Selling Tradition: Appalachia and the Construction of an American Folk, 1930-1940

By Jane S. Becker

The first half of the twentieth century witnessed a growing interest in America's folk heritage, as Americans began to enthusiastically collect, present, market, and consume the nation's folk traditions. Examining one of this century's most
prominent "folk revivals--the reemergence of Southern Appalachian handicraft traditions in the 1930s--Jane Becker unravels the cultural politics that bound together a complex network of producers, reformers, government officials, industries, museums, urban markets, and consumers, all of whom helped to redefine Appalachian craft production in the context of a national cultural identity.
Becker uses this craft revival as a way of exploring the construction of the cultural categories "folk" and "tradition." She also addresses the consequences such labels have had on the people to whom they have been assigned. Though the revival of domestic arts in the Southern Appalachians reflected an attempt to aid the people of an impoverished region, she says, as well as a desire to recapture an important part of the nation's folk heritage, in reality the new craft production owed less to tradition than to middle-class tastes and consumer culture--forces that obscured the techniques used by mountain laborers and the conditions in which they worked.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Nov 9, 2000
• ISBN: 9780807860311

Jane S. Becker

Jane S. Becker, an independent scholar, received her Ph.D. in American studies from Boston University.

Book preview

Selling Tradition

[JANE S. BECKER]

Selling Tradition

APPALACHIA AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF AN AMERICAN FOLK, 1930–1940

The University of North Carolina Press | Chapel Hill and London

© 1998 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Becker, Jane S.

Selling tradition: Appalachia and the construction of an

American folk, 1930–1940 / Jane S. Becker.

p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8078-2408-5 (cloth: alk. paper).

ISBN 978-0-8078-4715-2 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Appalachian Region, Southern—Social life and customs.

2. Handicraft—Appalachian Region, Southern—History—

20th century. 3. Handicraft industries—Appalachian

Region, Southern—History—20th century. I. Title.

F217.A65B43    1998       97-40858

974—dc21                                 CIP

P. ii: Aunt Cord Ritchie, Knott County, Ky., ca. 1935.

(Photograph by Doris Ulmann; used with special

permission of Berea College and the

Doris Ulmann Foundation)

In memory of my mother

Contents

Preface

Introduction

[1]

The Domestication of Tradition

[2]

Creating an Appalachian America: Enlightening Our Contemporary Ancestors, 1880–1935

[3]

The Southern Highland Handicraft Guild: Organizing a Handicraft Culture

[4]

Order Out of Chaos: The Federal Government and the Industrialization of Handicrafts

[5]

I Start as Early as I Can and Work as Hard as I Can: Mountain Craft Producers and Their Work

[6]

Labor or Leisure?: Industrial Homework and the Redefinition of Craftsmanship

[7]

Selling Tradition

Epilogue: True American History in the Bedroom at a Price

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Jorena Pettway and her daughter of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, making chair covers and flower decorations, 1939

Basketry class at Denison House, Boston, 1915

Frances Densmore and Mountain Chief of the Blackfoot tribe listen to a cylinder recording, 1906

National Folk Festival program book, 1936

Folk art from Abby Aldrich Rockefeller’s collection on display at the Ludwell Paradise House in Williamsburg, Virginia

Woody Guthrie and Huddie Ledbetter, ca. 1941

Zilphia Horton of the Highlander Folk School and striking Chattanooga hosiery workers, 1940s

Migrant workers’ camp near Prague, Oklahoma, 1939

Thomas Hart Benton, Ballad of the Jealous Lover of Lone Green Valley, 1934

Dr. and Mrs. Albert Einstein with Hopi Indians at the Grand Canyon, 1931

Old Familiar Tunes, special catalog from Columbia Records, 1927

Dr. Humphrey Bate and his ’Possum Hunters, ca. 1930

The Old Basket-Maker and His Wife, Kentucky, ca. 1915

Musicians at old-time fiddlers’ convention, ca. 1930

Cecil Sharp [and Olive Dame Campbell?] collecting old ballads and songs, ca. 1916

Weaver warping her chain, ca. 1914

Aunt Cord Ritchie teaching local women to make baskets at Hindman Settlement School, 1938

Men woodcarving at John C. Campbell Folk School, ca. 1930

Granddaughters of William Creech, Pine Mountain, Ky.

