Worlds Apart: Poverty and Politics in Rural America - Softcover

Duncan, Cynthia M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0300196598 ISBN 13: 9780300196597

Verlag: Yale University Press, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

First published in 1999, Worlds Apart examined the nature of poverty through the stories of real people in three remote rural areas of the United States: New England, Appalachia, and the Mississippi Delta. In this new edition, Duncan returns to her original research, interviewing some of the same people as well as some new key informants. Duncan provides powerful new insights into the dynamics of poverty, politics, and community change.

"What stories Mil Duncan has to tell!  In this new edition of her classic Worlds Apart, she offers sage advice about how to begin to reverse the dangerously growing divide between rich and poor in our country."—Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone and Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis

"A mosaic of intimate portraits revealing the social, ecenomic, and political isolation of rural poverty, Worlds Apart is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the root causes of inquality in America."—Darren Walker, president, Ford Foundation

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Cynthia M. Duncan is founding director of the Carsey Institute for Families and Communities at the University of New Hampshire and research director at AGree, an initiative bringing together diverse interests to transform food and agricultural policy in the United States.

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Worlds Apart

Poverty and Politics in Rural America

By Cynthia M. Duncan

Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2014 Yale University
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-300-19659-7

Contents

New Foreword by Angela Glover Blackwell, ix, 
Foreword to the 1999 Edition by Robert Coles, xiii, 
Preface to the 1999 Edition, xvii, 
Preface and Acknowledgments for the 2014 Edition, xxi, 
List of People Profiled, xxiii, 
chapter one Blackwell: Rigid Classes and Corrupt Politics in Appalachia's Coal Fields, 1, 
chapter two Dahlia: Racial Segregation and Planter Control in the Mississippi Delta, 89, 
chapter three Gray Mountain: Equality and Civic Involvement in Northern New England, 188, 
chapter four Social Change and Social Policy, 233, 
Appendix, 265, 
Notes, 289, 
Acknowledgments for the 1999 Edition, 297, 
Index, 299, 

CHAPTER 1

BLACKWELL

Rigid Classes and Corrupt Politics in Appalachia's Coal Fields

It is early morning on the last day of June and we are making our way deep into the mountains to Blackwell, an Appalachian coal county long plagued by poverty and labor trouble. An old truck piled high with large chunks of coal, lacking the cover required by law, strains to climb the hill up ahead, slowing our progress. Two new Chevy pickups, gun racks in the windows and dogs in the back, creep impatiently behind the coal truck, followed by an old Ford crowded with grandparents, teenagers, and small children climbing over the seats and peering out the back window. The drivers, holding their first morning Cokes, lean out their windows, anxious for an opportunity to pass.

The hillsides are blanketed in green leaves—the irrepressible kudzu vines start at the road and climb the hills, covering trees, abandoned cars, piles of dumped garbage, and the dilapidated coal tipples of deserted mines. The road dips down to follow a creek bed littered with plastic bottles, rags, washtubs, and other debris, and around the bend a precarious wooden bridge stretches across the creek to a faded trailer and its rusty prefab outbuilding.

As the road rises again to clear the mountain, an old coal camp emerges in the narrow valley below—company housing long since sold to the families who have lived here for generations now. A few houses have bright new aluminum siding and tidy chain-link fences that guard small lawns adorned with yard ornaments and painted tires filled with petunias. These are the homes of retired union miners with good pensions. Other homes are run down, their wooden clapboards peeling and covered in coal soot, children's tricycles and old tires lying in mostly dirt yards. Each small house has a front porch, some with a glider or rocker and hanging begonias, others with discarded washing machines or broken televisions. Overalls and sheets hang on clotheslines, providing hiding places for young children running from each other and their skinny dogs. The narrow, rutted dirt road is partly obstructed by cars parked alongside the houses. Most vehicles are decrepit, but at the end of the road an older couple loads suitcases into the trunk of a new Chrysler with Michigan plates and a Shriner ornament on the rear bumper.

The coal truck turns off the main road toward the railroad tracks, where its coal will be weighed and loaded on a train, and the pickups and old sedan speed ahead. A sprawling, modern, yellow brick home with a carved wooden front door and shiny brass light fixtures sits on the hill to the right. A new red Blazer with a boat trailer is parked at the end of the long, walled driveway, and a rolling lawn stretches to the two-lane highway—all a monument to the fabulous riches a local strip miner amassed during the brief coal boom in the late 1970s. Rounding one last hill before Blackwell's main town, the road widens into four lanes, and down in the valley the two- and three-story buildings marking the county seat are visible above the morning mist hovering over the river.

The new mall built by the Parkers, a leading coal family, is on the left, anchoring a commercial strip along the main highway. Only about half the storefronts facing the parking lot are occupied, and there is no sign of activity this early in the day. On Friday nights the mall parking lot comes alive with cruising teenagers, reminiscent of a scene from the 1950s—bright, recently waxed cars creeping bumper to bumper through the lot, guys calling out to one another and to girls in other cars, honking, music blasting. Just behind the McDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants two big discount stores are under construction. Studies by distant marketing firms have confirmed what local merchants have known for decades—this area has a solid captive retail market, including a steady flow of public checks that will be spent locally.

The large regional hospital lies just beyond the mall. It was built in the 1950s by the United Mine Workers union but is now owned and run by a large statewide health corporation. Employment here means a highly desirable union job, no matter whether you work in the cafeteria or out front admitting patients. We're the best-paying employer in the county other than the mines—the unionized mines—when they're working, says a hospital administrator. The hospital employs about three hundred workers, mostly women, and there is little turnover. When there is an opening, the administrator says, it pays to know somebody. It pays to know me. It pays to know the dietary manager, or the housekeeping supervisor, or the maintenance engineer.

Along the stretch of highway before town a few roadside vendors open bedspreads on the hoods of their cars, lay their freshly picked tomatoes and used clothes out neatly, and set up folding chairs where they will spend the day. A teenager nearby, cigarette hanging from his mouth and hands stuffed in his back pockets, uses his boot to nudge the stiff body of a dog killed by a car more than a week ago.

In the early morning light, the imposing stone courthouse that dominates the square in the center of town casts a shadow on the World War I memorial. The young men from Blackwell are renowned for their bravery in foreign wars and for their strong work ethic in urban factories in the Midwest. The courthouse is where county business transpires, where the magistrates and county judge administrator who make up the fiscal court haggle over where the county gravel will be spread and, as one exasperated assistant complained, who's going to get the opportunity to do the job rather than what the whole project will do for the county. Out front, the park benches where old-timers spend the day trading political gossip are still damp.

"GOOD RICH PEOPLE" AND "BAD POOR PEOPLE"

Surrounding the square is the usual small-town mixture of stores, lunch counters, florists, smoke shops, and the two banks that have been rivals since practically the turn of the century—one of them run by an octogenarian president who knows all the families and their reputations. According to a young man just returned from Ohio, When I came back here I went over to the bank and said I'd like to borrow a thousand dollars. Old man Carver, who is about a hundred years old, he comes out and he goes, "Well, who are you?" And I said, "My name's Greg Benton." And he goes, "You any kin to Matthew Benton?" I go, "He's my great-grandfather." And he just gave me the money. I didn't even sign a note. They just handed me a thousand dollars cash because my grandfather used to own...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Yale University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0300196598
• ISBN 13: 9780300196597
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 2
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland