"Romantic Appalachia: Poverty Pays If You Ain't Poor" by Don West

What follows is a zine written and published by the one and only Don West. Don adamantly refused to copyright his zines and encouraged their reproduction and dissemination. It's a shame he's not better represented on the internet. Fuck yeah Don West!

Almost every day we get letters from those wanting to come to Appalachia to “fight poverty”. They’ve read about the Southern Mountaineers. They’ve seen movies, comic strips or TV (Lil’ Abner, Beverly Hillbillies?).

It’s not that there’s no poverty in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago and other parts. There is. But Southern Appalachia has that “romantic” appeal.

IT USED TO BE THE NEGRO

Just a few years ago it was the southern Negro, and dedicated (or adventure seeking) young “yankees” came trouping to the South on freedom rides, marches and such. Not that racism, segregation and even riots didn’t exist at the North. They did. But since the black militants kicked the whites out, suggesting they go organize their own kind, the next most romantic thing seems to be the Appalachian South.

DISCOVERED AGAIN

So we are “discovered” again. It’s happening every generation, sometimes more often, since the Civil War. After a few people in the North, following Lincoln’s awareness, realized how the mountain South played a strategic role in defeating the Confederacy, there was a tinge of stricken conscience. First came the religious “Missionaries” from New England and other parts North to lift us up and save our “hillbilly” souls. They brought along their “superior” religion to do it -- and were closely followed by corporation emissaries buying up mineral rights for 25 cents to 50 cents an acre.

The Union General Howard, marching through Cumberland Gap, had been so deeply impressed by the friendly spirit, aid and support given his soldiers by the mountain people that he communicated it to the President. Lincoln himself vowed that after the war something should be done for “the loyal mountaineers of the South.” One eventual result was Lincoln Memorial University at Cumberland Gap. (We have degrees from that school).

NEW ENGLAND PILGRIMS

Subsequently a whole passel of mountain missionary schools sprang up. The loyalty of the southern mountaineer, his anti-slavery sentiment and action, and the plight of the poor little mountain boys and girls in isolated Appalachia were told in lurid details at the North. Many missionaries were New England women who, some of the romantic fables held, were disappointed in love. They came to the mountains to lose themselves. Nonetheless, they had “uplift” in their eyes. A few even married hill men. We reckoned maybe that was part of the “uplift” too.

I attended one of these mountain missionary high schools. I remember so well how the New England “Pilgrims” used to come down each year. A special train brought them on a siding to the campus. All of us little “hillbillies” were lined up with candles lighted on each side of the dirt road for half a mile with carefully coached greeting smiles. It was a “great day”. We were supposed to be cheered when the “Pilgrims” told us how we were “the last remnants of the pure old Anglo-Saxons” who, of course, were the most superior of all peoples. This, maybe out to have made us feel good and “superior” in spite of our poverty. And we did have poverty then. It’s nothing new in the mountains.

AND HENRY FORD

Our biggest show was reserved for the Henry Ford visits. THe old oxen were yoked to a wagon loaded with wood to amble all the campus roads, managing to meet the Ford procession on numerous occasions. (Henry might give us a flivver, you see.) Oh, but we really got to do our stuff then, including the old mountain dances with Mrs. Ford and Henry. That, we learned, was Henry’s favorite dancing, and he gave the school more than a flivver, too. Ford put millions into that school. He also gave jobs to graduates in his non-union Detroit Plant which, he vowed, would never sign a union contract. Though we walked out of Appalachian poverty through the slums of Detroit, Henry would protect us from all union evils.

Ford, we learned, was a tight lipped guy. He never bored us with speeches as others did. He was the “silent but strong” type. He also doted on our supposedly “pure old Anglo-Saxon” heritage. And we learned he had no use for the “money-grubbing Jew”.

(Ford later financed the organization of the “Anglo-Saxon Federation” and a virulent “hate-the-Jew” campaign that taught Hitler lessons. His newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, printed the “Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion,” and he financed their printing in the hundreds of thousands of copies as a pamphlet. Purporting to be a sinister Jewish plot to rule the world, the “Protocols” were proven to be false and were so labeled by leading scholars. Only after a public boycott -- by Christians, Jews and others - of the Ford cars which brought near bankruptcy to the Ford Motor Company, did Ford apologize to the Jews and publicly repudiate the “Protocols”. Henry Ford was a man greatly gifted mechanically with a flare for finance, but ignorant about nearly everything else).