Teaching basketmaking, North Carolina, 1930s

Advertisement for handmade furniture, ca. 1938

Mr. and Mrs. Anderson making a hooked rug, Saluda, N.C.

Tufted candlewick spread, Blue Bell pattern

Advertisement for Eleanor Beard’s hand-quilted coats, 1930s

Advertisement for Cabin Crafts needletufted bedspreads, 1942

Farm family weaving chair bottoms, Knott County, Ky., 1933

Souvenir stand, Route 41, Georgia, 1930s

Articles made of coverlet weavings and hooked mats

The Spinning Wheel, Asheville, N.C.

Advertisement for mountain pottery, ca. 1939

Advertisement for mountain basketry, ca. 1938–39

Penland Weavers and Potters’ Travellog, ca. 1933

Penland Weavers and Potters’ Carolina Cabin, ca. 1933–34

Advertisement for Drexel Furniture Co., 1942

Advertisement for Smithsonian quilt reproductions, 1992

Preface

Recently I reread the prospectus for the project that became this book. It was quite ambitious in its scope; I had originally intended to focus on unraveling the myth of the folk in the 1930s, as it appeared in many different genres and popular expressions. I would explore not only the southern mountain craft revival but also the folk festival movement, the commercial country music industry, documentary photography, the various New Deal cultural projects devoted to the folk, regional literature, radio shows, and the definition of folk art by collectors and museums.

I could still be working on that enormous task had I followed through on that prospectus, written nearly a decade ago. I was lucky, however, that relatively early on in this endeavor I encountered a collection of materials relating to the mountain craft revival that offered me some insight into the very intricate complexities of the process of defining a group of people as folk and interpreting their culture as traditional. This collection revealed the connections between the craft revival and other social and cultural phenomena—government social, economic, and cultural projects, along with issues relating to labor, industrial design, and art. I learned how complicated the creation of this mythical mountain artisan was, and how many people were involved in developing, selling, and buying that creation. Moreover, this one discrete example revealed the ambivalence of the contemporary fascination with the traditional in the 1930s: the tensions between concepts of the traditional and modern that shaped contemporary interpretations of vernacular cultures, as well as the conflicts inherent in promoting the local and the vernacular in a world that was growing increasingly national, cosmopolitan, and standardized in nature and expectation. This one small piece of my intended whole project offered many opportunities to explore some of the most fundamental cultural questions of a critical time in America’s history. Narrowing the scope of my study has, I hope, enabled me to shed light on the complicated process of cultural change and the social and economic politics that play important roles in that process.

Over the years, as this work took shape, many scholars and professionals generously shared their research and expertise. There are several individuals, however, whose insights and criticisms have been crucial in clarifying my thinking and constructing this narrative. My dissertation director, Robert St. George, began asking the questions that led me into this topic in the first place, and he continues to offer new strategies for understanding cultural evidence. As both teacher and friend he has always been generous and loyal and has believed in me; I am deeply grateful. David Whisnant, of course, inspired and taught me though his own work on cultural politics and Southern Appalachia. More important, he helped me start writing, generously waded through my earliest drafts, and kept steering me back on course every time I managed to balloon this project into unmanageable proportions. His friendship and often very practical advice have made all the difference. I could not have moved this project into its final stages without the help and encouragement of Eileen Boris, and I hope I have done justice to her careful readings and detailed suggestions. With her own research and writing, her steady commitment to nurturing newer scholars, and her friendship, Eileen has been an outstanding mentor. Richard Candee has been a steadfast and honest supporter since my first week in graduate school, tirelessly imparting his confidence in me and always sharing his knowledge and enthusiasm about his and my own work. Shirley Wajda has not only tirelessly and gracefully edited coundess versions of chapters and suggested new ways to explain complex ideas and problems, but has opened up new perspectives on the evidence with her own insightful questions. Moreover, she has constandy prodded my sense of humor. I am grateful also, for my other graduate school mentors, who patiently watched this manuscript develop, thoughtfully and critically commenting and pushing me toward clarity, particularly Richard Fox and Nina Silber.

