![]() I find Caudill’s complicated legacy a reminder that there is a lot more to the evolution of a people than the victimhood that has been placed upon them. The man, who proclaimed that Appalachia had been raped, now wanted to rape certain Appalachian people of their ability to procreate. He concluded that poverty is “genetic in origin” (2) and invited the eugenicist William Shockley to his home in Kentucky Together they proposed to study poor eastern Kentuckians as part of a research project on inherited intelligence.Cash bonuses would be offered to participants in exchange for sterilization (3). He came to believe that Appalachia’s gene pool had been watered down by inbreeding among what he called “dullards” who lived on welfare in remote mountain hollers (1). He concluded that Appalachia could not be fixed because its people were broken. After becoming the first person to successfully call attention to the dark reality of what was happening in Appalachia, Caudill’s thinking changed. Just 10 years after the War on Poverty was declared, Caudill saw that nothing was changing for the Appalachian people. After Kennedy’s death and Johnson’s announcement, millions of government dollars were doled out to initiatives that would solve these problems and turn America into the “Great Society” it was meant to be. As the story goes, John F Kennedy read Caudill’s book and quickly moved to set up the President’s Appalachian Regional Commission in order to take a closer look at what was happening in Appalachia. He was the first person to publicly question the coal operators who came to extract valuable natural resources in Appalachia using processes that obliterated the terrain through mountain top removal. The Coal operators did not give any of the wealth they made through this devastating process back to the region. This article was expanded into a full-length book, Night Comes to Cumberlands. ![]() In 1962 Caudill published an essay in the Atlantic titled, The Rape of Appalachia. ![]() My research into the origins of this initiative led me to Harry Caudill, a small town lawyer from the eastern Kentucky town of Whitesburg. It declared a radical policy initiative that he believed would put an end to poverty in America. ![]() This year marks the 50 th anniversary of Lyndon B Johnson’s January 1964 State of the Union address. I’ve been thinking a lot about the War on Poverty. MUD RIVER WV PORN SERIESThis is the third in a series of posts by Stacy Kranitz for BagNews Originals. ![]()
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