Chapter 23: The War on Poverty — When America "Discovered" Appalachian Poverty Again

"They came into our hollow with cameras and notebooks and good intentions. They took pictures of the worst houses. They talked to the people who looked the most pitiful. Then they went back to Washington and told everybody how poor we were. Like we didn't already know." — Oral history interview, Eastern Kentucky Oral History Project, Appalachian State University, 1987

Learning Objectives

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:

1. Analyze how Harry Caudill's Night Comes to the Cumberlands (1963) and media coverage of Appalachian poverty shaped national perceptions and policy responses
2. Describe President Lyndon B. Johnson's 1964 visit to Martin County, Kentucky, and its role in catalyzing the War on Poverty
3. Evaluate the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) — what it built, what it prioritized, and what it left unaddressed
4. Assess the "culture of poverty" thesis and its application to Appalachia, distinguishing between cultural explanations and structural causes of persistent poverty
5. Identify the tensions between outside anti-poverty workers and local communities, including the parallels between VISTA volunteers and earlier settlement school workers

The Book That Made America Look

In 1963, a lawyer from Whitesburg, Kentucky, published a book that cracked open the comfortable narrative of postwar American prosperity and forced the nation to see what it had spent a generation ignoring.

Harry M. Caudill's Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area was not the first book about Appalachian poverty. It was not the most scholarly, the most nuanced, or the most methodologically rigorous. But it was the most effective. Written in prose that was by turns lyrical and furious, Caudill's book traced the history of eastern Kentucky from its settlement through the timber and coal eras to the economic devastation of the mid-twentieth century, arguing that the region's poverty was not the result of cultural deficiency or geographic isolation but the direct consequence of a century of ruthless extraction by outside corporate interests.

Caudill's central argument was simple and devastating: the coal companies had come into the mountains, bought the mineral rights for pennies an acre (often through the infamous broad form deed, which gave the mineral owner the right to do whatever was necessary to extract the minerals, regardless of the surface owner's wishes), mined the coal, shipped the profits out of the region, and left the people with exhausted land, polluted water, ruined health, and no economic alternative. The poverty of eastern Kentucky was not a mystery. It was the predictable outcome of a system designed to enrich outsiders at the expense of the people who lived on the land.

The book arrived at precisely the right moment. In the early 1960s, Americans were beginning to confront the persistence of poverty amid unprecedented national affluence. Michael Harrington's The Other America (1962) had already drawn attention to the paradox of poverty in the wealthiest nation on Earth. John F. Kennedy, during his 1960 presidential primary campaign in West Virginia, had seen Appalachian poverty firsthand and had been visibly affected by it. The ground was prepared. Caudill's book provided the most compelling specific portrait of what American poverty looked like — not in an urban ghetto, not among a racial minority, but among white Americans in the mountains of Kentucky, people who could not be dismissed as recent immigrants or victims of racial discrimination but who were, unmistakably, desperately poor.

Night Comes to the Cumberlands was reviewed widely and favorably. It was read by politicians, journalists, and policy makers. It was read by the Kennedy White House. And after Kennedy's assassination in November 1963, it was read by Lyndon Baines Johnson, who was looking for a cause large enough to define his presidency.

The book was not without its problems. Caudill's portrayal of mountain people, while sympathetic, sometimes veered toward the patronizing. His emphasis on the passivity of the exploited population — his description of mountain people as victims who had been done to rather than agents who had resisted — underestimated the long tradition of Appalachian resistance documented in Chapter 17 and Chapter 26 of this textbook. And his prescription for the region's problems — massive federal intervention, including a TVA-style regional authority — replicated the top-down approach that had characterized the New Deal, with all its attendant contradictions.

But the book did something that no policy paper, no government report, no academic study had managed to do: it made Americans care about Appalachian poverty. It put the mountains on the national agenda. And it set in motion the chain of events that would produce the most ambitious anti-poverty program in American history.

The President Comes to the Mountains

LBJ on Tom Fletcher's Porch

On April 24, 1964, President Lyndon Baines Johnson traveled to Martin County, Kentucky — one of the poorest counties in one of the poorest regions in America — to announce his administration's commitment to fighting poverty. The visit was carefully staged. Johnson sat on the porch of a weathered cabin with Tom Fletcher, an unemployed father of eight whose annual income was $400, and talked about poverty in America while photographers captured the image that would become the iconic photograph of the War on Poverty.

The photograph — the president of the United States sitting on a ramshackle porch in the mountains of eastern Kentucky, leaning toward a gaunt, weather-beaten man whose poverty was written on his face and his cabin — was immediately and intentionally powerful. It said: poverty is real, it is here, and the most powerful man in the world has come to see it.

