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Rural Poverty in Appalachia
From: Cambridge University Press
| By:
Dwight B. BillingsKathleen M. Blee |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Rural poverty tends to have less of a public face than its urban counterpart. But such poverty can persist for generations, as has happened in Appalachia in Kentucky. Two theories which speculate why it is that this US region should continue in poverty are here criticized by sociologists Dwight B. Billings and Kathleen M. Blee. |
 ppalachia's rural poor have been discovered and rediscovered many times throughout the twentieth century. Two principal explanations have been offered for their poverty. Culture-of-poverty theory directs attention to how families and individuals in Appalachia, for better or worse, cope with poverty. The theory of internal colonialism, on the other hand, attempts to focus attention on the structural causes of poverty in Appalachia. Both yield insights, yet each is seriously deficient. |
Culture-of-poverty theory gained popularity during the 1960s, but its application to Appalachia was dependent on discursive traditions of Appalachianography that emerged during the late nineteenth century.  Conceptualized as a distinct region and people, Appalachia first came into American consciousness in the decades that immediately followed the Civil War. Writers such as James Lane Allen and John Fox, Jr., contributed to a distinct genre of local color fiction that simultaneously created, exploited, and tried to explain images of the mountain South as a place that was vastly out of step, culturally and economically, with the progressive trends of industrializing and urbanizing late nineteenth-century America. |
By the turn of the century, William Goddell Frost, president of Berea College in Kentucky and one of the most influential creators of the discourse on Appalachia, had named the people of the southern mountains "Appalachian Americans" and reconciled their presumptive backwardness to the social dynamics of fin de siècle America by pointing to the region's geographical, sociocultural, and economic isolation (see Woman's Home Companion 23 (1896), and Atlantic Monthly 83 (1899)). Mountain people, Frost said, were "our contemporary ancestors," a surviving remnant of the white pioneer culture that had first settled the eastern seaboard and contributed to the building of early American institutional life. Frost's writings influenced George Vincent's description of Appalachia in a 1908 article in the American Journal of Sociology as a "retarded frontier." |
Frost portrayed the people of Appalachia as impoverished yet morally upright and therefore deserving of the charitable and educational uplift efforts that institutions such as Berea College were prepared to offer, with the help of northern philanthropy. Many accounts, however, called attention to seemingly darker aspects of southern mountain culture such as moonshining and feuding. The cover of a 1913 issue of The Berea [College] Quarterly focused on "Men Proud of Being Dangerous" (see photo). This publication, like many others of the period, included articles on "The College and the Feud" and "How to Make Something out of This Fighting Stock" that linked Appalachian poverty and violence to cultural isolation and, at the same time, promoted the efforts of educational institutions like Berea College to modernize the Appalachian region. |
Ideas of Appalachia
As Henry Shapiro's intellectual history of the idea of "Appalachia," Appalachia on our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870-1920 (1978), has ably shown, such early writings about life in the mountain South contributed to the social construction of Appalachia as "a coherent region inhabited by an homogeneous population possessing a uniform culture." Regardless of how people in the mountains defined or identified themselves, the popular representations that created "Appalachia" stressed sameness and identity to the neglect of locality differences and population diversities. Early documentary accounts of the region such as John C. Campbell's The Southern Highlander and His Homeland (1921), James Watt Raine's The Land of the Saddle-bags (1924), and Samuel Wilson's The Southern Mountaineers (1914) contributed to highly selective interpretations of preindustrial Appalachian life that shaped a discourse about the mountains that continues to influence current thinking. They helped to create the enduring image of Appalachia as a region apart, an other in the heart of America. |
The early social construction of Appalachia as a distinct sociocultural world was reinforced by reform efforts that adapted settlement house programs and other urban-based strategies of benevolence and education to the task of bringing the rural Appalachian poor into the majority culture. Reformers' vision of the region was likewise reinforced by efforts to document and preserve preferred versions of the folk culture of the southern mountains by enthusiasts, for example, of highland crafts and music. Their accounts of the cultural isolation and separateness of the region were augmented by the writings of social scientists and even more importantly by journalists and popular writers. Between 1904 and 1927, at least 476 silent films depicted life in the Southern Appalachians to American moviegoers; 145 of these films featured moonshining and 92 featured feuds along with countless assaults and homicides. |
