Peace in the Mountains: Northern Appalachian Students Protest the Vietnam War: Legacies of War
Autor Tom Weyanten Limba Engleză Hardback – 6 iul 2020
Peace in the Mountains analyzes student activism at the University of Pittsburgh, Ohio University, and West Virginia University during the Vietnam War era. Drawing from a wide variety of sources including memoirs, periodicals, archival manuscript collections, and college newspapers such as The Pitt News, author Thomas Weyant tracks the dynamics of a student-led campus response to the war in real time and outside the purview of the national media. Along the way, he musters evidence for an emerging social and political conscience among the student bodies of northern Appalachia, citing politics on campus, visions of patriotism and dissent, campus citizenship, antiwar activism and draft resistance, campus issues, and civil rights as major sites of contention and exploration.
Through this regional chronicle of student activism during the Vietnam War era, Weyant holds to one reoccurring and unifying theme: citizenship. His account shows that political activism and civic engagement were by no means reserved to students at elite colleges; on the contrary, Appalachian youth were giving voice to the most vexing questions of local and national responsibility, student and citizen identity, and the role of the university in civil society. Rich in primary source material from student op-eds to administrative documents, Peace in the Mountains draws a new map of student activism in the 1960s and early 1970s. Weyant’s study is a thoughtful and engaging addition to both Appalachian studies and the historiography of the Vietnam War era and is sure to appeal not only to specialists—Appalachian scholars, political historians, political scientists, and sociologists—but to college students and general readers as well.
Through this regional chronicle of student activism during the Vietnam War era, Weyant holds to one reoccurring and unifying theme: citizenship. His account shows that political activism and civic engagement were by no means reserved to students at elite colleges; on the contrary, Appalachian youth were giving voice to the most vexing questions of local and national responsibility, student and citizen identity, and the role of the university in civil society. Rich in primary source material from student op-eds to administrative documents, Peace in the Mountains draws a new map of student activism in the 1960s and early 1970s. Weyant’s study is a thoughtful and engaging addition to both Appalachian studies and the historiography of the Vietnam War era and is sure to appeal not only to specialists—Appalachian scholars, political historians, political scientists, and sociologists—but to college students and general readers as well.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9781621905714
ISBN-10: 1621905713
Pagini: 272
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 25 mm
Greutate: 0.57 kg
Ediția:1st Edition
Editura: University of Tennessee Press
Colecția Univ Tennessee Press
Seria Legacies of War
ISBN-10: 1621905713
Pagini: 272
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 25 mm
Greutate: 0.57 kg
Ediția:1st Edition
Editura: University of Tennessee Press
Colecția Univ Tennessee Press
Seria Legacies of War
Notă biografică
THOMAS WEYANT is an assistant professor of history at Black Hills State University in South Dakota.
Extras
The students of northern Appalachian universities engaged in social and political activism in part as a response to the events and trends they witnessed in Cold War American society. By looking at how Appalachian youth interacted with their campus, local, state, and national communities, and the similarities with the larger national activities of students, it becomes clear that the young people of Appalachia must have experienced the same socio-cultural, political, and economic changes as the rest of the nation, at least on some level. To date, scholars of Sixties student activism have left Appalachia out of this discussion, assuming that, as the President’s Appalachian Regional Commission report stated in 1964, “Appalachia is a region apart.”5 The notable exception to this gap in the historiography is Thomas Kiffmeyer’s Reformers to Radicals. Kiffmeyer explores the radicalization of students in the Appalachian Volunteers as they strove to fight poverty and deprivation in Kentucky.
The schools chosen for this study include Ohio University, the University of Pittsburgh, and West Virginia University. Selections were made based on several factors, including (1) whether they fit within the geographically defined northern Appalachia; (2) whether, by the mid-1960s, they existed as a doctoral-granting state university (or state-related university); and, (3) whether they had some level of connection with one or more of the other schools in the region (athletics rivalry, regional organizations, etc.). For my purposes, I collapse the most recent Appalachian Regional Commission designations of “northern” and “north central” into a singular “northern” that, while anachronistic, more closely reflects the colloquially defined subregion within Appalachia.
