Research Piece

Bart Demeter

 

December 5, 2005 

Sticks and Stones (and bits of cloth): Allen H. Eaton’s

“The Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands” Role in the Stereotyping of
Appalachia

Appalachia, in most American’s estimation, is and has been a mythical place populated by violent, lazy, moonshining, illiterate, and barefoot hillbillies.  Heavily reinforcing these ideas are television programs like “The Beverly Hillbillies,” cartoons like “Snuffy Smith,” and movies like “Deliverance,” but what many people are unaware of is that the stereotyping of the Appalachian people has a long history with many discourse contributing to its image. One such facet is the early twentieth-century marketing of handicrafts, which started as a well-intentioned attempt to vitalize the Appalachian region’s economy after lingering hardships.  The promoting, which was somewhat successful in creating a market for the hand-crafted products, had the drawback of also creating an indelible hillbilly-shaped mark on the American consciousness. 

In the 1930s a sociologist, and scholar in the Arts, Allen H. Eaton, participated in the marketing when he joined with a branch of Russell Sage Foundation in the creation of a historical text designed to enlighten  America to the “happy economic and cultural combination” that is the handicraft of the Southern Highlander (Eaton 38).  His book, The Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands, while appearing to be a sound representation of the Appalachian handicraft movement, actually serves to commodify and objectify Appalachians (as opposed to their products), which in turn helps to cement the image of the Appalachian frozen in time, and a social inferior; the results of these efforts strips Appalachians of the opportunity to define themselves, placing the Appalachian in the same sort of predicament suffered by colonized peoples.

Of course, no discourse happens in a vacuum, and those which contributed to the creation of Appalachian stereotypes are no exception.  Perhaps the official start of the Appalachian stereotype goes all the way back to 1873 with Will Wallace Harney’s Lipponcott’s Magazine article entitled “A Strange Land and a Peculiar People” (Williams 197-198). Harney provides a colorful (albeit inaccurate) description of the local people of Cumberland, Kentucky:

The natives of this region are characterized by marked peculiarities of the anatomical frame. The elongation of the bones, the contour of the facial angle, the relative proportion or disproportion of the extremities, the loose muscular attachment of the ligatures, and the harsh features were exemplified in the notable instance of the late President Lincoln. (Harney)

His unflattering description of the people was tempered by a touch of presidential nobility, but only in the light of “harsh features,” and on the whole he painted the people somewhat less than human. This freakish caricature juxtaposed with his description of their general untidiness and their highly uneducated and superstitious nature, leaves little misunderstanding as to his negative attitude concerning the people of Cumberland (Harney). Moreover, his scientific descriptions of the terrain and indigenous rocks lent a certain authority to his descriptions.  Readers might even draw the conclusion that the area itself was having a “strange” effect on the people.  Courtesy of Harney, the outside world had its first impression of the “peculiar people” of highlands. He began the process of “othering” the people of Appalachia.  He was followed soon after by Mary Noailless Murfree, who perfected what Harney began.

 Writing under the pseudonym, Charles Egbert Craddock, Murfree penned In the Tennesee Mountians in 1884.  This created an image of the mountaineer which was powerful enough as to exclude any other representation.  “Cratis D. Williams wrote, ‘Writers who have attempted to present a literary mountaineer based on any type of real mountaineer other than the one she selected have met with indifferent success (qtd in Williams 198). And of course, this was yet another unflattering caricature of the Appalachian.  One need only to pick page at random to locate her tell-tale features of the people:

“I do declar’, it sets me plumb catawampus ter hev ter listen ter them blacksmiths, up yander ter thar shop, at thar everlastin’ chink- chank an’ chink-chank, considerin’ the tales I hearn ’bout ‘em, when I war down ter the quiltin’ at M’ria’s house in the Cove.”

