This is the fact, that in a nation as large as ours there are today thousands of people who live under such conditions and such standards that they can truly be called poverty stricken. The Appalachian region is a beautiful, scenic region, but the 15,300,000 people who live within the 340 counties and 10 States known as the Appalachian area lag far behind the Nation in income and housing and at the same time are far behind in the rate of unemployment and school dropout.

Something of a concrete nature must be done for these people. I believe this legislation along with other proposals will be the opening wedge in wiping out this intolerable situation. I trust that these hearings will go a long way toward alerting the American people to the problem and arousing them to do something about it.

For as long as one citizen of this country is forced to go to bed hungry, then all of us share the responsibility to do something about it. There must not be allowed to exist in a country as rich and as prosperous as ours the poverty that now exists in Appalachia.

I consider this legislation so important that I have need of an ad hoc committee of distinguished members to hear top Federal administrators who have recommended this program and who will appear before us. The Governors of the Central States and other local representatives from the region will be here.

I trust all the members of the committee will listen very carefully to what will unfold before them in the next few weeks. I am certain that after all the testimony is heard on this matter and after careful consideration is given to this testimony this committee will act decisively and quickly.

I might add that this committee has not been unaware of the problem as it affects Appalachia directly and as it affects unemployment in the Nation. In 1962, we reported out the Accelerated Public Works Act which became law and has helped to solve the problem of unemployment where it has been utilized.

A section of the Accelerated Public Works program was reported out last December and is still awaiting action by the House. So, we are to some extent familiar with the problem, but that which we are considering today is a unique one.

I can close my remarks in no better way than to quote from the letter of President Lyndon B. Johnson when he set up his proposed legislation. His words speak for themselves:

I strongly urge the Congress to attach to this bill the urgency and the need that is so plainly written on the face of the Appalachian citizens. They are looking to you and to me to help so that they can help themselves. For myself, I pledge my full support and untiring efforts.

Mr. Roosevelt, Under Secretary of Commerce, we are very delighted to have you here. I know of no man who knows better the conditions that exist through this country than Franklin D. Roosevelt.

STATEMENT OF FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, UNDER SECRETARY OF COMMERCE

Mr. ROOSEVELT. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

First, may I say that I consider this a great honor for me to again. come before this great committee of the House which has been for so many years under the leadership and chairmanship of my lifelong friend, Mr. Buckley.

I think that your work, Mr. Chairman, as chairman of this committee, has been recognized by not only the people of your district, but also the people around this country, as contributing to the welfare and to the economic growth of this country during the years of your chairmanship. I join with President Johnson in his noting this fact and I again say that it is a great honor for me to appear before you and the other members of this ad hoc subcommittee.

I am also glad to have this change because I served with so many of you during my 6 years in the House.

Mr. Chairman, it is with particular pride that I appear before you today, pride in representing the compassion and determination of two Presidents, President Kennedy and President Johnson, the concern of 10 Governors, the cooperation of 12 Government departments and agencies, the tireless efforts of 35 members of the Appalachian Regional Commission, and the hopes of 15 million Appalachians.

The work and the hope embodied in the report and the bill which is now before you is based on the conviction of this administration that there is no reason why three-thirds of this Nation cannot be wellhoused, well-clothed, and well-fed; that our great and continuing prosperity should bypass no one-that Clay County, Ky., or Boone County, IV. Va., have the same right to that prosperity as Westchester County, N.Y., or Los Angeles County, Calif.

In many ways I feel that I am a part of Appalachia, for I remember touring its counties with my father, seeing its coal mines with my mother and campaigning through the region in the primaries and election of 1960.

In that connection I want to briefly mention our late President John F. Kennedy. Many pundits have said that his election was made possible by the voters of West Virginia. That may be true, but I believe that his greatness as a President was made possible by his reaction to what he saw and learned in that part of Appalachia. If the people of Appalachia were assured of Presidential concern under John F. Kennedy, they have been reassured by President Johnson.

