Despite 30-Year War on Poverty, Only the Faces Seem to Change : Appalachia: In 1964, President Johnson vowed to eradicate poverty in America. But problem remains and successes are few.

This Administration today, here and now, declares war on poverty in America. . . . It will not be a short or easy struggle. No single weapon or strategy will suffice. But we shall not rest until that war is won. The richest nation on earth can afford to win it. We cannot afford to lose it.

--President Lyndon B. Johnson, 1964 State of the Union address

Worn and weary-looking, they stand dozens-deep outside the ramshackle house’s wood porch in dusty, steamy heat, waiting wordlessly and patiently for handouts.

Men such as George Bolan, a former coal worker who has been jobless more than a year and has moved back in with his mother at age 57.

“When I find somewhere like this that’s giving a little bit out, I try to get some. It helps a lot,” he says, an asthmatic wheeze racking his chest as he carries his cardboard box of food to a borrowed pickup truck.

Thirty years ago, when President Lyndon Johnson called America to arms for a War on Poverty, Appalachia’s poor lined up for government surplus commodities such as cheese and beans.

Today’s church handout is one measure of how little progress has been made in three decades in some areas of Appalachia: a bag of potatoes, a box of nacho-cheese crackers, other snacks, tooth powder, cough medicine, antiperspirant and assorted odds and ends.

“Honey, we’ll take anything we can get,” said the Rev. Hobert Cook, a former police chief who, after surviving a brain tumor 12 years ago, started an outreach ministry called God’s Holiness Church.

“I just wish the good people of this country could come down here and see some of the faces,” Cook said. “I don’t think people know that there are places like this in America.”

He would introduce Americans to Joyce Wood, 39; her husband was laid off by a timber company and has worked three months in the last two years. They receive $512 a month in government checks, gobbled up quickly by rent and expenses that include caring for a 13-year-old son who suffered brain damage during birth.

“It’s hard . . . it’s just hard,” she said, shaking her head.

Danny Tolliver, 33, hasn’t had steady work in four years. He and his wife have three small children, and can’t afford a stove or oven or other basic furniture. Meals are cooked on wood fires.

A husky man with red hair and lowered eyes, he was reluctant to talk. Finally, he snapped: “I need everything! I ain’t got nothing! There’s no jobs around here.”

In 1964, America did see faces like these when Johnson made a swing through the region some dubbed “The Other America” or “The Forgotten America.” Unlike the inner-city poor, the faces of struggling Appalachians were white; living in rural pockets, they were out of sight.

John F. Kennedy saw them while campaigning in West Virginia in 1960 and was deeply stirred; the anti-poverty crusade was part of his legacy to Johnson.

But then Johnson stepped down after one term dominated by Vietnam. And periods of national indifference and local failures allowed deep pockets of poverty to remain--towns such as War, where residents traded dependence upon the boom-and-bust coal industry for dependence upon government programs.

“My question is, what would have these areas been like today without the War on Poverty?” said U.S. Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), who put aside his millionaire lifestyle in the 1960s to become a West Virginia worker for VISTA, a kind of domestic Peace Corps.

VISTA, Head Start, Upward Bound, the Job Corps and other programs started in the 1960s helped many escape poverty, Rockefeller said. Food stamps, Medicare and welfare have protected those who didn’t.

Many in Appalachia agree that there has been progress in education and training, housing, health care and extensive road-building.

But failures also are apparent.

Improvements in the economy often are confined to the region’s largest cities or rural county seats.

The many towns built around coal mines enjoyed boom years capped by the 1970s’ oil shortages and price increases. But tapped-out mines and increased automation cost more than 93,000 jobs in the region since 1981.

Within Appalachia--a large region centered in West Virginia and eastern Kentucky but stretching across 13 states from New York to Alabama--there remain dozens of communities where progress is barely measurable.

The University of Kentucky’s Appalachian Center said in a new report that more than 31% of Appalachian Kentuckians live below the national poverty level, nearly the same rate as in 1965. Nationally, the average is 13%.

It reports clusters of communities in which nearly two-thirds of the residents live in severe poverty. “Real” unemployment figures, counting discouraged workers who have stopped looking for jobs, range beyond 50% in such communities.

“We see our needs now as greater than ever,” said the Rev. Ralph Beiting, a Roman Catholic priest in Louisa, Ky., who has helped the poor for four decades through a variety of programs run by his Christian Appalachian Project.

West Virginia Secretary of State Ken Hechler, now 79, campaigned with Kennedy as a congressman in 1960 and recalls the optimistic days under Johnson.

The War on Poverty, he said, was undermined because out-of-state corporations that own most of the region’s coal, timber and other resources weren’t forced to pay more taxes and take on more responsibilities.

At the same time, he said, local politicians often turned the anti-poverty programs into political spoils doled out to allies and withheld from opponents.

Without reforms, “it was like an aspirin to reduce the symptoms of poverty instead of antibiotics to cure the disease,” Hechler said.

Rockefeller sees revitalized hope for the region’s impoverished in the Clinton-Gore Administration, led by a president from a poor Delta state and a vice president from an Appalachian state.

“We’re not as bad off as we used to be, but we’re not nearly as good as we’re going to be,” pledged Democratic state Sen. Benny Ray Bailey, interviewed at a health care clinic in his Kentucky hometown of Hindman.

“This is the best place in the world to live--if you don’t need a job,” Bailey said wryly.

His home region doesn’t have the severe crime and overcrowding problems of the inner cities, and Bailey, who as a teen-ager turned out to watch Johnson’s visit to Appalachian Kentucky in 1964, figures that state government reforms and efforts to diversify the economy should ease the glaring economic problems.

Ron Eller, a 1960s anti-poverty worker who heads the Appalachian Center at the University of Kentucky, points to the new wave of political leaders who grew up during the war’s early days.

Eller is angered by traditional suggestions that Appalachia’s poor “hop a Greyhound” and ride one of the “Hillbilly Highways” to big-city jobs.

This region has lost tens of thousands of people over the years in massive out-migrations. Many prospered, but many others found themselves living ghetto existences, unable to find work above minimum wage.

“It’s a rather callous statement . . . that suggests a lack of desire or creativity,” Eller said. “The rest of America has benefited from their people and their natural resources. They should be able to stay where they have a strong sense of place.”

Jim Stutso, at age 40, refused a transfer last year when his coal company was moving its operations out of War. Instead, he opened a sports shop with a tanning salon that admittedly does very slow business after the first week of the month, when government checks arrive.

“There’s more to life than money,” he said. “This is home, and you can’t beat the people.”

To illustrate, he strolled down the street. His pickup was where he left it--windows down, cassettes strewn across the front seat and key in the ignition.

“There’s not many places left where you can do this,” he said.

Others who refuse to leave are convinced that things will get better--that despite all of the failures of three decades, Appalachia may someday no longer serve as a paradigm for rural poverty.

At the food giveaway, church volunteer Anita Miller, age 53, reflected on the last 30 years.

“The War on Poverty is still being fought,” she said. “It hasn’t been settled yet.”