She paused to prod the boiling clothes with a long stick. She was a tall woman, fifty years of age, perhaps, but seeming much older. So gaunt she was, so toothless, haggard, and disheveled that but for her lazy step and languid interest she might have suggested one of Macbeth’s witches, as she hovered about the great cauldron. (Murphree 3)

A quickly recognized feature which she draws attention to is the uncouth sounding (as we are led to understand) dialect which the Appalachian uses; for many readers this appears almost as a separate language, a clear indication of an illiterate and separate from the main stream status.  No doubt, for many on the outside of Appalachia, Murphree’s ability to reproduce that dialect gave her characters a great deal of authenticity.  And even more importantly, she brought the unique vocabulary of the mountains (far better than did Harney) to the waiting readers.  Words like “catawampus,” which one can easily guess the meaning, must have seemed like a curious treat to the urban readership.   Most interestingly, however, we also see that most Appalachian of virtues, the handicraft; in this case she mentions both blacksmiths and “quiltin’.”  Where Harney gave us a picture of the Appalachian, Murfree builds on that and presents voice and action, and setting (Williams 196).  With Murfree’s success, it was not long before others built on the image, one such was John Fox Jr.

In addition to the strengthening of an increasingly complex stereotype, John Fox brought a greater literary skill to readers with his works, The Little Shepherd Come in 1903, The Trail of the Lonesome Pine in 1908, which incidentally is currently performed throughout the Appalachian region as a summer-time tourist attraction, and The Cumberland Vendetta in 1911[1].  These stories served as bedrock for the redemptive qualities of the Appalachian.  For example in The Cumberland Vendetta, which reads somewhat like a Appalachian version of Romeo and Juliet, the protagonist Rome Stetson, a rugged and honest mountaineer, but whose family were slave owners before the Civil War, is engaged in a family feud with his antagonist, Japser Lewallen, a loathsome and drunkenly sort who fights without honor, yet still fought on the Union side during the war.

When the feud began, no one knew. Even the original cause was forgotten.  Both families had come as friends from
Virginia long ago, and had lived as enemies nearly half a century.  There was hostility before the war, but, until then, little bloodshed.  Through the hatred of change, characteristics of the mountaineer the world over, the Lewellels were for the
Union. The Stetsons owned a few slaves, and they fought for them.  Peace found both neighbors and worse foes.  The war armed them, and brought back an ancestral contempt for human life; it left them a heritage of lawlessness that for mutual protection made necessary the very means used by their feudal forefathers; personal hatred supplanted its dead issues and with the war went on.  The Stetsons had a good strain of Anglo-Saxon blood, owned valley-lands; the Lewallens kept store and made “moonshine”; so kindred and debtors and kindred and tenants were arrayed with one or the other leader, and gradually the retainers of both settled on one or the other side of the river.  (Fox II). 

Fox clearly shows his mountaineers as equally guilty and equally redeemable, but always as in need of redemption.  Additionally, the imagery of savagely violent people stuck in time, still suffering from the need for law, and civilization appears often in his work.  Fox also leans on the tropes of “moonshining” and the Anglo-Saxon blood line.  Note too that moonshining at this point still required quotes to identify its novelty.   Readers can now see the full picture of the mountaineer with Fox’s images.  Where Harney and Murfree described and set the stage, Fox puts the gun in the Appalachian’s hand and explores why these people were so quick to fight, something the papers had been reporting for years.

What Fox did not have to do was fire the imaginations of the urban readership with tales of feuds.  Since 1867, the Louisville Courier along with national papers had been reporting the feuds in the Appalachian mountain regions (Williams 193), the most notable of which was the feud between Hatfield’s and McCoy’s.  Altina L. Waller, a writer for Matewan’s official website and a professor of history for the
University of New York,Pittsburg, sums up the origins of the trouble this way:

Although the historical record is silent on the specific origins of the trouble, it seems to have been related to the market for timber.  In the period following the Civil War, America was industrializing at a rapid rate and the high quality hardwoods of the
Southern Appalachians were in great demand.  In this brief period before large timber corporations were operating in theTug
Valley, local farmers cut and marketed timber.  In this endeavor the branch of the Hatfield family headed by William Anderson “Devil Anse” Hatfield had been more successful than any other family in theTug Valley.  Not only were the Hatfields financially successful, they liked to brag about it, thus causing resentment among their neighbors.  Randolph McCoy and his family were especially irritated because their own efforts to profit from the timber market had ended in disaster (Waller 3).

Despite this uncomplicated reason for the tensions between families, the papers and preferred to turn the whole matter into a Shakesperian-styled love affair complicated by a trial over a lost pig.  And while there was truth in both aspects of this (the romance and the pig), the real complications occurred in the political arena (Williams 191, Waller 7).  But the Hatfield-Mccoy feud was but one of many, and like the more famous feud, property rights were often a central issue rather than the more newspaper-selling primal love angle.