Johnson's visit to Martin County was not accidental. It was the culmination of months of planning by the White House staff, who had been tasked with finding the right location to dramatize the president's anti-poverty agenda. Eastern Kentucky was chosen because it presented poverty in a form that was politically useful: white poverty, in a rural setting, among people whose families had been in America for generations. The poverty of Martin County could not be attributed to racial discrimination, immigration, or urban dysfunction — the explanations that allowed many white Americans to dismiss the poverty of Black Americans, Latino Americans, and urban communities. The poverty of Martin County was, in the eyes of the political strategists, "pure" poverty — poverty that could only be explained by economic failure, and that therefore demanded economic solutions.

This is an important and uncomfortable point. The War on Poverty was launched from Appalachia in part because Appalachian poverty was white poverty, and white poverty was politically easier to address than Black poverty. The strategy was not cynical — Johnson genuinely cared about poverty in all its forms, and his anti-poverty programs would eventually benefit communities of every race — but the staging was deliberate. Appalachia was chosen as the face of the War on Poverty because Appalachian poverty challenged the assumption, widespread among middle-class white Americans, that poverty was a problem of "other" people.

Primary Source Excerpt — President Lyndon B. Johnson, remarks at Martin County, Kentucky, April 24, 1964: "I have called for a national war on poverty. Our objective: total victory. There are millions of Americans — one fifth of our people — who have not shared in the abundance which has been granted to most of us, and on whose suffering we have too long turned our back. The time has come to act... I want to see it started in these hills."

Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library, Public Papers of the Presidents.

Johnson's visit lasted only a few hours. He flew in by helicopter, visited several homes, spoke with local residents, delivered brief remarks, and flew out. But the images and the rhetoric of that visit shaped the public understanding of the War on Poverty for a generation. The mountains of eastern Kentucky became, in the national imagination, the face of American poverty — a face that was white, rural, and sympathetic.

What Happened to Tom Fletcher

A note about the man on the porch. Tom Fletcher, whose face became the symbol of the War on Poverty, did not escape poverty. In the years after Johnson's visit, Fletcher and his family received some government assistance — food stamps, housing improvements, educational support for his children. But the structural conditions of Martin County did not change. The coal industry, which had been the county's primary employer, continued to decline. No significant new industry arrived. The roads improved, slowly. The water system improved, eventually. But the fundamental problem — an economy built on extraction, with no plan for what came after the extraction ended — remained.

Fletcher died in 2004 at the age of eighty. He had lived his entire life in Martin County. He had watched the War on Poverty arrive, make promises, build some things, and ultimately leave the underlying structures of poverty largely intact. His experience was, in microcosm, the experience of Appalachia itself.

The Appalachian Regional Commission: Roads to Where?

The Biggest Investment

The Appalachian Regional Development Act of 1965, signed by Johnson on March 9, established the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) — a federal-state partnership designed to promote economic development across the thirteen-state Appalachian region, from southern New York to northern Mississippi. The ARC was, and remains, the largest and most sustained federal commitment to a specific American region outside of the Tennessee Valley Authority.

The ARC's mandate was broad: to address the economic and social underdevelopment of Appalachia through investments in infrastructure, education, healthcare, and economic development. Its budget, while never as large as its advocates wanted, was substantial — billions of dollars over the decades since its creation. And its most visible investment, by far, was in highways.

The Appalachian Development Highway System (ADHS) — a network of corridors designed to connect the isolated communities of the Appalachian region to the national highway network — consumed the lion's share of ARC funding. The logic was straightforward: Appalachia was poor because it was isolated. If you built roads, you connected communities to markets, to jobs, to healthcare, to education. Roads were the precondition for everything else.

The logic was not wrong. Geographic isolation was a genuine barrier to economic development in much of Appalachia, and the highway system did reduce that isolation. Communities that had been hours from the nearest hospital were suddenly within reach. Businesses that could not have operated in areas without reliable transportation corridors could now consider locating in Appalachian towns. The ADHS, though never fully completed (some corridors remain unfinished as of this writing), did what it was designed to do: it connected previously isolated areas to the broader economy.

But the highway emphasis also revealed the ARC's limitations — and the political forces that shaped it. Roads were popular with politicians because they were visible, tangible, and distributed across many congressional districts. Every ARC state could point to highway construction as evidence that federal money was being spent. Roads were also popular with the construction industry, which benefited directly from the contracts. And roads were popular with the Appalachian political establishment — the governors, senators, and representatives who sat on the ARC's governing board and who understood that highway funding was the kind of federal investment that their constituents could see and that they could take credit for.

What roads did not do was address the structural causes of Appalachian poverty. A highway through a county where the coal had been mined out, the timber had been cut, the topsoil had washed away, and the young people had left did not, by itself, create an economy. It made it easier to leave — and for many Appalachians, that is exactly what the new roads facilitated. The highways that were supposed to bring jobs into the mountains often functioned, in practice, as routes for people to leave the mountains for jobs elsewhere.

