Appalachia: The Dismal Land
Caudill, Harry
In the fall of 1963 Homer Bigart came to eastern Kentucky and wrote an article for the New York Times that described the ragged, undernourished people with whom he talked, and the flimsy...
...The government is going to encourage them...
...One quarter of the white adults are functional illiterates...
...Government and private planners are at work devising the essential understanding for the fostering of new communities...
...In that year the company realized a net profit after taxes of 61 per cent of gross...
...An image-conscious President had issued an executive order creating PARC, the President's Appalachian Regional Commission...
...They "freed" Cuba and then ruled it through puppet governments for two generations...
...When the region was rediscovered after the Civil War the people practically gave away its great riches, effectually disinheriting their children and their children's children...
...The colonialist exploiters have been turned out and the people, by one means or another, have taken up the powers and responsibilities of governments...
...The television camera has emphasized time and again that the Appalachian mountaineers are poor, that their land is tilted on its edge and badly eroded, and that the chief industry of the region—coal mining—is in the doldrums...
...It built the Rocky Reach dam at a cost of $273.1 million...
...Nothing could suit them better than to empty the long valleys of the Appalachian hinterland, to leave the little houses without inhabitants to witness or protest the destruction of the land...
...They began decimating their timber to obtain "new grounds" which they wore out without replenishing them with cover crops...
...We did not build the schools, libraries, universities, and hospitals...
...Only in our Appalachia does it proceed unchecked...
...Millions of people are going to inhabit them...
...Here we have a territory the size of Switzerland...
...Then, without interference from troublesome local people, they could get out the minerals by the cheapest, the most technologically efficient method...
...But the Swiss miracle has not been repeated in Kentucky...
...And where can we find a more likely spot for new population centers than in our own southern and central Appalachia...
...With these acquisitions the people, acting through their Economic Development Districts, would undertake a comprehensive development program...
...d) to understand the availability of funds to finance the institutions the people need...
...The surface of this eastern Kentucky mountain earth is also abundantly endowed...
...We think the great wealth that was pilfered from our ancestors shouid be returned to the people of the mountains...
...The first battle ground in the struggle may well be the college classroom, but eventually it will be waged in PTA meetings and in state and local meetings of educational associations...
...They are doing many foolish things in the name of self-government, but rarely with such foolishness or greed as their colonialist predecessors...
...They hold that new cities must be built because existing cities cannot expand to absorb all who are destined to crowd into them...
...The Chelan County Public Utility District paid $1.5 million in taxes and donated another $ million to the county and county seat...
...Both regions embrace about 15,000 square miles...
...We ask that those people who now hold legal title should be given a better and fairer deal than was afforded our forebears...
...f) to inspire a political movement to accomplish the far-reaching changes I have advocated...
...but in the main its tragic tale has been repeated: a backwoods people has moved into a primordial forest...
...Like Switzerland, it is mountainous...
...We seek to accomplish here no more and no less than has been accomplished in rich resource regions elsewhere in the world...
...Very little of the country is warm enough for really good crops...
...The vast natural wealth passed into the hands of land companies organized by speculators with offices in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, New York, and Baltimore...
...The highways will act as efficient conveyors to move the people out of the hinterlands into a few places like Lexington, Kentucky, and Kingsport, Tennessee...
...Whether these profits will go out as dividends to distant stockholders or stay behind to finance the institutions our people need so desperately and have been promised for so long, remains to be seen...
...c) to resent its exploitation by absentee owners...
...Switzerland is almost certainly the richest region in the world...
...In Tennessee, in my own Kentucky, in West Virginia, western Virginia, western Maryland, and Pennsylvania the colonial bastions erected in the 1870's, 1880's and 1890's, and early in this century still stand...
...Unless we act on the side of progress and positive good we will continue an immense American sub-territory in the hands of ruthless exploiters who live far beyond its borders and care little or nothing about its destiny...
...Its counties operate 40 per cent of the nation's remaining one-room schools...
...It has supported its investors in fine style for more than half a century...
