All That Is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region

By David E. Whisnant

In the American imagination, "Appalachia" designates more than a geographical region. It evokes fiddle tunes, patchwork quilts, split-rail fences, and all the other artifacts that decorate a cherished romantic region in the American mind. In this classic work, David Whisnant challenges this view of Appalachia (and consequently a broader imaginative tendency) by exploring connections between the comforting simplicity of cultural myth and the troublesome complexities of cultural history.

Looking at the work of ballad hunters and collectors, folk and settlement school founders, folk festival promoters, and other culture workers, Whisnant examines a process of intentional and systematic cultural intervention that had--and still has--far-reaching consequences. He opens the way into a more sophisticated understanding of the politics of culture in Appalachia and other regions. In a new foreword for this twenty-fifth anniversary edition, Whisnant reflects on how he came to write this book, how readers responded to it, and how some of its central concerns have animated his later work.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Aug 25, 2018
• ISBN: 9781469649382

David E. Whisnant

David E. Whisnant holds appointments in English, folklore, American studies, Latin American studies, and communications studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His books include Modernizing the Mountaineer: People, Power, and Planning in Appalachia and All That Is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region.

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All that is native and fine

ALL THAT IS NATIVE & FINE

The Politics of Culture in an American Region

Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition

With a New Foreword by the Author

David E. Whisnant

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill

© 1983 The University of North Carolina Press

Foreword © 2009 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the original edition of this book as follows:

Whisnant, David E., 1938−

All that is native and fine.

(The Fred W. Morrison series in Southern studies)

Bibliography: p.

Includes index.

1. Appalachian Region, Southern—Popular culture.

2. Social classes—Appalachian Region, Southern. 3. Appalachian Region, Southern—Social life and customs. I. Title. II. Series

F217.A65W47 1983

306’.0974 82-24851

ISBN 978-0-8078-5964-3

Both the initial research and the publication of this work were made possible in part through grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a federal agency whose mission is to award grants to support education, scholarship, media programming, libraries, and museums, in order to bring the results of cultural activities to the general public.

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THIS BOOK WAS DIGITALLY PRINTED.

