Remembering President John Fitzgerald Kennedy on this sad anniversary, because of Welch, West Virginia.
I remember that terrible day. I was just short of 7. My second grade teacher, Mrs. Nesbitt, came back after lunch and put her head down on her desk and started to cry, and she told us that our President had been shot and sent us home.
And as someone who was Caroline’s age and had Caroline Kennedy paper dolls and had watched Macaroni with fascination, this struck me really hard. My own Dad had been deployed a year earlier during the Cuban Missile Crisis and had been gone a really long time. But what could it mean to have your Dad not coming home at all?
Blessings and prayers for Caroline Kennedy tonight.
But it is neither for Caroline nor myself tonight that I write; nor for the thousands of others of us who have shared memories of that dreadful day. Rather, it is for the people of Welch, West Virginia, and other communities just like theirs.
If you have read Jeannette Walls’s heartbreaking autobiography, Glass Castle, then you will know everything you need to know about the destitute hardscrabble life of those living in Welch, West Virginia.
I have read and re-read this book so many times that the covers are tattered. It just seems so amazing to me that Ms. Walls and I (who are roughly contemporaries) could have grown up in such parallel universes -- right here in the United States of America. But we did.
I grew up in a suburb of New York. I had, admittedly, a very privileged childhood ~ but I thought, nevertheless, that I was not unaware of what was going on in the rest of America.
There were progressives in my rich enclave -- people like Louise Ransom, whose son, Robert C. Ransom, Jr., was killed in Vietnam in 1968 and who worked tirelessly to educate America about the horrors there and to end the war. Lt. Ransom’s letters home were published posthumously in The New Yorker. And their voices educated and informed me ~ it was their voices that shaped my progressivism, forty years ago. And to them, I am so grateful.
Second Lt. Robert C. Ransom, Jr., at Bowdoin College
But hunger and poverty? I thought that was somewhere else, or perhaps only in the wretched enclosures of our nation’s cities. And this is not to say that I did not care (or did not know about) the wretched poverty there. I did. And I was brought up to volunteer, advocate and donate on behalf of others -- this was instilled in me from the time I was in nursery school.
This is what I did not know. I did not know then that the people pictured in Dorothea Lange’s photographs still existed, much less that their descendents were scarcely better off than they had been three decades earlier when the photos had been taken.
Appalachia is still a bastion of despair and poverty. If you look at the maps in TheFatLadySing’s heartbreaking diary about rural poverty, you will see many coal-mining areas of Appalachia lit up in dark red.
But the good people of Appalachia, and the rest of our country, would be in far worse shape, I think, had not President Kennedy been elected.
President Kennedy brought food stamps to those suffering from hunger. There are today 49 million Americans (49 million!) who are hungry . . . How much worse would this be without food stamps?
(We need to pressure Congress to raise the amounts of money available under the Food Stamp program. There are few -- if any -- government programs that are more effective in accomplishing their aims than Food Stamps.)
And so we come to Welch, West Virginia:
It was once a prosperous city during the coal mine boom of the early 20th century. Once the boom ended, the city fell on hard times.
When presidential candidate John Fitzgerald visited Welch by automobile caravan in 1960, he saw a city that was seriously decaying and had a very high poverty rate caused by the declining coal mining industry. It was his visit here that was believed to be the basis of the aid brought to the Appalachian region by the Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson administrations. During a speech in Canton, Ohio on September 27, 1960, he stated "McDowell County mines more coal than it ever has in its history, probably more coal than any county in the United States and yet there are more people getting surplus food packages in McDowell County than any county in the United States. The reason is that machines are doing the jobs of men, and we have not been able to find jobs for those men." The first recipients of food stamps were the Chloe and Alderson Muncy family of Welch. The family, which included fifteen children, received $95 worth of stamps from Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman on May 29, 1961 as a crowd of reporters watched.
Welch West Virginia
And on this night, at the close of the weekend blog-a-thon for Feeding America, organized by our amazing sister, rb137 (an effort that, thanks to the generosity of this community, will fund more than 10,000 meals for hungry Americans in the coming weeks), I’d like to remember President Kennedy for what he did for those for whom hunger is a daily horror.
Bless you, President Kennedy. Thank you.
We remember tonight.