...It has been calculated that $3 trillion worth of new housing will go up in the United States by the beginning of the twenty-first century...
...Our Kentuckians followed another road...
...It is rich in timber types and has more strains of oak than there are timber trees of all varieties in Europe...
...After debt retirement, Appalachia would use the profits from the sale of its power to finance the institutions and services the region desperately needs...
...With these funds and by due process of law they would buy much of the vast mineral holdings now controlled by the economic royalists in distant cities...
...By comparison with Switzerland's 5.5 million, there are only 800,000 people left in eastern Kentucky...
...In due time the commission made its report to President Johnson and to Congress, and in 1964 its recommendations became law...
...From their dreary ineffectiveness the more able, intelligent, and ambitious flee...
...The Swiss had confidence in their government and used it as a beneficial tool...
...It is certain that Appalachian fossil fuels will power much of the nation in the future, as they have done for so long and so consistently in the past...
...Appalachia is saddled with a colonial system...
...The Swiss taxpayers support 22 great institutions of higher learning, including seven world-famous universities and five great medical colleges...
...The Swiss earth, by contrast, is remarkably poor...
...It is blessed with 45 inches of rainfall annually and has no barren land...
...This proposal is neither radical nor new...
...They would send it by the fast-forming power grid to the electricity-hungry cities—including those now suffocating in grime and grit from antiquated generators on their outskirts...
...Their banks are immense...
...It has been thoroughly tested in the state of Washington over the last 30 years...
...We did not levy such taxes...
...They have, in effect, seized control of their own destinies...
...He told of children so hungry they ate dry mud gouged out between chimney stones...
...The shoddy schools and other public facilities frighten away potential investors...
...I have a deeply-rooted suspicion that this undertaking reflects a scheme fostered by the great absentee holding corporations to empty the countryside in order to facilitate their extractive industries...
...Most highlanders still entertain a tenacious suspicion of government and of strangers, and out of this ancient suspicion flow many of the ills that beset the region today...
...Of its receipts 76 per cent are tax-free at the federal level...
...Sadly, the experience of Kentucky's eastern counties is in no sense unique...
...The colonial system was strapped onto Appalachia during the same historic interval when it was imposed on much of the world...
...Whereas ignorant people were cozened into virtually giving away their substance, we would compensate these owners fairly according to modern values, vesting many of the great tracts of minerals in public ownership...
...Like most of the Appalachian South, the region has been turned into a paleface reservation...
...Originally, the coal fields contained some 35 billion tons of coal...
...The coal and water will be turned into electricity, and the electricity will be sold at a profit...
...approximately 32 billion tons remain under the hills...
...The Kentucky River Coal Corporation owns 200,000 acres in eastern Kentucky, and during that same year its dividend was a trifle under half of its huge income...
...A severance tax of 10 cents per ton of coal, barrel of oil, and com parable measure of gas would provide $30 million annually for education-for higher salaries, better buildings, enriched curricula...
...The people who designed and now operate that Public Utility District have assured me that if Appalachia's counties were similarly organized they could raise many billions of dollars by the same means and finance local, grass-roots TVAs under the auspices of the states...
...The little republic is so desirable a place to live in that it has to enforce the world's strictest emigration laws...
...For more than 50 years mountaineers have sat supinely and quietly by and allowed their land, kinsmen, and institutions to be exploited by people who have neither affection nor respect for Appalachia—whose only concern is to plunder it...
...There is probably not an acre of land in eastern Kentucky that, in its natural state, cannot grow something of utility and beauty...
...These companies and a score of others like them have shaped the destiny of Appalachia for 75 years...
...And there too, at last, they are being challenged...
...Their profits would swell accordingly and their dividend rates would soar to new levels...
...This spangle of man-made lakes would provide flood control, industrial water, recreational water, and cheap electricity —all important underpinnings in the creation of a viable economy...
...They carved up Africa as hungry children might slice a pie...
...They and others have proposed that the United States solve the problems of its people out in the countryside in new cities and towns, rather than in sprawling, crumbling ghettos in gargantuan super cities...