This book has also emerged partly from an exhibition that I developed for the Museum of Our National Heritage in Lexington, Massachusetts, on the history of American ideas about the folk and tradition. My thinking on this topic began to take shape there, and I owe much to members of the exhibition team—Jacquelyn Oak, Millie Rahn, Laura Roberts, and especially Barbara Franco, who encouraged me to explore the most intangible questions. Over the years that this book took shape, all of these women moved on to other institutions and endeavors, but they have continued to exchange ideas with me, drawing on their own work; their contributions and abiding friendship have made this a better book.

My grateful thanks go to the many archivists, librarians, and staffs of the research institutions and companies who kindly facilitated my work: the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Special Collections, University Library, University of Illinois at Chicago; Archives of American Art, National Museum of American Art; Crown Gardens and Archives/Whitfield-Murray Historical Society, Dalton, Georgia; Prints and Photographs Division, Recorded Sound Division, and Archive of Folk Culture, Library of Congress; Special Collections, Mugar Memorial Library, Boston University; Chicago Historical Society; Special Collections, University Library, Western Kentucky University; Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College; National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution; Museum of Our National Heritage, Lexington, Massachusetts; Spiegel, Inc.; Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas; Museum of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico; Special Collections, Berea College Library; and Russell Sage Foundation, New York, New York.

In singling out some by name, I have no intent to diminish the contributions of others: Andrew Glasgow of the Folk Art Center, Asheville, North Carolina; Bill Creech at the National Archives, Washington, D.C.; Gayle Peters at the Southeast Region office of the National Archives in East Point, Georgia; Gerald Roberts, Special Collections, Berea College Library, Berea, Kentucky; Deborah Wythe of the Brooklyn Museum of Art; Marissa Keller of the Corcoran Gallery and School of Art; Barbara Rothermel, formerly of the Everhart Museum in Scranton, Pennsylvania; Brad Rauschenberg and Martha Rowe of the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts in Winston-Salem, North Carolina; Jayne Stokes, formerly of the Milwaukee Art Museum; Susan Finkel of the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton; Catherine Gosfils of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation; Mark Medley of the Country Music Foundation, Nashville, Tennessee; Juanita Householder of the Highlander Research and Education Center, New Market, Tennessee; Judy Bell of TRO Records and Publishing, New York, New York; and Helen Deutch of Chicago, Illinois. I am also grateful to Frank, Margaret, and Mary Tom Adams for arranging my lodging at Warren Wilson College while I pursued my research in Asheville, and to Joe and Dorothy Dodd, who provided me with hospitality and companionship during my stay there.

Much of the thinking and writing that finally coalesced in this book took shape during my tenures as a Smithsonian Institution graduate student fellow and a predoctoral fellow at the National Museum of American History. The financial support was critical, but so too was the insight, wisdom, and comradeship of my colleagues there—my advisors Pete Daniel, Rayna Green, and Charles McGovern and my fellow-fellows, especially Carolyn Goldstein, Elise Goldwasser, Amy Hardin, Jeanne Houck, Nelson Kellogg, and Jeanne Lawrence.

