High Mountains Rising

by Richard A. Straw

  What images did these local colorists produce of mountaineers and their society? Murfree had the mountaineers speak in dialect like, “I hev hearn tell ez how them thar boys rides thar horses over hyar ter the Settlemint nigh on ter every night in the week ter play kyerds.”10 She described the men as tall and lanky, often with “an expression of settled melancholy on his face” and a “listless manner [that was] of stolidity, not of a studied calm.”11 Murfree described positive characteristics as well: “Their standard of morality and respectability could not be questioned; there had never been a man or a woman of the humble name who had given the others cause for shame;. . . they neither stole nor choused; they paid as they went, and asked no favors; they took no alms,—nay, they gave of their little!”12 Given that Murfree depicted her characters as physically isolated from the rest of America, it is not surprising that the men spent their days feuding, drinking, and hunting while the women spun thread and wove clothes.13

  Whereas local color writers contributed their images to the reading public, Northern Protestant churches provided similar images to their congregations. By the mid-1880s, almost all Northern Protestant denominations had begun home missionary activities, using religion and education to “lift” the mountaineers out of their isolation and into the mainstream of American life. The Presbyterian Board of Home Missions wrote in 1886, “Religion and knowledge go hand in hand; churches and schools supplement and assist each other. . . . In pushing our missionary work into the South, we have struck another great mass of illiteracy, this time among the whites. . . . These hardy mountaineers are eager for schools.”14 Shapiro argues that these and other Americans were dogged by a need to understand how this Appalachia fit into their understanding of modern America “as a unified and homogeneous national entity.” By and large these writers and church leaders saw “typical” American society as characterized by the more urban and northern or eastern culture in which they lived. The mountaineers’ peculiarity could not be explained away by their living on some distant frontier or their being ethnically “inferior” people. As Shapiro puts it so directly, how could observers explain “the ‘deviance’ of white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, native-born Americans living in the present and within miles of the older centers of American civilization”?15

  By the turn of the twentieth century, they came to explain it by defining and accepting Appalachia as a non-American place, “a legitimately discrete region defined by a particular pattern of culture as well as by its location, and inhabited by a legitimately distinct population.”16 William Goodell Frost, the president of Berea College in Kentucky, played a key role in this shift. He proposed the phrase “Appalachian America” to give the region a name of its own, and he called the mountaineers “our contemporary ancestors,” which cemented the idea of a homogeneous population in Appalachia.17 Remember, this type of generalization must take place for stereotypes to arise.

  Stepping back and looking at Henry Shapiro’s theory, two points stand out. First, the stereotypes did not develop until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when American society seemed to have developed in noticeably different ways than had Appalachian society. In the 1780s, life around Chesapeake Bay did not differ all that much from life in the Blue Ridge. By the 1880s, the differences had grown to the degree that some people took notice, found them remarkable, and wrote about them in national publications. Second, people from outside the mountain region created and publicized the stereotypical images of Appalachia. Mary Noailles Murfree lived in Murfreesboro, a few dozen miles southeast of Nashville, whereas home missionaries and educators hailed from New York City, Philadelphia, and other Northern locations.18 The role of outsiders in Appalachia forms a common theme that runs through several chapters of this book; consider the role of coalmining, lumbering, and the federal government to name just a few. In Shapiro’s analysis of stereotyping, the mountaineers themselves had little to say.

  Research on upper East Tennessee in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reveals a different process at work, however. These mountaineers were never cut off from the larger American society, never so isolated as to develop the characteristics described by the local color writers. Instead, differences began to appear within this population. The topography of the region—more open rolling valleys to the north and west, steeper mountains to the east and south—made movement and communication easier in some places than others. There developed two ways of seeing the world. Some who could travel more easily had an outward-looking perspective; for example, they tended to see their interests connected to regional markets and national issues. Others who had difficulty moving about developed a more inward-turning or local perspective; for example, these people tended to be more concerned with immediate neighbors and local matters.19

  By way of analogy, consider the people who read the New York Times, watch CNN, check out the NASDAQ online, or debate the Florida vote count in the 2000 presidential election. These folks have an outward-looking perspective. Then consider others who read the local paper and watch the local news, talk about the health of businesses downtown, or debate the outcomes of the school board and sheriff elections. These people have more of an inward-looking perspective. Of course everyone holds a mixture of these two views, but most tend to hold one perspective more than the other. Do the people with similar perspectives tend to stick together with others who hold comparable views? This began to occur in East Tennessee as the inhabitants developed self-perceptions of difference.

  The stereotypes began to crystallize at midcentury when the better-connected outward-oriented inhabitants campaigned for the East Tennessee and Virginia Rail Road, which would allow farmers to reach new markets quickly and manufacturers to distribute their products more easily. One newspaper writer claimed that the railroad would “open out the hidden treasures of East Tennessee that have so long been buried for want of an outlet—and then will her citizens who have so long been bowed down, have all the facilities necessary to make them a happy and prosperous people.”20 The goal seemed so sensible and desirable that the railroad advocates came to see people who did not support their efforts (and who often lived in the less accessible areas and therefore would not be able to take advantage of the railroad) as being backward and ignorant. For example, the writer “C” lamented the lack of support but thought it futile to print more facts because “we could multiply them without number but they would not be read, or if read many would prefer living in barbarism forever to putting forth one animated effort to secure them.”21 The battle to fund and construct the railroad thus produced a clear sense of difference between these two groups.