Simultaneous to the writing and the feuding, was a national movement towards industrialization punctuated by starts and fits and market crashes and economic depressions.  One of these national depressions occurred in 1893, after a long period of land speculation through out the Kentucky region (Williams 195), which in turn led to a crash. It is no wonder that poverty found a place in the Appalachian region when the depression settled in.  Afterwards, coal, railroad, and timbering companies from out of the region were purchasing (at bargain basement prices) enormous amounts of land, creating landless poor and heightening tensions between neighbors, the haves-and have-nots, and laboring Appalachians and their employers. Timbering, for example, over the years between 1870 and 1910, saw a reduction of the old-growth forest by four-fifths (Williams 250).  This sort of massive deforestation no doubt would create boom-bust economies as it moved through regions like a swarms of locusts.  Areas would meet with wild land speculation prior to the arrival of the industry, followed by flurries of low-wage high-danger jobs (248).  Creating even more pressure on the region was the results of the environmental damage, which limited hunting and required stricter limitations on livestock (218).  No longer could domestic animals run free range without legal consequence.

One might guess that since so much money was coming into the area this would be a time of economic abundance, but often unethical deals would separate the land owner from the property for a pittance.  Some scholars speculate that the Hatfield and McCoy feud was in large part fueled by N&W railroad purchases of five-thousand prime timbering acres of disputed property (Williams 194, Waller 6). All the while, the stories of poverty, violence, and worse made its way to the urban centers.

With the available fictional and non-fictional resources, readers could easily see two primary character traits coming through in Appalachians.  One on hand, they existed as a violent, ignorant, savage who was out of sync with the world at large.  But on the other hand, they still carried the most important factor a good blood line. And with the Civil War only a few years behind the United States, people were all too happy to embrace such an image. Additionally, that good heritage permitted Appalachians those virtuous characteristics of hardiness, G-d-fearing-ness; in most main stream America’s estimation they were just simple folk who needed to be helped in order to save them from their more destructive traits.  Most importantly, the wealthy and middle-class believed the stories, evidenced by the outpouring of sympathies beginning with the settlement schools.

Many “successful” settlement schools and social projects eventually dotted the Appalachian landscape. In the front (or lurking somewhere nearby) was John C Campbell.  His early work in education in the North afforded him an opportunity to work with several philanthropists in 1908, in particular a Mrs. John M. Glenn, the wife of the director of the “newly establish Russell Sage Foundation.  By January of 1913, the New York based Russell Sage Foundation had set up a Southern Highland Division with three-thousand dollars, and Mr. John C Campbell, its heart and soul (Whisnant 107).  Campbell and his wife worked in the area, acting as a repository of information, and supporting settlement schools and other projects.  One such was the commission of a book with the expressed purpose of capturing the ballads of the region.  With their help, Cecil Sharp, an 1882 Cambridge graduate, began the process of collecting the ballads of the region which culminated years later (1917) in English Folk Songs of the Southern Appalachians. After Campbell’s death in 1919, His wife Olive Dame Campbell, of Medford, Massachusetts, continued on with the work her and her husband had so dearly loved—despite the fact she had no formal training in the field—(Whisnant 108,117).  

Meanwhile, a young man by the name of Allen H Eaton, was getting his start in the world of education and Art.  This Dartmouth educated man acted as Art lecturer after receiving his sociology degree. And in 1916 began to correspond with Robert de Forest, the president of the American Federation of the Arts and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.  As is happens, de Forest was also associated with the Russell Sage Foundation, also of New York.  It was not long before Eaton accepted a field secretary position with the American Federation of the Arts. In 1920, Eaton receives a position with the Russell Sage Foundation (Becker 82).

Yet another player in the mix was the results of World War I, a marked increase in nationalism. It seems as if the most important lesson of WWI was lost on America.  The massive influx of European immigrants had the effect of testing the resolve of many American’s tolerance, and reinforced the need for a group with roots somewhere other than Eastern Europe. Of course, this helped to make the Appalachian all the more redeemable.  Independent scholar and author Jane S. Becker writes: 

In the 1910s and 1920s, this identification of the Southern Appalachian as the locus of an American folk culture gained nativistic overtones that upheld the nobility and supremacy of America’s Anglo-Saxon citizens in the response of waves of immigrants that filled the nation’s cities and factories. (61).

