Okay, I need some feedback from this group regarding an article
Last edited Sun Jun 1, 2014, 02:10 PM - Edit history (3)
First of all, let me get this out of the way: Alice Ely Chapman is a remarkable philanthropist for her Appalachian community and the world certainly could use a few more people of such resource and dedication. The programs she has initiated and supported in Washington County, Ohio will undoubtedly return their investment an hundredfold.
The article to which I'm referring is:
A Connecticut Yankee in Appalachia
by Howard Husock
Alice Ely Chapman wages a one-woman war on poverty.
Spring 2014
http://www.city-journal.org/2014/24_2_alice-ely-chapman.html
The struggle I'm having with the article is the tone in which I perceive it is written. Perhaps it's just me. I went to bed last night really bothered by the nagging feeling that as Appalachians we had just received a good dose of condescension. I had hoped that if I gave it a fresh look this morning my hackles would smooth. Unfortunately, after several readings I'm still bothered by the slant of this article. Perhaps what I really need is some feedback from others here because I now question my objectivity.
Those of us who've posted here have pretty freely discussed some dire issues facing Appalachia: poverty, unemployment, drugs, lack of educational opportunities et al. It's when those problems are presented in the manner I have illustrated by the excerpts below I have to ask, "Who the hell do you think you're talking to?"
All this dysfunctional behavior—the disordered families, the aversion to work, the welfare dependency, the drugs and violence—is what Marietta leaders mean when they use the euphemistic phrase “Appalachian values.” Social thinker Edward Banfield, in his classic book The Unheavenly City, described something similar when he wrote of chaotic lives marked by “present orientation”—that is, unable to plan rationally for the future and addicted to immediate gratification. Sociologist Joseph Howell called the conduct “hard living.” Economist Thomas Sowell has gone so far as to suggest that the values of the poor, antebellum Scotch-Irish Southern whites who settled the region became the cultural norms into which poor African-Americans eventually assimilated. Appalachian values, he believes, were imprinted on black culture, with the urban underclass its cultural product. City treasurer Harper links the drug and alcohol abuse among the young to what she calls “community disorganization.” Around here, bad choices are so common that people just accept them as normal.
To me, the paragraph above seems to smack of the worst kind of stereotyping. To add further insult to injury, the author then proceeds to fold these descriptors into what is described as "black culture" (and here we must assume the author is referring to the litany of our moral failings, such as "the disordered families, the aversion to work, the welfare dependency, the drugs and violence"
. I'm sorry, but to me that's racist, plain and simple. It's also a theme parroted more than once in the article.
The moral judgments seeded throughout this piece -- But school officials say that they are battling powerful and destructive forces in the community, with many students living in disorganized households with multiple children from multiple fathers. -- is the same lexicon employed against poor folks everywhere, not just Appalachia. Painting Mrs. Chapman as some genteel, cultured New England lady of breeding who stepped from the drawing room into a hillbilly pigsty rubs me the wrong way and I'm sure Mrs. Chapman doesn't view herself in that manner, either.
The efforts of Mrs. Chapman to uplift the youth of her Appalachian community is a noble legacy. For some it will provide a hand up but for many others a ticket out, further propelling the "brain drain" of the best and brightest from rural Appalachia. Therein lies the conundrum, because the underlying problems facing not only much of Appalachia but our society as a whole, remain. Income inequity and unemployment are the economic cancers of a people without hope. The people of whom Mr. Husock writes have been undone not by their own moral failings but by a plutocracy that has abandoned them and then as if to assuage the guilt, created a alternate reality wherein the victims themselves are to blame for being victimized.