What Else ARC Built

The ARC's investments were not exclusively in highways, though highways dominated the budget. The commission also funded:

Health facilities. The ARC funded the construction and improvement of health clinics, hospitals, and community health centers across the region. In areas where the nearest hospital had been hours away, ARC-funded clinics provided basic healthcare, prenatal care, dental services, and — increasingly — treatment for the chronic health conditions that plagued the coalfields: black lung, diabetes, heart disease.

Water and sewer systems. In many rural Appalachian communities, the basic infrastructure for clean water and sanitation did not exist. ARC funded the construction of water treatment plants, distribution systems, and sewage treatment facilities that brought running water and modern sanitation to communities that had relied on wells, springs, and outhouses. This was not glamorous work, and it did not make national headlines, but it was among the most consequential investments the ARC made — reducing waterborne disease, improving quality of life, and meeting a basic human need.

Education. The ARC invested in vocational training programs, community colleges, and educational facilities designed to prepare Appalachian workers for jobs beyond coal mining. Some of these programs were effective, particularly the community colleges that provided associate degrees and technical training. Others were less successful — training programs that prepared workers for jobs that did not exist in the communities where the workers lived.

Child development. ARC funded early childhood development programs, including some of the first Head Start centers in the country. The Head Start program, which provided preschool education, nutrition, and healthcare to children from low-income families, was one of the War on Poverty's most enduring and well-regarded initiatives, and its roots in Appalachia are not coincidental.

VISTA: The New Missionaries

Young Outsiders Arriving to Help

In 1964, as part of the War on Poverty's Economic Opportunity Act, the Johnson administration created Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) — a domestic version of the Peace Corps that sent young, mostly college-educated volunteers into impoverished American communities to work on anti-poverty projects. Hundreds of VISTA volunteers were deployed to Appalachia.

The parallels to the settlement school movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (discussed in Chapter 14 and Chapter 25) were striking — and largely unrecognized by the VISTA volunteers themselves. Like the settlement school workers of the 1890s and 1900s, the VISTA volunteers were young, educated, idealistic, and from outside the region. Like the settlement workers, they came with a mission to help — and with assumptions about what the people they were helping needed. Like the settlement workers, they sometimes imposed their own values and priorities on communities that had not asked for their help and did not always welcome it.

The VISTA volunteers were, overwhelmingly, well-intentioned. They came because they believed in the War on Poverty. They lived in the communities they served, often in conditions that were uncomfortable by the standards they were accustomed to. They worked on projects ranging from adult literacy programs to community organizing to legal aid. Many were deeply affected by their experience and carried it with them for the rest of their lives.

But the tensions were real. The volunteers arrived in communities where they were outsiders — outsiders who did not know the language, the customs, the social structures, or the history of the places where they had been sent. Some adapted quickly and formed genuine relationships with the communities they served. Others never did. The cultural gap between a twenty-two-year-old college graduate from Connecticut and a fifty-year-old coal miner's wife in Harlan County was not easily bridged, regardless of goodwill.

Some VISTA volunteers engaged in community organizing that local power structures found threatening. In eastern Kentucky, VISTA volunteers helped poor communities challenge county governments, coal companies, and local elites who controlled access to jobs, services, and political power. This kind of organizing was exactly what the War on Poverty's community action programs were designed to support — the idea was that poverty could not be fought from above, that poor communities had to organize themselves to demand change. But when poor communities actually organized and began demanding change, the local power structures pushed back, and the federal government — which was, after all, dependent on the votes and political support of those same local power structures — often sided with the establishment rather than the organizers.

Primary Source Excerpt — VISTA volunteer report, Pike County, Kentucky, 1966: "The people here are not passive. They are not waiting for someone to rescue them. They have been fighting the coal companies and the county political machines for years. What they lack is not motivation or intelligence — it is resources, legal representation, and a voice that the power structure has to listen to. Our job is not to teach them how to help themselves. They already know how. Our job is to amplify their voice."

National Archives, Office of Economic Opportunity Records.

This report captures, in miniature, the best version of what VISTA could be — outsiders who understood their role not as teachers or saviors but as amplifiers of existing community strength. Not all VISTA volunteers achieved this understanding. Some came with the implicit belief that they knew better than the communities they served — that their education, their perspective, their values were superior. These volunteers reproduced, often unconsciously, the colonial dynamic that had characterized outsider engagement with Appalachia since the "discovery" of the region in the late nineteenth century.

