Reformers to Radicals: The Appalachian Volunteers and the War on Poverty (review)

Thomas Kiffmeyer's work provides a critical analysis of the antipoverty group Appalachian Volunteers (AV) that operated in central Appalachia during President Johnson's War on Poverty. By relying extensively on the AV papers housed at Berea College, he chronicles the group's quick transition from conservative brainchild of the Council of the Southern Mountains (CSM) to radical and independent agency focused on confronting regional power structures. While this shift was initially examined in David Whisnant's 1980 work Modernizing the Mountaineer, Kiffmeyer contends that the process was much more complex than what Whisnant described. Reformers to Radicals thus complicates the AV's story by demonstrating that the group's radical transition was fostered by a series of external and internal events that altered both its membership and the volunteers' ideology.

This book is structured chronologically, and Kiffmeyer breaks down the AV program into four phases. The first phase, which began with the group's advent in 1964, fulfilled the Council of the Southern Mountains' goal of having Appalachians assisting other Appalachians. Native college students recruited from regional institutions ran projects such as school restoration, summer enrichment programs, and book drives. Kiffmeyer maintains that this emphasis on education as an antipoverty measure reflected liberal values and a belief in the culture of poverty on the part of the AV, the CSM, and government leaders. However, as the War on Poverty and the AV program expanded and more volunteers were brought into Appalachia from outside the region, their perspective changed. This expansion marked the second phase, and it was during this period that the introduction of outsiders exposed vast differences in "class, culture, and urban and rural values" between the volunteers and the natives. The third phase was defined by the Volunteers' move toward "issue organizing" (10). As the poverty workers challenged local business owners, politicians, powerful coal companies, and the elite-dominated Community Action Programs and welfare boards, their efforts were countered with charges of communism by local and state governments. Such charges, coupled with internal divisions over the Vietnam War draft, served to weaken and eventually destroy the AV. As the non-native volunteers were forced out, the AV moved into their fourth phase, which saw a return to the initial model of natives helping natives. The AV program ended in 1970.

Kiffmeyer is not particularly sympathetic to the AV, and rightfully so. He finds fault with a number of issues including their early focus on the poor rather than on the root causes of poverty, their inability to clearly define and convey the concepts of "community development" and "community action," and the paternalism that never dissipated despite the Volunteers' turn toward radicalism (14). These criticisms are significant and link Kiffmeyer's work with an entire body of scholarship that offers similar critiques of other historic efforts to "uplift" mountaineers. Still, he leaves one wondering if there are any small success stories that could have been added to enrich his analysis, even in terms of the native interns' personal empowerment or decreased school-dropout rates. This small question aside, Reformers to Radicals provides a valuable contribution to Appalachian and American historiography. It is necessary reading for anyone interested in understanding modern Appalachia's struggle with indigence or the War on Poverty's inability to provide solid and lasting solutions for such a persistent and pervasive problem.