Poor V. Politician

By Edward Magnuson

THEY'LL CUT OFF YOUR PROJECT by HUEY PERRY 256 pages. Praeger. $7.95.

Huey Perry grew up along Gilbert Creek in West Virginia's Mingo County and later taught history in high school there. He seemed safe and sound enough to local politicians to be selected as director of a new Economic Opportunity Commission project in 1965 The stated purpose of the program was to fight poverty in an isolated region of Appalachia, sprinkled with towns with names like Cinderella Hollow and Magnolia, but inhabited by people 50% of whom were officially classified as poor.

The dominant political clans and the courthouse crowds in Mingo County had always used welfare programs, patronage jobs and outright cash to buy the votes of the poor and keep their own positions on the public payrolls. They expected that the new poverty project would give them a chance to get a handle on nearly $2,000,000 in federal funds.

Death Threats. Perry, who was 29 when he got his job, began to realize what was expected of him when State Senator Noah Floyd, the Democratic boss in the area, told him the poor were "too lazy to work." "Keep them happy," Floyd added. "We'll need them on election day." As a result, Perry at first moved cautiously. Even so, his meetings with the poor to work out a program quickly ran into resistance. A snake-handling fundamentalist preacher turned up to rail against the project as the work of either Communists or the devil. Community toughs ambushed one organizer in an abandoned railroad tunnel along Twelve-Pole Creek. Perry began to get death threats.

But Perry gradually got the poor of Mingo County to feel happy in ways the politicians had not expected; they found joy in banding together to exercise a power they had never known before. Their projects were hardly radical. They kept their children out of class to force stingy school boards to expand hot-lunch programs and to repair schools and outhouses. They established cooperative grocery stores to bypass merchants who raised prices on days when food stamps were issued. They exposed officials who used state-financed work gangs to improve their private property. They documented the practice of bureaucrats who paid $5, or sometimes $3 and a bottle of whisky, for a vote. They successfully challenged hundreds of names on swollen voter-registration lists, including those of people long since dead or moved away.

As visiting reporters began to write favorably about these goings on, local politicians complained angrily about a poverty program becoming involved in politics. The resulting uproar from the tiny communities in the hills and hollows eventually reached as far as Washington. Congress, at the urging of Oregon's Representative Edith Green passed an amendment to take control of local poverty programs away from the poor and give it to county courts--often run by the same men who had so long and so profitably been keeping the poor in their place. Locally, the poor were harassed by law officials; some were charged with illegally "challenging rights of individuals to vote" (all those ineligible names on the voting lists). Magistrate Arden Mounts even told Mrs. Judy Trent, victim of such a charge: "You're going to have to prove your innocence, or I'm going to have to find you guilty." She was fined $100 and sentenced to 60 days in jail.

After five years of work among the displaced farmers and the unemployed miners and blacks of Mingo County, Perry's war against poverty was still a standoff. The FBI came to Appalachia to examine his project records. On the other hand, the Justice Department charged four Mingo County officials with vote fraud. Perry was absolved of any wrongdoing--but a local jury found the officials innocent too. Perry's story, told simply and without polemics, shows how hard it is to do something that seems simple--get funds into the hands of the poor. The book also exposes the fallacy of the naive theory that an anti-poverty program can remain nonpolitical. qedEdward Magnuson

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