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

Fred W. Morrison Series in Southern Studies

by David E. Whisnant

In the American imagination, the word Appalachia designates more than a geographical region. It evokes fiddle tunes, patchwork quilts, split-rail fences, and all the other artifacts that decorate a cherished romantic region of the American mind. David Whisnant challenges this view of Appalachia (and consequently this broader imaginitive tendency) by exploring connections between a comforting cultural myth and the troublesome complexities of cultural history. Looking at the work of some ballad hunters and collectors, handicraft revivalists, folk festival promoters, and other cultural missionaries, Whisnant discovers a process of intentional and systematic cultural intervention that had (and still has) far-reaching consequences. Why, Whisnant asks, did so many Bluegrass ladies and upper-class graduates of Seven Sisters colleges rush to erect cultural breakwaters around mountaineers? Why would a sophisticated New England woman build a Danish folk school in western North Carolina? Why did a classical musician from Richmond who hated blacks love southern mountain music? How did the notions and actions of all these cultural missionaries affect the lives of the mountaineers? And what do these episodes of intervention teach us about culture and cultural change--in Appalachia and elsewhere? Whisnant pursues these and other questions in closely documented case studies of the Hindman Settlement School in eastern Kentucky, the cultural work of Olive Dame Campbell throughout the mountains, and the White Top Folk Festival on the Virginia-North Carolina border. Moreover, he relates them to broader social and economic developments of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the comingof the railroads and the opening of the mines, the Depression, the advent of TVA, and more diffuse processes such as urbanization, the decline of agriculture, the movement of radio and the commercial recording industry into the mountains, and the implicit restrictions Victorian America placed on the political perspectives and activities of socially conscious upper-class women. We must begin to understand the politics of culture, Whisnant writes, especially the role of formal institutions and foreceful individuals in defining and shaping perspectives, values, tastes and agendas for cultural change. All That Is Native and Fine opens the way not only to a reexamination of the history of a single region but also to a more sophisticated understanding of the dynamics of cultural continuity and change in other regions and in the nation as a whole.

Genres: Folklore, History, Nonfiction

355 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1981

Reviews

[Jud Barry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whisnant examines the "politics of culture" as they played out in three case studies: the Hindman Settlement School in eastern Kentucky; Olive Dame Campbell's career, particularly the founding and operation of the John C. Campbell Folk School in southwestern North Carolina; and the White Top Festival held during the 1930's on Virginia's second-highest mountain.

The most positive portrait is Campbell's -- Whisnant grants her effectiveness and sensitivity as a ballad collector -- but her use of Danish models beyond the format for the school itself (weaving designs/materials, dances, music, e.g. recorders) betrays more than a little artificiality, while her unwillingness to engage the political system limited the school from having any deep, lasting impact on those it was most intended to help. Her greatest continuing impact seems to have been the formation of the Southern Highland Handicraft Guild, which went on to shape and condition the artifactual output that came to define the nation's understanding of "folk" cultural expression in the region.

Of the folk school recreation program designed and exported by the folk school to public schools, Whisnant writes, "By the mid-1940s the folk school recreation programs was sufficiently developed to draw a grant from the General Education Board to spread it and its underlying philosophy in the public schools. Converts multiplied. After a workshop led by Campbell at Hiwassee, Georgia, in 1945, a school principal (newly arrived from central Georgia) started regular sessions at his school. And a series of festivals at Rabun Gap, Georgia, in the mid-1940s became a stage for folk school culture: folk games, songs, recorder consorts, and puppet shows. Campbell … led countless sessions for schools and clubs, and most short courses at the school drew students from a dozen or more states: teachers, ministers, librarians, YMCA workers, and others. … The ripples appear to move forever: Danish singing games and sword dances; puppet shows and recorders; designer-craftsman pots and enameled copper ashtrays. Meanwhile, we are given to understand, mountaineers sit placidly in some magical living sepia-toned photograph, carving an infinite series of ducks and mad mules, oblivious to and untouched by the periodic expansions and contractions of a Rube Goldberg economic system. Culture has become not the deeply textured expression of the totality of one's life situation -- hopes, fears, values, beliefs, practices, ways of living and working, degrees of freedom and constraint -- but a timeless, soft-focused, unidimensional refuge from the harsher aspects of reality." Whisnant seems overly generous to confer any kind of organization -- even a Rube Goldberg one -- to our economic system.

