A Liberal Dose, May 26, 2022: "Poverty in the Upper Cumberland: Where Are We and Where Are We Going"

A Liberal Dose

May 26, 2022

Troy D. Smith

“Poverty in the Upper Cumberland- Where Are We, and Where Are We Going?”

 

Over the past four columns I have been talking about the connections between poverty, crime, stereotypes, and industry in Upper Cumberland history. If you missed it, or want to refresh your memory, you can find them online either at SpartaLive.com or at my blog, tnwordsmith.blog.com.

For a really quick summary: there is a long history here of drug-or-alcohol related crime, and I assert that the high poverty rates in the region are a large factor in that. I traced the history of the high poverty, and asserted that it started with the arrival of extractive industries like coal and timber, largely financed or owned by investors outside the region who wanted both land and a cheap work force. A bad national economy at around the same time caused many farmers to have to sell their land and go to work for these new industries, who were aggressive about preventing unions. The Appalachian hillbilly stereotype developed at around the same time, painting the people as backward and uncivilized and not trustworthy to make their own decisions about how to use their land or labor.

I mentioned that regional industry before the Civil War was more diverse than afterward, when it was dominated by the aforementioned coal and timber interests, then by tobacco agriculture, then by shirt factories. Tobacco dried up as more people quit (or never started) smoking, and the shirt factories moved to Mexico after NAFTA because people would work even cheaper there. Those things happened in the 1990s, by which time big box stores were dominating the economy in little towns throughout the Upper Cumberland, snuffing out small businesses left and right. All these things led to ever more dire circumstances for working-class and poor people, and seriously undercut opportunities for well-paying jobs. Which has added to the desperation.

Here’s another factor. When counties are poor, there is less education. Public schools are underfunded (and therefore offer fewer types of classes, with more students per teacher), because a poor county doesn’t have much tax revenue. Fewer people go on to college, or even graduate high school, in poor counties. This contributes, unfortunately, to a less skilled workforce who command less pay.

This leads me to now. White County is in much better shape, I think, where manufacturing jobs are concerned -we have several factories, and they’re not all in the same industry, which makes them more stable. Most of those factories have moved in because taxes are lower and labor is cheaper, though, and in many cases (though not all) the highest paid positions go to more-educated people they bring in from elsewhere.

In fact, a LOT of people are moving in, for various reasons: more people nowadays can work from home, so they prefer to live someplace pretty and cheap; many are retirees; quite a few are people who have jobs in larger towns and cities in commuting distance. Scenic beauty, a slower lifestyle, low taxes and cheaper cost-of-living. I welcome these businesses, and these people- I know many of them, and in fact my own lovely Minnesotan wife is one. But I also worry.

Real estate prices are through the roof -and so is rent. Part of this is due to national inflation, but much is not. My fear is that the people with good jobs and enough money will be people who have moved in, while the people whose families have been here for generations will get poorer and poorer. Something similar happened in Cumberland County, and violent crime there is among the highest in the region.

I think this can be avoided if the county and city government take all these factors into consideration and plan carefully. The fact our town square has gone from abandoned shells of buildings to one of the most vibrant in the region is a very good sign, I think.

But we must look out for the working poor who are the backbone of this county.

 

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

 You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE    

 

A Liberal Dose, May 19, 2022 "The Real Purpose of the Hillbilly Stereotype"

 

A Liberal Dose

May 19, 2022

Troy D. Smith

“The Real Purpose of the Hillbilly Stereotype”

 

Sometimes I ask students to list off for me some of the stereotypes of Appalachians widely held outside our region. Here’s what I tend to get: backwards, lazy, alcoholic, moonshiners (or meth-heads), barefoot, inbred, toothless, poor, uneducated, violent, racist. Some students from the region tell stories of being called these things when they travel. Some students from outside the region- even other parts of the South -confess to having believed those stereotypes before coming here.

Then I ask them to name some famous people who were associated with Appalachia BEFORE the Civil War. This takes more patience, but they usually come up with Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, and Andrew Jackson. How have those guys always been portrayed in popular culture, memory, and history? As brave, resourceful, clever, strong, and as violent in a more positive, patriotic way (unless, of course, you are Native American or Mexican). Indeed, those guys -and men like them -are portrayed as the very epitome of Americanness.

And yet. Their descendants are viewed as ignorant, toothless, inbred morons. When did that change, and why? That is a very important question, and one that almost no one ever thinks to ask.

