Annihilating The Hillbilly

by Jim Branscome, Appalachian Author
published in the early 70s
 
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     September CBS began its new television season with the theme "Let's All Get Together."  If you watch television on Tuesday nights, you know that who got together, back-to-back, were the stars of three of America's most popular TV programs:  "The Beverly Hillbillies," "Green Acres," and "Hee-Haw."  Each week millions of Americans gather around their sets to watch this combination, which has to be the most intensive effort ever exerted by a nation to belittle, demand, and other-wise destroy a minority people within its boundaries.  Within the three shows on one night, hillbillies are shown being conned into buying the White House, coddling a talking pig, and rising from a cornpatch to crack the sickest jokes on TV--all on the same channel, all only a short while after Eric Sevareid has completed his nightly lecture to the American public on decency, integrity, dignity and the other great American virtues to which he and his network supposedly adhere.  If similar programs even approaching the maliciousness of these were broadcast today on Blacks, Indians or Chicanos, there would be an immediate public outcry from every liberal organization and politician in the country and a scathing editorial in the New York Times about the programs' "lack of taste."  The new culture people would organize marches and prime-time boycotts and perhaps, even, throw dog dung at Eva Gabor as she emerged from her studio.  They might even go a stop further and deal with that hillybilly-maligning patriot, Al Capp.  But, with this, as all things Appalachian, silence.  America is allowed to continue laughing at this minority group because on this, America agrees:  hillbilly ain't beautiful.

     The treatment given by the media to Appalachia is only one example of the massive failure of America's institutions for over a century to meet the needs of the people of the region.  From government at all levels, to churches, private welfare agencies, schools, colleges, labor unions, foundations, newspapers, corporations, ad infinitum, the region has received an unequal share of exploitation, neglect, unfulfilled promises and misguided assistance.  This is not to deny that America is interested in Appalachia.  It has been for some time, in the peculiar American way--in Appalachia's worth to industry, of course; only erratically in the plight of the people.  General Howard of the Freedman's Bureau is said to have convinced Lincoln that he ought to try to do something for the poor mountaineers after the Civil War.  The New Deal brought the then rather progressive Tennessee Valley Authority to one part of the region, but TVA's recently developed capacity to burn lower-grade strip-mined coal brought the hellish human and material waste of that process to Central Appalachia.