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Accessible Appalachia: Chapter 15 The Great Society in the Mountains: Shaping Appalachia through the 1960s and Beyond

Accessible Appalachia
Chapter 15 The Great Society in the Mountains: Shaping Appalachia through the 1960s and Beyond
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“Chapter 15 The Great Society in the Mountains: Shaping Appalachia through the 1960s and Beyond” in “Accessible Appalachia”

The Great Society in the Mountains:

Shaping Appalachia through the 1960s and Beyond

Paolo D’Amato

Appalachian poverty made national news through the late 1950s and early 1960s, becoming a public face of federal anti-poverty efforts. Many policymakers subscribed to popular images of Appalachia as an economic and cultural backwater that should be developed and assimilated into mainstream America. They hoped to confront poverty in the “other America” without changing the institutional and economic structures that had abused the region for decades.[1] The presidential administrations of both John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson promised government-sponsored interventions and opportunities to distressed Appalachian regions, and while varied programs addressed national and Appalachian impoverishment, their design reflected post-war economic growth theories and theories of human capital. These policies focused around “modernization” and industrial development, meaning that legislation would encourage the expansion of industry and commercial ties to the rest of the nation.[2] In many ways, the results of the 1960s would be a continuation of those pursuits. Presidents Kennedy and Johnson built their campaigns and administrations around helping the impoverished regions of the United States, and both focused special efforts on Appalachia.

The national anti-poverty initiative gave rise to grassroots anti-poverty organizing in the region by providing implicit and explicit structures to align their grievances with the result of  shaping the region for decades to come. Cooperation between national planners and local residents varied wildly between anti-poverty organizations; while some groups embraced cooperation with grassroots efforts to varying success, others bitterly resisted the voices of the rural poor in the hollers and preferred cooperation with the political elite in more urban county seats. National planners of the War on Poverty–officially declared by President Johnson in Martin County, Kentucky, on January 8, 1964–weren’t sure if local people would assist anti-poverty efforts, and they neither publicly named any local people nor discussed how they would be involved. Appalachians, however, responded to national developments by pressing incoming organizations for their voices to be heard. Regional elites happily cooperated, as these efforts largely fit into their previous political agendas so long as they retained control of incoming benefits. By the 1960s, local elites in county governments had dominated political and economic markets in Kentucky for over a century. These county politicians had enormous power to influence the lives of locals, as the courts functioned as a centerpiece of Kentucky life. Court officials were mostly rich mine owners and merchants who used the position to pursue beneficial policies for themselves.

Decades of difficulty shaped federal interest in the Appalachian region from the 1930s into the 1970s. The Great Depression collapsed the coal industry, and with the New Deal public assistance as the miners’ only replacement, Appalachia became one of the most impoverished regions in the nation. Soon World War II preparations saw an industry resurgence as coal prices rose, giving hope through government expenditure.[3] Similar patterns to the Great Depression collapse, however, emerged after World War II came to a close as market and employment expansions were followed by industry overexpansion. After the war ended, instability and competition drove vulnerability even higher for Appalachian residents, as smaller mines relied on lower wages and being non-union to compete with larger corporations.[4] By 1948, the end of the war meant that market demand for coal had leveled off. The mass of smaller “truck mines” that relied on immediate sale, no unions, and early mechanization collapsed quickly, leaving those Appalachians tied to the industry once more without employment.[5] Thousands of miners were displaced as smaller Southern coal operators were forced to sell, close, or mechanize. At the end of World War II, the Appalachian region had employed 475,000 miners. By 1960, that number was halved, and lowered again to 107,000 by 1970.[6]

At the end of the 1950s, even protests like the Roving Pickets movement, a militant movement of miners who attempted to shut down non-union mines who refused to sign union contracts, failed to reverse trends. Labor violence met ever increasing violence from business hired guns and their own local legal systems alike.[7] Appalachians had responded to union and employment shrinkage with grassroots protest, but their protest failed to reverse the trends of the 1950s. The United Mine Workers Association’s Welfare and Retirement Fund, established in 1946, had begun to decrease benefits in response to union turmoil and declining membership. Miners and widows throughout Appalachia protested, calling on the federal government to pressure the union into fulfilling its responsibilities and rallying at mines that defaulted on union payments to ensure better lives.[8] Labor in Appalachia, however, had met its decline with the industries it relied on. By 1960, over six decades of organizing had helped mitigate the human impact of coal but left massive problems once coal declined. Little had replaced declining mining jobs, forcing families into migration away from ancestral lands or destitution. Decades of environmental damage from coal and timber extraction left a scarred landscape, even more so with the evolving practice of surface mining to further cheapen coal production in the 1950s. Flooding devastated central Appalachia in 1957,[9] and signs of environmental and human recovery were few. A federal assessment blamed the floods on strip mining and poor logging practices.[10] The region had been environmentally damaged to the point of social distress, and both were becoming increasingly visible to residents and outside eyes alike.