Whisnant briefly examines Hindman's "promotion" of the mountain dulcimer as "a revealing long-term result of the settlement's projecting a selective version of local culture--and the dovetailing of that version with the impulse of middle-class people beyond the mountains to collect cultural artifacts from picturesque mountaineers." It was "not clear" how long the dulcimer had been in the area, but Whisnant uses Allen Eaton to confirm that it had only been since the 1870's. The school favored it as the illustrative instrument of mountain culture (disfavoring the banjo) both to sidle up to the respectable people in the community and because of its "shadowy" past and domestic, ballad- and hymn-oriented performance style better suited the "settlement women's own genteel Bluegrass" cultural preferences. The school's own public relations efforts "paved the way for the dulcimer to become established in the popular mind as the 'real' instrument of mountain people," even though the evidence of mountain instrument makers was that they sold most of their instruments to New York buyers.

It is not until the afterword that Whisnant raises and skims over a fascinating subject: that of the apparently frequent marriage of Hindman teachers into mountain society -- although at what level he does not say. By way of broaching the subject, he says, "the energies that undergird cultural intervention efforts frequently arise from and are shaped by personal needs that have little or not logical relations to the enterprise as it is publicly described and justified." He goes on to write, "In the mountains, ... one reason that Katherine Pettit had trouble keeping teachers at her settlement schools was that so many Smith and Wellesley and Vassar girls (as well as Bluegrass belles) who came to teach hillbilly boys married them. The personal (and feminist) implications of that pattern seemed important enough to [Hindman's] Lucy Furman to cause her to return to the theme again and again in her novels. The loftier theory of settlement work goes only so far in explaining motive; a major preoccupation of settlement teachers was their relationships with men and their attempts to find meaningful work in two different social orders (the mountains and either Bluegrass Kentucky or male-dominated Victorian New England) which routinely denied it to them."

[Natalie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although it was at times difficult to get through, I learned a lot from this book and thought the author's way of history-telling was easy to understand. The unfortunate attempt in the Southern Appalachian region to "modernize" and the racist undertones of preserving English "culture" were described in real meticulous detail here. I didn't love reading the whole section on folk music, but I understood how it related.

[S.G. Benson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dry and pretentious, but raised some good points.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although I'm a Marxist reader, Whisnant's argument is too dismissive of cultural approaches to Appalachian studies. He seems to argue that there is no Appalachia--it's all in people's heads because it's "JUST" a cultural construction. HELLO???? Are there any identities that are NOT "just" cultural constructions??? That part of his argument is baloney. Still, his examination of how Appalachian identity has been influenced and manipulated by missionaries, capitalists, eugenicists, labor organizers, War on Poverty warriors, etc., is a necessary correction to overly romantic approaches to Appalachian identity.

[Shaun · Rating 4 out of 5]

David Whisnant’s All that is native & fine is an insightful, thorough, and delightfully readable investigation into the “politics of culture” at play in the “systematic cultural intervention[s]” carried out by culture workers in early 20th century Appalachia. Using three case studies, the author reveals the many ways in which well-meaning interventions relied upon romantic, ethnocentric, and socio-culturally selective visions of “traditional folk culture” that resulted in the “rescue,” “preservation,” or “reviving” of a sanitized version of culture that was “hybrid at best” and a racist, nativist invention at worst.

[Brent · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whisnant's critique of the politics of culture affected me mightily. The telling of three efforts in the folk culture field points out the real effects of cultural work.