The Social Life of Poetry: Appalachia, Race, and Radical Modernism (Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics)

The Social Life of Poetry

Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics promotes and pursues topics in the burgeoning field of twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetics. Critical and scholarly work on poetry and poetics of interest to the series includes social location in its relationships to subjectivity, to the construction of authorship, to oeuvres, and to careers; poetic reception and dissemination (groups, movements, formations, institutions); the intersection of poetry and theory; questions about language, poetic authority, and the goals of writing; claims in poetics, impacts of social life, and the dynamics of the poetic career as these are staged and debated by poets and inside poems. Topics that are bibliographic, pedagogic, that concern the social field of poetry, and reflect on the history of poetry studies are valued as well. This series focuses both on individual poets and texts and on larger movements, poetic institutions, and questions about poetic authority, social identifications, and aesthetics.

Language and the Renewal of Society in Walt Whitman, Laura (Riding) Jackson, and Charles Olson: The American Cratylus By Carla Billitteri Modernism and Poetic Inspiration: The Shadow Mouth By Jed Rasula The Social Life of Poetry: Appalachia, Race, and Radical Modernism By Chris Green Also by Chris Green Radicalism in the South since Reconstruction (co-editor, 2006) Coal: A Poetry Anthology (editor, 2006)

The Social Life of Poetry Appalachia, Race, and Radical Modernism Chris Green

THE SOCIAL LIFE OF POETRY

Copyright © Chris Green, 2009. All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–61093–4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Green, Chris, 1968– The social life of poetry : Appalachia, race, and radical modernism / Chris Green. p. cm.—(Modern and contemporary poetry and poetics) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–61093–4 ISBN-10: 0–230–61093–5 1. American poetry—20th century—History and criticism. 2. American poetry—Appalachian Region—History and criticism. 3. European Americans—Race identity. 4. Whites—Race identity— United States. 5. Cultural pluralism—United States—History. 6. United States—Race relations. 7. Modernism (Literature)— United States. I. Title. PS323.5G735 2009 813'.509974—dc22

2009023756

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: December 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

For Jenny Hobson

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Contents

List of Illustrations Series Editor’s Foreword Acknowledgments Permissions

ix xi xiii xv

Introduction

1

Part I Appalachia, Race, and Pluralism Chapter 1 Evangelizing an Anglo Equality (1883–1908) Chapter 2 New York City’s Cultural Pluralists (1906–1930) Chapter 3 Reactionary Regionalism versus Critical Quarterlies (1925–1945)

Part II

17 41 69

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Chapter 4 Racing the Land with Jesse Stuart’s Man with a Bull-Tongue Plow (1934) Chapter 5 “Authentic Folk Feeling” in James Still’s Hounds on the Mountain (1937) Chapter 6 Rebinding “The Book of the Dead” into Muriel Rukeyser’s U.S. 1 (1938)

97 125 161

Chapter 7 The Tight Rope of Democracy and Don West’s Clods of Southern Earth (1946)

199

Notes Bibliography Index

231 237 261

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Illustrations

Figures I.1

The Social Life of Poetry

6

4.1

Front Cover of Man With a Bull-Tongue Plow

98

4.2

Page 348, Poems #677 and #678, Man With a Bull-Tongue Plow

112

4.3

Distribution of Lines-per-Poem in MWBTP

121

5.1

Front Cover of Hounds on the Mountain

126

5.2

Page 55, “Heritage,” Hounds on the Mountain

141

6.1

Front Cover of U.S. 1

162

6.2

Page 27, “Absalom,” U.S. 1

178

7.1

Front Cover of Clods of Southern Earth

200

7.2

Page 28, “What Shall a Poet Sing,” Clods of Southern Earth

201

Tables 2.1 6.1

New York Jewish Literary Publishers and Editors, 1900–1950 Structure of U.S. 1.

44 168

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Series Editor’s Foreword

T

he Social Life of Poetry concerns the multiple dimensions and uses of U.S. poetry; it is a work contributing to our knowledge of cultural pluralism and regional diversity. Chris Green has made a model archival, textual, institutional, and cultural study of four books of progressive poetry coming from and standing with Appalachia—works of the 1930s and 1940s by West, Stuart, Still, and Rukeyser. Green offers the socially and politically textured story of a richly articulated circuit from production to dissemination/circulation and then to conditions of reception, at every step weighing motives, goals, contexts, and agents, and with acute scrutiny evaluating poetry’s uses, applications, interventions in this region and beyond. Looking at socially active groups, the ideology of cultural pluralism and its defenders, educational institutions with high regional stakes, individual poetic producers, publishers involved in the marketing of mountain writing, and critics and commentators interpreting texts for a variety of social goals—Green’s book illuminates the intermeshing of their resources, politics, and hopes. The book reads the network of motives and outcomes with a great sense of their intricacy, treating white ethnic and African American communities in Appalachia and Jewish and progressive communities in New York and elsewhere. Green views regionalist activist poetry as a mode of cultural intervention. This methodologically acute work of literary criticism in the mode of cultural studies examines a specific historical moment in which poetry became a mode of social explanation, educational enrichment, and local engagement. R B DP

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Acknowledgments

D

rawing together insights from my work as a poet, a teacher of poetry (to people of all ages), an editor, a reviewer, a scholar, and a theorist, this book is the result of a single inquiry I made as a young Kentuckian in 1985: Where do I live and how does poetry live here? Foremost, I extend deep appreciation to Dale Bauer whose belief, direction, laughter, and wherewithal allowed me to pursue that inquiry while working on my dissertation. I thank her for all she has done to make room for world-loving scholarship in the academy. For aid in developing the manuscript, I extend thanks to Janet Badia, Edwina Pendarvis, Jim Gifford, Erin Kazee, Susan Barnett, Thomas De Pietro, John Young, Lachlan Whalen, Even G. Ward, Jim Lorence, Rachel Rubin, Jeff Biggers, James Smethurst, Janet Eldred, and Gordon Hutner. For their help in chasing down material I could not otherwise reach, I thank Kimmerle Green, Thomas DePietro, and Craig Hobson. And for his work in making Marshall University’s English department the place that I was able (and wanted) to write this book, I extend my deep gratitude to David Hatfield. For their endless, blessed work, I extend appreciations to the ILL librarians at the University of Kentucky (2002–2004) and Marshall University (Fall 2004–Spring 2009), without whom this work could not have been done. I also thank Ann Salter, head librarian at Oglethorpe University, who opened up new parts of the college archives at my asking. And I heap thanks upon Donna Baker, head of special collections, at Morehead State University for her aid in my work with images of James Still’s book and for her work with Still’s and Stuart’s archives, for which she is a hero. For their grounding and guidance in Appalachian studies, I recognize Dwight Billings (whom can best be labeled a sage), Herb Reid, Shaunna Scott, Gurney Norman (whom we dare not label), and the entire Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative (past, present, and future).

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Acknowledgments

I hail those who taught me the literary theories upon which this book is based: Kathryn Flannery, Roger Mitchell, Linda Charnes, Leon Lewis, and all the many little magazines and small presses (and poets and editors) that I’ve worked with over the last twenty years. For their absolutely essential support in terms of time and money, I thank the Marshall University Graduate Council and College of Liberal Arts, the University of Kentucky Graduate School, and the Gaines Center for the Humanities (where it all started). I also received critical financial assistance to complete the manuscript from the West Virginia Humanities Council, a state program of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Parts of this book have appeared in the following sources, and I am thankful for their permission to reprint: “Headwaters: The Early Poetics of James Still, Don West, and Jesse Stuart.” James Still: Critical Essays on the Dean of Appalachian Literature. Eds. Ted Olson and Kathy H. Olson. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2007. 21–39; and “The Tight Rope of Democracy: Don West’s Clods of Southern Earth.” Radicalism in the South Since Reconstruction. Eds. Chris Green, Rachel Rubin, and James Smethurst. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 97–127. Finally, appreciation goes to my parents (all six of them) for their love and patience, to my two children (Eleanor and Paul, whose tongues and hearts are West Virginian), and to my wife Jenny Hobson (whose attention has helped to shape every word in this book and in my heart).

Permissions

I also wish to thank the following for their permission to reprint selected material: Abraham Lincoln Library and Museum, Lincoln Memorial University, Harrogate, Tennessee for permission to use selections from the LMU archives. Berea College Archives, Berea College, for permission to use selections from the William Goodell Frost Papers. George C. Mitchell Department of Special Collections and Archives, Bowdoin College Library, for permission to use selections from the O. O. Howard Papers. Linda McCarthy, for permission to reproduce the front cover of Clods of Southern Earth (Boni & Gaer, 1946); page 28 (“What Shall a Poet Sing”); and poetry by Don West. The Jesse Stuart Foundation, for permission to reproduce the front cover of Man with a Bull-Tongue Plow (E. P. Dutton, 1934); page 348 (poems #677 and #678); and poetry by Jesse Stuart. Teresa Reynolds, for permission to reproduce the front cover of Hounds on the Mountain (Viking, 1937); page 55 (“Heritage); and poetry by James Still. William Rukeyser, for permission to reproduce the front cover of Muriel Rukeyser’s U.S. 1 (Covici·Friede, 1938); page 27 (“Absalom”); and poetry by Muriel Rukeyser.

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Introduction

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his book reveals the role Appalachia played in America’s racial discourse during the modern era. To do so, it examines how that discourse shaped and was shaped by the people who wrote, published, and read four books of poetry about Appalachia. To set the stage upon which the books operated, part one (1883–1935) studies how three groups came together, strategized, and sought to affect Appalachian and pluralist discourse: evangelical neo-abolitionists who developed higher education for African Americans and Appalachians (1883–1910); progressive publishers and professors in New York City who forwarded the idea of cultural pluralism (1906–1935); and Southern academics and writers who contended over the relations between culture and industry (1925–1935). Part two (1934–1948) follows the social life of four books of poetry about Appalachia: Jesse Stuart’s Man with a Bull Tongue Plow (E. P. Dutton, 1934), James Still’s Hounds on the Mountain (Viking, 1937), Muriel Rukeyser’s U. S. 1 (Covici·Friede, 1938), and Don West’s Clods of Southern Earth (Boni & Gaer, 1946). I chart and analyze the trajectory of these books from their composition and publication to their reception and influence, noting how political institutions and individuals shaped that process. In doing so, I examine encounters between value-transforming agents who belonged to four varied circuits: James Still (an outsider who wrote for an educated, liberal middle-class), Jesse Stuart (an insider who wrote for a popular, national audience), Muriel Rukeyser (an outsider who wrote for an educated, leftist audience), and Don West (an insider who wrote first for the rural workingclass). These chapters also consider the transformative relations between writer, medium, audience, and the social groups represented: each author can be seen as writing for their “folk” even if they wrote about a folk that was, most often, quite different from their audience. Indeed, the particular

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discursive roads built by these cultural circuits’ folk went in quite different directions. Appalachia’s Absence Although scholars have carefully studied industrialism, pluralism, and Appalachia, histories about ethnicity, immigration, and race in the United States fail to account for the role of mountain whites in America’s racial history. Like other racial and ethnic categories, “Appalachian” is a discursive construct with a complex history that is tied into the nation’s development; indeed, scholarship about Appalachia has carefully explored the construction, vicissitudes, and cultural work of this identity category.1 Indeed, the absence of Appalachians from scholarship on race history in America is surprising given its careful examination of the relations between a wide variety of ethnic and racial groups. While this absence is understandable in earlier multiethnic histories such as Ronald Takaki’s A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (1993), Appalachia remains a blank spot in recent scholarship on the role of whiteness. For instance, Matthew Frye Jacobson’s Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (1998), Gary Gerstle’s American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (2002), and David R. Roediger’s Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White (2005) each indexes a list of over thirty ethnic groups whose mutually defining relations the authors explore, but none mention a category that might be considered Appalachian. The absence of Appalachians in such well-conducted scholarship indicates a type of naturalized blindness about a core racial referent for white America since the Civil War. From 1870 through 1945 national magazines (such as the Atlantic) regularly ran stories about mountain whites, referring to their Anglo and Scotch Irish heritage and often juxtaposing the portraits against those of immigrants, “Negroes,” and Indians. By 1904, the Encyclopedia Americana had an article called “Appalachian America,” which “reveals most interesting survivals of the spirit, arts, and conditions of colonial times”: “The stock is mainly British, representing rural England and the Scotch-Irish, though with traces of the Huguenot and the German” (Frost). Even as the United States was “exporting” its specifically Anglo democracy to the Philippines, ideologues were showing how Anglo pioneer heritage lived in the bodies of Appalachians. In response to a tremendous surge in raw-resource extraction and a corresponding growth in local-color publication, the study of Appalachia began in the early 1900s and has gained momentum through the current day.

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In post-bellum America, interconnections between race (the new immigrants, African Americans, Anglos, etc.) and industry (commodification, levelling, resource extraction, production) manifested in a literature that came to be called local color. Local-color authors who wrote about Appalachia did so with stunning sales, as exemplified by Rebecca Harding Davis and Mary Murfree (during the rise of realism) and John Fox Jr. and James Lane Allen (during the rise of naturalism). The development of local color alongside realism and naturalism once led scholars to dismiss local color as unworthy, but in the last twenty years, scholars have demonstrated the cultural work and literary merit of local-color writers. Growing out of scholarship about domestic fiction’s cultural work in the mid-1800s, most literary scholarship on “regionalism” has thus focused on the period from 1880 to 1920.2 While privileging “known” authors such as Willa Cather, they uncover and explain other “regional” authors whose cultural work was influential (such as Sarah Orne Jewett or Charles Chesnutt). Again Appalachia is all but left out except occasional mention of Murfree and then in much more recent work.3 Nevertheless, this scholarship has given rise to a reconsideration of regionalist literature. Within the last five years, literary scholars have begun to consider regionalism as an active ideology in America between the wars, a movement documented by Robert Dorman in Revolt of the Provinces: The Regionalist Movement in America, 1920–1945 (1993). Yet these scholars struggle against the modernist canon. In one case, Tom Lutz’s Cosmopolitan Vistas: American Regionalism and Literary Value (2004) conducts readings of authors in terms of literary quality and seeks to reinstitute new-critical aesthetics over the broadening claims of cultural work so adeptly undertaken by scholars of nineteenth-century American literature. Meanwhile, Jeff Karem’s The Romance of Authenticity: The Cultural Politics of Regional and Ethnic Literatures (2004) performs an informed read of how authors and presses negotiated the discourses of authenticity via reception theory, but the first half of his book focuses upon William Faulkner and Richard Wright, while the second half focuses on more contemporary examples. Karem thus focuses less on author’s action and effect than upon how authors found themselves being affected by racial discourse that he sees as a “curse” exhibiting the flaw of essentialism that he believes “confine[d] marginal authors” (15). What Karem does not consider is essentialism’s potential as an empowering contingency. In The Predicament of Culture (1988), James Clifford highlights authenticity’s relationality: “Questionable acts of purification are involved in any attainment of a promised land, return to ‘original’ sources, or gathering up of a true tradition. Such claims to

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purity are always subverted by the need to stage authenticity in opposition to external, often dominating alternatives” (11–12; emphasis in the original). Indeed, it is just this dynamic that the cultural actors I consider played upon. Such acts support Clifford’s assertion that “authenticity is relational [and] there can be no essence except as a political, cultural intervention, a local tactic.” Even A Companion to the Regional Literatures of America (2003), which compiles thirty essays about such writing from the antebellum America through the current day, mentions only Mary Murfree as an example of writing about Appalachia in Lori Robison’s “Region and Race: National Identity and the Southern Past.” Although Robison contextualizes Appalachia in relation to post-Reconstruction racial discourse, that moment represents only a beginning. Indeed, twentieth-century Appalachian authors use literature as a primary mode of cultural action, and it is stunning that this “companion” makes no mention of writers such as Wilma Dykeman, Mary Lee Settle or Jim Wayne Miller (to name but a few), let alone the authors I address. Appalachian literature, however, has been carefully considered in the field of Appalachian studies. Like other groups who focus their critical attention on ethnicity, Appalachian studies is deeply interdisciplinary. This book might best be understood as participating within a framework that for the last thirty years has brought together academics (sociologists, historians, literary scholars, etc.), cultural creators (poets, filmmakers, quilters, etc.), activists, professionals, and citizens who are “driven by our commitment to foster quality of life, democratic participation and appreciation of Appalachian experiences regionally, nationally and internationally” (“Mission”). For the last twenty years Appalachian studies scholars have given increasing attention to race within the region and have begun to explore whiteness as well.4 Similarly, consideration of Appalachian writers now includes examination of Native American and African American authors, particularly the Affrilachian poets. But as of yet few scholars have considered the role that Appalachians have played in the development of American ethnic (and hence racial and regional) discourse. Work that has considered the relationship of Appalachia and race in America has focused on African Americans and Appalachians from Reconstruction to the turn of the century. These studies examine aspects of the racialist discourse that gave rise to the mythology of Anglo-Saxon purity in the mountains and conclude that the othering of “mountain whites” came about as a result of exploiting natural resources and as a weight to counter national anxiety about African Americans.5 To these studies I add consideration of how the same institutions that worked to uplift African Americans also did so for the Appalachians and how the supposed racial purity of the mountain whites

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was a lynchpin for Anglo nativism. Similarly, I reexamine the development of cultural pluralism as a platform on (or against) which New York publishers would take interest in Appalachian poetry. The Social Life of Poetry Taking the cue from how writers and publishers thought about their work in the 1930s, my study of poetry finds its theoretical home in Richard Johnson’s discussion of the “circuit of production, circulation, and consumption of cultural artifacts” (46), outlined in his essay “What is Cultural Studies Anyway?” (1986–1987).6 Given the broad range of practices that currently fall under cultural studies, Tony Bennett’s definition reflects the history of the discipline and my own practice: “cultural studies is concerned with the analysis of cultural forms and activities in the context of relations of power which condition their production, circulation, deployment, and, of course, effects” (60). Thus I focus on the material history of texts with an eye toward explicating how and to what end various actors, in chorus or in conflict, generated and used them to affect the symbolic order. Foremost, I believe that actors (individuals as well as the power of institutions, political blocks, and the texts themselves) influence context—the multiple defining structures (discourses, institutions, hegemonies, identities) of their world through which possibility is limited and realized. My investigation is thus concerned with illuminating these actors’ theories, understandings, and strategies (as well as their biases and misunderstandings) so that we can transport those lessons to our own moment of action. Yet my job (as a critic of art and action) is to evaluate their creations’ value. As elucidated by Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s Contingencies of Value (1988), value derives from exchanges in specific systems of relations, and that value is at every move mutating. I ground those relations within Johnson’s idea of a cultural circuit wherein certain nodes hold particular transformative influence; therefore, by comparing a similar set of nodes and their influence, we can begin to discern the impact of actors’ understanding, strategy, and art. Although built for quite different groups of readers, the books under consideration follow relatively similar cultural circuits that I refer to as the social life of poetry (see figure I.1). The circuit starts by exploring poets’ development as writers and ideological actors. In the process, I show how writers’ paths were shaped by mentors who validated their work and guided them through the literary field. The first four nodes have the greatest influence on the poetry proper as authors seek to understand and amass enough cultural value to interest a publisher in his or her manuscript. Node five has been the focus of textual theorists (such as Jerome McGann, George Bornstein, and

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The Social Life of Poetry 1. Author • Background & education • Conception of and relation to poetry

2. Poetic and cultural mentors and peers

8. Extralitrary Discourse

3. Literary field via publication in magazines and journals

7. Readers • Uses • Effects

4. Author builds manuscript & seeks publishers

6. Reviewers

5. Publishers • Editors • Designers • Marketing & Distribution

Figure I.1

The social life of poetry.

D. F. McKenzie) whose work reminds us that the “text” is always a particular embodiment toward which scholarly analysis should be directed. Nodes six and seven, where the cultural work of the book is generally measured, are the realm of reader-response criticism and Rezeptionsästhetik (I am particularly indebted to Steven Mailloux’s work on rhetorical hermeneutics). I focus analysis of the circuit by exploring how various people and institutions generated, harnessed, and utilized the books’ value to affect the status of pluralism. The story of the books’ travel through their cultural circuits also offers windows through which to examine the dynamics of the literary field’s intrigues, discern its disciplinary mechanisms, and witness its role in fostering change via actors. This circuit, nevertheless, is not unidirectional, and each node is overdetermined. For instance, authors can dramatically affect reception of the book via readings and promotional events; similarly, readers transform and use the texts in a variety of ways, including redistributing them to others via networks that emphasizes particular interpretations and/or uses. Thus, a text’s value is always transformative and in transformation. Unlike reviewers,

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publishers, and authors, the identity of other value agents are not as obvious. Richard Johnson points out that we need to speculate upon how “cultural products are ‘read’ by persons other than professional analysts” in such a way as to understand these readings as “transformations” rather than as “misreadings” (47). Johnson also calls for a carefully contextualized explanation of that encounter: “To understand the transformations, then, we have to understand the specific conditions of consumption or reading.” Johnson opens an important door: rather than “interpretation” (which is connected to rational thinking) he uses the word “transformation,” which invites us to understand the process of symbolic exchange as the evolution (of value, of meaning, of belief, of fetish) that occurs at each point of encounter. Thus, I build brief portraits of the poets’ various readerships, their uses of poetry, and the effect of poetry’s rhetoric upon them. Poetry’s Problems What is it about poetry that makes it an ample gauge of pluralist discourse? In much of twentieth-century America, poetry’s ability to promulgate belief results from its tangential relations to discourses by which truths can be formulated and enforced. By “truth,” I mean securing—for some period, in some context—a relatively sure sense of a sign’s meaning. While discourses often reinforce each other’s power, recognition of truth occurs only with specific discursive contexts: what is true in one discourse is not necessarily true in another. With the structure of poetry in America, poets can easily cross and combine differing discourses, revealing potent and destabilizing truths. These “truths” however are often meaningless because they are formulated outside the discourses they represent, and they are only able to affect those discourses by amassing value within the discourse of poetry and its institutions. Hence, a study of Appalachia, race, and poetry necessitates revealing how varied networks evolved and related, allowing us to look into the inner workings of racial discourse. At the same time, the poetry books I study were constrained by the discourse of publishing in the 1930s. While the chapters in part two of the book investigate particulars, this section establishes how and why publishers valued poetry (which almost always lost money) when they had to turn a profit. Indeed, once one begins to understand the era’s publishers’ self-understandings and theories, the entire circuit lights with a pragmatic fire. Publishers know that when a solitary reader lifts a book that act happens only as a result of thousands of decisions made by hundreds of people: from when the manuscript is first read and passed up the chain, to when the author is contacted, a contract rendered, and the manuscript edited, revised,

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copyedited, and proofed; from when typography and cover are designed and paper selected to when the book is produced, advertised, and distributed to reviewers and book stores. The cumulative process of these events— whose reified form we call “book”—are guided by publishers’ decisions. And throughout their varied but highly selective lists, publishers’ imprints acquire distinctive value. In 1937, B. W. Huebsch (Viking’s vice president) describes this pattern as a “[p]ublishing personality” that is “discernable in the individual books of a house, but even more clearly in an entire list” (“Address” 670). At the same time, Huebsch clarifies that publishers naturally “ally ourselves with authors holding our point of view” with the result that that they are “at heart, pedagogues, propagandists or reformers.” That sense of quality and mission can contend with finances. As Huebsch lays forth, “The American publisher faces the fact that he is in the first instance a business man, that his bread and butter depend upon giving Americans books they will accept with the least resistance” (“CrossFertilization” 308). Yet, if publishers wanted to influence people and had to turn a profit, why did they invest in poetry, a book of which in the mid1930s sold only an average four hundred copies? Indeed, in 1933, publishers sold only half as much fiction as in 1929, had higher production costs, and had to sell at lower prices (Weeks, This Trade 214, 226–27). Harold K. Guinzburg, Viking’s owner and chief editor, elucidates the relationship between “serious” and “popular” literature in his essay “Book Publishing: A Dubious Utopia” (1951). Guinzburg states the need to succeed within “a competitive capitalist society” while at the same time realizing the “useful social role” and “responsibility” of fostering new talent (7). Or, as he put it in another essay, “free speech” creates tension with “free enterprise” (“Free Press” 2, 19). The job of the publisher is to realize a productive “compromise” in “the struggle between private ownership and public interest” in an economy that rewards standardization (6): with adequate profits from some books, publishers can invested in the quality and variety of voices. Or, put more bluntly, an entertaining best-seller makes poetry feasible (“Book Publishing” 7, 8). In the end, Guinzburg saw his mission as the promotion of those ideas for which “[c]irculation is not a synonym for importance” (41). Yet rarely did publishers see poetry (especially first books) as important. The particular place of poetry in Viking’s list was not abnormal. Although the smallest of the thirty-nine largest presses in the nation, Viking had only published six other poets in its history, and Still’s book was released in concert with another fifty-one titles they released in 1937 (“Publishers’ Output for 1939” 206; “Publishers’ Output for 1937” 205). In 1938, presses released only half as many (7 percent) titles of poetry and drama as fiction, which made up most of the sales (“American Book”). Therefore, as I show

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throughout part two of this book, when publishers took on new books, they carefully choreographed them into their lists. In a 1963 essay for Dædalus, Marshall Best (Viking’s managing editor in the 1930s) reflected that publishers brought out “marginal books” with “limited audience,” such as poetry, to support “the new creative writer who needs publication and an audience, however small, before he can develop his full powers” (“In Books” 32). While such books were published at a loss, publishers “recognize them as pledges to the future [and] as ornaments to their imprints.” More importantly, other cultural players noticed such books’ effect on a house’s reputation, which in the case of Viking helped change how Americans thought about race. Part One Appalachia, Race, and Pluralism Part one focuses on the issue of modernity’s levelling effects on culture and racial discourse. The first chapter, “Evangelizing an Anglo Equality (1883–1908),” shows how Appalachia came to be associated with AngloSaxon America in an era of imperial American democracy. It does so by exploring the discursive roots of Berea College (1869) and Lincoln Memorial University (1897) that arose from and participated within the network of Evangelical Abolitionists that formed around Oberlin College (1834) and the American Missionary Association (AMA; 1846). The underlying metaphysics of pluralism for these evangelical abolitionists was free will, means, and absolute equality. However, with the end of Reconstruction, the development of Jim Crowe, and increased immigration racial difference began to be upheld by the courts and governmental systems as an explanation as to why racial segregation was essential. At the same time, industrialism began to tear resources from the mountains, and “mountain whites” became a topic of national attention. Berea College, an integrated school founded by the AMA to champion racial equality, shifted its focus to uplifting the white, Southern mountaineer. Lincoln Memorial University (LMU) was founded in the 1890s during the massive international investment for extracting raw resources from the Cumberland Mountains. LMU’s two main founders also belonged to the same neo-evangelical network as did those at Berea. Hence, LMU’s founding led to an internecine struggle for support from Northern benefactors to whom they sold Appalachia as the blood-bed of Anglo heritage. Chapter two, “New York City’s Cultural Pluralists (1906–1930),” reveals how progressive New York educators, publishers, and ideologues of various races came together to foster pluralist discourse and set the stage for Appalachian poetry in the 1930s. Jewish New York publishers supported pluralism in the 1920s and the publication of Appalachian poets in the 1930s

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and 1940s as the next stage of their project. These publishers were primarily educated at Harvard where they were all exposed to Horace Kallen’s ideas about cultural pluralism that resisted cultural homogenization by appealing to preservation of one’s ethnic culture. In the 1920s, Kallen would go on to teach philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York City, where he would again find himself side by side with Alain Locke, a fellow student of Harvard’s pragmatist philosophers. Kallen’s and Locke’s work was published in New York City by progressive magazines (such as Survey Graphic and the New Republic) and Jewish publishers such as Albert and Charles Boni, who the chapter examines in light of their place in the New York Jewish community (Charles Boni would go on to publish West’s book as well). These ventures articulated the connections between African Americans, Jews, Native Americans, and Appalachians. Appearing within Survey Graphic a few years after Locke’s The New Negro first appeared, Percy MacKaye—a playwright whose prestige was then unparalleled—reported on the whites in the mountain south in the same issue that featured writing on the Navajo and the Gullah. His travel validated his theories on nativized American identity, and he would publish plays, stories, and an epic poem that were cumulatively titled “The Kentucky Cycle.” In the late 1920s, B. A. Botkin’s study of that cycle became the basis for his theory of radical folk culture. The child of Jewish, Lithuanian immigrants, Botkin went to Harvard and taught at the University of Oklahoma where he founded Folk-Say (1929–1932), the journal that became the rallying point for regionalism. Botkin’s work on MacKaye and Folk-Say earned him status as an expert on Southern and Appalachian folk cultures, which through the 1930s informed his increasingly radical vision of evolving, empowered folk cultures. Chapter three, “Reactionary Regionalism versus Critical Quarterlies (1925–1945),” shows how Appalachia was evoked and used by Southern cultural players as they debated the relationship between regionalism, race, culture, and prosperity. Against the commodity standardization of the 1920s and the economic despair of the Depression, whites acknowledged their own heterogeneity as class distinctions became exaggerated. Demonstrating the wide range of attitudes that white Southerners held, the Virginia Quarterly Review (VQR) and the Sewanee Review—the Southern cultural organs that first published Stuart and Still—played key roles in the raging debate about regional heterogeneity versus national standardization and industrialization. In debates, the Nashville Agrarians, Chapel Hill liberals, and cosmopolitan progressives evoked Appalachia, where race and region combined to produce the most seemingly essential of American ethnicities. Starting with I’ll Take My Stand in 1930, the Nashville Agrarians asserted the Anglo-yeoman

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nature of the rural South. They found their reactionary claims opposed by Southern liberals, resulting in a series of debates. The Agrarian’s campaign to define regionalism was led by Donald Davidson who engaged in a (cordial) decade-long debate with W. T. Couch, the editor of the University of North Carolina Press. Couch, like other liberals, also fought for regionalism and his press led the county in the publication of scholarship specific to the South. The Agrarians eventually left Donald Davidson in the hinterlands of the South in their quest (as New Critics) to colonize the province of poetry, but the cultural capital from the earlier debate about agrarianism generated the perfect setting for the emergence of Appalachian poetry. Part Two The Social Life of Poetry Part two follows the discursive trends established in part one as played out in the social life of four books of poetry. Often these connections were direct: Jesse Stuart, James Still, and Don West graduated from Lincoln Memorial University (whose history chapter one investigates) and attended graduate school at Vanderbilt University just after the release of I’ll Take My Stand (discussed in chapter three). Similarly, Rukeyser came from the next generation of New York Jews who would publish Appalachian poetry and whose work with cultural pluralism is described in chapter three Chapter four, “Racing the Land with Jesse Stuart’s Man with a BullTongue Plow (1934),” starts in 1933 when Jesse Stuart (Davidson’s protégé) leapt to the national stage with publications in the VQR, the American Mercury, and Poetry. Stuart’s earthy, forthright proclamation of ethnicity (along with his condemnation of modernity) led the traditional house of E. P. Dutton to spend more money publishing his book than they did on any other in 1934. Man With A Bull-Tongue Plow (MWBTP) contained 703 raw sonnets, quickly sold over 10,000 copies, and was in its fourth printing by 1935. The book appealed to leftist and popular audiences who felt the poems showed the ecology of mountain life and the deleterious impacts of capitalism. With the validation of an Appalachian poet, a chthonic white folk seemed to emerge as a living fact in Stuart’s vigorous verse that deployed sonnets in a way that articulated Stuart’s people’s culture. Due to its popularity and Stuart’s personal relationship to Still and West, MWBTP sets the stage for the other books discussed. Chapter five, “ ‘Authentic Folk Feeling’ in James Still’s Hounds on the Mountain (1937),” follows Still’s book that was brought out by Viking Press, America’s most effective and dynamic liberal publisher. By creating a gestalt of high-quality literature by authors of different races, ethnicities, and nationalities, Viking dramatically affected national assumptions about

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pluralism. Still’s quiet, well-wrought poetry about the endurance of the mountains found publication in the Yale Review, Poetry, and the Atlantic. Still worked as a librarian at Kentucky’s Hindman Settlement School, which featured his work in promotional materials to generate support from liberals. Affirming affluent readers who felt compassion in their removal, Still’s intimate rendition of Appalachia subtly portrayed its plight under the forces of modernity. The chapter also lays out the untold history of Viking Press as related to its editors’ ethnicity (German Jewish) and work in founding modernist American literature. Thus, when Still was taken up by Viking, he found himself in a house of measure; however, Still shied away from literary prestige, and this chapter shows the difficult choices about the literary field that Still made as he confronted the ethics of representing Appalachians to national readers. Chapter six, “Rebinding ‘The Book of the Dead’ to Muriel Rukeyser’s U. S. 1 (1938)” delves into her Popular Front pluralist politics and poetry. It explores the contradictions between Rukeyser’s ideal pragmatist poetics and the reality of her poetry’s social life. Rukeyser came of age in modernist literary activist networks, populated by figures such as John Dos Passos and Malcolm Cowley who traveled to Harlan County, Kentucky, to document violent strikes. Drawing on those examples, Rukeyser’s avant-garde poetry sought to mobilize her educated, leftist readers into action against exploitation and fascism. Published during the Spanish Civil War, U. S. 1 ends with a long tribute to the Republican cause in Spain, but the book begins with a twenty-poem sequence, “The Book of the Dead,” based on Rukeyser’s investigation into the seven hundred plus miners who died from silicosis at Gauley Bridge, West Virginia. U. S. 1 links together the concerns of regional America, urban New York City, and Spanish Europe. America’s Anglo-Saxon heritage in Appalachia becomes linked to Europe (and the Soviet Union) through the mutual threat of fascism. Contemporary scholarly focus on Rukeyser is offset by the lack of attention to the cross-racial influence in the 1930s and 1940s of Don West—a preacher, poet, and Communist. Chapter seven, “The Tight Rope of Democracy and Don West’s Clods of Southern Earth (1946),” explores how West composed poetry for working-class audiences to catalyze political action. Clods signaled pluralism’s shift from place back to race. The son of a sharecropper from the north Georgia mountains, West was Stuart’s best friend in college, directed Still to Hindman, and attended Vanderbilt to become a preacher trained in the Social Gospel. After cofounding Highlander Folk School in 1932, West served as a Communist organizer in the mid-1930s. During World War II, he earned national recognition as a school administrator who taught democracy in rural Georgia and became a

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professor of Citizenship at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta. After the end of the war, Charles Boni and Joseph Gaer brought out West’s Clods as the first book of their specifically leftist, Jewish press. West’s poems confronted racial violence and appealed to readers based on his heritage as a toiling Appalachian whose ancestors opposed slavery. Designed for accessibility, his poetry authenticated its audiences’ struggles, language, and desires; labor and civil-rights organizations that opposed segregation distributed the book into their networks to foster cross-class interracial unity and action. Released the year after Georgia abolished the poll tax and white-only political primaries, Clods instigated waves of support and backlash. West converted that cultural capital and led Georgia’s Progressive Party in the 1948 presidential campaign. However, in light of the Red Scare and Southern racial anxiety, West was forced to leave his academic post to continue his radical work for the next few years as a farmer. The book concludes by considering ongoing discursive relations between region, race, and pluralism that are still playing out today.

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PART I

Appalachia, Race, and Pluralism

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CHAPTER 1

Evangelizing an Anglo Equality (1883–1908)

A

t the turn of the century administrators at Berea College and Lincoln Memorial University (LMU) were engaged in an internecine struggle. Each sought to be the Appalachian institution of higher learning that served (white) Southern mountain students.1 In 1929, three of the poets (Jesse Stuart, James Still, and Don West) upon whom the second half of this book focuses graduated from LMU, a small mountain college near the Cumberland Gap. There, they found voices that—as the first mountain born authors to gain national publication—have helped define modern Appalachian poetry and literature. Berea College, which has helped define what it means to be Appalachian, and LMU grew from the same neo-abolitionist networks that gave rise to African American universities throughout the South, profoundly influencing the development of America’s racial mosaic.2 In short, African Americans and Appalachians share a key discursive ancestor in the form of the neo-abolitionists who saw themselves as a continuation of abolitionism that arose in antebellum America during the Second Great Awakening. At issue was the competition over resources by the men who were carrying on the work of the American Missionary Association (AMA), an evangelic abolitionist group formed in 1846. Its core members had either founded or been educated at the Oberlin Collegiate Institute, a haven for abolitionists theologians from around the country. Looking back over his career, in 1924 E. P. Fairchild, the treasurer for Berea and, later, a fundraiser for LMU, noted that it was “right and interesting” to understand Berea, LMU, and

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Oberlin as part of the same movement (Letter to Frost; Letter to Editor). To his list, I would add the AMA. After the Civil War, the AMA chartered and helped to support hundreds of primary and normal schools as well as universities such as Fisk and Atlanta, which have been central to African American intellectual and social history. This role of the AMA in American racial history has been widely recognized and analyzed by scholars. What has not been recognized is the AMA’s protean role in establishing schools and colleges in Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Alabama, hence affecting how both Appalachians and other Americans came to think about Appalachia.3 The AMA continued its work well into the twentieth century, and its publications and orators regularly made a point of their connection to both “colored” and “mountain white” schools in the face of Jim Crow. Recounting Jim Crow’s legal “cold-blooded policy of repression and subjection,” the keynote preacher for the AMA’s 1895 annual convention asked, “Shall the zeal of the fathers be perpetuated by their children?” (W. Ward 106). Members of the AMA felt their “purpose” that had begun with its founding in 1846 was still before them: that all races “black, red, yellow, or white, that have been depressed by generations of ignorance, barbarism or servitude, shall have an equal privilege with the best, to learn and know and rise” (106–107). The AMA and its educational scions arose from the ideology and resources of Oberlin, which would supply faculty and presidents for Berea College well into the 1900s. Similarly, Berea’s professors, missionaries, and alumni would spread into the Kentucky and Tennessee mountains, carrying with them the ideals of the AMA and Oberlin. Lincoln Memorial University in Tennessee would also be established with participation of AMA leaders. Mountain Whites The term “mountain whites” first appeared in the American Missionary, the AMA’s organ, in October 1883. The short piece announced that Mrs. A. A. Myers, “wife of Rev. Mr. Myers, who is our missionary in that region” would speak “on work among the mountain whites of Kentucky” (Emerson). The mention of Mrs. Myers’ talk comes in a review of speakers for the upcoming annual AMA meeting; in addition to mountain whites the list includes speakers in work with “Chinese on the Pacific Coast,” “Indian missions,” and “colored people.” Mountain whites were understood to be equivalent to these other minorities via their exclusion from and exploitation by the forces of American and international capital and government. For the next three decades, updates about Chinese, Indians, and colored people appeared beside reports about mountain whites. The term mountain whites

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deploys two essential binaries—white versus black, and Southern lowlands versus the mountains, where, it was widely held, the people opposed slavery and were victims of the lowland aristocracy. With the growth of Jim Crow and increasing resistance to Northern ecclesiastical encroachment into Southern white churches, the institutions that Northern churches had built to help blacks turned instead to the mountains (Shapiro 35–39, 47–49). Moreover, with the closing of the frontier, class levelling, and the arrival of the “new immigrants” from southern and eastern Europe, the late 1800s became a time of anxiety about American self-definition. Thus in the 1880s and 1890s, white missionaries undertook the salvage of their backward—but American, Anglo, Southern, and pioneer-like—racial cousins. In effect, the missionaries envisioned themselves building a canal between the backwater ox-bow of the mountains and the great ongoing river of America. In response to Mrs. Myers’ presentation, the AMA promised to develop “a specific increase in contribution” for mountain work. That year “brethren from New York” held educational meetings from Williamsburg, Kentucky, southward though the Tennessee mountains, ending with “a rousing service at a colored church in Knoxville” (“Mountain Work” 1884). The AMA practiced a nineteenth-century evangelical morality that believed in the interconnected work of education and religion to make moral, Christian citizens. These citizens would fight against caste and inequality (social, political, and civil), but the ideal citizen toward which they sought to uplift populations was culturally white, evangelical, educated, and middle class. While members of the AMA believed that any person was capable of reaching this ideal, they also viewed cultural variation as a less perfect state that individual will and community effort could, together, overcome. The belief that all people could achieve the ideal made them radical, but they practiced “culturalism” (Przybyszewski 103), a combination of racialism, paternalism, and optimism. Against the “ignorance, bigotry and sectarianism” of these “mountain people” who were an “anachronism,” the AMA focused on “reaching the children and youth” (“Mountain Work” 1885, 48). Literacy, schooling, and church were key to the AMA’s ideal of creating “a luminous Christian civilization” where the focus was on the individual’s role in the larger community (Phillips 27). With railroads, mills, and mines being established to excavate the great natural wealth of the area, the AMA realized that these transformations heralded the time for them to “occupy this ground.” When the population of the mountains resisted such induction into modernity, the missionaries were unclear whether this resistance was due to an inheritance of a retrograde culture or to the adaptation of the mountaineers to their geographic circumstances (Shapiro 84). A paradox arose: the mountaineers were

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praised for preserving American pioneers traits, but to become functional members of modern America, their culture needed to be cured. AMA’s new “mountain work” coincided with Reconstruction’s second, judicial end when in 1883 the Supreme Court declared the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional. This moment shows the powerful connection between race and class that thinkers of the day tied together into the word “caste,” a term opposed to associations with mountain-white culture. The courts had recognized three different spheres of rights after the Civil War: socials rights, referring to choice of affiliation; civil rights, referring to the entitlement of property, contracts, and courts (covered by the Fourteenth Amendment); and political rights, referring to participation in juries, voting, and public office (Przybyszewski 81–82). In 1883, the Court held that civil rights should not extend to social rights. Once a know-nothing slave owner in Kentucky before the Civil War, Judge Harlan, however, believed in the full extension of the constitution to all races and revealed his anti–Jim Crow stance as the lone dissenter (Yarborough 148–152). In his first impassioned dissent, Harlan held that the Civil Rights Act of 1875 appropriately made certain social rights (such as integration of public spaces) into civil rights, thus disrupting the formation of caste (Przybyszewski 93–95). Not only did the Court’s 1883 decision block the possibility of social equality, but in cases heard during the next twenty years, racial difference—and purity—would be defended as a type of equality to be preserved via segregation, thus maximizing society’s utilization of each race’s specific gift, a malign version of Horace Kallen’s cultural pluralism (see chapter two). M. E. Strieby, the leader of the AMA, called for an all-out resistance to the decision. Strieby begins his essay for the American Missionary by comparing caste in India with the racial system in the United States. “Caste,” he continued, “is the tap root of slavery, and the defense of it is a repetition—nay, an aggravation—of the apologies formally made for slavery” (“Caste” 376). The imposition of caste upon the “emancipated” would lead to “their continued degradation,” which Strieby names the “nation’s danger,” as opposed to “their elevation,” which was “the nation’s hope.” The constitutional denial of the “legal protection” found in the Civil Rights Bill would create racial antagonisms and a social dam, making “the colored races an opposing tide . . . overflowed and borne under, yet resisting their fate” (377). This circumstance would be exacerbated by the “white man” who, in vanity and desperation, sought to maintain his “superiority . . . by force.” The AMA’s renewed goal would be to make certain that both “the colored people” and “the white population of the South” were “educated out of caste” (378–380). AMA ranks rallied to this clarion, and they focused much of their energy on the mountains.

