Okies of the '60s

In Chicago they know them as WASPS (for White Appalachian Southern Protestants), in Cincinnati as SAMS (for Southern Appalachian Migrants). St. Louis calls them, among other things, swamp turkeys and hoosiers. In Columbus and Cleveland they are simply called hillbillies (the name they dislike most). By whatever name, more than a million impoverished white Southerners, comprising 20% of the population of the 250 Appalachian Mountain counties in nine Southern states, *moved northward between 1950 and 1960 to eke out a precarious living in the big cities. Packed into secondhand cars loaded down with their meager possessions, swarms still arrive every day in such cities as Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus, Dayton and Springfield. With them arrive the hopes, problems and frustrations of a new U.S. minority. They are the Okies of the '60s.

Mostly descendants of Scotch-Irish immigrants who settled in the Appalachians in the early 18th century, the migrants were long isolated by their mountain barriers from the mainstream of U.S. life. Settling down to a slow-paced, hand-to-mouth and inbred way of life, they became famed chiefly for moonshine, revenooers, family feuds and hillbilly music. They became the inspiration for Erskine Caldwell novels and such comic-strip caricatures as Snuffy Smith and Li'l Abner.

Still in the Hills. But civilization, of a sort, has reached the mountains. TV has penetrated into many Appalachian shacks that have little other furniture. It has brought with it a glimpse of jobs, salaries and luxuries that the mountaineers never dreamed of. Dressed in their mountain "uniform"--tight blue jeans, white sweat socks and open-necked shirts for the men, simple print dresses for the women--they have turned to the cities for a new life.

Most of them find the city a strange and unfriendly place. They long for the hill country, talk of returning to it as soon as they have saved a chunk of money to start anew. "I don't believe Appalachian whites ever get to like the city," says Bernard S. Houghton, director of Cleveland's West Side Community House. "It's simply wages that bring them here. They never get out of the hills." Asked to take part in any community affairs, the mountaineers almost invariably refuse, arguing that they do not intend to be around long.

With that attitude, they are the despair of law-enforcement, welfare, health and academic officials who try to help them become assimilated in the city. A proud people, they are slow to accept relief--but they often hand over their money to credit gougers (poorly educated, many cannot read the large print, much less the fine) for 21-in TV sets and for the chrome and aluminum baubles they have seen on the screen. Most of them live crowded together in slum tenements, but family ties are so strong that relatives from the South are always welcome--even when their visit turns out to last for years. Used to tossing out garbage to be devoured by the ever-present mountain pigs, some newcomers throw garbage out the windows; when told that garbage should be wrapped before it is discarded, some wrap it all right--then throw it out the window.

Distrustful of strangers, the mountain men spend much of their time in taverns that cater to them, drinking draught beer and listening to sad hillbilly songs that sum up their yearnings for the hills they left behind. Their women, many of whom washed their clothes in the creeks back home, are fascinated by Laundromats, spend hours there sitting around talking long after the laundry is done. For religion, the mountaineers turn to the fundamentalist sects and their little store-front churches, where they can feel more comfortable and sing their lusty hymns to their hearts' content.

Stolen Guitars. Like most uprooted groups, the mountaineers get into more than their share of trouble with the police, but their crimes are usually those of drunkenness (a frequent pastime) and theft rather than of violence. They have little respect for property; theft of musical instruments, particularly guitars, is a common complaint. Many mountaineers cannot understand why they cannot take their ailing motors apart on the city streets, why they cannot fire off a gun when their spirits are high. "They are not familiar with our laws," says Police Captain Walter Dorn of St. Louis' Lynch Street district. "In the rural areas from which they come, the sheriff has to have a warrant to make an arrest, but when we go to arrest them without one, you sometimes see a head get cut."

With unemployment high in many Northern cities, the unskilled mountaineers are finding it ever harder to realize the dream of accumulated wages that brought them north. Deprived socially and economically, they are torn between the city and the hills--and belong to neither. But sociologists consider them naturally bright and well-intentioned people who can find a place in the city and its life if they really try. As evidence of that theory, there is Robert Ford, 35, who moved to Cleveland with his wife and family five years ago from Welch, W. Va.--and now, with a good job as a factory grinder, lives in a clean, nicely furnished home. "They taught me a trade," he says. "Before that, all I knew was pick and shovel. I'm not special. Anybody from the South can make out here if they want to. When I came, I made it my business to get interested in the schools and city. If more people from the South would take the community to heart, they could make things better for themselves."

* Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia.

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