Even as I narrowed the scope of my work, it became more important that I think broadly and synthetically; in this, I was helped by many scholars and professionals who generously shared with me insights drawn from their own research, engaged me in conversations about notions of tradition in the 1930s, and helped me track down sources, including Roger Abrahams, Marlene Alderman, Robert Cantwell, Douglas DeNatale, Lynn Jones Ennis, Burt Feintuch, David Glassberg, Jerrold Hirsch, Jackson Lears, Raymond Lum, Eugene Metcalf, Jane Przybysz, Joan Shelley Rubin, John Saltmarsh, and Charles Watkins.

In transforming this work from manuscript to book, I owe much to the staff of the University of North Carolina Press and their myriad efforts, from early encouragement to the final stages of production and distribution. I knew I was in good hands from the start, with Lewis Bateman’s wise and honest counsel and his abiding faith in me. It has been my good fortune to work with Pamela Upton, a most professional and graceful editor of great patience, who also manages to maintain a refreshing sense of humor and knows when to use it.

A number of others—friends and colleagues—have read portions of the manuscript, sometimes more than once, or have simply cheered me on; I am especially grateful to Anne Brown, Hope Cushing, David Herder, Harriet Holbrook, Janet Hutchison, Lu Ann Jones, Ralph and Michelle Kylloe, Martha McNamara, Mary Panzer, and Nancy Zacks. My son Peter, born in the midst of it all, has given me happy excuses to turn away from this book and its myriad tasks, just as Valerie and Rebecca Anderson have allowed me to write by caring for and nurturing him. And finally, I am profoundly and deeply grateful to my husband, James Benn, who has endured this journey with me, and who continues to offer his support and understanding even while he tries to improve my computer skills.

Selling Tradition

Introduction

In the spring of 1992, quilt historians and other experts accused the Smithsonian Institution of abandoning its responsibility to protect the nation’s heritage. This charge was prompted by the sale of rights to reproduce American quilts in the collection of the National Museum of American History to a U.S. import firm that contracted the labor out to manufacturers in the People’s Republic of China. The licensee, American Pacific Enterprises, Inc., planned to procure as many as thirty thousand replicas for sale to large American department stores and mail-order companies such as Spiegel and Lands’ End. Although the ensuing debate encompassed economic issues and the needs of American workers, this was fundamentally a crisis over the integrity of our national culture. It was, one quilt expert explained, like the Louvre selling copies of the Mona Lisa. … It devalues the original voices of the women who created the quilts. At heart, then, the debate was about tradition.¹

Notions of tradition and the traditional have deep emotional roots in most cultures. Tradition refers to the past, of course, but also to the way in which the past is transmitted; it refers to the passing down of knowledge from generation to generation and implies value and veneration. It represents a lingering of the past in the present, a touchstone with those who have gone before and have left behind some of what they held most important for later generations. In this sense, the experience of tradition is personal—a gift of valued skills, customs, or stories, for instance, to younger members of the community.²

Tradition is a part of our private lives, in the form of the rituals and customs that our families and chosen communities maintain and perform. But traditions are also part of our corporate identity; we use them to define who we are as Americans. Moreover, Americans, particularly those who are middle class, seek out and consume tradition in public arenas as well. They attend folk festivals and heritage days, which display and celebrate traditional cultures; they purchase recordings of their favorite folk artists; they visit museums that re-create the way early Americans lived, worked, cooked, and dressed; they don the paraphernalia of fictionalized western cowboys; and they adorn their bodies with the kente cloths of African ancestors. Boy Scouts learn Indian lore, and some of their parents decorate their homes with egg baskets made in the mountains of Kentucky or Amish quilts stitched by Hmong immigrants in Pennsylvania and the Midwest. Thus we access tradition through those who, we presume, enact it in their daily lives—the folk.

Such attraction to the traditional and the folk, though, goes deeper than a particular aesthetic preference and patterns of consumption. The notions of tradition and folk that these objects and rituals embody help us define what we understand as American culture, what it means to be an American. The definition of a national identity draws heavily upon ideas of the nation’s past, of traditions deeply rooted in the culture of America’s early years yet maintained and expressed in new ways today.