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As early as 1880, Berea educational missionaries had engaged in spreading the work of AMA into the mountains to the southeast of Berea (Fairchild, “Kentucky”). In 1882, Berea and the AMA founded their first mountain mission school at Williamsburg, Kentucky, sixty-five miles south of Berea about fifteen miles from the Tennessee border in Whitley County (Wheeler). They soon expanded into Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina, and Alabama. A newly assigned “field superintendent” C. J. Ryder first visited the Kentucky and Tennessee mountains in 1885 and by 1890 had become the AMA’s most thoughtful commentator about the mountains. He described his first encounter with the “weird old mountains” as a tale out of the “ ‘Arabian Nights’ ” where people were “open-hearted in their hospitality, but quick and fiery in their resentment of any real or supposed injury” (“American Highlanders” 130). Touching on the progress of AMA schools, Ryder describes the “highlanders” as intelligent, involved, and dignified (131). Those characteristics, he points out, makes it difficult to speak about the difficulties they face “without giving them offense.” He called for a new study of the people to counteract the “grotesque and particular” that had been “so accentuated about them” in the press (“Jogging” 270). The AMA was keenly aware of the consequences of the raw-resource extraction and capital depletion that the mountains had been undergoing (Ryder, “American Highlanders” 130). The inrush of capital (both domestic and foreign), the erection of new towns and railroads, and the immigration of workers represented a crisis that necessitated the very type of work that the AMA had been undertaking in the South: to prepare people to meet the stresses of industrialization. As related by Ryder, The vast army of men crowding into this region to gather its wonderful wealth, makes still more imperative the necessity for Christian work . . . Within a few years, hundreds of coal mines will pour out their black streams along the railroads . . . Furnace fires will light up the darkness of the night along the hillsides. (“Notes” 1887, 13) Indeed, even though many participated and invested in the economy and education, the mountaineers were caught in the grinding changes of national industrialization.4 Following the developing rail lines south from Williamsburg, Kentucky, a cluster of AMA mountain endeavors took root in northeast Tennessee counties that bordered Kentucky, Virginia, and North Carolina, including Cumberland Gap. This work largely came about due to the labors of Mr. and Mrs. Aaron Arthur Myers.5 In January 1884, Mrs. Myers authored “Mountain White Work in Kentucky,” an extended article for the American

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Missionary. Myers began by creating a set of oppositions that would define inclusion: as opposed to working with immigrants or Indians (who were obviously from non-American cultures) or “Our brother in black” (who had the world’s attention), mountain whites were an “unnoticed class of people dwelling almost in the very centre of the settled portion of the United States” (13). Myers portrayed them as the victims of “arrogant Blue-grass slaveholder on the one side, and the greedy cotton-planter on the other,” who had “driven” poor whites into the mountains where they were “shut away” and disempowered “by the haughty caste spirit of the slave-holding monarchs” (14). Playing to her Northern audience, Myers’ story of antebellum white migration was based on powerlessness rather than their choices— either moral or geographic. From this first relatively benign characterization, Myers lays out many “grotesque and particular” claims: the mountaineers’ failure to reap the wealth of their land and their “distaste for labor”; their large families, “numbering twelve, fifteen, or even nineteen children”; their low standard of “morality and sobriety”; their poor hygiene, lack of baths, and “universal” coughs and colds (14–15). Mrs. Myers’ comments about mountain religion are even less kind: she attacks “Anti-missionary Baptists” for having “no conception of a living religion. They have no prayer or conference meetings . . . no bible instruction in families” (14; emphasis in the original). Myers attacks these churches as being “bigoted and ignorant via boasting that their knowledge comes directly from the throne, and proclaiming that they have nothing to do with manmade theories, as they call education.” These churches, which appropriately called the AMA “railroad churches,” were reacting against the missionary’s religious culture. Rather than valuing rationality, these churches valued ecstatic experience, and rather than calm discussion they valued vehement theological arguments, which Myers decries as “pitiful” given “the profound questions they discuss.” Of course, Myers concluded with an appeal, sharing that her husband has preached “one hundred and forty-two sermons” in the mountains since October 1882 (14). Calling upon her reader’s belief in individual merit, she asserts that if select mountaineers can be helped—those “who are shrewd, keen, far sighted-people” with unsurpassed “native ability”—they might save the majority, who are “unstable, thriftless, improvident and ignorant.” This appeal reflected donors’ sense of their minority moral leadership. As adamantly asserted by Deborah McCauley in Appalachian Mountain Religion (1995), Mrs. Myers was blind to and prejudiced against the real life and work of religion in the Appalachian culture. While McCauley’s critique of Mrs. Myers’ article is on target, McCauley converts the prejudices displayed in this article into a condemning synecdoche for AMA’s project without

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considering their larger work. The group was profoundly culturalist and remarkably progressive. Over the next fifteen years, the American Missionary had donations double in amount and published a large number of articles about “Mountain work”: twenty-one appeared from 1884 to 1889, and twenty-eight between 1890 and 1895, which represented the high tide of mountain work for the AMA. By 1889, the AMA had established “two normal schools, two academies, five common schools, and twenty churches” with calls to open “one good college” (“Mountain Work” 1889, 36). Seven years later, the AMA helped support nineteen schools (nine of which were academies) with 2,405 students, while having to turn away students because of lack of resources (“Mountain Schools” 17). The goal of the AMA, however, was not to run schools but to “awaken” the people to “their needs and their own powers that they will themselves carry on the educational work” (“Mountain Work” 1892). Berea The metaphysics that shaped the AMA’s mission and practices were established in the 1830s and 1840s during the founding of the American AntiSlavery Society and the Oberlin Collegiate Institute. In the twenty-five years prior to the Civil War, Oberlin College became a refuge for evangelical abolitionist Presbyterians and Congregationalists. Oberlin’s radicalism was, in part, a matter of allowing blacks and women to undertake a college education. While from its inception to 1883 only some 5 percent of students were black, Oberlin’s white students were definitely shaped by sitting as equals with black students. Such racial and gendered participation drew national attention, and the Ohio legislature attempted to revoke Oberlin’s charter four times before 1843. The notion of gender and racial equality resulted from an actively cultivated “Oberlin Theology,” a metaphysics that formed the foundation for an evangelical pluralism of perfect equality resulting in the AMA’s antislavery and anti-caste stance. The entire network of educators, missionaries, and activists who had come to Oberlin re-formed around the AMA; in that capacity, they worked closely with O. O. Howard (who would shape LMU) and were the literal and metaphysical ancestors of William Godell Frost (who would shape Berea). The AMA’s educational and religious goals were based on the belief of social and political equality. Growing out of New School theology, which held that sin and salvation were a matter of will rather than predestination, members of AMA believed that all people and cultures were transformable as they struggled toward godliness. Holding that the Declaration of

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Independence, the Constitution, and the Bible should be applied equally to all people, the AMA also held that all people should be aided to meet their responsibilities as citizens via religious and secular education. On the downside, they also had a perfect cultural construct for an American citizen—an educated, well-mannered, hard-working Christian who responsibly participated in the social and political system and who stood against immoral uses of social power such as caste and slavery. One might be tempted to call this formula Americanization, except that the AMA sought to reform America as well—both on the level of personal indulgence and on the level of political atrocity that led to slavery and the conquering of Indians. For the AMA this translated into full and equal privileges of citizenship for all people, as well as the right to be trained to meet those responsibilities. At the Civil War’s end, the AMA called on churches and members to promote education and resources that would allow all people who were fully active in a common civic, social, and economic life to become citizens (Beard 31). Caste, explained August Beard (one of AMA’s leaders in 1900), “means special class privilege. It excludes people from common rights and privileges. It degrades people on the ground of race or color. It denies equal rights, civil, political, and religious” (230). As with their beliefs about individual moral decision as regards Christianity, members of the AMA saw caste as a contingent human construct. For the AMA, “the cry for social equality had become a battle cry.” Kentucky hosted fifteen AMA missionaries, primarily in the eastern part of the state, including John G. Fee and J. A. R. Rogers, an Oberlin graduate, who started a school called Berea, named after the town near Jerusalem where Paul and Silas found sanctuary and converted a large number of Jews (Acts 17: 10–15). Berea was of broad educational purpose and intent, granting basic education to children as well as to adults, both black and white. Indeed, Kentucky represented the heart of the AMA’s educational work, with five out of the AMA’s eight antebellum schools located there. Within Kentucky, North Carolina, and Missouri AMA missionaries worked with blacks and whites, in specifically interracial settings. With John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, severe slaveholder reaction drove Fee and Rogers to abandon Berea. More than any other organization the AMA was key to building the educational infrastructure for blacks in the post-bellum South. They worked hand in hand with the Freedmen’s Bureau and, from 1861 to 1889, gave greater momentary support than all other home missionary bodies combined or even the Freedmen’s Bureau (Luker 13).6 The Bureau’s director O. O. Howard believed that education was the “true relief” for blacks, and he worked closely with many societies (both nonsectarian and home

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missionary bodies) to make that happen (qtd in Richardson 75). The Bureau’s superintendent of education introduced Howard to AMA’s leader George Whipple, who provided Howard with advice, knowledge, and friendship. Via Whipple, Howard met other AMA members, such as Berea’s president Henry Fairchild to whom he provided much needed financing (76–78). Between 1866 and 1869, the AMA charted seven institutions of higher education, including Fisk, Berea, and Atlanta.7 Each school served different purposes and constituencies, with Berea being the only fully integrated school. By 1866, Fee had opened a biracial elementary school, and in 1869, seven students were attending Berea College proper. Berea’s educational vision was closely modeled on Oberlin: both (1) were evangelical, (2) were interracial and admitted women, (3) had students work at campus upkeep, (4) were service- and world-oriented, and (5) instructed students in character and manners. Berea expanded this model to create a system of educational tiers running the gamut from children and illiterate adults to college graduates. From 1869 through 1893 slightly more than half of Berea’s students were black, allowing the interracial student body’s daily acts of social equality to be a beacon and model for the nation. About two-thirds of students (220– 250) were enrolled in elementary schools (which included adults), with some 50 in preparatory schools.8 Berea’s College Department fluctuated between 25 and 38 students from 1873 to 1893 (Peck 83), and many of these students took two year degrees (88, 95). Of the college students in 1891 (the year before Frost arrived), 22 of the 31 were “Negroes,” demonstrating the school’s intense commitment to higher education for blacks, whose path through the educational system was not easy: the 5 blacks who graduated in 1892 had been taking classes at Berea for between 10 and 13 years (47–48). Into the 1900s the association between Berea and the AMA was clear. As late as 1905 an essay by W. E. B. Du Bois (who had graduated from Fisk, another AMA school) about Atlanta University and an essay by Frost about Berea College (although focusing more on mountaineers than Negroes) would appear in From Servitude to Service (1905), a volume about Negro higher education, most of the schools in which had been started or supported by the AMA. The American Missionary held Berea up as a model of interracial education rather than highlighting its relation to the mountains. Yet from 1882 to 1904, Frost tripled Berea’s enrollment, but all of the new students were white. African Americans, who once formed the majority of students, were now outnumbered six to one (Peck 89). William Goodell Frost did not come to Berea to uplift the white mountaineer and ban blacks (as he is regularly framed). Rather, he went to save neo-abolitionist evangelical tradition. Frost, who had served as professor

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of Greek at Oberlin since 1879, was offered the job as Berea’s president in 1892. Frost had taken on the role as the defender of Oberlin’s evangelical tradition of social reform, from which he complained that the school had moved (Banard 37). Although Frost felt the same about Berea, in 1889 he had turned down an offer to become president there, but in 1892, M. E. Streiby (AMA’s executive officer who had been in Oberlin’s first graduating class along with the Fairchild brothers the later presidents of Berea and Oberlin) implored Frost to take up the job. A man whose moral and evangelical wherewithal was legendary, Strieby began his letter by laying out his close friendship with Frost’s grandfather (who had helped to found the AMA), his own role as an Oberlin trustee, and the critical role that Berea played in modeling how its attitude toward the color-line and evangelicalism could be realized (Letter to Frost, Feb. 29, 1892). Strieby thus contextualizes his appeal within the frame of Frost’s abolitionist heritage. Born in 1854, Frost grew up in the thriving era of evangelical abolitionism that he described as “an age of fire” (Frost, For 31, 28). While growing up, Frost listened to his father preach pro-AMA sermons, heard about his grandfather William Goodell’s life work to oppose slavery, and met escaped slaves who stayed with his family as a stop on the underground railroad (34–35). Frost was educated at Oberlin (class of 1876) where he met its founding theologians. After being offered a professorship in Greek at Oberlin, Frost undertook advanced study in Greek at Harvard, returned to Oberlin, and undertook a ten-year tour of charismatic teaching, scholarship, fundraising, and campus support. In 1889, his reputation was such that three colleges approached him to become their president (49). He turned them down, but in 1890, his father and wife died. In grief, Frost took a leave from Oberlin to complete his PhD in 1891, after which he and his new wife (an Oberlin graduate) left to visit Europe, where Strieby’s letter found him (43–52). Berea was failing, Strieby explained, because “Brother Fee”—whose “energies have taken a wrong direction”—was no longer checked by President Fairchild who had died. However, the “influential friends of the institution” had managed to name two AMA members. Strieby ended by appealing to the image of Frost as one of the heroes he had grown up amongst: “[Berea’s] trustees, the faculty, and the American Missionary Association turn to you again as the man to lead the institution out of the wilderness . . . into a position to do what its location, its history, and its facilities so eminently fit it for in enlarged and permanent usefulness.” Strieby’s appeal worked, but the direction of Frost’s energy and vision might not have been what Strieby anticipated. In order to increase enrollment and contributions, Frost encouraged more white students to attend. His rationale was that the racial proportion of the

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student population should reflect that of Kentucky itself, about six whites for every black. He also established firmer social barriers between the races on campus. Thus as he campaigned for funds, he had a reply ready both for those who supported Berea’s mission (which he said was even better achieved by transforming more white students’ attitudes about blacks) as well as for supporters and students who, while believing in the basics of racial equality, were apprehensive. Following the AMA’s changing focus and the work President Fairchild had begun with educating the mountain whites, Frost leapt to the front of the developing discourse. When Frost first came to the college, Berea’s motto read, “God Hath Made of One Blood All Nations of Man,” but six years later a new motto developed: “In Lincoln’s State—For Lincoln’s People” (Hickman and Hall 52). Frost demonstrates the rationale behind this change in a letter he wrote to his Vice President C. P. Fairchild (E. P.’s brother): “[Mountain] people do not know that ‘God hath made of one blood’ is in the Bible, and think it means amalgamation. Berea needs to be presented to them in quite different aspects from those presented to the colored” (Nov. 14, 1899). Frost drew upon the networks established with and by other AMA institutions dedicated to education of Negroes, but he did so in ways that would appeal to the period’s sense of social investment. Frost was excellent at marketing, and he undertook a campaign to publicize Berea’s new focus to a liberal, New England audience whose children were seeking to access college educations in ever greater numbers. In 1895, Frost founded the Berea Quarterly to publicize Berea’s new mission. Therein, he laid out his vision and acquired endorsements from and articles by figures such as Josiah Strong, whose 1885 influential book Our Country was no less than an evangelical manifesto based in Anglo-Saxon culturalism. Of particular relevance to Berea, Strong appealed to a “pure spiritual Christianity” based in the Anglo-Saxon culture of the “Teutonic race” (201). Although appealing to race based on nationality, Strong understood Anglo-Saxon to be a type of cultural practice that others could adopt (or be forced to assume) and so become Anglos themselves (200–203). While noting the characteristics of races, Strong praised the Anglo-Saxon both for “his money making power” and for “an instinct or genius for colonizing” (212). In the burst of global development, Strong proclaimed that it was “the final competition of races, for which the Anglo-Saxon is being schooled ” (214; emphasis in the original). And what could form a better base than to save one’s “contemporary ancestors” (a phrase coined by Frost)? Essays by Frost appeared in progressive evangelical magazines such as the Outlook and the Missionary Review of the World. These essays drew upon a tradition of local-color writing that was well established in a set of national,

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New England based magazines that constituted what Nancy Glazener has labeled “the Atlantic Group” (257–66). This group included Scribner’s, the Century, Appleton’s, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, and the Atlantic Monthly, all of which shared a set of editors, contributors, and cultural foci. Their readership “aspired to prosperity and cultural authority” and understood themselves as a group who read, with composed compassion, about the state of the common man and woman (246, 48). The most important essay published by Frost on Berea, “Our Contemporary Ancestors in the Southern Mountains,” appeared in the Atlantic in March 1899. The essay appeared as part of a series in the Atlantic on ethnicity and democracy in America. Walter Hines Page, the magazine’s vigorously progressive editor, initiated the series as part of his campaign to expand the notion of just who was American and what Americans should or could be. Essays appeared about the Irish (Mar. 1896), Germans (Nov. 1896), Negro (Aug. 1897), Jewish (July 1898), Indians (Jan. 1899), and Italians (June 1899) (Sedgwick 321).9 The best known of these essays is W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Strivings of the Negro People,” an early version of “Our Spiritual Strivings” that appeared as the introduction to The Souls of Black Folk in 1903. Before discussing “Our Contemporary Ancestors,” it is crucial to understand that Du Bois and Frost were products of the same institutions and ideologies. In 1888, Du Bois graduated first in his class of five from Fisk, a school that Du Bois’s biographer David Levering Lewis called “the flagship . . . of AMA higher education” (59), where the liberal arts’ curriculum was comparable to Ivy league colleges. As with any school in the Oberlin tradition, Fisk’s education attended to training in character and New England manners as well. Thus, Fisk earned its students—who came from a burgeoning black middle class—a telling nomenclature as “black puritans” or “Afro-Saxons” (60). During summers at Fisk, Du Bois wandered and taught in the central Tennessee countryside just fifty miles east from Nashville. Those experiences would be the basis of key chapters in The Souls of Black Folks (67–71). Du Bois relates that he became engaged with his identity as black man and at Fisk he dedicated himself to the study and uplift of Negroes’ racial identity.10 Given the Atlantic’s earlier focus on non-Anglo races, editor Page recruited Frost to write an essay about the white mountaineers. Frost took the opportunity not only to explain the racial culture of white America’s “contemporary ancestors” but to explain Berea’s role in their uplift and infusion into the contemporary cultural bloodstream. Frost begins by calling the people of the Southern mountains “an anachronism”: “It is a longer journey from northern Ohio to eastern Kentucky than from America to Europe; for one day’s ride brings us into the eighteenth century” (92). He recognizes how the mountain people are popularly understood as “illiterates, moonshiners, and

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homicides” and asserts that their “beleaguered” nature demonstrates “the importance of intercommunication as a means of progress” (93). After his introduction, Frost defines the geography of the region and the lay of the land, a definition that would soon become standard: The mountainous backyards of nine states abut upon the lofty ridges which separate the Virginias, bound Kentucky on the east, divide Tennessee from North Carolina, and end in Georgia and Alabama. There are some two hundred mountain counties, covering a territory much larger than New England . . . Its highways are the beds of streams; commerce and intercourse are conditioned by horseflesh and saddlebags. (93) Frost proceeds to describe dwellings (in this case, log cabins) and how the people support themselves without easy access to consumer items. The “dreariness of this destitution,” however, is relieved by the fact that “they can step into the forest and find or fashion some rude substitute. (Though in truth the handmade product is not a substitute but an archetype)” (95). Frost praises hand production, like spinning, for helping to “form the character of our race” (98). This use of racial heritage revises the normal course of local-color writing, whose readers praised their own Anglo-Saxon gusto and ambition in comparison with the stasis of the populations about which they read (Glazener 194–195). Frost’s focus on Anglo-Saxon heritage affirms readers’ self-identity and encourages them to support Berea’s work to modernize and preserve the mountaineer. He presents other facts of racial distinctiveness from the “startling survivals of Saxon speech” out of Chaucer. Sure not to threaten his readers, Frost then labels the mountaineers’ ballads, stock phrases, music, and tales the “literature of the illiterate” and describes how place names reflect the isolation of “these sons and daughters of solitude” (100). This isolation results in an “independent spirit which belongs to the owners of land,” making mountain people versions of the Jeffersonian ideal (102). Their independence is also reflected in their attitude toward religion and learning, which Frost finds is “strictly degenerated” because “they have lost the great Protestant idea that a minister must be an educated man,” echoing Mrs. Myers’ description. Although a necessary motif for his emphasis, Frost carries their lack of education to an extreme and points out the lack of skill in evaluating truth: Frost relates how a group of students at Berea mobbed John Fox, Jr. whose stories they thought had revealed slanderous truths about actual families. Such attitudes, mixing with local pride and the “generations of scorn from the surrounding lowlands,” have led these “feebly struggling” people to feel “stranded” (103–104).

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Against those weaknesses, Frost describes these “native born” mountaineers as possessing practical skills. What they lack “in intelligence,” they gain in “unjaded nerves” and procreative vigor (105). Hence, drawing upon Northerners’ anxieties about the South, Frost calls upon education to augment their deficits: “When once enlightened this highland stock may reinforce the whole circle of Southern states.” He concludes by warning of the impending industrial exploitation, which was already well underway: “The lumber, coal, and mineral wealth of the mountains is to be possessed, and the unprincipled vanguard of this commercialism can easily debauch a simple people.” It is understandable why he does not highlight this exploitation, since he is raising money from those very interests. At this point, Frost forwards a brand of cultural pluralism and writes about an uplift that would make mountaineers “intelligent without making them sophisticated” (106): “we should not try to make them conform to the regulation type of Americans; they should be encouraged to retain all that is characteristic and wholesome in their present life.” He ends by entreating his readers to support him in educating the mountaineers about the use of industrial resources, hygiene, U.S. history, and modern law. Against the infusion of immigrants and the failure to reform the South, America’s most American people could still be renovated and preserved. Politics outside of Frost’s goals for Berea soon intervened and completed Berea’s transformation from an integrated school to one for mountain whites. Biracial public education had been outlawed by the Kentucky Constitution, but in 1901, the Kentucky legislature extended this mandate into private schools (Hickman and Hall 39), which the U.S. Supreme Court had left as legal grounds for “social equality” because students in private schools had “natural affinities” and gave their “voluntary consent” (Plessy v. Ferguson 261). Berea filed suit, and the Kentucky Court of Appeals affirmed the law in 1906; two years later, the case came before the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled to uphold the legislation. Claiming to recognize and preserve cultural differences between races, court opinions demonstrate the paradox that still haunts pluralism: the struggle between cultural recognition and political inclusion versus veiled exclusion and paralytic essentialism. The Court of Appeals ruled that the state had to mandate segregation in order to maintain racial purity, which, it held, was necessary to maximize the welfare of both the state and individuals. At issue was “the right of self-preservation” that “inheres in every state” (Berea College v. Commonwealth 14), a right whose preservation, in this case, demanded placing police power above individual rights. In his opinion, Judge Cantrill O’Rear explains that each race is driven to unrestrained propagation by its instinctive “homogenesis” and protects itself from racial “amalgamation” via the defensive instinct of “race prejudice,”

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which, if unregulated, would lead to racial extermination (21, 23). Working against those drives, the “humane civilization” of American “governmental prescripts” that “preserve the purity of blood” allowed society to realize “the best qualities of manhood in all its races” (22–23). Government must mitigate the “racial antipathy to the destruction of its own identity,” while also “conserve[-ing] the very best characteristic of each race, to develop its idea of morality, its thrift, independence, and usefulness” (25). O’Rear held that it was the government’s responsibility to save Negroes from “race destruction” through legislating the separation of races (26). In November 1908, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Appeals Court’s verdict in a seven to two decision. Writing for the majority, Justice Brewer ignored the issues of individual rights raised by Berea’s lawyers and focused solely upon the relationship between a state (Kentucky) and a corporation. In vigorous dissent, Justice Harlan contended that the intention of the legislature was to mandate separation of individuals from different races (Berea College v. Com. of Kentucky 61–62). He observed that the state of Kentucky had destroyed “the substantial, essential purpose for which [Berea] was created” (67): the rights of liberty and property guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. Once pupils’, instructors’, and institutions’ rights had been so withered, the way was set to intervene in other moments of private learning: between whites and blacks at churches; between whites and other races; or between meetings of the Christian and Jewish faiths (68–69). “Have we become,” Justice Harlan asked in his conclusion, “so inoculated with prejudice of race that an American government, professedly based on the principles of freedom, and charged with the protection of all citizens alike, can make distinctions between such citizens in the matter of their voluntary meeting for innocent purposes simply because of their respective races?” (69) The answer was yes. At the turn of the twentieth century, the forces of racial essentialism, developing imperialism, and sectional division were in control. With Berea’s separation from the AMA’s core goals of racial equality, the stage was set for Berea to block AMA projects that impinged upon its new educational territory in the mountains. And it was at this time that Lincoln Memorial University (future school of Jesse Stuart, James Still, and Don West) was founded. Lincoln Memorial University In 1888, the Rev. and Mrs. A. A. Myers moved to the Cumberland Gap. That remote region had recently become the focus of international venture capital that sought to expunge resources, found industrial towns, and build resorts. By 1890, the Myers had opened Harrow School, which enrolled 308

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pupils by 1896 and became an example of AMA’s success (“School Work in the South”). As explained in the school’s 1894 catalog, the name “Harrow” (after a sixteenth-century English school) had been suggested by the wife of the British ambassador who had been visiting Harrogate, Tennessee. She had been staying in the Four Seasons, a luxury resort opened by the American Association, Inc. to accompany the expanding industrial town of Middlesboro, Kentucky. The same year that the Harrow School opened, James Lane Allen (a popular novelist and native of the Bluegrass Region in central Kentucky) published “Mountain Passes of the Cumberland” (Sept. 1890) in Harpers, where he had published “Through the Cumberland Gap on Horseback” four years earlier. These essays heralded national and international economic interest in the area, and the latter essay awakened the interest of Midwestern educators who would found LMU. “Mountain Passes” starts off by discussing the “human problem” in Kentucky’s mountains: in their isolation, these “pure blooded” pioneer Americans had been competing in a desperate “survival of the fittest” (560–561). This “virgin wilderness” was rife with timber, iron, and coal; however, geographic barriers had kept out industrial development. Yet Allen bragged that even economic investment began to refabricate values: “The passion for homicide [and feuds] has changed into a passion for land speculation” (566). Allen continues, “Thus the industrial and human problems are beginning to solve themselves side by side in the backwoods of Kentucky. You begin with coke and you get Christianity” (567). Allen’s piece becomes no less than an extended advertisement for international investment firms such as “The American Association, Limited” that had bought sixty thousand acres of land around the Cumberland Gap (567) where a three thousand acre “game preserve and shooting park” had also been bought by another group (572). The American Association was working with other firms and investors from New York to build Harrogate, Tennessee, a residential reserve for the upper classes (Suppiger 8). Over the mountain in Kentucky, “The Middlesboro Land Company” (named after England’s great industrial town) was building an industrial city to harvest resources, which Allen pointed out were present in great abundance (567). Praising America’s recolonialization, Allen praised the English “bankers, scientists, and iron-masters” who were “pouring in capital” in a way that was “characteristic of their race and that method of business by which they have become the masters of commerce the world over.” The planning of Middlesboro, Allen explains, also demonstrates American ingenuity and unity: “I know of nothing that would better illustrate the tremendous power with which the new South, hand in hand with a new North, works with brains and capital and science than the founding

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and building up of a mountain town” (572). Regarding the interconnection of social institutions, Allen wryly notes that although the railroad “may not always run in the direction of the kingdom of heaven, . . . it does always run towards dividends on stock” (572). In Power and Powerlessness (1980), John Gaventa sets out the gritty reality of how international investors and their industrial representatives convinced and coerced locals, picking apart resistance, to establish a new political and economic order whose ideology is well represented in Allen’s essay (47–83). But with the financial panic of 1893, the investors defaulted, leaving Middlesboro and Harrogate, in which twenty million dollars had already been invested, ghost towns. The properties were auctioned for a fraction of the investment, the great hotel was gutted, and its finishings were auctioned to a Chicago company that carted them away. What remained was Harrow Academy and Rev. Myers’ determination as he recruited supporters for his school, including Alexander Arthur, the now bankrupt Scotsman who had headed the American Association, Inc., and Rev. Fredrick B. Avery. Avery, who had attended Oberlin with Frost, met Myers during a meeting of Berea’s Trustees in 1894. Myers convinced him to visit the Gap, and Avery became one of the supporters of the Harrow Academy and would go on to become the longest serving member of LMU’s board of directors (Avery). The Harrow Academy undertook its turn toward becoming LMU when Rev. Myers heard that General O. O. Howard was planning a visit to Chattanooga in June 1896 to give a lecture. Rev. Myers wrote to Howard and asked him to visit the Cumberland Gap, deliver his talk, and split the proceeds with the Harrow Academy (Carpenter, “Architects” 10; Howard to Myers, June 16, 1896). Howard had great sympathy for Myers and the AMA’s mountain work. He had served as a vice president for the AMA from 1875 to 1883 and addressed their national conventions in 1890 and 1895, the lead sermon of which called for the development of a true university in the mountains (W. Ward 105). The evening after the lecture, Myers and Howard fed off each other’s energies, talked late into the night, and imagined the founding of LMU. This story of Howard’s enthusiasm has been retold time and again in LMU’s history, but Howard, it turns out, had only a passing interest—at first. The idea for LMU originated with Cyrus Kehr, a Chicago friend who scheduled Howard’s lectures. Kehr had been greatly impressed by Lane’s article on the Gap and suggested the idea of founding an institution of higher education there that might be called Lincoln Memorial University (Kehr). As Kehr set about establishing the school, he pressed a grudging Howard for support. Howard believed in the project but refused to take what he called the “laboring oar”; instead, he advised finding “a man of

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strength, of money and of will” like “Mr. Rockefeller [has] built up the Chicago University” (Sept. 18, 1896). Howard ended his letter, “Please for policy’s sake, particularly in the South, get some other name than that of O. O. Howard at the lead.” Howard had a greater moral cache than any other military person to facilitate integration. A staunch Congregationalist and head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, Howard founded Howard University with the aid of Congregationalists living in Washington D.C. He outmaneuvered those who merely wished the school to provide a minimal education, and he allocated significant funds from the Freedmen’s Bureau to Howard University in order to establish professional education in law, medicine, and the sciences in a school that integrated race and gender (Carpenter, Sword 169–184; Logan 59–68). In addition, under his direction, the Freedmen’s Bureau allocated more funds to the AMA than any other organization. When Howard took the presidency of the University from 1868 to 1874, he became embroiled in attacks upon his character and use of resources and returned to the field where he (reluctantly) commanded the campaign against the Nez Perce and Chief Joseph, whose surrender was delivered to Howard (Carpenter, Sword 261). Having finally retired in 1894, Howard was beset by obligations and requests. He was in regular correspondence with the secretary of war and was working with the Republication National Committee to promote McKinley’s election. Without his knowledge, he had even been elected as president of the Home Missionary Association, the AMA’s conservative double. In response to Kehr’s pleas, Howard eventually allowed the use of “my name and influence” (Nov. 4, 1896). To offer his stature gave Howard the chance to enact his values and life’s work yet again. Later that November, Howard set about finding a benefactor and wrote query after query to potential patrons. Soon thereafter Howard began advising Kehr and his associates on how to proceed, giving lists of names and offering strategies about finding a president, but he chastised them for asking him for money and not conducting proper fundraising (Dec. 21, 1896). By the New Year it became clear to Howard that stories about his support of the school were being bandied by Kehr and Myers. Defending a reputation he had spent his lifetime building, Howard rebuked them but agreed to be a trustee when Kehr shared that he and others had drafted a charter for LMU (Jan. 4, 1987). The following day Howard heard from Berea College’s president Frost who complained that LMU was encroaching on Berea’s educational territory. Howard’s response to Frost was terse but sincere: “I have not lent my name to injure Berea.” He assured Frost that LMU would not intrude on their funding sources. As a show of good faith, Howard even provided names of wealthy men he knew for Frost to contact (Jan. 6, 1897).

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Frost’s letter was just the first of Berea’s moves to defend its new mission of educating Appalachians. The next barrage came from Rev. William E. Barton, who had encouraged Frost to redefine Berea’s focus. Barton wrote scathing letters to Howard and accused him of making LMU into a “personal monument” and betraying the AMA in his new role as president of the Home Missionary Society (Howard to Barton, Mar. 15, 1897). Staggering under such accusations, Howard responded three times that March and upheld his “love” of the AMA and Berea. “Your kind letter suggests motives,” Howard begins, “that never entered my soul. I was the captain (by the consent of our Christian brethren) in the work of establishing at least 13 colleges and universities for refugees and freedmen and their descendents. Berea I helped all that I could, that Berea might hold the place where she is.” As reiterated by Howard, Barton had expressed belief that LMU would be the “inevitable . . . rival” of Berea and other regional AMA schools. Howard addresses and dismisses each complaint. LMU, he points out, would serve mainly as a “feeder” for Berea and would never “cross the color line.” If it were to do so in violation of the agreement made with Berea and the AMA (“There is”), Howard—who served “simply [as] a Trustee, as I am for Tuskegee”—stated that he would withdraw his support from LMU. Furthermore, Howard insisted that the AMA and the region needed and could support multiple colleges: “there are scholars enough of the Scotch-Irish people to fill several institutions.” What Howard did not know was that Berea was no longer the school dedicated to interracial education that he had known, loved, and supported: Barton defended the role Berea was assuming—a non-AMA school in service to the mountain whites.11 Over the next year when Kehr and his network of Chicago friends foundered, Howard found himself being forced into the leadership. Howard implored Kehr to pull things together, find a dependable board, and get serious about getting the “foundation stones laid” for the school’s mortgage and endowment (April 31, 1898). By August 1898, Howard became more animated in letters to both Myers and Kehr when they begged his help to secure funding. Howard told them to take out personal loans to create time to conduct fundraising, for which he would recruit E. P. Fairchild (Aug. 25). Fairchild would act as LMU’s main fundraiser, in part because of his long friendship with and admiration for Myers and in part because of his anger at how Frost was running Berea. Soon, the head of LMU’s Board of Directors (a magazine editor for Chicago) stepped down because of his poor book-keeping, as did Myers who had been serving as treasurer (Aug. 9, 1898). Howard stepped into the gap and became head director. Next, in 1899, Kehr—who had become the school’s first president and co-signed with Myers for the loan to buy the shell of the Four Seasons Hotel—became

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embittered with the difficulty of gaining support and left for Knoxville, where he sued LMU for money owed.12 Howard began the search for a president and financial support. In a letter to LMU’s secretary and assistant treasurer, Howard explained E. P. Fairchild’s fruitful fundraising work in the northeast and reported that “at my instance” the AMA is “trying to get a large man” for a president (To Eager, Jan. 25, 1899). Indeed, the AMA had again publicly stated their hope that their “mountains schools” were developing to the point where “a higher educational institution may arise somewhere on these highlands” (Hadden). As a result, Dr. John Hale Larry—an AMA member, educator, and Congregationalist minister who was then leading a church in Providence, Rhode Island (Suppiger 17)— would serve as LMU’s president from 1899 through 1904. In October 1899 Howard’s son was killed in the Philippines. With his son’s death and the wholesale collapse of Kehr, Myers (whose wife had died in 1897), and other college leaders, Howard poured himself into LMU “with all the strength I could muster” (Autobiography 567) until his death in 1909. As described by Howard, in 1906, LMU had 560 students from “the white people who live among the mountains of Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia” and “have in their veins the very best blood of our great nation” (Letter 771). Dedicated to educating those who “scarcely know the color of money,” each student paid minimally to attend LMU and worked, instead, for some thirty hours per week to build and upkeep the campus. Yet LMU itself was founded upon what had been a slave plantation (Suppiger 5) and would not admit African Americans until after World War II. This set of national contradictions, educational hopes, racial myths, and pure determination shaped James Still’s, Don West’s, and Jesse Stuart’s experience at LMU, forecasting how their poetry and politics would play out thirty-five years later after the discourse of race had been transformed by pragmatism, cultural pluralism, and regionalism. Selling Mountain Whites North The tensions and contradictions around Appalachia were also being played out in the Northeast. LMU’s biggest fundraising successes was the celebration of Abraham Lincoln’s ninety-second Birthday Anniversary at Carnegie Hall. Howard had asked Mark Twain to preside over the event, but Twain was concerned with Howard’s reaction to his essay “To a Person Sitting in Darkness” (Ensor 45). To be published in February 1901, the essay attacked President McKinley’s betrayal of American democratic values when the American army displaced the president of the Philippine’s nascent Republic and entered into protracted conflict with Filipino forces. “To a Person

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Sitting in Darkness” aligned American actions in the Philippines with other contemporary imperialist conflicts, including German retaliation in China during the Boxer Rebellion, the English persecution of the Boer War, and Russia’s invasion of Manchuria. All these assaults were conducted under the guise, as Twain puts it, of “conferring our Civilization upon the peoples that sit in darkness,” but the irony of the essay burns clear: the only ones in darkness are Americans who were ignorant of the conflict’s realities (27). Twain’s problem was that Howard had campaigned hardily for McKinley in the 1900 election, the main issue of which became America’s imperialist stance and annexing of Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. In response, Twain joined the Anti-Imperialist League, whose other members included William Dean Howells (a vice president and Twain’s good friend) and William Lloyd Garrison (Zwick xxi). How then could Twain and Howard share the same purpose, especially because Howard had first asked McKinley to be a speaker? (“Blue and Gray” 1) The answer was the ghost of Lincoln and education in America’s Southern mountains. Although “To a Person Sitting in Darkness” climaxed with the proclamation that Lincoln’s emblem was “the Slave’s Broken Chains” and McKinley’s was “the Chains Repaired” (38), Howard insisted that Twain’s stance was not a problem and pled for his attendance. So to a crowd of thousands in Carnegie Hall, Twain spoke with witty and eloquent passion about the healing of a nation, for both he and the main speaker, Henry Watterson (editor of the Louisville Courier Journal), had fought for the Confederacy and now they joined with Howard to celebrate Lincoln’s birthday. Twain appealed to the memory of Lincoln, asking the audience to forget section enmities and remember “only that we are indistinguishably fused together and namable only by one great name—American” (“On Lincoln’s Birthday” 230). This maneuver served as Twain’s Trojan Horse for his biting irony when he pointed out that men always, from the Crusades to the Civil War, fought for “convictions” and causes become “holy” and “sacred” when “blood [is] spilled” and life is “laid down.” Thus, his talk implicitly condemned McKinley’s war, whose imperial endeavor welded the North and the South. Calls to expand the rights, obligations, and character of American democracy were punctuated by the start of the Spanish-American War. The same year that Frost’s essay was published, Walter Hines Page wrote front-page Atlantic editorials in support of America’s new role in world politics. Just as Frost asked readers to salvage those pure remnants of the Anglo-Saxon race held in isolation, so Page proclaimed Americans’ urge to become benign “colonizers” who promoted democracy and freedom as inherent to “the fundamental temper and the ancient traditions of our race” (“Wholesome” 289). Page’s expansionism was founded on the belief that participation in an

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American-like democracy—much like salvation—was a choice that it was our duty to provide the world. Writing of America’s new relations to the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, Page held, “It matters little whether it be ten years or a century before we can be rid of the obligation to control and direct their political life; but it matters much whether we recognize in the beginning that we have not the right of conquerors, but the only duty of protectors” (290). Thus the Philippines; thus Appalachia. These two foci— one radically exterior, the other radically interior—were united in progressive urge to train all members of the commonwealth as able participants in a democracy that would lead to social and economic gain. In “The War with Spain, and After” (June 1898), Page calls on Americans to recognize “the forces of inheritance” and undertake the goals of their Anglo-Saxon forefathers “whose restless energy in colonialization and conquest in trade” resulted in “ ‘the spread of civilization’ ” to “every part of the world” (727). Harvard’s president Charles William Eliot, who had been Frost’s college advisor, exemplified similar contradictions. Eliot spoke during a Boston fund-raiser for Berea where Frost was raising money for a separate campus for African Americans. Eliot supported enrolling Negroes in Harvard and had selected Du Bois, who was only the sixth black allowed to attend, to give a commencement speech. However, Eliot noted that bringing education to the “mountaineers” and the Negroes represented two different problems. On the one hand, the mountaineers had suffered a century of isolation, but they were “dear to the hearts of all Americans” as well as being “independent, courageous, and vigorous” (“Twentieth-Century Club” 5). On the other hand, Negroes suffered from a recent release from abject conditions that would take two more generations worth of “moral and individual education” to overcome, let alone whites’ “race prejudice and hatred” (7, 5). Reflecting on cultural uplift, Eliot remarked that Harvard had no problem because its few “negroes” were “absolutely lost in the mass of 5,000 white students” and hence had “no influence of any sort for evil” (6). However, Berea’s situation— given the ratio of whites to blacks, which had been growing every year since 1892—was more dire because when “the two races [are] living together, it is vastly worse for the whites” (6). But Berea was to be praised for its strategies of “civilizing” and “uplifting” all via labor and education. After the Boston Herald published a condensed version of Eliot’s remarks the following day, Frost was called to task by Garrison, E. P. Fairchild, and many African American Berea alumni. Frost wrote essay after essay defending his policies, including one for Alexander’s Magazine, an African American journal. Therein, Frost proclaimed the righteousness of his intentions, means, and goals—and of his race: “All honor is due to the brave and noble people of the South who are now standing up for Negro education. By making this

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concession [and opening up a separate institution for Negroes] we make it easier for them to fight their hard battles” (“Berea College” 234). Although coming under fire, Frost did all in his power to oppose racial segregation at Berea, to place Berea’s colored students in other colleges, and to raise the enormous sum of over five hundred thousand dollars to start the Lincoln Institute (Burnside 266). Frost had increased Berea’s endowment by tenfold in under twenty years, managed to increase white enrollment from two hundred to eight hundred, and kept black enrollment steady (at around two hundred) (Burnside 261; Peck 147). Black supporters of Berea, who mostly disagreed with Frost’s stance toward blacks, supported his expansion of the school’s work among mountain whites. Yet Frost was also a vehicle for the day’s racial ideology, which turned sour even in the mouths of liberal thinkers. President Eliot, for instance, called for “universal education” to “uplift a race out of barbarism into civilization” (“What Lifts a Race” 277), but he was hesitant about too much racial mingling. Although Eliot worked to model Harvard as a place of racial inclusiveness, he readily explained that students of different races were not encouraged to mingle socially (Hawkins 181–193). Thus, Eliot supported the foundation of the Menorah Society in 1906, but those Jewish students who founded the Menorah Society were German Jews who Eliot felt fit in to Harvard’s cultural milieu because of their upbringing that included attending the best preparatory schools (Hawkins 190). Eliot upheld the ideology of racial purity, passing, and social equality but only if done on Harvard’s terms. In a 1909 oration on equality, Eliot laid out a strained metaphor regarding the alchemy of race: “The original diverse metallic elements are more valuable, on the whole than all the alloys and amalgams which can be manufactured by mixing them” (“Contemporary” 20). Thus America was ideal because it was composed of people “from many different races and living under free institutions” that maximized their “diversity” rather than “bringing about a racial blend” (22). And even with the diverse groups, which could rule people’s loyalties, what made America work was its many races’ common “intense loyalty to the ideals of freedom, security, and fellowship” (23). In so poising himself, Eliot was drawing upon the ideal community of loyalty postulated by the Harvard philosopher Josiah Royce, who had not only deeply influenced Du Bois’s vision of building a community, but had also given the philosophers Alaine Locke and Horace Kallen the tools that they would use to help start cultural pluralism and the Harlem Renaissance in New York City. There publishers, partaking of the discourse that those ideals helped to fuel, would seek out Jewish, European, African American, and Appalachian authors to create lists whose very make up argued for pluralism.

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CHAPTER 2

New York City’s Cultural Pluralists (1906–1930)

T

o understand the transformation of pluralist discourse in the 1920s, this chapter delves into the connections between New York City’s progressive, ethnic, publishing, and educational institutions whose collaboration set the groundwork for how New York presses of the 1930s vied to influence American understandings of ethnicity and culture via producing poetry books by Appalachian authors. Progressive educators, publishers, and editors formed a network that linked schools such as Harvard and Columbia with the New School of Social Research, the New Republic, Survey Graphic, and Jewish modernist presses. These networks also brought together people of diverse race and ethnicity—Anglos, Jews, Blacks, Southerners, and New Immigrants. As economic and cultural capital massed there, those sophisticated actors (e.g., Charles Boni, Alain Locke, or Allen Tate) questioned and resisted the standardizing forces of modernity. Often writers and publishers who sought to speak for and about their particular place and “folk” found themselves blending into the commodity system; however, such conformity was not absolutely plotted. Indeed, many educators, authors, and publishers held pluralist agendas that often coincided with those of regionalists. Between 1923 and 1925, six dramas about the Southern mountains opened on Broadway. While partaking in some stereotypes, these plays avoided melodramatic caricatures of moonshine, feuds, family loyalty, and love triangles that were well-established motifs in movies about the mountains, ninety-seven of which were released from 1920 to 1929 (Manning 302–303; Williamson 2). The plays sought refuge from (and sounded warning about) the ills of modernity.

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The 1920s also brought New York City into the fore of national publishing, with twenty-four of the nation’s twenty-nine largest houses based there (Gilmer 5–6; Tebbel, Vol. III, 42), and novels about the Southern mountains were a strong presence on house lists. From 1900 to 1920, the most important publishers of fiction about Appalachia were Scribners (who published John Fox Jr.), Macmillan (who published James Lane Allen), and Double Day, Page & Co. (who published Charles Buck Neville). In the 1920s, presses continued publishing those same popular authors who replayed the romantic tales of local color with an added dose of violence, honor, and intrigue. But by the end of the 1920s, a new seriousness had evolved with Thomas Wolfe at Scribners, Thomas Stribling (whose Teeftallow won a Pulitzer) at Double Day, Page & Co., and Lucy Furman at Atlantic Monthly Press and Little, Brown and Company. Houghton Mifflin would bring out six novels by Corra Harris in the 1920s, and Longmans, Green, and Co. published the six book of Percy MacKaye’s Kentucky Cycle. Viking Press joined in and published four novels by Maristan Chapman (from 1923 to 1933) and another eight by Elizabeth Maddox Roberts (from 1926 to 1938). The presses would respond to the Depression with proletarian realism, and early into the 1930s important changes can be seen in the remarkable, if grim, mountaineer-centered books by Olive Tilford Dargan (who published Call Home the Heart [1932] and A Stone Came Rolling [1935] as Fielding Burke with Longmans, Green), Ann Armstrong (This Day and Time, Knopf, 1930), and Grace Lumpkin (To Make My Bread, Macaulay, 1932). However, by the late 1930s publishing houses had signed Appalachian authors themselves. Three of the four books under consideration in part two of this book were published by houses run by Jews. Just as Realism took shape through a network of magazines and publishers centering on the coterie of Boston Brahmin who founded the Atlantic, no less might be said for the networks of young Jewish men who met while attending college at Harvard and Columbia from 1910 to 1923. These publishers-to-be were actively shaping their relationship to America and Judaism. Indeed, being at Harvard meant that they were attending the same school where Horace Kallen helped found the Menorah Society in 1906 (which thrived on campus) and where the Menorah Journal (a decisive influence on young Jewish intellectuals) would be founded in 1915. Moreover, in the 1920s Kallen was a figure about whom these publishers would have been distinctly aware, because his books and lectures at the New School for Social Research were a force in New York City, particularly in the Jewish community. Yet rarely have studies of these publishers considered their role as cultural players who were involved in shaping America’s pluralist discourse. Since 1995, studies on modernism and the Harlem renaissance have regularly acknowledged the roles that New York Jewish publishers played.1 For instance, Catherine Turner, in Marketing Modernism between the Two World Wars, claims

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that because Jews were not welcome in the publishing industry and because mainstream authors preferred “the accepted establishment, which appeared solidly Anglo-Saxon” the new publishing houses (which had been mostly established by Jews) could only find manuscripts—“strange, obscene, politically dangerous, and commercially risky” ones—that had been rejected by those established houses (48). Such a claim focuses upon the “upstart” and “innovative” nature of the houses (Bornstein 148) and devalues the presses’ choices and values. While other critics mention that these publishers were informed by “ideological and ethnic” motives, those are reduced to how these “new insurgents” were Jewish, and hence, outside the “Anglo-dominated industry” (Hutchinson 344). Most of the scholarship about Jewish literary presses totalizes the identity of modernist Jewish publishers and fails to examine the particular place of publishers within the widely varied Jewish community and culture in New York City. Indeed, if we examine who the publishers were, where and when they were educated and look at their full lists, it turns out that these young Jewish men quite purposefully sought to affect how the American mainstream related to non-mainstream cultures. These houses show distinct but allied motivations in promoting pluralism to a liberal readership in 1920s America. The ascendance of reactionary forces in 1924 worked against and gave rise to Jewish publishers’ pluralist sympathies. In the Great War’s aftermath, federal policy defended territorial boundaries, and America began to ever more strictly define, refine, and protect what it meant to be American. The newly formed U.S. Border Patrol minted the term “illegal alien” and began to regulate the eighty-nine thousand Mexicans who had poured into the United States the year before. The Johnson-Reed Immigration Quota Act was legislated, which allowed the entry of immigrants into the United States based on 2 percent of each nationality currently in-country in 1890. Not only would the influx of foreign races be monitored, but Indians would be held in check: as a variation of Americanization, the Indian Citizenship Act proclaimed all Native Americans to be U.S. citizens, distributed their communal property to individuals, and sought to absorb them—and their land—into national life. Not to be outdone, the Ku Klux Klan reached its peak with some three million members. In addition, from 1922 to 1926 many universities began excluding Jews, Harvard and Columbia chief among them (Steinberg 9). Against such “defense” of national and racial borders, progressive publishers released books that forwarded the idea of cultural pluralism, a term that appeared in Horace Kallen’s Culture and Democracy in the United States, which Boni & Liveright released in 1924. The year 1925 would see A. C. Boni release such books as William Carlos Williams’ In the American Grain and Alain Locke’s The New Negro, while Viking released The Book of American Negro Spirituals edited by James Weldon Johnson. To make a living, publishers require products they

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could sell to an audience for a profit, and the success of both A. & C. Boni and Viking testify to Americans’ continued progressive interest. While cultivating a similar set of authors and audiences, these presses’ relations were more than cordial. Distinct outsiders to the Anglo publishing field in Boston and Philadelphia, New York City Jewish editors were closely connected and often apprenticed with each other before moving on to start their own houses. For instance, Bennett Cerf, who started Random House in 1927, began at Boni & Liveright in 1923 where he worked for two years. While the various Jewish houses took different tacks (Cerf saw Knopf as classy and Liveright as a showman), the firms generally went out of their way for the other. Guinzburg, Viking’s president, was one of Cerf’s lifelong friends, and the presidents of Viking, Random House, and Alfred A. Knopf operated with a “bond of friendship and trust” (Cerf 41, 95–96). The growth of New York’s Jewish population correlated with expansion of the publishing industry. Between 1902 and 1946, twelve major New York publishing firms were founded by Jews, and of those twelve, eight were connected (via editors and ownership) to three of the four poetry books later considered. These publishers were also educated at Harvard and Columbia University, wherein many met and developed a similar set of values (see table 2.1). Table 2.1

New York Jewish Literary Publishers and Editors, 1900–1950

House & Dates

Editors

Education & Grad Year

H. B. Huebsch 1902–25 (merged with Viking)

H. B. Huebsch (Marshall Best 1923)

Huebsch, home schooled until thirteen and one year at a small business college; Best, Harvard 1923

Alfred A. Knopf 1915– (sold to Random House in 1960)

Alfred A. Knopf (Friede 1924–25; Oppenheimer 1921–24)

Knopf, Columbia 1912

Albert and Charles Boni 1914–15

Albert and Charles Boni

Albert, attended Cornell 1910–12 and Harvard 1912–13 but does not graduate; Charles, Harvard 1915

Boni & Liveright 1917–29

Albert Boni and Horace Liveright. (Boni leaves in 1919; Donald Friede 1925 buys VP; Bennett Cerf 1924 in sales; Richard Simon in sales)

Liveright, 9th grade education

Table 2.1 Continued House & Dates

Editors

Education & Grad Year

Thomas Seltzer 1920–26; Scott and Seltzer 1919–20

Seltzer, uncle to the Bonis, was a one-third owner of Boni & Liveright, which he left in Nov. 1918. When facing financial failure in 1925, he sold his firm to A. & C. Boni.

