An Appalachian Reawakening: West Virginia and the Perils of the New Machine Age, 1945–1972, and: “They’ll Cut Off Your Project”: A Mingo County Chronicle (review)

Appalachia in the 1960s has become a topic of great interest to scholars in recent years. In 2008, Thomas Kiffmeyer’s Reformers to Radicals and Ronald Eller’s Uneven Ground sparked vigorous debate over the merits of the War on Poverty in the region, especially Kentucky. West Virginia University Press’s two recent publications An Appalachian Reawakening and “They’ll Cut Off Your Project” are also important works in understanding that decade, and they should inspire further debate.

“They’ll Cut Off Your Project” is Huey Perry’s memoir of the turbulent years he spent as executive director of Mingo County’s Economic Opportunity Commission (EOC) beginning in the summer of 1965. Originally published in 1972, this second edition includes an introduction by Jeff Biggers who notes the critical success the first edition enjoyed and summarizes Perry’s experiences.

Huey Perry—a young high school history teacher before he became EOC director—followed the War on Poverty in the newspapers with great interest. Then, by simply following the dictates of the Economic Opportunity Act, which stressed “involving the poor to the maximum extent feasible” in solving their own problems, he ended up in the middle of one political controversy after another.

Perry immediately discovered that neither Gerald Chafin—a local businessman who had selected Perry for the job—nor the staff members of the Office of Economic Opportunity had a clear idea of what direction the program should take. To local politicians and businessmen like Chafin, the EOC’s most important function would be bringing grant money to the county. Perry decided that forming community action groups would be the best way to learn the problems that the poor faced, and they could later become the instruments by which they solved those problems. He had no sooner decided on this course when the political boss of Mingo County, Noah Floyd, and his revolver-toting associate, T. I. Varney, paid him a late-night visit at his office. Floyd told him that he did not know whether they could help poor people, but that they would be able to “bring a lot of money into the county” (12).

Perry’s narrative masterfully reveals the corruption of the Floyd machine little by little, just as he discovered it as a young EOC director. Virtually every program that the community action groups attempt interferes with Floyd’s elaborate system of patronage. Years of misappropriation of funds had left the county’s roads and schools in disrepair. Efforts to correct those problems revealed the deep roots of local corruption. With Perry as their advisor, the community action groups organized public hearings and demonstrations to expose corruption and to seize power from the Floyd machine. Despite meeting resistance every step of the way, the EOC and the community action groups managed to create a Head Start program staffed by welfare mothers, a Fair Elections Commission that challenged election fraud, and a school hot-lunch program for indigent children.

Perry’s chronicle of the Herculean efforts to remove machine politicians from the EOC board and to keep control of the programs in the hands of the poor are important clues to understanding the broader failures of the War on Poverty at the national level. Once heralded as a model for the rural War on Poverty, the Mingo County EOC was later held up as a model of “how not to do it” by politicians who wanted to stay in office (238). The massive loss of coal jobs in Mingo County in the 1950s and 1960s also plays a key role in Perry’s story. While Perry (and many others) came to view political corruption as being at the...