Abstract

The Path from Disaster

The U.S. has recently discovered that a sub-nation of paupers is hidden within its opulent structure. During the past year television commentators, newspaper reporters and photographers, sociologists and assorted government agents have swarmed through the Kentucky mountains, and have beamed a panorama of misery into practically every living room in the country. The Cumberland Plateau of Eastern Kentucky is the hard, bleak core of Appalachia, and Appalachia is a huge region of stagnation that extends through parts of nine states from Pennsylvania to Alabama. It is the largest and the best known of the islands of poverty that endure, and grow in the U.S. In the Kentucky hills, dozens of drab little towns and mining camps and thousands of dilapidated shacks stretch up a maze of creeks and hollows. Heaps of junked automobiles clutter the roadsides and incredible quantities of trash and garbage clog the silted streams.