Seltzer, University of Pennsylvania 1897

A. & C. Boni 1923–39

Albert and Charles Boni (Charles Boni leaves in 1930)

See above

Simon & Schuster 1924–

Richard Simon & Max Schuster (Guinzburg 1924)

Both, Columbia 1920

Viking Press 1925– (merged with Penguin in 1970)

Harold K. Guinzburg, George Oppenheimer (leaves in 1933), B. H. Huebsch, Marshall Best, Pat Covici (joins 1938), and Malcolm Cowley (joins 1945)

Guinzburg, Harvard 1919, Columbia Law School 1922 (drops out); Oppenhiemer, Williams 1920, attends graduate school at Harvard

Covici·Friede 1928–38

Pat Covici, Donald Friede (Friede leaves press in 1934)

Friede expelled from Harvard, Princeton, and Yale (1917–20); Covici attends Universities of Michigan and Chicago in the teens

Random House 1928–

Bennett Cerf, Donald Klopfer

Cerf, Columbia 1920; Klopfer drops out of Williams College

C. Boni 1929–32

Charles Boni, paperback book club; Kallen was on editorial board

See above

American Living Art 1935–40

Charles Boni

See above

Farrar Straus & Co 1945– Roger Williams Straus, Jr., John Farrar (non-Jewish) (bought by Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group in 1993)

Straus, University of Missouri 1939; Farrar, Yale 1919

Boni and Gaer 1946–49

Gaer, attends universities of Minnesota and Southern California in the teens

Charles Boni and Joseph Gaer (Boni leaves in 1948)

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Harvard and Horace Kallen If one were Jewish, one avoided Yale and Princeton, and sought out instead schools in New York City (City College, New York University, and Columbia, the first two of which were overwhelmingly Jewish) or Harvard, which under President Eliot had gained a reputation as being “liberal and democratic” (Steinberg 17). Harvard was the least exclusive of the Ivy League schools, with a lower number of prep-school students, and it did not operate on limited enrollment—if one passed the entrance exam, one was admitted. Jewish enrollment at Harvard in 1920 was 20 percent (9), but in its atmosphere, regardless if one was a member of established Jews or the child of recent eastern European Jewish immigrants, one knew that one was Jewish. Starting with the influx of Jews from the Pale of Settlement in 1880 to 1953 when President James Bryant Conant retired, Harvard had three phases in its relationship with Jewish students. The publishers addressed here attended during the second period, which is framed by the founding of the Menorah Society (1906) and President Lowell’s successful ploy to limit Jewish students’ entry into Harvard starting in 1926. The publishers’ experience as students during what might be called the pluralist phase indelibly affected their work with American and Jewish identities. Charles William Eliot, president of Harvard from 1869 to 1909, expounded progressive policies of educational access. Eliot strived to open Harvard to students and academics of diverse races and class backgrounds, exchanges between whom he believed would better prepare people to participate and learn in America (Synnott 38). While Eliot firmly believed in diversity (of skills and intellect) and fiercely opposed the Immigration Restriction League, his beliefs were grounded in an essentialist tendency that understood America’s national strength to be how unique and that complementary races (and classes) worked together in civic, if not social, equality (Solomon 181–188; Synnott 26–57). Under Eliot’s auspices, Harvard’s pragmatist philosophers thrived and became pivotal influences upon W. E. B. Du Bois, Horace Kallen, and Alain Locke. Josiah Royce was of particular influence on Kallen and Locke, and his definition of modernity stands as a guide post for my study. I define modernism as the effect of “levelling” upon culture. As expressed by Royce in his 1902 essay “Provincialism,” levelling refers to social training that blocks people from connection to their immediate contexts. He asserted that the “over mastering social forces” of popular education, centralized authority, industry, and mass media resulted in a homogenized, decontextualized knowledge (56). Royce lays out three social factors that muted initiative and sensibility to create the phantom of community in order to promote America’s economic

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nationalism: disconnection through economic migration, the levelling power of mass communication, and mob-mentality. Royce also understood a false commonality to be derived from the ritualized victimization of a people that were consistently “debased” by the “power” of another so that select racial characteristics seemed “essential” (“Race Questions” 46–47, 40). In the case of America, Royce was clear that the “Negro Problem” was one that had been created and could be solved by empowering “Negroes” to change their circumstances. Yet productive tensions arose between sameness and equality. On the one hand, if people can wear the same clothes and read the same books it suggests that they are equals. On the other, cohesion of sameness and equality (as was the goal of progressive reformers) implied that difference (of class, of culture, of education) was a curable disease. Thus, the goal of equality developed with the (literal) production of sameness and transformation of class structures. Substantive work has been conducted upon Royce’s and James’ influence on Du Bois and Locke, but following Werner Sollors’s critique of Kallen in “A Critique of Pure Pluralism,” the same works dismiss Kallen as someone who corrupted that pragmatist philosophy. For instance, in Ross Posnock’s substantive discussion of Harvard’s philosophers’ influences upon Du Bois and Locke, he dismisses Kallen’s “championing of immutable ethnic difference” as “unpragmatist” and “blind (or indifferent) to . . . hybridity” (188). Such critiques decontextualize and misread Kallen’s work. Along with scholars who study Jewish history, I find that Kallen was working with the ideological wedges of Zionism, Hebraism, and Hellenism to open a space for Jewish intellectuals in the matrix of American identity.2 Kallen’s life serves not only as an introduction to Harvard, but his social philosophy deeply influenced Jewish publishers. While he identified himself as a “German Jew,” Kallen’s family immigrated to the United States in 1887 from the northeast of the German Empire (now in Poland). They had been expelled for immigrating from the Russian province of Latvia, which lay just to the north of the Pale of Settlement, where most of the Russian empire’s 4 million Jews—some two-thirds of all Jews in eastern Europe—were forced to reside (Sorin, A Time 12). Kallen was born in 1882, the year after Alexander III became Czar and pogroms swept Russia, and Kallen’s family was at the headwaters of the 1.8 million Russian Jews who immigrated to the United States through 1920 (Sorin 33). Kallen’s father became the rabbi of an orthodox congregation in Boston. Rebelling against his father, Kallen entered Harvard in 1900 when Jewish students represented only 7 percent of the 511 undergraduates (Synnott 96). Social dissonance followed President Eliot’s policies of allowing a greater range of students to attend Harvard, and ethnic and class differentiation

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continued to exist outside the classroom. Instead of living in dormitories, Kallen lived “either at home or in a social settlement in Boston’s North End” and for three years “never once . . . had more contact with other students than touching elbows in classrooms” (Kallen, “Journey” 116–117). Kallen’s “initiation” came from his contact with his instructors Dean Briggs, George Santayana, William James, and Barrett Wendell, the last of whom, Kallen writes, “freed my surprised mind for ways of perceiving the American idea” (118). Indeed, Kallen almost cast aside his Jewish identity until Wendell, an English professor, showed him “how the Old Testament had affected the Puritan mind and traced the role of Hebraic tradition in the development of the American character” (qtd in “Dr. Horace”). Thus, Kallen reclaimed the heritage he had almost discarded: “The textbook story of the Declaration of Independence came upon me, nurtured upon the deliverance from Egypt and the bondage in exile, like a clangor of trumpets” (Individualism 7). Once Wendell, to whom Kallen dedicated Culture and Democracy, awakened Kallen’s interest in Judaism’s connection to America, Kallen became a Zionist in 1902. After graduating in 1903, Kallen taught English at Princeton for two years until “the God-fearing authorities refused any longer to harbor me and my Jewish heresies” (10). When he returned to Harvard to study philosophy, Kallen along with nineteen others founded the Harvard Menorah Society in 1906 (Menand 389), which was dedicated to “the study and promotion of Hebraic ideals” (qtd in Joselit 136). The use of “Hebraic” (as opposed to “Jewish”) located the group’s focus on culture rather than religion, fitting Eliot’s vision. The group’s goals were to study and advance public knowledge about Hebrew culture, thus countering Jewish student’s shame and desire to assimilate while also countering anti-Semitism (Korelitz 80–82). The society also worked to alleviate feelings of displacement common to the new immigrants and united Jews regardless of background, such as German Jews who were from established families and could readily function in the Anglo social world (Joselit 136). As Seth Korelitz points out, the Menorah Society’s main goal was to show how their culture was a critical part of and contributed to America: “Without advocating a particular interpretation of Jewish life, the Menorah Idea . . . proclaimed cultural pluralism as the model for all Jewish groups” (83). At the same time, Harvard welcomed the group because it, paradoxically, served to acculturate students (Fredman 100). So successful was the Menorah Society that the percentage of Jews enrolled in Harvard doubled from 1909 to 1918 (Synnott 53, 98–99, 109). By 1913, thirty other Menorah Societies had been established in other colleges, and the Intercollegiate Menorah Association (IMA) was formed (Intercollegiate 7), and by 1920, over eighty societies were established

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(L. Strauss 316). The IMA became the “weathervane by which Jewish Collegians oriented themselves” until World War I. Thereafter, the Menorah Societies’ influence fell because college-going Jews, whose numbers were reduced due to quotas, were attracted either to Jewish fraternities (focusing on material gain and integration), Hillel Foundations (focusing on an “integrated campus life”), or Zionist organizations (focusing on antinativist cultural assertion) (Joselit 147, 153). A critical off-shoot of the IMA was the Menorah Journal, through which two generations of Jewish intellectuals (from poets such as Charles Reznikoff to academics such as Lionel Trilling) gained their balance as they wrestled with the relation between Hebraism and modern America (Fredman 8–10; Fried 159, 171). As related by Susanne Klingenstein, “The group’s anti-assimilationist bent was counterbalanced by its equally strong commitment to cosmopolitanism, a seemingly contradictory combination but inherent to the theory of cultural pluralism as promoted by the journal’s contributors” (43). The publishers under consideration used it to measure their own identities and cultural politics. The liberal atmosphere at Harvard was not to last. President Abbott Lowell, appointed in 1909, pursued a circuitous campaign over the next two decades to limit Jewish and African American enrollment at Harvard. Lowell’s machinations reached a crescendo in 1922 when he shared that the best way to solve the “Jewish Problem” was to limit Jewish student admissions, thereby increasing integration and lessening anti-Semitism. However, Lowell was fiercely opposed by faculty and alumni, to whose ranks the publishers I study had recently been added. Even though Harvard faculty would publish a report about admissions policies that upheld “freedom from discrimination of race or religion” (qtd in full in the New York Times, April 10, 1923: 1, 7), moves were taken by the administration to limit admissions based on character tests, regional balance, “intellectual” preparation, and psychology exams (Steinberg 19–20). Jewish enrollment in Ivy League schools was cut in half. Thus, the publishers critical to this book were educated during the peak of the Menorah society’s influence only to be buffeted by anti-ethnic reaction. For the next forty years they would continue to fight for pluralism. A. & C. Boni The Jewish publishers who gained their education at Harvard represented two different versions of American Judaism. The Bonis (and their various presses) represented the culture of eastern European Jewish socialism, while Guinzburg (and Viking Press; see chapter five) represented liberal German

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Jewish culture. That distinction reflected the 1920s cultural geography of New York Jews, as described by Deborah Dash Moore: There were the Downtown Jews—the immigrants: the poor, the Yiddish speaking, the orthodox, the radicals. Opposite of them stood the Uptown Jews; the wealthy, acculturated American Jews of German-Jewish background, the Reform Jews. The schism in the Jewish community between its masses and its elite registered in the physical world. Where you lived explained what you were. (21) To this list of binaries we could add beneficiaries versus donors, socialists versus democrats, and Zionists versus non-Zionists. Although the second generation of New York Jews would blur those distinctions (which, as Hasia R. Diner points out, were often constructed to create a false binary [24–26]), the tendencies of New York Jewish publishers very much held to those lines. Although united by commitments to the Jewish goals of pluralism and social justice, the presses under consideration would publish Appalachian authors for differing purposes, Viking being more literary and integrationist, A. and C. Boni being more political and transformative. The Bonis’ parents were part of the great Russian Jewish migration from the Pale of Settlement. Before leaving Lithuania in 1886 at the age of seventeen, their father was a printer whose rabbi grandfather’s books had been burnt by Russians. Upon coming to America, he changed his name from BenPort to Boni because his brother wanted to be an opera singer and they felt that the name sounded Italian. The Bonis’ mother, Bertha Seltzer (Thomas Seltzer’s sister), emigrated from Poltava, Russia (now in current northeastern Ukraine), in 1887 at around the age of fourteen (“Charles Boni”; E. Ward; Levin and Levin 171). Settling in Newark, New Jersey, their father became a stalwart socialist and a Prudential Insurance branch manager. As Albert Boni (b. 1892), Charles’s older brother, relates, “My father sent me [at the age of 12] to socialist headquarters with five and ten dollar checks and after doing that for four or five weeks, I was welcome . . . [and] became a member” (Boni, Interview 10) Participation in the socialist party extended and transformed old world culture and networks, opposing in large part the philanthropies and business interest of the German Jews (Sorin, Prophetic Minority, ix). As exemplified by the Bonis, socialism was a cross-class structure that maintained the interconnection of eastern European Jews. In addition to the Jewish socialist influences and connections, the Bonis were witness to the thriving literary (and cultural) work of their uncle Thomas Seltzer.

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The Bonis’ mother pushed her younger brother Thomas to earn his BA from the University of Pennsylvania in 1897, and his “[p]ost-graduate work in modern languages made him conversant not only with Russian and Yiddish, but also with Polish, German, French, and Italian” (Levin and Levin 171). In addition to writing for papers and magazines, Seltzer was chosen by Maxim Gorky to be his translator and interpreter when he fled to New York after the failed 1905 Russian Revolution. This connection led to the publication of Seltzer’s translation of Gorky’s The Spy (B. W. Huebsch) in 1908 (171), which was just the first of eighteen books of Russian, German, and Polish fiction and nonfiction that Seltzer translated. Living in Greenwich Village after 1905, Seltzer became a notable Village intellectual, particularly when he became the first editor of the Masses in 1911. In 1913, his nephews would join him when they opened the Washington Square Bookshop. Albert Boni attended Harvard, and in his junior year (1910–1911) he became secretary for the Socialist Club and came to know John Reed (his fellow student) and Walter Lippmann (his professor) (Interview, 1, 2, 6–7). Although Boni here identifies as a socialist rather than a Jew, the rise of socialism in America corresponded with the infusion of the eastern European Jews whose connection with socialism was based in their Jewish culture (Sorin, The Prophetic 119). Such cultural traditions bucked doubly against Harvard’s Anglo elitism, contradictions that the Menorah Society did not allow Albert to overcome. In the summer of 1911, Albert convinced his father to give him the money originally set aside for the cost of his senior year and law school (Interview 10) to start a bookstore so that he could learn publishing. First, Albert Boni left school to seek his way in writing and politics, serving as the volunteer secretary for the Socialist Party in Essex County, New Jersey, during the 1912 presidential campaign (“Boni,” Universal). Then, along with Charles Boni (b. 1894), who was still in Harvard, he opened the Washington Square Bookshop early in 1913. Witnessing the rise of the Menorah Society and the foundation of the Menorah Journal, Charles Boni started at Harvard in 1912 and graduated in 1915. Thus, Charles was exposed to and synthesized the radical culture of Greenwich, the political culture of Jewish socialism, and the high American culture of Harvard. The bookstore hosted the start of The Washington Square Players, the Theatre Guild, and the Provincetown Players (“Charles Boni”). As committed Socialists, their bookstore also became a central meeting place for Villagers in the movement, and the Bonis cavorted with the likes of Max Eastman, Emma Goldman, John Reed, Margaret Sanger, Theodore Dreiser, and Eugene O’Neill (Dardis 46). The first book they published was the English Socialist’s Robert Blatchford’s Not Guilty. Albert Boni relates that he sold seventy

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thousand copies within the Socialist Party, whose membership peaked in 1912 at 118,045 members (Interview 10; Sorin, The Prophetic 86). While selling books and socializing (literally), the brothers also published and sponsored Alfred Kreymborg’s Glebe, a little magazine that set the tone for American modernist writers. Before shutting down after ten issues, Kreymborg had published an issue that introduced the Imagists. The Bonis also brought out the Little Leather Library, which sold over a million copies through Woolworth’s in 1915, but the young brothers (Albert was twenty-three and Charles twentyone) overextended their finances and had to sell their shop. Soon after Albert Boni and Horace Liveright met while working at an advertising agency, they established Boni and Liveright in 1918 (Gilmer 2–4). Theirs would be only the third Jewish publishing firm (after Huebsch and Knopf) to challenge the publishing world that was run by self-identified Christians for whom anti-Semitism was an ever-present practice. These firms (e.g., Harper & Brothers, Charles Scribner’s, and Houghton Mifflin) all had roots in the nineteenth century and were controlled by their original founders’ heirs, nearly all of whom had graduated from Yale, Harvard, or Princeton (Dardis 50–52). Via a substantial investment, Thomas Seltzer joined the firm “as vice president and editor of [Boni & Liveright’s] Modern Library,” which inexpensively reprinted classics of European authors such as Maupassant, Wilde, and Nietzche (Interview 17; Levin and Levin, 173). These books met with great praise and even greater sales. Boni and Seltzer showed their political fire by bringing out three books that were marked by “anti-militarism, intense pacifism, and overt Bolshevism” (Gilmer 16–17): Herni Barbusse’s The Inferno, Andreas Lotzko’s Men and War (which the Federal government suppressed, leading military intelligence to keep the publishers under watch), and Trotsky’s The Bolsheviki and World Peace (a German copy of which Seltzer owned and translated) (Interview 19). In addition, they brought out John Reed’s Ten Days that Shook the World as well as works by Eugene O’Neill and Upton Sinclair. However, the three partners came into conflict over financial management (Boni was the only one with sense) and what to publish (unknown American writers versus political authors and European novelists) (Gilmer 18–19). The conflict was resolved with a flip of a coin, which Liveright won. The New School for Social Research and Cultural Pluralism The war also brought Horace Kallen (who later served on an editorial board for Charles Boni) to New York when he joined the New School for Social Research. Kallen had lost his job at the University of Wisconsin in 1918 when

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he advocated for the rights of pacifists. But Kallen was well known, for he was William James’s literary executor, had written against Americanization in the Nation (1915), and had edited Creative Intelligence (1917), the most important pragmatist anthology to that point. The New School made an apt home for Kallen because it was formed by editors of the New Republic (who opposed the war) and Columbia University faculty who had either lost or resigned their positions (due to conflict over freedom of speech and antiwar beliefs). The New School, the New Republic, and cultural pluralism would come of age together. This evolving network of progressive intellectuals included Ben Huebsch (and hence, later, Viking) who published and worked closely with the New Republic’s literary-editor Francis Hackett, kept up with Walter Lippmann (a New Republic editor from 1914 to 1921), and was lifelong friends with Alvin Johnson, who would take over leadership of the New School in the 1920s (Huebsch, Reminiscences 62–63, 410, 452). This connection would form the transit for Malcolm Cowley to move from his position as literary editor for the New Republic (1929–1944) to Viking (1948–1985). Kallen’s New School’s public lectures soon became legendary, drawing large crowds (Rutkoff and Scott 78). While Kallen lectured on Judaism and aesthetics, he gained fame as a spokesman against Americanization. It was the job of American democracy, he argued, to foster “the spontaneous selfrooting and automatic growth of differentiated communities and the free flow, impact, compenetration [sic] and rendering of spiritual values between them” (“Postscript” 42). Kallen had first written about cultural pluralism in his article “Democracy vs. the Melting Pot” (Nation [1915]), in which he said that modernity’s forces resulted in pacified homogeny. For Kallen, the model American was the “ ‘average’ American of British stock,” a neighborly and elemental individualist who was “unthinkingly devoted to ‘laissez-faire’ in economics and politics” (83). Within this “Anglo-Saxon” type, Kallen proposed that the promise of equality had been reduced to an illusion of sameness. This “leveling up” was realized through commodity standardization and consumer social imitation (84, 101). The resulting “likemindedness” was also brought about by mass communication, national pastimes, the mobility of populations, and public schools (101). Under the promise of a “new ‘American race’ ” (97), immigrants became subject to a hierarchy based upon an exclusive racial norm. Against the influx of new immigrants, “ ‘patriotic societies’ ” and “tribal associations” formed, “tracing their stock back to the same pre-Revolutionary ancestry” (99). Anglos, that is, did not want immigrants to become American but wanted to produce workers habituated to “being a cog in the industrial machine” (95). Kallen also denounced actors who, by trying to create equal access to wealth, are “seeking by a mere change in

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outward condition to abolish an inward disparity” (88). America, asserted Kallen, “is an abstraction” (94). Kallen’s critique of cultural homogeneity via mass production reiterates Royce’s critiques of modernity in “Provincialism.” Where they differed was in the identity mechanisms each would rally to as the best mode of resistance: Royce called for the development of an identity based in locality, while Kallen turned to nativity. Americanization, Kallen held, wanted to cast (both in the sense of shape and social caste) immigrants into an Anglo norm, but two forces resisted such assimilation: organized labor and the immigrants’ “natio, the inwardness of his nativity” (94). For any person, [b]ehind him in time and tremendously in him in quality, are his ancestors; around in him in space are his relatives and kin carrying in common with him the inherited organic set from a remoter common ancestry. In all these he lives and moves and has his being. They constitute his, literally, natio, the inwardness of his nativity. (94) Hence, the greatest resource in resisting assimilation and industrial servitude, Kallen declared, is ethnic identity, for the greatest “group-consciousness occurs” at that point. Indeed, cultural association with other “fellow nationals” was amplified when an immigrant is called “a Dutchman, a Mick, a frog, a wop, a dago, a hunky” (94). Resisting the prosecution by Americans of colonial stock, the incoming ethnic group would find they held “common vision,” ideals, and ethos (104–105). Kallen suggested that what troubled those of British “stock” was the belief that “only men [who] are alike in origin and in feeling . . . can possess the equality which maintains that inward unanimity of sentiment and outlook which make a homogeneous national culture” (115). But given the diversity of immigrants, the rapid change of American culture, and the “historical sectional differences” between sprawling regions “not only in political matters but in manner an outlook,” Kallen concluded, “the likelihood of a new ‘American’ race is remote” (97). Hence, Kallen called for “a cooperation of cultural diversities, as a federation or commonwealth of national cultures” (116). In support of that vision (and echoing President Eliot’s beliefs), Kallen suggested promoting “the existing ethnic and cultural” differences and to “provide conditions under which each might attain the cultural perfection proper to its kind ” (121; emphasis in the original). The state, that is, should liberate and nurture the “human capacities,” which were “inalienable” because they are “ancestrally determined” (123). The result would be “a democracy of nationalities, cooperating voluntarily

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and autonomously through common institutions in the enterprise of selfrealization” (124). How does Kallen’s vision differ from that of the racially essentialist Appeals Court opinion in Berea College v. Commonwealth? As Justice Harlan made clear, the issue in the Berea case was one of maintaining caste. Kallen also stood against the system of standardization upon which the caste system was built: It is within the unifying, all-enveloping atmosphere of science and industry that a man to-day must come to himself. Against the architectonic and regimentation of the later, the logical oneness of the former, the deeplying cultural diversities of ethnic groups are the strongest shield, the chief defense. They are the reservoirs of individuality, the springs of difference on which freedom and creative imagination depend. (“ ‘Americanization’ ” 229; my emphasis) While scholars have justly critiqued Kallen for essentializing difference based on ancestry, they have failed to allow that Kallen was only one in a chorus arguing against the homogenizing affects of modernity—he was using the immigrant viewpoint to do so. The editors of the New Republic articulated a similar stand against standardization in national politics and called for middle-class whites to bring politics back to the local level—another forecast of regionalism. Speaking in May 1921, President Harding announced, “The great war effaced the last vestige of sectionalism and we stand more firmly united today than ever before” (qtd in “The Passing” 61). The centralization of resources and industry was facilitated by the American war effort that demonstrated the utility of social planning on a nation-wide scale with business, government, and citizenry working in tandem. In June, the New Republic published an editorial that agreed with Harding that the people of the United States had become “more welded together” than ever before (61). However, that national “unification” was conducted at “the expense of American local vitality.” The “centralization and specialization” of government and business along with the standardization of the American people, the editors warned, “will endanger the foundation of an essentially territorial democracy.” In other words, Americanization was happening to established, white Americans as well. The editors acknowledged that during the nineteenth century, the “loose territorial, economic, and political tissue of the country” had made progressive ideals difficult to realize against the shelter of “sectional interests and prejudices.” However, the very dispersed nature of American society

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allowed “provincialism and individualism” to create tension with “nationalism,” from which the “the great middle class of small property-owners which has always ruled this country had derived its strength” (62). With Harding in office, the balance was shifting in favor of “an over-stereotyped” and “over-centralized” America. For the middle class to remain a political player, the editors called upon them to cultivate their “former essentially provincial, territorial and town-meeting economy and democracy.” Against the “unrestrained” standardizing force of “commerce, industry, and banking,” the profits that President Harding was elected to promote needed to be in service to “human nature” rather than visa versa (63). If the forces that brought Harding to power were profiting, the New School was strapped. From 1919 to 1923, 3,435 students attended the New School: 60 percent had already graduated college while another 20 percent had attended; two-thirds of the students were women; and 30 percent of students had Jewish surnames. Still, by 1922 there were problems in raising funds for an educational format that provided professors with research resources and gave students, who were deemed to be apprentices, access to professors’ lectures without grades or tuition (Rutkoff and Scott 20). In response, a new director, Alvin Johnson (who had worked with the New Republic between 1916 to 1922), redirected the School’s energies toward students. Johnson dismantled the research division and added arts courses and humanities, which attracted more tuition-paying students and donors (Rutkoff and Scott 44). Although he had received his PhD in political science and economics, Johnson saw the arts as tools of cultural understanding that students could appreciate and learn to practice (48). Johnson felt the arts, along with the social sciences, were crucial tools of self-reflection that allowed practitioners and participants to break old molds and recast their cultures as more democratic and cross-cultural. The New School was renewed, and Horace Kallen was in his element. Recognizing a fellow progressive troublemaker, Horace Liveright brought out Kallen’s Culture and Democracy in the United States: Studies in the Group Psychology of the American Peoples in 1924. Kallen, Liveright explained, was “radical” like his other authors—John Reed, Theodore Drieser, Eugene O’Neill. “Radical,” Liveright clarified, meant that they “got at the roots of things” (686). Kallen’s ideas were critical ones for progressives, particularly in the Jewish intellectual and publishing community. The next year saw such publishers release books that forwarded the idea of cultural pluralism and would become the center for studies on American modernist identity. In addition to In the American Grain by William Carlos Williams (whose father was British and mother Puerto Rican) and The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein (an expatriate Jewish American

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telling her family’s story), A. & C. Boni would bring out a rich array of some eighty books positioning themselves and their readers in the pluralist field. Worldly and progressive, their scope included history, philosophy, and politics, but they primarily published literature. Their American Library Series included new editions of Melville’s Moby-Dick and novels by Ambrose Bierce; in addition, they published translations (e.g., Rabelais’s Gargantua), a series of Emile Zola novels, and contemporary works such as Ford Madox Ford’s No More Parades. Books on international history included The Economic Development of the British Overseas Empire and another called Israel about anti-Semitism; on the home front, they set forth a history of Jesuits in North America from 1610 to 1791 along with a new translation of Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer, a central articulation of the melding of culture to region. Just who was an American and America’s relationship to world culture and politics were deliberations at the center of Albert and Charles Boni’s program. Alain Locke Imports European Regionalism Thus it was with savvy that A. & C. Boni published The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925) whose investigation of Harlem Afro-Americans’ art and culture paralleled publication of books on Negro folksong collected from the deep South. Those books sought to reassure white audiences by transferring attention from the Harlem Renaissance to blacks as a primitive folk. In 1925, Viking released The Book of American Negro Spirituals edited by James Weldon Johnson; the University of North Carolina Press released The Negro and His Songs (1925) edited by Howard Odum; and A. & C. Boni juxtaposed The New Negro with the publication of Mellows, a Chronicle of Unknown Singers, which anthologized Negro work songs, street cries, and spirituals, edited by Robert Emmet. Considered in this context, Locke’s pluralist innovations take on particular resonance. Locke spoke to, for, and of African Americans as another ethnicity rallying in cultural self-recognition. Calling for the “Negro” no longer to “subscribe to the traditional positions from which his case has been viewed,” Alain Locke, who edited The New Negro, had clear ideas about “shedding the old chrysalis of the Negro problem” and “achieving something like spiritual emancipation” (4). In the flush of the “Negro migration, northward and cityward,” Locke offered that the “chief bond between [Negroes] has been that of a common condition rather than a common consciousness.” Condition could be transformed to consciousness in the “race capital” of Harlem that, like Dublin for the New Ireland or Prague for the New Czechoslovakia, would become a center for “folk-expression and self-determination” (7).

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Locke had long been a student of what social scholars at the time called regionalism, a reaction to nationalization in Europe. Coming into use in Europe during the 1890s, regionalism involved restoring the political and cultural life of cultures suppressed by the nation state. Federal control and national standardization contended against regional self-government and cultural autonomy. The Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (1930) noted that regional “problems” arose when isolation and group identity— “geographical isolation, independent historical traditions, racial, ethnic or religious peculiarities [such as language, tradition, or culture] and local economic or class interests”—compounded to resist nationalism (Hintze). Opposed to such “problems,” Locke attempted to show how cultivation of racial identity by Negroes in America would aid assimilation and change American culture, since that culture was the end product of the relations between all groups. In a 1915–1916 lecture series “Race Contacts and Interracial Relations” at Howard University, Locke observed that what “men mean by ‘race’ when they are proud of race” no longer refers to “blood” but a “kind of national unity and national type” (86). Locke explained, “Every civilization produces its type” that can succeed under that system’s institutions (88, 92). Given the scope of “modern systems,” those systems “cannot tolerate any great divergence” in social conventions (91). At the same time, civilizations struggled to maintain hierarchies under which the dominant group came to power: “[T]he dominant group in society cannot stop the process of assimilation or amalgamation” nor the changes that such assimilation would bring about in national institutions (93). Thus, upon the model of “submerged nationalities in Europe” (99), such as the Celts, Locke calls on blacks to develop “race pride” and establish a “doctrine of racial solidarity” (97) so they could gain some control of assimilation (95). The contradiction, one that Locke could not solve, was that establishing racial pride demanded the cultivation of conventions that marked difference even as the group sought to meld with the larger society. Locke sought not only to upset entrenched racial hierarchy and definitions but to redefine the relationship between the “new intellectuals” and the “rank and file,” whose “transformed and transforming psychology” Locke encouraged intellectuals to follow (New Negro 7). Similarly, reflecting the social-action focus of the Survey Graphic (which had published an earlier version of the book), Locke called upon those coming to Harlem to go beyond “charity” and to work for “justice” and “understanding” by building a common self-sense based upon the “deep feeling of race” that “is at the present the mainspring of Negro life” (10, 11). As with Kallen, Locke’s embrace of “race values” did not mean a rejection of American life but rather “a constructive effort to build the obstructions in the stream of [the Negro’s] progress

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into an efficient dam of social power.” Locke would name the dynamic relations of mutually affecting and transforming cultures “cultural relativism” (Locke, “Values” 331). Locke understood that hierarchies of power had to be changed. His diagnosis for revolution, however, did not seek combat on the streets nor in the stands of logic; rather, his philosophy focused on the pragmatics cultivating values that are, in turn, grounded in feelings, preferences, and affinities—psychological categories of belief (318–319).3 The Survey Graphic and Percy MacKaye The New Negro first took shape as an issue of the Survey Graphic that sold over forty thousand copies (Chambers 115). The Survey Graphic began circulation in 1923 as a popularized version of the Survey, which was dedicated to the daily work of progressive social workers, sociologists, and activists. As explained by Paul Kellogg who edited both magazines, the Survey Graphic sought to create community by exchanging representations and interpretation about “the big human concerns which lie underneath all this technical discussion of human problems” (qtd in Chambers 85). The hope was that empathetic representation would facilitate communication and cultural exchange. Subscriptions to the Survey magazines increased throughout the decade from fourteen thousand in 1920 to twenty-six thousand by 1929 (118). While “The New Negro” issue and the book have garnered much critical attention, that particular issue was only an iteration of the larger editorial project, much as the Atlantic had done around 1900. The Survey put out issues on the Irish (Nov. 1921), the South West American Indian (Oct. 1922), Russians (Mar. 1923), Mexico (May 1924), Orientals in California (May 1926), and Italian Fascists (Mar. 1927). As explained by Bob Johnson, “Each of these Race Issues brought together notable intellectuals, artists, and activists of the day . . . [and] combined trenchant analysis of social conditions with literature and the visual arts to offer what editors considered to be a full portrait of the racial and/or national group surveyed” (American 169). In the Great War’s aftermath, these issues rethought the relationship between civilization, race, and nation—the previous beliefs about which focused on racial uplift into an advanced civilization, one whose values and culture progressives now questioned. As reactionary forces in America turned to racial essentialism, postwar progressives drew upon pragmatic thinking about culture as a way to rethink the contingent relationship between race and nation. The Survey Graphic presented each case of cultural (and, hence, racial) development within the specific context of varying circumstances and national development. The goal was to show how change and freedom were possible even while honoring varied groups’

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cultural development and identity (R. Johnson, American 164). In short, these concepts were not at all specific to Jews or African Americans, even if they found powerful articulation therein. Mountain whites made two important appearances in the Survey. Detailed analysis and discussion of the West Virginia coal fields appears in the March 22, 1922, issue that followed on the heels of the greatest armed labor uprising in American history—Blair Mountain. This focus on industry as opposed to culture served a second strand of progressive thinking in the Survey magazines: the need for civic planning and the careful development of resources, such as in the issue devoted to regional planning (May 1, 1925). In the coal issue, bituminous miners (the kind of coal in Kentucky and West Virginia) are looked at through the lens of labor. Sherwood Anderson’s essay therein resonates with the fact that B. W. Huebsch was two-thirds of the way through publishing nine of Anderson’s books and foreshadows his support of the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners in their 1932 investigation of the Harlan coal fields. The January 1924 piece by Percy MacKaye, then perhaps America’s most well-known playwright, focused on culture. In a racial roster akin to reports in the American Missionary, MacKaye’s piece “Untamed America” about Appalachia Kentucky appeared in the same issue with articles on the Gullah in the Carolina Sea Islands and the Navajo (authored by John Collier, who in the 1930s would become head of the Bureau of American Indians and work to re-empower tribes). MacKaye portrayed the Kentucky mountains as a place where people stood independent from the standardizing power of commodity capitalism: they did not “chase the dollar,” “time-serve machines,” “learn their manners from movies,” or “think what they are told to in type” (“Untamed” 327). Life in the mountains, he noted, caused essential relationships to shift: “In the mountains death is not a guillotine to dissever human relationships with instant oblivion. There personality sets through a long colorful afterglow of memory, by the contemplation of which new lives of the tomorrow are touched and influenced” (360). In short, he discovered a place where he could direct his ideal: “I found still proudly beating the pioneer heart of my own people—America, ancient and untamed.” If nativists limited who could be American, MacKaye redefined what it meant to be American. MacKaye’s claims are not unexpected. The “native Theatre of Poetry” he witnessed in conversations, preachments, and fiddle-reels resulted from this people’s “oneness with wild nature” (328–329). And MacKaye, like those before (and after) him, appreciated the “thousand years of folkculture” wherein lived an “oral imagination” (231). Opposed to “leveling

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standardization” of education and mass journalism, he praised mountain culture’s practice of participatory “discipline” in community gatherings that gave rise to “[t]he charm, the rhythm and gusto of the singing personality which pervades their civilization” (360). MacKaye even envisioned that the pronoun “hit” might prove a “symbol of . . . uncontaminated heritage in a great folk culture, which hopefully may yet” act as an “anti-toxin” for “servility and the mob” in modern America (362, 363). Royce (as well as Locke and Kallen) would have agreed, as did an ever larger group of progressives who felt called upon to renovate modern America based on folk examples. A nationally known dramatist and poet who promoted a public and nationalistic role for the arts, MacKaye’s representations of the Southern Mountaineer held powerful sway in New York. After being appointed as America’s first writer in residence at Miami University (Ohio) in 1920, MacKaye was advised by his brother—Benton, a naturalist who championed the Appalachian trail—to go to Kentucky to find the folk. As a result, MacKaye took his family on a forty-five day visit to Harlan County, Kentucky, staying at the Pine Mountain Settlement School in the summer of 1921. The trip did not disappoint, and from 1923 through 1932, MacKaye wrote six books called the Kentucky Cycle (four plays, short stories, an epic poem, folktales, and a folk-masque) that drew upon this experience. Literary spokespeople of the 1920s heaped accolades upon the Kentucky Cycle: A. E. Robinson, Lewis Mumford, and Edgar Lee Masters all wrote MacKaye letters of unrepentant praise; in California newspapers Edwin Markham cheered MacKaye’s work; Carl Sandburg compared MacKaye to Smithsonian scientists who strived to value the language of American Indians (Grover 193); and Mary Austin, whose influence and prestige was essential to establish regionalism, testified that “Percy MacKaye has rendered the unique service of recording the only example of English gone wild, taking root, and flowering uninfluenced by any other tongue” (qtd in Grover 191). For our purposes, it is not important to judge if MacKaye failed or succeeded in fully reproducing the speech and oral rituals of mountaineers: reviewers, artists, and audiences around the country felt he had done so. Pine Mountain’s newsletter, however, notes that MacKaye’s This Fine Pretty World was the most problematic among the “four mountain plays [that] have all been drawing full house in New York”: We cannot defend Mr. MacKaye’s overloading of the dialect with idiom, nor the Irish cast he has given to both plot and characters. Nevertheless, there is much inherent truth to mountain characteristics in his development . . . On the other hand, it has aroused regret and indignation among

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some of our friends . . . [who] said it was “a disgrace to mountain people . . . Nobody will ever give to a mountain school again who has seen it.” (“So Much” 4) Against such worry, the column shares that representing the mountains as “an Elizabethan society . . . treated with an Elizabethan freedom” is just one version of the truth about the varied culture in the mountains and that critics found MacKay’s work to have “the feel of authenticity and the smell of the soil” (4). In the 1920s, Americans were hungry to somehow discover that national self-essence called “the folk,” and MacKaye fed that desire while at the same time demonstrating how that essence was under attack—not by foreign or racial influence, but by American capitalism.

B. A. Botkin and Folk-Say Throughout the 1920s, the books of Percy MacKaye drew the attention of B. A. Botkin, who in the early 1930s wrote a scholarly article praising and evaluating MacKaye’s use of mountain speech, composed an entire book analyzing MacKaye’s Kentucky Cycle, and became a proponent of regionalism. While he would become Folklore editor for the Federal Writers’ Project, direct the Writers Unit of the Library of Congress (1937–1941), and head the Archives of American Folksong (1941–1944), in 1921 Botkin began professional life as a professor of English at the University of Oklahoma. A 1920 Harvard undergraduate, he studied with George Lyman Kittredge, himself a student of Francis James Child who studied English balladry in the Appalachians. With Kittredge, Botkin learned to read folklore as literature, and, after receiving his MA in English from Columbia in 1922, he began to understand literature as living folklore. For the next twenty years, Botkin would continue search for a living language rooted in people’s lives. After his parents emigrated from Lithuania, Botkin was born in East Boston in 1901. As a child, Botkin’s father regularly had to move shop, thus furthering Botkin’s rootlessness (Kunitz 101). Although Botkin graduated magna cum laude from Harvard, John Livingston Lowes, a distinguished literary scholar, qualified his approval of Botkin in a letter of recommendation: “Mr. Botkin is a Jew although not of the obtrusive type. I have high respect for him; but of course his race [several illegible words] into account in recommending him” (qtd in Hirsch “ ‘My Harvard’ ”). At Columbia, Botkin wrote a thesis on Thomas Edward Brown, a Manx poet. That thesis foretold Botkin’s own struggle to find a language that was connected to the

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people of a particular locale with whom, like Brown whose parents were Scottish, he did not share ancestry (Kunitz 102). Being educated, Eastern, and having Yiddish parents, Botkin arrived in Oklahoma as a triple outsider. Yet his means of becoming an insider— poetry and folklore—gave him the opening to becoming connected to the region’s culture and literature. A poet himself, Botkin began a weekly poetry evening series and used the campus poetry society to “make Oklahoma culture-conscious and Oklahoma-conscious” (Botkin, “Folk-Say” 322). Botkin never publicly acknowledged his ethnic connections, but his mother corresponded to him in Yiddish and he found lodging at the home of an immigrant Jewish professor (Hirsch, “ ‘My Harvard’ ” 317, 315). In 1923, he returned to New York, wandered through graduate classes at Columbia, and taught English to “foreigners” in their homes and shops in Brooklyn and the Bronx (Botkin, “Folk-Say” 322–323). He also spent time at his brother’s art studio along with other avant-garde artists and his cousins George and Ira Gershwin (Hirsch, “Folklore” 10). In 1925, he returned to teach at the University of Oklahoma with a bride and began his PhD at the University of Nebraska under the guidance of Louise Pound. Upon his return, Botkin continued his quest for a localized American poetry and published an article called “The ‘Oklahoma Manner’ in Poetry” (1925). It is as if Botkin had taken Kallen’s advice in his essay “Americanization” (1924) to heart. Therein, Kallen points out, Poetry has the spontaneous localism, the responsiveness to the intimacies of community, caste and class which the other disciplines seem to lack, and without which the workmanship necessary to turn the noblest or most enticing matter into the substance and form of art does not seem to eventuate . . . Out of their fusion of geographic locality and cultural nationality, with its solid and sustained rhythm and timbre of attitude and feeling, the poets enter into the national letters, and they are the more national in the degree that they attain to the perfect utterance of their race and place. (225–226) Boktin took this analysis to heart, and his essay drew an invitation from Mencken to edit a selection of Oklahoma poetry for the American Mercury in 1926. Continuing his quest to learn about the relations between place and people, Boktin became president of the Oklahoma Folklore Society in 1928 and he began seeking a publication venue that would bridge his connections with community writers, the study of regional folklore, and his work in the academy. With the new director of Oklahoma’s university press, he soon developed an idea for its first publication—Folk-Say: A Regional Miscellany (1929).