While Athens, OH, and Morgantown, WV, are undoubtedly within Appalachia, some people may question whether urban and industrial Pittsburgh fits within the parameters of Appalachia, most often conceptualized as a region of shack-dwellers living in a Dickensian nightmare of poverty deep in some remote hollow. Pittsburgh sits well within the geographical boundaries of Appalachia; federal officials have defined all the surrounding counties for at least 80 miles in any direction as Appalachia, thus it seems incongruous to suggest that Pittsburgh is somehow not a part of Appalachia given its obvious geographic connection. Pittsburgh, whether consciously aware of it or not, is an Appalachian city—by far the largest Appalachian city. However, one need not be consciously aware that one is in Appalachia for the narrative constructions of Appalachia to have effect. Additionally, Pittsburgh serves as a counter to the existing narrative of Appalachia as southern, rural, and poor, by suggesting that the region was also northern, urban, and industrial.
The popular image of Appalachia constructs a conflicted vision of the effects of modernity in the region, seeing a place where individuals stubbornly cling to their antiquated ways in the face of progress while simultaneously becoming victims of development, all of which results in crushing poverty, ignorance, and despair. In this imagining, Appalachia symbolizes both the negatives of development and the intransigence of tradition. Appalachian scholar Allen Batteau described this view when he stated that for many “Appalachia represented poverty ennobled and perfected.” Appalachia therefore struggled within a culture of poverty and a colonial relationship with absentee corporations. Within the historiography, Appalachia has played the role of the “other,” often appearing as a counterpoint to arguments about slave power in the antebellum South, as a backdrop for discussions of unionization and the effects of natural resource extraction, and as the chief battleground in the federally directed War on Poverty. Themes such as poverty, exploitation, development, and labor unrest, have reappeared frequently in the historiography often to reinforce a sense of Appalachian victimhood.
The Sixties imaging of Appalachia emphasized its economic, political, and social shortcomings in comparison to the booming, modern American society alongside which it existed. In a February 1960 article for the Saturday Evening Post entitled “The Strange Case of West Virginia,” reporter Roul Tunley depicted West Virginia—and thereby, the region of Appalachia—as America’s paradox. The article’s title, a play on Robert Louis Steveson’s 1886 novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, suggested the region had a deviant nature; Appalachia was the brutish Mr. Hyde to modern America’s Dr. Jekyll. A similar evaluation of the region appears in a survey undertaken by the Ford Foundation in the late-1950s and published in 1962. The survey chronicled the substandard conditions in education, health services, and local government in the region while identifying a peculiar traditionalism and a weakness in both coal mining and agriculture as the main factors causing the region’s deficiencies.
Established by President Kennedy following his experiences in West Virginia during the 1960 presidential election, the President’s Appalachian Regional Commission (PARC) argued that isolation and backwardness had caused poverty to linger in the mountains despite national prosperity. At its core, the commission’s 1964 report suggested applying modernization theory to Appalachia. This theory held the view that “traditional” societies required assistance to become “modern” societies through the benevolent assistance of democratic capitalist nations, and was used as the basis for America’s development aid to the so-called Third World. In this view, Appalachia was an internal third world nation populated by the poorest Americans deprived of all the conveniences of modern American society. The 1964 PARC report called for an application of “that part of our international development program which fosters capital investment … into Federal programs that affect the regional development program for Appalachia.”15 Thinly veiled within this solution was a sense of Appalachian inferiority and backwardness amongst those coming into the region to lift up its residents. However, these programs did not address the underlying structural inequalities and shortcomings—they addressed the symptoms but not the illness—and therefore failed.
Although northern Appalachia’s characteristics stand as relatively representative of the larger region, scholars have focused little attention on the subregion. The bulk of the historiography focuses on Kentucky or southern Appalachia. When it does address West Virginia, it largely ignores connections with northern Appalachia. While northern Appalachia was more urban, industrialized, and prosperous than the other subregions of Appalachia, in part because of the benefits of an extensive railroad network, the region faced the same devastating effects wrought by post-World War II economic dislocation, especially as the highway boom slowed rail traffic. The deterioration of the railroads, decaying industry, and the mechanization of extraction-based labor sapped northern Appalachia’s economic vitality resulting in the same struggles in the region as existed throughout the central and southern subregions.
