The Road to Poverty: The Making of Wealth and Hardship in Appalachia (review)

The Road to Poverty: The Making of Wealth and Hardship in Appalachia. By Dwight B. Billings and Kathleen M. Blee (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1999) 434 pp. $59.95 cloth $24.95 paper

During his campaign for the presidency, Vice President Al Gore said, "I may not be the most exciting politician, but you can be sure that I'm going to work very hard for you." Billings and Blee's The Road to Poverty is a long, quiet, fact-filled book that sends a similar message. To be sure, James Agee proved that one can write an exciting (and moral) book about deep and persistent poverty. He turned his data on tenant farmers into a Blake-like world of poems and visions (Let Us Now Praise Famous Men [New York, 1939]). But poetic elevation, as Agee discovered, comes with tradeoffs and, in the end, the readers of this journal will be grateful for the hard-working empiricism of Blee and Billings.

Appalachia is geographically diverse. It spans 406 counties and 13 contiguous states, from New York to Alabama (4). Some of the counties of Appalachia--such as those of Northern Georgia--are now experiencing high rates of economic growth. Most counties are terribly poor, and always have been. Central Appalachia--the eastern counties of Kentucky--had in 1990 a poverty rate nearly double that of the United States, 25 percent. The Road to Poverty is a longitudinal study of "Beech Creek" in Clay County, Kentucky, central Appalachia, one of the poorest counties in the nation. In 1970, 65 percent of the county residents lived below the official poverty line. In 1990, about half the population lived in poverty. Forty-four percent had less than a ninth-grade education. Their median income was $8,700 per year. More than one-fourth received a form of public assistance (17--18). With census manuscripts, court records, probate records, popular literature, and ethnographical field notes, Billings and Blee set out to discover how Beech Creek arrived at, and then remained upon, its "road to poverty."

The authors dismiss the two reigning explanations--"culture of poverty" and "internal colonialism." Culture of poverty theories have dominated nineteenth- and twentieth-century historiography, and not only in the "low culture" media. The cartoons of Snuffy Smith and the television episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies--each with their variations on the theme of blame the victim or gentrify the victim--have roots in the "high culture" of the nineteenth century (The Berea [College] Quarterly) and the twentieth century (Henry Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberland [Boston, 1963]) (9, 12). Blee and Billings do the tedious archival work necessary to discover that feuds were "wars" between local elites fighting for political patronage and control, notably when the business cycle did not favor their profits in mining or timber or speculation in land (24, 281--315). Despite caricatures in culture of poverty scholarship, Blee and Billings make it plain that poverty and feuds were not borne of the toothless moonshiner in an isolated wood fighting over roadkill or his daughter-in-law (though they do dig up a Barney Google or two).

Likewise, the internal colonial model is found to be defective. Blee and Billings argue that the Wallerstein-type colonial model ignores the role of local agency and state coercion in economic development and in the reproduction of patriarchy, and that it ignores the historical importance of subsistence agriculture to the region's social capital (Immanuel Wallerstein, The Essential Wallerstein [New York, 2000]; Michael Hector, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536--1966 [Berkeley, 1975]) (30--31, 35). Mr. Peabody's coal typifies in the colonial model the exploitative industry that connects the mountains with markets but then proceeds to colonize and run the mountains and the mountaineers (12--13, 157--207). Culture and colonialism are not mutually exclusive. But Billings and Blee...