The "Culture of Poverty": Blaming the Poor

A Dangerous Idea

Among the most consequential — and most damaging — intellectual frameworks applied to Appalachian poverty during the War on Poverty era was the "culture of poverty" thesis, developed by anthropologist Oscar Lewis in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Lewis, based on his ethnographic research in Mexico and Puerto Rico, argued that poverty was not merely an economic condition but a cultural one — that prolonged poverty produced a distinctive set of attitudes, behaviors, and values that were transmitted from generation to generation and that perpetuated poverty even when economic opportunities became available. The culture of poverty, Lewis argued, was characterized by fatalism, present-time orientation (an inability to plan for the future), distrust of institutions, weak family structures, and a lack of civic participation.

Lewis's thesis was nuanced in its original formulation — he was careful to note that the culture of poverty was a response to structural conditions, not an inherent characteristic of poor people. But as the idea filtered through the political system, the media, and popular discourse, the nuance was lost. What remained was a simple, dangerous idea: the poor are poor because of their culture. They have the wrong values. They make the wrong choices. They do not work hard enough, save enough, plan enough, or aspire enough. Their poverty is, at some fundamental level, their own fault.

Applied to Appalachia, the culture of poverty thesis was devastating. It provided an intellectual framework for the stereotypes that had been attached to mountain people for a century — the lazy hillbilly, the shiftless mountaineer, the welfare-dependent holler dweller. If Appalachian poverty was cultural rather than structural, then the solution was to change the culture — to educate mountain people out of their backward ways, to teach them middle-class values, to reform their attitudes and behaviors. This was precisely the approach that the settlement schools had taken seventy years earlier, and it was precisely the approach that informed many War on Poverty programs.

The culture of poverty thesis also served a crucial political function: it deflected attention from the structural causes of Appalachian poverty. If the problem was culture, then it was not necessary to address the concentration of land ownership, the absence of a tax base, the exploitation of mineral resources by absentee corporations, the inadequacy of the educational system, the corruption of local political structures, or any of the other systemic factors that produced and perpetuated poverty in the mountains. If the problem was culture, the solution was cheaper and less threatening to existing power structures: teach the poor to be different, rather than changing the systems that made them poor.

Who Was Never Asked

The most striking feature of the War on Poverty as it was applied to Appalachia was the absence of Appalachian voices in the design of the programs meant to help them.

The War on Poverty was designed in Washington by policy makers, economists, and social scientists who, with few exceptions, had never lived in the mountains and whose understanding of Appalachian life was mediated by books (like Caudill's), photographs (like the images from Johnson's Martin County visit), and the assumptions of their professional training. The programs they designed reflected their understanding of poverty — which was, inevitably, an outsider's understanding.

The community action programs, to their credit, were designed to involve poor people in the decision-making process. The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 required that community action agencies include "maximum feasible participation" of the poor — a revolutionary idea that poor people should have a voice in the programs designed to help them. But "maximum feasible participation" proved to be a phrase that was easier to write into law than to implement in practice.

In practice, community action agencies in Appalachia were often controlled by the same local elites — county judges, school superintendents, coal company managers — who had controlled the region's institutions before the War on Poverty arrived. The "maximum feasible participation" of the poor was frequently reduced to token representation — a few poor community members on an advisory board dominated by the local establishment. The poor were consulted, formally, but their voices were not determinative. The decisions about how anti-poverty money would be spent were made, more often than not, by the same people who had presided over the conditions that created the poverty.

When community action programs did empower poor communities — when organizers helped them challenge local power structures, demand accountability from county governments, or fight the coal companies — the backlash was swift. Local politicians complained to their congressmen. Congressmen complained to the White House. The Office of Economic Opportunity, which administered the War on Poverty, found itself under political pressure to rein in community action programs that were doing exactly what they were supposed to do: organizing the poor to fight for their own interests.

The result was a gradual retreat from the War on Poverty's most radical promise — that poor people would participate meaningfully in the design and governance of anti-poverty programs. By the late 1960s, community action programs across the country, including those in Appalachia, had been tamed — brought under the control of local government, stripped of their organizing function, and reduced to service delivery agencies that distributed federal funds without challenging the structures that made the funds necessary.

What Actually Worked

The War on Poverty and the ARC, despite their limitations, produced real and lasting improvements in the material conditions of life in Appalachia. It is important to name these achievements clearly, because the narrative of failure — the story of the War on Poverty as a well-intentioned disaster — is as misleading as the narrative of unqualified success.

Roads. The Appalachian Development Highway System, whatever its limitations as an economic development strategy, reduced the geographic isolation that had been a genuine barrier to healthcare, education, and economic opportunity. Communities that had been hours from a hospital were suddenly within reach. The highways were not a sufficient condition for economic development, but they were, in many places, a necessary one.