(When I ask students to name a living Appalachian, they never think of anyone non-white -and are surprised when I tell them they missed Samuel L. Jackson of Chattanooga).

I’ll tell you when it started to change. The 1870s, picking up substantial speed in the 1880s, and then increasing for the next half-century. The “local color” school of American literature -roughly 1875-1925 -played a big part. This was the approach of using local dialect and culture in works of fiction, which is not in itself a bad thing -Mark Twain used it to great effect. But it was also used by a very large number of authors writing about moonshiners and hillbillies, almost always presenting them as ignorant and immoral. Meanwhile, throughout the 1880s, newspapers across the nation were obsessing over the Hatfields and McCoys feuding on the West Virginia/Kentucky border. The “feud” itself, while violent, was nowhere as widespread or as lethal as it was reported to be -nor was it more deadly than similar things happening at the same time in other parts of the country. These two families, though, quickly became a cautionary tale of how violent, unpredictable, and backward mountain people were. The theme was repeated often over the years, from numerous early silent films to cartoons to potboiler novels, until it was understood as gospel by most Americans. The 1925 Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee, brought about a renewed emphasis on the stereotype.

That’s the how. What is the why?

It is no accident that everything I just described -the rapid shift from viewing Appalachians as pioneer heroes to backward morons -coincided exactly with the rapid growth of extractive industries like coal and timber, often backed by investors outside the region, into Appalachia. Most Appalachians were content to be farmers, and did not want to sell their land, their resources, or their labor to these new companies.

And virtually overnight, they were being portrayed in all the negative ways I described. Most of all, they were portrayed as obstacles to “progress,” selfishly blocking the advances that, they were told, would benefit everybody. And at the same time, practices that farmers had used for generations to augment their income -turning their grains into potent liquids -became subject to heavy taxes and jail. Appalachians were, essentially, “othered” in the same way racial minorities were. “They are too backward to make their own decisions, so someone needs to make decisions FOR them -for their ‘own good’.”

First they were forced off their land into the mines, then punished for organizing. The stereotype was but one item in the toolbox used to trap Appalachians into a cycle of hopeless poverty and despair, to make other people money.

J.D. Vance never told you that part.

 

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU. 

 You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE   

A Liberal Dose, May 12, 2022 "The Roots of Upper Cumberland Poverty"

A Liberal Dose

May 12, 2022

Troy D. Smith

“The Roots of Upper Cumberland Poverty”

 

In the last two columns we have determined that 1) there is a long history of drug-and/or-alcohol-related crime in the Upper Cumberland compared to the rest of the country, and 2) the Upper Cumberland, and Appalachia in general, are much poorer than much of the rest of the country, and has been for a long time. I suggested that the drug-and-alcohol problems of the Upper Cumberland have, as their root cause, the economic stress of the region -this both creates a demand, from people whose life prospects have been limited by their economic circumstances and who wish to escape that reality, and creates opportunity for some to expand their economic horizons by providing for that demand, a situation which seems to promise a quicker return than working at a minimum wage job (if you can find one). This is neither an excuse nor a justification for crime, but is at least a partial explanation of it.

Before the Civil War, Appalachia was not significantly poorer than any other rural part of the country -most people were subsistence farmers and there were varied economic interests. This started to change in the 1870s, when railroads extended into the region, closely followed by extractive industries like coal and timber. Before then, most of the coal in America was mined in NORTHERN Appalachia, in Pennsylvania and Ohio. There was plenty of coal in the Southern mountains, but with no railroads to haul it out it was not economically or logistically feasible to remove it. Before the Civil War, while the many northern railroads were closely linked like latticework, southern railroads existed primarily to transport cotton from plantations to the harbors of coastal cities to ship overseas. Areas that produced little to no cotton -mountainous areas -were ignored. This changed in the 1870s -in part because there was renewed demand for coal (the 1870s were the beginning of the Second Industrial Revolution), and in part because there was a move toward more industrialization in “The New South.” A frequent marker of this expansionist drive was local businessmen creating partnerships with northern investors. For example, former Confederate general George Dibrell of Sparta was largely responsible for bringing both the railroad and coal mining to White County, with more and more northern investors as time went on. The coal and timber companies of Appalachia were frequently owned, or at least co-owned, by people in other parts of the country. 

