Vance drags the Obama family into discussions and sets them against poor white Appalachians. In his interview with Ezra Klein, he noted, “One of the points I tried to make is that if you’re asking the son of a West Virginia coal miner to check his privilege or to appreciate ways that, say, Barack Obama’s daughters are going to be privileged or underprivileged relative in certain ways, I think you’re asking too much from basic cognition,” echoing the blog post comments he cites in Elegy. It is telling how infrequently individuals who are both Black and Appalachian appear in his remarks. While bemoaning our basic cognition, he takes liberties with his own by refusing to acknowledge that not all West Virginians or coal miners are white.
Is it true that white Appalachians share a common Scots-Irish heritage and does this heritage inform our social position in the modern world? The answer to both questions is an emphatic “no.” Apart from myths and legends, there is no basis for the belief that historic or contemporary white Appalachians share a distinct culture informed by their homogenous ethnic heritage. In fact, fighting that myth has been the life’s work of many Appalachian historians.
The myth that Vance draws upon, borrowed from American Nations, Born Fighting, and other popular histories, often goes something like this. Once upon a time, during some indeterminate period usually in the eighteenth century, white people who weren’t pilgrims came to America. Those of Irish or Scottish origins were attracted to the eastern mountains because mountains were in their blood or some other romantic nonsense. These groups settled there and became the Scots-Irish.
The mountains, in turn, provided powerful insulation against the forces of the modern world and allowed the Scots-Irish to retain “old world” characteristics such as a clannish or tribal family structure, peculiar forms of speech, and the general traits of an “honor” or “warrior” culture that included a propensity for violence and feuding. Over time, this shared heritage became the presumed basis for certain ethnocultural deficiencies due to over-and interbreeding.
The work of modern Appalachian historian Wilma Dunaway provides a sharp corrective to the myth, which she calls the “ethnic homogeneity thesis.” Her scholarly work is filled with insight, drawn from primary sources of the Appalachian frontier and archaeological evidence, that eighteenth-century Appalachia was a fusion of a variety of European ethnic groups and other groups that reflected African and indigenous descent.
Archaeologists also address this myth in their work. Audrey Horning writes in her work on migration, “The southern upland region attracted settlers not only from the British borderlands… but from all over North American colonial regions as well as from France, the Palatinate and West Africa, while later drawing from eastern and southern Europe.”
Scots-Irish heritage is real, but the exaggerated dominance of its influence in the region is often put into the service of a variety of outcomes. In the early twentieth century, reformers utilized the belief that Appalachians were of “pioneer stock” in the application of a new social order that sought to curb the influence of “undesirable” people and modernize the nation.
HOLLOW FOLK
“They didn’t want something that looked good. They wanted to show the worst side. They took pictures. Well, you’ve seen them. I know why they do it. You see, movies are made about the South. They’ll be hillbillies and the rough people of the South, when you see the movies. And, well, people outside the South were viewing this community here. If it had been all spic and span and beautiful buildings, well, it wouldn’t have been interesting to anybody.”
This quote comes from a man who was interviewed by historians in the 1970s. He’s describing a photograph taken by Lewis Hine of a school that he and my great-grandfather attended. My maternal great-grandfather was born in Loyston, Tennessee, in 1896. In the 1930s, Hine accepted a commission from the federal government to photograph Loyston residents before the government seized the land to facilitate the construction of rural development projects. The 1920s and 1930s became a critical decade in the construction of the “mountain white,” a peculiar specimen thought to stubbornly resist social and even genetic progress. A new class of reformers deployed both visual and graphic images of white Appalachians to demonstrate the dangers of clinging to the past in an age of what the government hoped would be unprecedented modernization.
Hine, best known for his photographs that exposed the horrors of child labor, was not the only photographer commissioned to document the poor. The government employed a fleet of photographers, many through the Farm Security Administration (FSA). This form of visual cataloging complemented the agency’s aim to resettle individuals living on “sub-marginal” land as part of a larger New Deal effort to modernize America. The government justified its actions in the name of progress and leveraged the consolidated power of the federal government to modernize the rural poor by force if necessary.
Hine worked directly for the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), an agency best known for creating government-owned power generating facilities. Most of Loyston proper is now at the bottom of a man-made lake—sometimes called the Loyston Sea—created by the TVA’s Norris Dam project in 1936. My great-grandfather’s land, however, was not submerged. Finding itself with surplus land, the government transferred ownership to the state of Tennessee for the creation of a state park at the site of the new lake. This was consistent with the government’s broad aim to put sub-marginal land into the service of the public good.
The problem, of course, was that the government had the sole authority to determine the definition of “sub-marginal.” Many residents, like the farmer quoted above, believed that the government, through selective photographic documentation and biased sociological studies, intentionally created a narrative that suited its purpose. My family was fortunate. Rural developers, photographers, and a new class of sociologists found them uninteresting on the whole and they simply relocated, without the promised assistance, to a community several miles away. Beyond Tennessee, some families met a much darker fate.
