Matthew Algeo - All This Marvelous Potential: Robert Kennedys 1968 Tour of Appalachia

All times are approximate.

THE APPALACHIAN MOUNTAINS WERE FORMED about three billion years ago, when all the continents came together to form a single giant supercontinent that geologists call Pangaea.

Somewhere along the Carolina coast, Africa crashed into North Americaalbeit at a speed so slow as to confound human comprehensionand crumpled the eastern half of what is now the United States. Waves of mountains rose up. Over the ensuing two billion years, the weight of the mountains pressed down on deep layers of dead and decomposing organic matter (mostly prehistoric plants), squeezing out the oxygen and turning the mush into peat, which, after another few hundred million years, turned into a carbon-based black rock that burns slowly and emits tremendous heat: coal.

The Appalachians may have once stood as tall as the Himalayas stand today. Time has worn them down, but they are still formidable. And they are still pressing down, and squeezing, in ways both literal and figurative.

Just over fifty years ago, in February 1968, Robert Kennedy, a US senator born into great wealth and privilege, went to the Appalachian Mountains in eastern Kentucky to meet with people born at the opposite end of the social and economic spectrum: disabled coal miners, single and widowed mothers, children whose parents could not afford to feed them adequately.

The trip occurred at a pivotal moment in American historythe Tet Offensive had launched just weeks beforeand at a pivotal moment in Robert Kennedys life: he was mulling a run for the presidency. For two days, Kennedy traveled hundreds of miles up and down the hills and hollows of eastern Kentucky, on what the press dubbed a poverty tour. He visited one-room schoolhouses and dilapidated homes. He held a public hearing in a ramshackle high school gymnasium, sitting behind a wooden table set up in the foul lane. He toured a strip mine and spoke at a small mountain college.

As acting chairman of a Senate subcommittee on poverty, Robert Kennedy went to Kentucky to gauge the progress of the War on Poverty launched four years earlier by his brothers successor, Lyndon Johnson.

Robert Kennedy wasnt merely on a fact-finding mission, however; a cold political calculus was at work too. Kennedy was considering challenging President Johnson for the Democratic presidential nomination, but he would need support from white voters to win it. Kennedys main constituencies were dispossessed minorities: African Americans, Mexican Americans, Native Americans. He needed to forge a coalition between them and working-class whites. Lets face it, he told a reporter, I appeal best to people who have problems.

His trip to eastern Kentucky was a dry run for his presidential campaign, an opportunity to test his antiwar and antipoverty message with hardscrabble whites. He was greeted by what one biographer has described as a mixture of adulation and loathing. Young people mobbed him like he was a Beatle, begging him for autographs and tousling his own famous mop top. Their parents, however, were more circumspect. Frustrated by the governments continued inability to improve their livesand by years of unkept promisesthey warned Kennedy of a growing anger toward Washington.