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Botkin forwarded that collection with “The Folk in Literature: An Introduction to the New Regionalism,” the first of a decade’s worth of essays on regionalism, the final theories of which he spent fifty years refining.4 Marking the start for contemporary Americanists who perform cultural studies, Botkin noted the “arbitrary division between folk-lore and literature” (9), between orality and literacy, between popular and high-cultures. While Botkin drew a distinction between folk literature (oral) and culture literature (written), he noted their mutual, ongoing influence and startling complexity when he specified that many cultures and folks existed side by side. He agreed with Whitman who, in “Democratic Vistas,” divined that “the infant genius of American poetic expression . . . lies sleeping aside, unrecking itself, in some western idiom, or native Michigan or Tennessee repartee, or stump-speech, or in Kentucky or Georgia” (qtd in Botkin, “The Folk” 12). However, Botkin points out that Whitman was too obsessed with self-conscious abstractions like “the people” and “America” to see that American literature lay in the hands of those writers who . . . would find their materials and methods in their own regional culture—a culture, that is, with its roots in the oral tradition. For oral tradition is necessarily regional in that there is not one folk but many folk groups—as many as there are regional cultures or racial or occupational groups within a region. (12) In articulating the visions of those cultures, Botkin calls his era “an age of taking root and of the resulting conflict and compromise, within a locality, of varied racial stocks and opposing orders of civilization” (17). Following Mary Austin’s stance against standardization, this New Regionalism “has its feet on the ground and hands in the soil” as a way to find “solidarity and unity in identifying oneself with the community, a need growing out of world unrest and conflict during and since the War” (14). Against the “first flush of romantic local color” in John Fox, Jr., Botkin called for the study of history and lived systems—the discipline of folklore—to inform regionalist writing. However, he engaged in essentializing by locating “the Golden Age of primitive art and ritual, of pagan fantasy and mysticism, with taboos and symbols imbedded in folk consciousness” in the “spiritual frontier” of select folk: “the Indian, the Negro, and the Southern Highlander (who of all Caucasian stocks in the United States comes closest to being, like the other two, an elemental and atavistic folk, exotic in difference)” (16). This summary of the spell that Appalachia cast over America is a bit grandiose but accurately recounts how Americans exoticized the Highlanders’ “atavistic” folk-nature.

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When in the process of editing the first issues of Folk-Say, Botkin began an intensive letter exchange with MacKaye. In the process, Botkin shared with MacKaye that he had thought much about MacKaye’s Kentucky Cycle, and MacKaye and his publisher (Frank Hill at Longmans Green, who Botkin also published in Folk-Say) encouraged Botkin to write a small monograph on MacKaye’s work. The eventual result was a nine-thousand-word manuscript called “Percy MacKaye: A Study of the Kentucky Cycle,” which catalyzed Botkin’s melding of folklore, culture, nationalism, and literature in regionalism.5 Botkin ended up writing the manuscript for an academic audience trained in folklore rather than the general audience that the publisher envisioned, and Botkin understood why Hill decided not to publish the manuscript. However, Botkin published part of the book in American Speech, a journal his dissertation director edited. In “Folk Speech in the Kentucky Mountain Cycle of Percy MacKaye,” Botkin undertook an intensive linguistic analysis of mountain speech, whose “spiritual steam” he found had “been fully assimilated to the rhythmic and emotional texture of [MacKaye’s] imagination” (264). Botkin used MacKaye to demonstrate folk speech’s responsiveness and mobility: “[MacKaye’s folk speech], with its immediate response and appeal to experience, [is] individualized and compared in a wealth of concrete, figurative, and allusive expressions—homely, forceful, and exactly suited to the occasion— . . . in contrast to the worn counters of the standard language” (266). Botkin proceeded to analyze and praise the cultural and expressive resources of this “illiterate speech” with its “archaic” idioms (268, 272). Ultimately, Botkin appreciated that a living speech in America had escaped the constraints of Standard English and enlivened the literary arts (276). Of course, what Botkin analyzed was MacKaye’s rendition of such a speech rather than the speech itself. However, that analysis set Botkin on the track of understanding why readers would value such representations and sent him exploring the relationship between writers, audiences, publications, and the folk. Boktin’s analysis appealed to MacKaye, who saw his Kentucky Cycle as a fitting end to his long career. MacKaye had long composed literary adaptations of folk culture (plays, poems, and stories) and community masques. From 1910 to 1920, he had written and produced civic masques that were designed to celebrate American history and to Americanize, while preserving difference, immigrants who wished to become citizens. Held in St. Louis and New York City from 1914 to 1916, these dramatic rituals involved thousands of participants and tens-of-thousands of audience members.6 Against the tides of commercial standardization, MacKaye sought to preserve a diverse citizenship. In “The Drama of Democracy” (1909), MacKaye held that America could

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be richer and mightier for every positive contribution of distinctive experience and tradition which each member shall conserve from his own inheritance . . . —the Asiatic, the European, the American, each contributive of his particular zone and meridian of wisdom, harmonized by the ethics of a common human interest. (93) And from America’s “indigenous seeds” he sought a popular drama that might enact “our Cyclopean industries of iron . . . and blazing ores [that] sit on our Appalachians . . . and, like so many Polyphemi, gaze down with firey eyes upon their smoking hearth-stones” (94). MacKaye echoed Plessy v. Ferguson, which cited the resources of diversity as justifying segregation, and forecasted Horace Kallen’s theory of cultural pluralism. Inspired by MacKaye, Botkin placed the Southern highlander at the center of his regionalist project. In “Folk in Literature” (1929) Botkin explains, “In this country, the speech of the Southern highlanders, who still keep ‘the salt, Old-fashioned ballad-English’ (in some cases more fully than the English themselves), comes nearest to Yeats’s ideal of the language of poetry and drama—‘abundant, resonant, beautiful, laughing, living speech’ ” (11). The “folk” were a force of authentication, in which racial heritage was critical. Yet Botkin was not interested in the past but in current experience: “The difference between Folk-Say and folklore,” Botkin announces, “is the difference between poetry and history” (“Folk-Say” 324). With Folk-Say’s publication, a debate began in the New Republic about the uses and possibilities of regionalism. On one side stood Lewis Mumford (a visionary cosmopolitan regional planner and future director of the Federal Writers’ Project) whose response is related here; on the other stood Allen Tate (the once Fugitive, then Agrarian, and future New Critic), whose response appears in the next chapter. Mumford begins his review by proposing two previous incarnations of American relation to region. In the early 1800s, “provinces and colonies [made] . . . a deliberate attempt . . . to pick up the strands of local history and legend” (“Toward” 157). With the Civil War, the haste of westward expansion, the expansion of the factory and railroad systems, and the influx of immigrants, “local differences were ignored and obliterated” by displaced populations. He called local color that time “sentimental” for scratching after fleeting customs that may never have existed. Writers such as Sinclair Lewis and Edgar Lee Masters reacted against such nostalgia with “hatred, repulsion, and reproach.” But on the other side of the restless 1920s, Mumford recognized that regionalism was “a contemporary fact that must be assimilated and consciously directed”: folklore scholars and regional historians, who once scoured the

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country “running down songs and proverbs,” were now working with literary artists and philosophers on contemporary culture. Mumford called on them to make “an effort which recognizes the existence of real groups and social configurations and geographic relationships that are ignored by the abstract culture of the metropolis, and which oppose the aimless nomadism of modern commercial enterprise” (157). He admired FolkSay for recognizing that regional folk life continued along, and thrived within, the “conditions of modern life,” which were not merely vehicles of standardization but provided modes of self-articulation and intercommunication. Those technologies allowed local folk cultures to gain further self-definition and offered the chance to create an “intercourse and reciprocity” between them as “equals.” In the second Folk-Say (1930), for instance, Alain Locke and Sterling Brown published a review that analyzed the representation of Negro life in contemporary film. Paradoxically, their work appeared next poetry by the Agrarian John Gould Fletcher (see next chapter). Although other Agrarians (Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren) would attack magazines such as Folk-Say for producing literature as part of a regionalist fad (see next chapter), politically radical New York modernists used the language of regionalism and race to affect national attitudes toward labor, forecasting the surge of proletarian literature and Marxist theory to come in the 1930s. As detailed in chapter six, groups of writers set out from New York City to visit “Bloody Harlan” where coal strikes were making national headlines. As a result, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, and members of the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners (NCDPP) would author Harlan Miners Speak: Report on Terrorism in the Kentucky Coal Fields (1932), a book that served as a model for Rukeyser’s poetry. Rukeyser would go on to articulate a Popular Front pluralism that brought together Appalachia, New York City, and Spain against fascism. In 1932, Don West came to New York City, became a communist, and just after World War II conducted a radical (for all involved) intervention into the relationship between race and class in Georgia. In early 1930s, the South and Appalachia were also before the nation, except this time in terms of labor and race understood through the lens of industrialism, state planning, and Marxism. Southern intellectuals, activists, and writers engaged in this discursive development sought to swing understandings about race, culture, and the economy. The next chapter focuses on the ideological struggle between Southern liberal editors and the Nashville Agrarians about the relationship between the folk and industry, a struggle in which Jesse Stuart and James Still found themselves making their names.

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CHAPTER 3

Reactionary Regionalism versus Critical Quarterlies (1925–1945)

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hen Appalachian poets began publishing in the 1930s, they were largely able to do so because regionalism had become a national discourse with living roots in the ongoing debates between the Nashville Agrarians and Southern liberals about the South’s relationship to industry and culture. During the inward-looking 1930s, regionalism became a position from which social planners and literary artists resisted standardization while at the same time placing those resources at the behest of regional cultures. In American Regionalism (1938), for instance, Howard Odum and Harry Estill asked how the United States could best realize “an economy of abundance” by fostering “the pluralism of America” such that each group could “recognize their folk personality or culture” (144–150).1 The regionalists rallied around various local cultures but came into conflict about just who deserved to be recognized as “folk.” Regionalists drew upon Franz Boas’ concept of culture as developing in a specific environmental and historical context; however, they would disagree about which groups were worthy to be ordained as folk, the particular value to be assigned to those groups, how change and intercultural contact affected folk-groups, the degree to which a folk was either adaptive or static, and the arts’ relationship to the folk. At the heart of the controversy was an argument about the chthonic essence of national identity—that identity “which was-what-itwas” before becoming part of the social order, which it became the duty of the social order to recognize and preserve, even if in a museum. Debates about regionalism occurred at university conferences and in the pages of quarterly reviews and national publications such as the New

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Republic and the Saturday Review of Literature. The movement was supported by author-activists such as Mary Austin, Carl Sandburg, Percy MacKaye, and Willa Cather. Resisting New York as a defining center, such nationally known authors worked along with a wave of self-consciously regional magazines founded in the 1920s: Midland in Iowa City (1915–1933), the Frontier in Missoula (1920–1939), the Southwest Review in Fort Worth (1924– ), The Prairie Schooner in Lincoln (1927– ), and New Mexico Quarterly Review in Albuquerque (1931– ). Publishing literature and essays, these university quarterlies took regional validation as their ambition.2 A spate of conferences ensued around the country, the first being held at the University of Virginia (1931), followed by others at the University of Montana (1932), the University of New Mexico (1933), South Carolina (1934), and Louisiana State University (1935). Radicalism is not always progressive, and this chapter examines the sites in which intellectuals and literary artists debated and affected the discourses of American literature and regionalism à la Appalachia, the South, and Agrarianism. Within this decade-long spar, I focus on a wide ideological range of venues. On the liberal side appear the Sewanee Review (1892– 1942), the Virginia Quarterly Review [VQR] (1925– ), Folk-Say: A Regional Miscellany (1929–1932), and the North Carolina University Press [UNCP] (1925– ). On the other side we find I’ll Take My Stand (1930) and associated Agrarian-affiliated publications: the American Review (1933–1937), the Southern Review (1935–1942), the Kenyon Review (1939– ), and the Sewanee Review (1942– ). These venues helped to shape how intellectuals understood Southern problems, literature, and identity. We can discern these influences by asking how and why these journals published certain critics and writers (such as Jesse Stuart, James Still, and the Nashville Agrarians, who would deeply affect the practice of American literature). Charting this Gramscian battle for ideological position, this chapter focuses on Donald Davidson (who was critical to Jesse Stuart’s success) and the liberal point of view against which he argued—as articulated by VQR’s Stringfellow Barr, the Sewanee Review’s William S. Knickerbocker, and UNCP’s W. T. Couch. Davidson has been recognized as the most driven leader of the Agrarians, but scholars have portrayed him as pugnacious and sulky when the ideals of Agrarianism and the South, from which he defined himself, were slowly abandoned by other Agrarians. In part, this characterization comes from Davidson’s post-1945 focus on defending segregation rather than championing regionalism. However, in the 1920s and 1930s, Davidson was a kind, constant conciliator and an articulate—and genuinely accessible—public intellectual who sought to reach the ear of both the

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public and other cultural players outside his own milieu. Such an exploration of Davidson, long identified as a reactionary, unveils key discursive formulations of Appalachian identity and writing. Indeed, many of Davidson’s essays and words about commitment to locality and culture could have been published in the last thirty years in a wide set of academic journals with a regional focus, a claim that I hope will provoke readers to take a more careful look at Davidson and ourselves. The Regional Debate In July 1931, the Northerners came south to talk. The University of Virginia’s Summer Institute on Public Affairs hosted a round table on Regionalism whose subject was “[h]ow to foster in each region the fullest use of natural resources and economic opportunities so as to improve its social and cultural life” (Branlow). Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt kicked off the six-day roundtable with an extended talk about state planning. In his audience were some of the national leaders on regional thinking including Howard Odum (a sociologist from the University of North Carolina), Arthur Kellogg (editor of the Survey Graphic), Benton MacKaye (Percy MacKaye’s brother who was working to establish the Appalachian Trail), Lewis Mumford (a progressive cosmopolitan planner), and Stringfellow Barr (editor of the VQR). Led by Fletcher, Barr, and MacKaye, the discussion of culture and regionalism rang with the series of ongoing debates between the Agrarians (who called for full opposition to industrialism and preservation of Southern culture) and Southern liberals (who called for Southern culture to adapt to a regulated industrialism). Fletcher began by noting that Jung had a theory of “race-memory” (“Cultural” 2 ), which Fletcher implied had been best realized in the era of “Washington and Jefferson” but had become lost in the current abstraction of “cosmopolitanism” whose cultural claims “can only rest on the basis of local or regional culture” (3). Worse, cosmopolitanism was a veil for “intensive industrialism” (4) and “mass-production” (5) that destroyed local cultures: “We must do something,” expounded Fletcher, “not to mend, but to end industrialism.” Against a standardized education to train industrial workers and managers that students would “lose later,” he explained that schools must be directed to the pupil’s development “according to their cultural and regional aptitudes” (6–7). And instead of an abstracted version of Democracy that promoted “routine” and “conformity” he called on local governance “to de-centralize ourselves, de-industrialize ourselves, [and] de-systemize ourselves” (9). This reiteration of Agrarian principles had little support at this meeting.

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Benton MacKaye’s irritation with the Agrarians was clear: he redefined industry as “the conversion of natural resources into finished products” and culture as “the conversion of those products into the ultimate need of human welfare and happiness” (1). To MacKaye’s sense two types of planners existed—the “ ‘Fatalism’ school” who believed that infrastructure could merely cope in “inorganic” fashion with the rawest needs of the masses of population in cities, and the “ ‘Freewill’ school” who believed that infrastructure could be used to create “cultural life” via “organic growth,” space, and “folkplay” (4–7). This plastic sense of geographic and social engineering, however, was more for those from the Northeast like Lewis Mumford and MacKaye whose cultural vision drew on modern resources to reform the modern. Stringfellow Barr—a professor of history who had written extensively about Greek, Roman, and Medieval Europe—understood that this issue of “tradition” was at the core of Southern anxiety: “Economically, the agricultural system which in one form or another has been the basis of our physical existence for three centuries of history is giving way to the American factory system. Socially, our lives are being modernized, vulgarized, ‘Americanized’ ” (1). In response, Virginians (white, wealthy Virginians, although this identity was not noted) had been taking four courses of action: (i) they went North to make their fortune and came to Virginia to buy land, “restore the plantation,” and retire (3); (ii) they tried to sell the past to tourists; (iii) they clutched tradition and rejected all industrialism out right; or (iv) they embraced progressive beliefs about industrial wealth and education to make money and raise standards of living. Against the options of “blind traditionalism and blind progressivism,” Barr called on Virginians to enter into “intelligent revision” of tradition, which was the reality behind all surviving traditions (7). To do so, he identified the need to consider that tradition’s history, the problems others had faced with industry, and how to best adapt tradition to industrialism’s economic reality. He fiercely critiqued American politics (as being governed by “plutocracy” rather than democracy), economics (as producing a false sense of “vitality” that was actually “aimlessness and confusion”), culture (as an “urban herd-mindedness masquerading as metropolitan sophistication”), and education (as an “evangelical passion for literacy” that feigned an “interest in ideas”) (8). Critical self-awareness of how to adapt regional traditions to national economic reality would allow Virginians to avoid “sentimental self-defense mechanisms” and take the falsely progressive “bait” of the Northerners. Barr ended with a note of pessimism, noting that Virginia’s “crisis of tradition” was a sign that the culture it longed to recover was already dead (9). Rather than looking backward, Barr called those in the “cultural region” to become “engrossed in the problem of how to achieve universal values in terms of our special environment” (10).

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What is most surprising about Barr’s position is that the Nashville Agrarians considered him the enemy. The Virginia Quarterly Review and I’ll Take My Stand Barr had been engaged in a debate over the preservation of regional culture since VQR’s inception in 1925. That debate intensified with the publication of I’ll Take My Stand in 1930, and it continued until he left the VQR in 1934 to eventually assume the presidency of St. John’s College. As editor of the South’s premier critical quarterly, Barr had a strong give-and-take relationship with the Agrarians who asked him to publish, I’ll Take My Stand only to reject his essay. VQR was established in 1925 as a national “organ of liberal opinion” whose goal was to create “a fellowship of uncongenial minds” by publishing a variety of thoughtful authors who held different positions on critical issues (Wilson). Within each issue, the journal made room for Southern authors and topics, but its focus was on national matters. From 1932 through 1936, the review published an average of 2,220 copies per edition (N. W. Ayer) and was by far the most well-read and influential quarterly in the nation. After Lambert Davis took over editorship from Barr in 1934, he summarized the journal’s first ten years in the April 1935 issue that highlighted Southern literature. Davis took care to show that the journal’s mission was not “liberal” in the sense of promoting progress but in seeking to foster “a free interaction of opposing ideas [as] a necessary condition for the humanizing of knowledge” (“The Green Room” ii): therein, stories by Grace Lumpkin and Thomas Wolfe—a radical and liberal writer—appear next to stories by Stark Young and Andrew Nelson Lytle—both core Agrarian adherents. Yet on the side of cultural criticism—as we will see—four of the five essays were written by Nashville Agrarians, the most influential critics in the South. Davis also qualifies the VQR as different from the weeklies and monthlies by pointing out that rather than reporting on “programs,” its essays “skillfully expressed” authors’ “principles” (iv). Davis ends by noting that the Southern issues that were of “particular interest” to the journal also had national resonance and that the journal “will seek out” both national and international contributors. In Spring 2000, the VQR’s editor described those who contributed to the South as “prominent white liberal Southern male journalists and academics” who held “a position of cultural authority in a society about which he has some misgivings but to which he remains devoted.” Ayers asserts that the most important theme in the journal’s first forty years was “a longing for a more humane racial order, generated from within the South itself, over

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seen by enlightened white liberals emulating ‘saints’ ” (192). Its other great consideration was how Southerners might retain their cultural identity in the face of “emerging modern social order”; during the 1920s and 1930s the core manifestation of this topic was the tensions between “modernity and tradition,” with most VQR authors and professors at UNC siding with “modernity” and the Vanderbilt Agrarians siding with tradition. As a scholar of Classical and European intellectual history, Stringfellow Barr seems an unlikely candidate to stand as against and give voice to the Agrarians. Recognizing Barr as an astute critic of how contemporary Northerners misunderstood the South, Donald Davidson wrote to him in late 1929 asking him to submit an essay to I’ll Take My Stand. The essay that caught Davidson’s eye was Barr’s “The Uncultured South” in the VQR’s April 1929 issue. Therein, Barr takes Northerners and popular culture to task for romanticizing the plantation culture of the Old South, thus misshaping their understanding of current cultural practices. In contrast, Barr describes the pros and cons of the Old South’s ruling class’s essence as “a spirit of aristocracy” (198) that valued its privilege, read the classics, cultivated the art of conversation, and knew the realities of maintaining status. In a letter to Davidson (Feb. 15, 1930), Barr sets out his highly qualified support of agrarianism but admits that his “feelings are most mixed.” Barr had concluded “that industrialization of the South is an inevitable as cotton and rice and cane and tobacco once were and that the only Southern tradition worth fighting about is the responsibility of real leadership as against the irresponsible exploitation of a plutocracy kidding itself into calling itself a democracy.” Given that reality, he would argue for a “responsibleindustrialization programme” given guidance by “the practical leaders of the South who are faced with genuine decisions in the realm of action.” As for Agrarianism, he pointed out that the Southerner was “an extremely political animal” who—rather than developing a sense of aesthetics—developed agrarian culture as a means of “cashing in on his rich acres and mild climate that gave him a preferential position in what was already an international economy.” That same spirit of practicality would lead the Southerner to realize his fortunes within the industrial economy. Thus, rather than backing “a programme” blindly opposed to industrialism and praising its Southern opposite, Barr would fight for “collective bargaining for labor, workman’s compensation, and all the other commonplaces of decency that Europe and the North attempted to ignore when they industrialized.” Barr ends by begging off cordially and acknowledging his desire to “clarify . . . my heresy” in person. Barr was visited by Allen Tate the next month when they were both in New York, and Tate, who made Barr feel as he might “belong to the little

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group,” convinced him to send along an abstract of his idea to Davidson (Mar. 11, 1930). Once Barr was included in the conversation, he asked for such modifications to John Crowe Ransom’s statement of principles that Davidson cordially dismissed him: whereas Barr had called the collection “a bastard concordance of opinion,” Davidson described it as “a perfect natural conformity” that Barr’s inclusion would break (Davidson to Barr, n.d.). Davidson’s dismissal was, however, gracious: “Pray for us, and think kindly of us as you can. Our regard for you is fraternal and genuine.” Upon this exclusion from I’ll Take, Barr published “Shall Slavery Come South?” as the lead article in the October 1930 issue of VQR, preempting the release of I’ll Take by a month. Regardless of the impossibility of making industry subservient to small farm agriculture, what happened over the next six years was that these two groups of voices—the liberals and the traditionalists—would hold an extended, cordial debate that spoke to people’s anxieties loudly enough that thousands would gather to hear the live debates. Sprees of articles and essays were published throughout the country about the issue. The very title of “Shall Slavery Come South?” condemned the nature of industrial practice as a type of hidden slavery, a trope regularly employed by Southerners. The essay begins by identifying defenders of Southern tradition as “descendants of the Southern ruling class” who looked back to tradition as the single point of authority after their leadership had been “curtailed” in “the political, economic, and social sphere” (481–482). Yet their opposition to industry had not only become opposition to a national way of life but to even “the local Chamber of Commerce” (482). Instead of dismissing industrial society, Barr called on the traditionalists’ “mature sense of social responsibility” to help “the culture of the older South to discover a method for adapting” (484–485): to do otherwise would condemn Southerners to unregulated wage slavery. The South’s leaders, claimed Barr, might “benefit” from the “vicarious experience and antitoxins already in use [by other part of the modern world], in the form of industrial regulations” and guide those by Southern beliefs about “human decency” that the Agrarians proclaimed (491, 494). Barr’s essay inflamed Davidson, Ransom, and Tate who released a letter that was picked up by the AP condemning Barr. Lambert Davis, VQR’s managing editor, contacted Davidson soon thereafter, and they engaged in a cordial but spunk-filled series of letters, which rang full of motifs drawn from being seconds in a duel, setting up a debate between Barr and Ransom. Barr’s essay laid forth the views he (or his proxies) would later articulate in a series of well-attended, vigorous debates held with Ransom (or his proxy). The first debate in Richmond, Virginia, on November 14, 1930, paralleled

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the release of I’ll Take My Stand (and came two weeks before the death of Mother Jones) and demonstrated that Southern cultural practitioners knew how to generate cultural capital. Some thirty-two hundred people, including the current and ex-governors of Virginia, attended the Richmond debate that was presided over by Sherwood Anderson who then published several small-town papers in western Virginia (Davidson, “Wither Dixie”; “Dr. Ransom”; Kneebone 121). The most poignant example in the debate was that of Gastonia, where Ransom said that the collective identity of unions goes against the grain of Southern laborers—it looks like a breach of the Southern tradition. In fact the laborers at Gastonia were ex-agrarians, newly converted, and right off the farm. They hardly dreamed that any sort of economic life in a peaceable country would require them to surrender their individualism and join an army in order to get a decent protection. (Qtd in “Dr. Ransom” 2) Ransom predicted that the outcome would be communism. Barr, of course, disagreed: he claimed that unionism would not threaten “Southern tradition,” particularly if both industry and unions were regulated. Indeed, even before the Depression, Southern tenant farmers and farm owners had begun a desperate migration. The issues over which Barr and Ransom debated were immediate and palpable. In a survey of five hundred North Carolina cotton-mill families, 62 percent had been farmers (almost equally split between owners and tenants), nearly 40 percent had come from “the mountain section”, and 30 percent were from out of state (Rhyne 69–74). In short, one could not ask for a more dramatic effect and difference in a switch from the very folk-ways that the Agrarians valued to particularly insidious industrial cultural practices.3 The release of I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (Nov. 1930) heralded the emergence of another version of regionalism with Ransom and Davidson at the helm.4 Released a year after the stock market collapse in October 1929, I’ll Take My Stand was timely in its condemnation of industrialism and defense of human value from the perspective of an agrarian, Southern tradition. Although the Agrarians failed to bring about economic change, their work struck a chord that still resonates in our cultural conversation about culture and economics.5 Theirs was an argument about preserving human value in a rampant commodity economy. Lyle H. Lanier’s definition, which follows earlier critiques of standardization, might well be the same one used by L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poets: “By ‘industrialism’ is meant not the machine

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and industrial technology as such, but the domination of the economic, political, and social order by the notion that the greater part of a nation’s energies should be directed toward an endless process of increasing the production and consumption of goods” (148). Although the Agrarians spoke as Southerners, they also spoke with others who were critical of the industrial order and the consumer economy. The Agrarians and Marxist/proletarian writers (including early modernist as Anderson and Dreiser) all opposed industrial capital, but their methods and solutions differed dramatically. Not surprisingly, the Nation’s review chastised I’ll Take My Stand as “the rationalization of a nostalgia for ancestral ways rather than a rational approach to a real problem” (Hazlitt 48). But most other reviews generally agreed with the values the Agrarians sought to defend. One appreciated their Southern “qualities of character”—“agrarian opposed to industrial, traditional as opposed to rootless, human and individual, leisurely, courteous and composed”—and agreed that education should “produce good men rather than turn out graduates” (V. Moore). Many reviewers felt those goals were to be lauded, but critiqued their claim’s foundations. Henry Hazlitt commented, “Reading them, one almost forgets that such culture as the old South had rested on slavery, that it was confined to a small privileged upper class, relieved of the more menial duties” (48). Moreover, all commentary recognized that the Agrarians lacked a plan to realize their goals. Even as the merits of the book were weighed on the page, live debates continued six month after its release: between Ransom and William S. Knickerbocker (editor of the Sewanee Review) in New Orleans, Louisiana, on December 15 with one thousand attending; between Ransom and Barr in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on January 9, which was “well attended”; between Ransom and William D. Anderson (a textile manufacturer) in Atlanta, Georgia, on February 11 with some one thousand attending; and between Davidson and Knickerbocker in Columbia, Tennessee, on May 11 with seven hundred attending (Kneebone; “Noted Speakers”; Young 218–227). The next section outlines the positions of Davidson and Knickerbocker who played key roles in establishing Appalachian literature via their support of and influence on Stuart and Still. Davidson versus Knickerbocker The tale of the Sewanee Review demonstrates the shift in the academic study of literature brought about by the New Critics (née Agrarians), whose histories effaced Knickerbocker’s long editorship, which was pivotal in blending academic discussion of Victorian and English culture with the then contemporary American, Southern, and Appalachian culture and writers.

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The historical essay on the Review’s website, for instance, only mentions Knickerbocker in a series of names at the end (Bradford). Editors whose articles narrate the journal’s history infallibly dismiss Knickerbocker. George Core, editor from 1973 to present, writes, “Knickerbocker, who was behaving erratically at best, was a burnt-out case” (71). Monroe K. Spears, editor from 1952 to 1961, describes Knickerbocker as “a small, feisty, voluble rather silly person who was certainly offensive” (9). Knickerbocker was certainly not light of tongue, his writing was often verbose, and his letters were blunt and filled with confrontation—breaking the conventions of polite conversation common to the Southern writers. Andrew Lytle and Allen Tate claimed the review as their own in 1942, and it became a leading organ for the New Criticism. Founded in the University of the South in 1892, the Sewanee Review is the oldest continually published critical quarterly in the nation. The journal first began publishing poetry along with literary criticism in 1920, and Knickerbocker took over editorship in 1926. Even though the Sewanee Review’s print-run only averaged 470 issues from 1932 to 1936 (N. W. Ayer), it was the most heavily cited journal of criticism in the MLA bibliography. Knickerbocker, a New Yorker, began publishing essays on contemporary culture and poetry that he juxtaposed against scholarship on Victorian literature (A. Turner 25–27). His program was to revalue the South’s role in American culture and the humanist tradition. After writing evaluative essays on the Fugitives in 1928, Knickerbocker provided the central platform for Agrarians to trumpet their creed; “Reconstructed But Unregenerate,” John Crowe Ransom’s lead essay for I’ll Take My Stand, first appeared in the Sewanee Review as did other essays about the New South, many by those who forcibly disagreed with the Agrarians. But their early relationship was not adversarial, and Knickerbocker published essays by Tate on T. S. Elliot and regularly populated the review’s pages with poems by the Fugitives/Agrarians. Knickerbocker’s letters to Davidson throughout the 1920s were familiar and personable as were Davidson’s to him (Davidson Papers 8.34). Writing just after the release of I’ll Take and the first Barr-Ransom debate, Knickerbocker shared his deep regard for Davidson’s weekly book page that the Tennessean (Nashville’s paper) could no longer afford to pay him to edit: “[Y]ou have infused a philosophy in your reviewing; and I know that you have had a tremendous effect upon regional sentiment and opinion hereabout” (Nov. 28, 1930). Knickerbocker encouraged Davidson to write more poetry and then apologized for his forthcoming review of I’ll Take that he knew would be seen as “offer[-ing] up my friends to the Moloch of machinery.” Knickerbocker felt he was “forced into the unpleasant situation of being your implacable opponent” as regards the Agrarianism and

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explains that he inhabits a more central part of the Southern tradition represented by those Southerners who encouraged the cultivation of industry. Knickerbocker must have received an immediate and harsh response from Davidson who challenged him to “ ‘hasten into print [the] condemnations and misrepresentations of matter that [I] apparently do not understand’ ” (Knickerbocker to Davidson, Dec. 1, 1930). He reminds Davidson that he had regularly praised Knickerbocker for his support and study of “everything your group has written,” but Davidson’s condescending questioning of Knickerbocker’s understandings led Knickerbocker to shrilly proclaim that Davidson must “either show up or shut up.” In his review of I’ll Take My Stand for the Saturday Review of Literature, Knickerbocker appreciates the essayists’ skill and called the symposium “the most challenging book published since Henry George’s ‘Progress and Poverty’ ” (467). But Knickerbocker dismisses their deprecation of modernity and idealization of the past. He remarks on the inevitable relationship of industry and agriculture as “reciprocal and interdependent states . . . two ventricles of the heart of western society,” neither of which could be done without (468). Knickerbocker emphasizes that point by calling the Agrarians, whose book was dedicated to Dean Flemming of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University, “a group of economic protestants (chiefly products of a university whose principal patron was the northern industrialist, Cornelius Vanderbilt)” (467). Like other reviewers, Knickerbocker recognized the problem was not how to defeat modernity but how to “integrate” it “by hard labor, industrious experiment, and contingent thinking.” After Knickerbocker conducted his debate against Ransom in December, he composed an extended essay articulating his critiques of Agrarianism that April in the Sewanee Review. His essay, “Mr. Ransom and the Old South” begins by acknowledging that the authors in I’ ll Take “are my friends” (222). Knickerbocker then proceeds to lay out his main claim, which he supports by showing how Southerners had long fought for similar goals: “My contention is that an integrated, or regulated, order of agriculture, commerce, and industry is preferable and, indeed considering the present crisis, absolutely necessary” (223). The essay then proceeds to show the narrow, exclusive classification of Southern culture—“the most solid and enduring contribution to the Old South lay in the rudimentary agrarianism of the middle South” (222)—from which the Agrarians take their cultural definition. Drawing upon examples of Southern writers from various eras, Knickerbocker then proceeds to lay out “five overlapping phases” of Southern economic and social development, within which he details how Southern actors sought a diversified economy throughout its history of which the contemporary state of industrialism’s overbearing influence was the most current example (228–232). After pointing

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out how General Robert E. Lee sponsored programs in engineering and commerce during his presidency of Washington College (235) as well as the way in which Tennessee entrepreneurs had advertised the state to immigrants, Knickerbocker turned an eye to the debilitating vagaries and burdens of running a small farm. But he ends with a condemnation of “a predatory and capitalistic industrialism which recklessly exploits or paternalistically controls the lives of human being or natural resources” (238). His point echoes Barr’s that the need is to regulate, integrate, protect, and control those forces via state intervention to salvage individualism and local culture. The debate between Davidson and Knickerbocker took place in Davidson’s stomping grounds of Columbia, Tennessee, in Maury County, located between Nashville and Giles County, where Davidson was born and which borders Alabama. He had attended high school in the county just to the north (Giles County) where his father had been a high-school principal. When Davidson discusses agrarian life on small, independent farms, he is referring to life in Maury and Giles Counties. It is telling, then, to inquire into the state of farming in Maury county according to the 1910 agricultural census, a year after Davidson graduated high school. The county had a population of 40,456, which was 40 percent black. Over 95 percent of the county was given over to 4,039 farms of which 1,555 were run by sharecroppers. Blacks made up 19.3 percent of farm owners and 23.3 percent of tenant farmers, all of whom farmed much smaller acreage than whites. This brief portrait shows the majority of farms were small and owned by whites; however, black owners and a huge number of sharecroppers displayed another side to the culture about which the Agrarians would remain silent. A total of seven hundred people attended the debate that was sponsored by the local paper, the Daily Herald. The audience consisted of people from all walks of life, including farmers, a congressman, and three Agrarians (Ransom, Tate, and Lytle) (“Noted Speakers”). The Daily Herald thoroughly summarized the cordial encounter, but an article, written by the editor of another paper who was at the debate, struck on the particular temper of the evening. The author described Knickerbocker as someone who “circumvented and circumlocuted and symbolized,” whereas Davidson gave the audience what “any good Maury countian might have expected from a debate. First, he thanked his honorable opponent for citing the glories of agrarian traditions . . . Then he grew poetic” (Waldrop). Both speakers were granted forty-five minutes and a brief rebuttal. The full text of Davidson’s twenty-eight-page speech is preserved in his papers, and even if he had to condense parts, the Daily Herald ’s summary shows that its basic claims were communicated. In light of his speech, it becomes clear why Davidson would champion Jesse Stuart, who fit Davidson’s farmer profile to a tee.

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Davidson set about more precisely defining the nature of the contemporary, Southern, agrarian lifestyle he was supporting and pointed out the “25,000,000” Southerners “are sensible enough to stay on farms” and millions more were directly connected (“Columbia” 6). A farmer who had not laid “hopes on a money crop,” he claimed, had “no need to talk of unemployment insurance” because he had “hams in his smokehouse, corn in his crib, or hay in his loft”: It is the first sort of farming, it is the self-sufficient and independent life close to the soil that we call agrarian. This is the foundation of the southern tradition we seek to defend against industrial invasions. This, for us, is the true stuff of society, the beginning of all sensible and realistic theories of economics. (8) Utilizing access to “higher standards of living” to justify their looting, industrialists wished to strip these “thrifty farmers” of their independence and make them dependent as “consumers of industrial products” (8–9). Tacitly acknowledging that “drudgery” of daily farm work was a “terrible curse” for women and children (13), Davidson merely pointed out that was a better option than “corruption” and “false culture” of a de-spirited life dependent upon commodities. With government and industry collusion, this culture of consumption fueled the exploitation of resources, over-selling of markets, public-subsidy, and indebtedness, all for the purpose of creating profit for the companies. The end route of this path that sold itself based on the promise of prosperity, claimed Davidson, was communist revolt. In his urge to find a way free of capitalism, Davidson spoke what he saw as hard truths: “There is only one indispensable human occupation: and that is the tilling of the soil. There is only one real kind of wealth; and that is the soil and what comes from it. This, too, is a wealth that cannot be falsified and promoted through advertising” (16). This kind of wealth of belonging and freedom from commodity bondage led those in cities to stigmatize farm life as “unworthy and degrading,” and hence sought to save the farmer by offering either “industrial methods” or seducing him to abandon “his calling” (17). People could support agrarians by not utilizing industrial methods to farm, by staying local and taking minimal speculative risks, and voting for politicians to protect such interests. Drawing on a damning motif, Davidson condemned the federal government: “The north destroyed the plantation owner of the Old South, but it substituted the rapacious capitalists, the soulless and bodiless corporation with its hired battery of legal experts to keep it forever just beyond the reach of law.” Against the “Prussian compulsions, wither of sumptuary laws, or of oppressive factory

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whistles and office hours,” Davidson details the agrarian life as one of intimacy with work, land, kin, and heritage (22). Davidson admitted that it was “not perfect at all points,” but that “it is a good life, on the whole.” Davidson spent a long time concluding his speech by outlining the need for a national agrarian vote, but one must wonder, if those were his real values, why he supported Strom Thurmond rather than Henry A. Wallace in the 1948 presidential election. Of course, by that time some twenty years later, Davidson’s regional politics had turned into a politics of race—as had the very politics of America, detailed in chapter seven that narrates how Don West sought racial unity based on his poetry about once being an agrarian Appalachian. Fencing Off Regionalism with Tradition Drawing on the hosts of readers already aware of regionalism, the appeal of the Agrarians was powerful. But whereas Davidson wanted a mass conversion, other Agrarians sought to protect their lair. The month after I’ll Take My Stand was released, Allen Tate took steps to warn away those writers who felt they might take their cue from the symposium without having an organic relationship with Agrarian materials. Tate felt the literary movement of regionalism was susceptible to becoming a “program” whereby writers would seek out a relationship with locality that did not actually exist. By digging through “documents, living and dead,” the new regionalists felt they might “grant self-expression to the whole community” (159). Tate continues, “Such writing is nearly always still-born, for it is documentary, and the author may be deceiving himself in believing that the material has some vital rapport with his own moral temper” (emphasis in the original). Contrary to the regionalism that found value in “local color,” Tate calls for a regionalism that means “only the immediate, organic sense of life in which a fine artist works,” wherever that life might be—regional or not (158). That type of regionalism is what Tate calls tradition. The word tradition comes loaded in Tate’s mouth. For Tate, tradition is always private: “it is those ways of feeling, those convictions of propriety, those ways of speaking, of which the writer himself is hardly aware, and from which he cannot escape” and those “fixed procedures that we can rely on in the larger pursuit of a good life” (159). That personal tradition (one’s folkway or habitus we might call it) is sacrosanct, and the writer “should use it without ever writing about the society, the region, the nation, from which his tradition is derived.” To put it on a “billboard” in a “debauched conquest of the world” would make the writing “clumsy and sterile,” and such was “the plight of American fiction, the plight of Mr. Dreiser.” Tate’s label for mixing art and public action is “sectionalism.”

