
          The Politics of Culture in an American Region
          Reviewed by Williamson, J.W.J.W. Williamson
          Vol. 6, No. 6, 1984, pp. 23-24
          
          All That Is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in
an American Region by David E. Whisnant. University of North
Carolina Press, 1983. 340 pp.
          The first time I ever laid eyes on David Whisnant was at a big
conference in the mountains called "Toward 1984: The Future of
Appalachia," and he was making like the Prophet Amos even then. That
was in 1974. He stood up in the concluding plenary session, conducted
by "the Goals and Objectives Committee" of the conference, and told
all those industry and government and think-tank types what he thought
of their agenda for Appalachia. He didn'd want nothing those guys had
to offer, no way they could preach it or talk it. Well, he slowed them
down, but he didn't stop .hem. They went ahead and adopted their
"Goals and Objectives" for Southern Appalachia, one of which read--
          
            3. Educational institutions in Appalachia must relate more
consciously to the mountain experience. They must include a concern
for the rich historical and cultural heritage of the region, an
awareness of the relationship between human beings and their land, and
of the alternatives for the future and for the human values
involved.
          
          Nice liberal-sounding words. So what's so wrong with pasting this
humanistic veneer of culture-salvation on top of your run-of-the-mill
three-day conference?
          One of the things wrong with it was that the people writing this
agenda for saving mountain culture were also simultaneously in the
service of the coal industry, the power industry, the petroleum
industry, the land-development industry, the railroading industry, the
steel industry, and the-ahem--higher education industry--all in their
way and in their time exploitive of the place and the people. This
iron y is also at the core of Whisnant's new book, All That Is
Native and Fine. What happens when agents of the dominant
American, mainstream, middle-class, industrial society get it in their
heads that they ought to help mountain people? What happened at
Hindman Settlement School from the 1890's on? What happened at the
White Top Folk Festival in Virginia during the 1930's? What happened,
even, when as intelligent and wise a woman as Olive Dame Campbell
decided to start a folk school in the North Carolina mountains? All
basically liberal, benevolent "interventions" for the sake of doing
good. But Whisnant's attitude toward them is the attitude the Prophet
Amos toward hypocrites of his own day--"Take thou away from me the
noise of thy songs; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols. But
let judgment run down as waters and righteousness as a mighty
stream."
          In other words, All That Is Native and Fine is a
tough book. It needles the reader with a profoundly disturbing vision
of do-gooders doing mainly harm (or "young ladies with weak eyes and
young men with weak chins. . . offering cocoa and sponge cakes as a
sort of dessert to the factory system," as one critic of settlement
workers called them). Ironies and paradoxes breed in this book like
mayflies on a humid night. For example. Olive Dame Campbell founded
the John C. Campbell Folk School (named for her dead husband) on a
rather naive and romantic notion that Appalachia in the early 1920's
was still an "isolated, preindustrial, premercantile society," but
Whisnant sets that notion against some sobering reality:
          
            By 1925, however, even rural Cherokee and Clay counties were
neither preindustrial nor premercantile. The local weekly newspaper
regularly cataloged the arrival of mass culture in the late 1920's: a
traveling tent show was competing for an audience with "The 

Thief of
Baghdad" (starring Douglas Fairbanks) at the Bonita Theater; an
eight-story hotel was rising on Murphy's main street; Parker's Drug
Store was installing a jukebox; private power companies were damming
the Hiwasee River to run the electric refrigerators advertised
alongside Fords, Whippets, and Hupmobiles. At the time the folk school
opened, the other big news stories locally were the opening of the
Appalachia Scenic High way from Atlanta to Asheville (via Murphy) and
early plans for the formation of the Great Smoky Mountains National
Park. Fly the spring of 1927 an automobile raced to Asheville in two
hours, thirty-nine minutes--nearly fifty miles an hour. The annual
Cherokee County Singing Convention, organized in 1894, was still
drawing as many as fifteen hundred people in 1925, but the old ways
were clearly dying
          
          That paragraph alone is worth the price of the book.
          Whisnant's most concise statement of doctrine is this: intervention
in a "culture" for whatever reasons is usually wrongheaded because
"the 'culture' that is perceived by the intervenor (even before the
act of intervention) is rarely congruent with the culture that is
actually there. It is a selection, an arrangement, an accommodation to
preconceptions--whether of mountaineers, or Indians, or Georgia
blacks, or Scotch Highlanders. Thus the culture that is 'preserved' or
'revived' is a hybrid at best"--mountain people taught crafts and
songs and dances that they ought to know and which they would have
known if only they had had the good sense to be educated at, say,
Vassar.
          So what about the nice little ladies and the kindly gentlemen with
big box cameras in their portmanteaus, all the ones who are unaware of
the larger ironies of their undertakings--their interventions--in the
mountains? Can't we give them a break and say it's all right what they
did, so long as they thought they were doing good? Well, no. Whisnant
is a stern judge; "Rescuing" or 'preserving' or 'reviving' a sanitized
version of culture frequently makes for rather shallow liberal
commitment: it allows a prepared consensus on the 'value' of
preservation or revival, its affirmations lie comfortably within the
bounds of conventional secular piety; it makes minimal demands upon
financial (or other) resources; and it involves little risk of
opposition from vested economic or political interests. It is, in a
word, the cheapest and safest way to go." Woe to them that are at ease
in Zion!
          Whisnant is careful not to offer comments on other culture-saving
ventures of more recent vintage. On his three case studies, his
research is exhaustive, and he doesn't gallop beyond his research to
phenomena like Foxfire, for example. But the message seems pretty
clear if implicit: what they did then they're still doing now, only
their technology is better and sometimes their funding. People still
come to the mountains and see what they want to see: cabins in the
laurel and all that stuff. They don't notice the plain truth--for
instance, that the most ubiquitous feature on the Appalachian
landscape right now is the satellite dish--and they certainly haven't
begun to deal with the reality of what that means. Whisnant says that
the cultural objects, styles, and practices introduced by the little
ladies and kindly gentlemen--the "intervenors"--have a nasty habit of
taking on a life of their own, get imbedded in too many people's minds
as examples of what life in this region is all about, and then those
false notions become the basis for public policy--governments at all
levels deciding to do for and do to mountain people on the basis of a
profoundly warped understanding of who those people are and what
motivates them. That is the evil that comes from trying to save
someone else's "culture," and those are the dangerous "politics" of
Whisnant's sub-title.
          This is a sobering book. It needs study by a great host of "culture
workers," inside these mountains and out.
          
            J.W. Williamson is editor of the Appalachian
Journal.
          
        