[00:00:06.880] - [Narrator] This is a report on the North Carolina mountain people— [00:00:10.680] farmers, merchants, lawyers, blacksmiths, [00:00:14.240] millers, spokesmen from all walks of life— in such counties as Yancey, Mitchell, [00:00:20.560] Avery, Buncombe, Watauga. [00:00:27.900] Giving [?] views on what's happening in our Appalachians. [00:00:28.080] Dr. W. D. Weatherford of Black Mountain [00:00:30.760] and Professor Cratis Williams of Boone [00:00:33.286] are major voices in our story. [00:00:35.400] Have the tone of urgency and impatience. [00:00:38.640] There is good cause for the Appalachian region, [00:00:42.600] one of America's last lingering frontiers, is in trouble. [00:00:47.600] [music] [00:01:03.760] Yes, I'm a mountaineer. [00:01:04.600] My people have been on the border since before the American Revolution. [00:01:08.400] They were log hunters, Indian fighters, [00:01:11.200] fighters in the Revolution, and leaders in the Whiskey Rebellion. [00:01:15.520] Later, they fought in the Civil War, became Kentucky Mountain [?], [00:01:20.080] and have remained in the mountains down to this day. [00:01:23.720] I've heard a good many misconceptions of [00:01:26.386] mountain people during my lifetime [00:01:28.440] and many years ago I became interested [00:01:30.760] in trying to learn the facts about the mountain people. [00:01:34.840] What I have learned has been an eye opener. [00:01:39.029] [music] [00:02:30.240] Well, in my boyhood days [00:02:33.600] the country was dotted with mills everywhere. [00:02:37.071] I could count six or eight good mills [00:02:42.080] and now, the [?] Barker Mill is the only one I know of in operation. [00:02:47.360] The mill, of course, [00:02:49.280] and its work is going down because of the fact [00:02:54.171] that men have quit farming [00:02:56.600] and the farms are growing up in woods and bushes and [00:03:03.520] just laying idle. [00:03:05.120] This is a land of very little industrialization [00:03:09.400] and too many too small farms. [00:03:11.871] And these farms are fractionated to the point where [00:03:14.840] they're not productive and [00:03:17.414] the youngsters are just bleeding out of the land. [00:03:20.240] A great mass of our boys drop out at the seventh or eighth grade. [00:03:26.560] The result is the average [00:03:29.371] educational level for the entire seven Appalachian states [00:03:34.200] is 7 and 2/10 years for adult people. [00:03:39.280] And of course that's very, very low. [00:03:42.840] The population in these counties hasn't appreciably changed in this century. [00:03:48.240] Some of the counties have less population today than they had back in 1900. [00:03:53.200] We lost, the last ten years from '50 to '60, [00:03:56.800] we lost 1,132,000 people out of these mountains. [00:04:02.840] We didn't have a net loss of that much because we had [00:04:05.280] 935,000 babies born, but [00:04:09.160] there are lots of people left these mountains [00:04:10.671] to go somewhere else to get better wages. [00:04:14.920] - [Narrator] Here is Burnsville, a Carolina town locked in the ancient [00:04:19.520] weatherworn Appalachian Mountains. [00:04:21.514] Once those walkways crumbled [00:04:25.400] with the lusty commerce of miners, lumberjacks, and farmers. [00:04:30.320] The home of lingering frontiersmen, [00:04:32.960] of lonely gunsmiths who still fashioned their own hunting weapons, [00:04:38.440] of mountaineer printers [00:04:40.320] whose Gothic journals crackle with self-reliant thought. [00:04:44.586] [music] [00:04:55.120] And iron workers, [00:04:56.960] the great grandsons of Daniel Boone himself [00:05:00.600] who still forge hot metal into a farmer's plowshare or a delicate work of art. [00:05:07.200] [music] [00:05:16.520] Aging craftsman of another era when there was a bristling boomtown. [00:05:21.429] [music] [00:05:35.040] Now, like many of her upland neighbors, [00:05:37.720] Burnsville is a town in mourning for a lost youth. [00:05:41.680] Here's the town mayor. [00:05:43.240] Leadership is one of our important problems here. [00:05:48.520] I stated that [00:05:51.400] a large percentage of our high school graduates [00:05:54.120] practically all the college graduates, have left. [00:05:59.880] Most of our businessmen now are [00:06:03.640] older people like myself [00:06:06.080] and we just don't have the [00:06:09.240] young people to take part in leading the community affairs. [00:06:15.040] - [Mayor] There's a big shortage of employment for our people. [00:06:18.480] The county lost 14% of its population [00:06:22.686] between 1950 and 1960 due [00:06:26.720] principally to the fact there are simply no good jobs for people here. [00:06:30.843] Our factory closed [00:06:33.280] and I was unemployed. [00:06:37.880] I was a machinist for the company. [00:06:41.840] I worked approximately five years till it closed down. [00:06:44.440] We don't have enough payroll [00:06:47.480] so many people have to go away to seek employment elsewhere. [00:06:52.640] The merchants [00:06:54.680] would like to make progress and we have made progress in times past. [00:07:00.800] It's much better than it used to be since our [00:07:04.760] industry come in, but we need more. [00:07:08.200] It is a paradox that in this area where [00:07:11.800] so many minerals have been discovered [00:07:13.671] and such large quantities of certain minerals exist, [00:07:17.520] that there is no apparent future for the mineral industry. [00:07:21.040] Those that we have in quantity have had this decline in price. [00:07:25.640] Those that are valuable are present in such small quantities. [00:07:29.960] As a result of this, [00:07:31.480] there is no long term picture, [00:07:34.514] encouraging picture, for the mineral industry. [00:07:37.480] - [Narrator] The first settlers in the Appalachians, [00:07:39.914] five generations ago, [00:07:41.960] did not come to shovel in mines or to found a lumbering industry. [00:07:46.760] They were fresh out of the battlefields of the American Revolution. [00:07:51.760] Their demands were simple—good farmland and a new life in the western wilderness. [00:07:58.960] Boone, Houston, Cervier, Crocket, [00:08:03.120] they were the riflemen who would later send Andrew Jackson to the White House. [00:08:09.440] With the Cherokee Indian vanquished [00:08:12.057] life for the pioneers was good in the mountains. [00:08:16.000] The sowing of seed corn on slanted acres, pure water, wild honey and game, [00:08:22.160] cattle and swine massed fattened in the green valleys. [00:08:28.200] And every spring the sharp cry from an oak cabin of a newborn child. [00:08:35.560] In breaking the mountain new ground, [00:08:37.880] the first families staked out the broad river valleys. [00:08:41.760] New wagonloads from the Shenandoah [00:08:44.471] and they pushed into the rich creek bottoms. [00:08:48.880] For the belated settler, [00:08:49.960] only the shadowed coves, the spiny ridges. [00:08:54.120] It was the early 19th century, [00:08:56.343] the time of fertile beginnings and manifest destiny. [00:09:00.520] Large families multiplied and the farms grew smaller. [00:09:05.720] A proud people whose ancestry had already [00:09:08.800] earned a reputation for hard toil and fierce independence. [00:09:14.443] [music] [00:09:21.400] Contrary to what a great many people think, [00:09:25.760] these Appalachian Mountain people are not primarily English, [00:09:29.440] they are primarily Scotch. [00:09:32.760] Made up of two groups. [00:09:35.160] First, the Scotch-Irish who came by way [00:09:37.760] of Ireland and picked up the name Scotch-Irish [00:09:42.360] and who began coming into this country. [00:09:46.280] Of course, there are other strains of [00:09:50.160] ethnic stock in these mountains. [00:09:53.600] Certain number of Germans, certain number of Dutch, [00:09:57.920] certain number of French Huguenots here and there, [00:10:06.200] Swiss. [00:10:08.480] The overwhelming majority of the people in these mountains are Scotch. [00:10:13.080] Well, it would seem to me that the mountaineer [00:10:17.229] was not radically [00:10:18.760] different from other rural people at the time of the Civil War. [00:10:24.000] In fact, there is some evidence [00:10:26.160] to indicate perhaps he was a little ahead of [00:10:29.571] the average Southerner. [00:10:31.286] Even ahead of, [00:10:33.400] we say, the second or third rate plantation owners. [00:10:38.480] Objective travelers through the mountains before the Civil War [00:10:42.640] reported excellent [00:10:44.560] homes through the mountain valleys, certain degree of culture [00:10:48.960] and reading matter and evidence, [00:10:50.520] hospitality, the homes were well kept, [00:10:54.280] the barns looked good, the people were proud and prospering. [00:10:59.360] But the Civil War came along. [00:11:01.371] - [Cratis] During the Civil War, [00:11:03.400] propaganda writers for the North tended to present the mountaineer as [00:11:09.040] kind of a poor white and said that they were the South. [00:11:13.440] The Southern propaganda writers tended to present the mountaineer [00:11:18.300] as a kind of a misplaced Yankee [00:11:20.720] and said that they were the North. [00:11:22.960] Both types of writers, of course, misrepresented him. [00:11:26.880] During the Civil War, [00:11:29.280] the great Appalachian barrier, highlands divided the Southland [00:11:36.280] and made it, as a result, [00:11:39.800] impossible for the [00:11:43.280] South to mobilize its resources properly. [00:11:48.329] It enabled, in the final analysis, [00:11:53.000] the North to more easily conquer [00:11:58.000] the South and preserve the Union. [00:12:02.040] The mountain people have not been slaveholders in the [?]