The Fred W. Morrison

Series in Southern Studies

For my daughters

Beverly and Rebecca

Contents

Foreword

The Long Vector: A Book’s Life, and Mine

Preface

Introduction

CHAPTER 1

‘Hit sounds reasonable’: Culture and Social Change at Hindman Settlement School

CHAPTER 2

All that is native and fine: The Cultural Work of Olive Dame Campbell, 1908–1948

CHAPTER 3

‘This Folk Work’ and the ‘Holy Folk’: The White Top Folk Festival, 1931–1939

Cannibals and Christians: An Afterword

Notes

Index

List of Illustrations

1-1Town of Hindman

1-2Summer settlement teachers and students

1-3Interior of summer settlement teacher’s tent

1-4Moving stones for settlement buildings

1-5Hauling supplies for settlement

1-6Katherine Pettit

1-7May Stone

1-8Elizabeth Watts

1-9Christmas gifts for settlement children

1-10Settlement students in Fourth of July pageant

1-11May-pole at Mouth of Combs’ Branch

1-12Settlement students in Shakespeare production

1-13Settlement girls in cooking class

1-14Woodworking shop, Fireside Industries

1-15Local women delivering baskets to Fireside Industries

1-16Aunt Cord Ritchie and husband bringing baskets to Fireside Industries

1-17Aunt Cord Ritchie

1-18Sword dance team of settlement school students

1-19Uncle Sol Everidge

1-20Boy with banjo

1-21Uncle Ed Thomas, dulcimer maker

2-1Olive Dame Campbell and Marguerite Butler in Copenhagen

2-2View of Brasstown community in South Toe Valley

2-3Uncle Luce Scroggs

2-4Mill house under construction

2-5Oscar Cantrell with students in forge

2-6Leon Deschamps teaching surveying to folk school students

2-7Folk school credit union members

2-8Mountain Valley Cooperative and creamery

2-9Hayden Hensley

2-10Students singing behind Keith House

2-11Folk school students performing a Danish dance

2-12Weaving room

2-13Mr. Massey carving with young boy

2-14Folk school boys carving in front of fireplace

2-15Olive Dame Campbell

3-1Advertising poster for White Top Festival, 1931

3-2Group of fiddle contestants

3-3Festival grounds, mid-1930s

3-4Black cooks employed to cook for Mrs. Roosevelt

3-5Festival musicians posing with Mrs. Roosevelt

3-6Sailor Dad Hunt

3-7George Pullen Jackson’s Old Harp Singers

3-8Old Virginia Band of Harrisonburg

3-9Pine Mountain Settlement School sword-dance team, 1935

3-10Council Cruise’s family

3-11John Powell and Annabel Morris Buchanan

3-12C. B. Wohlford and John Powell

3-13Group of dancers

3-14Horton Barker

3-15John Smith presenting gift to Mrs. Roosevelt, 1933

3-16The parents of Council Cruise

Foreword

The Long Vector: A Book’s Life., and Mine

Two fairly obvious questions come to me when I contemplate the twenty-fifth anniversary of this book: How did I happen to write it, and what has happened to it (and to me) in the intervening years?

It is no simple matter to say how I happened to write it. I could just say that it came out of the book I wrote right before it (which to an extent it did), but that would be too easy. As nearly as I can figure from this remove, two life circumstances, one borrowed metaphor, and a few chance encounters led in that direction.

The first circumstance was my profound attachment to the mountains of western North Carolina where I grew up. The second was what I will call a persistent background deficit in my education. The metaphor I stumbled across while trying to figure out how to work around the deficit. And the chance encounters were with some smart people whose ideas influenced my thinking profoundly and permanently.

The Mountains

I have always felt fortunate to have grown up in the mountains, which I had never been out of but once or twice (briefly) before I was eighteen. They surrounded my brothers and me, and they were very beautiful. Our father was an outdoorsman, and from our earliest years we hunted with him and our grandfather. As Boy Scouts we hiked and camped, and as teenagers we water-skied the lakes. The sight of Mount Pisgah to the west, or of the mountains around the lakes, was as peaceful and reassuring an image as I could imagine, and it remains indelible in my memory.

From early in life, in ways I had no real understanding of, I wanted to know about those mountains. I must have been about ten when my dad took me across the street to visit the local preacher, who was a rock hound. The Reverend Mauney turned on his black light and showed me the first phosphorescent minerals I had ever seen. They were dazzling and magical, and he gave me some samples to take home. I had no black light, but somewhere I found an old wooden medicine cabinet, put some shelves in it, glued my samples onto some scraps of plastic, numbered them, and wrote the numbers and names in a Blue Horse composition book. If it had been an earlier time and I had known anything, I would have called it my Cabinet of Curiosities.

My mother was a very smart woman and she wanted the best for her boys, but she had to vacuum behind the door where I kept my little collection, so she called it those old rocks and urged me repeatedly to get rid of it. I remember feeling slightly ashamed.

But the door of that cabinet led somewhere I had no name for, and I couldn’t bring myself to throw my collection away. So my old rocks both provided an early intellectual spark and marked an early stage of the deficit—of feeling that there were so many things to know, and I didn’t know them, maybe couldn’t, and maybe oughtn’t to try.

The Deficit

In the county public schools we attended, my brothers and I were always among the brightest kids, so I was not aware of any deficit there. We didn’t have much money, but our parents worked hard for us, kept us clean and well fed, made us polish our shoes on Saturday night, and took us to church on Sundays. On the scale of respectability, we ranked somewhere above the kids from the farms, somewhere below those from Beaver Lake, and well below those from Biltmore Forest.

Neither of our very bright Depression-era parents had been able to go to college, and we didn’t know many people except our schoolteachers who had. They always insisted, nevertheless, that their sons would go, and we knew that somehow, money or not, we were going.

What our options might be, we really had little idea in those pre-SAT days. My older brother found out that he could go to Georgia Tech on the co-operative plan (going to school one term and working the next), so he did. I was three years behind him, and (not knowing what else to do or how to pay for it if I had) did the same thing.

At Georgia Tech so many of us were first-generation college students that if there was any deficit (social, intellectual, or otherwise), it was shared all around. At the end of each term, maybe with a few dollars still in my pocket, I hung my Asheville sign on my Samsonite two-suiter, walked to the expressway, stuck out my thumb, and hoped for a fast ride back to the mountains. After a late course correction out of mechanical engineering and into physics, I decided I wanted to teach somehow in the humanities (a word I’m sure I didn’t actually know), applied for some fellowships, got two substantial ones, and set off for Duke.

