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2 American Paradox, Appalachian Stereotype A veritable chain of weather-worn, moth-eaten towns from Chester to Canebrake have lost touch with progress. Charleston Gazette, October 12, 1958 You must remember that we’re going through a violent industrial revolution– with few of the things other states have to cushion the shock. It’ll be all right eventually, but it sure is a hell of a rough ride along the way. Unidentified West Virginian quoted by Roul Tunley, Saturday Evening Post, February 6, 1960 The Appalachian reality ran counter to the ebullient national mood of the 1950s. A “politics of consensus” accompanied the growing national affluence. The Taft-Hartley Act, the Cold War, the Korean War, McCarthyism, and the politics of anticommunism further put a chill on the kind of reform and union activism that had marked the 1930s and the New Deal era. The prevailing mood discouraged reform or protests against racism, sexism, the persistent poverty of those who did not share in the affluence, the new industrial workplace dangers , and environmental adversities in Appalachia and elsewhere. The American people enjoyed the cars, television, movies, consumer appliances , and other benefits of a new prosperity even as they worried about communism, both domestic and foreign, and “automation.”1 While the general culture basked in prosperity’s glow, the American dream fell short of reality for many in the mountains of Appalachia. The survey of the Southern Appalachian region sponsored by the Ford Foundation at the close of the 1950s suggested that in rural Appalachia the persistence of “familism” in the face of the technological revolution retarded the development of complex organizational systems typical of the more industrialized parts of 41 American Paradox, Appalachian Stereotype the United States. In matters of state and local government, education , health care, and “providing for the social and economic welfare of those who are inevitably socially dispossessed in an era of rapid change,” the survey concluded, the region had failed to keep pace with national standards.2 In truth, an exploitative system of absentee land and resource ownership, the impact of the new machine age, and the demands of the global economy had more to do with Appalachia’s ills than familism or fatalism or other academic, journalistic, and political diagnoses of what ailed the region. By the end of the 1950s, in part because it was the one state most completely Appalachian and maybe also because urban journalists could more readily access it, West Virginia began to attract attention as an “American paradox,” a state left behind by the nation’s progress, exemplifying many of the shortcomings of Appalachian development as perceived by the broader culture and as defined by the Appalachian survey and metropolitan observers.3 The Alienation of the Land One of the critical problems of Appalachia—the system of extensive absentee land ownership—had its roots in land speculation dating to colonial and revolutionary times. Much of the territory won through the exertions of Euro-American pioneers (and at the expense of Native Americans) fell into the hands of land companies and shrewd speculators, many of them prominent men of the late eighteenth century. George Washington, for example, took advantage of the French and Indian War to engross some 33,000 acres along the Ohio and Kanawha rivers by buying up military warrants issued to veterans of that conflict. Similarly in the Revolutionary era, the land won by the blood and treasure of many generally fell into the clutches of a few speculators, many of whom never saw the land they claimed. Virginia’s post-revolutionary land policies tended to favor the speculators at the expense of pioneer settlers. The state made several vast land grants in the Trans-Allegheny region, and speculators, seized by a near mania, engrossed thousands of acres more. Prominent politicians and eastern merchants vied with one another in accumulating wilderness empires in what would become West Virginia and Kentucky.4 Appalachian scholar Wilma A. Dunaway’s analysis of county tax lists has revealed that by 1800 a few distant speculators 42 American Paradox, Applachian Stereotype had engrossed 93.3 percent of the acreage of West Virginia, leaving very little to actual settlers.5 The vagaries of Virginia land law and the post-Revolutionary speculative boom also resulted in extensive legal haggling over land titles, making it difficult for pioneer settlers and yeomen farmers to defend their holdings against the speculators. The insecurity in titles discouraged settlers and led many to go elsewhere, contributing to the paucity...

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