Tradition and folk, however, are ideologically constructed categories shaped by social, gender, and racial relations and by political and economic considerations. Definitions of these categories tell us less about the identified people and their cultures than about their interpreters. Sometimes the professionals dedicated to understanding tradition are the very ones who construct the genres used to understand or define it. Sociologists, anthropologists, and folklorists use tradition as the fundamental basis for ascribing authenticity in their interpretation of cultures. Yet such thinking has political implications. Anthropologists, Johannes Fabian observes, have explained the cultural differences of their human subjects by linking them to a time remote from the scholars’ own—by rooting contemporary non-Western peoples, for example, in the past. Faced with societies and cultures they do not fully understand, these scholars have explained cultural difference as a function of temporal distance.³

The same ideological constructions characterize many present-day corporate and individual relationships with cultures that do not fit the Western model of modernization and progress.⁴ Such was the case in the first half of this century in the United States, when intellectuals, reformers, artists and museums, and business and industry all defined the nature and meaning of America’s folk by assigning them to society’s margins as relics of a generalized past, accessible mainly through the commodities they produced. The past that the folk were thought to inhabit was a generalized one, stripped of the specific conflicts and tensions that shape social and economic life. Thus idealized, this past stood in distinct opposition to the here and now: it was traditional; the present, modern.

Yet the very nature of the cultural forms defined as traditional and folk raises questions about the processes by which those forms have evolved, the new meanings they embody in historical contexts so different from those of their inception, and the implications of their new status and interpretation for the members of the cultures and communities they presumably represent. How are tradition and the folk defined, and by whom? What is the relationship between the folk, tradition, and the marketplace? What consequences do interpretations of the folk and traditional culture have for those named as its bearers? These are the central concerns of this book, which examines the contemporary construction and dissemination of ideas about one marginalized group of Americans in the 1930s—those residing in the Southern Appalachian mountains—who were popularly recognized as America’s folk.

Interest in the folk and folk traditions reaches far back in American culture. The burgeoning of industrial capitalism, urbanization, and immigration at the end of the nineteenth century brought prosperity and new opportunities to some people, but many were ambivalent about the rapid change and looked back longingly to an imagined past. On one level, the folk cultures defined in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries offered critical alternatives to America’s industrial-capitalist society and its culture of consumption. Those in search of the nation’s folk often sought out people who, they imagined, lived in tightly knit societies, close to the soil, where life more closely resembled a preindustrial and precapitalist ideal. Folkways, these same individuals thought, flourished in simple societies not dominated by industrial organization and production; in such worlds, communications were presumably personal and informal, the community took care of its members, human and spiritual values reigned, and beauty and value lay in carefully crafting from raw goods the material necessities of everyday domestic life.

For some, this look backward took the form of studying and recording the customs and relics of endangered cultures—folk survivals that marked a passing way of life doomed to certain extinction by the forces of modernity. In 1888 a group of academics, philanthropists, and collectors, many of them women, formalized this interest by founding the American Folklore Society. The urban sophisticates who collected the myths, tales, ballads, superstitions, dialects, and material culture of such exotic and picturesque peoples as southern Negroes and Indians thus assumed for themselves the right to define America’s others, or folk.⁵

Other American scholars and reformers sought to go beyond recording the endangered remnants of earlier customs and to actually revive and integrate particular traditional ways of life into the contemporary world. These middle-class individuals saw the folk world as a crucible for reform; they believed that the practices, aesthetics, and cooperative spirit of preindustrial communities could transform an increasingly troubled American society. Social and cultural reformers influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement, for example, maintained that reuniting art and labor would not only result in well-designed and well-manufactured commercial goods but would also create whole and contented blue- and white-collar workers. Model artisans were to be found among the folk.⁶