The region captured national attention in the early 1960s, much due to the floods shining light on regional issues. During the 1960 presidential primary election season, presidential hopeful Kennedy made “depressed areas” a major issue, making a historic trip through West Virginia that helped further center Kennedy’s ideas on rural needs as part of his future administration.[11] With Kennedy’s victory and subsequent presidency (1961-1963), Appalachian poverty became a national concern. Although Kennedy’s “depressed areas” technically had no regional target, he clearly imagined Appalachia. Appalachia was indeed “depressed” by all metrics used by the incoming administration, with areas of eastern Kentucky having one in three workers unemployed.[12] Decades of improperly taxed coal and other industries left little infrastructure to support rural residents or to alleviate environmental issues. Letcher County lawyer and environmentalist Harry M. Caudill stated, “Much of the county’s total land surface has been stripped of vegetation and reduced to jumbles of stone and gulling spoil-banks,” in his book Night Comes to the Cumberlands.[13] The environment had been scarred, and the natural and social problems resulting from those scars were visibly increasing in intensity. Caudill, alongside other local politicians and elites, called for the federal government to take action and alleviate the region's plights. Thus, the Kennedy administration instituted two separate acts to address regions like Appalachia. Those were the Area Redevelopment Act (1961), which created the Area Redevelopment Administration (ARA) that focused on job creation, and the Public Works Acceleration Act (1962), which was designed to jump-start flagging infrastructure in depressed regions.

The ARA was an inviting prospect, with an “appealing elegance” that promised a neat cooperation between business expertise and local community planning[14]–a  perfect cycle of government and the private sector, leading to jobs. However, an assumption underlaid the ARA’s creation. The act assumed that private sector jobs and benefits to business would lead to community uplift, when those same factors of mono-industrial growth and shrinkage were what led to the region’s volatile difficulties in the first place. Predictably, ARA Overall Economic Development plans drawn up by local business and political figures “increased development of coal and timber resources” while only adding recreation and tourism as new means of economic diversification.[15] The ARA made little meaningful progress in depressed areas. Kennedy and local leaders alike grew sick of the group’s limited positive impacts, beginning to phase it out in less than two years. The ARA continued to endorse tourism in Appalachia, with few other proposed alternatives, until its demise in 1965. Economic development under Kennedy, with its emphasis on the private sector and local leadership, faltered quickly with little to show for itself as it failed to meaningfully address how the region had become impoverished in the first place. His other legislative piece, the Public Works Acceleration Act, similarly failed to address the simultaneous political and environmental issues facing the region.

In Central Appalachia, industrial and municipal pollution overwhelmed nearby rivers’ ability to absorb waste and visibly degraded the region’s waters. The North Fork of the Kentucky River, one of the same rivers devastated by the 1957 flood, was called a “fuming sump” due to the nearly black waters filled with acid mine drainage and under-treated sewage.[16] Beyond surface waters, powerful explosives from mining operations threatened to crack the aquifers that nearly sixty percent of southeastern Kentucky residents relied on for water. These cracks could cause wells to run dry or allow pollutants to enter these aquifers, threatening the lives of residents who relied on them daily. The phrase “water–you have to drink it with a fork,” may sound hyperbolic, but it was close to the truth for some in Central Appalachia who lived with water damaged from decades of industrial waste and population growth.[17] The health risks of this water pollution were numerous. When ingested through waters polluted by industry, common chemical pollutants can cause cancer, genetic mutations, infant death, fetal damage, and organ damage.[18] These towns, however, were ill equipped to provide those services. Trapped by a need for clean water and an inability to procure it, both of which were shaped by coal and timbering, municipalities looked to the state and federal governments for assistance.