Simultaneously, the popular imagination constructed Appalachia as a Southern region. Regional movements and organizations such as the Council of the Southern Mountains, a community action agency headquartered at Berea College in Kentucky (which had begun its existence in 1913 as the Southern Mountain Workers Conference), reinforced this image. Such organizations penetrated West Virginia but could go no farther north because of the centuries-old division; the Mason-Dixon Line continued to serve as an imagined and symbolic border. Thus, even though intellectually one may have recognized Pennsylvania, Ohio, or even New York as part of Appalachia at the time, the popular imagination erased these states from its construction of the region because they were not Southern. This false division continues to pervade Appalachian historiography.
The false image of Appalachia as disconnected from the rest of the nation has created a faulty impression that some of the fundamental concerns of the early Cold War era did not affect Appalachia. Baby Boomers who grew up in northern Appalachia did not live in an alien world devoid of the impulses and activities that affected the rest of their generation. If student activism during the Sixties was a response to the Cold War world they experienced, then the fact that northern Appalachian students engaged in similar activities as their national counterparts should suggest they were responding to similar stimuli. Thus, despite assumptions of Appalachian otherness and a dearth of scholarly studies that expand beyond poverty, unions, and migration during the period of 1945 to 1960 in Appalachia, the student activism of the Sixties suggests a greater continuity with the national narrative.
In fact, or in their imagination, Baby Boomers grew up in the new suburban subdivisions of Cold War America in part because of the vast reach of the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act of 1944. The G.I. Bill, as the act became known, provided money for schooling and to start businesses, but equally important, it allowed veterans to buy a home through its loan program.19 Raised in the Depression Generation’s white suburban “American Dream” of security in an age of anxiety, the Baby Boom Generation emerged. By the early 1950s, America appeared to be awash in babies. Young families littered the landscape of the new suburban subdivisions of ranch houses. Child-rearing advice flowed from all directions and the stores brimmed with the newest trends, gadgets, and necessities for the babies of today to grow into the citizens of tomorrow. However, not all Americans who wanted to could participate in this middle-class, white, suburban bliss that television programming and advertisements pumped around the nation. Regardless, from birth, those around them conceived Baby Boomers as part of a new era in American history.
As Boomers grew, the conception of a generational coherency grew as well, inculcated among them from various sources: political, economic, and cultural. Young people united in a generational sense through their shared youth and liminal space in American political society. The Baby Boom Generation often found that politicians called them the “future leaders of America,” and were encouraged to participate in political activities, like pen pal programs, that served to widen the national security needs of the nation. In an economic sense, youth represented an increasingly important target market. Culturally, the Boomer generation shared the same entertainment outlets across the nation, whether it was music, movies, or television—all of which, by the middle of the 1960s, reinforced a supposed youth generation. As the theme song from The Monkees, a popular television show aimed at Sixties youth, said, “We’re the young generation, and we’ve got something to say.” Ultimately, a wide variety of socio-cultural and political sources helped to forge the idea of the Baby Boom Generation and provided a framework for their worldview as they began to populate the nation’s college campuses in the early 1960s.
World War II and the Cold War shifted the debates again: the advent of the military-industrial-academic complex altered the relationship of colleges with the government, students, and society. Tensions emerged from the pressures and possibilities associated with the Cold War and enrollments ballooned thanks to the G.I. Bill and the Baby Boom. Enrollments at colleges and universities doubled as veterans stormed the campuses leading to a few logistical problems: from housing, to classroom spaces, to finding qualified instructors. In the end, large class sizes, mechanically graded exams, graduate-student-led discussion sections, and several other innovations became standard procedures maintained even after the flood of World War II student-veterans receded from campuses.
