AN APPALACHIAN NEW DEAL: WEST VIRGINIA IN THE GREAT DEPRESSION

Epilogue: From Nearly Perfect to Almost Heaven

Epilogue From Nearly Perfect to Almost Heaven Looking back from the perspective of more than sixty years, what are we to make of the impact of the New Deal on West Virginia? Historians have long agreed that the New Deal failed to bring economic recovery before the coming of World War II, but there is disagreement over the long-term impact of New Deal policies. i Numerous circumstances intervened with the passage of time to limit New Deal influence, including the difficulty of persuading state and local governments to cooperate in the implementation of New Deal policies, the rise of congressional conservatism late in the thirties , and the coming of World War II-which is described by Anthony J. Badger as "the juggernaut that ran over American society." In the postwar period, New Deal influence faded in the face of a powerful remobilization of business and conservative forces, a booming economy, and the coming of the Cold War.2 Though general New Deal recovery policies fell short of their goals, the relief efforts met desperate needs in West Virginia. Before the crash West Virginians were already suffering from the impact of a half century or more of heedless exploitation of their natural resources, and with the coming to the Depression unemployment rates climbed to startling levels. Outside investigators who came into the state from 1930 onward were shocked at the level of destitution they saw, whether they were representatives of the American Friends Service Committee or the Red Cross, agents of the Hoover unemployment relief office (POUR), the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, or New Deal relief agencies. Heroic private and voluntary efforts fell short of meeting relief needs. Despite the half-hearted cooperation of the Depressionera governors, the New Deal relief and unemployment programs were lifesavers for a large percentage of West Virginians who could .find Epilogue 235 neither work nor adequate sustenance from the land. New Deal relief and welfare policies also led to the abandonment of county poor farms and improved conditions for children and the elderly who had once shared the humiliations of the poor farms. The New Deal meant the end of county responsibility for relief, and the attempt, compromised by politics and the lack of fiscal support, to build a modern welfare system staffed by trained social workers. One of the lasting changes the New Deal brought to West Virginia was a political realignment that swept away a long era of Republican dominance. Democrats shaped a lasting majority that relied heavily upon organized labor but also drew increased support from women and African Americans. Despite the rising power of groups that had often been ignored within the party before, conservative Democrats, more solicitous of corporations than people and committed to fiscal conservatism, controlled the party and the state throughout the New Deal era and frustrated many federal recovery and reform programs. Only in 1941, when the New Deal had lost its impetus in Washington, did the pro-New Deal Democrats take power in Charleston , too late to test the promise of state-federal cooperation. While the conservative governors Herman Guy Kump and Homer Adams Holt resisted what they viewed as New Deal threats to state sovereignty, the ill-conceived Tax Limitation Amendment of 1932 compelled them to make basic changes in the relationship between the state and local governments. Caught in the financial and administrative morass created by the amendment, they consoled themselves by reaping the patronage bounty that fell into their hands as the state came to control many jobs once under county courts and municipal governments. The pro-New Deal faction, led by Senator Matthew M. Neely, controlled federal patronage, and the two rival patronage machines waged a bitter struggle for party dominance in which the participants on both sides often lost sight of public needs or New Deal goals. The factions' ideological differences were not nearly as dramatic as Governor Holt imagined in characterizing it as a battle between constitutionalists and totalitarians. Indeed, upon becoming governor, Neely restructured the statehouse machine, but, as historian John Alexander Williams notes, he "did not make it liberal, only less conservative ."3 The fiscal conservatism of statehouse Democrats, in combination with the Depression, the drastic budgetary contraction imposed by the Tax Limitation Amendment, and the reluctance to find ways 236 An Appalachian New Deal to use federal matching funds, needlessly starved public institutions and inhibited efforts of cities, towns, and counties to take advantage of...