I had no idea what I was in for. There I was, in a Ph.D. program in English, with a B.S. in physics from Georgia Tech (great preparation for some endeavors, but not for that one). There was no denying that I lacked the background. My Big Ten− or Ivy League−prepared fellow students knew vast amounts that I did not know (or at least behaved as if they did) and groused about having to re-read Moby-Dick. I had just heard about it (and Melville to boot) for the first time the week before.

How could I be credible as a student in such a situation? I could not hope to replicate in a few months the education other students had spent years getting. They could skip Moby-Dick this time, if they wanted to, and go on to what they knowingly referred to as the Melville criticism. But I had to start with Call me Ishmael.

I hung in, turned out an M.A. thesis on Edgar Allan Poe’s study of science by the end of my first year, and forged ahead. But the urge to learn more about the mountains wouldn’t go away. Weekends I spent driving through western North Carolina as much as I could, aided by a well-worn copy of the WPA guidebook—to Linville Falls, or Mount Mitchell, or Roby Buchanan’s gem shop and Bea Hensley’s forge in Spruce Pine.

Around 1963 I bought and read a new Ford Foundation−funded study of the Appalachian region—the first substantial work to appear in decades.¹ For a brief time I considered writing my dissertation on some aspect of the region, but I had no idea how to do that, or whom to ask for help. Besides, the fellowship money would soon run out, and I needed to move on.

In mid-1965, a conventional American literature dissertation wrapped up and new Ph.D. in hand, earthly possessions in a U-haul truck, I headed for my first teaching job, in the English Department at the University of Illinois. The stakes were higher, the competition more intense, and the deficit undeniable. Moby-Dick and Melville were the least of it. Every semester or so there was a new course to teach, with at least a few authors I had barely heard of. Insofar as I had a strategy for coping, it was to work hard and not let too many people discover how much I didn’t know. The deficit was just there, and there was no way it could be erased.

The Metaphor

Fortunately, a clarifying metaphor came to me—not from literary criticism, Lord knows, but from physics. Back in my early Georgia Tech days, we had learned about vectors—quantities that had both magnitude and direction, represented by arrows of varying lengths. A vector told you which way you were headed, and how fast you were getting there.

It seemed like it might be a useful metaphor for what I had to do. I couldn’t hope to read everything I needed to read, or to retain it if I did. But I could allow whatever I was reading to correct the vector of my understanding a little bit, nudging it slightly this way or that, directing my thinking a little more. In the short term, that might get me through another class preparation, and in the longer term it might help me be clearer about where I was (or maybe should be) headed.

This was not, I vaguely understood, how most of my colleagues did it. It would be years before I understood that the then-dominant careerist ideal of mastering the field as a scholar, and the corollary one of insuring coverage in a course, were impossible for anyone to attain, background or not. But following a constantly self-correcting vector did seem possible, and—the more I came to trust it—both desirable and unavoidable.² It calmed, freed energy, and made what I was trying to do seem possible. It made the vast amount I didn’t know (and probably would never know) seem not so much a deficit as a fact of the human condition—even the condition of those who chose to spend their lives trying to learn and teach about things.

Appalachia and Nicaragua and indeed almost all of my work still lay ahead. But now I had a way of proceeding (hardly a method, and certainly not a methodology) that seemed to work. And for the time being at least, it seemed that I could trust it. As the years passed, it turned out that it allowed me to move ahead with project after project that I lacked (in the usual sense) the background for, but which I trusted myself to try, having taken on similar challenges before. Besides, I liked it a whole lot better than the other way.

In those early years, in any case, the mountains would not go away, far as I was from them. Four years on the flat plains strengthened their pull, and for about a year (1969−70), I worked as best I could from that distance to design and establish (at some university in or near the mountains) what would have been the first center for Appalachian studies (a term no one was yet using). But the obstacles proved to be too great. A few months later, vectoring again, I wrote (emboldened by all I didn’t know) a short article on Appalachian development models.³

Though I was unaware of it, a group of people, somehow related to the Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE, of which I had never heard) and the old Council of the Southern Mountains, had formed around West Virginia University. As scholars and activists, they were engaged with critical issues in the Appalachian coalfields: strip-mining, black lung and United Mine Workers reform, health care, absentee land ownership, and mine safety.⁴ One of them happened across my little article, read it, and invited me to a meeting.