...It paid a dividend of 45 per cent of gross, nine times as high as that paid by General Motors...
...Was this kind of a future for Appalachia sold to an unwitting Regional Commission in 1963-64, and to an equally unquestioning Congress...
...We must educate people: (a) to be discontented with the present arrangement...
...We and our forebears had an opportunity to build a vigorous society, but we have opted for a low-key society instead, a society that places little emphasis on human development—on skills, competence, and inquisitiveness—and the result has been the enlargement of incom• petence and dependency...
...Consequently, we are a people in flight...
...Failing to educate their descendants, the generations perpetuated a lack of understanding of the land and its capacities...
...A quarter of the dwindling population is on public assistance...
...Once those same companies and their associates and minions dominated Africa, South America, and Asia...
...b) to appreciate the immense wealth of their land...
...Tao (e) to grasp the vast power they can exercise —but have long neglected to exercise—over their basic wealth...
...We, in eastern Kentucky, proceeding in the usual Appalachian fashion, have done precisely the opposite, though the Kentucky mountains are superbly rich in minerals...
...Its rainfall, shed on denuded hillsides and unchecked by dams, rushes away in ever more frequent floods...
...They would profit immensely from meaningful reform...
...They would turn the abundant resources of fuel and water into electricity and sell it in the world's largest and fastest-growing power market...
...These public corporations would have the right of eminent domain and would be empowered to sell bonds to finance the developmental efforts of their districts...
...Yet, the Swiss have become a remarkably rich, strong, and self-reliant people, despite their poor land...
...Mountaineers have traditionally looked at government as a dangerous tyrant, albeit a tyrant of the people's own creation...
...The colonialist sway in the rest of the world has ended...
...There is, for example, Virginia Coal & Iron with its 206,000 acres, almost certainly the most profitable investor-owned corporation in the United States...
...24 per cent of the surface is barren and incapable of growing anything...
...Its failure may have been greater in some respects than those of its kindred regions—southwestern Virginia, West Virginia, eastern Tennessee, western Maryland, and southern Pennsylvania...
...They built schools, libraries, universities, and hospitals, and these institutions enriched the people in a creative, upward-moving spiral...
...Hundreds of thousands of mountaineers have moved away...
...IV The scheme the federal authorities have devised for our highlands is not a development program at all...
...Its once great timber stands have been reduced to pathetic remnants...
...They con temptuously laced the countries of Latin America into economic strait jackets and then scornfully dismissed their victims as "banana republics" and "coffee empires...
...III If a New Appalachia is to arise out of the present tangle the people must be educated to comprehend the truth about their land...
...The predecessors of the present-day companies came to the mountains when our ancestors were unschooled and inexperienced, and, taking advantage of their credulity, persuaded them to sign "broad form" deeds whereby coal companies in state after state claim the right to wreck and plunder the land, often without compensation to the people who live on and hold title to the "surface estate...
...As a result the Appalachian states and people have deliberately kept their governments weak—and weak, underfinanced governments have kept the people ignorant and, in their ignorance, poor...
...Then our latter-day colonialists could drill and dig and gouge and cut and blast to their heart's content...
...Some 5.5 million Swiss live in their little corner on the housetop of Europe...
...They created an equitable tax system and collected the adequate revenues which are the lifeblood of civilization...
...They have set the policies followed in its courthouses and state houses, and governors and legislators have cowered before them, enacting laws that exempted them almost entirely from any effective taxation...
...We would put the title into public corporations, chartered under state enabling laws and governed by representatives of the people...
...Each contains extensive brine beds...
...Thus water—one of the region's great assets—has become its scourge...
...But here the comparison ends...
...In fact, central Appalachia is threatened with virtually complete depopulation within another decade or two unless we find a way to stop the present ruinous process...
...In the fall of 1963 Homer Bigart came to eastern Kentucky and wrote an article for the New York Times that described the ragged, undernourished people with whom he talked, and the flimsy shacks in which they lived...
...A few years ago the president of that company told a reporter for Dunn's Review and Modern Industry that he managed to "carry practically all of Virginia Coal & Iron's income down to net...