Well, I've had my rant for this morning. Just had to get this out of my system. As I suggested, perhaps I'm just a bit too thin-skinned regarding this topic or perhaps I've misinterpreted the tone of the article. I'd appreciate some feedback.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Apparently, The City Journal is the magazine venue for the (laugh now) non-profit 501(c)3 Manhattan Institute that puts forth the sort of "Atlas Shrugged" propaganda that lost Mitt Romney the last election. Howard Husock is a regular contributor to Forbes and The National Review, and is a promoter of the "philosophy" of Charles Murray, the author of the controversial 1995 book, "The Bell Curve" that proposed that "cultural inferiority" is behind low-performance testing of some African-American young people ... Husock is performing the same "service" for the residents of Marietta, Ohio who he portrays in his article ("A Connecticut Yankee in Apppalachia" as being mostly misfits and drug-addicted single-parents who need both Marcellus Shale developers and the philanthropy of people like Alice Ely Chapman to keep them from sliding into the pit of Hell ... Actually, like many other towns, Marietta has its share of problems - yes there are fewer jobs than in the 1960s, and there is a sizable drug problem - but it also has many good people and many cultural attributes (it was just named the "sixth nicest town to visit by The Smithsonian Magazine. Our most pressing problem is that some of the entities here that reap big profits are too cheap to pay their workers a living wage. As far as the Marcellus Shale play is concerned, most of those hired are from places like Texas or Oklahoma, and those workers (that Husock mentioned as staying at local motels) will be on-the-road again once they finish trashing the local water supply ... Here's the deal. The Mid-Ohio-Valley tea-party gang here are a very active (and often very nasty) group that would not be above slipping a few choice morsels (i.e. the night photo of a west-side house scheduled for demolition) to some faraway hack to promote their Social-Darwinist, "blame-the-victim" message ... My guess is that Mr. Husock spends most of his time in a cushy office, and has never come within a 100 miles of the town that is so pompously trashing in his lengthy article ... I certainly hope that the good folks at the Eli Chapman Foundation (who HAVE done much good work with children from ALL backgrounds) will notice that their name is being used to promote a spurious political agenda, and that they will respond accordingly! ~ Fred O'Neill, Marietta, Ohio
It's really an eye-opener and actually confirms some of my suspicions.
I'm a native of Portsmouth so the problems experienced by the folks in Marietta are quite familiar to me, sans the Marcellus Shale. I was really incensed by that article; I've been to Marietta many times and despite the problems it faces due to the economic woes shared by many river towns, I've always found the people there to be gracious and the town itself historic and charming -- a town with a lot of pride that didn't deserve that condescending portrait.
My best to you... 
While it's difficult to send links to non-subscribers (since the Marietta Times went to its "pay-to-play" format in April) but, after about three weeks, our local paper finally printed an article about the Howard Husock "makers vs. takers" article in Spring, 2014 issue of The City Journal ... See if someone can find the June 5 edition of The Times. It contains a front-page article entitled "Offended; disappointed - Magazine article about Marietta gets big reaction", as well as an editorial on page 4 entitled "There's more to Marietta than recent article shows" ... There ARE some revelations. It seems that Husock DID visit Marietta twice last year - but no word on who invited him. One of the people he "interviewed" was Cathy Harper (who Husock called "Cathy Jo" the current City Treasurer (who was NOT yet elected when Husock met her). Cathy is a nice lady who runs a group that tries to help young people with drug problems, BUT she is under the influence of local tea party characters like Khadine Ritter and G.O.P. Chairperson Leslie Hass who fully subscribe to the "Atlas Shrugged" philosophy touted in the City Journal article. The Times is now upset that the photos used by the City Journal were from their archives and were used without permission by Husock. The Times also reports that an anonymous employee of Community Action possibly helped Husock by giving him some (as it turns out, false) figures about local poverty rates and percentages of residents on public-assistance. Finally, the subject of the article, Mrs. Alice Ely-Chapman (whose work in our community, as I said in my May 31 op-ed piece, is "beyond reproach" is NOT amused by the Husock article ... The mystery remains - WHO decided that Marietta should be the subject of a crummy polemical treatise on alleged "makers vs. takers"? Did no one learn anything from the Mitt Romney "47%" debacle in 2012?