The Chance Encounters

It was a new world for me. I had not come from an educated or political family, or one where books were read, to say nothing of talked about. I think my parents probably had pretty conservative politics (to the extent that they had any at all), but I don’t recall that we ever had any political discussions. So I was astounded by how much these mostly West Virginia and Kentucky people knew about politics, labor history, the coal industry, and public policy, and over the next several years I learned a very great deal from them. When one of them asked me what I was going to do to develop my article, I realized (the deficit reared its head) it had never occurred to me to develop it at all, and I had little to no confidence that I could. But prodded again a few months later by University of Tennessee Press editor Steve Cox, I embarked on writing my first Appalachian book, Modernizing the Mountaineer. Time would tell whether my little vector metaphor would serve in this way, too.

Going to the URPE meeting, in any case, was the first in a series of encounters with people who talked in a way that made sense to me right away, and what they said had a profound influence on my thinking. The regional analysis they favored in those days, for example, was partly based on a colonialist paradigm, and frequently highlighted economic and political interventions by capitalists and corporations.

I continued to puzzle over this term as I interacted with another group made up primarily of folklorists, including my Illinois colleague Archie Green—indefatigable folklorist, labor historian, and former union carpenter and shipwright.⁵ With his colleagues and students, he thought and wrote about coal mining songs, early country music, blues and ballad singers, fiddlers and banjo pickers, honky-tonk and western swing, Cajun singers and corridos. About such matters I then knew next to nothing, but I loved learning from people who had thought so carefully about them, and was increasingly confident that I could learn what I needed to know. Slowly it dawned upon me, however, that as scholars, interviewers, teachers, and record producers, they were cultural intervenors as well, and their intervention had a political dimension.

Oddly, the URPE group and the folklorists—whose interests so frequently intersected—seemed to overlap hardly at all in their thinking. Even though blues scholars sometimes wrote about mountain blues singers, and anti-strip-mining rallies sometimes featured blues songs from the coalfields, the two analytical vocabularies and projects appeared to have little or nothing to do with each other. The culture people, I began to say to myself, knew little about politics, and the political people knew little about culture. That turned out to be too categorical a judgment, and there were important exceptions, but it was broadly true.⁶And unfortunate for both.

At some point I began to think that I wanted to write something that would bring together what I was learning from both groups. I first tried it in a report I wrote for the Smithsonian’s Festival of American Folklife in 1972, where I said that the cultural (mainly musical) exhibits on the featured state of Kentucky had far too little to do with those on coal mining and with the conflicted political history of the state in general. In that connection, I used the term the politics of culture for the first time. So far as I then knew, I had made it up to suit the occasion.⁷ Several other culturally oriented papers with nascent political dimensions followed.⁸

My major project during the early 1970s, however, was writing Modernizing the Mountaineer, which I completed about 1975.⁹ It was about the politics of economic development efforts in the Appalachian region—early private and foundation-funded efforts (mostly schools, literacy programs, and health projects), the Tennessee Valley Authority of the 1930s, and federal anti-poverty and regional development programs of the 1960s. I also paid some attention to how certain notions about culture were defined, became widely accepted, and came to be deployed politically in Appalachia, especially in the settlement schools and church and foundation projects from the 1890s onward, and in the Council of the Southern Mountains (1913), a forum for discussion and cooperation among mountain workers.¹⁰

While writing that book, I had also started working with folklife festivals—the Maryland state festival around 1975 and the National Folk Festival at Wolf Trap Farm Park a little later. That work foregrounded a special set of cultural issues: Who decided what forms, examples, or carriers of culture were considered important enough to preserve, document, and present to the public? How should they be presented? What was the public told (and not told) about that culture? What messages did the public seem to prefer (or be able) to hear? Where did such preferences and predispositions come from?¹¹

If these issues were inescapable with regard to festivals, I thought, where else might they be examined? The most obvious context was the history of the Appalachian region that I had recently finished writing about in Modernizing the Mountaineer. With the exception of Archie Green, nobody I knew of had come close to doing that before.

The Book

Could I do that? And how? Where to focus? On cultural genres, like the ballads and ballad hunters that had been scrutinized for decades? On some key individuals who had done cultural work in the region? On institutions such as churches or foundations? Or on some set of cultural items?

