Reformers to Radicals (37 page)

Summing up the effects of the Appalachian Volunteers in the Kentucky mountains, those testifying before KUAC reached a consensus: the AVs created a situation so bad, not just in Pike County but in all of eastern Kentucky, that virtually nothing of any value could be accomplished. “When the AVs first came into the area,” one testified, “they got into some bad trouble . . . with some people that they brought in that wasn't local people. They were outsiders that they brought in from all over the nation . . . [and] the local people . . . resent[ed] them.” Another claimed that, in his efforts to form a community organization in Van Lear, in Johnson County, the volatile situation precipitated by the Volunteers forced him to assure the mountain residents that he had no connection with the Appalachian Volunteers. “I was asked specifically,” he told KUAC, “if the AVs would have anything to do with the organization of the club, . . . and they said if they did, we could forget about organizing it right then and there.” Another witness insisted that the AVs were “a liability to our nation and to our county and to our state, and unless laws are passed to prevent people of this caliber entering into these programs, then we are going to have trouble, more trouble.”
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After listening to testimony for two days, KUAC adjourned. Just over
a month later, the committee issued an interim report to Governor Louie Nunn in which it asserted that the AV program in Pike County “has served as a tremendous detriment to the deserving people of this region.” The committee contended that the Volunteers had no clear purpose or program and actually worked at “cross purposes” to the county officials and the local CAPs, which were trying to help the poor mountaineers. Moreover, they created “strife” rather than improving the situation of the people. “After hearing all the evidence,” the report concluded, “the committee recommends in the strongest terms that the Governor take whatever steps necessary to make certain that the AV program is permanently discontinued.”
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Ultimately, the influence exerted by those prosecuting the AVs spread beyond the boundaries of Kentucky and into the neighboring state of West Virginia, where the AVs also worked. On October 3, 1967, Robert Byrd took the Senate floor and read a letter from Governor Hulett Smith to Sargent Shriver. Smith claimed that many in his state regarded AV-VISTAs as “‘trouble-makers' who offer only negative solutions to community problems.” These same people also asserted that the activists taught the poor “‘ideas that are Communistic.'” Byrd exploited this attack on the Volunteers and took the opportunity to discredit the OEO as well. He claimed that the OEO's vindication of the AVs in the sedition case was merely a “defensive report” that indicated “the agency actually [had] little control at the local level over a number of activities carried on in its name.” While he understood that the Appalachian Volunteers “were not directly employed by the OEO,” he asserted that “they were identified in the public eye with its activities” and dependent on public funds. “So the damage,” the senator argued, “is done. The poverty program, by the very nature of the way in which it is set up, is given another nationwide black eye.” More important than the OEO's incompetence, Byrd continued, was the fact that “outside agitators in the guise of seeking to help poor natives have, instead, brought deep dissension and set neighbor against neighbor.” In his final evaluation, the antipoverty warriors in Kentucky and West Virginia were “revolutionaries bent on destroying the present order of society instead of trying to improve conditions within the framework that exists.”
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Following this period of turmoil, the Appalachian Volunteers struggled to survive. In the aftermath of the original sedition arrest, the organization rejected the proposed move to Pikeville in favor of relocating to Prestonsburg,
in Floyd County, Kentucky. However, Volunteer activities after January 1968 again landed the Volunteers in a position precariously close, in the eyes of local officials, to Moscow. In addition to their anti-strip-mining activities, the Volunteers' protests against the Economic Opportunity Act's Title V programs further alienated the powers that be. By providing the unemployed with “work, experience, and training,” Title V hoped “to expand the opportunities for constructive work experience and other needed training available to persons who are unable to support or care for themselves or their families.” Administered at the local level through the social security system, this program trained unemployed fathers so that they could find jobs and end their dependency on welfare.
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Although they were in favor of job training for unemployed mountaineers, the Appalachian Volunteers believed the Title V programs were not the answer. In a 1965 article in
The Nation
, Richard Cloward had made some observations that the AVs apparently took to heart: “The chief concern of the federal anti-poverty program is the victim of poverty, not the source of his disability.” Men who previously had no job were, indeed, working, Cloward conceded: “And to that extent the work and training programs of the Office of Economic Opportunity have been a success. But the work which they perform is quite different from that anticipated by the framers of Title V.”
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Cloward's analysis rang true in Appalachia. Rather than performing meaningful tasks or learning a marketable trade, the newly employed could, the AVs proclaimed, “cut weeds or clean out old cemeteries.” Not only were the jobs, in terms of training, meaningless, “but they [had] very little educational significance”: “Men . . . learned long ago how to cut weeds or pound rock into a road.” While the Volunteers found fault with this antipoverty program throughout Appalachia, the CAP in Floyd County, the agency that administered Title V programs in that county, complained loudly to Governor Nunn in April 1968: “The AV's have knowingly associated with communists and subversive elements in this and other states.” Interestingly, the AVs had a hand in forming the local Floyd County AGSLP chapter. Seemingly, wherever they tried to establish a presence following the first troubles in Pike County, the Volunteers found themselves unwelcome.
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Before the summer of 1968, the Appalachian Volunteers felt the effects of this turmoil. Reporting from West Virginia, David Biesmeyer informed
the Volunteer staff that he witnessed a great amount of “demoralization and disorganization” among those operating in the Mountain State. As evidence of this depressed condition, Biesmeyer cited a “lack of knowledge and concern on the part of the staff as to what the other members of the staff are doing and the usual lack of agreement on goals and techniques”: “At least several members of the staff are talking of the demise of the AVs in West Virginia by the end of the summer and I believe this is a common assumption.” Many volunteers made “no plans for what they will be doing the next several weeks or months from now.” The following October, Biesmeyer informed the central office that, because the West Virginia AV project “was not approved for continued use of . . . funds after October 1,” “nearly all the staff had new jobs with other agencies.” Moreover: “The most viable CAPs in West Virginia—Raleigh and Mingo–will be taken over by the county courts, and . . . many of the really fine [local] organizers and leaders we have identified will be putting themselves and their work on the line as never before.”