The FSA’s fleet of photographers produced social documentation of enormous cultural significance. We are all familiar, for example, with Dorothea Lange’s photographs of dust bowl migrants, and many brilliant photographers honed their skills with the FSA. Gordon Parks, a magnetic African American photographer, credited it with forcing him to “take a hard look backward at black history; to realize the burdens of those who had lived through it.” This experience, Parks remarked, made him “much better prepared to face up to that history yet to be made.”
Several of the subjects of FSA photographs became symbolic of their particular historical moment. Lange’s “migrant mother,” Florence Owens Thompson, became a visual representation of the strength of motherhood in the wake of enormous social upheaval. The African American cleaner, Ella Watson, the subject of Parks’s American Gothic, became a symbolic representation of the unequal treatment of Black Americans during an age of progress.
Less is known about the subjects of Arthur Rothstein’s first assignment with the FSA. Rothstein would later become a prolific photographer with tenures at Look and Parade magazines, but in 1936 he was twenty-one years old and among the first photographers sent on assignment by Roy Stryker, the head of the FSA’s photographic unit. Rothstein’s assignment was to document families living in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, soon-to-be-evicted for the construction of a new national park.
Momentum to establish a national park in the area had existed for some time. The government authorized Shenandoah National Park in 1926, much to the enthusiasm of local Virginian businessmen and politicians, but progress on construction moved slowly because approximately five hundred families lived at the designated site. The state began to slowly acquire the necessary land through eminent domain, and in 1928, Virginia passed the Blanket Condemnation Act, which streamlined the state’s acquisition of the 200,000 acres slated to become national park land.
Much like projects in the Tennessee Valley, the government framed the reloca
tion of farmers as a benevolent process that would move residents geographically, but also temporally, from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. As you might imagine, then, expert opinion that confirmed this perception was in high demand.
The passage of the Condemnation Act brought many strangers with cameras to the Shenandoah Valley. Surveyors, social workers, academics, doctors, and photographers arrived to assess the residents and initiate the eviction process. In 1933, journalist Thomas Henry and University of Chicago sociologist Mandel Sherman released Hollow Folk, a book that purported to be a sociological study of the very people the government aimed to displace.
Their work largely follows a pattern of casting mountaineers as a primitive, isolated, and backwards people with a homogenous white ethnic identity and monoculture degraded through idleness and inbreeding. They write, “Social evolution presumably still goes on but so slowly do groups go forward under their own power that no movement can be discerned through generations.” These less evolved individuals, the experts argued, could only be saved through the intervention of outsiders.
Henry and Sherman were assisted by the state’s social workers, who helped them order the residents of the Shenandoah Valley into discrete geographical family units—the “hollows” of Hollow Folk—which they then scaled from most evolved to least evolved. They designated “Colvin Hollow,” their quasi-fictitious name for Corbin Hollow, as the least evolved and most degraded.
Henry and Sherman, with no small amount of assistance from area social worker Miriam Sizer, described the residents of Colvin Hollow as living in primitive squalor, subsisting on a diet of weeds and small vermin, and overrun with illegitimate children. According to the two writers, these individuals knew little of the “outside world” and did not include in their basic vocabulary more modern words like “post office.”
The ghosts of Henry and Sherman would like you to know that they were not eugenicists. That really doesn’t matter, however, because eugenicists loved their work, filled as it was with lurid descriptions of white mountaineers’ degraded “pioneer stock.” Virginia was already at the forefront of the American eugenics movement thanks to the efforts of the Eugenics Records Office in Cold Spring Harbor, New York. The New York collective helped Virginia’s politicians draft sterilization and racial integrity laws. In 1927 the fruits of their labor blossomed when the infamous Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell effectively legalized compulsory eugenic sterilization nationwide, which was practiced in Virginia until 1979.
According to Charles Davenport, the director of the Eugenics Record Office, Virginia’s mountains were filled with mongrels of “a combination of the worst traits, a badly put together people.” Many individuals thought to fit that description, like Carrie Buck, ended up at the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, where they were sterilized to, in the words of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, “prevent our being swamped with incompetence.”
Into this environment stepped Arthur Rothstein, objective documentarian. Or was he? In 2011, Rothstein’s work in the Shenandoah Valley became the subject of Richard Knox Robinson’s film Rothstein’s First Assignment. Robinson, himself a photographer, saw in Rothstein’s photographs striking parallels to the narrative embedded in Hollow Folk. Rothstein extensively photographed, for example, the residents of “Colvin Hollow,” including the mother of four illegitimate children who so captivated Hollow Folk’s authors.
Robinson suggests it was as if Rothstein used descriptions of subjects in Hollow Folk to guide his photographic eye, a not-unlikely crutch for a new photographer to use. Ignoring the presence and evictions of more “modern” residents who owned gas stations and restaurants, Rothstein delivered a photographic portfolio that shored up a narrative of the Shenandoah Valley as a place forgotten by time and progress.
Curiously, the mountaineers identified by both Rothstein and the authors of Hollow Folk as the most degenerate lived in the area of the Shenandoah Valley closest to developed areas of the future national park, where wealthy businessmen hoped to accelerate evictions to begin the expansion and new construction of vacation resorts. Many of them even worked at the Skyland Resort, which hoped to offer luxury accommodation to visitors of the new park.