The G.I. Bill also altered the relationship between institutions of higher education and the federal government. Schools relied on federal funds to build the facilities necessary to accommodate the student-veterans at the same time that the federal government sought to stimulate research beneficial for winning the Cold War. Large sums of money flowed into schools, which helped reinforce the expansionism stimulated by the G.I. Bill. By 1960, universities drew nearly $1.5 billion from the federal government, largely from the Department of Defense. Some administrators and political leaders expressed trepidation at linking university and military research agendas fearing it had a corrupting influence on the mission of higher education in America.
Divided campuses and conflicting notions of mission made college campuses ripe for unrest. With increasing distance between students, faculty, and administrators, and as each sought to address various needs and constituencies, the social bonds that had once created a sense of a singular college community frayed leading to increased tension and animosity between the various groups. On top of the internal divisions growing within universities one must add the pressures wrought by the Cold War: the fear of Communist subversion led to investigations, dismissals, or forced resignations of faculty and administrators as well as large sums of federal monies flowing into university coffers to support research deemed necessary for national security.29 Claims of rightful access to the collegiate campus space grew in number as an ever-widening array of constituencies came under the multiversity’s umbrella making it increasingly difficult to discern the mission of the university and the meaning of studenthood.
The multiversity concept in action created a level of anxiety amongst students, as they felt increasingly distant and disenfranchised. Further, it left them to try to define themselves, their roles, and their community within an increasingly faceless university society. In response to the diverse web of impulses and expectations that pulled students in myriad and contradictory directions, a contested student community developed. Students invented their own culture in which they imagined a united campus based on shared experiences, frustrations, and aspirations. Though never fully unified, student communities emerged—of students of a particular university or field of study, for instance, but also a shared trans-campus community identity that spanned the United States and, especially in the 1960s, the world. They attempted to define themselves in dialectic opposition to faculty and administrators and the campus newspapers served as the conduit that perpetuated this forged identity.
The schools chosen for this study include Ohio University, the University of Pittsburgh, and West Virginia University. Selections were made based on several factors, including (1) whether they fit within the geographically defined northern Appalachia; (2) whether, by the mid-1960s, they existed as a doctoral-granting state university (or state-related university); and, (3) whether they had some level of connection with one or more of the other schools in the region (athletics rivalry, regional organizations, etc.). For my purposes, I collapse the most recent Appalachian Regional Commission designations of “northern” and “north central” into a singular “northern” that, while anachronistic, more closely reflects the colloquially defined subregion within Appalachia.
While Athens, OH, and Morgantown, WV, are undoubtedly within Appalachia, some people may question whether urban and industrial Pittsburgh fits within the parameters of Appalachia, most often conceptualized as a region of shack-dwellers living in a Dickensian nightmare of poverty deep in some remote hollow. Pittsburgh sits well within the geographical boundaries of Appalachia; federal officials have defined all the surrounding counties for at least 80 miles in any direction as Appalachia, thus it seems incongruous to suggest that Pittsburgh is somehow not a part of Appalachia given its obvious geographic connection. Pittsburgh, whether consciously aware of it or not, is an Appalachian city—by far the largest Appalachian city. However, one need not be consciously aware that one is in Appalachia for the narrative constructions of Appalachia to have effect. Additionally, Pittsburgh serves as a counter to the existing narrative of Appalachia as southern, rural, and poor, by suggesting that the region was also northern, urban, and industrial.
The popular image of Appalachia constructs a conflicted vision of the effects of modernity in the region, seeing a place where individuals stubbornly cling to their antiquated ways in the face of progress while simultaneously becoming victims of development, all of which results in crushing poverty, ignorance, and despair. In this imagining, Appalachia symbolizes both the negatives of development and the intransigence of tradition. Appalachian scholar Allen Batteau described this view when he stated that for many “Appalachia represented poverty ennobled and perfected.” Appalachia therefore struggled within a culture of poverty and a colonial relationship with absentee corporations. Within the historiography, Appalachia has played the role of the “other,” often appearing as a counterpoint to arguments about slave power in the antebellum South, as a backdrop for discussions of unionization and the effects of natural resource extraction, and as the chief battleground in the federally directed War on Poverty. Themes such as poverty, exploitation, development, and labor unrest, have reappeared frequently in the historiography often to reinforce a sense of Appalachian victimhood.
