to neglect education. They valued family and kinship ties over work and appeared to be less competitive, less anxious for advancement, and less aggressive than their northern neighbors.32 “They don’t consider work to be the fundamental purpose of their lives,” observed one reporter. “They are as indifferent to politics as they are to making money.”33
Nowhere were these cultural conflicts more apparent than in the schools. Opportunities for formal education were limited in the mountains, and there were few incentives for the children of coal miners to complete school. Consequently, some migrant families placed little value on school attendance and performance. In the mountains, children were given greater