President Kennedy was an advocate of public works spending. The Kennedy administration pushed through H.R. 6441, better known as the Public Works Acceleration Act (PWAA) of 1962. The act was intended to combat unemployment and economic recession, similar to the ARA. However, the PWAA sought to combat regional depression via increased public works spending as a countercyclical measure. The act was designed to counteract recessions by boosting employment and domestic spending via short-term funding of public works projects. The PWAA covered a wide range of state and local public works projects, and the organization considered highway facilities, educational facilities, residential buildings, sewage facilities, and water supply systems for these funding programs. Water and sewage were not the only public works under this act but offered essential means to bring federal grants to high unemployment communities like those in eastern Kentucky. Proposed improvements whose planning was nearly completed and proposed near immediate benefits, known as “shovel-ready” improvements, would be given the most consideration under the act to ensure they were quickly funded and completed.[19] 

Local areas competed to propose quick and easily completable improvements to entice federal spending. This process was facilitated by state representatives like Carl D. Perkins, representative of Kentucky’s majority Appalachian–and now defunct–7th district, who were happy to secure more significant investment into their districts by helping municipal constituents cooperate with federal agencies for approval. As a result, eastern Kentucky communities saw significantly increased grants, but also greater costs to cover local contributions under the PWAA. The total grant funding under the PWAA for sixty-four waterworks projects in Kentucky was $10,006,121.92, but construction costs for projects totaled $17,497,550.93.[20] Many of those projects in eastern Kentucky qualified for the maximum federal share, but that could leave small local governments with tens of thousands of dollars–or even more–in costs to bear. Those costs fell to residents to repay, residents who could ill afford the additional costs they were being asked to pay to revive their region. Moreover, financial costs weren’t the only sacrifices asked of them.

The power disparities within the region became even more prevalent through Kennedy’s anti-poverty efforts. Much of the development focused on private industry and local elites, the same two groups that had spent decades constructing the 1960s central Appalachia seen through nationally known books like Michael Harrington’s The Other America (1962) and Harry M. Caudill’s Night Comes to the Cumberlands (1963). Little encapsulates these disparities within the region better than the contention over building Carr Fork Reservoir in southeastern Kentucky. While flooding historically has been a common occurrence for the region, decades of timbering and mining made floods ever more dangerous. The 1957 flood devastated Hazard, Kentucky, destroying more than 300 residences and 180 commercial buildings and killing six people. Total damages were estimated at around $4.5 million.[21] For the nearly 6,000 citizens of Hazard, the dam promised safety, economic development, and expansion.[22] So long as they could be protected from “natural” devastation, the area could attract small and large businesses, catching up to the rest of the nation. The Carr Fork Reservoir was planned to flood approximately 1,120 acres in the Knott County area, promising flood control and recreational tourism for urban centers like Hazard and Hindman. There was one problem, however. The Carr Creek community was “thickly populated.”[23] Protecting Hazard from further flooding required flooding the lands and displacing hundreds of people in rural Knott County.

The federal government prioritized the visions of growth in Hazard, authorizing the dam in October 1962 to provide flood control, tourism, and increased municipal water supply to the city. Thus began the fifteen-year process of construction and displacement, much of it by the forceful policy of eminent domain, for a single dam. What the dam did not do was address why the land needed that protection. Hazard represented an Appalachian urban environment, at once an economic beneficiary and environmental victim of strip mining, who pushed to keep the disease and cure the symptoms by sacrificing their rural neighbors through urban favoring government infrastructural policies. The ARA, PWAA, and other massive legislative and physical projects under Kennedy’s administration shared a similar theme. Kennedy’s policies saw great changes in infrastructure, but little structural change to the social and political formations that molded the region’s needs. The War on Poverty, however, sought to differentiate itself from prior policies, continuing the spirit of Kennedy’s dedication while not replicating its disappointments.

Johnson’s War on Poverty mainly centered on the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which represented Johnson’s view of the entire directive and his differences from Kennedy’s administration. The act’s opening declaration of purpose stated that the War on Poverty would “eliminate the paradox of poverty in the midst of plenty” through “opening to everyone the opportunity for education and training.” The act created numerous programs, most importantly the Job Corps in Title I and the Community Action Program in Title II, that revolved around increasing the permanent capacity of individuals. Giving opportunities to the impoverished while avoiding simply “handing out” benefits was crucial to many supporters of the act, as Johnson and others believed that poverty was born out of an “impoverishment of opportunity.” Johnson held a distaste for “welfarism” and Sargent Shriver, Johnson’s appointee for program planning, was explicitly told “no doles.”[24] Unlike under Kennedy, however, the federal government would be providing these opportunities, not private industry. Thus, the Economic Opportunity Act established the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) to lead and shape a diverse set of programs, creating systems for government-provided “opportunities.”