Water and sewer systems. Before the ARC, large portions of rural Appalachia lacked access to clean drinking water and modern sanitation. By the 1990s, the ARC had funded water and sewer systems serving millions of people. The reduction in waterborne disease, the improvement in quality of life, and the elimination of the basic indignity of living without running water or indoor plumbing were among the War on Poverty's most consequential achievements — and among its least celebrated.

Healthcare. The community health centers funded by the War on Poverty and the ARC brought basic healthcare to areas that had been medically underserved for generations. In the coalfields, these centers provided the first non-company medical care that many families had ever received. The centers treated black lung, provided prenatal care, vaccinated children, and addressed the chronic health conditions — diabetes, heart disease, dental disease — that plague Appalachian communities to this day.

Head Start and early childhood education. The Head Start program, launched as a War on Poverty initiative, provided preschool education, nutrition, and healthcare to hundreds of thousands of Appalachian children. The long-term outcomes of Head Start have been extensively studied, and while the results are debated, the consensus is that the program improved school readiness and had lasting positive effects on the health and educational outcomes of participating children.

Legal aid. War on Poverty-funded legal aid programs provided, for the first time, free legal representation to poor Appalachians who had previously had no access to the legal system. The Appalachian Research and Defense Fund (AppalReD) and similar organizations took on cases involving land rights, mineral rights, workers' compensation, black lung benefits, and environmental protection — cases that the poor could not have brought without legal assistance. These programs were among the most effective components of the War on Poverty, directly addressing the power imbalance between poor communities and the corporate and political interests that dominated the region.

What Didn't Work — and Why

Treating Symptoms While Leaving Structures Intact

The War on Poverty's fundamental failure in Appalachia was not that it did nothing — it did a great deal — but that it addressed the symptoms of poverty while leaving the structures that produced poverty largely intact.

The land ownership pattern — in which vast acreages of Appalachian land, including the mineral rights beneath them, were owned by absentee corporations that extracted resources and exported profits without contributing to the local tax base — was not addressed. The Appalachian Land Ownership Study, conducted in the late 1970s (after the War on Poverty era), documented what everyone in the mountains already knew: that in many Appalachian counties, the majority of the land was owned by a handful of corporations, and that these corporations paid minimal property taxes, leaving the counties without the revenue to fund schools, roads, or services. The War on Poverty built schools but did not address the tax structure that left schools underfunded. It built roads but did not challenge the corporate ownership patterns that left counties without the revenue to maintain them.

The coal industry's political power — its ability to control state legislatures, county governments, and judicial systems across the coalfield states — was not confronted. The broad form deed, which allowed mineral owners to destroy surface land without the surface owner's consent, remained in force. The severance taxes that could have captured a portion of coal revenues for local reinvestment were either nonexistent or inadequate. The regulatory frameworks that allowed companies to externalize the environmental and health costs of mining remained weak. The War on Poverty operated within the existing political structure rather than challenging it — and the existing political structure was the primary mechanism through which poverty was produced and maintained.

The "culture of poverty" framing — the assumption that Appalachian poverty was at least partly a cultural problem requiring cultural solutions — diverted attention and resources from structural causes. Programs designed to change attitudes, teach job skills, and improve personal habits were not useless, but they were insufficient. You cannot educate your way out of poverty when the jobs do not exist. You cannot improve your attitudes when the coal company owns your land and the county judge is on its payroll. The culture of poverty thesis allowed policy makers to feel that they were doing something meaningful about poverty without confronting the powerful interests that benefited from the status quo.

The Anchor Examples

In Harlan County, Kentucky, the War on Poverty arrived in a community that had been in continuous economic crisis since the coal industry's decline began in the 1950s. The county received ARC highway funding, community health centers, Head Start programs, and VISTA volunteers. The physical infrastructure improved. Children who would not have had preschool education received it. People who had never seen a doctor received healthcare.

But the coal companies still owned the land. The county government was still beholden to coal interests. The young people still left — the highways that were supposed to bring economic development to Harlan County functioned, in practice, as routes out. By the 1980s, Harlan County's population had declined dramatically from its mid-century peak, and the economic problems that the War on Poverty was supposed to solve persisted in only slightly modified form.

In McDowell County, West Virginia — once the wealthiest county in West Virginia during the coal boom, by the 1960s one of the poorest counties in America — the pattern was similar. Federal anti-poverty dollars funded improvements in housing, healthcare, education, and infrastructure. The improvements were real. But the coal industry's decline continued, the young and the ambitious continued to leave, and the structural conditions that had produced poverty — absentee land ownership, extractive economics, political dependency on the coal industry — remained in place.