Last week President Johnson made the first leg of his visit to Appalachia and saw there the conditions which he so eloquently described in his message to Congress transmitting this bill. I should like to quote just briefly from this message:

The visible lag of Appalachia justifies the special programs I respectfully request you to consider.

But behind the description of the need of a region lies the desolation of a people.

I have seen the despair and the hopelessness in the faces of these citizens. What exists in this area is a challenge to the ingenuity as well as the compassion of the Congress.

Our concern for what exists in Appalachia is great because of what we know could exist there. The potential that this region once held was described by Woodrow Wilson in his "History of the American People." Writing of Appalachia as it was in the years after the Civil War, he said:

The great Appalachian region which stretched its mighty highlands from Pennsylvania through Maryland, the Virginias, Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Carolinas full 700 miles into Alabama and Georgia, and which spread its broad surfaces of mountain valley and plateau 150 miles by the way upon either hand, geologists knew to be an almost unbroken coal field.

Upon its skirts and in the broken country to the east and west of it iron also abounded, and mineral deposits which no man had looked into * * for the first time since the modern industrial age set in, capitalists turned to (the region) for investment and the enterprises that bring wealth and power.

And they did turn to Appalachia for wealth, but thereby began a process of wealth outflow that is the chief source of the area's distress today: the coal left, the lumber left, the abundant rainfall-unchecked. by natural impoundments-left, and the wages of its workers left via the company store. Its cities, instead of being processing centers for the regions wealth, merely became way stations to speed its resources on to benefit others.

What all this has wrought in the region today cannot be fully told in the statistics we usually use. I can tell you that almost 1 in 3 Appalachian families lives on an annual income of less than $3,000-in the rest of the country it's 1 in 5-I can tell you that in 1960 the per capita income for the region was only $1,400 a year when the rest of the country it was $1,900.

I can tell you that if Appalachians purchased retail goods at a rate proportionate to their population, an additional $4 billion in goods would have been sold in the area. I can tell you that the job gap in the region that is those who are unemployed and those who have given up looking for jobs-is over 1,100,000.

I can tell you that while employment in the rest of the country went up 15 percent from 1959-60, in Appalachia it went down 1.5 percent. I can tell you that only 32 out of every 100 people in the region have finished high school and that only 5 out of 100 complete college.

I can tell you about the 2 million people who have out migrated from the region only to join the unskilled unemployed in other areas. I can tell you about how the region's natural wealth has turned to dross through neglect, and I can tell you that, at present rates, Federal welfare expenditures in the region will amount to almost $5 billion in the next 10 years.

But all that is in the report, in its impersonal charts and graphs that portray deprivation in digits and decimals.

But what is poverty in terms of human experience?

What do we mean when we talk of poverty? If you live on Park Avenue in New York City, then poverty is living in a rat-infested tenement in Harlem. But what if there is no such startling contrast provided to identify poverty. In Appalachia, poverty is not so easily recognizable because it is so widespread and because poverty in Appalachia is defined differently.

Poverty in Appalachia is founded on more than deprivation or need; it is founded on neglect and on the feeling that the future will be no different from the present.

In Appalachia, poverty is waiting in a surplus food line instead of waiting in a supermarket checkout line.

Poverty is not being able to fill out more than four or five lines on your income tax return, because there may have been no taxable income that year.

Poverty is living in a house without running water, in a town without a decent road, in an area without a hospital, or in a State without the tax base to afford the needed educational facilities.

Poverty is having given up looking for a job, because you have no hope of finding one, no savings to enable you to move to another area, and no skill to get a job there if you could move.

Poverty is living near a strip mine, where there is no topsoil, or wildlife, only gutted land and polluted streams.

Poverty is having your children inherit your relief check. Poverty is sending your children to school ill-clothed and also ill-fed.

Poverty is trying to sell the parts of that 1948 Studebaker that is rusting out back.

Poverty is a deserted factory. Poverty in Appalachia is being certain of little more than next year's flood.