The many programs of the Office of Economic Opportunity, however, held differing interpretations of a phrase in the Economic Opportunity Act, “maximum feasible participation of the residents.”[25] Johnson saw the Economic Opportunity Act as delivering job training and necessary services without intruding on local elites or social welfare agencies. However, many others in Johnson’s administration, including the later director of the Community Action Program Fred O’Reilly Hayes, saw the phrase as a federal endorsement of politically organizing the poor to press their needs on local political figures. While Kennedy’s anti-poverty efforts held little risk to embedded political structures, Johnson’s had radical potential based on interpretations of this one phrase. The differing views of anti-poverty planning led to conflicts between local governments and anti-poverty programs and within the OEO itself. The Community Action Program potentially empowered the poor via a number of community action agencies that were led by locals. Veteran community organizers and civil rights activists gained many of these local leadership positions across the nation, using federal grants for political empowerment of disadvantaged groups.

Another OEO program, Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), similarly impacted local politics across the nation, as the program helped fight against local housing exploitation and educate individuals on the programs and resources available to them outside the control of local political powerhouses. Rather than focusing on an impoverishment of opportunity through existing local power structures, VISTA and the community action agencies held the potential to destabilize local power structures and give political power to new groups through the phrase “maximum feasible participation.” Due to their challenge to local authority, the programs faced heavy resistance from local leadership. President Johnson also quickly backed away from the more progressive side of the Office of Economic Opportunity, stating, “To hell with community action.” The War on Poverty split very early on into the two different interpretations of “maximum feasible participation” seen in Johnson’s impoverishment of opportunity that worked with local leadership and VISTA’s direct political involvement of the poor.[26]

        While committed to anti-poverty measures at large, Johnson’s beliefs in the methods of the liberal state were more of a call to previous New Deal styles of liberal reform. His approach to anti-poverty attempted to revive and update New Deal era policies that emphasized the obligations of citizens to aid one another, through government mediation, while contributing through work to the “greater good of society.”[27] Similarly to his predecessor, President Kennedy, Johnson did not foresee his anti-poverty policies as a means of addressing issues of structural inequalities that prevented equal access to resources. Johnson and many others involved with the War on Poverty advocated for policies on job training and education alongside local leadership, or a “trickle down” method of development similar to the ARC’s and ARA’s methods where a solid base for economic benefit would be created through structural improvements in areas of interest to local leadership.[28] Others involved with the War on Poverty presented an understanding of the War on Poverty focusing on the other interpretation of the term “maximum feasible participation,” making the politicization of the poor a firm goal for their programs and saw the local leadership as creating the structural inequalities that kept groups dispossessed and impoverished.[29]

The partnerships between the Appalachian Volunteers (AV) and VISTA, more so than other anti-poverty organizations, were the most deeply involved with local organizing. AV and VISTA workers originally came to Appalachia with the same top-down approaches as previous anti-poverty efforts, working directly with county governance or educational projects. However, in the region they found locals already pushing for community change. Their interactions with the Appalachian grassroots groups slowly altered the missions toward structural change and assisting local organizations rather than the top-down approaches of their peer organizations. By listening to local organizers, they began to take on widely varied issues and understand the complex relationships between poverty, local power structures, and environmental destruction.[30] AV, in particular, became a more politically aggressive organization through their local participation, mainly due to resistance from local politics. AV members were “determined to make the Appalachian poor more aware of their capacity for ‘local political participation.’”[31] They organized community organizations through local meetings designed to challenge county power structures, which they viewed as dominated by the coal industry. These directly contrasted the Community Action Programs in Appalachia, which–despite their radical potential–preferred to involve local political figures as representatives for local needs. AV and VISTA formed a radical arm of the War on Poverty in the region that involved itself with grassroots organization.

