Sources of the Fascination

            The source of TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) and ARC (Appalachian Regional Commission) begins with the national identification of the southern mountains as one region, calling it "Appalachia," a title given the region by a now forgotten tribe of coastal Indians who deemed it "On the other side."  The fact that the word, or the loose regional unity it stands for, has never attained popularity in the region has not deterred its use.  Roosevelt could have heeded advice to put TVA on the Missouri or the Columbia or the Colorado rivers.  But like the young Massachusetts senator who was horrified by what he saw in West Virginia, Roosevelt, who had once been a surveyor in the Virginia coalfields, was haunted by the poverty of the mountains.  If it had not been for that identification, John L. Lewis's vehement objection to TVA alone might have killed it.  (Lewis erroneously divined that TVA would kill off the market for steam coal.)  But poverty was and is only a part of the nation's picture of the mountains

            It was no less a writer than Edgar Allan Poe who first put mountaineers into literature.  In 1845--in a description that has run as true in future literature as the Daisy Mae thread in Jesse Stuart's short stories--Poe described the mountains of Virginia as being "tenanted by fierce and uncouth races of men."  His theme was picked up by a generation of novelists like John Fox, Jr., who solidified the notion so well in the public mind that with the near exception of Horace Kephart's Our Southern Highlanders there had never been challenge from any author, journalist or story-teller.  Influenced by the literature and studies, Arnold Toynbee said in the Study of History that mountaineers were unique as barbarians because they were the first people ever to attain civilization and then lose it.

            That basic theme has seldom been contradicted by the federal government.  For civil libertarians who believe police-statism began with the Palmer raids or Watergate, the annual reports of the Commissioner of Internal Revenue from against moonshining mountaineers and the descriptions that clearly show the government gave full blessing to wholesale abuse of civil liberties--warrantless arrests, jailings, beatings, and even murder--in the war against mountain moonshiners, a war that ended, incidentally, with Bluegrass gentlemen in full, monopolistic control of the lucrative distillery industry.  At one point the Commissioner said insightfully, according to Kephart's account:

            Much of the opposition to the enforcement of the internal revenue laws is properly attributable to a latent feeling of hostility to the government and laws of the U.S. still prevailing in the breasts of a portion of the people of these districts, and in consequence of this condition of things the officers of the U.S. have often been treated very much as though they were emissaries from some foreign country quartered upon the people for the collection of tribute.   

             Mountaineers were in fact a people apart, a people "on the other side."   In 1935 the Department of Agriculture, in a report on economic and social problems of the southern mountains, made official what mountaineers had long suspected was a fundamental tenet of federal policy.  The report noted authoritatively, "The Appalachian area is a reservoir of population.  A reservoir is a place where supplies are stored and furnished at the right time to places where they are needed."  The report recommended the "encouragement of emigration" to be accomplished "gradually."  David Lilienthal, TVA director and later chairman, notes in his Journals that after being pestered repeatedly by James Dombrowski of Highlander Center and Mrs. Roosevelt to help unemployed miners in Grundy County, Tennessee, he had suggested to Dombrowski that the people should be moved out.

            The point is obvious and can be belabored, but it important to note that the public attitude toward the mountains has changed little.  Alvin Arnet, former ARC executive director and later OEO director, told a reporter that the mountains had become such an unfit place to live that they should be turned "over to the mining of coal" with miners coming in as commuters.  People now living in "degrading" mining communities could be moved to "absolutely gorgeous places to live just a hop, skip, and a jump away."  In short, a paleface trail of tears.

            Hot on that track, came the word from an otherwise sensitive and sensible southern writer who made "the good old boys" a household word in 1974 in a book by that title.  Quoting Harry Caudill, but relying upon his own visit to Crum and Sarah Ann, West Virginia, Paul Hemphill wrote, "Damming and flooding huge portions of Kentucky and West Virginia might be the only way to save these strong-willed and isolated people from themselves."  At the same time Hemphill was there the Corps of Engineers was working on a dam near Crum and the Pittston Company was expanding its own dam in adjoining Logan County on Buffalo Creek. That dam broke in 1972, killing 125 people and devastating the entire valley below.  The Corps of Engineers' dams in central Appalachia are slowly, but methodically, filling up with strip mine silt.

            Public perception of mountaineers has not come a long way since Poe, and neither has public policy.  The latter, of course, is shaped by the former.  While no political science award can be expected for making the point, it is obvious that a people will get little more than the policy makers believe they deserve.  Farmers who pen hogs in 6' by 6' pens can rightfully say they are dirty animals; just so, a reporter covering the Brookside strike in Harlan County, Kentucky, in 1974 dutifully noted the pollution left by a Duke Power Company subsidiary coal company, and then wrote that the people of Harlan County had "lost the civilizing instinct to clean their nests."

            The reporter's observation could probably be dismissed as just another misconception by someone tied too long to the  concrete of Atlanta, if they same were not still poured out continuously by the government.  This final word comes from a 1972 report from the National Endowment for the Humanities on Georgia mountaineers:

            We all profess to love liberty, but these people take their liberty seriously.  They don't buy food:  they shoot, grow, or catch it.  Few have running water or electricity in their cabins, and most have less than a fifth-grade education.  Family and kinship ties are strong here; it is common for three and four generations to live together.  They have no social consciousness in the modern sense--but when one man's barn burns down, every man in the vicinity shoulders his axe and hikes through the woods to help build a new one.

            In a word, the government has a unique and sustained regional commitment to Appalachia for the same reason that National Geographic has a penchant for writing articles and taking pictures of the natives of the Third World.  What that policy turns out to be and how it is implemented and evaluated follows on course.  Just as the magazine would not ask an Australian tribe to outline its article or the local chief to be its guest editor, the government feels under no obligation to consult mountaineers on policy or to put them in control of the structures that implement it.  "After all," an assistant to the States' Regional Representative of ARC told me once, "if the people are so damned smart, then how come they ain't planners?"  The statement is not unlike that of the TVA Director of Reclamation, who, after being pressed hard by New York Times reporter Ben Franklin on how TVA could justify destroying a community in east Kentucky by strip mining, retreated with, "strip mining is the American Way."  After all, TVA has always insisted, the land it was stripping was good for nothing but growing trees anyway.  TVA owns 40,000 acres of coal land in the Daniel Boone National Forest in Kentucky, where nothing but trees grow, but the agency hasn't yet stripped its own property.  Evidently one strips his own nest only after he has given everyone else a taste of the "American Way."

            Saying that TVA and ARC are not accountable to their region, and that they are frequently autocratic and arbitrary--charges frequently made today--is not understandable apart from noting why.  They both believe they know better than the people what is good for the people.  That doesn't make them unique, but the fact that they deal mainly with mountaineers whom the country holds in less than high esteem makes their action less subtle and leaves them less vulnerable to national criticism.  After all, when assumedly well-informed writers are convinced that the region should be covered with water to save the people from their own mischief, then the nation can hardly be expected to respond differently.  David Lilienthal did not object to Mrs. Arthur Morgan's plan for the agency to choose the workers' home furniture at the new town of Norris because he believed the people capable of selecting their own, but because it was just another "basketweaving" project he had come to expect from her husband, TVA's first chairman, whom he accused of being a "human engineer." Lilienthal thought the agency should concentrate on its power program.  "Welfare work and economic revisions are two different things--I don't have much confidence in the first," he once told Senator Bob LeFollette.