So distinct is the economic gap between Appalachia and the rest of the United States that the average Appalachian, no matter where he lives, has not matched his counterpart in the rest of the United States. In short, all of the subregions of Appalachia share this unhappy distinction: rural Appalachia lags between rural America. Urban Appalachia lags behind urban America, and metropolitan Appalachia lags behind metropolitan America. The sad fact for Appalachia is that the depression of its hinterland retards the growth of its cities, and the slow growth of its cities further depresses the rural interior.

This vicious cycle of poverty has placed the region in a position where recovery must occur in both the city and county. New prosperity for Appalachia's cities must accompany economic growth in its rural areas, just as rural Appalachia will in turn benefit from a greater vitality in its urban centers.

The program which we have before us, gentlemen, is designed to assist both rural and urban Appalachia and thereby enable the entire region to escape from the pall of despair.

Among the many statistics which accurately mark Appalachia as the largest area of poverty in the United States is the listing of areas of severe and substantial unemployment. The list of 15 areas in the United States which have the highest percentage of unemployment contains 9 Appalachian labor markets.

The bill which we are considering today identifies the Appalachian problem as a regional problem. It recognizes that the human condition in Appalachia cannot be materially improved until the region itself is upgraded.

This program recognizes that each of the Appalachian States has been unable to solve, through its own efforts, the problems of its part of Appalachia. Furthermore, it is neither workable nor desirable that the Federal Government provide the missing ingredients by itself.

Rather the only system that offers any hope for the future, is a joint Federal-State effort which uses the best talents and combined funds of each and the equally valuable resources available from local communities and private groups.

We on the President's Appalachian Regional Commission believe that a coordinated, adequately funded, and sustained effort must be undertaken to restore the region's economic vitality. A process of regional development must begin now if Appalachia is to participate fully in the American society.

The Appalachian development program contains the type of balanced and coordinated programs which can reverse the economic decline of the Appalachian region and achieve a sound base for further economic development. It gets at the roots of the region's most serious deficiencies through the following major goals.

1. Provision of access into, out of, and within a new isolated region. 2. Construction of facilities both to control and exploit the abundant rainfall of Appalachia.

3. The creative management of Appalachia's valuable natural resources coal, timber, and arable land.

4. Attention to immediate improvements in human resources, including education, housing, health, vocational rehabilitation, and nutrition.

Before discussing this action program, I should like to make it clear that not all of the suggested Appalachian investments are contained in the bill which the President submitted to the Congress. In many instances, we have recommended an expansion of effort in Appalachia through programs which have already been authorized by the Congress on a national scale.

The only implementation needed for the President's recommendation in those areas will be contained in the supplemental appropriations bill which will be dispatched to the Congress when the legislation before you has been approved by the Congress.

Among the programs recommended which require only such an appropriation supplementation are the expansion of the Corps of Engineers and Soil Conservation Service water control projects, the construction of additional national forest development roads, supplementation of research programs seeking use for Appalachian hardwoods, acquisition of additional lands in the natural forest system, provision of Appalachian plant and materials center, extension of loans to farmers participating in the Appalachian pasture improvement program through the Farmers Home Administration and an expansion of mapping and hydrological studies of the Geological Survey.

We have recommended the construction of a 2,350-mile development highway system for Appalachia. Anyone who is remotely familiar with the terrain and existing road conditions in western Pennsylvania, West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, or western North Carolina, for instance, recognizes the overriding necessity to provide this region with an adequate transportation network.

The Interstate Highway System, when completed, will by itself not penetrate to the heart of Appalachia and will not bring trade and commerce to its interior. This development road network, tied into the Interstate System will stimulate traffic in Appalachia and will open up large areas which are now strangled by their isolation from the mainstream of American life.

Without these highways, Appalachia can never hope to attract the industries which will be its salvation, nor can it attract the tourists who wish to visit its recreational facilities. Recreation, although not a panacea for curing Appalachia's economic ills, will nevertheless play an important role in the region's drive for recovery.