What became of these mountaineers following their evictions was not widely known until Robinson set his documentary in motion. Although the government successfully relocated some mountaineers, others were destined for the Colony. This process appears to have begun during the writing of Hollow Folk, during which time the authors had frequent contact with area physicians and social workers.
Roy Sexton, an area doctor, wrote to Horace Albright, the Director of the National Park Service, “After the survey is done, we’ll Colonize the worst of the bunch”—a sinister play on the eugenics institution’s abbreviated name. Robinson found that the state authorized the institutionalization of at least eleven members of the family that populated “Colvin Hollow” at the Colony, nine of them children. Rothstein was present when social workers took two children away for institutionalization, photographing them just days prior.
In the early 1990s, the National Park Service funded a series of archaeological studies of the Shenandoah Valley. One focused on the settlement sites vacated by evicted residents. In Corbin Hollow, archaeologists found mass-produced furniture and toys, modern medicines, records, specialized farm equipment, shoes, an assortment of diningware, and even an automobile.
The most moving discovery, to me, was a Maxfield Parrish calendar for 1931. Parrish was a particularly striking illustrator known for his modern and vibrant colors, who often incorporated innovative drawing techniques to give his illustrations a three-dimensional feel. He was, in other words, an artist of his time, and the residents of Corbin Hollow decorated their home with his art because, contrary to belief, they were people of their time as well.
And with that we have our first example of the strange bond between up-and-comers on the Appalachia circuit and salivating eugenicists. And it will keep happening. Kelli Haywood, the Public Affairs Director of Whitesburg, Kentucky, radio station WMMT, recently argued that people in Appalachia dislike J.D. Vance because he “airs our dirty laundry.” For me, this couldn’t be further from the truth. I don’t dislike Vance because I get embarrassed when he talks about “hillbilly culture.” I dislike him because I think about children stolen from their parents. I think about white nationalist flyers that proclaim, “Appalachia is white, Scots-Irish, proud.”
But the combination of dirty laundry and Whitesburg makes a nice set up for the next section, where we’ll meet Vance’s predecessor, Harry Caudill, a genteel lawyer from Whitesburg who showed the problems of Appalachia to the world and ultimately came to advocate for very disturbing solutions to them.
THE (RE) DISCOVERY OF APPALACHIA
Before 2016, the last time the nation took such an obsessive interest in West Virginia’s politics was in 1960, when John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey did battle during the state’s Democratic primary. Kennedy had had a promising but unconvincing first primary result in Wisconsin in April—his win came courtesy of the state’s substantial Catholic population—and West Virginia was next.
Kennedy campaigned throughout the entire state and by most accounts developed a genuine attachment to the people there, whom he often commended for their resilience in the face of economic distress. The people of West Virginia, in turn, awarded Kennedy with a victory in the state’s primary. His win in a state with a small Catholic population helped convince the Democratic establishment that he could be a viable presidential candidate and the rest, as they say, is history.
Images captured during Kennedy’s presidential campaign stops in West Virginia left an enduring impression on the nation. As Ronald Eller writes, “Kennedy’s visible alarm at the conditions of the Mountain State and the attention given to economic issues in the presidential campaign lured dozens of journalists in the months that followed the election. Stories of human tragedy, personal struggle,
cruel injustice, and heroic perseverance abounded in Appalachia and provided grist for a growing media mill of articles about poverty in America.”
In August 1960, Julius Duscha wrote in the Washington Post, “Much of the Southern Appalachians is as underdeveloped, when compared with the affluence of the rest of the nation, as the newly independent countries of Africa.” His essay, “A Long Trail of Misery Winds the Proud Hills,” hinted at what would become a decidedly Cold War-era twist on long-standing narratives of Appalachian otherness: Appalachia as a third world within the heart of America.
This twist applied a particular post-war logic to the problems of Appalachia. If America was willing, this logic implied, to use its abundant wealth to help develop African countries striking out from their colonial pasts, then shouldn’t it apply the same effort and offer the same assistance to poor Appalachians at home? The myth of Appalachia as homogenous and white went far in capturing the attention of the nation. Photographers, journalists, and reformers stuck closely to this myth in capturing stories of an “other America” that would help fuel what would become the nation’s War on Poverty.
Into this moment came Kentucky writer and attorney Harry Caudill, a born and bred Appalachian spokesperson who had a storied career as the voice of a misunderstood region. In 1967, Caudill helped prosecute Hobart Ison for the murder of Hugh O’Connor, but in the early 1960s, he was at work on his exposé of coal mining, which he first published in 1962 in the Atlantic with the provocative title “The Rape of the Appalachians.”
Strip mining—the excavation of coal through the surface of soil and rock rather than via subterranean means—had recently become an established method of extraction in eastern Kentucky. This had resulted in broad changes to the landscape and labor practices in coal communities. Environmental destruction became more rampant. Strip mining also required fewer miners, which led to widespread unemployment. Communities and landowners attempted to curb this practice through the courts, arguing that strip mining was an “unusual and wholly unforeseen method” of extraction inconsistent with the terms of existing coal leases. The courts sided with coal companies, and Caudill went on the warpath.
What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia Page 7