With this final set of circumstances in place, it seemed the need to save the neglected Americans, the Appalachians was as important as ever.  A national call was sounded.  The founder of the Southern Industrial Education Association, Martha S Gielow wrote an article entitled “The Call of the Race: Save and Lift up Our Own Neglected People—a Woman’s Eloquent Plea for a Great and Noble Patriotic Cause” (61).  Appalachia became the poster child for patriotism. In 1923, Dame Campbell, takes a trip to Scandinavia.  Her trip became a model of things to come for the region.  Based on “Danish theory and practice”  Campbell set out looking for the perfect location.  During this search and quite by chance in the winter of 1926, Campbell and Eaton meet where she invites him to a conference where they discuss, amongst other things, the Handcrafts Guilds she saw in Finland (Eaton viii). By 1929 she had found such a place in North Carolina, near the Pine Mountain Settlement School (Whisnant 138). In that same year, with great amounts of help from Eaton, the Southern Highland Handicraft guild is also established (Eaton ix). At Campbell’s request and direction and with the Russell Sage Foundation’s support, in 1937, Eaton writes his book, Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands.   

With a more or less understanding of the history the many discourse and events which informed the participants, one is in better position to understand how Appalachian stereotypes took such a great and tenacious hold.  In affect, Appalachians were no longer in charge of creating there own identity. If one was to only consider the players in this movement to help the Appalachian, certain suspicion begins to creep into one’s mind.  Why are all the people in authority from the Northern States, all with deep ties to New York? Why are the people who are the authority on the people and crafts not the Appalachians themselves?  The answer is all too simple.  Despite the good intentions of the people like the Campbell’s, Eaton, and others, Appalachia had been taken over by Northern interests, first by industry, hungry for new sources of raw materials and cheap labor (which in turn created the environment for economic collapse).  Second, by the Northern social philanthropists who sought to help the mountaineers out of their self-created isolation and economic woes.  The very people who sought to help Appalachians turn out to be hijackers of the Appalachian culture and voice.  It was in fact people like Eaton who played a vital role in the stereotyping of Appalachia.

As establish by the writers of fiction in the 1880s and early 1900s, the Appalachian exhibits certain qualities which make them redeemable in the readership’s eyes.  First and foremost is their Anglo-Saxon roots, followed by their ability to cope with the hardships of nature, a support of the Union army during the Civil War, and over-all lack of education.  Eaton addresses these fictional stereotypes in his book in a manner unexpected in a work the purports to be a “study,” even one supported by the Russell Sage Foundation.” As an aside, the 1973 republication includes further authority with complimentary blurbs from a Smithsonian director and a University of Massachusetts professor (Eaton Cover). Eaton begins his book with the normal background material, such as the sort of people who make up the Appalachian:

It is generally agreed by Campbell, Kephart, and Thompson the early and largest migrations to the region were from southern Pennsylvania, eastern Virginia, and Eastern North Carolina.  While many families in the mountain sections of Virginia and West Virginia are of German decent, or Pennsylvania Dutch, as they were commonly called, the majority are of English, Scotch, and Irish ancestry, and here, together the mountain regions of North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina, is to be found the highest percentage of “pure” American, or Anglo-Saxon stock in any part of the United States.  The Highland sections of each state according to the figures of John C. Campbell, based upon the 1910 census, contained a population of less than 1 percent foreign born (43-44[2]).

Two things of importance strike a close reader of this paragraph.  One, that the Appalachian is incapable of describing him or her self.  It is up to experts of the greater population, in this case men with ties to New York.  In doing this they have effectively proclaimed themselves the powers to be, and with no nay-sayers, they remain as such.  This is mirrored in Bhabha’s describtion of  “Signs taken for Wonders.”  The act of finding the Bible’s information has created a “historical act of enunciation” (Bhabha 105). Like the Bible which served as an authority (of Western ideals), the census is taken as a treated similarly (with Northern ideals).  And like the pundit who was revered as “[G-d’s] Angel in Bhabha’s work,
Campbell, Kephart, and Thompson are similarly empowered.  Which leads to the second important point, wrapped up in mute acceptance is that these people, Campbell, Kephart, and Thompson, are now the experts. Yet, none of these men were statisticians. No doubt these were educated men, but there is some doubt that every avenue was exhausted in finding the true makeup of the region.