By the First World War, tradition and the folk had come to serve important roles in shaping a national cultural, as well as political and economic, identity that would distinguish America in an international context. The years during and immediately after the war saw the inception of institutions and cultural definitions that expressed a homogeneous vision of ideal community, in vivid contrast to the actual growing diversity of American society. America’s vision of her folk became entwined with her vision of her distant past—folk became synonymous with colonial, and the impetus for the collecting and restoration efforts that we associate with the colonial revival also encouraged the collecting of folk arts and crafts and music, not to mention the enshrinement of the preindustrial artisan. The institutions that emerged from this wave of cultural nationalism—Colonial Williamsburg (1926), the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1928), and Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village (1929)—presented objects from the American past as cornerstones of an American culture. In each case, selected and romanticized notions of preindustrial life provided blueprints for museum interpretations of American life and culture.⁷

During the depression decade of the 1930s, the folk and their traditions seemed to offer Americans the foundation for a way of life that did not rely on material wealth. Traditional practices, many believed, might be restorative, uniting body and spirit, nourishing the soul, encouraging self-reliance, and upholding the family. They might provide both a mythic source of collective identity, a mirror in which to view oneself, and a means to understand and come to grips with the contemporary world.⁸

The 1930s thus offer rich material for exploring the construction of folk and tradition in the nation’s consciousness. In this decade, Americans enthusiastically collected, presented, marketed, and consumed the nation’s folkways, past and present. The public encountered folk culture on festival and theater stages, over the radio and in recordings, at country fairs and museum exhibitions, in popular magazines and published fiction, and through department stores and mail-order catalogs. Indeed, definitions established in the 1930s continue to shape both popular and scholarly notions of the folk and tradition even today. This legacy—bequeathed by influential scholars, writers, folk festival promoters, folksong collectors, and craft revivalists of the thirties—offers clear examples of the ways in which notions of traditionality have provided a theoretical foundation for social and political reform in the United States and, in the process, helps us understand the intersection of politics and culture.

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, many Americans looked to the Appalachian South as the locus of the nation’s folk heritage. The activities and publicity generated over several decades by writers, ballad hunters, and social workers in the mountains fostered the myth that a traditional American culture existed in Southern Appalachia, characterized by a preindustrial economy, face-to-face relations, and the persistence of Anglo-Saxon folk traditions. A stream of local-color literature portrayed southern mountaineers as picturesque, quaint remnants of an eighteenth-century colonial culture and cultivated Americans’ interest in the material, musical, and oral expressions of these exotic mountain dwellers.⁹

Between 1880 and the Second World War, middle-class social reformers and educators sponsored a revival of mountain handicrafts that encompassed a complex network of schools, guilds, government projects, marketing and retail experts, and commercial companies involved in the production and sale of products made by southern mountain folk. Many of these craft enterprises were nurtured in mountain settlement houses under the leadership of middle-class women who often came to the region from the urban Northeast. Influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement, these women believed that the methods, aesthetics, and community ethic of preindustrial labor offered an antidote to the ills of industrial society, as well as a foundation for social and economic uplift of the mountaineers. They encouraged what they considered the most valuable aspects of surviving Anglo-Saxon culture and worked to reintroduce presumably traditional forms.¹⁰

In embracing the revival and popularization of southern mountain craft traditions, however, urban and suburban America did not simply incorporate one of the country’s distinct cultural groups into a pluralistic conception of national culture. It was hardly so simple. America’s interest in her folk cultures was also characterized by the need to make those strange ways familiar to an industrialist-capitalist culture and its values. In the end, mountain craft traditions were shaped not only by local culture, but also by reformers from outside the region, by the government, by the marketplace, and by middleclass consumers.