Faced with a War on Poverty that generally promised much but gave little voice to Appalachian poor, locals used AV and VISTAs to free themselves from local political structures when organizing. The backgrounds of Appalachian men and women in labor movements and community work, especially Appalachian women, provided lived experience in social organizing and a keen understanding of social welfare.[32] Local political control, however, kept this lived experience constrained. AV members were not wrong in identifying that. In a depressed area, control over livelihoods equated to control over humans. An outside organization’s ability to provide livelihoods enabled organizing when locals ran afoul of elites. Edith Easterling, for example, lost her job as a school cook for her involvement with the Appalachian Volunteers; the group hired her directly as an intern, freeing her to become a lynchpin of organizing for the entire Marrowbone Creek area of Pike County.[33] 

Welfare rights became an organizing platform for local activism initially based on civil rights activism. Black women in Louisville, Kentucky, joined a nationwide welfare rights protest on June 30, 1966, with the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) forming in 1967. Edith Easterling invited representatives from NWRO to Marrowbone Creek a year later, starting welfare rights groups all over the Appalachian South that brought local groups into statewide coalitions to fight for public assistance.[34] Appalachian members of this broader movement brought their expansive understanding of welfare outside of media stereotypes of welfare meaning Aid to Families with Dependent Children, including discussions of health care, food stamps, and black lung benefits. These local welfare rights groups organized thanks to local community networks creating incorporated organizations through cooperation with VISTA and AV. Despite that, Appalachian welfare rights groups like Eastern Kentucky Welfare Rights Organization (EKWRO) were regionally specific and locally led. Local women formed the organizing backbone of the organization, like many others nationwide, and a Floyd County woman named Eula Hall led the organization herself.[35] While state and national connections from VISTA and AV were invaluable for local movements, similar to UMWA organizers in the 1920s and 1930s, local residents spearheaded grassroots anti-poverty campaigns like EKWRO that benefited their rural Appalachian regions. Regardless of whether sympathetic national groups or local activism were more critical, their close ties gave rise to powerful anti-poverty movements in Appalachia.

The close ties of local activists and AV, however, meant that the region’s anti-poverty movements were just as vulnerable as they were powerful. Changes in state and national leadership constrained the entire War on Poverty. President Johnson may have backed away from the progressive side of the War on Poverty, but it was never fully disavowed under his presidency. The hope for “community action” remained. Instead, the death knell for this short-lived side of the federal anti-poverty effort was in Kentucky governance itself. Local power brokers had seen how federal programs could disrupt political structures and helped launch a massive multi-year assault upon AV. The beginning of the end for AV, and many of the organizations they helped, was on June 29, 1967, when a farmer and retired miner named Jink Ray blocked a Puritan Coal Company bulldozer from strip mining the land he had farmed in Pike County for over forty years. AV, alongside the anti-strip mining group Appalachian Group to Save the Land and People (AGSLP), demonstrated to support Jink Ray. To avoid some of the national embarrassment, Governor Ned Breathitt suspended the mining permit on July 18, 1967, and two weeks later, the permit was revoked entirely.[36] Days later, AV member Joseph Mulloy and Southern Conference Education Fund workers Alan McSurely and Margaret McSurely were arrested on charges of sedition. While a Lexington federal court ruled the state law unconstitutional three days later, the court’s accusations of sedition and communism throughout the arrests were powerful enough to destabilize AV credibility. In early September, even Governor Breathitt announced that all AV funding would be cut. In the end, AV had its OEO funding restored, but grants were due to expire the following year, and renewal possibilities looked grim under new political regimes.[37] 

Breathitt’s successor, the new Republican governor Louie B. Nunn (1967-1971 term), was instrumental in fully reining in anti-poverty organizing. The more radical ends of the War on Poverty such as AV, unpopular with local elites and President Johnson himself, had seen funding cuts and flagging support for years by this point. More than ever, they were vulnerable to local political plays rather than remaining the aloof bastions for organizers they formerly represented. In March of the year after the sedition arrests, Governor Nunn helped set up a replacement for the defunct sedition law by establishing the Kentucky Un-American Activities Committee (KUAC). KUAC announced it would hold hearings in Pikeville in October 1968, during which the committee portrayed AV as seditious manipulators of the poor. In a word, they were “outsiders.”[38] The injured AV, combined with an already faltering War on Poverty, failed to recover from the damaging accusations, becoming demoralized and disorganized. Grant funding reapplications were rejected, and the organization was entirely closed by summer 1970. With it, local anti-poverty movements lost their federal counterpart. Welfare rights and anti-poverty efforts lost some of their political platform, at least nationally, but environmental and anti-strip-mining movements were only picking up more steam.

