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4 Good Intentions: The New Frontier and the War on Poverty In places like Clarksburg and Grafton and Jane Lew, the American from Megalopolis has the uneasy sensation of being displaced in time. They stir old memories of depression towns in the 1930s. It nags at the mind, and the mountain air is heavy with a sense of fundamental American failure. Russell Baker, New York Times, August 22, 1963 There’s nothing wrong with hillbillies—a description which Mountain people loathe—that a strong dose of equal opportunity wouldn’t cure. Applying every yardstick of social well-being, their Appalachian homeland emerges a sordid blemish on the balance sheet of the wealthiest nation in the world. Harry W. Ernst and Charles W. Drake, The Nation, May 30, 1959 By the end of the 1950s, West Virginia and Appalachia increasingly attracted attention as a region in need of help. Clearly the new machine age, whether because of “fundamental American failure” or as a “result of progress rather than stagnation,” had resulted in massive unemployment, a great migration, and growing poverty. What, if anything, was to be done to address the Appalachian crisis? President Eisenhower twice vetoed area redevelopment acts in the late 1950s designed to address Appalachian issues, citing inflationary concerns, but journalists, scholars, and some government officials continued to examine the problems of the region. The presidential election of 1960 focused the national media and the federal government on West Virginia and Appalachian issues and put in the White House a president sympathetic to Appalachia. As noted in chapter 2, the 1960 primary election in West Virginia also helped John F. Kennedy address the conventional wisdom of the day 127 Good Intentions that a Catholic could not be elected president. By defeating Hubert Humphrey in overwhelmingly Protestant West Virginia, Kennedy demonstrated that Protestant voters could set aside their religious preferences to vote for a Catholic. In The Making of the President, 1960, journalist Theodore White suggested that although Kennedy’s background of wealth and privilege provided him with little understanding of poverty and the struggles of less affluent Americans, his time in West Virginia had awakened in him sympathy for the unemployed coal miners and rural poor of Appalachia.1 During the fall campaign against the Republican nominee Richard Nixon, Kennedy promised West Virginians that after his election he would send to Congress “a complete program to restore and revive the economy of West Virginia—to bring new industry and new jobs to your state, and all other neglected areas of our country.”2 Structural Unemployment, Automation, and the Culture of Poverty Kennedy and his advisors drew upon a substantial body of economic ideas that had developed in the 1950s as the economy, despite its general prosperity, had developed pockets of persistent poverty and unemployment. Some economists, social activists, and reform politicians saw the Appalachian problem as part of a greater national problem . They offered “structural unemployment” as an explanation for continued poverty in some areas and persistent unemployment rates of 7 percent or more even as most of the nation prospered. Structural unemployment explained the problems of the coal industry, and it explained why unemployed individuals did not easily move to different jobs, as John L. Lewis and Jack Long and other coal industry leaders , as noted earlier, expected they would do. Other industries such as automobiles, railroads, and radio production now could produce more with fewer workers. The skills of the unemployed did not fit the needs of the economy. Two studies by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 1962 projected that the problem would grow in the decade ahead as fewer jobs would be available for the unskilled. Many workers would have to be “retrained for different jobs.”3 A critical part of the structural unemployment issue—called “automation”—underlined the perils of the new technology of the post-war period. Just as had been the case since the beginning of 128 Good Intentions the industrial revolution, new machines took the place of labor. In England’s eighteenth-century transformation, textile machines, for example, made human weavers obsolete. Generally, however, society accommodated to new machines and new processes, but in the post-World War II era, with electronic and computer-driven mechanisms and continuous flow operations (as was happening in the coal industry), the fear arose that technological innovations would outrun the capacity of society to absorb them, and unemployment like that suffered by the coalfields would spread throughout the country . At a press conference in February...

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