Positively, the early construction of preindustrial Appalachia as an isolated folk culture inspired a later tradition of ethnographic studies of rural Appalachia that continues to provide an indispensable viewpoint on social change in the mountains because of its close attention to daily life, especially family and community institutions. Our study builds on this rich ethnographic legacy. Negatively, however, the cultural approach reinforced the image of Appalachians as a "people without history" by defining the study of the region as belonging largely to the professional domain of anthropology rather than historiography. Appalachia, it seemed, offered good material for ethnographers, as well as novelists and story writers, but little to warrant the serious attention of historians. Symptomatically in 1922, William Connelley and E. M. Coulter concluded an influential two-volume History of Kentucky whose 1,211 pages almost never mentioned Appalachian Kentucky with a brief ethnographic addendum on the "Cumberland Gap Region." As a result of this discursive tradition, a popular writer in the 1960s described the whole of early Appalachia as a place where "time was standing still" (Jack E. Weller, Yesterday's People, 1966). |
Physical and social isolation
When Appalachian poverty was rediscovered in the 1960s, it was but a short conceptual step from viewing Appalachia as a traditional folk culture to viewing Appalachia as a regionwide culture of poverty. More than any other popular work of that era, Jack Weller's Yesterday's People: Life in Contemporary Appalachia made explicit the link between folk society and the culture of poverty in Appalachia. Weller claimed that "independence-turned-individualism" had become a great "stumbling block for [the mountaineers'] finding a place in our complex and cooperative society." Mountaineers' "traditionalism," he argued (quoting Horace Kephart), was "stubborn, sullen, and perverse" and where "fatalism" had become a way of life in Appalachia, "there [was] no rebellion, little questioning, little complaining." In Weller's bleakly pessimistic view, "The greatest challenge of Appalachia, and the most difficult, [was] its people" (Weller, Yesterday's People, pp. 32, 33, 37, 7). Such people simply did not want to change in order to improve their lives. |
With poor families totaling more than half the population in many Central Appalachian counties during the late 1960s, the depletion of Appalachian culture as approximating a regionwide subculture of poverty made sense to many social scientists, policymakers, and popular writers. Rupert Vance, a distinguished expert in the sociology of the South, wrote: Thus mountain isolation, which began as physical isolation enforced by rugged topography, became mental and cultural isolation, holding people in disadvantaged areas, resisting those changes that would bring them into contact with the outside world. The effect of conditions thus becomes a new cause of conditions, but the cause is now an attitude, not a mountain. (Rupert Vance, "An Introductory Note," in Weller, Yesterday's People, p. vii.) The practical implications of this approach were clear: "to change the mountains," Vance asserted, "[was] to change the mountain personality." |
Efforts to transform Appalachian personalities by modernizing Appalachian culture went hand in hand with regional economic development efforts. These efforts were based on the assumption that Appalachia suffered economically because, in the language of the President's Appalachian Regional Commission, Appalachia was a "region apart," a place insufficiently integrated into the national "free enterprise orbit." Thus, culture-of-poverty theory, with its stress on cultural isolation, was bolstered conceptually by the combination of neoclassical economic theory and central place theory that guided the development strategies of the Appalachian Regional Commission, which aimed at overcoming economic isolation. "The resulting regional development model," according to one of its critics, was "concerned with providing social overhead capital, training people for skills for new industrial and service jobs, facilitating migration, and promoting the establishment or relocation of privately-owned industries through a growth center strategy" (see David S. Walls, Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare 4 (1976), p. 233). Local projects designed to encourage "maximal feasible participation" of the poor in community development during the War on Poverty thus complemented federal investments by ARC in transportation, education, and health care that were designed to overcome isolation and stimulate economic development, especially in federally designated "growth centers." |
An "arrested frontier"
VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) workers and Appalachian Volunteers, like their Peace Corps counterparts in the Third World, initially devoted themselves passionately to cultural modernization in the mountains. Soon, however, many antipoverty workers began to develop a more radical approach. By enlisting the poor in projects designed to overcome fatalism and alienation, they came up against major obstacles to participation--the political and economic powerlessness of those who had been trapped in poverty for generations and the reality of entrenched local power structures that served the interests of absentee corporate owners who monopolized land, mineral resources, and politics. Influenced by the writings of Third World scholars, they began to describe Appalachia as an "internal colony." |
Analyzing the causes of Appalachian poverty in 1968, Bob Tanner, a VISTA worker in West Virginia, wrote: In West Virginia... as throughout Appalachia, we live in a system of absentee control by large financial and industrial corporations pursuing their economic ends without respect for the lives of the people in the state or region. The responsibility for the damage--political, economic, and social--can be attributed to these colonial exploiters.... West Virginia is a rich state. Yet it is obvious that West Virginia is a poor state. Much wealth has been extracted from West Virginia's natural resources, but little of that wealth has remained in the hands of West Virginians. (Quoted in Helen Lewis, "Fatalism or the Coal Industry?," in B. Ergood and B. Kuhre (eds), Appalachia (1976), p. 155.)
Appalachia was poor, according to the internal colonialism model, because of the nature of its integration with--not isolation from--the U.S. corporate economy. Some contributors to the colonialism model explored how the denigration of Appalachian culture in culture-of-poverty theory helped to legitimate the exploitation of the region's land, resources, and people whereas others interpreted indigenous cultural patterns as forms of resistance to colonization rather than simply the remnants of an "arrested frontier." A few activists and scholars romanticized early mountain folkways to dramatize the effects of exploitation, but most radical scholars shied away from discussions of Appalachian culture altogether, viewing the latter as either conducive to victim blaming or as diverting attention from hard-core economic realities. |
In a widely influential article, Helen Lewis contrasted the Appalachian subculture and colonialism models by stating that "In simple terms it [the cause of poverty] is either fatalism or the coal industry" (see Ergood and Kuhre, Appalachia, p. 153). Thus, by the use of metaphor and metonomy, Lewis and others reshaped the discourse on Appalachia. The metaphor of colonialism soon largely displaced the metaphor of folk society in discussions of regional poverty and coal came to symbolize the whole of Appalachia as an impoverished and exploited region. More than any other work of the period, however, Harry Caudill's history of Appalachian Kentucky, Night Comes to the Cumberlands: Biography of a Depressed Area, although marred by cultural stereotypes, forcefully advanced the internal colonialism model and set the stage for the contributions of a younger generation of scholars and activists in the 1970s and 1980s who documented the economic exploitation of Appalachia and its impact on the region's culture and politics. |
Conclusion
Looking back on the culture-of-poverty and internal colonialism models today, the limits of both are readily apparent. Although still frequently applied today, culture-of-poverty theory hinges on a faulty view of culture that leads one to think of Appalachian culture as a collection of traits that are settled, nonnegotiatory, and fixed. More recent "postmodern" approaches to Appalachian culture, such as Shapiro's account of the discourses that constructed a "mythic system" about the mountain people and region, enable us to see that essentialistic and universalizing statements about Appalachian people, in fact, derive from assumptions about a complex, intertextual reality, "Appalachia," rather than about the diverse populations actually living there. Images of fatalism, for instance, constitute Appalachians as victims and obscure the possibilities for agency and empowerment, but are refuted by the rich history of struggle and resistance in the region. |
Although the culture-of-poverty theory was justly criticized in the 1970s for blatant stereotyping and victim blaming, the model did grasp the fact that remarkably high levels of poverty in rural Appalachian communities represented a systemic problem for those trapped in impoverished conditions and it underlined the extent to which intergenerarional experiences of living in poverty are likely to blunt people's faith in personal efficacy. The culture-of-poverty theory erred terribly by attempting to explain chronic poverty in terms of individual behaviors and family patterns, but its emphasis on the consequences of entrenched poverty was potentially suggestive nonetheless. |
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