Part Five: Reform, Resistance, and the War on Poverty

On April 24, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson sat on the porch of Tom Fletcher's cabin in Martin County, Kentucky. Fletcher was a father of eight. He earned four hundred dollars a year. The cameras were rolling. Johnson had come to the mountains to launch his War on Poverty, and he needed the image: the President of the United States, surrounded by poverty so photogenic that no one watching on television could look away.

The photograph did what it was supposed to do. It mobilized public sympathy, congressional votes, and billions of dollars in federal spending. But it also did something else. It fixed, once again, the image of Appalachia as a place of passive suffering — a region that waited on its porch for Washington to arrive with the solution. What that image left out was everything the people of Appalachia had already done for themselves, and everything Washington would fail to do, and the long history of federal intervention in the mountains that stretched back three decades before Johnson's cameras showed up.

Part Five covers the arc of reform and resistance from the New Deal through the end of the twentieth century — a period in which the federal government repeatedly "discovered" Appalachian poverty, repeatedly intervened, and repeatedly failed to address the structural causes of that poverty, which were not cultural deficiency or geographic isolation but the extraction of wealth by absentee owners and the political systems that protected them.

It begins in the 1930s, with Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and its most ambitious experiment: the Tennessee Valley Authority. The TVA electrified a region, controlled flooding, and created jobs on a scale that mountain communities had never seen. It also displaced thousands of families to build its dams and reservoirs, many of them among the poorest people in the region. The national parks — Shenandoah, Great Smoky Mountains — followed the same pattern: conservation that required the removal of the people who had lived on the land. The Blue Ridge Parkway was built, in part, by the Civilian Conservation Corps, and it is magnificent. The families removed to make way for it are not commemorated along its length.

Then came the 1960s, and the rediscovery. Harry Caudill published Night Comes to the Cumberlands in 1963, and it hit the country like a conscience. Johnson went to Martin County. The Appalachian Regional Commission was created. VISTA volunteers arrived. Highways were built. Programs were funded. Some of it worked. Some of it was patronizing. Almost none of it confronted the coal industry, the absentee landowners, or the political structures that kept the extraction going. The War on Poverty treated symptoms. The disease — an economy designed to move wealth out of the mountains — was left intact.

Meanwhile, the mountains themselves were being destroyed. Mountaintop removal mining — a method in which entire peaks are blown apart to reach the coal seams underneath, with the rubble dumped into the valleys below, burying streams and communities — became the dominant form of surface mining in central Appalachia. It was cheaper than underground mining. It required fewer workers. And it was devastating on a scale that is difficult to comprehend until you see it from the air: mile after mile of what was once forested mountain reduced to flat, gray, lifeless plateau.

But Appalachians fought back. They always have. Part Five closes with a chapter on the resistance tradition — the thread that runs from Blair Mountain in 1921 through the Buffalo Creek disaster of 1972 (when a coal company's dam collapsed and killed 125 people in a West Virginia hollow) through the Pittston Coal strike of 1989 through the anti-mountaintop-removal movement and the pipeline opposition of the twenty-first century. This is not a region that waited for rescue. This is a region that organized, protested, sued, and bled for its own survival, in every generation, against opponents with vastly more money and political power.

Chapters in Part Five

  • Chapter 22: The New Deal in the Mountains — The TVA, rural electrification, the CCC, national parks, and the Blue Ridge Parkway. Federal transformation and its contradictions: help that also displaced, conservation that also dispossessed.

  • Chapter 23: The War on Poverty — LBJ on Tom Fletcher's porch. Harry Caudill. The Appalachian Regional Commission. VISTA. What worked, what failed, and why treating symptoms while leaving extractive structures intact guaranteed the poverty would persist.

  • Chapter 24: Mountaintop Removal — When they blew up the mountains. The shift from underground to surface mining. Environmental devastation, stream burial, community displacement. Larry Gibson and Kayford Mountain. Regulatory capture and the failure of enforcement.

  • Chapter 25: Education and the Fight for Literacy — From one-room schools to settlement schools to the Highlander Folk School. Education as both opportunity and cultural imposition. School consolidation and its consequences for rural communities.

  • Chapter 26: The Appalachian Resistance Tradition — Blair Mountain, Buffalo Creek, the Pittston strike, Camp Solidarity, anti-mountaintop-removal organizing, and modern pipeline opposition. A continuous thread of resistance spanning more than a century.

Chapters in This Part