...It is studded with the names of great corporations—United States Steel, Bethlehem Steel, Inland Steel, Republic Steel, International Harvester, Jones & Laughlin, Ford Motor Company, and scores of others...
...Some of the mineral tracts sold for as little as 100 an acre...
...Appalachia is a rugged land...
...There, the theory runs, they will find jobs and happiness...
...Nothing could be farther from the truth...
...There are important deposits of high-grade petroleum, beds of natural gas, and immense strata of limestone and silica-rich sandstone...
...The colonialists went to Japan and China with gun boats and compelled these nations to trade...
...In classrooms, in courthouses, in community action centers, in every place where people meet, the possibility of Appalachian reform must be taught...
...A trifling part of this money would build scores of dams and lakes across the Appalachian South...
...And there are less famous corporations, the obscure firms that own immense tracts of mineral-rich land and lease them to operating companies for royalties payable on coal, oil, gas, and limestone...
...The government of the United States is thinking of spending $100 billion to bring a river down from Alaska to southern California...
...The cheap power and good schools are attracting industry, and the county is booming...
...It is wondrously prosperous, for the coal depression has long since passed into history...
...These Economic Development Districts, these public corporation, would go to Wall Street or other money markets and raise their investment funds by offering a sound deal to the investing public...
...Now their benighted policies, rejected so firmly elsewhere, continue in effect and force only in the Appalachian South...
...Some 80 per cent of the money Congress has authorized will go into roads, and these roads will lead to a few strategically located "growth centers," many of them completely outside the hills...
...about onefourth will grow timber, though the varieties are exceedingly limited...
...They have told us that the people are undereducated, suspicious, and poorly motivated...
...It is a depopulation program...
...Each is scenically beautiful...
...The hidden face of Appalachia must be brought into view and seen in proper focus...
...But in these "backward" or "underdeveloped" countries the anti-colonialists have been at work with much courage and zeal, and the once viselike grip of the absentee overlords has been shattered...
...How much better it would be to seize the dream President Johnson and Senators Ribicoff and Kennedy have expressed in recent months when they spoke of new cities springing up across America...
...that as Americans we are a free-born people and intend to order our communities and affairs as such...
...While Switzerland fences people out, Appalachia sustains the greatest outmigration since the Irish exodus of the nineteenth century...
...A great deal of superficial writing has given the nation a one-sided and misleading picture of the Appalachian South...
...Then, in God's good time, the stripmined landscape and its hideous streams would be sold to the federal government for rehabilitation at the cost of the taxpayers...
...They would build lakes and dams and coal-burning steam plants...
...Teachers and their charges pay a terrible price for our regional backwardness...
...We in the Congress for Appalachian Development have pioposed that the people of the Southern mountains, whose forebears pioneereu the institutions of freedom at Mecklenburg, South Carolina, and proclaimed America's first Declaration of Independence, should now assert a new Declaration of Independence and of Self-sufficiency...
...They have feared that if government is made strong enough to be effective it will be strong enough to enslave them...
...All this is true, after a fashion...
...In these once—and sometimes still—lovely valleys, whose scenic beauty should be worth fortunes to their inhabitants, the poor little counties huddle—shabby, starved for funds, in debt, deep in perpetual fiscal crisis...
...I Let us Iook, for example, at eastern Kentucky, the region brought most often to the attention of the nation...
...The Big Sandy Corporation, with 75,000 acres in the fabulously rich Big Sandy region, is dominated by the Delano family and has its headquarters at Campo Bello...
...We neglected the one great resource that overshadows and outweighs all others in importance—the people...
...Most Americans now comfortably assume that the problems of Appalachia have been fairly faced and are well on the road to being solved...
...Consequently, Appalachia's counties are hollow shells, resting lightly on an enormously rich natural-resource foundation...
...Industry is going to move into them...
...A single county —Chelan—with a population of 40,000 has sold more than $500 million worth of bonds for its development...
Vol. 14 • November 1967 • No. 6