Infrastructural improvements became the embodiment of the 1960s attempts at anti-poverty for state and federal governments, and their problems became characteristic of the era. Enmeshed in national narratives of growth and post-war optimism, Presidents Kennedy’s and Johnson’s efforts ran headlong into the decades of centralized political power and environmental destruction from the industry locally called “King Coal.” They tackled the symptoms of poverty while tackling little of the underlying issues that created it. John Burch Jr. argues that economically and politically, the War on Poverty changed little in Appalachia, especially counties served by the Middle Kentucky River Area Development Council.[39] In terms of aims–Johnson’s bold claims of eradicating poverty through his “war” come to mind–the 1960s certainly fell short. Central Appalachia in the 1970s faced many of the same issues as 1960s Appalachia, which faced similar issues to 1950s Appalachia, of which remnants still appear in contemporary Appalachia.

There is a watershed moment in the War on Poverty revolving around “maximum feasible participation” and “community action,” phrases-turned-policy that had the potential to disrupt intertwined economic and political structures that shaped the region seen in the 1960s. The potential of federal support for residents against the local power structures was, for a time, real. That promise disappeared in Appalachia, as it was never truly intended to be offered in the first place. Yet, the legacies of that promise, however fleeting, are also real. The hope of federal support re-galvanized grassroots organizing throughout the region. Particularly, as Jessica Wilkerson writes, women leaders with the authority that comes with lived experience–such as Sudie Crusenberry, Minnie Lunsford, Lois Scott, andBessie Lou Cornett, among others–fought for social justice and wove a “web of activism” that lasted long past the 1960s. The space opened by national interest and federal planning in the region gave rise for these women to create lasting networks of grassroots organizing.[40] These networks spiraled out, becoming foundations for future movements to continue the fight on a variety of topics. Black lung benefits protests, public health activists, and the anti-strip mining movement all took advantage of this opened space to push for social justice within the region. If the 1960s were a moment of great disappointment, it was equally a moment of great and enduring hope. Perhaps poverty was not eradicated, but the legacies of the attempt certainly improved life for many within the region as well as helped platform an enduring Appalachian legacy of organizing to fight against local political and economic interests–a fight that, frankly, must continue.

Bibliography

Appalachian Regional Commission Records, 1958-2010. University of Kentucky. UK Libraries Special Collections. Lexington, KY.

Arnett, Douglas O’Neil. “Eastern Kentucky: The Politics of Dependency and Underdevelopment.” PhD diss., Department of Political Science Duke University, 1978.

Billings, Dwight B., and Kathleen M. Blee. The Road to Poverty: The Making of Wealth and Hardship in Appalachia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Burch, John R., Jr. “The Turner Family of Breathitt County, Kentucky, and the War on Poverty.” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 107 (2009): 401-17.

Carl D. Perkins Congressional Papers, 1948-1984. Eastern Kentucky University. Special Collections and Archives. Richmond, KY.

Caudill, Harry M. Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area. Boston: Little, Brown, 1963.

Davies, Gareth. From Opportunity to Entitlement: The Transformation and Decline of Great Society Liberalism. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996.

Eller, Ronald D. Uneven Ground: Appalachia Since 1945. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013.

Gaventa, John. “Water–You Can Drink It with a Fork.” Southern Exposure 14 (1986): 21-26.

Jacobs, Nicholas F., and James D. Savage. “Kennedy’s Keynesian Budgetary Politics and the 1962 Public Works Acceleration Act.” Journal of Policy History 30 (2018): 522-51.

Kiffmeyer, Thomas. Reformers to Radicals: The Appalachian Volunteers and the War on Poverty. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008.

Lyttle, Nathan. “WYMT Documentary: The 1957 Flood.” WYMT. January 28, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWBW0SmsC3A

Mckee, Guian A. “‘This Government Is with Us’: Lyndon Johnson and the Grassroots War on Poverty.” In The War on Poverty: A New Grassroots History, 1964-1980. Edited by Annelise Orleck and Lisa Gayle Hazirjian, 31-62. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011.

Orleck, Annelise. “Introduction: The War on Poverty from the Grass Roots Up.” In The War on Poverty: A New Grassroots History, 1964-1980. Edited by Annelise Orleck and Lisa Gayle Hazirjian, 1-28. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011.