McDowell County's population, which had peaked at nearly 100,000 during the coal boom, had fallen to fewer than 20,000 by 2020. The War on Poverty did not prevent this decline. It may have made the decline more humane — the people who remained had better roads, cleaner water, and more access to healthcare than they would have had without federal intervention. But the fundamental trajectory of the county was not altered.

The Media's Appalachia: Poverty as Spectacle

The Camera's Gaze

The War on Poverty brought something else to Appalachia that the region had experienced before and would experience again: the camera.

In the 1960s, photojournalists, documentary filmmakers, and television crews descended on the mountains to document American poverty. The images they produced — gaunt faces, barefoot children, sagging cabins, hollow-eyed mothers — were powerful, effective, and reductive. They showed real conditions that needed to be seen. But they showed only those conditions. They did not show the strengths of Appalachian communities, the resilience of Appalachian people, the beauty of the landscape, or the complexity of lives that included poverty but were not defined by it.

The photographs of the War on Poverty era — particularly those published in national magazines like Life, Look, and the Saturday Evening Post — established a visual vocabulary of Appalachian poverty that persists to this day. When Americans think of Appalachian poverty, the images that come to mind are the images from the 1960s: black-and-white photographs of weathered cabins, hollow-eyed children, and gaunt men sitting on porches. These images are not false — the conditions they depict were real. But they are incomplete, and their incompleteness is a form of distortion.

The people photographed during the War on Poverty era were rarely consulted about how their images were used. Their photographs appeared in magazines and newspapers, on television broadcasts and in government reports, without their consent or input. They became symbols — symbols of poverty, of need, of the crisis that the War on Poverty was supposed to address — but they were not given the opportunity to tell their own stories in their own words. They were objects of the camera's gaze, not subjects of their own narrative.

Oral history — Dora Mae Halcomb, Letcher County, Kentucky, 1988: "A man come up here with a camera and asked could he take pictures of my children. I said what for? He said for a magazine, to show people how poor folks live. I looked at my children — they were clean, they were fed, they were going to school — and I said, we ain't as poor as you think. But he took the pictures anyway, and when they come out in the magazine, they made us look like we was the worst off people in the world. My children was ashamed. I was ashamed. We was poor, yes, but we wasn't what they made us look like."

From the Appalachian Oral History Collection, Southeast Community and Technical College.

This dynamic — outsiders arriving to document poverty, selecting the most dramatic images, and presenting them without context — is a form of what scholars have called "poverty tourism" or "poverty pornography." It reduces complex human lives to their most desperate dimension, satisfying the emotional needs of the viewer (pity, outrage, the warm feeling of having "seen" the problem) while doing nothing to change the conditions it depicts. The photographs of the War on Poverty era helped build political support for anti-poverty programs, and in that sense they served a purpose. But they also reinforced the stereotypes of Appalachian backwardness and degradation that had been constructed by the "local color" writers of the nineteenth century and that would be perpetuated by the media representations discussed in Chapter 35.

The Parallel That No One Noticed

It is worth pausing to notice a pattern that should, by now, be familiar.

In the 1890s and early 1900s, well-meaning outsiders — settlement school workers, missionaries, educators — came to the mountains to help the poor, backward mountain people. They brought schools, healthcare, and modern values. They also brought assumptions about the cultural inferiority of the people they were helping. They built institutions that served real needs while also imposing outside values and disrupting existing community structures. (This story is told in Chapter 14 and Chapter 25.)

In the 1930s, the New Deal brought another wave of outsiders — TVA engineers, CCC supervisors, agricultural agents, Park Service planners — who built infrastructure, provided employment, and modernized the region while also displacing communities, imposing outside expertise, and treating mountain people as problems to be solved. (This is the story told in Chapter 22.)

In the 1960s, the War on Poverty brought yet another wave — VISTA volunteers, community organizers, social workers, policy experts — who came to the mountains with the same combination of genuine help and unexamined condescension. They built health centers and water systems while also applying the "culture of poverty" framework, documenting poverty as spectacle, and designing programs from the top down.

The pattern is consistent across seven decades: outsiders arrive, diagnose the problem (always finding it partly in the culture of the people themselves), implement solutions (always designed by experts from elsewhere), achieve some real improvements (always in material conditions rather than power structures), and ultimately leave the underlying systems of extraction and exploitation intact.

The reason the pattern repeats is not that the outsiders are malicious. Most are genuinely committed to helping. The reason is structural: the programs are designed and funded by institutions — the federal government, philanthropic organizations, universities — that do not challenge the fundamental power arrangements that produce poverty. They treat poverty as a condition to be ameliorated, not as a system to be dismantled. And so the amelioration arrives, real but insufficient, and the system continues, modified but intact, and a generation later, another wave of well-meaning outsiders arrives to discover — once again — that Appalachia is poor.

