A desire to “tame” Appalachians for the benefit of industry often lurked behind twentieth-century theories of Appalachian “otherness.” Although industrialists deployed region-specific narratives to justify the development of Appalachia, widely held attitudes about the social position of the poor aided them in this. Late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Social Darwinism, for example, posited that wealth and privilege fell naturally to those who most deserved them and that social differences between the rich and the poor reflected differences in their innate abilities.