The Sixties imaging of Appalachia emphasized its economic, political, and social shortcomings in comparison to the booming, modern American society alongside which it existed. In a February 1960 article for the Saturday Evening Post entitled “The Strange Case of West Virginia,” reporter Roul Tunley depicted West Virginia—and thereby, the region of Appalachia—as America’s paradox. The article’s title, a play on Robert Louis Steveson’s 1886 novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, suggested the region had a deviant nature; Appalachia was the brutish Mr. Hyde to modern America’s Dr. Jekyll. A similar evaluation of the region appears in a survey undertaken by the Ford Foundation in the late-1950s and published in 1962. The survey chronicled the substandard conditions in education, health services, and local government in the region while identifying a peculiar traditionalism and a weakness in both coal mining and agriculture as the main factors causing the region’s deficiencies.
Established by President Kennedy following his experiences in West Virginia during the 1960 presidential election, the President’s Appalachian Regional Commission (PARC) argued that isolation and backwardness had caused poverty to linger in the mountains despite national prosperity. At its core, the commission’s 1964 report suggested applying modernization theory to Appalachia. This theory held the view that “traditional” societies required assistance to become “modern” societies through the benevolent assistance of democratic capitalist nations, and was used as the basis for America’s development aid to the so-called Third World. In this view, Appalachia was an internal third world nation populated by the poorest Americans deprived of all the conveniences of modern American society. The 1964 PARC report called for an application of “that part of our international development program which fosters capital investment … into Federal programs that affect the regional development program for Appalachia.”15 Thinly veiled within this solution was a sense of Appalachian inferiority and backwardness amongst those coming into the region to lift up its residents. However, these programs did not address the underlying structural inequalities and shortcomings—they addressed the symptoms but not the illness—and therefore failed.
Although northern Appalachia’s characteristics stand as relatively representative of the larger region, scholars have focused little attention on the subregion. The bulk of the historiography focuses on Kentucky or southern Appalachia. When it does address West Virginia, it largely ignores connections with northern Appalachia. While northern Appalachia was more urban, industrialized, and prosperous than the other subregions of Appalachia, in part because of the benefits of an extensive railroad network, the region faced the same devastating effects wrought by post-World War II economic dislocation, especially as the highway boom slowed rail traffic. The deterioration of the railroads, decaying industry, and the mechanization of extraction-based labor sapped northern Appalachia’s economic vitality resulting in the same struggles in the region as existed throughout the central and southern subregions.
Simultaneously, the popular imagination constructed Appalachia as a Southern region. Regional movements and organizations such as the Council of the Southern Mountains, a community action agency headquartered at Berea College in Kentucky (which had begun its existence in 1913 as the Southern Mountain Workers Conference), reinforced this image. Such organizations penetrated West Virginia but could go no farther north because of the centuries-old division; the Mason-Dixon Line continued to serve as an imagined and symbolic border. Thus, even though intellectually one may have recognized Pennsylvania, Ohio, or even New York as part of Appalachia at the time, the popular imagination erased these states from its construction of the region because they were not Southern. This false division continues to pervade Appalachian historiography.
The false image of Appalachia as disconnected from the rest of the nation has created a faulty impression that some of the fundamental concerns of the early Cold War era did not affect Appalachia. Baby Boomers who grew up in northern Appalachia did not live in an alien world devoid of the impulses and activities that affected the rest of their generation. If student activism during the Sixties was a response to the Cold War world they experienced, then the fact that northern Appalachian students engaged in similar activities as their national counterparts should suggest they were responding to similar stimuli. Thus, despite assumptions of Appalachian otherness and a dearth of scholarly studies that expand beyond poverty, unions, and migration during the period of 1945 to 1960 in Appalachia, the student activism of the Sixties suggests a greater continuity with the national narrative.