. [00:12:05.240] They were compromised by the war. [00:12:08.120] Their sympathies laid largely with the North. [00:12:10.680] - [Cratis] Following the war on the South [?] in [00:12:13.614] the throes of reconstruction, [00:12:16.840] there was not very much to be passed around for anybody in some of the states. [00:12:21.040] The mountaineers were left on their own devices and they entered into a series [00:12:26.080] of up to three generations of ignorance and poverty. [00:12:30.560] And they lost sight of their old, thrifty ways. [00:12:33.800] They corroded in character, they became ignorant. [00:12:38.600] Their culture became an oral culture [00:12:41.357] rather than a written culture. [00:12:45.880] They remain in this situation until after the turn of the century. [00:12:51.960] The title of this song is "The Last Old Shovel." [00:12:55.880] That's the last shovel that's used [00:12:59.871] at a burial in the country in the mountains. [00:13:04.280] ♪ "The Last Old Shovel" ♪ [00:13:46.600] Proud, he's stubborn, he's self reliant, [00:13:48.160] he is disinclined to cooperate with other people. [00:13:52.760] This means, of course, [00:13:54.040] that it's a little difficult for [00:13:57.200] mountaineers to come together to do things [00:13:59.760] on behalf of their own communities. [00:14:01.629] They're a reticent type of people. [00:14:06.880] I remember having a man come up to see me [00:14:09.640] and he thought I knew who he was and he said hi and I said hi. [00:14:14.680] And he stood around four or five minutes [00:14:16.600] and turned around, walked off. [00:14:18.857] And I walked down to see him the next day, [00:14:21.120] and this is over in the mountains here, [00:14:23.680] and I said, "Why didn't you tell me who you were?" [00:14:25.840] Well, he said, "I thought, you know'd." [00:14:29.280] They will not talk very much. [00:14:31.680] The most unfortunate thing about all this is that [00:14:34.643] actually the mountaineer did not come [00:14:36.520] into contemporary civilization with [?] years. [00:14:40.240] And because of the economy in those days, [00:14:43.600] he came in through the back door. [00:14:47.320] That means that [00:14:49.920] he left an unpleasant impression [00:14:52.600] of himself when he migrated outside the mountains to the cities of the North. [00:14:57.714] [music] [00:15:09.000] - [Narrator] The mountain family became a mountain clan. [00:15:12.960] Each home a shut off island unto itself. [00:15:16.960] Civil war had left a bitter legacy [00:15:19.280] of revenge feuds, brigandage, economic paralysis. [00:15:25.080] The Appalachians were locked out of the 19th century, [00:15:29.920] but the primitive frontier of folkways remained on. [00:15:34.200] The outlander was swapping his horse for the motorcar. [00:15:39.200] But mountain son and daughter still grew up by the cedar chern, [00:15:44.000] the apple press, the draw knife, and the iron kettle. [00:15:49.014] [music] [00:15:51.320] There was no money, only a barter system. [00:15:57.040] All mouths had to be fed [?] and pork from the land. [00:16:01.880] The only thing in plentiful supply was human life, [00:16:05.743] life that was often bitter. [00:16:09.440] The custom of splitting up the farmland among heirs continued. [00:16:14.120] Families began to subdivide themselves into tiny patches of poverty. [00:16:20.157] [music] [00:16:36.840] For America, it came the age of the Depression. [00:16:43.200] The mountaineers had always known hard times, [00:16:46.557] now it was almost unbearable. [00:16:50.480] The old clung to their hills, [00:16:53.157] [music] [00:16:57.720] but the young had to find a new life somewhere else. [00:17:01.960] They emigrated to Cleveland or Baltimore or Detroit. [00:17:06.929] [music] [00:17:09.480] Scorned by city folks, no longer on a par with their neighbors, [00:17:16.760] they were now called "hillbilly." [00:17:21.240] The mountain clan was split asunder. [00:17:26.160] I can't tell you much, but I know [00:17:29.080] we started out with nothing much to live on [00:17:32.320] but