King Coal

By Melvin Maddocks

THE WATCHES OF THE NIGHT

by HARRY M.CAUDILL

275 pages. Atlantic-Little, Brown. $8.95.

On April 24, 1964, a bright spring day, President Lyndon B. Johnson descended on the Kentucky hills in a helicopter, a deus ex Washington, vowing to wage war on poverty. As the air and the rhetoric swirled, one native bystander held onto his hat and declared: "Well, he'll sure as hell have a real bad fight on his hands!"

Just a year before L.B.J.'s advent in Appalachia, Harry Caudill, a lawyer from the University of Kentucky who is descended from the earliest settlers of the Cumberland Plateau, wrote a small classic, Night Comes to the Cumberlands. The book detailed with angry eloquence the paradox of a people who had grown "shockingly poor" in a land stuffed with "valuable natural resources." In The Watches of the Night, an equally indignant, equally effective broadside, Caudill updates that gloomy report. Appalachia in the '60s, he suggests, was L.B.J.'s and America's domestic Viet Nam: a confrontation that defeated our economic and political strategies, confused our morality, and left us--to say nothing of the battlefield --much the worse for the encounter.

Kentucky's Cumberland Plateau is a region a little larger than Holland, and potentially a lot richer. Forty percent of the world's coal is in the U.S., and of that, 35 billion tons of the highest quality lie buried in the Cumberland ridges. In addition, there is what Caudill calls "the temperate zone's most varied forest" as well as many arable valleys blessed with abundant rainfall.

Yet the land now lies largely untilled. The forests are both abused and neglected. The hillsides are scarred beyond repair by strip mining that mostly profits absentee millionaires. As for the 780,000 people there, by the early '60s Appalachia contained nearly a quarter of a million coal miners in variously advanced stages of ruined health. According to Caudill's rough estimate, a fifth of them could write no more than their names. In Caudill's grim image, southern Appalachia had become a sprawling welfare reservation of kept peoples, waiting in shanties and mobile homes, beside polluted streams, for the next government check. Poor Fork, Defeated, Hell-for-Certain--the town names tell the story.

Poverty Warriors. How, after all the TV documentaries, after all the "poverty warriors" from the best bureaucracies in Washington and the VISTA volunteers--after all those good intentions and all that matching money --can Caudill's Appalachia be more of a blight today than it was a decade ago? The villain of Caudill's piece is the coal industry: "backward, brutish, medieval," controlled by "industrial Neanderthals." Caudill contends the industry has corrupted the American political system from the county courthouse to the state capital to the halls of Congress with what he scathingly refers to as "contributions."

The Coal Rush, now practically a permanent way of life, will continue, Caudill assumes, as long as greed coexists with need--i.e., an energy crisis.

The spectacular disaster that befell the coal industry after World War II should have served as a warning. Railroads and ships switched to diesel. Homeowners converted their furnaces to natural gas or fuel oil. Mines closed, and those that stayed open watched the price of their coal drop to $2.95 per ton. But who remembers the bust now that the boom is back? Today coal supplies one-fifth of the nation's total energy requirements. This elementary fact, says Caudill, permitted mineowners to run up the price from $9 to $35 per ton in 50 days after the Arab oil boycotts. He thinks it has also allowed Old King Coal largely to ignore the counterattacks of reformers -- the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969, the Environmental Protection Act. Would nationalization of the coal industry be a solution? Caudill doubts it. He distrusts Government planners almost as much as coal's entrepreneurs. How about more leaders like Historian Ken Hechler, who, as Congressman from West Virginia's Fourth District, became "an Appalachian legislator for whom coal held no terrors"? Possibly. But Caudill sees few candidates in sight.

Defiant Dilemma. In fact, he offers no answers to this defiant dilemma. But he regards Appalachia as a microcosm of America. Unless deterioration can be stopped here, we will have proved ourselves an ungoverning and ungovernable people. If greed-and-need continues to dictate, Caudill predicts, strip mines will next "demolish the West as a viable ecosystem."

Caudill occasionally gets carried away by excessively aghast prose ("The heart flutters in contemplation" while "the greediest mind boggles"). He does not pretend to be impartial. He does not even pretend to be fair. He is a prophet returned from his well-ravaged wilderness with a specific case which, as others have before, asks a general Bicentennial-spoiling question: Will the U.S. go down in history as the land of opportunity that could not control its opportunists?

Melvin Maddocks

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