In fact, or in their imagination, Baby Boomers grew up in the new suburban subdivisions of Cold War America in part because of the vast reach of the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act of 1944. The G.I. Bill, as the act became known, provided money for schooling and to start businesses, but equally important, it allowed veterans to buy a home through its loan program.19 Raised in the Depression Generation’s white suburban “American Dream” of security in an age of anxiety, the Baby Boom Generation emerged. By the early 1950s, America appeared to be awash in babies. Young families littered the landscape of the new suburban subdivisions of ranch houses. Child-rearing advice flowed from all directions and the stores brimmed with the newest trends, gadgets, and necessities for the babies of today to grow into the citizens of tomorrow. However, not all Americans who wanted to could participate in this middle-class, white, suburban bliss that television programming and advertisements pumped around the nation. Regardless, from birth, those around them conceived Baby Boomers as part of a new era in American history.
As Boomers grew, the conception of a generational coherency grew as well, inculcated among them from various sources: political, economic, and cultural. Young people united in a generational sense through their shared youth and liminal space in American political society. The Baby Boom Generation often found that politicians called them the “future leaders of America,” and were encouraged to participate in political activities, like pen pal programs, that served to widen the national security needs of the nation. In an economic sense, youth represented an increasingly important target market. Culturally, the Boomer generation shared the same entertainment outlets across the nation, whether it was music, movies, or television—all of which, by the middle of the 1960s, reinforced a supposed youth generation. As the theme song from The Monkees, a popular television show aimed at Sixties youth, said, “We’re the young generation, and we’ve got something to say.” Ultimately, a wide variety of socio-cultural and political sources helped to forge the idea of the Baby Boom Generation and provided a framework for their worldview as they began to populate the nation’s college campuses in the early 1960s.
World War II and the Cold War shifted the debates again: the advent of the military-industrial-academic complex altered the relationship of colleges with the government, students, and society. Tensions emerged from the pressures and possibilities associated with the Cold War and enrollments ballooned thanks to the G.I. Bill and the Baby Boom. Enrollments at colleges and universities doubled as veterans stormed the campuses leading to a few logistical problems: from housing, to classroom spaces, to finding qualified instructors. In the end, large class sizes, mechanically graded exams, graduate-student-led discussion sections, and several other innovations became standard procedures maintained even after the flood of World War II student-veterans receded from campuses.
The G.I. Bill also altered the relationship between institutions of higher education and the federal government. Schools relied on federal funds to build the facilities necessary to accommodate the student-veterans at the same time that the federal government sought to stimulate research beneficial for winning the Cold War. Large sums of money flowed into schools, which helped reinforce the expansionism stimulated by the G.I. Bill. By 1960, universities drew nearly $1.5 billion from the federal government, largely from the Department of Defense. Some administrators and political leaders expressed trepidation at linking university and military research agendas fearing it had a corrupting influence on the mission of higher education in America.
Divided campuses and conflicting notions of mission made college campuses ripe for unrest. With increasing distance between students, faculty, and administrators, and as each sought to address various needs and constituencies, the social bonds that had once created a sense of a singular college community frayed leading to increased tension and animosity between the various groups. On top of the internal divisions growing within universities one must add the pressures wrought by the Cold War: the fear of Communist subversion led to investigations, dismissals, or forced resignations of faculty and administrators as well as large sums of federal monies flowing into university coffers to support research deemed necessary for national security.29 Claims of rightful access to the collegiate campus space grew in number as an ever-widening array of constituencies came under the multiversity’s umbrella making it increasingly difficult to discern the mission of the university and the meaning of studenthood.
The multiversity concept in action created a level of anxiety amongst students, as they felt increasingly distant and disenfranchised. Further, it left them to try to define themselves, their roles, and their community within an increasingly faceless university society. In response to the diverse web of impulses and expectations that pulled students in myriad and contradictory directions, a contested student community developed. Students invented their own culture in which they imagined a united campus based on shared experiences, frustrations, and aspirations. Though never fully unified, student communities emerged—of students of a particular university or field of study, for instance, but also a shared trans-campus community identity that spanned the United States and, especially in the 1960s, the world. They attempted to define themselves in dialectic opposition to faculty and administrators and the campus newspapers served as the conduit that perpetuated this forged identity.