Taking some cues from Modernizing the Mountaineer and from a special cultural issue of Appalachian Journal I edited in 1979, I decided to focus on several institutions, each led by a powerful person (all women, as it turned out, though that was not a part of my design), each in some central way concerned and involved with the politics of culture.¹²

Katherine Pettit and May Stone’s Hindman Settlement School was one of the earliest of many such schools organized between the 1890s and the mid-1920s. It had done very important work for three-quarters of a century, and was still functioning. The John C. Campbell Folk School, though not as old, had been founded by John C. and Olive Dame Campbell, two of the earliest and most sophisticated of the mountain workers. It focused some key issues, and was also still functioning, though it had gone through several major reorientations over the years. Annabel Morris Buchanan’s White Top Folk Festival of the 1930s was compelling both because I was at the time working so much with cultural festivals and because it presented such a revealing example of how the work of a culturally naive but good-hearted and decent woman could be distorted and perverted by two men (John Powell and John Blakemore) skillful in the deployment of culture for commercial and ideological ends. For all three cases, some useful archival materials were fairly readily at hand.¹³

All in all, it appeared to be a feasible project, however audacious in view of all that I didn’t know that I should have. To do the work, I was fortunate to receive (with skillful assistance from Archie Green and the Smithsonian Folklife Program’s director, Ralph Rinzler) two grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a year as a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

All That Is Native and Fine is the product of those three years of intensive work. The University of North Carolina Press wanted the subtitle to be The Politics of Culture in Appalachia, but my hopes were broader than that. I had come to be convinced that the politics of culture I was writing about was to be found virtually everywhere. If I was correct, scholars working in many other venues would find the book resonant and useful. Hence the subtitle it came to carry: The Politics of Culture in An American Region.

The main arguments of the book were fairly straightforward:

•That the vast array of culture work that was being done in the region from the 1890s onward both overlooked and masked the cultural politics of the profound social, economic, and political changes that were afoot.

•That well-entrenched cultural assumptions and discourses about Appalachia predated, underlay, and informed these instances of cultural intervention, and that these women were to a considerable degree aware of them.¹⁴

•That Pettit and Stone, Campbell, and Buchanan were also complicated human beings, with inner contradictions such as we all have, that their motives were basically positive, and that they accomplished some worthwhile things, whatever their limitations and contradictions.¹⁵

•That each of the three institutions I examined was complicated and full of contradictions; none was monolithic or simple.

•That it is not true (as some critics had complained about the Council of the Southern Mountains chapter in Modernizing the Mountaineer) that nobody knew better or could have chosen differently at the time. Other more politically aware and engaged alternatives were in fact being tried at the time in comparable settings, with comparable risks: in the urban settlement houses, which served as partial models for settlement schools in the mountains; in the Scandinavian folk schools that Olive Dame Campbell traveled abroad to study; even in another major folk festival of the time—Sarah Gertrude Knott’s National Folk Festival (begun in 1934).¹⁶

•That however one defines culture as a discrete category, it is ultimately inseparable from politics, with regard to which it may usefully be analyzed dialectically.

•That there is therefore such a thing as the politics of culture that can be mapped, anatomized, and analyzed, and that it is productive to do so.

•That discourses and programs generated by cultural institutions inevitably serve some interests and agendas, and legitimize some definitions of culture, more than others.

•And finally that what happened in Appalachia was not unique—that it was a fairly predictable outcome of the politics of culture, observable in many other places and times.

At the same time, I tired consciously not to argue (or even imply):

•That some pure or unique Appalachian regional culture existed before these women came to do their intervening cultural work.

•That the women’s motives were questionable.

•That people in the region (students at the schools, their parents, performers at White Top) were purely naive, unwitting, and passive victims of such institutions and efforts, lacking agency to make their own cultural choices.

•That these efforts by themselves should or could have reshaped Appalachian history, or defeated the coal industry or other exploitative institutions or systems.

The Life of a Book

The history that a book turns out to have is significantly determined by its author’s intentions and plans before writing ever begins, by the insightfulness of his analysis and his skill with language as the writing unfolds, and certainly to a major degree by the book’s design and physical form. At the outset, then, this book was what both I and the UNC Press’s staff (especially designer Rich Hendel and editor David Perry) made it to be.

But that is not the end of the story. When a book is set loose in the world to find readers and reviewers, to be used by students and writers of other books, it comes to be other things that reach beyond the author’s work and the publisher’s design. So it has been with All That Is Native and Fine.

