Advancing West Virginia: Transforming the 1963 State Centennial Celebration into a “Big Sell”

40 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY D uring his 1960 presidential campaign , candidate John F. Kennedy paid a visit to the town of Welch, West Virginia, to witness firsthand the economic destitution that blanketed much of Appalachia in the 1950s. Shocked by what he saw, Kennedy promised West Virginians that if elected he would wage war on poverty. Kennedy won and did his utmost to combat poverty; likewise , his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, made Kennedy’s anti-poverty mantle the centerpiece of his Great Society program. Still, towns such as Welch remained desperately poor well into the next decade, as Jeannette Walls, a resident of the town in the late 1960s and early 1970s, recounts in her recent memoir. As Walls recalls, Welch had no sewer system; the sewage flowed into the nearby river, leaving its banks lined with toilet paper. A film of black coal dust covered the “shabby and worn out” downtown. She remembers the streets of Welch as “mostly silent” because “most of the grown-ups didn’t work at all.” People visited the town “to inflict one form of misery or another—to lay off workers, to shut down a mine, to foreclose on someone’s house.” As a result, “townspeople didn’t care much for outsiders.” Walls recalls leaking roofs, spongy floorboards, exposed wires, rats in her home, and garbage piling up in the yard because the “Advancing West Virginia”: Transforming the 1963 State Centennial Celebration into a “Big Sell” Gregory Jason Bell President Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908-1973). THE FILSON HISTORICAL SOCIETY John F. Kennedy (1917-1963). CINCINNATI MUSEUM CENTER SPRING 2009 41 GREGORY JASON BELL family could not afford the town’s trash collection fee. Her house had running water, but the bathroom was outside. In winter, icicles sometimes hung from the ceiling because her parents often lacked money to heat the house. They seldom washed their thrift-store purchased clothes, and consequently family members frequently smelled “rank.” The malnourished Walls children sometimes ate out of other people’s garbage. “Though ordinary Americans might find it hard to believe,” Walls notes, her story reveals that “starvation-level poverty existed right in their own country.” Clearly, the government’s best efforts at reducing poverty failed to reach some rural areas, particularly in Appalachia.1 In his recent history of post-World War II Appalachia, historian Ronald D. Eller documents both the high levels of poverty that gripped much of the region and the local, state, and federal efforts to cope with the problem. Government attempts to reduce poverty in rural West Virginia largely failed, he argues, because the post-war faith that economic development alone could solve poverty failed to foster other characteristics essential in creating and sustaining a healthy society. For many government officials, promoting economic development became the default strategy against poverty instead of one part of a multi-faceted approach that included support for education, social services, and infrastructure improvement. The planning and development of the 1963 West Virginia State Centennial Celebration reflected the efforts of state officials who believed economic development offered the best means to combat poverty. Indeed, the economic development approach superseded all other centennial planning considerations and resulted in a unilateral commemoration that largely ignored alternative strategies in the war on poverty.2 In the mid-twentieth century, commemorations increased in popularity in the U.S. Attempting to piggyback on the successes of the World’s Fairs, governments and civic organizations spent great amounts of time, effort, and money marking important historical milestones. The rising popularity and status of commemorations increased public pressure on the planners of such events, prompting them to design ever more elaborate celebrations. Between 1940 and 1970, twenty-three states and several large cities commemorated historical anniversaries, while the federal government marked the centennials of both the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil War, and New South ideologues defiantly made their own centennial plans. Four World’s Fairs added to an already crowded schedule. Faced with a finite audience that could choose between multiple events, each host endeavored to ensure the popularity of their commemoration.3 Though West Virginia was one of the poorer states in the union, it shared the commemoration impulse. To celebrate the...