Portelli, Alessandro. They Say in Harlan County: An Oral History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

“Remembering the Flood of ’57.” National Weather Service. ​​https://www.weather.gov/jkl/1957flood

Shackelford, Nevyle. “Pollution Has Ruined North Fork River As Fishing Stream.” Lexington Herald-Leader. October 9, 1964. https://www.newspapers.com/image/684347879/

Smith, Zachary A. The Environmental Policy Paradox. 4th ed. Upper Saddle River: Pearson Education, 2004.

Unger, Irwin. The Best of Intentions: The Triumph and Failure of the Great Society Under Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. St. James: Brandywine Press, 1996.

United States Census Bureau. “Table 25: Occupancy and Financial Characteristics, Year Built, and Heating Equipment, for Places of 2,500 to 10,000 Inhabitants: 1960.” https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1960/housing-volume-1/41962442v1p4ch4.pdf

Whisnant, David M. Modernizing the Mountaineer: People, Power, and Planning in Appalachia. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994.

Wilkerson, Jessica. To Live Here, You Have to Fight: How Women Led Appalachian Movements for Social Justice. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019.


[1] Eller, Uneven Ground, 93.

[2] Billings and Blee, The Road to Poverty, 109.

[3] Eller, Uneven Ground, 11-12.

[4] Ibid, 15.

[5] Ibid, 18.

[6] Ibid, 19-20.

[7] Portelli, They Say in Harlan County, 272-74.

[8] Wilkerson, To Live Here, You Have to Fight, 31.

[9]  Lyttle, “WYMT Documentary: The 1957 Flood.”

[10] Eller, Uneven Ground, 38-40.

[11] Whisnant, Modernizing the Mountaineer, 70.

[12]  Ibid, 71.

[13] Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands, 322.

[14] Whisnant, Modernizing the Mountaineer, 72.

[15] Ibid, 78-79.

[16] Shackelford, “Pollution Has Ruined North Fork River As Fishing Stream.”

[17] Gaventa, “Water–You Can Drink It with a Fork,” 21-22.

[18] Smith, The Environmental Policy Paradox, 126.

[19] Jacobs and Savage, “Kennedy’s Keynesian Budgetary Politics,” 523, 533-34, 540.

[20] Accelerated Public Works Program: Water Work Projects, June 15, 1964, Box 691, Appalachian Regional Commission Records, University of Kentucky, Kentucky.

[21] “Remembering the Flood of ’57.”  

[22] U.S. Census Bureau. The exact census population was 5,889 citizens.

[23] Secretary of the Army, Kentucky River and Tributaries, Kentucky: Referred to the Committee on Public Works June 4, 1962, Box D-029, Perkins Papers. Estimates ranged greatly as to the number of people within the area. The survey report cites 225 “family units” alongside 27 commercial buildings, six churches, four school buildings, and five post offices. Reports protesting the dam’s construction cite as many as 3,000 people, or 500 families. Due to the historic invisibility of many rural Appalachians to federal investigation, I tend to favor the latter over the former numbers. The truth certainly lies somewhere between the two.

[24] Davies, From Opportunity to Entitlement, 34-39.

[25] Unger, The Best of Intentions, 82.

[26] Orleck, “Introduction: The War on Poverty from the Grass Roots Up,” 2-15.

[27] Mckee, “‘This Government Is with Us,’” 33.

[28] Arnett, “Eastern Kentucky,” 160-61.

[29] Mckee, “‘This Government Is with Us,’” 46.

[30] Wilkerson, To Live Here, You Have to Fight, 39.

[31] Kiffmeyer, Reformers to Radicals, 159.

[32] Wilkerson, To Live Here, You Have to Fight, 50.

[33] Ibid, 53-54.

[34] Ibid, 97.

[35] Ibid, 103.

[36] Kiffmeyer, Reformers to Radicals, 188.

[37] Ibid, 193.

[38] Ibid, 197.

[39] Burch Jr., “The Turner Family of Breathitt County, Kentucky, and the War on Poverty,” 417.

[40] Wilkerson, To Live Here, You Have to Fight, 197.

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Chapter 16 Ravaged Land and Polarized People: Community Response to Strip Mining in Eastern Kentucky, 1946-1972
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