This book has had a long and active life, as the lives of such books go. At publication it was nominated for (though it did not receive) a Pulitzer Prize. During the ensuing dozen or so years, it engendered sustained (generally positive) discussion. At this quarter-century remove, regular sales continue; it turns up fairly regularly on university syllabi; and with some frequency I still receive inquiries from general readers, students, and scholars from around the world—sometimes working in areas only tangentially related to its subject and focus.

My hope that this book would be used widely and for a reasonably long time has thus been more than amply fulfilled. As a quick Google or JSTOR search will show, over the years it has been reviewed and cited by scholars (both in the United States and elsewhere) working in Appalachian studies, country music history, cultural conservation and preservation, cultural studies, ethnology, ethnomusicology, film studies, folklore, history, music history and criticism, Native American studies, political science, sociology, tourism research, women’s studies, and other areas.

Somewhat surprisingly to me, much of the (relatively little) early negative reaction I am aware of came from within Appalachian studies.¹⁷ It first emerged at an open discussion of the book during the Appalachian Studies Association meeting at Berea College in 1985. As best I can recall, a few attendees objected that I had not paid sufficient attention to mountain people’s vise. Others said that I had been unkind to the early Council of the Southern Mountains staff and members (many of them women who worked in the settlement schools).

Beyond the totalizing mountain people phrase (a category that corresponds to no locatable reality I am aware of), I can say only that I did manage to find and interview a (very) few former participants in some of the programs I examined—musicians who played at White Top, and John C. Campbell Folk School and Hindman Settlement School students and faculty. The problem turned out to be that (1) I could not locate enough interview subjects to form anything even approaching a useful sample; (2) a few whom I did locate declined to talk; (3) most of those few I located and who agreed to be interviewed did not recall their experience sufficiently clearly or in enough detail to be very helpful; and (4) most of those whom the available documentary record suggested would be the most useful to interview (such as former White Top musician Council Cruise and his family) had either long since died, or moved away (or both), or could not (even after persistent effort) be located. For better or worse, then, I had to work almost exclusively from the available (through about 1982) written record.

More broadly, it would indeed have been interesting and useful to assess (as some of my Appalachianist colleagues wanted) how people around Hindman, Kentucky or in eastern Kentucky, or people around the Folk School or in Cherokee County, or people around White Top or in southwest Virginia saw and reacted to those cultural efforts. But such assessments, could they have been designed and carried out (which I doubt), lay far beyond the time and resources available to me.

The question of whether I was kind enough (or not) to the settlement school founders and teachers, and to the longtime Council of the Southern Mountains stalwarts is quite different in character. Since their views and actions are reflected (in most cases) more than adequately in the record, even had they still been alive (as a few were), they did not need urgently to be interviewed. The issue was (as I gather) that their still living admirers believed they did the best they could do at the time, that they did a lot of good work, and that criticism at such a remove was little more than gratuitous second-guessing.

That they did indeed do some good work I freely admit, and I did my best to represent that work in the book. But the contention (voiced with some frequency) that they did the best (or only) thing they (or anyone) could have done at the time—because no one could have known better then—is subject to serious question. The record offers many examples of others who were at the time doing similar work of a much more politically engaged character. Moreover, the record shows unambiguously that Olive Dame Campbell examined in person a wide political spectrum of Scandinavian folk schools and chose to model hers on the most conservative ones. That Annabel Morris Buchanan (a very decent woman) chose to ally herself with the vehemently racist John Powell and the greedy and cynical John Blakemore is also a matter of record.

Beyond these fairly delimited nodes of reaction, then, All That Is Nativeand Fine seems to me to have been responded to as positively, and for as long a time, as one might reasonably hope. The appearance of this twenty-fifth anniversary edition is thus doubly gratifying.

The inescapable fact, it has long seemed to me, is that those of us who choose to act in the public arena (as teachers, founders and directors of organizations, filmmakers, public officials, politicians, corporate executives, writers of books, or in whatever capacity) are not entitled to be immune to scrutiny. That we were, or are, nice or well-intentioned people is neither here nor there. We are responsible for the perspectives we formed, the intentions and motives we had, the actions we took, and for their results and impacts upon other lives. And others are in every sense free to analyze and comment upon the entire package.

I am mindful, at the same time, that the world (and the world of cultural analysis) has changed greatly in twenty-five years. Indeed it was changing rapidly even as I wrote.