we just worked and [00:17:34.143] made what we raised the children on. [00:17:37.600] And then we kept making little along to send them to school. [00:17:41.640] They were good in school [00:17:43.920] from the time they first started when they were little right on [00:17:46.760] and they kept it up as long as they went to school. [00:17:49.840] And then since they've been out of school, I think they've done well. [00:17:52.960] All of them, I don't see anything wrong with what they've done. [00:17:58.560] There's not much I can tell you, it's just common [00:18:00.929] everyday living for us [00:18:02.880] but they've gone through it. [00:18:05.560] Well, the mountain family once was a very solid institution. [00:18:10.880] There was no such thing as divorce in the mountain family. [00:18:14.360] I'm sorry to say that there is considerable divorce growing [00:18:18.080] in the mountain families. [00:18:19.514] We find a good many children who are left orphans. [00:18:23.520] The father walks off and leaves them or something else. [00:18:27.440] That's partly due to the fact [00:18:29.520] that the women [00:18:31.920] have fallen heir to the idea of liberty of women, [00:18:36.560] and they won't do the things they once did. [00:18:40.280] They won't take the punishment they once took. [00:18:44.240] - [Narrator] Moonshiner, ridgerunner, hillbilly. [00:18:48.920] Those are the epithets cheap fiction writers gave our mountaineers. [00:18:53.480] Perhaps they did not know that those were [00:18:55.600] the descendants of George Washington's favorite revolutionary fighters. [00:19:02.320] To begin with, the mountaineer was [00:19:04.560] presented as a kind of a culmination of Daniel Boone and Natty Bumppo. [00:19:12.240] He entered into fiction [00:19:14.100] following James Fenimore Cooper in the 1830s. [00:19:18.320] And one book in particular that presented the North Carolina mountaineer [00:19:23.480] was Kennedy's Horse-Shoe Robinson. [00:19:24.960] - [Cratis] Which a mountaineer from Burke County [00:19:28.029] was the lean, hungry-type carrying a rifle in the crook of his arm, [00:19:33.320] wearing homespun clothing, and a hunter's shirt. [00:19:36.800] This picture of the mountaineer was so indelible that [00:19:40.080] I'm afraid that the average American hearing about the mountaineer even yet [00:19:45.920] thinks of him as somewhat along this line, [00:19:49.560] a man who steps out of the bushes with a [00:19:52.086] squirrel rock in the crook of his arm [00:19:54.040] wanting to know what you're doing here, mister. [00:19:57.880] There was a lady from New York who had a very poor [00:20:00.329] interpretation of the mountain people. [00:20:02.040] She seemed to feel that we were all [00:20:05.240] the [?] type of characters that we may have been back in [00:20:08.960] Davy Crockett's time, perhaps. [00:20:12.640] She asked me if she could see a real mountaineer. [00:20:16.200] Of course, I told her I was a real mountaineer. [00:20:19.160] She wanted to know if I went to school, [00:20:21.200] how I counted my money, if I live in a log cabin, [00:20:25.080] was I going to college? [00:20:27.200] After I explained to her [00:20:28.560] that the advantages were more or less the same in the mountains as elsewhere, [00:20:32.280] she wanted to know if I was a rich mountaineer. [00:20:34.840] I told her no, of course, I was a very average mountaineer [00:20:37.600] and that we all live just like anyone else. [00:20:41.040] They have a feeling that those of us who [00:20:44.640] come in from the outside, they call us foreigners [00:20:47.800] by the way. [00:20:49.320] They have a feeling that we are critical of them because they don't live [00:20:53.760] in accordance, in the same fashion that we do. [00:20:56.280] And they're very sensitive. [00:20:58.920] They don't like anybody to come in and criticize them. [00:21:03.440] Now, of course, what the mountains have really needed [00:21:07.814] has been not the reports [00:21:10.760] of third rate writers of fiction, but some objective research. [00:21:17.200] A fine piece of work was done in 1920 or thereabouts by John Campbell. [00:21:22.600] After his work of the southern highlander in his homeland [00:21:27.080] very little was done to determine exactly what the mountaineer's [00:21:31.629] situation is [00:21:33.480] until recently when the Ford Foundation [00:21:37.000] gave a considerable grant to [00:21:40.480] the Southern Council to investigate the cultural, [00:21:44.960] economic life of the mountains, the social life of the mountains, [00:21:49.120] and to identify mountain