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Biesmeyer was one of those who found refuge in other agencies. By May 1969, he was the president of Designs for Rural Action. This West Virginia–based organization, through its “Knowledge Power” project, proposed to “demonstrate the utility of providing leaders of the poor with the skills in researching . . . and . . . dealing with their problems.” So poisonous was the atmosphere surrounding the War on Poverty by this time, however, that Biesmeyer's new efforts met with the condemnation of at least one member of the state senate. Writing to the new Republican president, Richard Nixon, State Senator Neal Kingsolving called Designs for Rural Action a “dummy corporation” that operated “over the objections of our duly elected governor.” “To permit public funds to pass into private hands for such questionable purposes,” he continued, “without the approval and supervision of duly elected representatives of the people, is highly disruptive of good government and flies in the face of American tradition.”
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In Kentucky, the situation was no different. By the end of 1968, the AV board of directors admitted that “active participation in its activities suffered severe blows by the sedition arrests in 1967 and the KUAC hearings in 1968.” The established rhetoric of the Appalachian Volunteers, however, remained. The AVs' “primary role,” it was declared, was “the building of Appalachian poor people's organizations for economic and political change.”
These organizations would wreck “the political bases of southern demagogues locally and nationally” and “confront the colonial institutions of the region.”
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Four years had now passed since the Appalachian Volunteers completed their first school renovation project in Harlan County, Kentucky. The energy, enthusiasm, and optimism characteristic of those early projects had long since dissipated; the organization now fought for survival. By the end of 1968, it had alienated every group—from its parent organization, the Council of the Southern Mountains, to its benefactor, the OEO—with which it had worked. A future that in 1964 looked so bright and promising was now dark and uncertain. “Where hundreds of volunteers had worked in the area in the past,” the Volunteers reported, “during the summer of 1968 the AVs carefully used the skills of only fifteen subsistence workers.”
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Other than attempts to continue issue organizing, most AV activity reverted back to the service projects that were the hallmark of the organization's early years. At this point, the AVs entered their forth and final phase, during which those most active in the overall AV program, people such as Edith Easterling and the community interns, were again Appalachians, not outsiders. They were not, however, necessarily volunteers. Instead, they were Volunteer employees. This last manifestation of the AVs was illustrated through the organization's tenuous relationship with the Pike County Citizens Association (PCCA). Founded just prior to the sedition arrests in 1967, the PCCA was an attempt by the Volunteers to create a countywide base of support. By 1969, however, only residents of Marrowbone Creek participated in the group. The fact that the AVs hired the staff but required local people to accept full responsibility for the group was indicative of this new version of the Appalachian Volunteers. One exception to this shift was a legal services effort headed by the Yale-educated lawyer Howard Thorkelson. Focusing on issues such as black lung disease and welfare rights, even this program represented a change from the AVs' issue-organizing days. While these questions remained crucial to both the Volunteers and local mountaineers, legal services, though adversarial, operated through the courts rather than through open confrontation. More significantly, the legal services effort represented a philosophical shift within the Volunteer organization. Instead of attacking the “corrupt system,” the AVs worked to remedy the plight of the poor through legal action
within
the system.
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Included among the activities of the new local Appalachian Volunteers was the registration of indigent mountaineers on the county welfare roles so that they could receive such benefits as food stamps. Despite this effort, however, one AV mountaineer implied in his report that many people still had a difficult time receiving the benefits to which they were entitled. Other volunteers conducted projects reminiscent of the group's early years. In Letcher County, the Volunteers sponsored two programs, a woodworking cooperative in Carcassonne and a low-cost housing project in Blackey, but they canceled a third slated for Kingdom Come because the people there had “heard so much talk about the AV's” that the group found it “difficult to work there.” An AV economic consultant, Ben Poage, advised the Volunteers to select certain communities for demonstration greenhouse projects and woodworking cooperatives that specialized in the construction of stringed instruments and custom rifle stocks. Other volunteers undertook similar efforts. With AV help, the poor of Logan County, West Virginia, established a “very small” Aid to Dependent Children welfare-rights group, and other AV workers set up boys' and girls' basketball teams and held “socials” for local children on weekends. After the tremendous pressure brought to bear on them by the sedition affair, the antiwar episode, and the KUAC hearings, the Appalachian Volunteers returned to those programs that would generate the favorable publicity and exposure that they had enjoyed in 1964.
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Money was also very scarce as the last OEO grants, “originally made in 1967, were due to expire at the end of April 1968.” Because of extremely conservative spending measures on the part of the AVs, “substantial funds remained unused, [and] the program year was extended by three and six month periods through March, 1969.” Grants from private foundations such as the Field Foundation, the New World Foundation, and the Aaron Norman Fund helped the AVs operate at a reduced level after the OEO grant expired.
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In August 1968, the Appalachian Volunteers submitted an application for refunding to the OEO for the calendar year 1969. After the OEO approved the application in December 1968, it sent it to Louie Nunn for his approval. Asking for only $116,116, an amount considerably smaller than previous grants, the AVs stated that they “voluntarily limited the application to this amount because they wanted to restrict their activities to the
Cumberland Valley of Kentucky.” This restriction, however, did not seem to be voluntary. Douglas G. Robinson, the lawyer hired by the AVs to help them obtain money from the OEO, reported that he had doubts whether the OEO would accept this argument “since West Virginia Governor Smith told the OEO director unequivocally that he would no longer give his approval to AV programs in his state.”
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