Appalachian Values/American Values: The Role of Regional Colleges and Universities

Appalachian Values/American Values The Role of Regional Colleges and Universities by JIM WAYNE MILLER The following chapters are selections taken from Jim Wayne Miller's Book-length manuscript APPALACHIAN VALUES/AMERICAN VALUES: The Role of Regional Colleges and Universities. Other Chapters will follow in subsequent issues. Let us now come to the Highlands—a land of promise, a land ofromance, and a land about which, perhaps, more things are known that are not true than of any part of our country. —John C. Campbell THE SOUTHERN HIGHLANDER AND HIS HOMELAND, 1921 I. IMAGES OF APPALACHIA During the years since Campbell made this observation about Appalachia little seems to have changed. Since 1921 a vast bibliography on Appalachia has accumulated . Almost anything can be said, usually with some justification, about a region so vast and various, and just about everything has been said. Romantics, in the grip of an old Alpine myth, what Roland Barthes has called "this bourgeoise promoting of mountains" which causes them to become enraptured "anytime the ground is uneven,''^ have lamented the passing of the old ways and the noble highlander as a type. Others, cursing the persistence of the old ways, have seen Appalachia as a problem to be solved, and Appalachians as pathological failures at being mainstream Americans. It is impossible to say which point of view has resulted, however unwittingly , in greater mischief. All we are certain of is that our images of Appalachia—the people, their values and institutions—are confused, simplistic, contradictory, and often at variance with fact. Two observers of the same aspect of Appalachian life can reach altogether different conclusions regarding it. Campbell considered the mountain church, for instance, "a conserver of the best in mountain life."^Jack Weiler has called the church in Appalachia "the most reactionary force in the mountains."-^ (In this instance it is possible they are both correct.) Appalachians have been considered a place-bound people , so attached to their mountains they would not go where economic opportunity 24 was greater. At the same time, so many of these place-bound Appalachians have migrated to midwestern and northern industrial cities, in search of economic opportunity , that they have come to be considered a social problem in those places. One comes across writers who, in the past, have deplored the monotonous diet of Appalachians , who have considered them ill-fed and malnourished while at the same time admiring their physical stamina. Appalachians have been considered incorrigibly backward and ignorant at a time when Appalachia was providing midwestern and northern school systems with large numbers of teachers. Appalachians have been considered notoriously suspicious of strangers and outsiders and also naively trusting with regard to the intentions of outsiders. Appalachia has been praised, damned and lamented. Every hill and holler, it seems, has been microscopically examined. At one point in the 1960's the typical Appalachian family was said to consist of one mother, one father, a brood of children and a resident sociologist. Yet, over fifty years after Campbell wrote, there is still no clear understanding about the relationship of the region, the people and their values, to the rest of the nation. In 1973 Harry Caudill could still plausibly maintain that "The Appalachian mountain range is the least understood and the most maligned part of America."4 After seeing two books on Appalachia recommended in a recent number of Harper's Weekly, I can appreciate Caudill's statement more than ever. Over a threeparagraph excerpt from Yesterday 's People Weller's book was recommended as one which gets into the "guts and brains" of the poor whites of Appalachia, who live in a world of their own and are "so difficult to assimilate." Not six inches away on the page another reader enthusiastically recommended Foxfire 3, "about people who are as real as the hills of Appalachia, where they have lived zestfully during difficult times and made their peace with life and with themselves."^ The juxtaposition of these two images of life in Appalachia is but the latest in a fun-house of historical, sociological and fictional distortion which goes back at least a hundred years. The result is that there are two Appalachias. One is...