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Tate, that is, marked off the Agrarian’s identity territory—once one’s parents and culture moved away from the roots, one was lost. This act of being grounded in a discovered tradition from which one could not easily move echoed wide beliefs about race, class, and culture as something one had to find but could not ever leave. Tate himself, however, was victim of his own criteria. Tate’s father and mother were of Scotch Irish extraction from Illinois and had inherited hundreds-of-thousands of acres of land (Underwood 8–9). However, Tate’s father was a hapless entrepreneur whose ne’er-do-well attitudes led to one failed business venture after the other and alienated Tate’s mother. Tate’s mother compensated by engaging in expensive travel and built an elaborate fantasy about her remote Virginia heritage. Tate then cultivated a Southern identity to lick the wounds of a soiled family. As his biographer relates, Raised by a father who paid little attention to household expenditures and by a mother who claimed the family had descended from gentry, Allen not only became a poor manager of his own money, but learned to think of himself as a member of the genteel class. He compensated for the shame he felt over his parent’s financial condition by carrying himself as something of a southern aristocrat. (15) As a result of his father’s ineptitude, Tate (born in 1899 in Winchester, Kentucky) was moved throughout the Ohio Valley region until he went to school at Vanderbilt at the age of eighteen. Two stops are of particular interest. Tate lived in Cincinnati with his parents from 1915 until he started Vanderbilt in 1918, a time of the great reaction against German immigrants and speakers when German books were taken from public libraries and the substantial number of bi-lingual German-English schools were shut down. Tate also lived in Ashland from 1912 to 1914, less than twenty miles from the farm where Jesse Start’s family was living. At the heart of central Appalachia, Ashland was just downstream from where the Big Sandy River emptied into the Ohio, allowing the easy transport of the timber and coal being torn from eastern Kentucky and southern West Virginia. Although Tate’s father failed, his older brother Ben—based in Cincinnati—was successful and soon owned coal mines up and down the Ohio, allowing him to pay Tate’s way through college and in 1931 to hire Tate’s other brother to manage the coal company’s office in Ashland (179). Ben would be the fount of Tate’s welfare, buying him (in June 1930), a 185-acre rundown farm with an antebellum house (50 miles northwest from Nashville) that Tate would call Benfolly (159–60). With a tenant farmer on the grounds, Tate would regularly host the Agrarians and other writers there. Writing to Malcolm Cowley about his brother’s kindness,

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Tate remarked, “I found that Industrialism had been profitable beyond my best nightmare” (qtd in The Dream 159). The Strange Alliance of Donald Davidson and W. T. Couch The year after I’ll Take My Stand came out, Donald Davidson entered into negotiations with the University of North Carolina Press (UNCP) to put together a critical book on Southern literature. However, after the dorm he and his family lived in at Vanderbilt had burned down in February 1932, Davidson began to encourage W. T. Couch, UNCP’s editor, to continue with a collection of essays about Southern culture (Davidson to Couch, May 2, 1932). Even though at this time he was in despair and found himself unable to generate a book on Southern literature (Winchell 151), Davidson was always cordial and in the business of promoting networks even when he disagreed with Couch (for the University of North Carolina was the stronghold of Southern liberal sociologists). In response to the Agrarians’ regionalism, W. T. Couch, director of UNCP, edited Culture in the South (1934), an anthology of essays that portrayed the life of Southern cultural institutions—from universities and labor organizing to literature and folk-life—and defined how the South was understood for years. In the preface Couch charges that I’ll Take My Stand “reveals clearly the fallacy of expecting a better way of life as a result of merely bigger and better business; but it falls into even the more serious error of interpreting southern life in terms of industrialism vs. agrarianism” (vii). He reminds the reader that agrarian life in the South consists of “1,790,000 tenant farmers, white and black. One finds the last stronghold of child labor. One finds women who have to cook, sew, wash and iron, who have to work regularly in the fields planting, hoeing, and harvesting and who are not protected by any laws or customs regulating their hours of labor” (viii). Couch identifies the lack of scholarship on the variance in class, politics, economics, race, education, and religion: “The interests of the great mass of the white population have not been adequately studied by leaders in the South either of the present or of the past. The history of the South as it has been written deals almost exclusively with the larger slaveholder, his slaves, and his other interests” (ix). Holding his own approach accountable, he admits the paradox that the study of how small farmers can “raise themselves out of bankruptcy” was made possible by “financial aid from foundations that have gained their wealth in industry.” The essays collected, he hopes, will help to “sound” the depth of the “broad stream of southern life” and “measure its strength, discover its complexity, and ultimately find ways to remove the debris which now infests its waters” (x). It is with some irony

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then that the collection brought together varied visions of the South, including essays by the Agrarian Donald Davidson on Southern literature; another by B. A. Botkin on Southern folklore; one called “Appalachian America” by J. Wesley Hatcher, who was the head of Berea College’s Department of Sociology; and a piercing piece about coal exploitation by Bruce Crawford, a Virginia journalist and member of the Dreiser Committee that had investigated “terrorism” in Harlan county. In “The Trend of Literature: A Partisan View,” Davidson began adopting the rhetoric and identity strategies of other regionalists and deployed the language of cultural pluralism to defend the South as a separate and distinct culture. Akin to Kallen’s and Botkin’s critique of Whitman, Davidson declares, “America is an abstraction” and adds that this abstraction only takes power under an “industrial régime”: “Its government in no accurate way represents the heterogeneity of its parts, which are grouped in a loose spiritual confederation” (185), a Southern spin on William James’ statement about “how the pluralistic world is . . . more like a federal republic” that proved so central for Kallen (James 145). The “old character” South, for Davidson, was a repository and example for Americans who wanted to preserve the arts against the “industrial blight” (“The Trend” 185). When pressed, Davidson is not able to define that old character of the South; instead, he gestures, “the southern character is easier to recognize than define, and has much more variety than is commonly supposed” (199). He found that most post-Reconstruction Southern writers, betraying their heritage, were “over-anxious to avoid the charge of sectionalism. They were either critical or despairing in their rendering of southern life” (193). When not despairing, white Southern writers wrote of the Negro or the “poor white and mountaineer,” both of whom were in vogue—one in Harlem, the other in national folklore circles. He found that writers such as Julia Peterkin (Black April), Paul Green (plays and stories), and Howard Odum (Rainbow Round My Shoulder) all wrote of a modern “rendering of Negro life,” just as Elizabeth Maddox Roberts (The Time of Man) and Maristan Chapman (The Happy Mountain) romanticized “poor whites” who were “rich in folk-ways that the civilized could only admire” (191). What gave rise, Davidson asked, to this “new myth, which apotheosizes and exalts the rich primitiveness”? Davidson put the situation simply: while these authors built bridges to “enlarge [readers’] understanding” of Negroes and mountaineers, “in this field their creative powers are stimulated and elsewhere they are blocked” (204). They move into escapism and “revive an old romantic subject.” The more successful books, such as Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, “showed how skillfully a troubled and imaginative soul could adapt a modern

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technique to southern materials; but unlike some of his contemporaries, Mr. Faulkner displayed no animus toward the South” (193). Even though Faulkner “conducts us into the abyss” of “the degeneration of a southern family” where “the moving glitter of life is ruled by demons of pain and despair,” he creates a tragedy with “disinterested artistic performance” (205). But Davidson found Faulkner to be atypical. In addition to the social pressures felt by Southern writers, Davidson notes the lack of publication venues in the South. Without “communication and fellowship among themselves,” Southern writers had to reach their Southern audience through “the bottle-neck of New York” where their writing was “financed and interpreted” (197). Rarely did groups of writers—such as the Fugitives out of Nashville—manage to gain voice on their own terms. Davidson proclaims a “war of cultures” between “urban” and “rural or provincial civilization” (198). And urban standardizing culture was encroaching upon the South. Against that trend, Davidson proclaimed: [W]e should gladly defend the conditions of life which permit the free and natural growth of a genuine southern art. The rebellion against uniformity in American life, which in the literary field has now taken the name of regionalism, and the general dissatisfaction with the rule of centralized metropolitan culture that seems to have brought us to sterility and chaos—these new phenomena suggest that a movement toward selfdetermination in southern letters may prove a battle for the right. (210) Davidson lauded Southern writing as “restrained and conservative” and “nearer to the English tradition,” but he did not predict the outburst from mountain writers whose “genuine art” portrayed how their culture was being savaged by the reaping of raw resources. In large part, national publishers began to bring out mountain authors because of Couch and UNCP’s success in cultivating a critical Southern audience. Founded in 1922, the UNCP quickly became the only major nonreligious publisher in the South. Privileging professors from their schools, university presses published for other national scholars, but Couch came from a generation of newly minted professionals. Having been raised on a struggling family farm and working his way through high school and college, Couch’s education allowed him insight on local racial and social difficulties, so he began what he called “an experiment in ‘cultural’ publishing” (qtd in Singal 277): his goal was not to engage national scholars but to awaken the Southern middle class. Couch began a publishing program that featured critical discussion of Southern social realities only after overcoming his board’s resistance. Couch

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was the UNCP’s assistant director in 1927 when a controversy broke out over Paul Green’s introduction to a collection of black folktales (265). Green was a playwright and professor at UNC who had just won the Pulitzer for In Abraham’s Bosom, a play about the life of Southern blacks (266). In his introduction, Green recognized the deep interrelationship of the races— “black and white are inextricably mingled in blood and bone and intention” (qtd in Singal 266)—and asked whites to break the power hierarchy that allowed them to stand over blacks, who labored “in the ditch doing the dirty digging.” After the press’s Board discovered the introduction, they wanted to destroy the book, but Couch had already sent them to national reviewers (267). When no backlash resulted from the book’s release, Couch began his regional work. Almost a third of the UNCP’s books published under Couch addressed the South. Because the press was based in a prominent Southern university, books focusing on the region held great authority with Southerners (266). In his portrait of Couch and UNCP, the historian Daniel Joseph Singal adeptly demonstrates why their regional books succeeded. Seeking to overcome both the New South’s blind lauding of economic development as well as the reticence of Southerners to enjoin in critique, Couch encouraged authors to take a position and to represent it with potent description rather than mere facts (279, 282). He also sought “candor” about social circumstances (283), which is demonstrated in his critique of I’ll Take My Stand in Culture in the South. Moreover, Couch acted upon his values and gave his press’s prestige and monetary support to the founding of the Southern Conference of Human Welfare in 1938 (Singal 291–293), whose interracial coalition’s fight against social injustice and economic inequality that would be a important factor leading to the publication and reception of Don West’s Clods of Southern Earth. The Players Meet In 1935 a conference on Literature and Reading in the South and Southwest was held at Louisiana State University. Led by Dean Charles W. Pipkin of LSU’s Graduate School and Robert Penn Warren (editor of the recently founded Southern Review), the conference drew forty editors, writers, and scholars from all sides of the regionalist movement. Literary players included W. T. Couch, Allen Tate, and John Gould Fletcher, B. A. Botkin, Lambert Davis (managing editor of VQR), and Ford Madox Ford. Discussion centered on the relationship between writers and audiences. On one side, Pipkin proposed that the South had few readers to “set” the problems that artists should write about, and without a “corrective public,”

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writers had become antisocial and self-indulgent, a problem amplified because Southern writers were held to New York’s cultural standards (“Conference” 43–45). Allen Tate pointed out that the writer had “no public of his peers” in the South but instead wrote for a removed “general public” that had to “buy the book as [a] commodity” (46) produced and appraised in New York. Their solution was not to write for a specific audience and, instead, write in what Tate called a “humane tradition that enables the writer to write things that are exportable” (63). Against that presumption, Botkin countered that “one of the first rules of Fugitive poetry as I understand it . . . is not to write about the South” (58; emphasis in the original). Botkin went on to praise the Fugitives as “a closely-knit, cooperative self-conscious group” who had set about creating “a taste and a public” (61), even if he felt that the best public was a regional one that had to be educated and cultivated. The idea of creating an audience was championed by Fletcher, who cited statistics about library circulation to prove that the size of the reading public in the South was much greater than Tate and Pipkin had posited (50). Hence the need to “publish regional books” to cultivate those readers (49). Yet as B. A. Botkin pointed out, in order to generate a public, writers and editors need the support of commercial financing: “Here the regionalist is confronted with the ethical problem of asking the plutocrats to support a propaganda that is definitely aimed against the society that has produced them” (62). Seeing themselves as intermediaries between the writer and the public, editors discussed the difficulties of realizing that goal. Couch outlined the pragmatics of publishing costs, distribution, and sales. At the same time, he held that intellectuals should encourage audiences by writing “books that would enable people in the region to know the region” (69). John McGinnis, editor of the Southwest Review and book page editor for the Dallas News, concurred that publishers were “slow to wake up” to Southern “markets” (55). Conversely, the literary editors felt trapped between a provincial “patriotic” public, who was not open to criticism, and regional educated readers who wanted “New York approval” that debased Southern life too freely (54). In the end, Ford Madox Ford’s comments carried a feeling of fatherly impatience: “You do not grow up as a writer until you have to write for someone else, that writing is a communication with an ideal reader or class, not necessarily a large public” (75). And while Ford recognized New York as a necessary distribution center, he ended by proclaiming the “inevitability of folk art” (76). Conference attendees would go on to write about relations that define literature’s cultural circuit. Couch’s UNCP would release Donald Davidson’s Attack on Leviathan: Regionalism and Nationalism in the United States wherein

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Davidson noted that “in the nineteen-thirties the publishing houses of the East were quick to perceive the strength of the ‘regional’ appeal . . . [and] were the agents of a process which, by helping to stir and awaken regional consciousness, undermined the strategic position of New York as a literary capital” (“Regionalism” 88–89). In that same fateful year, Botkin would release the final in his series of essays in the English Journal (1936–1938). “The Folk and the Individual: The Creative Reciprocity” (1938) considered how regionalist writers might renovate their roles as prestige-seeking interpreters for a middle-class audience and cross the chasm of commodity relations to become actors with and for a folk. In the “nationalist theory of folklore,” Botkin stressed, is “rooted in the myth of a pure national cultures and pure races.” And while a “[f]alse national culture, with its delusions of purity and superiority,” might “require closed doors,” maintained by gate keepers, “the true folk culture . . . like love laughs at locksmiths” and publishers (131). Indeed, the issues raised by Davidson and Botkin stand at the center of this book’s inquiry. Exclusions and Endings With the tenth-anniversary issue of VQR (April 1935) that focused on Southern literature, the Agrarian project had begun to unravel. The VQR was being edited by Lambert Davis who had accepted James Still’s poem “Mountain Dulcimer” for publication in the July issue. Of the seven essays in the issue, five were by once Agrarians or their allies, including Tate (whose essay began the collection), Ransom, John Wade, Stark Young, and Cleanth Brooks Jr. The other two essays by Gerald W. Johnson and Thomas Wolfe gave quite different visions. The same was true of the poetry and fiction included, with stories by Warren and Lytle being balanced by Grace Lumpkin and poetry by Tate and John Peele Bishop balanced by Elizabeth Madox Roberts. The two Souths presented had little overlap: in their essays, the Agrarians either denied successful literature as properly Southern (as with Tate and Ransom) or lauded fellow Agrarians as the only successful Southern poets. Opposed to the Agrarians’ exclusive South, Johnson listed writer after writer who brought the daily, hard realities of Southern life to vivid life, including Paul Green, Julia Peterkin, Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, and Ellen Glasgow. The goal of the Agrarians—and now the New Critics—was to stop such literature from being understood as either Southern or good. Davidson, however, as we have seen, was much more honest in his evaluations. Indeed, what is notable about this issue of VQR is the lack of an essay by Davidson.

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Davidson hadn’t expected to see the essay he submitted, “I’ll Take My Stand: A History,” published because it was part of a sequence of retorts that started with Davidson submitting and H. L. Mencken publishing “Dilemma of Southern Liberals” in the American Mercury (February 1934). What Davidson did not foresee was that Mencken’s attack on the Agrarians (“The South Astir”) would be featured in the January 1935 VQR or that Davidson would have the role of the archly benighted Agrarian in it. What disturbed Davidson was that Davis, VQR’s editor, had sought Allen Tate’s advice about who to have in the issue and that Tate had not mentioned Davidson (Davidson to Tate, March 17, 1935). While Davidson was concerned, he was, as ever, politic about personal relationships and group dynamics. The situation came to a head, when Davidson mentioned to John Gould Fletcher that Davis had not taken “I’ll Take My Stand: A History.” Fletcher—who would go into an asylum soon thereafter—wrote personal letters to the Agrarians and asked them to withdraw their essays in support of Davidson (Conkin 119–120). Davidson had never wished for such action, and in the process of defending and reconciling the group discovered the gulf between himself and the other Agrarians. As Paul Conkin puts it, “[D]eep down [Davidson] felt betrayed—perhaps an early warning sign of his alienation from Ransom and even Tate” (119). Indeed, the first cracks were earlier seen when Tate would dismiss Davidson’s support of Jesse Stuart to be included in the American Review’s May 1934’s poetry supplement. Moreover, this VQR issue is the first collection of specifically New Critical essays by Ransom, Brooks, and Warren, a collaboration later developed in the American Review. The American Review evolved as a project between Seward Collins (who published it) and the Agrarians (who edited and wrote for it). Collins had met Tate in 1933 and had hoped to keep the Bookman (Collins’ old magazine) going with Tate’s help. The Agrarians met with Collins in April 1933 and entered into an agreement with him (whose distributionist ideology did not always fit theirs) that allowed them to make the American Review “their own periodical” (Conkin 107). In the next four years, the Agrarians would fill the American Review’s pages with their essays, reviews, and literature; Donald Davidson alone had over twenty contributions (Conkin 109) including, in one of the first issues, his essay “Scottsboro, the Third Crusade; the Sequel to Abolition and Reconstruction” that spoke against outsiders’ (such as Rukeyser) interference. Collins, however, became associated with fascism; the Agrarians also split with Donald Davidson fighting for regionalism and Tate, Warren, and Brooks publishing on modern (rather than Southern) poetry. Indeed, in one of the last issues in which those affiliated with Agrarianism would appear (February 1937), Davidson’s

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“Howard Odum and the Sociological Proteus” prefaces the essays that Tate, Brooks, and Warren read at the 1935 Modern Language Association conference. Therein, Brooks and Warren articulate the core theses of what would become their 1938 Understanding Poetry and make it clear that the problem with American poetry was the lack of an educated audience.6 And as we have seen, Davidson turned his focus more directly to regionalism; thus, even as Ransom established the Kenyon Review, he would write to Tate sharing that Davidson had become debilitated by his focus (Conkin 156). Although Davidson would later have cordial contact with Ransom and Tate, by 1940 he was out of contact with both. Just as Ransom had fled north to pursue poetry, so Tate had moved to Princeton, New Jersey, in 1939 and became poetry consultant to the Library of Congress in 1943 (a position that Rukeyser had also sought). The same year that Ransom published “Criticism, Inc.” and took a job at Kenyon College (1938), Davidson found an important, but odd, place of support for his regionalist project in W. T. Couch, whose UNCP brought out Davidson’s The Attack on Leviathan, a collection of his essays from the previous decade. Although scholars have since valued the book for its import (including its skilled writing and fallible ideology), The Attack would sell only five hundred copies in three years and less than another one hundred over the next nine, leading UNCP to pulp the remaining unbound sheathes in 1948 (Winchell 217). As we have seen Couch was no supporter of the Agrarians, and he even wrote two essays for the South Atlantic Quarterly denouncing them, so why would he bring out Davidson’s book? As a Southern liberal intellectual, Couch—as with Howard Odum— saw the South in terms of regional culture and resources. Although Couch and Odum certainly understood that race and class divisions needed to be addressed, they hoped to do so through amelioration via improving the standard of living for all. The VQR and UNCP’s support of the Agrarians gave them an ideological stance to push against and allowed them to make claims about reform that were heeded by New Deal liberals. However, with the waning of the Depression and the coming of fascism, national attentions turned toward race rather than region, making Davidson more and more a specifically racial reactionary. Although more distant from his once Agrarian colleagues, Davidson would publish ever more inflammatory social essays in the literary journals they ran. In Warren’s the Southern Review, he wrote a review essay against Erskine Caldwell’s and Margaret Bourke-White’s You Have Seen Their Faces (Viking 1937) as special edition coffee table book that sold the South’s poverty and relationship with blacks rather than recognizing that “[n]early all Southerners are tenants” to Northern culture (“Erskin Caldwell’s Picture

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Book” 18). After World War II, Davidson’s anti-integration stance grew ever more antagonistic. In the summer 1945 Sewanee Review, of which Tate had recently become editor, Davidson authored his first outright defense of segregation in reaction to Rayford Logan’s What the Negro Wants (UNCP, 1944), a collection of essays by black authors who all called for fully equal and integrated social and political rights. Davidson upheld the South’s “bi-racial system” as the best possible solution to the “Negro problem” because therein most individual “Negroes” earned the respect of whites via personal encounters (412): “Even as a slave, the Negro won personal esteem, often great esteem, from the white man who ruled him.” These respectful encounters, Davidson held, would erode customs of social distance. However, Davidson held that if the federal government would set “Law against Custom,” the country would again face “a bloody ruin” as happened when “[t]he old-time abolitionist called for justice for the Negro” but “ended by perpetuating a large-scale injustice upon the white man” (410, 411). By this time, however, many of the abolitionist heirs were themselves Southerners. Of specific relevance, Edwin R. Embree, president of the Julius Rosenwald Fund and grandson of John G. Fee who had founded Berea, approached Franklin Roosevelt soon after his election in 1932 about setting up a position in his administration to assure that African Americans were treated fairly under the New Deal (Foreman 139).7 Roosevelt heeded the advice, and Harold Ickes (Secretary of the Interior) created a post called Advisor to the Secretary of the Interior on the Economic Status of Negroes, to which Clark Foreman was appointed in 1933. Foreman would become president of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW) in 1944 and create alliances with the Progressives in which Don West’s book would flourish. Grandson of the first editor of the Atlanta Constitution, Foreman was an Atlanta native who attended the University of Georgia just after World War I where he witnessed a lynching that led him to question “the practice of democracy in the South” (“Foreman”). After going to graduate school at Harvard, the London School of Economics, and earning his PhD in political science in 1932 (which focused on race relations and environmental influences in Negro education) at Columbia University, Foreman served as director of studies for the Julius Rosenwald Foundation in Nashville, Tennessee (1929–1933). Thus Roosevelt listened when Foreman suggested bringing together a group of Southern experts (including government officials, academics, and union organizers) to write a document elucidating the South’s economic crisis. The resulting Report on the Economic Conditions of the South set the framework for establishing the SCHW, the first meeting of which was called in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1938 to answer concerns raised in the Report (Foreman 140). The conference brought together twelve hundred

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religious, labor, educational, and farm activists from all over the South, including bankers, editors, businessmen, congressmen, and senators (141). Although arrangements had been made with the authorities to allow the participants to sit where they chose, as the highest-profile biracial gathering ever organized in the South, the Birmingham police surrounded and threatened to storm the convention unless its participants segregated. Only Eleanor Roosevelt, the main speaker, dared to keep her chair in the center of the aisle between whites and blacks, thus breaking the very border that Davidson feared would be crossed and showing that some Southern “conventions” were only upheld because of state power. In the New York Times (Jan. 1931), Arthur Krock was not so far off in characterizing I’ll Take My Stand’s vision in Homeric terms: “here is but Cassandra predicting the dismal fates in store. There is no Hector visible in the foreground. The Greeks have landed from their ships; the topless towers of tradition, considerably obscured by the fogs of time and imagination, are threatened” (3). Even when the Nashville Agrarians would retreat to the defensive position of literary journals and then eventually into academe, their defense was a brilliant one: we are still recovering the poets and work that their criticism dismissed. Even our recovery of figures such as Muriel Rukeyser has yet to acknowledge the broader range of regionalist literary action. For when Agrarians transformed into the New Critics, they preserved their values through effacing their origins—origins shared with communist preachers, labor activists, community poets, and radical academics. Less surprisingly, literary theoretical reaction over the last thirty years to New Criticism has blocked understanding of Jesse Stuart, the agrarian who was so authentic as to be denied a place by their side. The New Critics and Agrarians fought to gain control of the Elysian wells and then poisoned the peasants’ groundwater.

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PART II

The Social Life of Poetry

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CHAPTER 4

Racing the Land with Jesse Stuart’s Man with a Bull-Tongue Plow (1934)

J

esse Stuart (1906–1984) is a central yet ambiguous icon in Appalachian literary history. The son of a tenant farmer from northeastern Kentucky, Stuart stands as Appalachia’s most prolific author, having authored sixtyfour books, mostly with E. P. Dutton and McGraw-Hill.1 Riding the wave of postwar Americanism, Stuart’s reputation reached its apex in the late 1960s when most school children in the nation knew his name. As popular as Stuart was, his reception by academics was undercut by New Critical devaluation of his poetry. Against that trend, critical and biographic monographs (from 1967 through 1980) sought to redeem Stuart’s work but largely did so with New Critical tools and in reaction to the rise of ethnic studies.2 At the same time, scholars associated with Appalachian studies—who arose along with race-based scholarship such as African American studies—rejected Stuart’s persona and work because of how he played into Appalachian stereotypes; indeed, Stuart’s seeming opposition to progressive, multicultural causes gave those scholars someone against whom to define themselves. As a result, thirty years of scholarly silence now surrounds Stuart’s work. This chapter begins to unearth the racialized roots of that silence by examining the cultural work of Stuart’s first book. When E. P. Dutton brought out his 703-sonnet Man with a Bull-Tongue Plow (MWBTP) in 1934 (figure 4.1), Stuart became the first Appalachian author to gain national publication. In just under a month, the book sold fifteen hundred copies, and Dutton released the second of five printings the book would soon undergo (“Book Notes”). MWBTP poeticizes the process of genus humi, an Anglo-nativizing of the land. It does so by opposing

Figure 4.1 Front Cover of Man with a Bull-Tongue Plow (E. P. Dutton, 1934). Designed by B. D. Recca. Courtesy of the Jesse Stuart Foundation.

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commodity culture and industrial exploitation and by demonstrating how a certain group of mountaineers had become one with the land. Showing an Anglo-American culture that had survived apart from modernity, MWBTP provided a racialized palliative during the Depression and countered modernity’s industrial, commodity, and racial deterritorialization. Stuart’s dramatic appearance in the national literary field started with a spree of publications in 1933, which was initiated and fostered by Donald Davidson’s guidance, networks, and direct interventions. Starting with American Mercury’s publication of “Elegy for Mitch Stuart” that January, the first sonnet sequences from MWBTP appeared that October in the Virginia Quarterly Review (VQR) with another soon to follow in the American Mercury. These publications set the stage for Stuart’s feature in Poetry (May 1934), with a sonnet sequence called “Young Kentucky” that won the Jeannette Sewell Award. Other publications quickly followed that summer with poems in July’s Forum and Dublin Magazine and sonnets in the Saturday Review of Literature that September. Those publications and editors’ championing help set the field for E. P. Dutton’s acceptance of MWBTP. From Vandy to W-Hollow to NYC Stuart first came to Nashville in the summer of 1930 when he was studying at Peabody College to supplement his employment as the principal of Greenup County High School. Witnessing the tumult around I’ll Take My Stand, Stuart wriggled his way into the MA program at Vanderbilt in 1931. While at Vanderbilt, Stuart identified his relationship with Davidson as central to his molding. Stuart was riveted by Davidson’s courses on the English lyric because the poems they studied seemed to reflect the mountain songs and poems he had heard as a child. Although Stuart would make mediocre grades in those courses, Davidson became his great mentor and guide. Indeed, when Stuart slipped his poems under Davidson’s office door, Davidson admired his poetry enough to read it to a class, which brought Stuart respect that he could not earn in the intellectual arena (Stuart, Beyond 260). Although Stuart would not graduate from the MA program, before leaving Nashville he did visit Davidson who shared words that Stuart relates “would change my whole life”: “Don’t change and follow the moods of these times. Be your honest self. Go back and write of your country, as William Butler Yeats is writing of his native Ireland. Your country has your material” (To Teach, To Love 163). Davidson’s encouragement proved potent, and after Stuart’s return to Greenup County he would author over 420 of the 703 sonnets in MWBPT (LeMaster 18) over the next eleven months even as he served as superintendent of Greenup County public schools. More

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importantly, Davidson commented on Stuart’s poems and guided his entry into the national literary field. As a chief strategist for the Agrarians, Davidson had an interest in promoting Stuart, whose writing and life served to exemplify the yeoman farmer values that Davidson wanted the Nashville Agrarians to forward.3 More directly, Davidson continued a vigorous correspondence with Stuart after he had left Vanderbilt, wherein Davidson directly aided Stuart’s climb into national attention through advice about where to submit, writing letters to editors, and hand-delivering Stuart’s manuscript to Edward Weeks, the Atlantic’s literary editor. It comes as little surprise that the other literary Agrarians frowned on Stuart’s poetry. Tate twice rejected Stuart from collections. In 1932, Tate wrote Davidson to explain about why he had rejected Stuart’s submission to the Southern poets issue for Poetry. Tate explained that he found Stuart’s poems to be “merely clumsy,” but gave Davidson room for grace by continuing, “But he does have a genuine flair and being near him you have a good chance to give him pointers” (Davidson and Tate 270). Similarly, as 1934 began, Stuart wrote several letters to Davidson, asking for him to intercede with Ransom, Tate, and Warren who were putting together the “poetry issue” of the American Review (Dec. 4, 1933, Jan. 24, 1934). But Stuart’s poetry would never appear in any journal edited by these men, who via the Southern, Kenyon, and Sewanee Reviews established the canon for postwar American poetry. Over the decades as Davidson lost cultural clout and Tate gained it, Tate became more honest about his disdain. As he commented in a 1950 letter to Davidson, “[Stuart’s] dramatization of himself as the Hillbilly, for New York consumption, had disgusted me for years” (Davidson and Tate 351). This split dramatizes the difference between Tate’s elitist and Davidson’s populist hopes for cultural intervention. Near the end of his brief tenure as superintendent of Greenup County Public Schools, Stuart sent Davidson some 300 sonnets and asked again for his guidance (Stuart to Davidson, April 4, 1933). Davidson advised Stuart to send poems to American Mercury, VQR, and Poetry, which Stuart immediately did, submitting stacks of 150–200 sonnets to each (Stuart, Beyond 311). However, in public statements Stuart denied his desire for publication and instead shared that “I was needing clothes badly, for McKell High” where he would be principal after stepping down as superintendent (311). Stuart’s ploy for gaining editors’ attention was to share his Vanderbilt associations and explain that Davidson “asked” him to send the poem because “he knew you personally and that, perhaps, you would be interested in my work” (Stuart to VQR, Oct. 3, 1932). The VQR politely rejected him. When he sent poems that May, Stuart tried a new bid by sending along a letter he

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had received from “Mr. Untermeyer” (perhaps the day’s most powerful canonizer) that advised him to send poems to VQR. But just four days later, it was the letter that Davidson sent the editor—Stringfellow Barr, with whom he had an established history, as related in chapter three—that made all the difference. Barr and Davidson, while they had disagreements about the proper orientation toward industrialism in the South, still respected one another’s vision and understanding (Barr on history and Davidson on literature). Davidson explained that Stuart was “an American Robert Burns” and the “first real poet (aside from the ballad makers) ever to come out of the southern mountains.” Davidson shared that Stuart’s sonnets “had an energy, intensity, and a flow that simply staggered me” but that Stuart himself was “utterly unschooled in editorial etiquette.” Like his sonnets, Stuart was “unspoiled” by his education and “utterly-direct, impulsive and above board.” In short, Stuart was not “ ‘literary,’ in the strictly modern sense” and Davidson would “be personally grateful for any interest you may feel you can take.” Attending to such interventions demonstrates how cultural capital is mustered and names are made. Davidson was negotiating for Stuart (and what he represented)—a native, Southern poet who wasn’t involved in the literary field via education, New York, or modernism. Such appeal was a powerful call to the readers of VQR who kept close tabs on the debate about Southern culture and modern America. This claim to being unschooled also excused Stuart’s uncouthness. Finally, Davidson offered Barr this chance to heal the rift that existed between the two over the conflict they had come into about Agrarianism and industrialism. Barr accepted twelve sonnets and praised Stuart for the “splendid work you have done” (Barr to Stuart, June 13, 1933). While such praise is vague tribute, the publication and the resulting prestige was not. In a letter dated July 1, Barr asked to see the whole book’s manuscript so that he might interest publishers: “But, of course, right now most publishers are on their last legs and poetry is the least profitable venture you can make when you are threatened with bankruptcy.” One might be hard put to understand how publication in a journal would compel a publisher’s interest; however, at the time, literature widely appeared in popular venues (such as newspapers, radio, and weeklies), and the few critical quartiles on the scene held great credence outside the academy. If Stuart’s publication in the VQR along with the ministrations of Davidson and Barr were not enough, he placed another thirteen poems in the American Mercury, leading Lambert Davis, the managing editor of VQR, to comment in a letter: With the twenty [Mr. Mencken] runs and the twelve that we run, you will be getting a fairly good start towards book publication, in my opinion.

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I also believe that you will be able to dispose of additional sonnets to other magazines after these two sequences have appeared, as they will certainly attract a good deal of attention. (Davis to Stuart, July 31, 1933) But part of what VQR wanted to sell was that they were the “first” to publish Stuart, which he had claimed even though he had published widely in minor little magazines and in the American Mercury that January, so Davis also demanded, politely, that Stuart hold his sonnets back from American Mercury until the VQR came out. Magazines and journals largely generate value from their relationship with similar venues, and the editors at VQR saw their own project as serious intellectual consideration of culture versus the American Mercury’s more vociferous approach. Stuart agreed and noted,“One cannot tell they are by the same author unless the same name appears with both groups. Your tastes are widely different” (Stuart to Davis, Aug. 1, 1933). Indeed, editors of each publication carefully selected poems that promoted the distinct vision and ideology of their publication, and it speaks highly of Stuart that his poems—all of which centered on farm life in Appalachian Kentucky—were so variously deployed. The twelve sonnets in the VQR begin with the narrator-poet’s retreat into the countryside and follow him (the only human to appear in the sequence) though a year of seasons and farm work. In so highlighting the poet’s relationship with nature, the VQR was giving critical space and balance to an idealized agrarian in a world where man and nature meld via weather and land-work: “Oh blood of autumn, you are in my blood— / Your shoe-make blood is in my dead-leaf veins” (ll. 9–10, VQR 508; MWBTP #425). Notably, Stuart’s poems appear after the first essay, “The Roosevelt Revolution,” thus tempering it and the issue’s other critical and worldly essays. While in the VQR the poet-narrator speaks to himself, the earth, and weather, those in the American Mercury begin with the poet-narrator addressing the reader, providing an apology for the poetry’s subject and form: Sir: I am a farmer singing at the plow, And as I take my time to plow along A steep Kentucky hill I sing my song— A one-horse farmer singing at the plow. I do not sing the songs you love to hear; My basket songs are woven from the words Of corn and crickets, trees and men and birds. I sing the strains I know and love to sing. And I can sing my lays like singing corn, And flute them like a fluting gray corn-bird;

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And I can pipe them like a hunter’s horn— All of my life these are the songs I’ve heard. And these crude strains no critic can call art, Yours very respectively, [sic] J S

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(MWBTP 1)

Such salutation and qualification is appropriate given the worldly (aspiring, educated, urban) identity of the American Mercury’s readers (Singleton 156–163). The narrator begins (and ends) by politely addressing the reader and makes a case against analyzing his writing as art, further appealing to the common person who would, nonetheless, recognize the form as a sonnet whose form is functionally “woven” from everyday words into “basket songs” (6). Such a metaphor supports the poem’s imperfect manifestation of a Shakespearian sonnet evoked with the opening quatrain and closing couplet, but formal expectations are thwarted by an interceding, off-balance octet that rhymes C-D-E-FD-E-D. This poem frames the productive ambiguity between Stuart and his folk-dance for a literate public for whom he claims not to write. This invitation allows Stuart and the reader to slip outside of their proscribed positions (the reader now becomes an understanding editor, the poet a nonpoet), so they can appreciate the poetry in terms of its plain vigor. The reader is thus invited into the world-system from which that aesthetic arises. In late August and early September, Barr related to Stuart the pleasure he had at seeing Stuart’s work “on the front cover of the new issue” and explained, “We are doing everything in our power” to get publishers to see Stuart’s poems (Barr to Stuart, Sept. 14, 1933). Barr’s brief letter evoked a flood of correspondence from Stuart over the next three months. Stuart shared his troubles and seemed to be placing Barr in Davidson’s place, except Barr did not return his letters. Nevertheless, the letters tell about Stuart’s situation as he sent out his manuscript. In mid-September he heard back from Mencken, whose publisher, Knopf, would not take it because of the “uncertain” times and their fear that they could not make a book of verse—even one cut to three hundred sonnets—pay (Stuart to Barr, Oct. 11, 1933). Stuart then appeals to Barr for support, a paradox because Stuart often writes about his unease with aid. Stuart shares, at length, the scheme by which he sent out copies of his manuscript for low postage. Then on the last page, Stuart lays out his finances, which I quote at length to help portray Stuart’s vexed relationship with money—a relationship that (as is later discussed) makes sense when seen in terms of Stuart’s culture’s “Kentucky Way”: I have not made but $105 since last March—$30 from you—$75 from the Mercury—Those were life saving checks—We can’t get paid work here and there is not but one bank left standing here—It cannot

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accommodate us—we all want to take out and not put anything in—But let the wheels turn and the money will be in New York—we have two cribs of corn—a barrel of sorghum— Although underpaid, Stuart was at least the principal at McKell High School. Stuart, it seems, is playing upon the popular visions of the Depression amplified by his own location in eastern Kentucky. Moreover, his culture’s relationship to money was based on occasional need and defined itself as not being indentured to jobs that interfered with other cultural obligations. Of course, Stuart was not well off and people were in desperate straits in Greenup, but Stuart knew the contradictions that he was courting. Although many of the poems in MWBTP cast aspersions upon commodity exchange in modern America and writing for any audience other than one’s own place in the world, Stuart was desperate—as his letters show—to sell his poems. In the same way, part of Stuart’s success derived from the narratives he provided to papers, magazines, editors, and publishers about how (at times upon sacks and leaves) and why he wrote. These narratives need to also be read as yarns that might be told about oneself, and over the years Stuart—who spoke and wrote endlessly of his own writing, work, and history in acts of self-promotion—is easily caught contradicting his own claims. Regardless of his factual exactness, what is important is that he knew how to spin a tale that his readers were hungry to believe. Early in 1934, Stuart’s book was accepted by E. P. Dutton. As he relates in a letter to the VQR editors (to whom he was submitting another large batch of sonnets), “[Stringfellow Barr] got me in touch with William-Morrow and they gave this manuscript to E. P. Dutton. And they have accepted it. Mr. Barr, directly and indirectly, has been the cause of this acceptance” (Stuart to Davis [1933]). Stuart also shared his apprehension at how the book was going to be received because Dutton planned to publish his 703-poem manuscript “as it stands.” Before detailing how the press, reviewers, and others actors drew upon aspects of that seeming mélange for varied interventions into race, I’d like to present an overview of its structure, so those varied visions can be readily discerned. By laying out the book’s complex architecture, its synthesis of Appalachian and American culture and poetics becomes clear and shows how Stuart’s wove the spell about his people racing the land. The Kentucky Way #1: An Overview of Man with a Bull-Tongue Plow MWBTP sets forth Stuart’s system of values in four interrelated sections. The first section (poems 1–200) establishes the parameters of conducting a

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worthy life of working the soil in Stuart’s land, and the second section (201– 450) considers the paths that Stuart might take to make a home therein. Sections one and two have 23 sequences (roughly 33 percent of the poems) about nature where the only human presence is that of the narrator’s. These 151 poems form the framework for human life and work. After deciding to stay in Kentucky and work the land at the end of section two, the poet is allowed in the third section (451–650) to converse with the land and tell the stories of the dead who have united with it. The final section (651–703) unites Stuart’s claims for poetry and life on the land as a way to resist the fragmentation of “Mammon” in the modern world. The first section of the book, “Leaves from a Plum Grove Oak” (poems 1–200), focuses on relationships between the people who work the land in Stuart’s region; throughout the section, Stuart balances representations of those relations with meditations upon nature, seasons, and poetry (which compose nearly 35 percent of the section). Section one starts by establishing the author-narrator’s self-identity via describing how he works the land and writes poetry there (poems 1–3). Similar groups of poems expand upon the worth, why, and how of poetry in Stuart’s world (19–20, 28–29, 36, and 142–147). Building upon those identifications, poems 4 through 18 describe the region’s nonhuman seasonal cycle. The section then considers the first half of the human life cycle: youth versus age (21–27); childhood (30–35); and prime years (37–50), using Stuart’s parents as examples. In these poems, Stuart explores the distance between generations, setting up the rest of the book to chart their continuity. The next group of poems (55–98) contains either portraits of or dramatic monologues by people who tend the land. These tales vary in their topics (working the land, anger at law, tobacco, children, failed love, parenthood, etc.) but central to all is the consideration of a person’s worth or worthlessness. The concept of worth is well-described in Rhoda H. Halperin’s “The Kentucky Way: Resistance to Dependency upon Capitalism in an Appalachian Region.”4 Unlike the national assumptions about Kentucky’s relationship to coal, unions, mountains, and isolation, Halperin draws her conclusions from the culture of the ten northeast Kentucky counties (to which Greenup is central)—an area of rolling hills, bordered on the north by the Ohio River. “[S]omewhere in between the core and periphery of economic life” (343), these counties were not fully isolated because the Ohio River was populated with cities dedicated to the shipping and processing of raw resources harvested from the mountains. Thus, “Kentucky way,” which is a local idiom, describes the relationship between the people’s values and how they make due in an area of a “three generational . . . multicentric

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economy of small family farms and subsistence gardens, factory based wage labor, and an informal periodic marketplace system” (344). Halperin continues, “At its core, ‘the Kentucky way’ is about maintaining livelihood and maintaining rural culture. It includes commitments to kin, to hard work and self-sufficiency, to freedom and to the land, to generosity and reciprocity, and to certain kinds of practical knowledge.” People become part of a group of interlinked generalists—each of whom is basically self-reliant but necessarily interlocked. Allied with occasional work for pay, this set of resources allows people to meet their “basic needs without overconsumption or conspicuous consumption” (347). Hence, the people who live by the Kentucky way “[d]isdain” whatever tears that “network of people” upon which their daily lives rely. Thus, they scorn “industrialism and economic development” as well as “those in [regional and state political] power and . . . those who control the means of production.” Hence, worth has nothing to do with wealth; instead worth has to do with how one participates in the local network of livelihood and culture. Worth was not determined by morality but by coherence to values such as defending oneself or one’s family, pursuing of a tragic love, or persevering under duress (such as drought or child loss). The fruit of the well-lived, worthy life is procreation of family and farm. The unworthy are those who have broken obligations to land and people. These unworthy take two forms: those wantons who spoil their land and families, and those who are seduced by gain via education, law, or profit. It is that last category—connected to the civilized lands of Mammon—that Stuart rails against. The next subsection (poems 99–113) more directly considers the trials (of season, of loss, of death) that people face, leading into consideration of country life (117–134). Thereafter, poems undertake an extended homage to April and renewal, which ends with a six-poem sequence about the woman to whom the book is dedicated. The section then begins its conclusion and launches into an appreciation of working the land and seasons (168–178). Those poems are juxtaposed against a closing sequence of tragic love-ballads (179–93) and the coming dance of loss, love, and land. The title of section two, “Blades from a Field of Corn” (poems 201–450), plays off Leaves of Grass and mulls Stuart’s potential fates as discovered in the lives of those around him. The poems are almost entirely narrated by Stuart (only 10 of the 250 poems are spoken by other characters) who delves into his own daily work, romances, struggles, and love of the natural world (which, as in the first section, form a foundation in 11 sequences). Unlike the portraits in section one, Stuart cannot discern the outcome that his slow path winds through drought, long nights, love, illness, and masculine violence. The first eighty poems (200–280) meditate upon the consequences of

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two ways of life: life while working the land (in nature’s grip for good and ill), and life in modernity’s discordant clarity (its cities, schools, extractive industries, and laws). Throughout this section, Stuart and the country people struggle with drought and depletion of resources, which leads into a set of ballad-like poems (267–271) that tell the story of a duo whose frustrated love spans their lifetimes. Following that tale, the drought breaks, rejuvenation is discovered, and, having made his commitment to the “book” of the land rather than the book of law (273–280), the rest of the section tells of Stuart’s quest for love and a worthy place in his world. Six sequences of poems (the book’s weakest) narrate his romances with four different women; strung among those are sequences about his struggle with masculinity. After the first three romance sequences, Stuart relates the story of his grandmother’s burial (353–356). He next heeds the story of an old woman who lies bed-bound in her mountain shack, listens (joyfully) to the work of insects and animals, and shares her wisdom of life’s pursuit during youth (363– 366). As the next groups of poems make clear, Stuart has a decision to make about finding a wife with whom he can work the land (374–378) and dance (378–382). In the final group of poems (396–450), Stuart ponders how worthy relations to land and family offer a way to realize poetry and romance against modernity’s sour options. This cogitation jells in four poems where Stuart’s father explains to him how work, blood, land, and procreation intermingle (429–432). Having made the decision to follow his father’s path, Stuart—in the third section of poems, “Enriched Resignation” (poems 451–650)—delves into the poet’s relationship with the past as embodied in the earth-bound voices of the dead. The stories of the dead occupy approximately three-fourths (186) of the poems in the section; those stories are interspersed with the poet’s meditations upon and conversations with grass, dust, and earth. The dead’s tales interlace stories of worthy and unworthy, but as the sequence progresses, it focuses upon generational procreation where bodies rise from and fall to the earth. Although a few examples of the worthy are included, the first sequences about the dead (461–463, 467–490, 493–500, 507–509, 518–525, 533–545) tell stories of failed procreation, failed continuity (via violence, death by childbirth, industrial accident, infidelity, children indentured to modernity, etc.), and anger at death. The final sequences (551–556, 558–580, 585–598, 601–607, and 615–644) consider the “Blue Dreamers,” Stuart’s nomenclature for the original pioneers; these portraits are mixed with tales of how the dead (both worthy and not so) rest in the land. As the section progresses, more time is spent telling the story of those who birthed broods of 11–20 children and worked the land well (561–562, 591, 616–617, 629, 634, and 641–644). Although the land mixes peoples of all worths and

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fates together, satisfaction is felt only by those who knew and became part of the land through work and parenthood. The section’s final focus on such lives punctuates the direction of Stuart’s life. The fourth and final section, “Preface for After Death” (651–703), begins by Stuart closing off his senses and considering what it means to meld with the earth. Stuart then addresses Donald Davison (655–659) and meditates upon what it meant to write poetry. After engaging in rich farewells to the seasons (660–674), Stuart starkly condemns the Mammon called modernity and considers the role of poetry, nature, and worth in resisting it (675–690). Realizing the inevitability of death (692–693), Stuart calls on Davidson to seize the day (694) just as did the Blue Dreamers who now rise with the blackberries (695–696); Stuart’s hope is to be worthy of being buried in the land where his siblings and mother rest (697–698). Speaking of his poet’s laurel as a “wreath of green corn-blades” (702), Stuart ends the book with four poems that revel in the fact that wind and clover and briar rise from the land he has worked, from his body, and from his poetry in opposition to commodity, law, and profit. The Kentucky Way #2: A Closer Read of Culture in Man with a Bull-Tongue Plow After situating the strategic ambiguity of the readers’ and poet’s relationship to poetry in the book’s first poem, Stuart locates two other ideal readers. In poem 19 he hopes that “new plow boys will take time / To sit down by their plows and spin their rhymes” so that “common folk will read in future times!” (10–11, 12). His hope is for “tall men unborn” to take the place of the “men now forlorn” and be the land’s new readers and writers. Poem 29 presents a picture of a man “grown old enough to die” who will “read / With solemnity upon his wrinkled face” (3, 4–5). The satisfaction of this “white-haired sage” becomes poetry’s best judge (8). The forecast of such perfect readers was a hopeful impossibility that nevertheless allowed Stuart’s readers to imagine themselves in such roles and gain perspective on Stuart’s understanding of his work. Just as education, law, and industry tempted people to leave the land, so Stuart frames the poems mentioned earlier with how he resists the temptation of Mammon’s promises of fame and wealth with writing. Stuart first rejects this temptation in poem 20 where he claims he just wants to “stop the plow / And take an hour to spin a useless rhyme / Then throw it to the wind for you to find” (1–3), thus reinforcing Stuart’s freedom from formal success. “Better to sing,” he goes on, “From mountain folks and from Kentucky hills. / . . . / . . . [T]o hell with all your gold” (7, 8,

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11). Such freedom from momentary desire played well with audience who bought whole-heartedly into the belief that mountain whites were free from that trap of modernity. Poem 28 picks up a similar strain and sings the praises of how a nameless speaker (who has just reviewed the course of his life in poems 21–27) “did not write with calculating eye / For cash nor did he write for futile fame” (1–2). Such derision is applied throughout the book to worldly gain, be it via education, law, or business, each of which Stuart sees as disrupting his Kentucky’s cultural ecology. The conflict between the modern world and Stuart’s Kentucky is the focus of poems 201–280, which switch between antimodernism, working the land, nature, and life with people in the country. After spending the first eight poems singing about the good, hard work of breaking sod, planting corn, and harvesting tobacco, Stuart recalls how his time in Nashville was spent with “hunger in my guts” as he walked “penniless” with “her dirty bricks and her loose-strung wires” (poem 209, ll. 6, 5, 2). In Poem 211, Stuart recalls how the “intellectuals” would meet over “scanty food and eat and think,” but having come back to his Kentucky, Stuart now says he would go back, order more than he could eat, “discuss fleas,” and “dream” (3, 4, 11, 14). After revisiting his current life of working the land and nature in poems 212–226, Stuart bursts out in anger against the class bias of “Mother America” where people like “hungry” hounds “lick some Master’s spittle”: “money—money—money—is all you cry” and signs read “NO ENTRANCE, TRAMPS” (1, 8, 9, 12). Denouncing Mammon frees Stuart to be part of his Kentucky. Instead of college he seeks solace in the “willows” and “briars” that he touches like “the pages of a book / . . . that I can never read” (277, 12–13). Clear-cut knowledge does not, for Stuart, catch the complexities of the land; however, even there on night walks, he finds “an ulcerated hill / Where slate-dumps in the moonlight lie blue and still” (231, 13–14). These sentiments are reiterated in poems 308–366 where Stuart ponders his relationship to the land and women. After writing a sequence of ten pastoral courting poems to a woman from Nashville (323–332), he insists that when he is dead, readers should respect him for being “a bondsman of the soil” whose “hands were calloused by an honest toil” rather than reading “my rugged poetry at your tea” (337,11, 9, 3). Again, Stuart gives his readers room to forgive themselves their place, even as it is quite clear that Stuart is uncomfortable with his own since he addresses these future readers. Then in poem 339 Stuart attacks a plural “you” whose “Mammon” is a “spider god” that has “spun his daylight lines” and left “you shriveled flies” (5, 7). To offset his imagined encounters with false appreciation and wealth’s desiccation, poem 340 narrates an ideal economy of relations (although it is unclear for

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whom he performs—the person he was, wants to be, or who he wants his readers to think he is): I sing for plowboys and the seedy sinner. I pay my debts and do not bow to man. I live on the fruits of my sweaty labors— I hate the law—God damn the politician— I divide without a fuss among my neighbors. I live among the earth a dirt-colored man. (8–13) This proclamation allows the narrator to begin appreciating the slow, sometimes awful process of how blood and land become one. Poems 391–393 narrate how Stuart’s mother told him of a worthy couple whose baby had just died, which Stuart later watches the husband bury. In the next sonnet (394), Stuart defends the life of the man he just watched. Therein, he portrays how mountain adults were labeled as children via their relationship with mainstream culture that judged status based upon literacy and education. The poem starts, “Men say these are the children of the night, / These mountain men who cannot read and write” (1–2). Playing upon the phrase “children of the night,” Stuart acts as a translator and a protector to explain how these “bronze men” are “children of the sun” (11, 7). The poet calls on his reader to recognize their own illiteracy: “Unnoticed things of earth one could show you, / And how to run your furrows straight and true” (8–9). Accenting his peer’s illiteracy qualifies his own ability to “shape a word” when he explains how “Their education is a book of soil” (4, 12). Stuart gains his authenticity as a mountaineer by his seemingly crude use of the sonnet with 14 lines that, like the “furrows” mentioned earlier, “run straight and true” (9): each line contains ten syllables with five beats (although not always in iambic pentameter), and to accentuate the work’s starkness, eight lines are fully endstopped. Similarly, the rhyme scheme starts with a couplet followed by three quatrains—a reversed Shakespearean sonnet that gains emphasis by starting with a couplet and ending with two of them. In the final line, Stuart revises the saying “children of the night” and calls upon readers to “Let them be children of the darker night” where one must know how to “work and pray and fight” (14, 13). This combination showed people around America what they craved: that poetry and people thrived outside of modern America. Section two climaxes with the voice of Stuart’s father giving him instructions about their way of life. Against all of Stuart’s rebellion his father’s voice is one to which Stuart bows his head (429–432). Stuart’s father first commands, “take you a strong wife; / Take you a mountain girl strong as a

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tree” (429, 1–2). This wife should be nature incarnate with “teeth white as a thunder-cloud’s white head” (6); with her, Stuart should “get yourself about six right pert sons / So they will carry on blood of their fathers; / . . . / Let them take wives and multiply again” (9–10, 14). The father then coaches his son toward the hard work of worthiness: “don’t spend your good seed on a whore,” rather get a “decent wife,” build an “oak log house,” and “clear the fields and break the ground for corn” (430, 11, 2, 4, 6). Even though they will “find life hard as a stone” at first because of failed crops and children, they should “reach out and grab for life” (7, 9): “You live together—multiply the land. / You two strong trees can stand the storm and strife. / You two strong trees will stand and understand” (12–14). Notably, the last six lines of this sonnet are tightly laced with alternating end rhymes (G-H-G-H-G-H), just as the union of the husband and wife would, entwined, stand against storms. In the next two poems, the father narrates how he and Stuart’s mother sowed their own lives and now “go down a-helping one another” (432, 14). This clarification of life-path allows Stuart to embrace his world where his “inheritance is drink and gun” (436, 1), and he proclaims his desire to live there: “These are the hills that’s native to my blood. / These are the hills I choose to live among / And die among and let them drink my blood” (439, 1–3). This decision to belong frees Stuart in section three (451–600) to speak to the very land itself and learn how the dead live in the dust, grass, and earth. In the final section, Stuart releases himself to his fate and recognizes the seasons and nature as he prepares to say farewell to them in death (660–674). In doing so, he speaks to Donald Davidson as a peer who might “know the truth I write” (656, 8) and charges Stuart to have people remember him as a poet of “dust and stench and bone” rather than as a “moon-god” (659, 4, 6). Stuart spends the next fifteen poems noting the varied life of the hills, only to again return to his anxiety about what it means to be a poet who writes books. Extending his anger at Mammon to the publishing industry, Stuart insists, “I never tried to write a book” (676, 1), and even if “[m]y pencil . . . / sketched a willow-aggravated brook” that he “[d]id not write this for profit, loss or gain” (2–3, 11). He cries against the “dirty Showmen” who called for levelling change, gave “my people facts,” declared the children needed school, and drove the forests back so that “white frames replace the mountain shacks” (682, 3, 11). Against the seemingly inevitable force of knowledge, cash, and those who “look upon unlettered men and scoff” (690, 11), Stuart claims for himself and his people a place near the “dust of generations” where “blackberry blooms sprung from their bosoms” (695, 2, 3). Stuart seeks a place where poetry speaks of obligations to people and land, a place where “[e]ach life is dirt and time and rhyme and stone” (678, 14) (see figure 4.2).