Folk cultures were defined in opposition to America’s dominant culture, which in turn was shaped by corporate capitalism and its underlying ideologies and structures. Beneath America’s mainstream culture lay a resolute commitment to the rewards of material progress spawned by technological development. Rationality, efficiency, and hierarchical bureaucracies were the organizational principles of corporate capitalism, which depended on disciplined workers and centralized management. The media and modern systems of distribution extended the corporate reach far beyond local producers and consumers and into national markets. America’s dominant culture was a culture of consumption; it both fed the middle class’s desire for comforts that could be purchased and reinforced the notion that satisfaction lay in the acquisition of goods and the pursuit of leisure. Consumers were deluged with expert advice on how to obtain the rewards of modern culture, while at the same time they were assured that certain types of commodities provided access to the past, to tradition.¹¹

The marketplace may have shaped the forms, styles, materials, and designs used by craftspeople, but it was the idea of tradition that sold mountain handicrafts and defined Southern Appalachian folk as cultural others. The people who promoted these mountain crafts followed the lead of an earlier generation of reformers and writers by situating Southern Appalachian culture in an idealized Anglo-American colonial past. Traditionalizing mountain craftwork and its producers served to obscure the conflicts and specific histories that constituted the reality of mountain life and craft production, endowing them instead with constructed meanings that increased their market value. Recasting cultural differences as temporal differences reshaped those distinctions as sources of unity rather than conflict, a transformation that served well the contemporary quest for defining a national identity in the midst of economic crisis. The worth of Southern Appalachian crafts, thus commodified, depended not on an understanding of the mountaineers as Americans living in a complex and changing contemporary world, but rather upon the invisibility of the Southern Appalachian people in the present.¹²

The popularity of traditional handicrafts was but one manifestation of the contemporary fascination with folk culture and the tendency to reshape tradition to meet middle-class needs. The processes by which vernacular culture and the folk were domesticated, and the meanings they embodied, were diverse. In the first chapter, I examine some of the contested meanings and uses assigned to tradition and the folk in Depression-era America and explore some models for analyzing folk culture in a modern world, along with problems inherent in each.

The creation of a popular mythical image of the Southern Appalachian mountaineer needs to be studied within the complicated contexts of developing regional economies, societies, and cultures, however. Chapter 2 provides a historical sketch of the transformation of the Appalachian South and its cultures after the Civil War, especially the influences exerted by industry, missionaries, and fiction writers; this history will help us understand the complex mix of old and new, tradition and innovation, that shaped regional cultures as well as the needs and skills that provided a foundation for the revival of domestic arts and crafts.

The next five chapters focus on the goals and strategies that guided those who fostered the production of mountain handicrafts, marketed the finished goods, and interpreted their makers to the consuming middle class. Chapter 3 examines the organization of the region’s craftspeople through the Southern Highland Handicraft Guild and the ways in which craft leaders from outside the ranks of local producers used the guild to redefine the meaning of mountain crafts. Chapter 4 considers New Deal rural rehabilitation advocates’ contributions to the domestication of southern mountain culture through their efforts to apply rational and scientific principles and methods to depressed agrarian communities. These bureaucrats hoped to save Appalachia and bring it into the American mainstream by accommodating tradition to the techniques of rational organization.

In Chapter 5, I examine the organization of craft labor, with special attention to the ways in which Appalachian craft producers actively negotiated the management of their own skills, traditions, and circumstances within the framework of demands and working conditions imposed by outside craft leaders and industry. Mountain craftspeople’s discussions about the meaning of their own work provided fodder for a debate over the place of Southern Appalachian craft production in the modern American economy and culture. Chapter 6 explores this debate, which emerged from the U.S. Women’s Bureau’s comparison of mountain craftwork with industrial labor, and which had at its heart the issue of whether craftwork should be defined as an economic rather than a cultural practice.

Most efforts to promote mountain craft traditions, however, relied on the past to define the value and meaning of those traditions in both Appalachian and American culture. In Chapter 7 I explore the use of the past in domesticating Southern Appalachian culture and the simultaneous interpretation of Appalachian craft work as commodity and history. Advertising and publicity for sales outlets and museum exhibitions relied on tradition to promote mountain products, ignoring the specific conditions of mountain life and labor.

