Sadness in Appalachia
McWilliams, W. Carey
The mountain ballad is a sad song. Harry Caudill's book has the tone of the ballad, the sound of the saga. The land of his story, the Southern mountains, is an American folk-land. There is...
...Traditionally, the gap between man and the system, the people and the experts, was to be bridged by politics...
...The businessmen were trusted in the beginning, and eventually deserted the region (first, of course, "freeing" the company towns by selling the houses to the miners they were soon to leave without em ployment...
...The hyper-democratic constitution of Kentucky builds local governments which are at best obstructions...
...Mountaineers, like the rest of us, can be truly freemen only in a truly free society...
...The world of the mountains is a world of savage individualism among men who struggle for a livelihood and where the primary foe is man...
...The federal government is far away, its enforcement of existing laws largely perfunctory...
...The villain, in Caudill's eyes, would seem to be coal itself...
...It is an industrial and social system which allows itself to be guided by the aim of "efficient production," and in which men are molded to fit the patterns of a process and then cast aside when the patterns change...
...With bewildering rapidity, the industries gutted the land and went into a decline which could be survived only by automation on one hand, and ever more ruthless methods on the other...
...That, in itself, teaches us something: that man has a need for a soul as well as for sustenance, that even abundance in the Cumberlands would be no substitute for dignity...
...In Caudill's book there are no human villains...
...The world in which they have been forced to live is not one they can resist...
...The United Mine Workers was, for a time, a champion of the land, but confronted with a crisis of its own, the UMW too has deserted the region...
...But Caudill has already suggested that TVA, once set up to fight the industrial juggernaut, has become part of it by supporting destructive "strip mining" in order to gain cheap coal...
...The New Deal brought help in the form of welfare...
...Caudill, himself a politician, is aware that something has gone wrong with politics among a people who no longer care...
...In the Southern plateaus lonely men find a constant companion only in death, hear no words of approbation and no message of hope...
...men in the Cumberlands are not the natural men of romantic myth...
...That truth alone makes Night Comes to the Cumberland worth reading for any man who still would be free...
...Caudill's book is part of the great tradition of American Populism...
...Indeed, that struggle and the violence which attends it is one of the few breaks in the monotony and despair of life...
...Until that crisis is resolved, Caudill's Mountain Authority runs the danger of being a new juggernaut with a kindlier aim...
...The government gave a favored status to the companies on the tax rolls, but left the area without adequate public works or schools...
...There is no old-world atmosphere of warmth and community...
...Men act from comprehensible and even decent motives...
...But the villain of the saga is more than coal...
...But welfare has proved to be a permanent, not a temporary, fact of life...
...When they have been loyal, they have been betrayed, and when they fought—as they often have—they have been beaten...
...It has become a dole, based on no sense of worth or contribution, accentuating the mountaineer's sense of weakness, depriving him of any sense of dignity...
...The Cumberland people are the passive men, those whose lives have been shaped by the juggernaut of modern industrialism...
...The experts seem to be obstructed by the people, who do not understand the crisis, and the people are dehumanized by the experts, who do not understand man...
...His suggestion of a Southern Mountain Authority is a good one, undoubtedly a progressive step...
...The agencies become expert, and having become expert, became the servants of the monster...
...The rapacious operator of the small "truck mine" is trying to keep his head above water...
...The men across the border in West Virginia have a motto: Montani Semper Liberi, mountaineers are always freemen...
...The land of his story, the Southern mountains, is an American folk-land...
...Harry Caudill's book has the tone of the ballad, the sound of the saga...
...The modern age, he affirms, has produced a crisis of democracy...
...Moreover, it is not one they can understand, let alone control...
...The UMW leaders are trying to save their union...
...All this Caudill knows, but his proposals are not always happy ones...
...The great "rail mines" are striving to save a dying industry by automation...
...Both have led to growing unemployment and poverty in a region which comes more and more to resemble a scar on the land...
...The words are full of pathos because they contain a hollow truth: the men of the Cumberlands have a freedom, the freedom of isolation and weakness...
...The railroads came, and after them came coal and timber exploitation, new wants and new ways...
Vol. 11 • July 1964 • No. 3