The Appalachian Volunteers: From Service to Confrontation

From Reform to Rebellion

Alongside VISTA, a homegrown organization called the Appalachian Volunteers (AVs) — initially a project of the Berea College-based Council of the Southern Mountains — sent young people into eastern Kentucky communities beginning in 1963 to repair schoolhouses, organize community groups, and provide direct assistance to impoverished families.

The AVs began as a service organization — college students spending summers painting schools and repairing community buildings. But as the volunteers spent time in the coalfield communities, they began to understand that the problems they were addressing were not problems of peeling paint and leaky roofs. They were problems of power. The communities they served were poor not because they lacked motivation or knowledge but because the economic and political systems they lived under were designed to extract wealth from the mountains and concentrate it elsewhere.

This understanding radicalized the organization. By the mid-1960s, the Appalachian Volunteers had evolved from a service-oriented group into a community organizing operation that was actively challenging local power structures — county governments that served coal company interests, school systems that were run as patronage networks, strip mine operators who were destroying the land while paying minimal taxes and employing almost no local workers.

The confrontation over strip mining was particularly intense. As strip mining expanded in eastern Kentucky during the 1960s (a precursor to the mountaintop removal described in Chapter 24), the Appalachian Volunteers helped communities organize opposition. They provided legal assistance to landowners whose property was being damaged by strip mines operating under broad form deeds. They helped communities document the environmental damage and present evidence to state regulators who were, for the most part, unresponsive.

The backlash was fierce. Local politicians, who depended on the coal industry for campaign contributions and political support, accused the AVs of being outside agitators — communists, troublemakers, people who had no business interfering in local affairs. In 1967, Joe Mulloy and Alan McSurely, Appalachian Volunteer organizers in Pike County, Kentucky, were arrested on charges of sedition — plotting to overthrow the government of Pike County. The charges were ultimately dismissed as absurd, but the arrests sent a clear message: community organizing that threatened the coal industry's interests would be met with the full force of the local legal system.

The sedition arrests were a turning point. They demonstrated that the War on Poverty's promise of "maximum feasible participation" had limits — that the federal government, which funded the community organizing, would not protect the organizers when local power structures fought back. The Appalachian Volunteers, defunded and demoralized, dissolved by the early 1970s. But the seeds they planted — the understanding that poverty was a political condition, not merely an economic one, and that the poor had the right and the capacity to organize in their own interest — would germinate in the broader Appalachian resistance movement described in Chapter 26.

The Other America's Other Half: Race and the War on Poverty in Appalachia

The Segregated War

The War on Poverty was, in national terms, a response to both white and Black poverty — and the relationship between the two was never simple. In Appalachia, where the majority population was white but significant Black communities existed (particularly in the coalfield counties documented in Chapters 6 and 12), the racial dynamics of anti-poverty programs were complex and often unjust.

In some Appalachian counties, community action agencies administered programs in ways that reproduced existing racial hierarchies. The boards that controlled funding decisions were dominated by white community leaders. The staff that delivered services reflected the racial composition of the local power structure rather than the population served. Black Appalachian communities that were eligible for programs sometimes found them harder to access — applications more difficult to navigate, offices located in communities that were unwelcoming, assistance provided with more scrutiny and less generosity than was extended to white applicants.

This was not unique to Appalachia. Across the South, War on Poverty programs operated within the structures of segregation and racial inequality that characterized the region. But in Appalachia, the racial dimension of anti-poverty policy was particularly invisible — because the dominant narrative of Appalachian poverty was a narrative of white poverty, and the media images that defined the War on Poverty in the mountains were images of white faces.

The result was a double erasure. Black Appalachians were erased from the narrative of Appalachian poverty (which was framed as white poverty) and erased from the narrative of the Black freedom struggle (which was framed as an urban and Deep South phenomenon). Their specific experiences — as Black people in a region whose identity was constructed as white, as poor people in a nation that struggled to see Black poverty as anything other than a racial problem — fell through the cracks of both narratives.

The Mud Creek Health Clinic in Floyd County, Kentucky, and other community health initiatives that served mixed-race communities in the coalfields represent the quieter, less-documented dimension of the War on Poverty in Appalachia — programs that served Black and white families side by side in communities where the mine had been the great equalizer of labor, even if the town had not been the equalizer of dignity.

Then and Now: The ARC at Sixty

Then: In 1965, the Appalachian region's poverty rate was approximately 31 percent — nearly double the national average. One in three homes lacked plumbing. Infant mortality was significantly above the national average. Educational attainment was far below it. The region was, by most economic and social indicators, a generation behind the rest of the country.

