Participation Type
Panel
Session Title
Faith, Economics, Justice, and the Working Class in Post-war Appalachia
Session Abstract or Summary
There are no more authentic voices from the “misty mountains” than those of the working class in all its diversity and unity. This session demonstrates that diversity and unity occur within as well as between Appalachians, and there is no better example of that than the struggles of the working class to speak with a single political voice.
Presentation #1 Title
“Termites in the Temple”: Working-Class Faith and Spectacle in Postwar Appalachia
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
In April of 1946 thousands of individuals marched on the local Knoxville, Tennessee, radio station, WNOX, for its cancellation of Rev. J. Harold Smith’s popular Radio Bible Hour. During a fifteen-year career as an evangelist and radio preacher, Smith had gained an ignominious reputation as an arch-foe of organized labor, the liberal state, and modernist Christianity. Yet, the audience that flocked to Knoxville to march on the WNOX building was principally from the working class, as were the more than 44,000 individuals who wrote protesting the action of the radio station. Among them were individuals who had benefitted from wartime gains in industrialization, union growth, and government-mandated improvements in wages and working conditions. With the CIO’s ambitious Southern Organizing Campaign less than a month away, how can we explain the robust mobilization of individuals to a crusade to save the radio program of a man acknowledged to be one of the South’s most reactionary ministers? This paper will examine the social bases of support for J. Harold Smith and the factors that made the cancellation of his radio program the occasion for a working-class spectacle of faith in postwar Appalachia.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Much of my career has focused on labor and social history, particularly the intersection of religious belief and working-class activism. With my wife, Elizabeth, I recently coauthored Struggle for the Soul of the Postwar South, which examined the role of religion in one of the pivotal movements in U.S. labor history, the CIO’s Southern Organizing Campaign following World War II. That work emphasized white evangelical Protestants. For my next project, I hope to explore the relationship of black churches and the labor movement during the CIO years
Presentation #2 Title
“It Isn’t Very Pretty in Resurrection City: West Virginia, the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968, and Meaning of Justice”
Presentation #2 Abstract or Summary
In May 1968, a small group of poor West Virginians encamped on the capital lawn in Charleston. There to demand action on the part of the state to address unemployment, political corruption, and the “tyranious (sic) and oppressive” conditions that then existed in the Mountain State, the protestors represented an alternative to the national Poor People’s Campaign that happened at the same time. Because it was concomitant with the move toward economic justice within the civil rights movement, the growing political conflicts over the War on Poverty, and the War in Vietnam, this “West Virginia Poor People’s Campaign” also requires action on the part of War on Poverty and the civil rights movement students. It seems curious, for example, that West Virginians would stage a local action which competed with the larger, more visible demonstration in Washington, D.C.. It is possible that Appalachian whites faced, or believed they faced, issues fundamentally different from those of African or Mexican Americans. Moreover, it is likewise plausible that it was the country’s racial minorities that assumed their cause was unique. Last, racism may have played a part in the Appalachians’ decision to hold their own protest within their own locales. This presentation examines the motivations, hopes, and goals of impoverished West Virginians, tries to understand how poor Appalachians defined and understood issues such as “justice,” and how those definitions may have been different from the definitions of those issues offered by other oppressed groups.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #2
Associate Professor of History, Morehead State U
Author, Book: Reformers to Radicals: The Appalachian Volunteers and the War on Poverty (2008)
Presentation #3 Title
Trust in the Hills: Alternative Economic Arrangements in 1970s Appalachia
Presentation #3 Abstract or Summary
This presentation will provide a brief examination of ideas that contributed to the formation of land trusts in West Virginia during the 1970s. In the midst of the decade’s economic crisis and a nationwide “back-to-the-land” movement, thousands of ex-urbanites migrated to Appalachia to become self-sufficient. A cluster of them settled in Lincoln County, West Virginia, and of those, several dozen had come from the Heathcote Center in Freeland, MD, an educational center affiliated with agrarian advocate Ralph Borsodi.
From 1975 until 1977, one of the migrants, Paul Salstrom, edited the organizational newsletter, the Green Revolution. During his tenure the newsletter published dozens of articles chronicling West Virginia’s struggles with labor, poverty, and environmental degradation. Land trusts became one of the key economic alternatives proposed during this era. Organizers from both Heathcote and The Peacemakers intended for them to provide the state’s impoverished residents with the opportunity to access arable land. This session fits with the theme of diversity in Appalachia, as it highlights the convergence of multiple strains of thought that contributed to the ways Appalachian residents responded to economic crisis. The radical implications of early land trusts, however, seem absent in today’s iterations, which primarily emphasize ecological goals.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #3
Jinny Turman is an Assistant Professor of History, Community History and Preservation at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. She received her Ph.D. in 2013 from West Virginia University and her Master of Art degree in Appalachian Studies at Appalachian State University in 2001.
Presentation #4 Title
Session Moderator
Presentation #4 Abstract or Summary
John Hennen will moderate the session
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #4
Professor of History, Morehead State University
Author Book: The Americanization of West Virginia (1996)
“Termites in the Temple”: Working-Class Faith and Spectacle in Postwar Appalachia
In April of 1946 thousands of individuals marched on the local Knoxville, Tennessee, radio station, WNOX, for its cancellation of Rev. J. Harold Smith’s popular Radio Bible Hour. During a fifteen-year career as an evangelist and radio preacher, Smith had gained an ignominious reputation as an arch-foe of organized labor, the liberal state, and modernist Christianity. Yet, the audience that flocked to Knoxville to march on the WNOX building was principally from the working class, as were the more than 44,000 individuals who wrote protesting the action of the radio station. Among them were individuals who had benefitted from wartime gains in industrialization, union growth, and government-mandated improvements in wages and working conditions. With the CIO’s ambitious Southern Organizing Campaign less than a month away, how can we explain the robust mobilization of individuals to a crusade to save the radio program of a man acknowledged to be one of the South’s most reactionary ministers? This paper will examine the social bases of support for J. Harold Smith and the factors that made the cancellation of his radio program the occasion for a working-class spectacle of faith in postwar Appalachia.