Eaton also uses a bit of rhetorical trickery here to allow flaws in his data to go unnoticed.  First he fails to define what is meant by “foreign born.”  From the context we are lead to believe that this means he is referring to those with “German, English, Scotch, and Irish ancestry” (44), yet they too are in fact immigrants.  Unless he had another definition in mind, perhaps that of a second or third generation immigrant?  Then why might Native Americans and Americans with African immigration not make his list? Certainly, these groups would have had status using his methods. 

A second bit of trickery he employs surrounds the discussion of his data.  The bulk of immigration occurred after 1910.  As he remarks the information was based on the 1910 census data.  Yet this book was conceived of in the 1920s was written in 1937.  A census was taken in both the 1920s and the 1930s.  What could be the purpose of using such old data?  He cites other data as late as 1934 on the same page (45).  One could argue, quite reasonably, that the pressures of the readership, The Russell Sage foundation (who had credibility to lose), and the Southern Highlands Handicrafts Guild (who had dollars to lose) forced him to support the stereotype.  If he were to write that the makeup of the Appalachian region was awash with immigrants, Native Americans, and African-Americans, one of the key illusions would be shattered.  As fiction- writers like Fox, Murfree, and Harney had established over forty years prior, these people were of a particular racial ancestry. Eaton, despite his background in sociology, chooses to misrepresent the facts—in fact chooses to support the stereotype and rob the Appalachian of their true identity. 

 He then replaces identity with the idea of “pure American, or Anglo Saxon stock.” Stock is a term often associated with the breeding of dogs, horses, and other working class animals.  When juxtaposed to the purpose of the book which is essentially a “how to yoke a population to a certain kind of work” guide, a colonial them emerges.  Dehumanized and commodified, in short, “othered,”  Appalachians have been transformed into “a they,” those “Anglo-Saxon stock” who can perform the task of handicraft for the benefit of the Northern middle-class consumer.  Fanon spoke of a similar problem concerning his status: “The white world, the only honorable one, barred me from all participation.  A man was expected to behave like a man. I was expected to behave like a black man” (324).  To a degree, the Appalachian now faces a similar problem.  Eaton has reinforced the fiction of the Anglo-Saxon Appalachian, complete with all its over-determined implications (provided by the fiction writers) and now the Appalachian must perform as such. Whereas Fanon reports he cannot escape from over-determinization because of his black body, Appalachians cannot escape due to their tell-tale dialect.

Eaton goes on to imply Appalachian’s isolation (and by further implication, dialect) is their own responsibility.  (In order to be truly othered it would not due for them to be guiltless).  Eaton solves this inconsistency with evidence that further divides Highlanders with the rest of the general population:

It is true that the culture of the Highlanders was due to the fact that from the time they entered this great mountain region until recently they were practically lost to outside influence.  For generations people of the highlands and the
Lowlands mingled with one another as little as they belonged to different countries, and until quite recently it was customary to refer to anyone outside the region as a foreigner. (44).

With that, despite the fact that in the previous paragraph Appalachians are made out to be the “pure American,” their self-imposed isolation has caused them to suffer their own the hardships. And therefore absolves the mainstream population a sense of responsibility, this entire paragraph removes the need to consider this “pure American” as a human. 

As was established by the fiction writer such as Fox, the violent Appalachians often are in need of redemption and there are qualities which make them deserving of such treatment.  Eaton provides this stereotype with support as well:

However, in the early 1860’s mountain men came out of their coves and valleys 150,000 strong as volunteers in the Union army, where they proved themselves among the ablest fighting men, and their response in the World War is one of the traditions not only of the mountain region but of the nation (44)

Additionally, this feeds the notion that these ancestral Anglo-Saxons still maintain their aggressive tendencies.  The image of the mountaineer as the good fighter in the good fight reminds one of the noble savage, noble, but not quite civilized.  

