Local Issue; 4; Appalachia: The Survival of a Region

[beeping] The National Educational Television Network presents Local Issue, a seven-part series of regional documentaries produced by affiliated stations of NET. This week, Appalachia: Survival of a Region, produced by WQED Pittsburgh. - The issue is Appalachia, it is a complex issue, it is an issue without clear-cut answers. But because it involves basic aspects of social and economic misery, it is a meaningful issue. Let's cut it open by asking the geographer, "What happened?" - What happened to us here is that this is a one-crop region, a one-crop economy.

That crop is coal, that crop is gone, and there is no other crop. This kind of thing is going to happen, it will happen increasingly in a volatile economy like ours, where we are doing things some place, and suddenly we don't need to do that anymore. And at that moment, that activity, it ceases. And then we have the problem of relocating plant and relocating people, and possibly repairing and refurbishing the earth. Now, here, a problem consists of two things. Retraining people to take a place in a society, for which they are ill-trained, and the second thing is repairing the earth so that the earth goes back to work for man. The tragedy of the earth that you see here is that it will be 100 or 150 years before

that earth will naturally come back to work for man. - Technological progress is at the bottom of our predicament. The industries on which we here in Northern Appalachia were almost wholly dependent: coal, steel, agriculture. All have been deeply affected by technological change. They have been modernized, automated, and have partly, and in many places, totally, withered away. Take coal. In 1950, there were 186,000 miners in Pennsylvania. Ten years later, only a third were left. Take agriculture. In 1950, 61,000 West Virginians were employed in agriculture. Ten years later, only a third were left.

This kind of development, the region was not prepared to handle. There was nothing to take up the slack. There was little or no other industry. Besides, a great many people had neither the skill, nor the right age for a changeover. Massive unemployment, sometimes up to 20%; immigration of youth, decline of local business, and erosion of the tax base; all these were the consequences. The economic structure as a whole received a crippling blow. In less than a generation, the region was out of step, was left behind, poverty-stricken, deeply scarred, drained of much of its resources. This is Appalachia, a compound of some 300 counties belonging to the states of Alabama,

Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Maryland, North and South Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania. 160,000 square miles of hills and valleys along the Appalachian mountain range, an area of the size and of the population of California. This in particular is the area we are concerned with, the coal region. And these are the realities of Appalachian deprivation. Federal aid: 30% above the national average. High school graduates: 25% below the national average. Per capita purchasing power, retail trade: down 30%. Selected services: down 50%.

Per capita savings: down 40%. Inferior housing: 100% above the national average. Unemployment: up 30%. Yearly per capita income: down as much as 50%. In economic terms, this is poverty. But is poverty merely a matter of economics? - I don't think that poverty is always a matter of income. I think that poverty goes beyond this, it goes beyond the financial realm, it goes into the whole area of, as I said before, values and attitudes. I think that what happens to individuals happens a lot of times because it is this particular

personality involved, that it is the kind of person he is that ends up in the kind of predicament he's caught in. I feel that in the areas in which I have worked on many occasions, in many occasions, I think the persons are there because they want to be there, it's comfortable to them. No, no, I don't think anybody's lazy. I have a very strong conviction, I don't think anybody's lazy. I think the person is either unable to work because of certain attitudes, certain values he maintains, and certainly I think that this kind of slothfulness that we refer to as lazy is a kind of defense against being placed in a competitive situation. I think that this is how he handles himself, but I think no one intentionally is lazy because he lives in a society in which he sees others accomplishing, if he sees other people who appear to be successful, if he sees cleanliness all about him, and yet he remains unclean.

Then there's something else wrong with this individual. He is out of step, to say that the environment is completely responsible for the plight of some of these people, it isn't complete, it isn't true, and it isn't realistic because I think the two work together. The individual who has certain personality traits, certain personality strengths in a certain environment. - The human side of the Appalachian issue has been introduced. Our next question is, who are the people of Appalachia? Who in particular are the poor? If their attitudes matter as far as their predicament is concerned, what determines these attitudes? Isolation. They're sealed from the mainstream of American life. They're now a minority group, they used to be a majority group, that's a very key point.

The middle class is now the majority group in America. The poverty people used to be the majority group in America and now the minority group in America, although they're still extremely significant in size. They're excluded because they're existing in a single class environment, and alternatives are not visible to them. This is a recent phenomenon in American history, we used to have the classes clearly mixed in various areas of the cities, so that a child growing up could view different ways of life, different value systems, different systems of taste, and consequently make some choices. But the more we isolate them physically and the more we deprive them of the opportunity to move into all the various activities of our society, the more we're going to keep them in poverty. - I see it as a cultural problem. People have been separated and isolated for hundreds of years, actually, from the rest of the country, so that the values, which they've held on to suddenly when the world comes into them, have no meaning. The people I know from the Southern Appalachians are mostly from Scotch-Irish background,

have strong individualism, have strong sense of self-reliance, and find really that their way of living, their values, is a little bit of, in fact a large bit, of anachronism in our present 20th century culture. Part of this is that the people were isolated and from the rest of the country, so that culturally they were really left behind. [music] - Still another point of view comes from a small mill town on the Monongahela River. Its mill is closed now, a sad piece of junk, but it once was the way of life of the community.