When later at a mountain college (Lincoln Memorial) Henry and Mrs. Ford showed up, we sort of felt just like old friends. Dancing the mountain folk dance with Mrs. Ford again we could talk about back when. Henry didn’t confine his southern mountain interests to high school. He beckoned to “the best” in our colleges, too. We were inspired to “make a success”, “get ahead,” “be somebody,” just like Henry had. The dollar mark was the standard, always.

AN OCCUPIED TERRITORY

Each time we are “discovered” a passel of new missionaries invade the mountains. Old clothes, surplus food and such are made available and some temporary reforms may result -- crumbs thrown to the poor who need whole loaves and some meat, too. Some stirring is stimulated. Hope flutters painfully to escape the lint covered mill-hills or dust blackened shacks behind slate dumps only to fall broken-winged in polluted air on rivers outside.The missionary effect is to dull the razor-edge thrust of the people toward human betterment. Appalachia’s colonial status -- the ownership, production and distribution of structure -- is left in tact, hardly shaken or questioned.

As the nation’s awareness of the new “discovery” wanes and, despairing of saving our “hillbilly souls” anyhow, the “missionaries” begin to pull out again. In such manner went many Presbyterians, Congregationalists and other religious cults years ago. More recently it was the Appalachian Volunteers, SCEF, VISTAS, some CAPS and other assorted conglomerates of poverty warriors. Shortly we may be forgotten again, until another generation “discovers” poverty in Appalachia.

Yes the southern mountains have been missionarized, researched, studied, surveyed, romanticized, dramatized, hillbillyized, Dogpatchized and povertyized again. And some of us who are natives and have known this hard living all our lives and our granpaw’s life before, marvel that our “missionary” friends discover us so often.
(Southern Appalachia is a colonial possession of Eastern based industry. Like all exploited colonial areas the “mother country” may make generous gestures now and then, send missionaries with up-lift programs, “superior” religion, build churches and some times schools. They’ll do about everything -- except get off the backs of the people, end the exploitive domination. That the people themselves must eventually see to. The latest “missionary” move is the “War on Poverty”. It was never intended to end poverty. That would require a total restructuring of the system of ownership, production and distribution of wealth).

SOWING “RADICAL WILD OATS”

This is not the first time in our lifetime that big city folk have come down to save and lift us up. I remember the 1929-1930’s. Southern Appalachia was discovered then, too. Young “missionaries” were sowing their “radical wild oats” from the black belt of Alabama and Arkansas to Harlan County, Kentucky and Paint and Cabin Creeks in West Virginia. They were mostly transients as “missionaries” frequently are. I don’t know of a single one who remained. I do know of quite a few who returned North and are now rich men, some multi-millionaires. It was a thrilling experience to be in romantic Appalachia or other parts South for a spell, but it was nice to have a rich papa up North to fall back on.

Not long ago visiting in an affluent apartment house on Riverside Drive in New York our hostess asked if I knew who owned that building. I didn’t, of course. “Well”, she said, “It is your old friend, Alex -- and this is just one of several he owns.”

I remembered Alex very well. Once I drove his car from New York to Birmingham. Hew as a super activist and articulate as big city folk frequently are. He was sure he had the answers, too, about solving the problems of the poor. If you disagreed you were just no doggoned good, maybe an enemy of the poor. But I went to see him there in New York recently. He is not interested in the plight of the poor anymore. His time is given to looking after his multimillion dollar real estate business. He sowed his “radical wild oats” down South years ago.

1930’s AND NOW -- SOME DIFFERENCES

There is a qalitively different situation for those who come to fight poverty in Appalachia now and back in the 1930’s. Then they came (Theodore Dreiser, the great American novelist, brought a passel to Pineville and Harlan, Kentucky on their own. There was no OEO, no VISTA, no Appalachian Volunteers. No body was paid a good salary to fight poverty. THey made their own way, shifted as best they could. It was depression times, too. Some did good work -- helped to smooth the way for a future union and such. Some were murdered by thugs. Others were beaten, crippled. Issues were sharp and violence too common. There was more to it than writing songs, though songs were written. “Which Side Are You On?” came from Harlan, Kentucky, “Solidarity Forever” came from the Cabin Creek Struggles. There were underground papers, too, that didn’t have an address or editor’s name. They were really underground, no romantic play like. They who worked at organizing the poor had to keep a wary eye. The murder of the Yablonski family is a throw-back, a reminder that the billionaire coal operator families always play rough, and for keeps, against effective opposition.