Whether the crafts and other products marketed as Appalachian were authentically folk or truly traditional is not the subject of this book; in fact, the chapters that follow should reveal the problematic nature of such categories. Instead, I hope to shed light on the process of cultural change by reconsidering two fundamental assumptions about traditionality. First, although the traditional has been placed ideologically outside of the marketplace, this very fact demands that we unravel its relationship to the consumer culture of its invention. Rather than ignoring as inauthentic such organized folk cultural events as festivals, we might refocus our attention on the social, economic, and political relationships that structure these events in history. Such an approach could help clarify the connection between culture and industry, facilitating the exploration of the roles of tradition and the folk in America’s culture of consumption.¹³

In this it is helpful to shift our focus to (using Hans Moser’s word) folklorism—a secondary, administered folk world that is effective because it appears to be uncontrived in origin, but that incorporates the worlds of the marketplace, the city, technology, and human agency into the process of cultural creation. According to Moser, folklorism refers to the process of a folk culture experienced at second hand. By shifting our focus from folklore to folklorism we gain new ways to explore notions of authenticity and its inextricable link to the marketplace. This encourages us to consider the function of the many packaged traditions purchased by consumers—handcrafted objects, clothing, music, and staged performances, for example. With such products, authenticity is highly prized and often highly priced. The goods and performances that consumers buy, however, are divorced from their original contexts and provide mediated encounters with the folk.¹⁴

Although some scholars denigrate these cultural forms as pseudo-events that do not adhere faithfully to an authentic culture, staged representations and fakes may be as useful as presumed originals in satisfying the needs of their consumers and audiences. Furthermore, they may serve the same purposes for their creators. Folkloric rituals and events staged for tourists may in fact provide the performers with opportunities to express and maintain their local identities. Any examination of traditions requires us to unravel the complex forces of market, performers, consumers, and media that they incorporate. Moving beyond the dialectic of the authentic and inauthentic offers us new possibilities for understanding the constructed categories of folk and tradition in the 1930s and the cultural products that emerged from such interpretations.¹⁵

The second assumption that I challenge here is one regarding the political and cultural consequences of using tradition to define a people and their culture. Using historical time to explain cultural difference obscures the conflicts and alternatives posed by the contact of disparate contemporary cultures. Notions of primitive, as applied to particular societies and cultures, are profoundly political, constructed by Western evolutionary theories of social development supporting the ideology of progress. This paradigm asserts a scientific and moral authority that portrays alien cultures as reacting to the new order rather than actively producing change and suggests that their significance lies in the past rather than the present. Such an approach has tremendous consequences for those people to whom the labels traditional and folk have been assigned and blinds us to the conflicts and differences that shaped those cultures in both the past and the present.¹⁶

A close examination of a particular example of a culture defined as folk and of its customs and products labeled traditional—the people of the Appalachian South and their handcrafted products—helps us understand not only the dynamic administered folk world of 1930s America, but also how traditions have functioned and changed in the economic and social worlds of their making. At the same time, the networks and hierarchies of social relationships revealed in these stories illuminate the relationship between politics and culture.

[1]

The Domestication of Tradition

In 1944, writer James Agee published a scathing commentary in the Partisan Review on the corruption of folk culture, in response to writer Louise Bogan’s lament that the rediscovery and revival of pre-urban folkways after the First World War had "thoroughly bourgeozified [sic] folk tradition. Taking up Bogan’s complaint that these revitalized folkways had been rendered useless to artists except those immersed in middle-class values, Agee focused on the decay of jazz since the mid-1920s—in particular the abandonment of the music of the southern backcountry, street bands, and race records in favor of the sophisticated sounds and forms that pandered to white, middle-class tastes: the music of Duke Ellington, Hazel Scott, and Paul Robeson. Louis Armstrong’s new version of West End Blues, according to Agee, was adulterated, sugared-and-spiced, and Hazel Scott’s music was decadent and affected, the sort one could probably pick up, by now, through a correspondence school. With scorn, Agee also discarded the mock-primitive demagogic style