  Henry Shapiro correctly states that Mary Noailles Murfree played a key role in spreading the stereotypes to a national audience. But how did Murfree develop these images in the first place? Murfree had very limited exposure to mountaineers. She spent her summers from the ages of six to twenty-one (1856–70) at the mountain resort of Beersheba Springs, and she took one trip farther east to Maryville. “Beersheba and Maryville,” notes Murfree’s biographer, “are barely in the Smoky Mountains, if at all, and she had known only those mountaineers who came often into contact with residents from the lowlands.”22

  In other words, Murfree came into contact with mountaineers who lived in more accessible areas and who probably had a more outward-looking perspective, like the railroad advocates in upper East Tennessee who were, at precisely this time, criticizing their more remote and locally oriented neighbors as being backward. Imagine a prosperous farmer visiting Beersheba Springs and telling a young Mary Noailles Murfree about the state of his crops, the fair prices he obtained at distant markets, the railroad that made such sales possible, and, conceivably, the destitute mountaineers who had no such access to modern transportation. He himself was advancing toward a bright and prosperous future while others in his community were mired in a gloomy and primitive past. Perhaps Murfree remembered such stories when she sat down, in middle Tennessee, to write In the Tennessee Mountains.23
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  Stepping back and considering this theory, two points stand out. First, this theory argues that the sense of distinctiveness began within the region and not, as Shapiro argues, from outside the region. Second, this theory draws on detailed records for one locale in Appalachia (a micro-level approach), as opposed to a broader use of records covering the entire mountain region (a macro-level approach). One theory or approach is not necessarily better than the other. Similarly, one historian’s answer is not necessarily “right” and the other’s “wrong.” The issue of stereotypes and Appalachia is so complex that one should expect that it would take many different approaches to understand the subject. When wrestling with questions and theories, one must use one’s own brain critically and analytically to come to an informed conclusion. Doing so will avoid the lazy thinking that gave rise to the stereotypes in the first place.

  To understand the stereotype’s origins is hard enough, but to understand the persistence and popularity of these stereotypes may be even more difficult. Consider the following ideas as tools to dissect the images of Appalachia that pervade American culture. Keep in mind that for any given situation, several forces probably are at work concurrently.

  First, the image of Appalachia can mean just about anything. The image of the hillbilly, for example, has remained largely unchanged over the past 150 years, which is remarkable given the political, economic, social, and cultural changes in the United States over that same time period. Anthony Harkins attributes the image’s amazing staying power to its ability to evolve in response to the changes in American society. “The key to the ‘hillbilly’s’ ubiquity and endurance . . . has been the fundamental ambiguity of the meaning of this term and image. In its many manifestations, ‘hillbilly’ has been used both in national media representations and by thousands of Americans within and outside of the Southern mountains to both uphold and challenge the dominant trends of twentieth-century American life— urbanization, the growing dominance of technology, and the resulting routinization of American life.” Harkins sees the hillbilly stereotype as a “continually negotiated mythic space through which modern Americans have attempted to define themselves and their national identity and to reconcile the past and the present.”24

  For example, from the 1920s to the 1940s, country music in general, and the hillbilly image in particular, became very popular. However, the meaning of the image varied greatly. Radio promoters such as George D. Hay and John Lair took a direct and active role in shaping the musicians’ public presentation, even changing the names of groups (for example, from “Dr. Humphrey Bate and His Augmented Orchestra” to “Dr. Bate’s Possum Hunters”) and requiring publicity photos to be shot in cornfields or in front of barns. Although Hay and Lair later wrote that they refused to use the term hillbilly because they considered it derogatory, their actions created “a rural country image that helped legitimize both the use of the term and a humorous rustic conception of mountain folk and country musicians.”25 The image could mean different things to different people in different places at different times in the nation’s history. Such flexibility and adaptability promised this stereotype a long life.

  Second, some argue that the images are so popular because people use them for profit. According to Kathleen Blee and Dwight Billings, “Outdoor dramatizations of the Hatfields and McCoys and John Fox Jr.’s Trail of the Lonesome Pine, for example, have been performed now in West Virginia and Virginia for roughly twenty-five years.”26 Similarly, Chris Burritt of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution reported, “Here along Blackberry Creek [Kentucky], a spot of rugged beauty with a murderous past, descendants of the Hatfields and the McCoys are plotting a killing of a different sort. Gathering this weekend [June 10, 2000] for a big family reunion, they hope to parlay an accurate telling of the bloody legend into tourism dollars for this hardscrabble patch of Appalachia.” Given the decline in coalmining—a loss of more than half of Kentucky’s coalmining jobs since 1990—planners sought to attract tourism dollars by building a Hatfield and McCoy museum, erecting highway markers, and organizing a Hatfield-McCoy festival. According to Ron McCoy, the organizer of the reunion, “We think the notoriety of the Hatfield-McCoy feud is a draw that the area has not capitalized on. It is so recognizable that a lot of people out of curiosity will come here and walk the sites.”27

