Word: appalachia
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Just a year before L.B.J.'s advent in Appalachia, Harry Caudill, a lawyer from the University of Kentucky who is descended from the earliest settlers of the Cumberland Plateau, wrote a small classic, Night Comes to the Cumberlands. The book detailed with angry eloquence the paradox of a people who had grown "shockingly poor" in a land stuffed with "valuable natural resources." In The Watches of the Night, an equally indignant, equally effective broadside, Caudill updates that gloomy report. Appalachia in the '60s, he suggests, was L.B.J.'s and America's domestic Viet Nam: a confrontation...
...land now lies largely untilled. The forests are both abused and neglected. The hillsides are scarred beyond repair by strip mining that mostly profits absentee millionaires. As for the 780,000 people there, by the early '60s Appalachia contained nearly a quarter of a million coal miners in variously advanced stages of ruined health. According to Caudill's rough estimate, a fifth of them could write no more than their names. In Caudill's grim image, southern Appalachia had become a sprawling welfare reservation of kept peoples, waiting in shanties and mobile homes, beside polluted streams...
Poverty Warriors. How, after all the TV documentaries, after all the "poverty warriors" from the best bureaucracies in Washington and the VISTA volunteers-after all those good intentions and all that matching money -can Caudill's Appalachia be more of a blight today than it was a decade ago? The villain of Caudill's piece is the coal industry: "backward, brutish, medieval," controlled by "industrial Neanderthals." Caudill contends the industry has corrupted the American political system from the county courthouse to the state capital to the halls of Congress with what he scathingly refers to as "contributions...
Though more than half of the nation's coal lies west of the Mississippi, the industry still concentrates heavily on working the old veins of Appalachia and the Midwest. They are still rich enough to support what has become an industry of corporate giants. Some 1,200 companies work small mines, but they account for only 40% of output. The other 60% comes from 15 companies, led by Peabody Coal of St. Louis and Consolidation Coal of Pittsburgh. Only three of the 15-Pittston (No. 5), North American (No. 10) and Westmoreland (No. 13)-are independent; the rest...
...thick seams close to the surface. All a coal company must do is strip off the topsoil and gouge up the mineral. Mining cost per ton: a mere $3. Even after transportation costs to the East are figured in, the coal can compete in price with that of Appalachia...