Figure 4.2 Page 348, poems #677 and #678, Man with a Bull-Tongue Plow (E. P. Dutton, 1934). Designed by B. D. Recca. Courtesy of the Jesse Stuart Foundation.

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Stuart recognizes the binding contradictions. His greatest desire was to gain publication in the best magazines and journals of his day and to be read by people around the country (thus, playing the role—which he condemns—of poet in capitalist modern America). Moreover, Stuart was desperate to translate his publications into money. Similarly, Stuart wrote poetry largely because of his education at LMU and Vanderbilt. While he would go on to write (extensive) columns for papers in Greenup County and (intensively) promote his books throughout the region, he did so for audiences that were not those from whom he had come (and among whom he continued to dwell). Stuart was torn. In the publishing world he played the role of an uneducated man and came to see himself as a “prostitute among the magazines” (Stuart to Still, June 18, 1936), giving Americans what they wanted to hear about Kentucky. Yet he also clearly understood (more than anyone of a similar education in his day) the workings of the Kentucky way. Although at first uncomfortable, he was able to integrate his education into his local obligations and became appreciated as a writer and educator. A split remained: his writing reflected the ethos of the Kentucky way, yet the critics’ tools were based on literary merit, while most national readers would see his writing in terms of their expectations about Appalachia. Both complicit and radical, the rich ambiguity of Stuart’s writing (and the impact of the cultural work it has done) has been lost beneath easy praise and condemnation. E. P. Dutton Stuart’s unwieldy book and raw verse seemed an odd addition to the well-established house of E. P. Dutton. The house had made its name via religious books and through 1890 was mainly “theological in character” (Seventy-Five Years 49). Renowned for its courtesy and quality of service, the firm was a mainstay with the New York elite (“Fifty Years” 1982). As the firm came into the 1920s, Dutton was, in nearly every way, associated with the character of its founder: in keeping with the gospel of wealth, Edward P. Dutton was known for an “ethics” of “simplicity,” dedication, and belief in a “higher Power” (Seventy-Five Years 32). When Dutton passed, John Macrae (who had come aboard in 1884) became president. Even into the 1930s, Macrae “remained the epitome of the nineteenth-century publisher” (Tebbel 521). After grounding the firm’s finances through holiday retail cards, Macrae became a partner in 1900 and coordinated the firm’s business in terms of providing cultured reading for America’s growing middle class. In 1934, E. P. Dutton’s 174 title list was conservative. Of those, only 2 were poetry by living poets, and Stuart was the only American. Overwhelmingly, the list favored eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European philosophy,

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literature, and biographies. On a similar strand, the list included histories of English royalty and nobility, Shakespeare’s plays (one play per book), and assorted classical studies. Two other books stand out: Escape from the Soviets by Tatiana Tchernavin and N. Alexander, which was one of the firm’s bestsellers that year, and another book on correct speech. Dutton appealed and marketed to a conservative American readership that fetishized traditional high European culture, one that Stuart’s off-kilter sonnets might not seem to sit well with until one realizes that Stuart too was antimodern. As other houses published books about the despair of poverty (such as Viking’s Erskine Caldwell), Dutton’s editors knew the strong appeal that Stuart would have for a segment of the public who blamed the Depression on modernity and believed in America’s pioneer-like nobility before it became corrupted as modeled in some of Stuart’s characters’ mottled lives. The big push for Stuart’s book, however, came from Merton S. Yewdale, E. P. Dutton’s editor-in-chief. From late January 1934 through December of that year, Yewdale sent some thirty multi-paged letters to Stuart, each of which expressed Yewdale’s enthusiasm for Stuart’s poetry. Having just been involved in publishing Jean Thomas’s The Traipsin’ Woman (a nonfiction book by a court stenographer from Ashland, Kentucky, about her tours through the mountains with a circuit judge), Yewdale felt himself familiar with the Kentucky mountains and was thusly amazed to suddenly find himself writing to one of the “primitives” (Feb. 1, 1934). Yewdale continuously refers to Stuart as an author who “comes from far down in the American earth,” whose characteristics manifested all the mainstream’s preconceptions about Appalachians, being “by nature clannish, reticent, sensitive and fearful.” Yewdale also was careful to defend the untethered tumult of the collection and argued to all that it should be published as sent. In his report to Macrae, Yewdale defended the book on the basis of its being a “fertile and lusty” living history of the mountain people (“No. 34949”). Yewdale points out that Stuart “does not adhere strictly to the sonnet form” but turns them into “a novel in verse” that threads the details of soil, smell, sun, and storm with the stories of an “eclectic gallery of Kentucky mountaineers.” But most important to Yewdale was the character of Stuart himself: “There is nothing studied or self-conscious or artificial about the man. He is truly simple and has the innocence of nature.” The poems’ sensual “frankness,” Yewdale concludes, defies “[a]ll artificial medium even metrical form” and brings the reader under their sprawling sway. Yewdale’s pleas worked. Soon, Dutton’s office was abuzz with excitement about the manuscript (May 31). By the end of April, Stuart had signed a contract, and Yewdale went out of his way to help Stuart see his place as worthy of the national stage. When Stuart wrote Yewdale about Allen Tate’s rejection, Yewdale replied

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that Tate wrote “intellectual poetry” and was unable to appreciate Stuart’s (March 21). When asked about the Atlantic, to whom Stuart had already submitted poems and the manuscript of Beyond Dark Hills, Yewdale defended Dutton’s claim and suggested that Stuart withdraw the submissions lest they be “stripped” and sterilized by “over-refined editors” in preparation for “the most cultured of Boston circles” (March 21 and 30). In many ways, Stuart’s book was a cure for Dutton’s own temperate and cultured list, yet it also struck a powerful knell on the bells of race and nation. Yewdale predicted the confusion that Stuart’s crude style and matter would have on critics. It had the opposite effect on salesmen who over the months until MWBTP’s release brought in orders from stores throughout the country. In the letter from Yewdale that accompanied reviewer’s copy of MWBTP, Stuart describe his writing process and his relationship to the land (“Quaint”). To support Yewdale’s claim that “Jesse Stuart does not love Nature—he is part of Nature himself,” Stuart is quoted: “I write poetry in longhand . . . on redhorse tobacco sacks, shoe boxes, pieces of wall-paper, sugar sacks—some on wood—and many were written on popular leaves.” Stuart, that is, was being sold to reviewers as a “powerful young” farmer who craved “solitude,” “green fields,” and “fried chicken.” To cap off his letter, Yewdale notes that Stuart was being published in England’s Adelphia and Ireland’s the Dublin Review, provides sonnet #292 (which portrays Stuart’s flight from city life), and quotes Mark Van Doren: “Jesse Stuart is a rare poet for these times, in that he is both copious and comprehensible. His book ought to be interesting, even to those who think they cannot read poetry. They can read Jesse Stuart . . . and find themselves in the company of a modern American Robert Burns.” Louis Untermeyer is also quoted as admiring Stuart’s poetry that is “far more vital than most of the over-cultivated verse to which we have now given so much attention.” Van Doren’s and Untermeyer’s ideas would be reiterated in review after review. Yewdale presented Stuart as an American essence that embodied the spirit of a (white) American folk that had been saved from education and exploitation: the book’s jacket announced that MWBTP was “born out of the American soil, and . . . is imperishable.” These same messages were sent out in every ad, in catalogues, in each interview or talk that Stuart gave, and in every article he wrote; in the next few months the same claims would appear in reviews around the nation, which would then be recycled into ad-copy for the next month. Dutton sent out photo spreads of Stuart with signed seventy-five copies of his books to up the sales price. Similarly, a Dutton ad in Publishers Weekly (Sept. 15, 1934) finished with, “We have spared no expense in making this a beautiful book. $3.00.” The price was high and contradicted the poems inside that

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valued precisely the opposite. Macrae knew selling books meant to sell the idea of the invaluable: racial perseverance. Led by B. D. Recca, Dutton strove to create a typography to “reflect the spirit of [Stuart’s] poetry”: “masculine” and “vigorous” (Yewdale to Stuart, March 21 and August 16, 1934). MWPTB runs to 361 five-by-eight-inch pages with two numbered sonnets per page (see figure 4.2). The pages are full but not filled; each poem is given space while being clearly linked with the others. With six-point leading in all poems, Recca slightly varied the font-size from section to section, with a page-filling twelve-point Timesfamily font (which, paradoxically, had just been developed) in the first and third and eleven-point font in the second and fourth. Thus, the book came well made and endorsed into the hands of booksellers and reviewers. Reviewing Race Calling on its clout, Dutton sent out 153 copies to editors (“Dutton Royalties”) and garnered reviews from Los Angeles to New York City, from Green Bay to Atlanta. All in all, 32 newspapers offered reviews, as did all 5 major weeklies, but the American Mercury, the Yale Review, and Poetry were the only monthly, quarterly, and little magazine to review the book. That final group extended a tepid welcome, critiquing MWBTP’s lack of literary merit, while the national and regional papers granted Stuart’s work high praise based on its accessibility and the author’s heritage. The weeklies appreciated the poetry’s crudeness as manifesting American folk poetry. Reviews considered race in three different ways. Not more than one of these was used in any review, but each mixed discussion of “heritage” (a code word for race), land, and poetry showing interlaced associations. Six newspapers and the Nation highlighted Stuart’s “Kentucky mountain farmer folk” heritage as Scotch, Indian, English (Walton), and the Atlanta Journal claimed “this brutal, bloody, exquisitely lyrical book” as proof of AngloSaxon heritage (Paschall). Another set of reviews (found in the New Masses, the New York Times, and the Yale Review) used language such as “wholly indigenous” (Chamberlain) and “genuine native” (Johns, “Up”). This nativity was earned by Stuart’s portrayal of his people’s bond with the Kentucky soil. The Book of the Month-Club News epitomized this approach and called the book “a history of repeated generations, and the prototype of the land is the poet himself” (Johns). All reviews drew upon associations with the pioneer icon, a racial figure tied to the nativist ideal. Malcolm Cowley (in the New Republic) and Edwin Mims (in the Vanderbilt Alumnus) deploy those connections. Mims notes, “A constantly reappearing theme is that of the place of the pioneers in

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building Kentucky and America—the men who cut the forests, plowed the rooty hills, spanned the rivers and build the towns. Their blood is in Stuart’s veins; he hopes to keep their heritage and speak it for them.” Mims recognizes that “[m]any authors have written about the mountaineers but [his] is the voice of the mountaineer himself, who has lived close to his people and shared their struggles with the soil.” Not surprisingly Mims had also edited books on Robert Burns. Due to his reporting on the 1932 Harlan coal strikes, Malcolm Cowley was also glad to see Stuart as “the first spokesman that the pioneers of the Kentucky hills have found among themselves.” Cowley poses Stuart’s worldview against that of outside “townspeople” or “charity visitors” who stayed long enough to learn “something about their customs, their ballads, their dialect” but never fully appreciated the life-ways of “side-hill farmers, moonshiners and loggers.” Unlike most reviewers, Cowley notes the conflict with capitalism: The pioneers themselves were mostly poor men, driven onward by their poverty and never able to rise out of it. Today their children’s great-grand-children are digging coal in southern Indiana or sharecropping in the Arkansas river bottoms, or perhaps plowing a hill farm in eastern Kentucky. They’ve never seen anything but the underside of American business enterprise. As we’ve seen, such enterprise was Stuart’s antipode. Yet Stuart’s support of the Kentucky way and resistance to modernism are glossed over by Orrick Johns whose review for the New Masses misreads Stuart in terms of proletarianism. Johns calls MWBTP an “authentically proletarian epic, though not a conscious one.” He diagnoses Stuart’s lack of class awareness as a dead-end: While he points to the losing struggle of his kind, to the empty-handed finish of the generations, he also rejoices in “his” land, “his” muscles, “his” conquering self. He only dimly senses his real entrapment and subjection, he feels only as much as class pride as will enable him to despise his college degree, the intellectuals of the city, and the industrial machine. While Stuart’s old best friend Don West might disagree that the mountain people’s existences were “ruined,” he would agree with Johns that Stuart was subjected to a capitalist ideology: “Jesse Stuart,” writes Johns, “dirt-farmer and genuine native poet, will be made a symbol of the virtue of peasant independence and rugged individuality.”

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Indeed, most reviews saw Stuart’s connections to race, class, and land as an explanation about his lack of overall organization, monotony, thematic repletion, and egotism; however, such critiques were dismissed by reviewers (all except Fletcher) on the basis of his “complete earthiness” (Chamberlain), “fertility of expression” (Jack), “gusto” (Mims), his “crude but undeniable power” (McCord), and “exuberant defiance” (Paschall). Reviews most admired the poet’s freedom to ignore what was formally proper: as put by Albany’s Knickerbocker Press, Stuart poems are “filled with a rustic and rugged philosophy. Unlike anything in American poetry . . . There will be much criticism [because] Mr. Stuart has violated as many rules of poetry as Whitman did; but his plow is plowing a deep and inviting furrow” (Christman). That freedom from the strictures of accomplished poetry allowed the everyday person to delve deep and long into the poems. The New York Times review began by noting how “the less avid, the less professional, the less intellectual, readers of verse,” who do not have adequate “leisure time,” have been driven away from Pound’s, Eliot’s, Spender’s, and Auden’s “intricacies and mysteries” (Jack), a comparison made in many reviews due to the recent release of Auden and Spender’s first books. Violating the rules of poetry demonstrated Stuart’s seeming authenticity. What made an object “authentic” was the consumer’s belief that craftspeople built it to fulfill their life needs and that such objects carried meaning within their native cultural traditions. Authentic Appalachian writing and handicrafts also held white America’s attention: they indicated non-modern, Anglo national origins that manifested the property Horace Kallen called “natio,” that “inwardness of nativity” standing “[b]ehind [one] in time” and in which one “lives, moves and has [one’s] being” (“Democracy” 94). That mountaineers were believed to have maintained the lifestyle of America’s pioneers held powerful sales seduction during the Depression, particularly because millions of Americans had recently left their farms to enter the wage-labor force. That heritage could now be renewed through the commodity eucharis of Appalachian wares. Americans sought to protect themselves (consumers) from themselves (modernity in America) by consuming themselves (their natio). This natio wafer was ardently consumed because of its populist form. Published in a large spread on the front of the New York Herald-Tribune’s book section, Horace Gregory, himself a modernist stylistic innovator and Muriel Rukeyser’s mentor, labeled the book “the event of the season,” because it reacted “against the so-called ‘intellectual’ poetry of the last ten years in America.” What stood out for Gregory and other reviewers was Stuart’s relationship with form: “many will read Jesse Stuart’s ‘sonnets’ with genuine relief, will say that here is something that the average man can understand.” While most reviewers held Stuart’s feet to the formal fire for “careless and repetitious” rhymes (McCord) whose “artistry is accidental” (Untermeyer,

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Review of MWBTP), Gregory’s sentiments were reiterated in papers throughout the country. At the core of these claims about accessibility and aesthetics was a conflict about the lay and language of the land versus the law of class privilege and elite education. Indeed, when we examine Stuart’s sophisticated adaptation of the sonnet’s conventions, the form’s highly ethnicized nature as well as what it meant for Stuart to be Appalachian becomes clear. Petrarchan Sonnets in Mountain White As Gillian Huang-Tiller relates about identity politics and the American modernist sonnet, by 1886 the sonnet had become naturalized into an anachronistic “accepted canon” that cast Dante and Petrarch as perfect practitioners (51). At the turn of the century, perfectly wrought sonnets (exemplified for critics by Longfellow) became a naturalized sign of “genteel” America (71–72). These sonnets manifested Victorian traditions by “adherence to the perfect Petrarchan form, intellectualism, and expression of all human feeling in abstract, idealized terms” (101). In 1930, Lewis G. Sterner highlighted the qualities that an Ivy League education expected in a sonnet: “A combination of worthy theme and dignified restraint of language is an integral part of American sonnet tradition from Allston to Robinson. . . . Austerity without pomposity; splendor without ostentation; imagery without conceit; depth rather than profundity; passion rather than eroticism” (xix). Sterner felt only a few of the great sonneteers had broken with that essential formula. But where Sterner brooked no deviation was in the matter of form: “i.e., fourteen lines of five-stress verse, arranged according to some definite scheme of four to seven rimes, and, in general, treating one idea only, in a more or less logical manner” (xiv). Those “definite schemes” only included the “orthodox Petrarchan, Miltonic, Shakespearean, and Compromise sonnet forms [which] existed before American sonnet writing began.” Only begrudgingly does Sterner include what he calls “irregular forms” that vary in their rhyme schemes, hence “bearing the name sonnet only by courtesy” (xv). From 1900 to 1930, American poets produced far more sonnets than had been written in the entire nineteenth century (Sterner 143). In schools, handbooks, and anthologies, sonnets became tools of enculturation into proper English and poetry. This became doubly true for Americans at the turn of the century with the rise of the middle class, the increasing number of African Americans in higher education, the expansion of American imperial might onto the world stage, and the establishment of Ellis Island. Sonnets were held to the perfection of Petrarchan love and form, and sonneteer after sonneteer took their measure by reference to that master signifier. African American and women poets utilized the form to gain entry and to

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critique the very culture of power that ordained its use (see Bornstein 5–31; Huang-Tiller). As Huang-Tiller points out, its “fixed mirror, unmask[s] its excluded otherness” (276). Huang-Tiller makes a provocative case for such an identity dance based on how e. e. cummings (in Tulips and Chimneys [1923]), Edna St. Vincent Millay (in “Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree” [1923]), and Countee Cullen (in Color [1925] and Copper Sun [1927]) took measure of self and culture from their diverse subject positions as they performed the sonnet. The same needs to be said for the Fugitive poet turned physician Merrill Moore, who wrote tens-of-thousand of rampant sonnets in the 1930s about his daily life in Boston. The difference was that John Crowe Ransom, William Carlos Williams, and Louis Untermeyer heaped praises on him.5 If a white, male psychiatrist in Boston could find the form only by abandoning “formality,” no one would feel the same about a mountain male farmer-teacher from Kentucky, who also had attended Vanderbilt and had studied with the same group. In short, the sonnet’s cultural capital evoked racialized standards of culture, class, race, and sexuality, which was one reason that many poets used the form (and modifications thereof) to demonstrate their relationship to those standards. Stuart became determined to write sonnets when a writing instructor at LMU insisted that he did not have the capacity to write in that form (Stuart, “When Not”). Even before arriving at Vanderbilt, Stuart had composed a book of sonnets that held many of the same themes as in MWBTP, but Stuart had set it aside because it possessed a “mood of doubt, uncertainty, and insecurity” that reflected the Depression and his own frustrations upon returning to Greenup (Miller, Introduction xiii).6 Yet Stuart did not abandon the sonnet; instead with Davidson’s encouragement, Stuart took its conventions on a romp, through which he brought America’s ideas about poetry, race, and European culture into conversation with the Kentucky way. Each poem in MWBTP is rhymed but with no standard schema: most are written with ten-syllable lines, and 501 (71 percent) have fourteen lines. Distribution of fourteen-lined poems through the book’s four sections shows that Stuart carefully considered ratios, as shown in figure 4.3. In section one, the first three poems—all about the unity of land, work, and poetry—are a stable fourteen-line, ten-syllable count: they establish Stuart’s ability to work with the sonnet form, even as he claims that “these crude strains no critic can call art” (poem 1, l. 13). Stuart does not claim that his work is not art, only that critics would think so; his mission is to bring the outsider into the ecology of relations between words, work, and ways. The significance of the measured fourteen-line poems about poetry continues throughout this section (see poems 19–20, 29, and 142–147), reminding the reader of Stuart’s mastery. When Stuart starts describing his people’s lives in the book’s first hundred poems, line-counts range from thirteen to

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45 40 35 30 13

25

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Figure 4.3

0 25 25 0 1– 3 30 00 1– 3 35 50 1– 4 40 00 1– 4 45 50 1– 5 50 00 1– 5 55 50 1– 6 60 00 1– 6 65 50 1– 70 3

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Distribution of lines-per-poem in MWBTP.

seventeen, with the lowest proportion of fourteen-line poems in the book. This line-count deviance reflects the roiling lives of the people Stuart describes. As the section continues, the proportion of fourteen-lined poems (per fifty-poem unit) increases and reaches its peak at the end of section one and at the start of section two, reflecting Stuart’s goal of melding poetry with his people’s song. After the first fifty-poem unit in section two, each unit gradually decreases the number of fourteen-line poems, reflecting Stuart’s search for his own place. Section two’s gradual declines sets the stage for section three’s dramatic decrease, the first fifty-poem unit of which has forty fourteen-line poems and moves to thirty-two to twenty-nine to twenty-two. This plunge reflects Stuart’s reach into the ground to hear lives from the past, with their mix of worth, work, love, tumult, loss, and worthlessness. The proportions then strike a crescendo in the book’s final section (and unit) with fortynine of its fifty-three poems being fourteen-lines: this return is appropriate because this section starts with poems addressed to Donald Davidson, from which Stuart sets himself the task of mastering the Kentucky way and opposing modernity. Line ratios also reflect romantic fates: the Kentucky way of the worthy (who love, wed, and proliferate), the despair of the unworthy, and the tragedy of ballads. Stuart synthesizes these traditions (Petrarch, ballad, and Kentucky way) via the MWPTB’s structure. In section one, the first sequence of Petrarchesque poems (159–166) are stable, well-measured,

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fourteen-lined sonnets about Stuart’s most unachievable love who comes from Nashville. Almost immediately thereafter come the first two tragiclove ballad-like sequences, which (appropriately) cannot be contained: the first four poems (178–182) run 16, 13, 15, and 16 lines. This juxtaposition sets up Stuart’s consideration of his own loves in section two that includes eight Petrarchesque sequences. Section three then includes three more tragic-love sequences (each of which beings with a thirteen-lined poem); those sequences, however, occur early in the section and set up later consideration of worthy love that unites blood and land. Stuart, in other words, has gone beyond his flirtation with Petrarch and the city, beyond the temptation of the ballad, and melded them into a sustainable, Appalachian world. New York, New York Stuart was a hit and traveled around the region (and later to New York) to promote his book. The Associated Press authored a full-page portrait of Stuart, detailing his heritage, writing process, education, and publications—and that combination of personal story and poetry fired audiences. In an important move of self-marketing, he visited literary clubs, community forums, universities, and schools throughout eastern Kentucky, southern Ohio, and western West Virginia (Scrapbook #2, Murray State Archives). Articles written about these events relate Stuart’s interpersonal energy, enthusiasm, and clarity, both in his poetry and in the stories he told about himself and his Greenup County home. During these tours, he met cultural promoters such as state poet laureates, professors, librarians, and civic leaders who promoted his work in schools, libraries, and reading groups. What people consumed was not only Stuart’s poetry but the self that came along with it—a Scotch Irish self that claimed to exist outside the commodity enclosure of modern American culture. Stuart’s biography was told again and again in newspapers and critical quarterlies, all of which highlighted his relationship to race. As related in the Southwest Review in January 1936, Jesse Stuart is a firm believer in heredity. His father’s people came to Virginia from Scotland; his mother’s people, the Hiltons, are English. Greenup County in general is suspicious of foreigners—that is, of any persons not of Anglo-Saxon blood. His ancestors on both sides were solid, substantial people. “If we were ever taught anything,” he says, “it was to pay our debts,” and with Scotch thrift and clannishness, he has contrived to pay off his father’s and brother’s debts and put the rest of his

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savings into more land and into a good road to their farm, in order to please his mother. (Salmon 165) Another more inflammatory draft of this same article was sent to Stuart, wherein the following quote came after the phrase “Anglo-Saxon Blood” in the quote just provided: “No Jews will stay there. When Jesse had a date once with an Italian Girl, the neighbors thought it was terrible” (Stuart Scrapbook, Murray State Archives). While this disparaging racial comparison was cut, its negative background highlights Stuart’s racial identification.7 New York’s fascination with Stuart increased with Dutton’s media blitz. In a long, late-December column, John Chamberlain, the Time’s literary editor, praised Stuart exactly for thwarting the alienating “Eliot-Pound lingo” of Spender and Auden: “the less avid, the less professional, the less intellectual, readers of verse” do not have adequate “leisure time” for those “intricacies and mysteries.” Stuart, however, wrote as a man “completely uninhibited” by conventions of complexity: “Mr. Stuart seems to write sonnets very much as anonymous mountain or cow country balladists go on adding extemporaneous verses to ‘Barbara Allen.’ ” Therein, Stuart “mingles his ardor with complete earthiness,” and even if more wordy than Burns, Chamberlain— countering those reviewers who disagreed with the comparison—found the poets alike in “their ecstasies and their unwillingness to forget the flesh, the appetites and the good earthen clods.” The NYC-Stuart love affair continued into the next year when the Times reported on Stuart’s visit in May 1935, quoting six straight paragraphs of Stuart rambling about how awed he was by New York and his desire to return home (“Mountaineer”). Stuart returned home, bought (in 1936) one of the farms where his family had lived as tenants, and authored seven books in the next eight years: two collections of short stories, an autobiography, another collection of poems, and three novels, one of which (Taps For Private Tussie [1943]) became a million-copy best-selling novel that Don West savagely reviewed for its degrading representation of Appalachia. During that time, MWBTP alone sold over a thousand more copies and generated volumes of reader feedback. Stuart’s fanfare would continue for another thirty years, reinforcing his exile from critical quarterlies and the halls of academe, after which the siege to New Criticism was well underway and Appalachian studies had begun.

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CHAPTER 5

“Authentic Folk Feeling” in James Still’s Hounds on the Mountain (1937)

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ooking back from 1988, James Still describes the difficulty of realizing a book’s value: “It might be a comfort to some to learn that of the ten books I’ve published, every one cost me in time and travail more than I earned in royalties” (“I sometimes tell” 141). Indeed, Hounds on the Mountain (figure 5.1) sold only 773 copies from its publication in June 1937 to October 1940, generating a mere $113.90 (“Royalties”). Even over the next decade when Still’s name became better known from his fiction, Hounds would only sell about 11 copies per year. Born and raised in east central Alabama, James Still first came to the Appalachian mountains as a student at Lincoln Memorial University in 1926. After earning his MA in English at Vanderbilt in 1930 and his MS in library science at Illinois in 1931, Still began work at Hindman Settlement School, serving as a librarian and educator for the next sixty years. He authored seventeen books and became Kentucky’s poet laureate in 1995. By the time of his death in 2001, scholars and writers throughout Appalachia recognized Still as their literary primogenitor.1 Still’s first book Hounds sings the tense contradictions of America’s desire to behold a premodern state, the last vestiges of which were understood to be dissolving in the remotes of Appalachia, a belief that Still held throughout his life (Still, Interview 54). Reviewers and editors described Still’s poetry as “authentic,” a word valorized by the mountaineers’ status as the “contemporary ancestor” of Anglo-American culture (Frost, “Contemporary Ancestors”). Still trained himself by carefully reading the Atlantic while at LMU and studying with English professors at Vanderbilt University where he wrote his thesis on

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Figure 5.1 Front cover of Hounds on the Mountain (Viking, 1939). Designed by Milton B. Glick. Courtesy of Teresa Reynolds.

the Middle-English poetry of dreams. Thus primed to craft poetry befitting an educated audience, Still found his subject at Hindman. As part of the settlement uplift movement, the school educated the mountain youth for survival in the modern world and marketed its mission to middle-class funders, and Still

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followed in the footsteps of the Hindman teacher and novelist Lucy Furman, whose stories and novels had been published in the 1920s by the Atlantic and Atlantic Monthly Press. Moreover, one of the young college-educated teachers at Hindman was the daughter of Dr. Edwin Grover, who would become Still’s mentor in negotiating the literary field, had just edited a major bibliographic study of Percy MacKaye, whose Kentucky Cycle (a sequence of six books) stood as his latest achievement. Such work drew upon tradition that the Atlantic had helped found. In Reading for Realism, Nancy Glazener relates that “literary nationalism emerged in Atlantic-group periodicals [such as Putnam’s Monthly or Lippincott’s] as a means by which a northeastern, urban bourgeoisie legitimated its cultural authority by exercising it in the name of the nation and on behalf of less privileged populations” (57). With the closing of the frontier and expansion of the U.S. interests overseas, the difference of power relations between classes became set into racial essentialism, which developed into the modernist nostalgia for authenticity. Glazener explains: “In keeping with the imperialistic functions of Anglo-Saxonism . . . the local-colorist proclivity for making the mores of a depicted population seem static and unchanging conduced to the idea that subordinate ethnic and social groups lacked the flexibility and ambition of the self-styled Anglo-Saxons who read about them” (194–195). Although muted, this dynamic continued into the Depression. Appropriately, the Atlantic’s editor Edward Weeks recognized Still’s work as continuing this tradition and would publish his poems and stories, which catalyzed publishers’ interest. Through his familiarity with Hindman and the Atlantic, Still reproduced conventions that allowed middle-class readers to recognize his work as authentic, hence validating those institutions: Still became part of a reinforcing circuit of discursive production regarding middle-class Anglo-identity. The Viking Press was thus pleased to become Still’s publisher. However, Viking did so with an eye toward intervening in American pluralism. The press was founded by four German Jewish Americans, two of whom had come of age at Harvard during the establishment of the Menorah Society and the Menorah Journal when Horace Kallen’s concept of cultural pluralism was the rage among educated Jews. For Viking Press, Still’s work became an example of how a living Anglo-ancestry was but one of America’s many cultures. For Still, publication by Viking guaranteed reviewers’ attention Hounds represents Still’s early belief in “the elemental and atavistic” Southern Highlander (Botkin, “The Folk in Literature” 16). Via its well-wrought poetry, its subject matter, and its material quality, Hounds was used to produced cultural capital by drawing upon and reproducing belief in the aura (to borrow a term from Benjamin) of authentic folk arts. The

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contradiction of reproducing the aura of mountain life in a commodity art form (the poetry book) is reflected in Still’s ambiguous stance toward the literary field and the Appalachian folk. Hounds represents Still’s stance as an outsider whose sympathy for the mountain condition resulted from his agrarian background, from his empathy as an artist, and from what he had learned of the mountains from other educated outsiders. On one side, Still succumbed to writing about the “primitive,” about which, as Donald Davidson had pointed out, white Southern writers regularly resorted for inspiration (“The Trend” 204). On the other, Still was an artist whose understanding of mountain life and work in Knott County, Kentucky, was ever deepening. Still witnessed the evolving vestiges of the native mountaineers’ belief, ecology, economy, and art whose culture was rapidly changing under modernity’s pressures for efficiency, production, and consumption. These considerations grow more complex when we realize that few regional natives knew Still’s writing. While Still wrote about their experience, he did not write to them or imitate their tongue. Inspecting Still’s relation to his audience and subject shows him in a simultaneously intimate and removed relationship with the people about whom he writes. Still was invigorated by his moral loyalty to his art, the mountains, and his work at Hindman: this energy quickly earned him a high profile in the literary field, but he was confounded by the self-promotion that the literary field demanded he enact to capitalize upon his success and make his name. Overview of Hounds on the Mountain Hounds contains thirty-five brief poems in five sections. The first section, “Hounds on the Mountain,” takes its title from the final poem in that part, which was published in the April–June 1937 issue of the Sewanee Review (which published five poems from Hounds) immediately before the book’s release that June. This section’s eight poems establish Still’s sense of mountain culture, including descriptions of a mountain marriage in “Infare,” of a hunt with hounds, and a “Horse Swapping”—all of which summon the era’s AngloSaxon associations to the premodern events described. The section concludes with two poems questioning the cost of abandoning such a culture. “Hounds on the Mountain” (14), the section’s final poem, invokes the form of a sonnet. Its speculative breaks, evolving transformations, consistency of rhythm and pace, and tenuous slant-rhymes manifest mountain life’s ephemeral connection to the edge of America’s symbolic order. The first part (ll.1–5) begins by rendering the ongoing “agony” of “hill on hill” that join “dry roots” and “the wet lattice of morning” in their “[s]low dull fulcrum, slow arched leanings,” all the while “witless” of any living “stark

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eyes.” The first line’s hemistich is also manifested in the stanza’s form, which is cleft by an end stop in the middle of the fifth line and continues in a new sentence on the sixth line indented far enough to recognize the absentpresence of the fifth. The second section (6–10) displays the latent intrusion of humanity via “[t]he hounds of day,” which appear from “thickets of darkness” (7). The poem’s progression demonstrates the interconnection of the earth with the animal. “Lean as brown straws,” these hounds give the grass their bodily dampness and proceed to roam beyond any human “thoughts that cream the tongue unspoken” (6, 10): marking the natural world with nearly untraceable presence, they are, “[t]hinner than fly-wings, heavier than words in a cavern” (9). With a stanza break, the third section begins with an amputated hemistich and then erupts: Hounds on the mountain . . . Grey and swift spinning the quarry shall turn At the cove’s ending, at the slow day’s breaking, And lave the violent shadows with her blood. (11–14; ellipsis in the original) Without warning, the first ten lines of the sonnet have described the emergence of a hunt, which ends with confrontation and sundering. It is as if only a portion of unobservable nature (blood) can be brought from “the violent shadows” as the hounds catch the quarry at the “breaking” of the known world. This sudden “turn / at the cove’s ending” symbolizes the mountains’ promise, where encounter with what is vitally real—defined as much by the prey as by the landscape or the hunter—inhabits a sublime liminality just beyond sight. The poem represents a place where an ever-evolving, continuously renewed gift of nature to civilization is realized through a ritualized relationship. The book’s second section, “Creek County,” renders the harmony of mountain farmers with nature. “On Redbird Creek” (18), the section’s second poem that was also published in the Sewanee Review, considers the limits of what can be discerned in cultivated areas. Written in thirteen lines and two stanzas (seven and six lines), the poem hints at the Petrarchan sonnet but combines it with an Anglo ballad form (A–B–C–B) of the first quatrain with solidly wrought, iambic-pentameter lines. Forming the first sentence, these lines detail the “cloven soil” that “has penned acres up / With greenness prim” (3–4). The second sentence makes up the next section, which, instead of providing the expected quatrain, includes only three lines that rhyme A-D-D. These lines point toward the “mist grown stark and tall” beyond the farm’s edge to “where crows and blackbirds call” (6). The missing fourth line

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of the quatrain perhaps represents that which rests beyond the bounds of what can be perceived from the farm’s folds. Until this point, the images and syntax are clearly rendered. However, the second stanza (ll. 8–13), through use of unspecified antecedents, points out the limits of cultivation: The vibrant canes crowding marshy ground Are tuneless pipes heard by bleeding ears Through blighted chestnut cankered to the heart And rousing all of memory’s ancient fears These foils of clouds that men and plows attend Are tares and thistles strewn upon the wind. (8–13) Composed of one abundant sentence, this sextet’s rhyme mimes the shape of a Shakespearian sonnet, joining a ballad quatrain and an ending couple. On the edge of the human ordered world, one questions just what causes the “ears,” which hear the “tuneless pipes” of canes by the streambed, to be “bleeding” (8–9). The reference to blood is akin to the corporeal rupture on the edge of the visible world as in “Hounds on the Mountain.” The “ancient fears” that are raised have less to do with the sound of “vibrant canes” than the fact that sound passes through “blighted chestnut” (11, 8, 10), where manipulation has torn nature. Thus, “these foils of clouds” in the final couplet might be read as referring to both the “pipes” that have not been given human meaning (they are, after all, “tuneless”) as well as to the consequence of not undertaking the rituals that are required to partake of substance from outside the human world. To dispel such fears, “men and plows attend” to the tamable (and tunable) precincts of farmed land. The “foils” become “tares and thistles strewn upon the wind” that human implements cannot constrain (13). Yet the farm Still describes is vigorous because of its proximity to the inhuman. Conversely, over-cultivation and raw exposure dehumanizes both farmers and the land. In “On Double Creek” (22), the final poem in this six-poem section, Still relates the consequences of such forced labor and misshapen poverty that causes “palsied hands, the worn flesh of their faces, / And their odd shapelessness, and their tired cries” (7–8). Still, however, downplays such poverty. The third section, “Earth-Bread,” contains three short poems that depict, with compression and symbolic agility, experience in mining towns. Even though these poems gain strength through contrast with others in the volume, only two reviews mention (without quoting) them. Nevertheless, the section plays a critical role in Hounds and demonstrates the debilitation of raw resource extraction. Consider the concluding lines from

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“Earth-Bread” (26), which appeared in Poetry May 1937, a month before the book’s release: Bent into flesh-knots the miners dig this earth-bread, This stone-meat, these fruited bones. This is the eight-hour death, the daily burial In a dark harvest lost as any dead. (10–13) These lines catch the false death and depletion brought on by the quest for wealth. The negotiated, ritualized dance with meaning (that place where the symbolic order fails and is enriched by what it cannot contain) displayed in the first two sections of the book is sacrificed to the irony of equating the miner’s muscles and search for wage to the “earth-bread” of coal. The book’s fourth section, “Death on the Mountain,” plunges into the metaphysics of mortality, in which human and mountain meld, and demise takes on a meaningful, if fraught, relationship with life. These poems of solitary contemplation were the most heavily quoted in reviews. “Death in the Forest” (37), which appeared in the Saturday Review of Literature, was wholly reprinted in four reviews and begins, “I was born humble. At the foot of the mountains . . .” Here, humility is one’s nearness to “the immensity of earth” (2). Through such a posture, the narrator discerns the promised meaning of the natural world “writ upon the parchment of leaves” (4). The speaker cannot capture such unbearable plenty under “the mute trees,” but learns, instead, to immerse himself with surrender: “I can but fold my hands and sink my knees / In the leaf-pages” (6–7). Yet such a determined act of resisting the urge to cultivate or analyze nature (i.e., to capture meaning) is not an act of joy: “My heart grieves / Beneath this wealth of wisdom perished with the leaves” (10–11). The narrator’s hope is that he will learn to stay present with that which resists human understanding and control. In the context of the other poems in this section, perished “leaves” refer also to figures such as Nixie Middleton, who bemoans the death of her lover in the poem that immediately precedes “Death in the Forest.” Other poems, such as “Passenger Pigeons” (39), first published in the New York Times (Feb. 5, 1936), meditate upon the act of extinction, demonstrating the hubris of humanity. The final section’s title, “Hill Born,” refers back to the book’s first poem (“Child in the Hills”) and attempts to synthesize the tension between continuity and contingency, between pure presence and inevitable loss. The mountains are reaped for their metaphorical resonance as Still develops a poetic metaphysics to resolve the dilemma of the modern promise. On the one hand rests the mainstream guarantee to provide a high standard of living

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for all people (through standardization, dislocation, and resource extraction). On the other stands the mountaineer, whose culture of spirit and handicraft was crafted from negotiated proximity to nature where loss, ending, and creation were constant companions. Reviews choose to highlight Still’s attention to the latter rather than his quiet critique of the former. “The Hill-Born” (43), the lead poem of the section, was Still’s earliest publication in the Sewanee Review (Jan. 1936). Like the dogs in “Hounds on the Mountain,” the mountaineers appear at dawn on ridges “astride their bony nags / In the gaunt hours when the lean young day” (1–2). Appropriately, this poem seems to roam across the page, and a third of its first twenty-one, odd-footed lines end with the resonance of “-ing” (“curving,” “breathing,” “spawning,” etc.). Rising from their “wall-darkened beds” that are bathed “with the crickets’ chirping” and “cicadas’ song,” the mountaineers appear from the early morning’s “leprous mist” as figures joined to the landscape (5, 6, 7, 8). Such predawn melding allows them to walk without a “trace in aftergrass” on their way with “broadax and with adz and fro” to “hew and flay among the patriarchs / And bring their strength and aged glory low” (11, 12, 14–15). In such an envisioned harvest, this reaping of “ancient wilderness” with swinging “scythes” and “wildly singing” blades is no less than “A song echoing from earth’s dull throat. / A sweep of years will bring them all to lie / Wrapped in strange flowering of earth and sky” (19–21; emphasis in the original). The antecedent for “them all” who will “lie” (and hence live) among “ flowering of earth and sky” is not just the trees, but also the men who fell them. Amid “the shallow amblings of Squabble Creek” and “broad hills,” “earth-born lays are sung” without being trapped in civilized rancor (23, 28). Still generates a feeling of authenticity in his readers without actually portraying the “lays” and hence being accused of disingenuousness (and of interfering with the reader’s fantasy associations). The existence of such unseen lays was Still’s early idyllic fantasy as well. “The Hill-born” sets the ideal that the next nine poems of the section would contest, revise, and attempt to realize. “Dulcimores,” Settlement Schools, and Modernity Still had not known about Hindman before Don West sent him a dulcimer from Hindman in 1930. The dulcimer was made by J. D. Thomas whose brother had taught Jethro Amburgey, a crafts teacher at Hindman to whom Still would co-dedicate Hounds (which was also dedicated to Guy Loomis, a wealthy northerner who paid for Still’s graduate education and provided critical literary contacts). While West was working on his Bachelors of Divinity at Vanderbilt, he had gone to the Hindman Settlement School to work and collect data for his thesis on rural social infrastructure and its

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effect on values. During the time Still was in Illinois pursuing his masters in library science, West wrote that he had “at last captured one of those old instruments known as the ‘Dulcimore’ ” [sic], and he sent it to Still along with testimony as to the “hopeless” case of the mountain youth (Nov. 29, 1930). As a young man learning the Social Gospel, West related his despair at the school’s “undersized” boys “without legal fathers,” everyone of whom “smokes, swears, and drinks” (Oct. 25, 1930). In an impassioned fourteenpage letter, West relates his “feeling of helplessness” and his desire to serve the suffering people who “will be a bunch of degenerates within a few more generations.” West had first written to Still in October after hearing of his mother’s death and appealed to him to honor his recently deceased mother “like a real man” by coming to Hindman to uplift the people by helping them to be as clean and beautiful as the mountains they lived upon. Moreover, knowing his friend’s interest in writing, West repeatedly promises that “I could give you material for stories and lots of them” (Mar. 7, 1931), describes getting to know old men of the hollows, and how he had reformed some of the boys. West would undergo a moral crisis, leading him to discount settlementschool methods, but the language he used portrays how many outsiders at Hindman understood the mountaineers as subjects of reform: victims degenerating morally and physically under the forces of modernity. Still’s work gained notice by association with these uplift understandings, but he himself never waged such judgments upon the people of Knott County. Still was able to make not only a home at Hindman, but he also witnessed—with an appreciative (and sharp) eye—the people among whom he lived and worked. Like other poets at the time such as William Carlos Williams, Still sought to represent the reality that modern culture had blinded Americans from seeing—in Still’s case, the reality of life in the mountains. But the reality he first came to know was the one filtered, in part, through Hindman’s project. In mutual validation, Still’s association with Hindman familiarized him with the conventions of Appalachian authenticity that were recognized by the mainstream, and Hindman converted Still’s cultural capital into fundraising pamphlets for Hindman. Founded in 1902, Hindman was modeled upon practices established by the American Missionary Association. After reading of the feuds reported in eastern Kentucky, Katherine Pettit (Hindman’s founder who hailed from central Kentucky) sought to alleviate the conditions that lead to behavior contradictory to participation in American democracy and wealth. Soon joined by May Stone, the two women shared the mutual influence of the Presbyterian Church’s social gospel, popular fiction (such as that written by Allen, Fox, and Murfree and was considered by readers as factual

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description), and the ideas of progressive social work and education. After visiting Berea College, Hampton Institute (both AMA schools), and the Elizabeth Russell Settlement at Tuskegee, Alabama, Hindman melded the approach of racialized industrial education with a progressive early-childhood education called kindergarten. Most settlements were formed in northern urban centers, but by 1920 over two hundred missionary and settlement schools had been founded in Appalachia (Stoddard 15, 4). Settlement workers—who were mostly college educated white women—were bound by their contemporary understanding of race and ethnicity, which often caused harsh judgments and attempts to preserve often stereotypical aspects of the culture. Stone and Pettit, of course, had their own biases, and appealed—as Frost did with Berea—to funders to help mountaineers of “Pioneer Stock” adjust to industrial work habits (qtd in Stoddard 22), and much as Don West did in 1930. Pettit in 1899 emphasized the folk’s “truly wretched lives” and the decrepit work attitudes of males who, she explained, merely hunted and talked while the women worked (qtd 29). Unlike settlements that served immigrants or African Americans, Hindman worked to uplift Americans who still lived “the pioneer life,” as one 1909 encyclopedia article on Southern social settlements put it (Neve 617). These schools sought to preserve the mountaineers’ “natural force of character” while giving them the “moral training to render them valuable citizens of the republic” (621). The best way to do so, the article prescribes, was through the industrial school and fireside industries, which would market items such as weaving and basket-making to consumers (619). Hindman students were educated in academic essentials and were taught to value their heritage in the face of imposing change, but at the same time they learned to market that heritage (Stoddard 113–117, 141). To help mountaineers adapt to the threats of industrial (and modern) intrusion, the Settlement promoted the preservation of mountain culture, yet the forces of industry also helped to determine which culture would be preserved. Stone’s father—an official with the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, which had been making investments in the region since 1890—was one of six board members (Whisnat 76). And after its first decade of operation, 76 percent of Hindman’s “endowment was in coal company money” (74). Asked about these accusations of cultural imperialism, Still related that although the school administrators and staff had a certain “noblesse oblige,” the school’s program “consisted in teaching students how to read and write effectively, and in equipping them with good habits and practical training” (Miller, “Madly” 11–12). The effect on literacy was palpable, making Knott one of the most literate counties in the region.