  Third, some people may accept the stereotypes because by putting down someone else, they feel better about themselves. Darlene Wilson argues that with the stereotypes at the turn of the twentieth century, “white Americans wanting desperately to believe in a three-class (or more) structure could breathe a sigh of relief. ‘See,’ they could say, ‘that’s the bottom for white folks and we’re not like that at all,’ thus confirming their idealized middle-class self-positioning.”28 Middle-class white Americans needed this reassurance, Wilson argues, because they were buffeted by industrialization, urbanization, economic depressions, immigration from southern and eastern Europe, labor unrest, and reform movements. These Americans faced “crises of identity and purpose” and took legislative, economic, and social steps to “purge Americanism of any taint of otherness” and shore up the insecurities they had about the world around them and their place in it.29

  J. W. Williamson makes this point more generally. “Everyone can feel reassured about his or her own standing and about the rightness of lining up on such a scale as long as someone else is standing underneath.”30 For example, Williamson notes that the hillbilly image gained popularity in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Why? “Economic collapse, for one thing. The early 1930s forced middle-class urban Americans to consider seriously the unthinkable possibility that the whole damn shooting match of the American economic system itself was about to land them back in Rural Subsistence Hell. So Paul Webb’s hillbillies [in cartoons for Esquire magazine] were the shadow of our doubt, a nervous clowning talisman to wave off the evil of failure.”31

  Fourth, the stereotypes may be popular because they serve as a release for mainstream middle America’s fears. J. W. Williamson describes the “Womanless Wedding folk play,” which featured “the hillbilly garb and the hillbilly props—outlandish rural poverty enacted by and for small-town people,” being performed throughout Appalachia but also in states such as Florida, Ohio, and Michigan.32 From his own experience growing up in west Texas, Williamson saw men in “a raucous burlesque wedding, some of them taking men’s parts . . . but many of them starring as the women.” The comical plot

  dealt with a shotgun wedding between two clans, hillbillies of the classic cartoon guise. The bride, played by the biggest, most macho tub-belly in [town], was visibly, extravagantly pregnant. The groom, one of the smallest men in town, was forced to the altar by the bride’s pappy, who was toting a rifle and swigging from a moonshine jug. The parson was a mis-namer and a misstater, a monumentally dumb hick, so the ceremony itself was full of interruptions accompanied by general vulgar high jinks. . . . The main course and centerpiece of the evening was unembarrassed pregnancy out of wedlock.33

  Why were these shows, and by extension the stereotypes, so popular? Williamson argues that these performances “allowed us to make sport of what actually and truthfully frightened us. . . . In our world, when a pregnancy occurred outside of marriage, it was too shameful to speak of in the open. Drunks were werewolves who tore their own families apart. . . . Nobody made fun of such things because we were all too vulnerable—except in the foolshow of the Womanless Wedding. It was our safe mirror for seeing what we could not look at otherwise.”34 The writer Stephen King makes a similar argument for our desire to see horror films. “The mythic horror movie, like the sick joke, has a dirty job to do. It deliberately appeals to all that is worst in us. It is morbidity unchained, our most base instincts let free, our nastiest fantasies realized.” The films serve the purpose of “lifting a trap door in the civilized forebrain and throwing a basket of raw meat to the hungry alligators swimming around in that subterranean river beneath. Why bother? Because it keeps them from getting
out, man.”35 Williamson asks comparable questions: “Were we allowed this vent so that the hillbilly in us wouldn’t break out for real? Was the hillbilly fool part of our cosmos to keep us in line? Or was our public pageant a more innocent display to help us maintain our balance in a plainly unpredictable world?”36 Perhaps Appalachian stereotypes have remained so persistent because they speak to such deep emotional needs.

  Having discussed several tools to analyze Appalachian stereotypes, perhaps the time has come to tackle one of the most interesting examples around. Pikeville, Kentucky, celebrated its twenty-fifth annual Hillbilly Days Festival in April 2001. Begun in 1977 by local Shriners such as Howard “Dirty Ear” Stratton and “Shady” Grady Kinney to raise money for their children’s hospitals and burn centers, the festival this year brought more than 100,000 visitors into the town of 6,500, making it the state’s second largest annual gathering after the Kentucky Derby. The Shriners had created a “hillbilly degree” to recognize its members’ achievements and had designated its units as “outhouse” chapters. Activities and events included music by invited performers, an open stage, a “kiddie carnival,” the annual square dance, arts and crafts demonstrations and displays, and “the climactic event each year,” the Hillbilly Parade, where thousands of people dressed up in “hillbilly garb,” carried moonshine jugs, and wound their way through the streets of Pikeville.37