I remember a night on a mountain road above Harlan town in the 1930’s. Six operator gun thugs with deputy badges and a young native organizer. Beaten to unconsciousness thrown in the brush for dead he came to hours later, crawling from the nightmare, stumbling down the mountainside to where a friendly old couple tended him in their humble cabin. A few nights later in a fourth rate Hazard hotel, beyond sitting up, unable to pay for food or lodging, dirty, hungry, listening to every footstep in the hall outside with fearful uncertainty. Organizing the poor in the 1930’s was risky and extremely uncertain. I speak from experience here.

But things are considerably different now. The young “missionary” in Appalachia has it comparatively easy. First, he is paid. He has food to eat regularly, a place to sleep. He goes to bed with scant fear of being murdered in his sleep, He holds meetings without slipping around secretly in the bushes or basements. His meetings are not liable to be broken up or machine-gunned by operator thugs with deputy badges. And in an area where tens of thousands of families live on less than $2,000 a year, poverty fighters may get much more. Some salaries are large -- $10 thousand, $15 thousand, $20 or $25 thousand or more.

MONEY IN POVERTY

We know one poverty “consultant” who received $500.00 a day for his consulting. He was later hired by a poverty fighting agency to work 4 days a month at $10 thousand a year salary. Others received similarly outrageous stipends. And some of the bright young “missionaries” who came down in one of the poverty fighting brigades, perhaps despairing of saving our “hillbilly souls”, certainly failing to organize the poor, now find money in poverty by setting up post office box corporations that receive lucrative OEO grants or contracts to train others to “fight poverty.” If they failed to organize the poor themselves, they nonetheless can train others to go out and do likewise. They become “experts” in the process, and now get well paid for their “expertise.”

Recently a new agency a-borning to “change the image” poverty creates in our area, to be financed by OEO “seed money,” proposed to pay its director $25 thousand and so on. The claim is that such salaries are essential to get “qualified” personnel. Some of us who have seen the “missionaries” come and go over the years may think that such salary demands is indicative of precisely the kind of quality not needed.

THE POOR ARE POOR, BECAUSE,..

From their affluent middle class background so many do-gooders who come into the mountains seldom grasp the fact that the poor are poor because of the nature of the system of ownership, production and distribution. When the poor fail to accept their middle class notions they may end up frustrated failures. Some put their frustrations into a book (Yesterday’s People). Others set up post office box corporations to get in on the “benefits” of the system. Both have been done.

Their basic concern was not how they related to the mountains but how the mountains related to them and their notions. With their “superior” approach they failed to understand or appreciate the historic struggles of broad sections of the mountain people against the workings of the system dating back beyond the 1930’s. (Early Paint and Cabin Creek battles; the armed march with 5 to 7 thousand miners camped at Marmet in the Kanawha Valley, marching toward Logan to help fellow miners against gun thug terrorism; the Battle of Blair Mountain where the enemy dropped bombs from the air; the battle of Evarts, Harlan and Bell in Kentucky; Gastonia, Marion, High Point in North Carolina, Elizabethton, Wilder, Coal Creek in Tennessee and later Blue Ridge in Georgia and the Black Lung West Virginia Strike in 1969. And before that the mountain man’s struggle against a slave system that oppressed both the poor white and black slaves,

These modern “missionaries” (some already “ex-missionaries”), despairing of us, may return home. Ten years from now -- if the world still stands -- they may look back from their affluence with nostalgia for the time when they sowed their “radical wild oats” in Appalachia.

OUR OWN SELF IDENTITY

The “missionaries” -- religious or secular -- had and have one thing in common: they didn’t trust us hill folk to speak, plan and act for ourselves. Bright, articulate, ambitious, well-intentioned, they became our spokesmen, our planners, our actors. And so they’ll go again, leaving us and our poverty behind.

But is there a lesson to be learned from all these outside efforts that have failed to save us? I think so. IF we native mountaineers can now determine to organize and save ourselves, save our mountains from the spoilers who tear them down, pollute our streams and leave grotesque areas of ugliness, there is hope. The billionaire families behind the great corporations are also outsiders who sometimes claim they want to “save” us. It is time that we hill folk should understand and appreciate our heritage, stand up like those who were our ancestors, develop our own self identity. It is time to realize that nobody from the outside is ever going to save us from bad conditions unless we make our own stand. WE must learn to organize again, speak, plan and act for ourselves. There are many potential allies with common problems -- the poor of the great cities, the Indians, the blacks who are also exploited. They need us. We need them. Solidarity is still crucial. If we learn this lesson from the outside “missionary” failures, then we are on our way.

--Reprinted from WEST VIRGINIA HILLBILLY

(Labor donated)