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For the last century, the dulcimer has been one of the most well-recognized cultural symbols for Appalachia, and Still’s early poetry about dulcimers display the tensions and hopes underlying Hounds. “Mountain Dulcimer,” Hounds’s second poem, illustrates the contradictions and tensions of outsiders’ beliefs about Appalachia as a premodern space whose people lived in vital proximity to nature. In “Mountain Dulcimer” (5) no human voices are heard. Divorced from the human tongue, Still’s “dulcimer sings,” seemingly of its own accord, “Of the doe’s swift poise, the fox’s fleeting step / And the music of hounds” (1–2). The poem’s ambiguous syntax refuses to locate actors, blurring the distinction between the human and nonhuman world. The dulcimer’s “fretted maple throat” allows the “creak of saddle-bags, of oxen yoke” to sound out next to the “Wild turkey’s treble [and] dark sudden flight of crows,” for the dulcimer has been crafted in the “quiet” by “the carver of maple” (1, 9, 10, 19, 20). The fine line between the human and natural is the “keen blade’s edge” that carves the body of the dulcimer, an instrument whose “breast . . . sounds hunting horns / Strong as clenched hands upon the edge of death” (20, 7–8). After the distant drumming of the “anvil’s strength,” the dulcimer vocalized the “silence” that “aches and cries unhushed into the day” (4, 5, 6). In this poem, a mountain dulcimer is the implement of an unseen people who, due to minimal technology, live next to and can see through the veil between life and death, between the human world and the natural. The poem was Still’s first major publication and appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review (July 1935), and it would be republished on July 4 in the newspapers of Durham, Greensboro, and Norfolk whose populations held large numbers of recent mountains immigrants. Another of Still’s poems called “Dulcimer” appeared in Mountain Life and Work (ML&W ) in October 1934 (10). In this poem, Still uses repetition (perhaps miming the relatively narrow range of the dulcimers) to show that “The dulcimer’s three strings are the heart’s cords” with which mountain people “Play love’s first waking, play the yielding light, / Play life, play death, play eyes that cannot weep” (1, 16–17). The poem manifests the beliefs of the Council of Southern Mountain Workers (CSMW), of which ML&W was the official organ. Consisting primarily of home missionaries, charity workers, health reformers, educators, and social workers, the CSMW sought, even as they aided the mountaineers in becoming modern, to honor the interconnection of handicrafts, culture, and environment, through which the human spirit might faithfully discern, render, and appreciate the world. “Dulcimer” articulated the myth about how a people’s unquantifiable intimacy with the environment was realized and deepened through their relationship with their handcrafted music. The poem served as no less than a manifesto of preservation even as CSMW struggled to help

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the mountaineers adapt to modernization, even via developing and marketing mountain handicrafts. In Selling Tradition Appalachia and the Construction of an American Folk, 1930–1940 (1998), Jane S. Becker demonstrates the American marketplace’s exploitative influence on cultures whose authenticity was for sale. But articles in ML&W promoted handicrafts as a way of fostering culture, reclaiming human relations, and forwarding self-sufficiency.2 Still’s poems reinforced (and drew upon) the conceptions about the nativity of handicrafts to the mountain folk and their role in sustaining the folk’s organic relations with the mountains. From 1935 to 1939, Still published four poems and three stories in ML&W (more than any other author) and became a contributing editor (1939–1947). While important, it was not the “mountain people” who read and valued Still’s poems but members of the CSMW and readers in the mainstream literary establishment. “Authentic Folk Feeling” in the Atlantic Monthly The hope to catch this fleeting “mellow voice” of a passing culture (and the sure belief of its presence) is exemplified in “Child in the Hills” (3), the first poem in Hounds on the Mountain. Edward Weeks (the Atlantic’s editor) wrote to Still: “the stanzas are remarkable for their impulse, their authentic folk feeling, and for a diction which will appeal to readers far removed from your hills” (Sept. 5, 1936). Hindman republished the poem in a four-page pamphlet of Still’s poetry, seeking to harness both the ideas conveyed in the poem as well as the prestige of Still’s publication with Viking and the Atlantic. How could a poem appropriate for publication in the Atlantic also express an “authentic folk feeling,” and why was such a “feeling” valuable to Still, Hindman, the Atlantic, and Viking? “Child in the Hills” presents the traces of an unnamed child from the mountains who has been swept away by the tides of civilization and has “[d] rifted into years of growth and strange enmeshment” (25). In the first stanza, the narrator asks where he can find the “tracks a small foot made” and “the echo of his voice” within “tall trees,” “fallow earth,” “sleeping years,” and streams that flow before “his darkened door” (1–6). The narrator claims to hear the unseen child’s voice and the “ebbing and returning” of his heart among “rain in the beechwood trees” in the “dark hours” when it rises from “mountain silence” (13, 7–10). Against this presence felt during stillness and seclusion, the next two stanzas create the wonderment of the child who “once” (a word that begins five of the next ten lines) merged himself with the earth as he “thrust” his toes into the “gladness of soil” and “waded the clear stony waters of the Carr” (14, 16). In the fourth stanza, the child witnesses the world, listening

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“open-eyed” and “breathless” to unseen “geese flying over” (18–19) and to the echoes of horses upon his brother’s death (20). In this poem, perception is no guarantee of encounter with what lurks just beyond sight. Upon hearing the “swelling voice of the water’s strength,” the child is “[s]wept with the waters down the winding mountain valleys” to the civilization beyond. The last stanza returns to the start of the poem, where the child lives via absence: “He is waiting under the shadows of these hills, / . . . / He is lost in the mossy coves, in the lynn’s late sighing. / His voice is drowned in the waters of the Carr” (27, 29–30). As with the child, the poem’s form is haunted with loss. Written in six stanzas whose line count slowly dwindles (6, 6, 5.5, 5, 4.5, and 4 lines), each of the thirty lines runs from ten to thirteen syllables and is fretted by an unfilled iambic hexameter, with five–six beats per line. Did Hindman appreciate this poem’s call to save the lost child or the need to preserve that loss? Weeks’s praise of its authentic folk feeling provides an answer. “Child in the Hills” appeals to the concept of a chthonic innocence that preceded the abandonment of the farm in the first stanza. Even though the literal child, who is now “shod against the earth,” has migrated with his family in search of work, the innocent child—the one not yet encumbered by the “strange enmeshment” of modernity—remains in the “coolness of the laurel.” Paradoxically, this child whose presence Still summons from the earth only does so because he has been “lost” and “drowned”—an awful sacrifice whose consequences are demonstrated by the juxtaposition with “Epitaph for Uncle Ira Combs,” a poem appearing with “Child in the Hills” in Hounds (35) and in Hindman’s 1937 four-page pamphlet of Still’s poems. “Epitaph” demonstrates the patriarch into which the lost child might have matured: a well-known preacher in Knott County, Ira Combs had sermonized against following “Social Gospellers” who believed in fostering material gain (Stoddard 39). The promise is that innocence, uncorrupted by civilization, matures into wisdom. The authentic folk feeling to which Weeks referred revises the classic American trope of the earth as either woman or man: in the Appalachian mountains, America’s children and their communal innocence have e/merged from/with the earth. The Atlantic saw fit to publish “Child in the Hills” because of the magazine’s long investment in promoting the Southern mountains to its readers. Although Still had been previously published in such prestigious literary journals as Poetry and the VQR, Still called the appearance of “Child of the Hills” in the Atlantic his first major publication (“I sometimes tell” 135). The story of how Still came to value the Atlantic is an essential part of understanding his (and his Appalachia’s) place in the literary field. Born in 1906 as the first boy in a family of ten children, Still grew up on a small farm in east central Alabama near the Georgia boarder (Still, “James

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Still” 232). In a classical story of the deep South, he describes his childhood as picking cotton and having a “black wet nurse” named “ ‘Aunt Fanny,’ ” who he loved “with all his heart.” When he was a high-school senior, Still came across a catalogue for Lincoln Memorial University. Because LMU was predicated upon the students paying their own way by working, Still decided to attend: “I had made a genealogical circle. Up the road in Virginia was the site of the Still’s pioneer home” (235). After working his first year in the limestone quarry, Still became the janitor for the library where he discovered a decade’s worth of donated Atlantic back issues (Still, “A Man Singing” 12). Still relates, “I spent the summer reading. All of them. Every article, every poem, every word. I practically ate the paper. I learned more from them than I could ever state. Even the art of composition, if it can be said I ever obtained it. I decided to write for The Atlantic” (“I sometimes tell” 135). Still began submitting poems to the Atlantic in 1932, and it took three years for him to become published. When he finally gained publication, it came (in large part) because of the Atlantic’s central role in establishing popular American knowledge of Appalachia. In his correspondence with Still, Weeks explained, The Atlantic has always had a soft spot in its heart for the Old Primitive, and your mountaineering sketches come to fill a place which has not been occupied since Lucy Furman last turned our way . . . [And they] will have a bearing upon those many households which have grown crowded in these lean years. (April 23, 1936) In a letter he sent along in acceptance of Still’s story “Job’s Tears,” Weeks pointed out that “The Atlantic helped to lead the way to the literature of the mountains. Walter Page began the exploration and contributors such as Lucy Furman, Olive Tilford Dargan, and Maristan Chapman continued the good work” (Aug. 25, 1936). But Weeks underestimated the Atlantic’s role in promoting essays (seven between 1929 and 1933 alone with titles such as “Elizabethan America” [Aug. 1929] and “Heredity” [Sept. 1929]) and fiction about Appalachia. The foundation for the Atlantic’s interest in Appalachia was set in 1875 when William Dean Howells first published Mary Murfree (then under the pseudonym Charles Egbert Craddock), granting her a high enough profile that her 1884 collection In the Tennessee Mountains would go through twenty-three printings in her lifetime. Murfree went on to publish nine more novels set in the region. Followed by James Lane Allen and John Fox, Jr., these authors’ protagonists are outsiders to the otherworldly and spectacular landscape of the mountains, whose inhabitants’ noble oddities and

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irredeemable flaws the authors directly connected to the pioneer-like folkways of an isolated mountain people. Another outsider, Lucy Furman was even more directly involved with the state of the mountains. Furman published stories and four novels (the last two in the mid-1920s with Atlantic Monthly Press) based on her experience at Hindman from 1907 to 1924, and so it is in her shadow that Still most directly walked. In a sequence of stories published in the Atlantic in 1922 and 1925, Furman portrayed the role of the “Quare Women” (the mountaineers’ word for the Settlement workers) in helping feuding families overcome their vendettas through engaging in the Settlement’s manners, games, and dances (see “Quare Women,” the Atlantic, May 1922). Unlike Furman, who remained an outsider, Still’s lyrics and stories nativized their author by authenticating (and hence modernizing) the lurid mystery local-color writers had granted the peaks. Continuing to support local color in the 1930s, the Atlantic had published Maristan Chapman (a pseudonym for Mary Ilsley Chapman and John Stanton Chapman) in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Moreover, Viking had also published their first three novels, The Happy Mountain (1928), Homeplace (1929), and The Weather Tree (1931). The Chapmans attempted to bypass the presence of an outsider entirely and write the story from the perspective of mountain characters, but these brittle characters fail to break the mold. Nevertheless, the Chapmans provided a gangway for Still not only to board the Atlantic but to ride upon that ocean in the Viking’s Drakkar. Raids from the Prow of History The Atlantic’s interest was reflected throughout the country. From his first publication in VQR and the Saturday Review of Literature in July 1935, over the next eighteen months Still’s poems appeared in critical quarterlies (e.g., Yale Review), national magazines (e.g., Esquire), weeklies (e.g., the New Republic), and a scattering of little magazines (whose modernist aesthetics he opposed). Those poems were often republished in newspapers, ranging from the New York Herald-Tribune and Times to papers in North Carolina. Such publications formed the foundation from which Still’s value in the literary field was generated. The editors of these publications also wrote reviews, acted as conduits to publishers, and gave Still recommendations. The person who helped Still convert his sudden prestige into a book contract was Edwin O. Grover, a literary “Professor of Books” at Rollins College, Florida, where he served as vice president. Grover was the father of Frances Grover, a new teacher at Hindman (Boggess 87). When Frances wrote her father about Still’s success, Grover responded that he had heard about Still from Theda Kenyon, a member of the executive board of the

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Poetry Society of America. Kenyon had become aware of Still after she dined with his patron Guy Loomis in New York City, exemplifying the connection between literary and economic fields. Loomis was a wealthy New Yorker who sponsored students at Lincoln Memorial University, and Still was the first to write Loomis in thanks, beginning an exchange that led to Loomis attending Still’s graduation and offering to pay for a year of graduate study anywhere in the South, thus allowing Still to study at Vanderbilt. Loomis and Still’s relationship was one of paternal intimacy until Loomis’s death in 1951. Appropriately, Still would dedicate Hounds to “G. L.,” Guy Loomis, as well as to Jethro Amburgey. After Still’s return from spending Christmas with the Grover family, Loomis wrote Still that he had met Kenyon and gave Still advice about seeking out a good publisher “with a high class publicity department to push it” (Jan. 18, 1936) and one that would publish Still’s prose because that “makes a man’s reputation (Dec. 17, 1935). Loomis understood how names were made. Still then received an unexpected letter from Harold Strauss, an editor at Covici·Friede publishers, who wrote that someone had shown him Still’s poem “Mountain Heritage” (Feb. 10, 1936). Published in the New Republic, a magazine with which other Covici·Friede authors such as Horace Gregory had ties, “Mountain Heritage” (54) is the final poem in Hounds and expresses an American essence that could not be disintegrated by mining, deforestation, and the subsequent damages. Given the New Republic’s and Covici·Friede’s decided support of the American left, Malcolm Cowley (the New Republic’s literary editor) and Strauss no doubt admired Still’s use of the pastoral to resist industrialism. “Heritage” (which has become Still’s most well-known poem) demonstrates the cultural continuity of Western culture that had taken root in America’s topography (see figure 5.2) I shall not leave these prisoning hills Though they topple their barren heads to level earth And the forests slide uprooted out of the sky. Though the waters of Troublesome, of Trace Fork, Of Sand Lick rise in a single body to glean the valleys, To drown lush penny-royal, to unravel rail fences; Though the sun-ball breaks the ridges into dust And burns its strength into the blistered rock I cannot leave. I cannot go away. (1–9) The poem is structured as a Petrarchan sonnet in two stanzas of nine and six lines. The first stanza, quoted earlier, contains three tercets (rather than two quatrains) that are structured by syntax rather than rhyme, an important nativization and modernization of the form. Each tercet begins “Though . . .”

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Figure 5.2 Page 55, “Heritage,” Hounds on the Mountain. Designed by Milton B. Glick. Courtesy of Teresa Reynolds.

and forwards the narrator’s determination against abandoning the earth even though it is being flayed with floods and droughts. The stanza ends with a halting, full-stop hemistich that gains intensification through that tercet’s variance with the first two: “I cannot leave. I cannot go away.” Still’s

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declaration of a naturalized Western cultural heritage as a point of resistance generated the interest of editors and publishers who had to account for the proletarian surge in the 1930s without exiling mainstream readers. However, with “American reading habits being what they are,” Strauss explained that he was more interested in prose, but he would consider a volume of poetry if Still had one prepared. Covici·Friede was looking to market mountain writing to a reading public that had testified its interest through the response to Jesse Stuart, whose first collection of short stories Dutton was preparing to release. Moreover, Covici·Friede was also preparing to release Harriette Simpson Arnow’s novel Mountain Path. In a letter later in February, Strauss emphasized that the “judgment of the public” determined an “author’s reputation” based on novels (Feb. 27, 1936). Still asked Frances to write to her father for advice, which he provided in abundance. Grover considered himself a man in the know about literature and the mountains because he directed the Blowing Rock School of English in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains, one of the new summer writing programs that brought together writers, editors, reviewers, academics, and students. Grover had also authored an extensive bibliography on the high-profile literarch Percy MacKay whose Kentucky Cycle had been a central inspiration for regionalism (see chapter three). Grover, from his high ground, advised Still to “keep Covici, Friede on the string” (Frances Grover to Still, Mar. 4, 1936). Grover frowned on Covici·Friede because they were “a young house” that had been “fined for putting out obscene literature”—and besides, it was reported that Mr. Friede was “a Hebrew.”3 Instead, Grover suggested that he might be of some help making contacts with Viking Press, “which is many degrees above Covici, Friede.” Here, however, Grover demonstrates his distance from New York—for not only had Friede left the house in 1935, but the founders of Viking were themselves “Hebrew.” In January Grover had taken the step of forwarding Still’s fiction to literary agents and in March had also began advising Still about how to enter into the literary field’s networks, suggesting that he attend the McDowell Colony and Grover’s own Blowing Rock School. Then, in April the Atlantic accepted “All Their Ways are Dark,” and Grover began to query New York publishers and helped Still to set up meeting times during his visit to the city As a result Still heard from Viking; Dodd, Mead & Company; Farrar & Rinehart; Henry Holt & Company; and Charles Scribner’s and Sons (“Publishers” [whole]). It is unclear why Still selected Viking; however, Grover had earlier praised them, and they had published the Chapmans’ three novels as well as six by Elizabeth Maddox Roberts who was widely known as the writer who spoke for Kentucky. That Grover praised Viking for its literary repute is testimony to the skill of its publishers to both act as

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Jews and pass as gentiles. The history of Viking Press demonstrates one of modernism’s greatest pluralist interest interventions, and James Still was a key member of their authorial crew. As related in chapter two, the rise of cultural pluralism in New York City was fostered by the growth of networks that included modernist presses founded by Jews who had graduated from either Harvard or Columbia. To generate economic and cultural capital for Viking, Harold K. Guinzburg drew upon his family’s wealth and prestige as well as that of Ben Huebsch whose house (B. W. Huebsch) merged with Viking at its outset in 1925. Guinzburg (b. 1899) came from one of New York’s wealthy German Jewish families and would assume his father’s mantle as a leader in the Jewish community. Henry A. Guinzburg, his father, was vice president and treasurer for the Kleinert Rubber Company, treasurer for the Federation for the Support of Jewish Philanthropy, and a New York City planner. Henry Guinzburg was born to Austrian parents who fled the failed revolution of 1848. His parents stood out from other “forty-eighters,” because they were proponents of civil liberties who faced persecution as much for their politics as for their religion (Diner 42–43). After growing up in the Northeast, where his father was a rabbi, Henry Ginsburg established himself in Democratic politics in Missouri and St. Louis. There he met and married Leonie B. Kleinert, daughter of the founder of I. B. Kleinert Rubber Company in New York City, where in 1898 Henry came to serve as vice president and treasurer. For the next twenty years, Guinzburg focused on three activities central to upper-class Jewish life: work, philanthropy, and educating his children. Harold and his older sister Lenore attended the Fieldston School, the high school for the Ethical Culture Schools, in New York City and attended top colleges, wherein they were able to network with other elites. After graduating Barnard in 1919, Lenore married James Marshall, son of perhaps the most important person in American Judaism: Louis Marshall. Marshall was one of sixty German Jews who formed the American Jewish Committee (AJC) in 1906 (Sorin, A Time 206–208), upon which Harold Guinzburg would serve from 1938 to 1948. With the goal of defending the Jewish community, the AJC functioned “as a tightly knit prudent group working quietly though governmental authorities” (206). From 1912 until his death in 1929, Marshall became president of the AJC, fought against immigration restriction, and worked to integrate eastern European Jewish immigrants into the U.S. Jewish community. In 1920, New York City’s Jewish elite formed the Federation for the Support of Jewish Philanthropy and sought to unify the New York City Jews (who varied in ethnicity, class, and politics). As treasurer, Henry Guinzburg helped to lead this organization that, against the socialist tendencies of

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many immigrants (such as the Bonis, see chapters two and seven), “sought to adopt American Progressive business ideals as the guiding principles of Jewish communal organization” (D. Moore 133). Henry Guinzburg was treasurer until his death in 1927, and Louis Marshall would be one of his pallbearers. The upper-class Jewish values of community, charity, and fiscal sense deeply informed his son, Harold K. Guinzburg. Four months after the United States declared war on Germany in 1917, Harold K. Guinzburg began attending Harvard. The Intercollegiate Menorah Association stood strongly behind the American war effort because its members saw the war as a way to “prove to the world that one could be both cosmopolitan and patriotic, self-consciously Jewish and American” (Joselit 142). Guinzburg’s publishing took a cue from this orientation. Viking’s cofounder, George Oppenheimer, attended Harvard as a graduate student in the early 1920s and worked in promotions at Alfred A. Knopf from 1922 to 1924. Guinzburg also spent the first half of the 1920s searching for a profession: as a reporter in Boston (1921–1922), as a student at Columbia law school (1922–1924), and as Simon and Schuster’s European liaison for his friend Richard Lee Simon. When Oppenheimer and Guinzburg met and formed their house, they drew upon sixty thousand dollars of Guinzburg’s inheritance for financing, and Viking’s treasurer was a Guinzburg family friend who had taken care of the Guinzburg family’s financial matters for years (Best, “The Viking” 368–369). Viking’s cultural saga and ingenuity is best caught by the story of its colophon. Guinzburg and Oppenheimer had planned to call their house Half Moon Press and use Hendryk Hudson’s ship as a trademark. However, upon commissioning Rockwell Kent to design the colophon, he produced a Viking drakkar instead, so they changed their name to Viking (“The Viking” 493). Then in August before they had brought out their first books, B. W. Huebsch merged his publishing house with them, bringing along writers who have been considered core to the modernist tradition including James Joyce, Sherwood Anderson, and D. H. Lawrence (as well as Elizabeth Maddox Roberts). Huebsch also brought international authors who were, he relates, “champions of oppressed minorities and propagandists for liberty” (“Footnotes” 407). As the first Jewish literary publisher in the United States (and a radical one at that), Huebsch’s colophon was appropriately enough a menorah. In its cultural sallies, the Viking Press’s drakkar sought, with an invisible menorah on its bow, to cut through the dark seas of nativism and enlighten America as to the reality of its pluralism. Huebsch was exhausted from publishing the Freeman (1920–1924), a cultural and political magazine that, in the vein of populist Henry George, offered a “philosophical anarchist’s conception of progress to be effected by

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non-political means” (S. Turner 36). When Huebsch met the two young Viking editors, he was relieved to have them start their press in his old office because he saw them as continuing his vision (Huebsch, Reminiscences 74). This melding represented a generational transformation of a common habitus. Born in 1876, Huebsch was the third child of Adolph Huebsch, who immigrated to the United States from Prague in 1866 on the eve of the Austro-Prussian War. Heubsch senior was an advocate of Reform Judaism and helped to found (and later served as a trustee) Hebrew Union College (HUC) in Cincinnati (“Huebsch, Adolph”). B. W. Heubsch was raised on his father’s religious principles: religious conventions should speak to the heart and minds of modern people so that Israel would be a “kingdom of truth, justice, and peace among all men” rather than a literal nation (“Pittsburg Platform”). Huebsch’s official education, however, ended at the age of eight when his father died. He then became home-schooled, attended a year at a small business college (at the age of thirteen), became an apprentice lithographer (between the ages fourteen and eighteen), and took up work with his eldest brother and uncle as a printer (McCullough 3–7). Huebsch began publishing at the turn of the century when an author paid him to publish his book (McCullough 8). Soon other authors approached him and word began to spread, leading Huebsch to publish Tom Seltzer’s translation of Gorky’s The Spy in 1908 along with a growing variety of fiction, nonfiction, and political philosophy. Huebsch’s list gained its greatest strength in response to the heightened tensions of the Great War. Following the lead of Walter Lippmann, who was an editor for the New Republic, Huebsch published and befriended Lajpat Rai who wrote books on “Indian history, grievances, and demands” (Huebsch, Reminiscences 342). By 1917, Huebsch was James Joyce’s and D. H. Lawrence’s U.S. publisher, as well as of Francis Hackett, the New Republic’s literary editor, who fervently supported Irish nationalism. By 1920, Huebsch had brought out Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Lola Ridge’s The Ghetto, and Other Poems, and Wilfred Owen’s Poems. Huebsch would also publish professors at the New School for Social Research, such as Thorstein Veblen. Huebsch’s networks—via the New Republic and the New School for Social Research—promoted his contacts with authors who wrote decidedly anticolonial books. Yet Huebsch, much like Guinzburg, was not a revolutionary; his friends described him as a “calm and gentle” man with “a deep and consistent set of values” (McCullough 2). His list manifested his convictions that united tolerance and justice, peace and action, and freedom of speech and quality of articulation. As Huebsch related in his 1936 talk before the Jewish Publication Society, “I deplore the get-rich-quick scheme which animates so many who write primarily in hope of commercial success

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rather than because of an inner impulse; with whom the worldly return is more important than the divine fire” (“Address” 671–672). Huebsch built books whose goal was clarity of text rather than sensational design. Instead of playing the game of advertising books to a wide audience, he focused on liberal magazines such as the Nation, the New Republic, and the Dial (C. Turner 52). As related in the Saturday Review of Literature, a book by Huebsch is “a book that has some genuine reason for existence” (Morley). When Huebsch, Guinzburg, and Oppenheimer began their talks, Huebsch was relieved to give guidance to young men who shared his values. In Guinzburg, Huebsch recognized someone who could bring together four parts of a publisher’s vision: pragmatics of profit, cultivation of readership, selection of skilled authors, and a message worth sharing. Thus, Huebsch transferred his colophon’s reputation to Viking, which created a list that blended its liberalizing vision with established white culture. As formulated in their initial 1925 announcement: “Our aims are, briefly, to have the name of a symbol of enterprise, adventure, and exploration in the publishing field . . . to cultivate home soil, yet seek foreign lands [and] to acclaim treasure when we find it” (“A New”). The publishers at Viking had a keen eye for how to inhabit signs that held positive association with Americans’ self-definition. In 1935, Viking was recognized for its lists cultural breadth. “A Milestone in American Literature: A Publishing House that United Europe and America,” an article for the Jewish Criterion (Pittsburgh), highlighted the firm’s ability to publish decidedly American authors (such as Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Albert Halper, and Erskine Caldwell) but noted, “Its greatest triumphs by far have come with the importation of German Jewish and Austrian Jewish writers” such as Lion Feuchtwanger, Arnold and Stefan Zweig, and Franz Werfel (Frederick). In 1942, Huebsch alluded to Viking’s motivations: It should be our aim to preserve separate languages and separate ways of thinking and to encourage the expression of healthy nationalism that promotes the full expression of a people’s genius; to urge students to wrestle with ideas of alien origin by studying languages, by translating and interpreting, so that the conceptions of each group may grind against every other. (“Cross-Fertilization” 310) While focusing on international exchange, Huebsch’s words ring true for claims of American regionalists who would also agree with him about immigrants whose “languages enlarge our intellectual vision and sharpen the tools with which we work.” Referring to the “new immigrants” (i.e., eastern and southern Europeans), Huebsch explains that even as they integrated, immigrants “revive the meaning of those [American] ideals which tend to

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be forgotten in the constant repetition of the words that describe them, and they supply us with living examples of the pioneer spirit.” Huebsch’s publications of these words twenty-seven years after Kallen first published his article about cultural pluralism in the Nation demonstrates his idea lived in the words and practices of one of America’s foremost publishers. “Elizabethan English” and Poetry at Viking When negotiating publication with Viking, James Still corresponded with Marshall Best, Huebsch’s apprentice who became Viking’s general manager. Best wrote that the press was “extremely cautious about taking on new poetry” but might do so if Still could show he was working on a novel, the publication of which would make up for the loss the publisher would incur on the poems (Feb. 9, 1937). When Still sent Best two chapters from what would become River of Earth, Best wrote back with enthusiasm: “You speak of this as a rough draft; yet the language is always right, sometimes extremely beautiful. Your feeling for the setting and the people in their setting seems perfect. You manage to achieve . . . authentic color in every detail.” Best was also excited that one of the chapters—“Job’s Tears”—had just appeared in March’s Atlantic, increasing the value of Still’s work. In light of the promised novel, Viking and Best went to work to “find an audience” (Mar. 5, 1937). The nativizing role of Hounds on the Mountain on Viking’s list is apparent in their eight-page June 1937 catalogue. Still’s book appears across from Star-Begotten, a novel by H. G. Wells about a historian who discovers “strange beings” (aliens) walking unnoticed on England’s streets. Two other books also earned their own pages: Ludwig Beleman’s My War with the United States was a personal narrative about his immigration to the United States in 1914 as an Austrian; and Herbert Clyde Lewis’s Gentleman Overboard, a novel of light pathos, follows the predicaments of a passenger on a cruise through the Pacific. Appearing on a single page at the back are three “previously announced” works: a novel about a Roman plebian who rose to power, a book of “87 authentic Negro songs,” and a study called The Spirit and Structure of German Fascism by Robert Brady. The catalog copy further accented Still’s place by highlighting his language: “His vocabulary is enriched by the mountain speech, which probably retains more Elizabethan English than will be found anywhere else in the world today.” Still’s poems grounded Viking’s books in an America that was as foreign as an Austrian immigrant, as exotic and unseen as aliens in Britain, and whose “pure and uncomplicated beauty” opposed German fascism. While Still’s book was but a drop in the ocean, Marshall Best saw it as a way to launch the career of a new Southern novelist. After the Depression,

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publishers rarely brought out more than 1,000 copies of a first novel, so the fact that Viking printed 750 copies of Hounds on the Mountain is significant. The designer of Viking’s 1937 catalogue played on the fact that Viking only had six poets on its list and used half of the text about Still to valorize them, including George Dillon (then editor of Poetry) and Robert Hillyer, both of whom won Pulitzers after publishing with Viking. In 1937 Viking brought out fifty-one other books (“Publishers’ Output” 208), including Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White’s You Have Seen Their Faces, whose photographs and words document the privation of Southern sharecroppers and whose images still hang in our minds. Poetry about the beauty of Appalachia’s poverty gains particular resonance against this stark comparison: the hardship and neediness of Southern sharecroppers was a manifestation of America’s grim Civil War heritage, whereas the scarcity of commodities in Appalachia was seen as a rediscovery of authentic American roots. Notably, Viking would publish Caldwell, Steinbeck (who came with Covici in 1938), and Faulkner (starting in 1945). Viking was recolonizing America’s idea of itself via books that narrated the failure of its ideals. The publication of Hounds was an investment in Still’s future, Viking’s image, and the ideology of liberal pluralism. The book was designed by Milton B. Glick, who led Viking’s domination of awards for best design in trade books in 1937 and 1939 from the Book Clinic of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, whose founder Robert Josephy designed Rukeyser’s U.S. 1 (“Viking Press Wins Book Design” and “Viking Press Wins Book Clinic”). The volume’s design expresses this sense of a well-made item: the book is 8.25 by 6.25 inches, has 8 pages of front matter, and is 55 pages long. Titles are italicized, and the poems are composed in the same sharp 11 point, Goudy font with 3 point leading (the space between the lines), with a maximum of 23 lines per page (compared with an average of 32 lines per page of poetry in most trade books today). The use of space emphasized both intimate yet removed clusters of text and the vastness of the surrounding page. In light of Still’s poems’ association with handicrafts, the quality of the typography confirmed readers’ associations with the “aura” of authentic art (Benjamin 221). Best’s first step to generate prepublication recognition was to request endorsements from Edward Weeks, John Crowe Ransom, Mark Van Doren, and Robert Frost (letter to Still, Mar. 23, 1937). Weeks did not do so because he wanted Atlantic Monthly Press to bring out Still’s work and held a “tinge of disappointment” when he heard that Still would publish with Viking (Mar. 29, 1937). Ransom also supported the values that Still represented but did not think highly of Still’s writing. Still had taken classes where Ransom read aloud his contribution to I’ll Take My Stand, and Still has called that book

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“a pioneering undertaking, a seminal work” (qtd in Stonback 5). But Ransom turned a cold eye to the young Still. When Still submitted an essay that articulately reiterated the Agrarian credos in terms of his own life, Ransom only noted that Still was “too general & verbose—it’s difficult & obscure” (“Ways of Escape”). Moreover, Still’s MA advisor was Edwin Mims, whose The Advancing South: Stories of Progress and Reaction (1926) caused “considerable disregard” among the Nashville Agrarians (Still, “A Man Singing” 13). If Still found himself slighted by Ransom because of his liberal associations, those same associations allowed Viking to secure a blurb from William Rose Benét, editor of the important Saturday Review of Literature whose weekly column on poetry was featured in the front part of each issue. Benét’s blurb appeared on the book jacket: “Mr. Still has turned real life in the most picturesque part of our county into real poetry. . . . We have had the homespun singer before in the South, but we have rarely had the poet who could blend homespun life and eternal beauty.” Benét’s use of “real” as an adjective for “life” and “poetry” links Still’s lyrics to well-documented poverty of the Depression. Furthermore, his use of “homespun” counterposes Still’s works to Stuart’s and his rephrasing of “homespun” in terms of “eternal beauty” rearticulates language common to the national marketing of mountain handicrafts (see Becker 193–203). In addition, Viking provided key associations for reviewers on the jacket’s flap, including discussion of Still’s colonial, Scotch Irish heritage and his labor as a librarian at Hindman. Unsaid was that Still did not see the mountains proper until he went to Lincoln Memorial University in 1928. Reviewers capitalized upon Still’s biography and its Appalachian associations, often overpowering their reading of his poems. Such attention by popular critics to a books’ matter was necessary because of the volume of reviews they undertook. Reviews appeared in weekly and monthly national magazines (five), national newspapers (eight), little magazines and critical quarterlies (six), and regional papers (17) (Cadle, “Reviews” 208–211). National newspaper reviews praised Hounds on the Mountain and detailed Still’s colonial heritage as an essential interface with the land. Writing for the New York Times Book Review, Percy Hutchison notes Still’s relation to the mountains and calls Still “a Southern mountaineer, born and bred” whose diction is “homespun from his ancestors, the warp from Chaucer, [and] the woof out of the English Bible.” Still, however, had learned skill with such diction from his master’s thesis, “The Function of Dreams and Visions in the Middle English Romances,” his college education in the Cumberland Gap, and his experience at Hindman. John Holmes, writing an extended review for the Boston Evening Transcript (and a separate review for the VQR), begins by recounting Still’s colonial heritage and his work with mountain literacy. He explains Still’s “discrimination”

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and “craftsmanship” that treats words “with scrupulous honor,” opposed to the work of Jesse Stuart and Thomas Wolfe. Fully quoting the final two poems in the book, Holmes emphasizes the book’s last section where he could best apprehend the author’s presence. The penultimate poem is “Horseback in the Rain” (54) where the narrator writes (and implicitly speaks) a series of unspoken second-person imperatives that unite reader and narrator as being mutual subject to the “you must” of the superego. This technique also fills the poem with the feel of a scrambling continuity and the mad-rush of a traveler seeking shelter against a storm that cannot be denied: To the stone, to the mud With hoofs busy clattering In a fog-wrinkled spreading Of waters? Halt not. Stay not. Ride the storm with no ending On a road unarriving. (13–18) Like the child in the first poem, the narrator has been turned out from human shelter, but instead of leaving, the poet-narrator keeps going even though there is no promised end. The surging pace of “Horseback in the Rain” contrasts with the “solemn pace” of the closing poem “Heritage,” in whose quiet tone Holmes proposes that Still is “most like his mountain people.” Here is the second stanza of that naturalized Petrarchan sonnet, whose first stanza I discussed earlier: Being of these hills, being one with the fox Stealing into the shadows, one with the new-born foal, The lumbering ox drawing green beech logs to mill, One with the destined feet of man climbing and descending, And one with death rising to bloom again, I cannot go. Being of these hills I cannot pass beyond. (55, 10–15) Holmes quotes the whole poem in order to demonstrate Still’s formal organic quality. Still’s control of tone with syntax is clear when we compare the careful pace this final sextet, which contains only two endstops, with the clatter of “Horseback in the Rain,” whose stops within the narrow lines paradoxically accelerate its pace. However, the last two lines of “Heritage,” which Still might have seen as allowing one to transcend death by “rising to bloom” within a larger natural cycle, are frowned on by Holmes: “[for] regional writers who insist that they are forever at home and happy in their chosen valley, there may already be some foreboding limitations.”

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Just such a critique appears in the much briefer reviews from the New Republic, the Atlantic, and the New Yorker, which read Still as a poet rather than as a farmer-proletarian (as in Stuart’s case). Defending the literary gate in the New Republic, John Gould Fletcher—one of the original Agrarians who also savaged Stuart in a review—railed against Still’s “monotony” of precise observation in which he became “too much the photographic realist, plodding along where a rustic furrow leads him.” Beyond representation of an agrarian life, Fletcher wanted Still to take a stand on modern culture: apparently, to gain one’s letter-jersey with the Agrarians, one needed a fervid stance on culture that “burns on, line after line.” Similarly, Theodore Morrison, the director of the Bread Loaf Writers Conference describes the poems as “saturated with the love of nature.” The Atlantic issue that held Morrison’s comments also contained a ten-page excerpt from Caldwell’s and Bourke-White’s You Have Seen Their Faces. Notably, all these reviews mention Still’s connection to the highlands and regionalism without recounting either his biography or popular associations with Appalachia. For the more affluent or politicized reader, the reign of regionalism was already beginning to pass even as native Appalachians were entering the literary field. However, reviews in Poetry and the recently founded Southern Review denigrated Hounds as outmoded, ill-crafted regionalism. In the Southern Review F. O. Matthiessen’s crows that Still’s “Kentucky regionalism” faces the same dilemma as “the local colorists of the eighteen-eighties”: “He dwells lovingly on the details of his environment as ends in themselves. And, almost inevitably in such a method, the details chosen are quaint ones, which set off his remote valleys from the harsher realities of the modern world” (378). Matthiessen ends by calling for Still to take the tact of Marxists, or, even better, to write more like “a man and only secondarily as a Southerner,” just as “Ransom and Warren [do], whose pungent local details can become symbols for broad human value” (379). Similarly, in Poetry Sherman Conrad panned Still’s diction and repetitive syntax. And Conrad is on target: Still overuses adjectives and repetitive construction. Yet to make this the focus of a four-page review is an act of dismissal, amplified by the fact that Still strove for (and often achieved) skillful use of language, unlike Stuart who was praised for vigorously disregarding such trappings. Matthiessen also is to some degree correct, as shown through the value that the Atlantic and Hindman was placed on Still’s work. Indeed Conrad and Matthiessen’s reactions certainly forecast Still’s eventual exclusion from the more academic literary field then coming into ascendence.

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Demonstrating that regionalism was already passé for learned writers, Robert Penn Warren had composed an anti-manifesto in 1936 called “Some Don’ts for Literary Regionalists,” which decried—among other equally valid points—the use of “hicks” and “primitivism” titillate readers (145, 148–149). Yet Viking did not publish poor writing: Was Still propagating and sustaining fantasies that America held about the difference between a learned, exterior, benevolent culture and its mindful affirmation of America through aid rendered to an illiterate, interior, primal culture? Or was Still aiding in the contact, appreciation, and inevitable transformation of both cultures? Hounds’ engagement of those issues earned an honorable mention from the Southern Author’s Award Committee. Nevertheless, even as the students of the Agrarians took their ideals and turned them to progressive goals, what the Agrarians had helped to create, the New Critics would now defend and transcend. Stumping the Literary Field Still’s first encounter with prestige came after his fiction and poetry had appeared in the Atlantic. The chair of the English Department at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, some 130 miles away from Hindman as the crow flies—asked Still to come be part of the Woman’s Club festival (Dantzler, April 7, 1936). Upon Still’s vehement and negative response, the chair asked him to meet with “English majors and staff members” (Dec. 18, 1936). Still again said no. On February 26, 1937, the wife of the university’s president implored Still to visit; when he declined, she wrote back again on March 11: “Whatever the day, please come. My husband joins me in assuring you of the warm welcome that awaits you” (McVey) Finally, after much begging, Still agreed. While we do not know how Still’s visit went, we do have evidence about his hesitation to be in front of an audience. For instance, Grover invited Still to attend the Blowing Rock School of English. Due to his shyness, Still declined to read his poems, so the Southern novelist Majorie Kinnan Rawlings read his poems aloud for him. In a letter later that year Rawlings warned Still against such education and insisted that he ignore the outside world: “Your lessons, James, are in your Kentucky hills. They are in the waters of Troublesome Creek. They are in the strange minds and destinies of your mountain people. They are most of all in your own innate good taste in writing—in your own heart, sensitive and raw” (July 13, 1936). Yet attending Blowing Rock led to meeting the reviewer for the New York Post. As a result, the reviewer later praised Still’s work and verbal story-telling ability, which he encouraged New Yorkers to experience when Still visited several years later.

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The next year, Still’s response to Hounds forecast his reaction to professionalizing his writing. Albert Stewart (who attended Hindman in the 1930s, became Still’s friend, and went on to found Appalachian Heritage, a journal that has long been central in Appalachian literature) relates that when he asked Still what it felt like to author Hounds, “the reply was strange, and in words to the effect that ‘Maybe I should have felt elated but on that day I received the printed copies, I took a copy and walked out in the field and sat on a stump and felt like crying’ ” (38). Still’s vulnerability hints that publishing was at odds to the creative life he desired. Still’s later failure to generate recognition in the literary field resulted largely from the dilemma that arose in his stance toward and relationship with the people and places that formed his subject material, his relationship with his own art, and his attitude about self-promotion. Still felt that respect and dignity demanded keeping the first two apart and that his literary work would speak for itself. Yet, as explained by the cofounder of Viking Press (who brought out Still’s first three books) presses invest in authors, not books: “A certain audience has been created, a certain prestige established, all of which can be entered on the credit side of the ledger when and if the next book comes” (Oppenheimer 219). Marshall Best, Viking’s managing editor, knew the critical importance for Still to meet editors, reviewers, authors, and publishers, so Best suggested that Still attend Bread Loaf Writers Conference and won him a scholarship. Best’s decision was no coincidence, because Best was Morrison’s (the director of Bread Loaf and Week’s assistant) college roommate at Harvard. Bread Loaf began in 1925 at Middlebury College and by the mid-1930s was an institution (Morrison, Bread Loaf 12). Teachers and visiting speakers included the likes of Archibald MacLeish, Julia Peterkin, Donald Davison, and Paul Green. Even though the final three held opposing positions toward race issues, the discourse of writing drew them together. Soon editors, writers, literary agents, and publishers (such as the Atlantic’s editor Edward Weeks, John Farrar, and Robert Hillyer), rather than writers, were acting as instructors (44). Bread Loaf was as much about learning the market as producing a marketable piece of writing. While there, Still worked with the North Carolina playwright Paul Green, Herbert Agar of the CourierJournal, and George Stevens of the Saturday Review of Literature. Still met Carson McCullers as a fellow student with whom he would stay in contact. Robert Frost was also a guest speaker when Still attended. Although Frost did not blurb Still’s book, Still reported having met him one afternoon “in Florida” at Grover’s home where both were staying. That evening when he went back to his own room, Still discovered Robert Frost “sitting there”: “It’s the kind of thing that happens in dreams. We talked for a long time—he did

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most of it. He talked about the difficulties and rewards of being a writer and about the need to remain free of pressure and promises and temptations” (Cadle, “Pattern” 138). Still took that advice to heart even as he struggled to negotiate the networks he was pushed to become part of. In 1938, Still attended the McDowell Colony, where he met John Gould Fletcher, who would win the 1939 Pulitzer Prize for his Selected Poems. Given Fletcher’s disparaging review of Hounds, a great reconciliation occurred. Fletcher wrote Still later that year and provided admiration and guidance: Your personality with its blend of complete integrity and love for your own local background, is not a common kind of thing in America. I believe that you are going to do fine things . . . but you will always find it hard to satisfy yourself, and you are by nature so sensitive as to be almost unable to protect yourself from the world by means of warding off things that upset you. Fletcher’s observations tell us about Still’s reticence to act on the worldly stage. At McDowell, Still also met and impressed the editor of the Columbia Review who wrote Still letters sharing how deeply impressed he was. It’s impossible to tell if that editor was courting Still as a contributor, but the connection would have offered benefits had Still acted upon them. Still went on to meet other young authors at artist colonies such as Yaddo, which he attended in 1939. There he met Katherine Anne Porter and Delmore Schwartz, the three of whom actively promoted one another (Porter and Schwartz letters to Still). After Still’s novel River of Earth was published in February 1940, he was contacted by Irwin Edman, a philosophy professor at Columbia University, who asked him to be the Phi Betta Kappa poet at Columbia’s commencement exercises. Also an author published by Viking, Edman explained the esteem in which he and his colleagues held Still’s poetry. Three days after Edman, Best wrote Still to express his “satisfaction” and “delight” (April 1, 1940). Acting as Still’s coach, Best encouraged him: “This is a distinguished honor and I sincerely hope that you will find it possible to accept.” Knowing of Still’s meager income, Best offered to help cover Still’s expenses. Still declined to go because, as he explained years later, “I didn’t have the bus fare and, as I thought, clothes suitable to wear at such function” (Interview 51). Frustrated with Still’s reticence to till the literary field, Best admonished, “I am tremendously disappointed to know that you have turned town the Columbia invitation. As a human being, I can understand your feelings about it, but that doesn’t prevent me from being sorry to see you miss this honor” (April 18, 1940).