Now: By the 2020s, the Appalachian poverty rate had declined to approximately 15-16 percent — still above the national average, but dramatically lower than in 1965. Plumbing is now essentially universal. Infant mortality has improved. High school graduation rates have increased substantially. The Appalachian Development Highway System, though incomplete, has reduced geographic isolation. The most extreme forms of material deprivation — the kind that Johnson saw in Martin County — are less common than they were sixty years ago.

But. The gap between Appalachia and the rest of the nation has narrowed without closing. Counties that were the poorest in 1965 — McDowell County, Martin County, Owsley County — remain among the poorest today. The opioid crisis (Chapter 33), the collapse of the coal economy (Chapter 32), and the health crisis (Chapter 38) have created new forms of despair that the War on Poverty did not anticipate and that its successors have not effectively addressed.

The ARC still exists. It still receives federal funding. It still builds roads and funds healthcare and supports economic development. Whether it has achieved its fundamental mission — to bring Appalachia to parity with the rest of the nation — is a question that the data answers with a quiet, persistent "not yet."

Whose Story Is Missing?

• African American Appalachians experienced the War on Poverty differently than their white neighbors. In communities where racial segregation persisted, anti-poverty programs were sometimes administered in ways that excluded or marginalized Black families. The intersection of racial inequality and Appalachian poverty during the War on Poverty era deserves more systematic attention.

• The voices of Appalachian women — who ran households, organized communities, and bore the daily burden of poverty while also serving as the primary caregivers for children, the elderly, and the sick — are underrepresented in the political narrative of the War on Poverty, which tends to focus on male politicians, male activists, and male poverty.

• The community organizers who emerged from within Appalachian communities — not the VISTA volunteers who came from outside, but the local people who organized their neighbors, challenged the power structure, and fought for change on their own terms — deserve more prominence in the narrative. Their stories are told, in part, in Chapter 26.

• The people who designed the programs — the policy makers, economists, and social scientists who created the War on Poverty from their offices in Washington — are present in the narrative as institutions but absent as individuals. Their assumptions, their training, and their blind spots shaped programs that affected millions of lives. Understanding who they were and what they believed is important context for understanding why the programs looked the way they did.

Community History Portfolio Checkpoint

For your county portfolio, investigate the following:

1. The War on Poverty in your county: What War on Poverty programs operated in your county? Community action agencies? VISTA volunteers? Head Start programs? Legal aid? Job training?

2. ARC investments: What has the Appalachian Regional Commission funded in your county? Roads? Water systems? Health facilities? Education? Can you identify specific ARC-funded projects?

3. Poverty data: What was your county's poverty rate in 1960? In 1970? In 2000? In 2020? How has the rate changed? How does it compare to the state and national averages?

4. Local voices: Can you find oral histories, newspaper accounts, or personal stories about how people in your county experienced the War on Poverty? How do they remember it — as helpful, as condescending, as insufficient, as something else?

5. The culture of poverty question: Has the "culture of poverty" argument been applied to your county? Can you find media accounts, government reports, or academic studies that characterize your county's poverty as cultural rather than structural? How do these characterizations compare to the evidence you have gathered about the county's economic history?

Chapter Summary

The War on Poverty in Appalachia was catalyzed by Harry Caudill's Night Comes to the Cumberlands (1963) and dramatized by President Johnson's 1964 visit to Martin County, Kentucky, where he sat on Tom Fletcher's porch and declared war on poverty. The Appalachian Regional Commission, established by the Appalachian Regional Development Act of 1965, became the primary vehicle for federal investment in the region, spending billions on highways, water systems, healthcare facilities, and education. VISTA volunteers arrived in the mountains to work on anti-poverty projects, replicating many of the dynamics — both positive and problematic — of the settlement school movement seventy years earlier. The "culture of poverty" thesis, developed by Oscar Lewis and applied to Appalachia, provided an intellectual framework for blaming the poor for their poverty while ignoring the structural causes — absentee land ownership, extractive economics, political domination by coal interests — that produced and perpetuated deprivation. The War on Poverty achieved real improvements in material conditions: roads, water systems, healthcare, education, and legal aid changed lives. But it left the underlying structures of poverty largely intact — the land was still owned by outside corporations, the mineral wealth still flowed out of the region, and the political systems still served the interests of the powerful rather than the poor. The pattern of outside intervention — genuine help combined with unexamined condescension, material improvement without structural change — that characterized the settlement schools and the New Deal was repeated, once again, in the War on Poverty. Tom Fletcher, the man on the porch, died in 2004 without having escaped poverty. His county's fundamental conditions had barely changed.

The War on Poverty promised transformation and delivered improvement — real improvement, in roads and water and healthcare and education, but improvement that left the extractive structures of Appalachian poverty intact. In the next chapter, we will see those extractive structures reach their most extreme and destructive form in the practice of mountaintop removal mining — when the coal companies stopped digging into the mountains and started blowing the tops off them.