Often in the attempts to “other” a population for the purpose of colonization, ridiculous distinctions are offered up.  In his article “Articulation the Archiac,” Bhabha comments about the idea of colonial division: “What emerges from the dispersal of work [work of the empire] is the language of a colonial nonsense that displaced those dualities in the colonial space is traditionally divided: nature/culture, chaos/civility” (124). Closely examined, Eaton’s claims do not make much sense.  First he claims “they entered this great mountain region until recently they were practically lost to outside influence” (Eaton 44).  Yet in the same paragraph he mentions they were available for the Civil war, a war which occurred less than three generations from the time of the American Revolution and not even one since World War I.  What can he mean by “recently?” After all, coal, timbering, and railroads did not have any trouble locating local labor for their purposes.  Moreover, Appalachians participated in that Civil War and then again in the World War I.  This seems out of character for a group of people who Eaton claims looked at “anyone outside the region as a foreigner” (44).  As a sociologist, one might expect Eaton to understand the flexibility of language and terms.  Yet, he chooses the less charitable route by forcing the Northern understanding of the term against the Appalachian’s use, which would be simply someone who did not live in that area.  Once again he supports the stereotypes rather than truth.

Another of the tropes common to the Appalachian myth was the ancestral hardiness. The Appalachians are able to live off the land and survive where no one else can.  Fox reminds readers of this in The Cumberland Vendetta: “With the start of a few hours and the sympathy of his people one mountaineer can defy the army of the United States: and the mountaineers usually laugh when they hear troops coming (XIII).  Clearly Fox sees this ability to live off the land as an Appalachian trait which permits survival where even a trained soldier could not manage.  Eaton plays into this stereotype:

To leave the impression that all the Highlanders fared alike would be inaccurate, but it is not an overstatement to say that no other group of Americans has lived though generations so meagerly.  But if this lean existence seems, as it undoubtedly does, an indication of low standard, it must in justice be said that the ability of the average Highlander to extract from his surroundings the essential elements of life is no small tribute to his strength, ingenuity, and endurance.  He has under circumstances that would have discouraged many another maintained a faith that is one of his outstanding characteristics (45).

The Appalachian appears to receive hearty praise.  Keeping in mind that the purpose of this book is to study the labor and market of handicrafts, there is an underlying implication; these people are tough, and they will work hard.  Harder than others might, after all, they’re used to it.

Finally, Eaton supports Harney’s grotesque caricatures of a people affected by the “strange land” while reinforcing that their problems are self induced:

That great penalties have been paid by many mountain families for the privation they have endured and that heavy toll has been taken in both physical and mental debilities, are grim facts which those who know the situation admit.  Nevertheless these secluded people have won the devotion of person who in the capacity or another are lending aid to the various enterprises in the region, primarily, because Highlanders crave above everything the opportunity to develop their own potentialities and carry their own responsibilities (45). 

What an incredible opportunity for Eaton to stress that many of the health and economic related problems were in fact not the direct result of Appalachians’ “privation,” but the result of the interference of economy and ecology on the part of Northern business interests.  Instead he remarks that the Appalachians are fortunate indeed to have “won the devotion” of people who recognized their “potentialities.”  One can assume he meant people like Dame Campbell and himself as they were both instrumental in the creation of the Handicraft Guild.

Yet despite this “high praise” the Guild, denied this responsible and potential people the very work which the hoped would uplift these debilitated people. In the book “The Selling of Tradition” Becker points out:  “Individual Craft producers were at the bottom of the hierarchy, denied access to top decision-making positions, first by guild leadership and the by the producing centers under which they worked” (Becker 85).  And to further the insult, “Government officials concerned with rebuilding local economies institutionalized the notion that crafts could function either as expressive culture or as commodities (84).  Clearly, despite the words and seemingly good intention, other motivations, other than true altruism drove the machinations of Guild decision makers, such as Eaton.

Since the Guild was not run by Appalachians for Appalachians, who then were the people being trained to work for?  Addressing a different model, Philip G Altbach actually explains the problems brought on by the Craft Guild: “Reliance of foreign models was dictated in part by the colonial government.  Indigenous educational pattern were destroyed either by design or as the inadvertent result of policies which ignored local needs and traditions” (453).  One only needs to insert “Craft Guild” were “government” rests and this statement works perfectly to describe the situation brought about in the Appalachian region.  Eaton own words suggest the truth of Altbach’s ideas:

Much of the handiwork of the Southern Highlands is indigenous—it had grown out of the needs and aspirations of the people of the region.  In the beginning the craftsman was as near self-taught as a man can be; his shop was his place of abode, his materials what nature had provided, the tools were his own hands and a few simple implements brought on or made by his forebears; his teacher was the urgent necessity for the object he created. (Eaton 262).