As I understand it in retrospect, this book straddled a developmental divide in several respects. I wrote the first draft of it on a typewriter, and the final one on an early word-processor. The Internet, in its first recognizable commercial form, was still a half-dozen years away, and Google about fifteen. The Appalachian Studies Association was established only a year or two before I started working on the book, and the enterprise was only gradually accumulating the focus and strength it would eventually have.

By now, hundreds of scholars working in and on the region gather annually to share perspectives; the association has flourished; scores of excellent books have enriched the scholarship; several strong Appalachian studies programs are approaching their own twenty-fifth anniversaries, and Appalachian Journal has passed its thirty-fifth year. Younger scholars, deploying new analytical paradigms, exploring expanded archives, and incorporating Internet-based research possibilities are doing innovative and brilliant work.¹⁸

Related analytical enterprises have also appeared and matured during this quarter-century. Cultural studies (developed by Stuart Hall and others beginning in the 1970s) has produced a massive body of work, as has postmodernist analysis (the term entered the lexicon in 1979). Postcolonial studies, whose roots reached back to Frantz Fanon in the 1960s (my own tattered paperback copy of The Wretched of the Earth bears a note saying I bought and read it in 1968) was catalyzed by the appearance of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978. Subaltern studies also arose in the 1980s.

Somehow, All That Is Native and Fine has been able to hold its own across this developmental divide. It would also be gratifying to be able to observe that, whatever effects it had in the world of scholarship, it helped lay to rest the old popular misunderstandings of the Appalachian region. Unfortunately, few things are cherished as much as old beliefs, convictions, and myths; new interpretations and analyses that challenge them are not always readily adopted. Maggie Greenwald’s Songcatcher (2000) resurrected Olive Dame Campbell as a proto-feminist ballad hunter in the mountains, but despite its attention to the politics of resource (in this case, coal) extraction, the film’s portrayal of the region’s people as (in the words of New York Times critic Steven Holden) noble, if sometimes terribly misguided, savages turned the analytical clock backward, UNC-TV’s recent documentary Sing Behind the Plow: John C. Campbell Folk School studiously avoided every serious question about the history of the school Mrs. Campbell founded, retreading all the old romantic myths yet again.

What Came Afterward

I finished working on All That Is Native and Fine sometime in 1982. Feeling that I had by then done most of what I could do on the subject of Appalachia, and sensing that my vector was again shifting, I moved in a different direction. Having long wanted to be bilingual, I began to study Spanish. At a relatively advanced age, having not studied another language for more than twenty-five years, I walked into a Spanish classroom with a bunch of nineteen-year-olds, and said my first hesitant, hillbilly-inflected buenos días. Each time the teacher asked ?Quántos años tienes? (How old are you?), the other students parroted each other glibly with diecinueve or veinte (nineteen or twenty). Meanwhile, I was searching my dictionary frantically for forty-six (cuarenta y seis). But I swallowed my professorial pride, persevered, and within a year had become comfortable in Spanish.

Way leads on to way, as a Robert Frost poem said, and I soon found myself working on a book on the politics of culture in Nicaragua.

Why Nicaragua? Small, poor, and convulsed with conflict, Nicaragua was much in the news in those days. From accounts of the cultural ferment there, I was excited to learn what the new Sandinista government was trying to do with culture—with literacy, artisanal production, museums, music, and in other areas. It sounded like they knew what culture was, how to talk about it, how important it was. It sounded like they might know what they were doing in the cultural sector, and be doing a good bit of it right. It sounded like they might agree that culture was as necessary a domain of policy as any other. And it sounded like some of it could (should?) have happened in Appalachia, but mostly didn’t. In any case, some of the parallels were intriguing.

Such confidence as I had that I might be able to write a book about what was going on culturally in Nicaragua derived both from my by then years-long confidence in the vector and from sensing that it might come out to be something like Volume II of All That Is Native and Fine, but about a different place, time, and cultural system. The questions that thrust themselves upon me certainly were not that different. They had to do with the roles of culture in processes of social and political reconstruction, the relationship between elite and vernacular culture, the politics of cultural representation, tradition (and its contradictions and political uses), and the political functions of cultural institutions (and the cultural functions of political ones).