At the same time, another form of economic opportunity was coming into the region: tobacco. Before the Civil War, most tobacco was “dark tobacco” grown in Virginia and Maryland. In the late 1800s, though, a new tobacco strain was developed -burley -which can thrive in the mountains. By the early 1900s, the vast majority of this popular new strain was coming from Kentucky and Tennessee. This strain -which was virtually guaranteed to produce a profit -enabled some Appalachian subsistence farmers to supplement their income. They had mostly been self-sufficient, but not prosperous -as someone once said, not poor but also not used to a lot of money.

Coal and lumber companies, however, were competing with tobacco for the mountain land -or at least the timber and mineral rights to it. They were also looking for a work force, which was initially hard to find because most people worked their own small farms and were content to do so (and reluctant to leave or sell those farms). In the early years of the coal industry in the Upper Cumberland, countless immigrants were imported to the mountains to work them, many from either Scotland, Ireland, or Wales or Bohemia (the modern-day Czech Republic). Land, however, could not be imported- it had to be bought. The Panic of 1893 caused a four-year depression in which many farms failed -many were bought by coal or timber companies, and the now-unemployed farmers became the cheap, desperate workforce the companies had been waiting for.

Next week I’ll discuss how this all led to our current situation.

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

 You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE   

 

 

A Liberal Dose, April 28, 2022 "Down and Out in the Upper Cumberland"

 

A Liberal Dose

April 28, 2022

Troy D. Smith

“Down and Out in the Upper Cumberland”

 

Last week, I may have painted myself into a corner. I made the point that the Upper Cumberland has a long history of drug-or-alcohol-related crime, which I argued was in large part due to the region’s depressed economic conditions down through the years. I said I would explain that this time. That’s going to take a lot more than 600 words, but I’m going to do my best to at least describe the situation in this week’s space.

First, let’s take a look at some numbers. The figures I use here are from the Labor Department, census, and (mostly) the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC). ARC does its studies in groups of 5 years: 2010-2014 and 2015-2019.

At the end of that first cycle, 2014, the number of people below the poverty threshold (or, less than 125% of the poverty rate) in the U.S. was 15.6%. In Appalachia it was 19.7%. During that time, by the way, roughly 41% of poor people in the U.S. lived in the South (it is now 44%). Within that framework, in Southern states that include Appalachian areas, the Appalachian counties are poorer than the non-Appalachian ones. I could not find the breakdown for Tennessee, but in Kentucky the poverty threshold rate in 2014 was 18.9%, compared to the national rate of 15.6, but the Appalachian counties of Eastern Kentucky had a rate of 25.4%. Appalachian areas also tend to have higher poverty rates than rural areas in other parts of the country.

The Appalachian poverty threshold numbers are significantly better than they were in 1960, which is when national focus turned to the dire economic straits of this region in the form of several bestselling books and TV documentaries, as well as the attentions of JFK and LBJ- at that time it was 30%. The decline has not been consistent, though. If we look at the ARC study that ends in 2019, we see that Putnam County’s rate has gone down significantly -from 18.9 in 2014 to 14.5, and DeKalb’s has gone down slightly, from 18.4 to 17.4. Most of the counties in our region, though, went up in that time -White County went from 16.2 to 17.3. In the same five-year period, the nation as a whole dropped from 15.6 to 15.2. In other words, the nation (and Smithville) did a teeny bit better, Cookeville improved by leaps and bounds, and everyone else in our area did worse. I think a lot of this can be attributed to the explosive growth of Nashville, whose population has almost doubled in twenty years. Nashville has become a favored destination for upscale workers -many of whom prefer to commute from a more rural, scenic location. Putnam County’s population has grown by 10% in the past decade, and White County’s has grown by 6%. Many recent arrivals have brought money with them and are eager to spend it on property, as real estate prices seem to indicate.

Anyway, the point is, we’re poor.

Once upon a time, before the Civil War, Appalachia was not significantly poorer than the rest of the country. There were a lot of subsistence farmers and a diverse range of economic concerns, unlike in the rest of the South, where almost all the attention was on cotton (and the slave labor used to maximize plantation owners’ profits). The war was extremely destructive to our region, of course, but that was true of most of the South. The real economic turning point for Southern Appalachia would come at the end of Reconstruction and in the first two or three decades of the 20^th century. The change would come in the name of “progress” -but it was not progress for most people in the area.

There now, I’ve set the stage. Next time I will tell you what that turning point was and what it has meant to White County, the Upper Cumberland, and Appalachia.

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU. 

You can fund all previous entries in this weekly column HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE