Worlds Apart: Why Poverty Persists in Rural America by Cynthia M. Duncan (review)

Cynthia M. Duncan. Worlds Apart: Why Poverty Persists in Rural America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. 325 pages. $27.50. This is an informative and important book that has deep personal meaning for me. Cynthia Duncan, a former administrator for the Mountain Association For Community Economic Development in Berea, Kentucky, has examined three rural communities in different sections of the country to uncover the critical factors that determine the extent, depth, and persistence of poverty in non-urban America. The book is based upon extensive research in the census reports and 350 interviews with community members of all ethnicities and classes. Duncan, now an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of New Hampshire, deliberately chooses communities that are identified with nationally recognized areas of deprivation and that are culturally very different from each other. The first community examined is Blackwell, a coal mining community in eastern Kentucky. Although Duncan attempts to disguise her communities, it seems clear that this small town is Harlan. Duncan points out that the most significant sociological factor in this community is the deep divide between the middle-class town dwellers and unemployed poor in the county. Duncan explains in detail how the exploitative policies of the coal companies and the decline in employment in that industry have created what appears to be a permanent underclass. She also describes a corrupt political system designed to maintain the status quo and which uses its control of local jobs to reward loyalists and to punish those who challenge the power structure. Individual portraits of residents in the community provide a complex texture to this fairly simple framework. Duncan is careful to show that many of the poorer residents of the county have made good-faith efforts to advance themselves economically, but they do not have many opportunities. One limitation in this study is highlighted by this chapter. Duncan has not cited a great deal of secondary literature to support her analysis. In this chapter, she has relied on Ron Eller's fine study for her base of information. While Eller's analysis of industrialization in southern Appalachia is unmatched, his depiction of pre-industrial mountain society has been rigorously challenged. The work of Paul Salstrom, Mary Beth Pudup, and Wilma Dunaway would have been quite relevant and could have altered Duncan's depiction of preindustrial Appalachia. Including works by Crandell Shifflett on company towns and John Hennen on the modern phase of industrial76 ization might also have led Duncan to modify some assertions about southern mountain economic development. I doubt that Duncan's overall conclusions would have been significantly altered by adding insights from these scholars, but including their work would reassure others that the author had consulted all of the relevant scholarship. The second chapter describes the community of Dahlia, in the Mississippi delta south of Memphis. Duncan accurately describes the underclass in this county as even more rigidly controlled than the poor among the coal-mining regions of Appalachia. The key factor here is race. The majority of the population in the county is AfricanAmerican , with a European-American power structure determined to maintain its dominance. This split clearly has historical roots in slavery, white terrorist organizations during Reconstruction, and the undemocratic political settlement of 1890. When the federal government—belatedly—forced the end to legal segregation in this region, public facilities became essentially all AfricanAmerican —especially the schools. Since whites were having to fund private institutions for their own use, they sought to keep taxes low and to starve, financially, public institutions. Duncan's accurate—and terribly depressing—outline of the situation is once again made more complex by the personal sketches she provides. Her descriptions of the older and dependent black middle-class leadership, civil rights radicals, and the new African-American middle-class professionals provide important insights into a seemingly undifferentiated underclass. Duncan also effectively captures the total lack of interest or sympathy among European Americans for their black neighbors. While Duncan's selection of her first two community studies is predictable, the inclusion of Gray Mountain as the third location is inspired. This small industrial city in northern Appalachia —undoubtedly Berlin, New Hampshire—offers important contrasts and comparisons with the...