My guarded confidence that I might be able to write such a book notwithstanding, the deficit was there again. It was an audacious thing to try to do, neophyte that I was in Latin American studies, an area others had worked in for many decades. Veteran Latin American scholar Lee H. Woodward took a chance on me nevertheless, giving me a spot in his NEH summer institute on Latin America at Tulane University in 1984. Seeking follow-up funding, I applied three times to the National Humanities Center, and was rejected every time. One reviewer’s report put it bluntly: Whisnant is not a Latin Americanist, and there is not a chance he can write this book.

But the vector was telling me otherwise. I figured if at one point I had taught myself about longwall mining, pumped storage hydro plants, and sulfur dioxide scrubbers, I could probably learn about cabildos abiertos, the coffee oligarchy, and cofradías. During the next nine years, I managed to write the book, reading, learning, and experiencing things I would never have encountered otherwise.

As I worked on it, I was often struck (and reassured) by parallels between Appalachia and Nicaragua. General Sandino’s hideout at El Chipote reminded me somewhat of the rebellious Appalachian coal miners’ encampment at Blair Mountain in West Virginia in 1921, and I noted that the two armed rebel groups were the first to be bombarded from the air. The Guardia Nacional that served the interests of the Somoza regime wasn’t all that different from the National Guard that served those of the West Virginia coal operators. The bearded and puckish writer Pablo Antonio Cuadra reminded me of pioneer Appalachian scholar Cratis Williams, both of them diminutive, witty, and fascinated by what it really means to be a mountaineer or a Nicaraguan. The ventana group of radical students at the national university in León reminded me of the People’s Appalachian Research Collective. I was confident that if La Prensa’s Pedro Joaquín Chamorro had ever met Tom Gish, the courageous and crusading publisher of Whitesburg, Kentucky’s weekly newspaper, the Mountain Eagle, they would have had a lot to talk about, as would young Appalachian Film Workshop filmmakers and their counterparts in INCINE, the Nicaraguan Film Institute. The patriarchal, imperious, and provocative Nicaraguan writer José Coronel Urtecho would have seen himself in octogenarian Myles Horton—director of Highlander Research and Education Center, one of the generative nodes of social change work in Appalachia. And Gioconda Belli’s poetry summoned the hard-edged music of West Virginia singer Hazel Dickens, who wrote so many politically clear songs about the lives of coal miners, working-class women, and economically displaced mountaineers on the streets of Baltimore.

Now and then, an actual historical connection between Nicaragua and Appalachia startled me. In 1851—when thousands of people were in a hurry to get from the east coast to the California gold fields—Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt secured a monopoly on the Nicaraguan transit route and made himself a pile of money. Some of it he used to buy a 270-foot steam-powered yacht. He paneled its salons with satin-wood, furnished them with hand-carved and velvet-upholstered Louis XV chairs, embellished the walls with marble, painted the ceilings with medallion portraits of the Founding Fathers, and took along his own personal minister to proclaim the whole ensemble a credit to American taste and skill.¹⁹

Some of the rest of his money Vanderbilt passed along to his sons and grandsons. Grandson George W. Vanderbilt came to Asheville, North Carolina, in the 1890s and in a grand imperial spirit similar to his grandfather’s built a 300-room French chateau, which he appointed with the finest European furniture, tapestries, and paintings. His guests approached the estate through a picturesque half-timber and tile English village named Biltmore, which he provided with its own Episcopal chapel and loyal curate.

Shortly after the Vanderbilt mansion opened in 1895, my grandfather and his brother left their small farm in the foothills of the Blue Ridge and went up the mountain to Asheville looking for work. They found it driving streetcars, work my grandfather continued to do for the next fifty years. And many mornings when he arrived at the Asheville Street Railroad Company’s car barn at 3:30 A.M., he set out to make the Biltmore run.

About the time my grandfather died, my high school classmates and I were taken on a field trip to see the cultural wonders of Mr. Vanderbilt’s Biltmore house—to expose us to great art, of which we in our culturally benighted hillbilly ignorance presumably knew nothing. All I remember is feeling dwarfed by the scale of the place, and ashamed of my clothing and my ignorance. Thus one of my most poignant moments of connection during my Nicaraguan work occurred when I read that the ship that carried U.S. troops to Nicaragua’s east coast to move against Sandino in April 1931 was named the USS Asheville.

So my moving from Appalachian to Nicaraguan work wasn’t all that difficult, partly because I was so mindful of such parallels and connections as these. Thus while I was trying to learn and write about Nicaragua, Appalachia was never absent as a frame of reference, a ground to come back to in my thinking,