In America, to be white and impoverished really takes some doing. Of course, this was American poverty, this was white people’s poverty, which isn’t like poverty elsewhere. It isn’t even like the poverty in Tuskegee. It has been suggested with more than a touch of cynicism that when Lyndon Johnson launched his great War on Poverty in 1964, the focus was placed on Appalachia not because it was so destitute but because it was so white.