problems. [00:21:51.443] This is a step forward. [00:21:54.560] This should supply some of the answers [00:21:57.000] that we need to questions concerning the mountaineer and his dilemma. [00:22:03.080] - [Narrator] Over the heartland of the eastern United States [00:22:06.840] sprawls the Appalachian Mountain range. [00:22:09.480] 80,000 square miles occupied by five million beleaguered people. [00:22:16.040] Ford Foundation scholars fanned out over this entire region. [00:22:20.520] They sought to find out why it lags behind the rest of the country in schooling, [00:22:25.480] health, transportation, government, and income. [00:22:30.000] Included in the survey were the mountain counties of western North Carolina, [00:22:34.520] twenty-two of them in all. [00:22:36.643] The interviewers posed sharp questions. [00:22:40.200] Is there a peculiar mountain attitude? [00:22:43.920] What does the mountaineer expect out of life? [00:22:47.400] What does he believe in? [00:22:50.720] We had some seventy or seventy-five people in the field [00:22:55.560] interviewing individuals and families for a number of months, [00:23:00.960] and we interviewed a good many thousands of people. [00:23:05.200] We only found six people who said [00:23:09.120] definitely they did not believe in a God [00:23:13.029] and we only found eight who said they [00:23:16.760] did not believe in answer to prayer, so there's no skepticism in these mountains [00:23:23.040] there's just indifference. [00:23:24.900] They just don't pay any attention [00:23:27.240] to what's going on, but they believe in religion. [00:23:31.080] Unfortunately, the churches are very small. [00:23:34.960] 21% of all the churches in the Appalachian Mountains have [00:23:41.560] twenty-five or fewer members, [00:23:43.586] which means to say that churches are very weak. [00:23:47.600] My own feeling is we've got to have a good [00:23:51.480] deal of consolidation, just like the schools had consolidation, [00:23:55.840] but there's a great deal of fighting of that. [00:23:58.760] Local people don't want to give up their little church [00:24:02.114] because their grandfathers [00:24:03.840] and grandmothers were buried in the cemetery there [00:24:07.320] and they don't want to give up the church, [00:24:09.171] but we've got to have stronger churches. [00:24:12.800] Secondly, we've got to have better trained ministers. [00:24:17.214] - [Dr. Weatherford] 43% of all the ministers [00:24:19.600] in the Appalachian Mountains have high school training or less. [00:24:25.160] And no man has any [00:24:28.320] business representing the great issue of religion [00:24:33.157] on a twelfth grade education. [00:24:35.514] [laughs] [00:24:38.040] - [Narrator] The mountain home and school— [00:24:40.486] once teeming with frontier voices [00:24:43.080] now uncertain companions both weakened by loss of members. [00:24:48.760] The southern Appalachians have been called America's number one problem area. [00:24:53.400] And where nearly a fifth of the adults has never gone beyond grade five [00:24:57.800] the greatest problem of all is education. [00:25:01.120] Here, the mountain people describe their schooling dilemma. [00:25:06.800] One of the outstanding teachers [00:25:08.880] in a state teachers college in the Appalachian Mountains. [00:25:14.400] She told me that of a thousand students [00:25:17.320] she taught in the last ten years, she'd gone through every card, [00:25:21.960] she had not taught a single solitary [00:25:24.680] student who graduated with a [00:25:26.614] straight-A record who stayed in that state to teach. [00:25:30.640] And she told me she had not taught a single [00:25:33.440] student who graduated with a straight-C record [00:25:36.843] who didn't stay in the state to teach. [00:25:39.480] And I said to the state superintendent, "Just how long will it take us to reduce [00:25:44.560] ourselves to absolute mediocrity, [00:25:47.343] educationally speaking, on any such basis as that?" [00:25:50.560] Incidentally, one of our problems is lack of school consolidation. [00:25:54.680] We have about 967 high school students in Avery County. [00:25:58.680] They go to three separate high schools [00:26:00.440] which are located within twelve miles of each other. [00:26:04.080] The schools are too small to have really good faculty [00:26:09.640] in the sense of teachers being able to specialize in their subjects. [00:26:14.400] To have a good curriculum, that's one of the needs. [00:26:17.760] Vocational training is almost impossible under the present setup. [00:26:21.400] Many of the high schools are simply not large enough [00:26:25.314] to provide an educational opportunity [00:26:28.720] which removes this unfair competition [00:26:32.120] as between the one who graduates [00:26:34.771] from the small high school, [00:26:36.600] particularly in the mountain area, [00:26:38.240] and the one who graduates from the large high school [00:26:40.880] in an urban or metropolitan area. [00:26:49.480] Well I think that most mountain students, when they go off to [00:26:50.700] larger universities, [?] of the mountain, [00:26:49.371] have a [00:26:50.880] pretty bad inferiority complex, so to speak. [00:26:53.760] Because we've come from small schools, [00:26:56.271] our classes are small and we just don't feel like we're able to compete [00:26:59.120] with the students who have come from large city schools. [00:27:03.960] I think that consolidation of high schools [00:27:09.320] in our county would really help this [00:27:09.486] because with these small classes [00:27:11.880] our teachers just can't give us the material that we really need. [00:27:15.400] - [Man] All the data I know anything about would indicate [00:27:19.120] that those who come from small high schools generally [00:27:25.320] are less well prepared immediately for college [00:27:28.360] than those who come from the larger school. [00:27:30.360] But so far as native capacity is concerned, these youngsters [00:27:38.680] have what I call their share of brains. [00:27:43.960] The third thing is this. [00:27:45.320] We've got practically no vocational [00:27:48.920] training in the public schools [00:27:52.843] of the Appalachian Mountains except agriculture. [00:27:54.480] And nobody is interested in agriculture anymore because in the first place, [00:27:58.560] the mountains don't provide much land for agriculture. [00:28:02.080] And less than 20% of the people now are engaged in agriculture. [00:28:06.400] Once it was 100% but it's only about 20% now. [00:28:11.640] That leads me to say another thing. [00:28:13.743] We've got [00:28:15.280] somehow or another to motivate these boys and girls, [00:28:19.360] the boys in particular, to want to go to school. [00:28:22.920] They don't think it's necessary. [00:28:26.160] As a matter of fact, when a boy finishes the seventh or even [00:28:30.680] the eighth grade, as most of these boys do [00:28:34.071] at sixteen instead of at fourteen, [00:28:37.120] they are not prepared [00:28:39.271] then to take the kind of training that's necessary [00:28:41.880] if industry does come in. [00:28:44.186] They have neither enough mathematics [00:28:46.720] nor enough physics, nor enough chemistry [00:28:49.243] nor anything else that pertains to mechanical operation. [00:28:54.560] So they can't take the training and they are left out. [00:28:59.440] During the time [00:29:01.640] while North Carolina first became so [00:29:03.760] actively interested in seeking industry we did organize this [00:29:07.200] group that we called the Avery County Chamber of Commerce [00:29:09.960] for the purpose of trying to induce industry [00:29:12.414] into Avery County, get new jobs. [00:29:15.480] We got a lot of prospects, [00:29:17.320] we got a little industry. [00:29:19.640] We found that our labor supply that is available here, [00:29:24.320] that is the unemployed labor supply, [00:29:26.160] was largely untrained [00:29:27.800] and not really suitable for industrial employment immediately. [00:29:32.080] In our study of the Appalachian region [00:29:35.800] we discovered that it would take [00:29:38.120] approximately $400 million to bring our equipment— [00:29:44.040] that means buildings, [00:29:46.720] furnishings, libraries, laboratories, whatever you had— [00:29:51.560] to bring our public school equipment in these seven states up [00:29:55.480] to the standard of the United States, $400 million. [00:29:59.160] Well, there just isn't $400 million on these mountains [00:30:01.920] to get to do that kind of thing. [00:30:05.500] The [00:30:08.000] fact that the salaries are lowest among [00:30:12.714] the teachers in the mountain section, [00:30:15.360] I think is some indication of the index of education of the mountain people. [00:30:22.400] And if we were to consider that education is [00:30:24.600] not a regional matter but is more of a national matter [00:30:29.240] then combined efforts of the local community, [00:30:35.000] the state, and the nation [00:30:37.614] must be brought to bear upon this educational [00:30:40.720] problem. [00:30:42.040] I am not one of those who fears federal aid to education [00:30:46.880] so long as its management is safeguarded at the local level.