How might then Eaton explain the educational methods the Handicrafts guild created?  The John C. Campbell Folk Schools, where methods and materials (and eventually instructors), were brought over from Scandinavia (Whisnant 127-165).  Or Beria College, where quilters eventually lost their craft to Swedish instructors, stitches, patterns, dyes, and looms (Becker 66-67). Simply put, the schools supplanted Appalachian crafts with what was to be sold as Appalachian craft.  

 

While it appears that one could easily assume profit was the central motivation which drove the Northern organizations, Becker suggests some of what was at stake was that the “Appalachian craft revival was in some ways just another manifestation of the colonial revival.  Both expressed a yearning for an idealized past and tried to cultivate ways of life associated with a vague premodern state in the interests of creating a unified national identity” (196).  Such an argument; however, does not necessarily exclude a profit orientated one. And in either case the need for a poster child is great.  Additionally, the Arts and Craft movement allowed modern and middle class America a commodified way to access either paradigm.  Along the way certainly some few people made money as one professor described the crafts as “objects of wood, clay and fiber, guaranteed to fit in the back of your car” (204).

Ultimately though, the Appalachian Arts and Craft trade was controlled by outside forces, these forces in turn marketed and created the image of the people crafting the items they made.  This became for many, the only connection they had to this “pure America” which they had read about and longed to see, a return to the days when people were made of stronger stuff, with roots stretching back in the mists of time. This led to a larger long-term problem; as Appalachia grow and change, the world still sees the region as that commodified marketed version of itself, not unlike a child one knew but has now grown up, yet one still sees as the child, or that type-caste actor who can only be seen as “that one role.” Writers such as Eaton, played to the role, supported it, and strengthened it to meet their own goals.

When a child one is picked, parents and teachers mollify the child with phrases like “sticks and stones will break your bones but names will never hurt you.”  As children we believe that what our authorities tell us is true.  But it isn’t true.  The Appalachian people were essentially called names by writers, starting with newspapers, Harney, and continuing on today with Hollywood.  On such a grand scale name calling amounts to forcibly changing an identity.  This name calling is of course quite a bit more complex than simple playground teasing, but essentially it is the same thing.  As children we instinctively, react.  Some children fight back, others sulk, and a few simply succumb to the teasing.   If the process goes on long enough, the child becomes labeled, perhaps a “geek,” “nerd,” or what-have-you.  The schoolyard bully has chosen the identity for the less-aggressive child.  And like Fanon points out once one has been over-determined one is forced into the “expectation.”  The pressure from society then becomes a limitation of potential, a loss of freedom. The people of Appalachia find themselves in a similar predicament on a much grander scale.  The schoolyard bullies of the greater American mainstream have essentially called Appalachians names for nearly 120 years.  Perhaps, it is time to at very least say “Nuh-uh.” 

Works Cited

Altbach, Philip G. “Education and Neocolonialism.”  The Post-Colonial Studies Reader..  New York, Eds. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth
Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. Routledge 2004.

Becker, Jane S.  Selling Tradition:Appalachia and the Construction of an American Folk 1930-1940.  Chapel Hill: North Carolina
University Press, 1998.Bhabha, Homi K. “Articulating the Archaic.”  The Location of Culture.
New York, Routledge, 1994.

—.“Signs Taken for Wonders.”  The Location of Culture.
New York, Routledge, 1994.

Eaton, Allen Hendershott. Handicrafts of the
Southern Highlands. 1937.  New York:
Dover, 1973.

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[1] Some questions exist as the most accurate publication date. Writers such as Williams credit 1911 as the publication date; other sources mention, 1900 and others still, (Whisnant for example) 1895. As this discrepancy is not an integral part of this essay, I am inclined to leave that argument to someone else.

[2]  Due to long introductions and content tables, page 43 actually represents the second page of the first chapter.