Grandfathers worked here, fathers worked here, children grew up under its smokestacks in the neat solidly built houses on the hillside, expecting that they, too, would one day go to work in the mill. The mill was a way of life, but rumors came that it would be closed, no one believed it, no one wanted to believe it, but the mill did close down and the town, unprepared, reeled out of the impact of that event. - These people migrated to America approximately seventy-some years ago, and their first thought when they came here was to form or band themselves into a group, and their idea was to bring to America, to this new country, many of the customs that they had in their so-called fatherland. Their first thing was to have an edifice, no matter how humble it might be, but a church where they could worship the way they worshipped in Europe.

And I remember in the history of our people, and we had settled, this is the ethnic group that I'm connected with, they had settled in the hard coal regions, the soft coal regions, and in the steel industries. Now, as soon as they got together, they had fraternal organizations got mixing in one with another. The first thing that they decided upon was to get a priest, of their own rite, from Europe to bring him here so that they would have and preserve their national, let's say, instincts they had in Europe. This they did. They started humbly, it's true. Many of our churches have been rebuilt, many of our churches have been remodeled because they've expanded. And the thing that I would say distinguishes them from maybe, let's say, the so-called, although I'm an American citizen now, but from the American of the present day is that they wanted to keep what they had, and they did not even like change at that time.

It was sort of to them something changing was going to be something wrong, and they tried to have everything here as they had it there. And this, I would say this, they have manifested all throughout the regions wherein they have settled. It's something they, I wouldn't know if you'd call it, stable, but I would call it more immovable because they have a certain uniqueness in there. You cannot change them as easily as you would change others because it's not that they mistrust you, but they have implanted in themselves their own seeds of thought. And it is very difficult, very difficult to change them. It's not that they don't believe you, they believe you. And yet they would like to see the things be as they are, they are... now as progress comes

in, they go in, it's true, they go along with it, but don't change the essential thing that they have. - Clearly Appalachia is not merely an economic issue. Clearly human attitudes are very much in the picture. On one hand, the long years of destitution have taken their toll. Without the desire, without the motivation to strive for the ideals of our society, poverty cannot be overcome. But this desire, this motivation, like our natural resources, has been eroded. On the other hand, isolation has left its mark. It has prevented adjustment to the requirements of a changing society. The very traits which distinguish the solid citizen of yesterday -- the ties to the family

unit, to land and property, to a given and social economic pattern of life -- today stand in the way of progress. This means that to ensure survival and rebirth of this region, two things must be achieved. Economic recovery and social re-adjustment. And they must be achieved simultaneously. We have, or hopefully will have, a number of tools to do this job. An Appalachian redevelopment bill is now before Congress. It is the result of the combined efforts of the governors of the various Appalachian states and is designed strictly to meet the region's most urgent needs. It would provide for the construction of a regional highway system, for the construction of schools and health centers, for flood control, for improved management of the region's

natural resources, for land reclamation and the restoration of wildlife. This multitude of programs, planned on a region-wide basis by an Appalachian Regional Commission, would be executed by or in cooperation with various state agencies. While the Appalachian bill is aimed at strengthening the region's economic foundations, there are three other pieces of major legislation which have a bearing upon its social problems. They are the Vocational Act of 1963, the Manpower Development Retraining Act, and the new Economic Opportunity Act, which is also known as the Anti-Poverty Bill. The first two provide professional training and retraining. The third is a sweeping approach to poverty as a whole.

Its most important features are a job corps, an organization designed to rehabilitate the growing army of dropouts; and a community action program, a federally-supported but locally- planned and locally-executed, attack upon all aspects of social and economic misery. Now how far will these measures contribute to solving the region's basic problems? - ...first time, title two of this Appalachian bill will provide us an opportunity to build a system of highways which will encompass and be planned for the whole Appalachia. This is extremely important for Appalachia particularly because the character of the region it's characterized by a development which is a clustering of people in among an extremely rough topography.

These people are people that have grown up in the area that have worked the older industries and are now left in pockets throughout the area that must be served. The states individually, in Appalachia generally, do not have the strong underlying economic base to develop a regional system and effect, when I speak of regional system, I mean a system that is designed to tie the states and the areas of Appalachia together. Well, hopefully the one result that we all need and hope for is the bringing in of industry, of major modern industry into the area. And of course, all industry needs an effective way of moving both people and goods. This is essential if we are to bring this industry in, a transportation system that serve them. - But we need more than highways to attract industry to the region so the conservationist feels. - The basic problem which is confronting the Appalachian region is that in the past the land resources haven't been treated properly.

