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 20th
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
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