Harry Caudill: Appalachian Environmentalist

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CAUDILL: It depends on how you define the word "survive" on whether you want to revive the old independent ways of life or go along with the new.

About a third of the people who now live in our part of the Cumberlands and the Appalachians don't till the earth or do anything, you know. They just draw checks. The federal government has turned this section of the country into a tremendous welfare reservation, patterned in some considerable degree after the Indian reservations.

When the Indian tribes were broken up, destroyed, we put what was left of those people-as you'll remember-on reservations. We gave them issues of beef and blankets and waited for something to happen. Nothing happened. So, later, we added food stamps, Medicare, Medicaid, and checks. And the Indians are still there waiting.

We've done the same thing with the Southern Black. He got up and left the South and piled into the center of our great cities and we turned. those cities into welfare reservations. New York now has a million and a quarter people on relief mostly jammed into a few areas, piled thick and deep, just waiting for something to happen. Nothing's going to happen.

And, of course, we've done the same .thing with the Appalachian Mountains. The land wore out and the people went to the mines and then mining was mechanized and about two-thirds of the people became superfluous. One of those thirds left and the other is still here on relief. They, and their descendants, are waiting for something to happen. And nothing ever happens.

We're building gigantic welfare reservations all over this nation, because we flatly refuse to develop any alternative. When it comes to social pioneering, we're the most conservative country in the western world. We don't try anything except checks handouts in one form or another.

, We could have followed Switzerland's example, if we had wanted to, and had people gainfully employed at useful, desirable, pleasant, and enjoyable jobs from one end of this country to the other. But, as a matter of public policy, we didn't do that.

Just like we didn't try to make anything of our Blacks after they were freed at the end of the Civil War. We could have followed Thaddeus Stevens' advice and built schools for the Blacks arid opened the western lands to them and turned them into a contributing, independent, valuable part of our society.

Instead, we did nothing for the Blacks except turn them loose and let them become wage slaves of the people who had fought for four years to keep them in bondage. So they stayed in the South for 70 years after the Civil War, eking out a bare living, exhausting the land with archaic farming methods.

Finally-when the South was just about farmed to death all those Black people piled into the North in quest of a war job or a manufacturing job after the war. Then when automation and mechanization came along and that raw labor was no longer needed, we just stacked them up and gave them relief checks and created Black welfare reservations. We did that as a matter of public policy just as we've created these welfare reservations here in the Appalachians.

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