Man has come in, taken out what he's wanted, and just left things which suited him best in the short term. The most profitable way out was just to leave this. Well, the problem is this type of disturbance here is, is not something which will automatically heal itself. The whole process of soil building, of reforestation, natural reforestation, will not take place here. The strip mine wastage, for instance, on 2% of the land, only 2% of the land, will pollute over half the streams. But 2% of the land has its place here in several valleys, detracts, prevents growth in 80% of the land within the same area. A lot of the countryside has just been made barren because of this. Barren for economic growth and they aren't going to get the type of industrial, business expansion, the type of communities going up which one, will attract people to the region,

which two, will be able to participate in the American way of life, come up to the American standards. The Appalachian Bill provides one thing which the states combined and singly do not have. And that is a tremendous investment which is necessary for correcting a lot of these problems. Well, what would these, what would these monies be spent for? Well, very simply they'll be spent for land reclamation. In conjunction with this will be water reclamation and also projects for water, municipal industrial supply, recreation areas, flood control. Monies are also available for wildlife management. This is not only just restocking these areas where we'll be reclaiming the land but also restocking the adjacent land areas where the wildlife is been diminished because of what exists here.

We need money to build a regional highway system. We need money to reclaim the land. We need money to improve management of the region's natural resources. We need money to make the region fit for industry and its jobs to move in. But we need more than money. We need the means and the organization, the know how and the patience necessary to adapt a great many people to modern society and its social and economic value systems. ...middle-class values mean is the attempt to better yourself materially in a, in what we would call the American way of life. Looking for upward mobility by better occupation, by better education, by better housing. Most of these people, most people in low income areas, don't share these beliefs. The problems are deep, the problems are related to the economics of the situation and related to the family structure. Let's take a case example of a child that's entering the first grade.

Our whole school system in the past has been motivated by middle-class values. We ask kids to adhere to things that they don't understand. We give an IQ test and in the test we see a child with one shoe on and one shoe off and in middle-class neighborhood they ask what's wrong with a child and they say, "look he's missing a shoe." But in a low income area, this is a normal pattern, there's nothing wrong with that picture. You see a picture of a broken window in IQ test and they ask, "what's wrong with the house," and the child says "well there's a broken window," well in a low income area, this isn't true, most of the windows are broken. This is a pattern that this community knows. They ask about a symphony orchestra, well these kids have never heard about a symphony orchestra. So the whole school system is built out of the cultural context of the neighborhood. New welfare concepts: too many times family and emotional problems have stagnated low income people. They didn't know how to get help and the traditional helping services have been removed: they've been downtown, they've been psychiatrically oriented. Most low income people cannot talk, verbalize their problems.

They can't move out, out of their neighborhood to some institution in a cubby hole downtown. We're trying to reorient that welfare system to move out to the community, to use neighborhood people to have better points of contact so that the services can be where the people are. What we need in a depressed area is a program of community action, a program that's based in the local neighborhood, a program that is developed through local initiative and local flexibility using federal financing, state financing and local financing, a program that's comprehensive in scope, program that ties together needs of housing, welfare, education, employment and pulls them together into an integrated package. We think that this kind of program would be provided by the President's Economic Opportunity Act in 1964, entitled to that act we have a mechanism, a mechanism in the community action program that allows the development of this integrated, comprehensive, cohesive program that we think will have a beginning impact in solving the problems of a deprived neighborhood. - The increasing number of dropouts throughout the region demand more immediate, more short-

range action. For them, the job corps might be the answer, but what are the chances for any vocational program where the environment has a powerful negative influence even on the willing? We talked about this with Obediah Sims, social worker in one of Pittsburgh's deprived neighborhoods, where the dropout rate approaches 50%. We talked to him about a bright young man who only a few months previous had registered for high school and vocational training, optimistic and determined. How was he doing? Well, he dropped out again, Sims said. - Let's not forget, rather, that a subculture is pretty rigid. After all, how many people do they know who are gainfully employed, you follow me?

And they will have to be educated to the fact that there are opportunities, but they should be trained. Okay, now take Beasley's situation. Beasley comes from a home in which the father has been on welfare for a number of years, and his sisters are on the welfare rolls. So you see his outlook on life is sort of limited. You know, these are the only things that he can visualize for himself, really, because to tell Beasley, "Go to town, sign up, be trained, and so forth," it's completely foreign. However, I do think that one of the things that we can do is to bring existing training programs into the neighborhood, as I've often said before, and let these all see that these things do exist, and perhaps if we work with them long enough, they're hard enough,

that one day we might somehow get them involved. What I'm trying to say is, if the job corps comes into Manchester, and I do think that it will have to come into Manchester, it should set up its headquarters on one of its busy thoroughfares, and become an intricate part of the neighborhood. I think that once the job corps or its personnel is accepted by the neighborhood, then we will make the necessary progress. But to expect the people to go from Manchester, to town, to sign up for a job, or to sign up for training, for testing is too much. I think it's expecting too much of it. They're not going to leave the security of their environment. - The issue is Appalachia and its survival. It's a complex issue. It's an issue without clear-cut answers. It involves questions of industrial diversification.

It involves management of natural and human resources. It involves both geographic and social isolation from the mainstream. It involves the destructive effect of destitution upon the mind of man. Briefly, it involves every pertinent element of social and economic health. Because of this, and because it affects a substantial part of the country, it deserves our fullest attention. The National Educational Television Network has presented Local Issue, a seven-part series of regional documentaries produced by affiliated stations of NET. This week you have seen Appalachia: Survival of a Region, produced by WQED Pittsburgh. This is NET, the National Educational Television Network.

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