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In the 1960s, Still repeated his opposition to self-publicizing: “I don’t think a writer should allow himself to be used to promote his writing. That sort of deceptivity is more appropriate for politicians and automobile dealers. My writing speaks for itself.” Indeed, Still saw “lecture tours and autograph parties” as the “enemies of writing . . . The writer only has one duty: to write” (Cadle, “Pattern” 116). However, as we have seen, reviewers’ responded positively when they met Still. Such reviews only generated enough attention to get Still into the next series of encounters within the literary field, encounters from which he quailed, whether from his personality, his artistic philosophy, or a mixture of the two. Twenty years later when Still’s position as the primogenitor of Appalachian literature was well established, he had revised his thinking. In an interview with the editor of Appalachian Journal in 1978—a year after the founding of the Appalachian Writers Workshop at Hindman, which has become a central fixture in the Appalachian and Ohio Valley literary scene—Still shared, “I wouldn’t blame an author for doing anything reasonable to bring his writing to the attention of the public. Agreed, I haven’t done much in this line myself. Frankly, I wouldn’t know what to do” (Interview 51). Still’s attitude toward the literary field was the result of his attempts to resolve the paradox between his commitment to place and art and his opportunity to become a literary professional. Still was introverted and committed to continuous, slow, private work. This position reinforced what he had been taught by the upcoming New Critics at Vanderbilt about the proper stance that one should take toward literature—it must speak for itself. But he also enacted Donald Davidson’s call from his essay, “A Mirror for Artists,” in I’ ll Take My Stand, to be “both a person and an artist” (60). By being a person and a citizen first, the artist (claims Davidson) “will do best to feel the infection of our times, to stand for decentralization in the arts, to resist with every atom of his strength the false gospel of art as a luxury which can be sold in commercial quantities or which can be hallowed in discreet shrines.” When Still undertook a life of service to mountain literacy at Hindman, he was more than careful not to become lost in the seduction of the artistic field—he radically separated himself from it, even while writing poetry designed to function within it. In 1968, Cadle explained that few people in the region of Hindman had actually read anything by Still who had a policy of “flagrant disregard” for self-promotion and, instead, “worked diligently to protect his privacy and to insure separation between his personal life and any critical acclaim that might adhere to the name James Still as writer” (“Man on Troublesome” 236). Still felt entrusted to quiet observation of and service to the people among whom he had come to live.

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When Cadle asked if there was a contradiction between Still’s life as a writer (“whose duty is to preserve mountain people as they are, with their folk-customs and often primitive attitudes”) and his dedication as an educator and librarian at Hindman (who sought “to teach them to read, to improve their living conditions, and to bring them closer to culture and socalled modern thinking and living”), Still replied: “No. None at all. I would still write about them as they would be under changed conditions. For it’s the people rather than the conditions I’m writing about” (“Pattern” 114). Yet the very terms of Cadle’s question and Still’s response belie underlying assumptions. Words such as “preserve,” “primitive,” and “about” demonstrate a contradiction at the heart of Still’s stance: instead of becoming directly involved in the artistic practices of the local population, Still wrote about a people whose culture was valued by Hindman because of their removal from modernity, and he wrote for an exterior audience of highly literate readers. Yet Still eventually came to have great influence upon writers from and in the mountains. Still’s slow rise toward becoming “the Dean of Appalachian literature” resulted from his humble approach toward the literary field and, indeed, toward all of humanity. Such humility and ability to listen engendered ever-deepening connections with those that he (and his work) touched, which helped set the tone for the Appalachian Renaissance that continues into our present day with ever-fuller realization. An attitude of humility—which denotes coming from a low social circumstance and “lack of pretension”—does not promote literary success, if by success one means recognition and influence. Still felt that parading his work would disrupt that alchemy of relation, writing, and imagination that we call the muse, for the gift of creativity is just that, and is a gift that each author discovers in his or her own context and that many writers find themselves betraying. Instead, Still obeyed his heart and choose a quiet path that would honor (rather than market) the world and life about which he wrote. With the imposing forces of labor and raw resource exploitation, his stance was questioned by those who assumed other tactics. Nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated than in the response to his work by his fellow mountain poets Jesse Stuart and Don West. Between the three of them, they represent three distinct attitudes toward pluralism, regionalism, Appalachia, and poetry. Still, West, and Stuart Before his first acceptance to Poetry, Stuart had been writing to Still since 1933. In January 1935, Stuart wrote how “fine” it was to see Still “climbing

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in poetry,” and in November 1935 wrote how “honestly glad” he was to see Still’s poetry appearing in the Atlantic, Household, and Esquire all within the same week. While both poets were writing about a similar geography, not a tinge of jealousy was registered. In June 1936 upon reading Still’s “All Their Ways Are Dark,” the first story he published in the Atlantic, Stuart wrote him about how he had seemingly “got over what Don [West] has been trying to put over all of his life” (June 18, 1936). Stuart refers to how Still managed to, in just three pages, portray the crisis of a mountain family who participated in the economy of a coal mine during the Depression. This move brought the family in strife over the use of resources, and the narrator’s mother solved the problem by burning down their home. Don West did not appreciate Still’s description of internalized class conflict. West had returned to Kentucky in 1935 to unionize coal miners, whose lives and struggles served as a central subject for his writing. Accordingly, when Stuart wrote Still, he ranted against West’s answer of political action, which Stuart saw as creating an “old sad-faced world” and denying the joy and “grand time” the world offered. Stuart’s take was that West—who was then the State Organizer for the Kentucky Workers’ Alliance and district organizer for the Communists in Kentucky (Lorence 66)—was a charismatic but failed leader and poet. Stuart told Still that “[Don] wants his name before the public on the sweat and blood of other men’s labor and other’s writings” (Jan. 30, 1936). While predicting that “Don will pass in a blowing wind unless he does a book of his own” and settles down, Stuart continued, “There’s something in Don West that makes him go on. There is a thirst unbearable in him” (Sept. 8, 1937). Against West’s political example and Still’s literary bearing, Stuart noted his own complicity in marketing mountain stereotypes: “I’m afraid about all my virginity is gone. I’ve been more or less a prostitute among the magazines” (June 18, 1936). Like smoking and drinking, West also felt that the mainstream literary field was a moral delinquency. That November (1936), West had written Still on precisely this point. West had been speaking at Sue Bennet College in London, Kentucky, about Kentucky writers and his hope for a new way. He dismissed the representations of Kentucky by John Fox Jr. and Elizabeth Maddox Roberts—with whom Still would become quite close before her death—and even spoke against Still and Stuart (Nov. 6, 1936). West condemned Stuart for being “hungry for a career, exploiting the old romantic, sentimentalism which outsiders hook up to the mountains.” Then he launched into “Still,” who he describes in the third person within the letter: “As for Still, he is still a very confused young guy, honest in his work, sincere in his desire to picture the mountains—but tends to idolize and idealize. Fails as yet to get into the

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vital stream of present day life. Still holds on to the old romantic approach.” He then says that Still’s recent story in ML&W had “nothing new, not even a new approach”; besides, he went on, “you still make the mistake of fumbling mountain language.” He continues, “This story [“One Leg Gone to Judgment”] is as trite as all the poems I’ve seen of yours in the same magazine and in the Sewanee Review.” West no longer confided his inner dilemmas to Still. By this time West had been blacklisted from ML&W, which he called “that reactionary sheet” catering to “the old maids of Hindman,” so he was publishing stories of mining strife and conflict there under the pseudonym Mack Adams. In the furor of his righteousness (and perhaps frustration at his lack of literary success), West was preaching to Still. Finally, in May 1937, West revealed to Still that “I find myself constantly on a nervous edge with all kinds of commotion, fights [and] unpleasantness.” He shares his appreciation of Still’s ability to get him to listen quietly to stories and says he appreciates that Still is “pushing ahead” and sticking to his writing: “Of course, a man goes as far in any way as his vision allows. I do not expect you to go the same way I do socially in thought or action. We have two different outlooks, different set of values, as much as I love peace . . .” But West’s calm was only momentary, and after reading Hounds, West realized their distance and voiced his anger at Still’s stance: “seemingly our interests are a million miles apart, [but] we once did have quite a close friendship which I have always appreciated in spite of the feeling that I have that you and your writing are barely scratching the surface of things” (Aug. 9, 1937). West concludes by admitting that Still might find his contempt hard to bear but that “we can still get a hell of a kick out of talking together.” Such words were poignant since West had acted as a big brother to Still and Stuart when they were at Vanderbilt and had inspired Still to come to Hindman when he sent him the dulcimer seven years earlier. Although West would later send Still a copy of the flyer announcing the publication of his 1946 Clods of Southern Earth, this letter was essentially the last contact between them. In the years leading up to World War II, the threat of fascism loomed ever closer with the ongoing Spanish Civil War and the Munich agreement that appeased German aggression. Harold K. Guinzburg decided to more directly intervene into how Americans understood the relation between race, culture, and politics. During 1938, Guinzburg chaired a newly founded American Jewish Committee group called the Survey Committee that was formed to supervise, “expand,” and “intensify” AJC’s educational work (“Report . . . 1937” 789–790). In his 1938 AJC presidential address, Cyrus Adler praised the committee for its “enormous” devotion to “every phase of the Jewish question in America” (624). Detailing the committee’s work, Guinzburg reported on “the particular task of counteracting the effect of

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Nazi and kindred anti-Jewish agitation in our own country and promoting a healthy resistance to racial and religious bigotry” (“Report . . . 1938” 638). Knowing of the reluctance to let in more Jewish immigrants, Guinzburg sought to influence policy makers to see immigrants, as he put it in an interview with the New York Times, as “potential sources of strength” rather than as “refugees” (Streit). Not only would the United States gain the intellects and skills of scientists and physicians, but “a whole layer of able, highly trained people.” For Guinzburg, the Jewish cause was the American cause, and the American cause was one of a democracy synonymous with liberal pluralism. America was by no means indifferent to the plight of her own underclass or rural regions; however, the timbre of America’s attention had changed. To understand the end of the 1930s and start of World War II, one needs to acknowledge the presence and influence of books such as You Can’t Go Home Again (1940) by Thomas Wolfe, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) by Walker Evans and James Agee (who hailed from Knoxville, Tennessee, and had won the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1934, beating out Muriel Rukeyser), and The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, which was published by Viking and sold over three hundred thousand copies in 1939 alone (“The Best Sellers”). This attention to the plights and struggles of America’s exploited and disinherited eclipsed Still’s call to value an authentic mountain culture. During a rise of ethnic and racial awareness throughout the country in the 1960s, intellectuals and cultural workers in Appalachia would again come to harvest and generate ethnic awareness with Still’s work, but in the late 1930s proletarian writers, such as Muriel Rukeyser, would render Appalachia as the heart of America that was pummeled by industrial exploitation and fascism. Rather than seeking to preserve the authentic values of an idealized Anglo-American past, they looked to contemporary scientific and social resources to overcome exploitation and to renovate the quality of people’s lives through democratic practice and citizen action.

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CHAPTER 6

Rebinding “The Book of the Dead” into Muriel Rukeyser’s U.S. 1 (1938)

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cholars have skillfully analyzed Muriel Rukeyser’s “The Book of the Dead” for how it manifests modernist discourses, but decontexualizations have led to substantial oversights. Analysis of “The Book of the Dead” has been isolated from its original place of publication, U.S. 1. (Covici·Friede, 1938; figure 6.1). Considering the sequence’s role within the collection as a whole reveals its ideal audience as educated urbanites and the role that Rukeyser wants them to take against world fascism. This literal decontextualization also has occurred regarding sequence’s (and hence book’s) relationship to Rukeyser’s life and place in the literary field. Rukeyser became part of the leftist literary network via a Communist-affiliated student newspaper, which led her into associations with Horace Gregory, John Reed Clubs, the New Masses, the New Republic, and Covici·Friede. In short, Rukeyser scripted U.S. 1 and “The Book of the Dead” in light of readers in (and recruiting readers to) the Popular Front, whose model of interaction with minority and repressed cultures was the moral crusader John Brown. This chapter reconciles Rukeyser’s beguiling theory of poetry and readership with the relations among Rukeyser, U.S. 1, publishers, and a few highly educated readers. These recontextualized facets allows us to gauge the important but limited work of U.S. 1. Radical Modernist Ancestors Born in New York City in 1913, Muriel Rukeyser witnessed the city’s meteoric growth in the 1920s because her father owned and ran a concrete company

Figure 6.1 Front cover, U.S. 1 (Covici·Friede, 1938). Designed by Robert Josephy. Courtesy of William Rukeyser.

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that set foundations (Rukeyser, “The Education” 219–220). Rukeyser attended Felix Adler’s The Fieldston School of Ethical Cultures—the same Ivy League preparatory school that the Guinzburgs attended earlier—and went to Temple with her mother. Rukeyser relates, “I grew up among a group of Jews who wished, more than anything else I think to be invisible” (“Under” 6). But in Temple, Rukeyser discovered the conflicts she witnessed in New York: “[The Bible’s] clash and poetry and nakedness, its fiery vision of conflict resolved only in God were true to me” (7). She attended Vassar for two years until her father’s company went bankrupt in 1932, at which time she entered the leftist maelstrom. In November 1931, Theodore Dreiser and members of the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners (NCDPP) ventured into eastern Kentucky where miners were conducting strikes. Throughout the 1930s, “Bloody Harlan” became a national symbol for the exploitation of workers and repression of civil liberties. But Rukeyser’s experience of Appalachia and labor went far beyond reading leftist representations—she participated in the same social networks as those writers. After dropping out of Vassar, Rukeyser became literary editor of the Student Review. Her connection with the Student Review—the organ of a Communist-affiliated national student organization—introduced Rukeyser to Appalachia and the South. The review’s contributing editors included Sherwood Anderson, John Dos Passos, Waldo Frank, and Joseph Freeman, the first two of whom were “fellow travelers” and the last two of whom were important Party members. In the second issue of the Student Review, Dos Passos, who edited Harlan Miners Speak: Report on Terrorism in the Kentucky Coal Fields (National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners), published an essay about what he had witnessed when he visited eastern Kentucky with the NCDPP. Dos Passos narrated his visit to a section of Bell County organized by the National Miners Union (NMU; a Communist union), and he wrote about the “disorderly rows” of bedraggled “shacks” with “rotten boards,” among which wandered, and defecated, cows and pigs (5). Against that background of forced poverty, he describes a secret union meeting at a church, where he sees images from Anglo-Saxon Appalachia: These were gaunt faces, the slow elaborations of talk and courtesy, of frontiersman who had voted for Jefferson and Jackson, whose turns of speech were formed on the oratory of Patrick Henry. I never felt the actuality of the American revolution so intensely as sitting in that church, listening to these mountaineers with old time phrases, getting up to their feet and explaining why the time for revolution had come again.

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A week after the Committee left, a Bell County grand jury charged each member with criminal syndicalism. The Committee’s visit, which had had been initiated by the Communists, drew the nation’s attention: that November, eleven stories were published in the New York Times with sixty-two more to follow in 1932 (Draper 389). Harlan Miners Speak, which included testimony of the strikers, set an example for how writers might participate in class struggle. In a New Masses article, “American Writers and Kentucky,” Edwin Seaver explained the significance of this writerly witness: “Our writers have begun to abandon their role of aloofness and disillusion, of cynicism and distain—their historic role of the twenties—and to become active participants instead of amused or bored observers” (9). In early 1932, Waldo Frank, Edmund Wilson, Malcolm Cowley, and nine others took food and relief to the miners in Bell County. After confrontations with authorities, they were chased out, but Frank and a lawyer with International Labor Defense (ILD) were severely beaten (Cowley, The Dream 63–76; Hevener 81–85). Photos of Frank’s bloodstained face appeared around the nation.1 The outpouring of articles deeply influenced students and young writers in New York, such as Rukeyser and her peers. In March, the National Student League, which published the Student Review that Rukeyser would soon join, organized a delegation to investigate the “feudal subjugation imposed upon 15,000 miners and their families” (Wechsler 99). That April two busloads of students from five eastern colleges were met at the state border by two hundred armed men: deputies boarded the buses, jailing those who would not leave (Hevener 85; Wechsler 95–108). This repulsion was widely documented by accompanying reporters. The lead story in May’s Student Review narrates the students’ difficulties in accessing the area and their failed appeals to governors and national representatives. In their attempts to help the miners break the “blood-and-iron rule” of capitalism, the students found the only common cause they could grasp was the fight for democracy and constitutional rights (Hall 9). The National Miners Union dwindled to some five hundred members in Kentucky by summer 1932, so Communists turned to more active and accessible examples. The ILD won the right to represent the Scottsboro Nine, and Rukeyser and another staff member of the Student Review undertook a visit to Scottsboro and Decatur, Alabama, in March 1933. In preparation, Rukeyser had reviewed books about the South, including Sherwood Anderson’s Beyond Desire and John L. Spivak’s Georgia Nigger. She appreciated Anderson’s glimpse into the “restless and unorganized” lives of Georgia mill workers “who are not rich in self contemplation, who are driven desperately to revolt; who are devotees to disaster.” Inversely, the role of the educated outsiders was to explain “the grand scale” and “larger view.” Similarly,

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she admired Spivak’s account of Georgia blacks who were freed from chain gangs only to be placed in “peonage and enforced labor.” Anticipating the construction of her “Book of the Dead,” what she most appreciated was Spivak’s integration of facts and “copies of convicts’ letters and death certificates and . . . pictures of brutalities” to document the conditions for which there were no adequate “penological” studies. When Rukeyser went to Scottsboro, she modeled her visit on activist writers. Rukeyser’s essay “From Scottsboro to Decatur” described her venture “to see that trial” rather than read it in “the newspapers” (12). Rukeyser recounts her assay of the South—the quiet roads and the unresponsive “Negroes” who had been “taught better.” After describing the crowds of journalists around the courthouse and guards with bayonets, the story leaves the tale of the trial and becomes a tale about Rukeyser’s encounter with the Decatur police, who discovered that Rukeyser and her peer were carrying announcements for an interracial student conference about African American students. She recounts their brief incarceration, the charges that were brought against them, and the threatened consequences if they were ever to return. “From Scottsboro to Decatur” became a tale about the stripping of her rights by Southern whites. Between narrating her experiences in essay and writing poems about them, Rukeyser sought out the advice of Horace Gregory, who had helped found and lead New York’s John Reed Club and was a chief mentor for leftist poets who used modernist techniques (Denning 208; Gregory, “One Writer’s” 21). Rukeyser reports having sought Gregory out at Sarah Lawrence College, where he aided her in revising Theory of Flight, which is dedicated both to him and to Marya Zaturenska (his wife). However, Zaturenska’s diary entry on Nov. 9, 1933 relates, Muriel Rukesyer, a 19-year-old girl looking like an Early Picasso, visited us yesterday. She writes poetry and wants Horace to give her advice on it, and she wondered if she ought to return to Vassar and complete her college course, or throw herself into the radical movement. Horace told her to complete her college course first. She seemed disappointed. (169) Rukeyser quickly became Gregory and Zaturenska’s disciple, and in 1934 (via their influence) she attended Yaddo, a writers’ colony where she sketched out ideas for U.S. 1 (Rukeyser, “Notes”). Rukeyser transfigured her experiences in the South into the poem “The Trial” (The Theory, 49–50), which was her last appearance in the Student Review (Jan. 1934). “The Trial” begins by focusing on a “black boy” who quietly “teeters no-handed on a bicycle, whistling the St. Louis Blues” (5, 6)

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down a muddy southern back road in April. The poem then leaps to images of courts and migrant labor. Naming Nat Turner and Dred Scott, Rukeyser continues, “all our celebrated shambles are repeated here: now again / Sacco and Vanzetti walk to a chair” (36–37). In Theory of Flight, “The Trial” appears as the third (and final) part of the sequence “The Lynchings of Jesus.” The section’s first poem, “The Committee-Room” (45), questions the right of writers to undertake such recounting: Our little writers go about, hurrying the towns along, running from mine to luncheon, they can’t afford to let one note escape their holy jottings : today the mother died, festering : he shot himself . . . (50–53; Spacing around colons is Rukeyser’s) Rukeyser continues this catalog of easy outrage by condemning the educational system that limits students’ literary analysis to analyzing abstracted morality. They are reduced to voting on what poverty means to the Piers Plowman or on what anger did for Shelley. Her reply is the impassioned historical analysis of Scottsboro in “The Trial.” The first part of the next sequence, “The Tunnel” (51–52), represents the plight of coal miners, whom Rukeyser knew from visiting coalfields in Pennsylvania and from their representation in the press. In this roughened ballad, the mine has changed the very structure of culture and nature: “black glosses” a white man’s skin who stands, unspeaking, before the “pithead” (6, 7) where Behind his shoulder stands the black mountain of unbought coal, green-topped with grass growing rank in the shag, as if the coal were native earth and the top a green snowing (9–12) The poem proceeds to describe out-of-work miners and a pregnant woman who eats “roasted puppy” (25). At the end, Rukeyser returns to the employed miner who wishes he had found some way out but feels caught in a loop of feeding his own family even though separated from them: “we got infants, and never knew our wives, / year in and out, seeing no color but coal, / we were the living who could not have their lives” (46–48). While Rukeyser avoids stereotyping the culture of mountaineers, her portrayal of the miner also minimizes their culture, reducing their lives to a desperate search for work. Although she would come in second to James Agee in the 1934 Yale Younger Poets Award, Stephen Vincent Benét (the judge) would seek her out in 1935 and asked her to resubmit. She suddenly found herself, at the age of

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twenty-one, a nationally acclaimed poet when she won the prize for Theory of Flight. As Benét explained in the foreword, “Politically, [Miss Rukeyser] is a Left Winger and revolutionary” but “when [she] speaks her politics— and she speaks with sincerity and fire—she does so like a poet, not like a slightly worn phonograph record” (5). This “sincerity and fire” came from a committed balance in Rukeyser’s life as well as from the close coaching of her elder, leftist poets. After Theory of Flight was published, Rukeyser’s association with Gregory and Zaturenska deepened; indeed, Rukeyser’s reception (and her critical fate until the 1960s) was interlocked with theirs. Gregory, who would become the New Masses’s literary editor, published both of the long poems and four other poems later collected in U.S. 1, which was also dedicated to him partially because he had garnered its publication with his own publisher, Covici·Friede. Gregory was not only Rukeyser’s mentor but also her guide. U.S. 1: Process and Architecture Rukeyser’s early thinking about U.S.1 was an idea about class and geographic interrelationship, but its poems were not yet written nor lodged West Virginia, New York City, and Spain. Before her trip to Spain in 1936, Rukeyser traveled from New York to Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, to document the deaths of almost eight hundred miners from silicosis, which they contracted when digging a tunnel through a mountainside to divert the New River for hydroelectric power. Soon thereafter, Rukeyser found herself in Spain reporting on the People’s Olympics in Barcelona when the Spanish Civil War began. That experience catalyzed her vision for the book’s architecture. Rukeyser’s vision of the relationship between American regionalism, national class conflict, and international fascism is demonstrated in the structure of U S. 1. America’s Anglo-Saxon heritage in Appalachia becomes linked to Europe (and the Soviet Union) through the mutual threat of fascism. As laid out in U.S. 1, the world is constructed from interpenetrating and mutually influential sections, at the center of which rest New York City and Rukeyser’s identity (see table 6.1). In the book’s first section, “The Book of the Dead” (7–73), the narrator is an urban outsider who proceeds into rural West Virginia to witness to the near-futile search for reparations by workers who died or were dying from silicosis. The sequence is structured so that readers, who are scripted as American middle-class urbanites, are complicit. “Night-Music” (74–114), the second section, is a lyrical Bildungsroman that demonstrates how middle-class urban dwellers might rise into historical consciousness and become actors capable of

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The Social Life of Poetry Structure of U. S. 1

Section

Genre

Locality

Time

Person

“The Book of the Dead”

Neo-Epic

West Virginia

Retrospective

You/ They

“Night Music”

Lyric

New York City

Contemporary

I

“Two Voyages”

Panegyric Allegory

Europe/Spain

Projective

We

recognizing and changing the structuring forces of history. Therein, Rukeyser represents the difficulties of resisting “corruption of consciousness” within her urban New York home (Life 48). The third section, “Two Voyages” (115–147), provides a course of unhesitating action. Therein, the narrator breaks free of nationality and relates her experience of fighting against fascism in Spain. The book’s narrative demonstrates a decisive evolution of involvement: the narrator moves from retrospective witness (in “The Book of the Dead”) to ideological awakening (in “Night-Music”), to projective participation (in “Two Voyages”). Thus, to either side of the urban reader lies the need for action, whether against the deadly, stultifying force of capitalism and law in the American interior or against fascists’ acts of war in the international arena. Impressed with her ideas, Gregory guided Rukeyser to his publisher Covici·Friede, a house closely associated with leftist intellectuals. Covici decided to take on Rukeyser on the advice of Gregory, whose reader’s report to Covici led Rukeyser into deep revision. To achieve that work, Rukeyser left the pressures of New York City for Los Angeles. Correspondence between Rukeyser and Gregory (and Zaturenska) reveals Rukeyser’s intensive process of composition and revision in light of Gregory’s comments. While in Los Angeles, Rukeyser met with literary figures such as Faulkner and members of the Popular Front to report on the Spanish Civil War. Los Angeles also provided critical refuge from both her own family—with whom she swore she would never again live—and the political intrigues of New York leftist circles. While in Los Angeles, she drew a minimal income and constantly—and successfully—sought publication and advances on royalties from Gregory and Covici. Upon completing a draft of the manuscript that reached her satisfaction, Rukeyser wrote to Gregory, who begged Rukeyser to send him poems for the New Masses: “Your note on the progress of the book of poems is very good news: that book is your important work . . . Do everything you can to protect yourself toward completing it; if work is moving forward in Hollywood, stay

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there until you must come East to finish U.S.1” (June 20, 1937). Gregory saw Rukeyser’s book and poetry in terms of the developing conflict over the direction of poetry and the Popular Front, which was devolving into what Gregory described as “dangerously provincial” embattled groups: figures such as Cowley, “who are reviving dead horses,” led the hope for a “united front”; those associated with the Partisan Review opposed the League of American Writers, which they saw as Stalinist; Granville Hicks and others sought to renew a more purely proletarian writing; and Gregory and his allies sought to put a critical modernist aesthetics in service to leftism. In response, Rukeyser sent along “Mediterranean,” her long poem about the start of the Spanish Civil War that served as the unrepentant climax to U.S. 1. Gregory published in New Masses that September (Sept. 14, 1937: 18–20). Popular-Front Pluralism and Rukeyser’s Ideal Pragmatist Poetics Rukeyser’s relationship to regionalism and race was defined by her perspective as a Jewish New Yorker and a member of the Popular Front that opposed fascism via a version of cultural pluralism. At the center of Rukeyser’s pluralist project rests the American ideal of self-revelation through social engagement. In “Migrations” (1975), Rukeyser wrote about her ancestors’ migrations until her father had become “walled-in” by his business in New York. For Rukeyser, migration was not about leaving (or joining) a culture but about using art and life itself to plunge “deeper, deeper under these dark voyages” (n.p.). Migration meant a continual quest for “our own deep wish” and “forming our own lives.” In taking up the issues of Scottsboro and mining in West Virginia, Rukeyser’s morally and politically motivated encounters with Southern lives were no less than a study of her own: “How did we search for the live men and the dead men, the women alive and dead, and not search for our own stories?” For Rukeyser, people were defined not by their different cultures but by evolving moral relationships. In the 1930s, her phrase for those relationships was “the idea of America.” As assessed by Michael Denning, the Popular Front’s ideological and aesthetic position is rendered in the slogan, “Communism is twentieth-century Americanism” (129). This “pan-ethnic” reclamation of American symbols and ideals drew upon “pride in ethnic heritage and identity” (130). The result was a working-class mythology in the late 1930s that “significantly reshaped the contours of official U.S. nationalism” toward inclusion and equality. As members of ethnicities sought to gain authority via American symbols, a key Popular Front figure for native whites was John Brown (131). Rather than emphasizing the ability of particular regional cultures to resist

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capitalist subjugation, Rukeyser valorized the role of the outside moral crusader. The power of Rukeyser’s pluralist poetics has led critics to analyze the audience of “The Book of the Dead” in terms of the empowered “multiplicities” (such as working-class blacks and women) forecasted by Rukeyser’s poetics (Life 211).2 However, my reading of U.S. 1 shows how Rukeyser scripted it for a specific type of reader. This reader first emerges in “The Book of the Dead” with its revision of regional and proletarian motifs associated with Appalachia, coal, and labor. Constrained by the literary system within which she functioned and the problematic tradition of writerly involvement initiated by Dos Passos’s Harlan Miners Speak, a narrower audience results than what the other critics predict. Still, Rukeyser’s skill in situating the reader as a participant and “witness” leads to fluid moral possibilities. At issue is the relationship between the writer and those whom she represents. Caught in the sweep of Communist ideological explanation, to what degree would Rukeyser value culture—the focus of regionalist writing—in terms beyond class conflict? To what degree does Rukeyser deploy character types, and to what degree does she honor her subjects’ experience by representing full and complex individuals? Such successful renderings were rare given the gaps between writers and the subject matter—gaps of class, locality, culture, religion, and politics. Rukeyser would strive to turn those apparent chasms into a chance for connections. Rukeyser understood poems to be the product of changing relationships. In The Life of Poetry (1949), Rukeyser quotes the pragmatist Charles Peirce, who grounded the construction of meaning within contingent relationships between “a sign, its object, and its interpretant” (qtd in The Life 174). Thus, Rukeyser explains, “The giving and taking of a poem is, then a triadic relation . . . [W]e are always confronted by the poet, the poem, and the audience.” Once they are drawn into a relationship, Rukeyser finds the terms “audience,” “reader,” and “listener” insufficient to describe this dynamic exchange’s authority. Instead she chooses the word “witness” (175). By grounding interpretation in relationship, Rukeyser calls an evolving community. She found that this formulation frustrated her critics who wished, Rukeyser claimed, that words would lie statically on the page even as a piece subjugated the reader to its conventions. Although highly attuned to the material experience of theater (both movies and plays) and the relations among the author, the poem, and the reader, Rukeyser held publishers in suspicion and failed to account for the fact that the connection between author, poem, and poet was mediated by print. Of course, as we have seen, books published by one publisher meant something quite different from those

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published by another, so Rukeyser was fortunate that Covici·Freide’s political and literary proclivities were a close match to Gregory’s and her own. Covici·Freide Binds the Book Paschal Covici and Donald Friede formed their house in 1928. Best known for his close editorial relationship to Steinbeck, Pat Covici (b. 1888) came from Rumania to the United States at the age of twelve. In 1922, he opened a bookstore in Chicago and began publishing literature (Paschall 29–30). Donald Friede was born at the turn of the century and helped finance the firm (Friede’s father had made a fortune as the czar’s agent to Ford Motor Company). Friede either dropped out or was expelled from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, but eventually used $110,000 of his inheritance to buy a position as vice president with the Horace Liveright’s ailing Boni & Liveright (“Donald”). When Covici decided to move to New York, Friede welcomed him because Liveright had just lost control of his firm. The history of Covici·Friede has been defined by the publication of Radclyffe Hall’s best-selling The Well of Loneliness—which was censored because of its portrayal of lesbianism—and of Steinbeck’s early novels. Feeling more fit to the 1920s, Friede’s memoir emphasizes the press’s eclectic nature: its limited editions, its publicity schemes, its involvement with the arts, and its high-profile authors. Yet Covici was deeply involved in publishing leftist authors, the story of which Friede reduces to three pages (119–121). Most presses in the 1930s published left-oriented literature to some extent, but Covici·Friede published books that came to define the proletarian era such as Lewis Corey’s The Decline of American Capitalism (1934) and Crisis of the Middle Class (1935) (Denning 100). Rukeyser was lucky that Robert Josephy, the 1930s’ leading typographer, designed the layout for U.S. 1. Josephy’s goal was to give the reader access to the text through manifesting its content in “simple, clean-cut, and tasteful” typography (Farrell qtd in Josephy 81). Josephy’s social engagements mirrored his design principles, which allowed him to give vital force to his design of U.S. 1. Although publishers often held liberal values, most paid low wages to designers, so in 1935 Josephy helped to establish the CIO affiliated Book and Magazine Guild, which he led for ten years. Josephy understood the deep interconnections among labor power-relations, skill, industry, and product. Thus he was known for how his innovations in design corresponded with his advances in labor and in mechanical production, all of which he sought to put into service of writers and artists (23). But he was frustrated because intellectuals failed to understand how “[t]he commercial and cultural apparatus that promotes and sells their work, that makes their

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names known, helps to establish public belief in their cerebral power” (88). With Rukeyser’s mistrust of the publishing industry and ideal pragmatist poetics, these accusations hold particular relevance. The final page in U.S. 1. holds its colophon: “this first edition of U. S. 1 by muriel rukeyser consists of thirteen hundred copies, designed by robert josephy, set in baskerville type, and printed on warren’s eggshell wove paper by J. J. Little and Ives Company, new york.” These details provided tremendous authentication to those in the contemporary literary field. Josephy’s name alone carried great weight, and attention to the book’s paper, quantity, and typeface lent Rukeyser’s poetry aesthetic credence against accusations of its political nature. Using eleven-point Baskerville with ten-point leading (with a maximum of twenty-seven lines per page), Josephy gave meticulous attention to proper spacing. Reflecting Rukeyser’s use of exact diction and space, Baskerville was considered “the epitome of neo-classicism and eighteenth-century rationalism in type” (Bringhurst 168). Moreover, the eleven-point font is assertive, and the large leading guaranteed that the poems would dominate the page. Further, the right margin is a quarter-inch smaller than in any other poetry book, allowing Rukeyser to indent sections of the poem to show their relationship to other sections (see figure 6.2 p. 178). Josephy provided similar attention to the book’s stark cover that offset Rukeyser’s complex critique of American institutions. The front cover’s blue background is blazoned with a large, white shield (a federal highway sign) that heralds: “U.S. / 1” (see figure 6.1). Rukeyser, it promises, is going to show the reader America. Below her name, the reader is reminded that she is the author of “theory of flight,” and the back cover quotes seven critics, all of whom praised her first book. William Rose Benét’s quote, which is both the largest and the last, reminds the reader of Rukeyser’s age (twenty-one) and goes on, “When you hold this book in your hand you hold a living thing[ . . . ] If the bitterness of our day is here, the hope of it is here also: the new youth that is already rising and shining.” That Covici·Friede reprinted this assurance by the premier mainstream literary editor demonstrates that they anticipated the conflicts in the literary field into which the book was entering. Reading the Readers in U.S. 1 “The Book of the Dead” is a twenty-poem sequence that relates the struggle for restitution from the Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, industrial disaster in which silicosis killed over 800 miners between 1930 and 1936. The tragedy in the central mountains of West Virginia occurred when Union Carbide & Carbon, Co. had contracted to have a tunnel built through 3.75 miles of a mountain in order to divert the New River—a large, fast-flowing

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river—and produce hydroelectric power. In the process, they discovered that they were tunneling through silica, a key component for the electroprocessing of steel, which was conducted at a nearby town. To speed the tunnel (and the mining of the silica), basic precautions such as wet-drill mining and breathing masks were ignored, leading to the deaths of 764 victims according to one conservative estimate (Cherniack 104). News of the tragedy and of the difficulty in securing restitution was first published in New Masses (Jan. 1935). Word quickly spread through the left press, whose publicity led to Senate investigations in 1936; these investigations were covered by mainstream journalists who dismissed the scope of the tragedy. In 1936 Rukeyser traveled from New York to West Virginia with a photographer friend. Through observation, interviews, and reading transcripts of the Senate hearings, Rukeyser set about uncovering what had happened. In many ways, the resulting sequence, “The Book of the Dead,” brings the reader through the same series of uncoverings, witnessings, and revelations. The introductory poem, “The Road” (9–11), firmly addresses a reader who holds a cosmopolitan perspective. The first line lays out exactly to whom Rukeyser pictures this sequence as speaking—an urban “you” who is searching for America: “These are roads to take when you think of your country.” The you is tracking down an America she has heard about from friends and read about in statistics and newspaper stories (3–4). Written in languorous twelve-syllable lines this you—the reader-witness—leaves the “tall central city’s influence” on six-lane highways to drive into the Appalachian mountains, where she finds herself on slim roads that follow rivers up passes into the heart of America, West Virginia. She or he sees what any vacationer would desire: “Pillars and fairway; spa; White Sulphur Springs” (19)—the golf courses and luxuries of the best vacations to which “Gay blank rich faces [wish] to add / history to ballrooms, tradition to the first tee” (20–21). Yet the narrator looks beyond the attractions: The simple mountains, sheer, dark-graded with pine in the sudden weather, wet outbreak of spring, crosscut by snow, wind at the hill’s shoulder. The land is fierce here, steep, braced against snow, rivers and spring.   , Lookout, and swinging the vicious bend, New River Gorge. (22–27) As “The King Coal Hotel” perches on the overlook above the New River Gorge, all seems quiet, but Rukeyser has already planted the seeds of the story: King Coal (1918) was a well-known book by Upton Sinclair narrating a

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1914 mining unionization conflict in Colorado, which was also reported upon by Max Eastman (the editor of the Masses) and John Reed (Duke 19–25). All these authors were models for the proletarian writers of the 1930s. Rukeyser goes further into American history in “West Virginia” (11–12, the next poem in the sequence), which first recounts the state’s history and summons American beliefs about how descendants of colonial ancestors still lived the wilds of the mountains. The poem then relates how “the military telegraph” of the Union’s headquarters was strung over the “gash of the gorge and height of pine” (31, 33). The “two hundred battles fought during four years” in West Virginia during the Civil War are framed by Rukeyser as a response to John Brown, whose “RAID AT HARPERS FERRY” in the West Virginia lowlands to the northeast was announced with a historical marker (30, 26). Rukeyser begins to move beyond the well-established labor conflict in the coal-mining industry to hint at the interlocking depths of oppression, wealth, and the struggle for freedom. This “scene of power” (38) introduces the next poem, “Statement: Phillipa Allen” (13–15), which outlines the tragedy at Gauley Bridge. As the first speaker in the sequence, Allen’s statement is taken before an official body (although just who is asking the questions is not clear at this point).3 The poem’s mode of question and response recalls the model of recorded testimony in Harlan Miners Speak. The great difference is that Allen is an outsider who first discovered the silicosis “During the summer of 1934, when I was doing social work / down there” (4–5). With a voice of authority, Allen presents the facts of the case and outlines the danger involved and the lack of safety precautions. In this poem, Rukeyser inverts her contemporary readers’ associations with Appalachia, for now, rather than the weight of ink-black coal, the white dust of silica kills the miner. Furthermore, rather than the gun battles and ambushes that had become famous in “Bloody Harlan,” the people in West Virginia are “delightfully obliging.” Unlike the determined miners of earlier union battles, Allen speaks parenthetically about the tunnel workers: “(All were bewildered. Again at Vanetta they are asking, / ‘What can be done about this?’)” (63–64). These are people who need to be shown the way, and Allen has come to help. Like Harlan Miners Speak, which begins with ninety pages of essays by outside authors before the miners are allowed “testimony,” Rukeyser uses the voice of an outsider to provide an overview. Rukeyser’s non-Appalachian readers are eased into the facts of the situation by someone whose voice they can trust in a situation they can recognize. But Rukeyser’s foregrounding of Allen’s voice and characterization of the people as “delightful” and “bewildered” (62, 63) creates a problematic relationship to those figures, who are clearly not conceived of as the sequence’s

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readers. The appeal to the reader is to defend the defenseless—a powerful technique but one contingent upon tunnel workers who are victims rather than actors. The sequence’s third poem takes the reader into the memories of an ex-tunnel worker who walks through town. Written from a limited omniscient third-person point of view, “The Face of the Dam: Vivian Jones” (18–19) slowly narrates the story from the perspective of a white man who drove the “locomotive” in the silica tunnel. As he shuffles through the valley town on an hour walk along the river, he sees the missing history: There, where the men crawl, landscaping the grounds at the power-plant, he saw the blasts explode the mouth of the tunnel that opened wider when precious in the rock the white glass showed. (5–8) The narrator renders the interior thoughts of Jones as lyric description, combining memory and exterior phenomena. The reader-witness is inducted into the workers’ perspective through Rukeyser’s decision to trace Jones’ reminisces in the form of descriptive ballads, drawing upon associations with Appalachia. Paradoxically, these ballads silence Jones’ voice, perhaps because Rukeyser did not feel confident representing his Appalachian dialect—unlike her work with Robinson’s African American voice (see later)—or perhaps because she felt such a voice could not sustain the reader’s expectations about lyric poetry. Jones, who again mixes past and present in his sight, continues, The old plantation-house (burned to the mud) is a hill-acre of ground. The Negro woman throws gay arches of water out from the front door. It runs down, wild as grass, falls and flows. (9–12) Against the burned plantation-house, Jones recalls the coming of migrant workers “riding freights,” most of whom are gone now that “the snow clears and the dam stands in the gay weather, / O proud, O white, O water rolling down” (33–34). Images of the once-unquestioned white power of the “plantation-house” over the “Negro woman” are now transferred to the dam, which diverts the river (and the workers) into the tunnel. Rukeyser’s clearest statement of cross-regional, cross-racial, cross-class community comes in the sequence’s sixth poem, “Praise of the Committee” (20–22). George Robinson is the “leader and voice” of the Committee that has formed “To fight the companies to make somehow a future” [sic] (30,

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66; space is included in Rukeyser’s poem). Under his guidance are “four other Negroes,” Mrs. Jones (a native mountaineer, mother of three dead miners), Mrs. Leek (cook for the bus cafeteria), Blankenship (a white married man), Peyton (an engineer), and Juanita (a waitress). A line in italics announces: “The Committee is a true reflection of the will of the people” (20). The poem narrates their work in seeking support for compensation and the likelihood that they will be “cut off [from] relief” for being active members (49). Indeed, the poem’s antagonists are the very procedures of seeking restitution rather than the people who block it: the local sheriff and company “Spies” only briefly appear three pages into the poem (58–63). The fight is not about overcoming local oppression but about gaining public support through the media and senate hearings. The poem ends by confronting the reader with the stare of a victim of silicosis: In this man’s face family leans out from two worlds of graves— here is a room of eyes, a single force looks out, reading our life. (85–88) The interrogative force of the dying man questions the readers’ hermeneutic authority by “reading” (hence interpreting) “our life,” which cannot apprehend its own mechanisms of discursive composition (i.e., meaning). A sequence of questions erupts in the next two stanzas and exports the local alarm to the nation: “Whose feet go running in these rigid hills / . . . warning the night [?] / . . . / Who runs through electric wires?” (89, 90, 93). The questions demand that the reader-witness listen and see into the lives of those on the committee. Here, Rukeyser’s narrator speaks for the interconnection of broad struggle. And four of the next five poems are dramatic monologues by committee members. In “Mearle Blankenship” (24–26) three narrative voices mix, and his are the first halting words spoke by a victim of silicosis. The authorial narrator begins with a description that later casts Blankenship as consummate with the earth: He stood against the rock facing the river grey river grey face the rock mottled behind him like X-ray plate enlarged diffuse and stony his face against the stone. (30–36)

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Blankenship gives halting verbal testimony to his “choking” in the night (8) and explains that he is writing a letter to a newspaper. The difference between spoken and written voice is an important distinction: one is choking and is heard only in the night by his wife, while the other hopes to reach out to readers around the nation. The letter explains—in simple language and anaphoric repetition—Blankenship’s history with the tunnel and how the lawyers cheated him. The letter (and the poem) ends: I am a Married Man and have a family. God knows if they can do anything for me it will be appreciated if you can do anything for me let me know soon (45–49) This letter humbly appeals to the outside world for aid by a thwarted but kindly individual, who—although he has outlived others and is “expecting to lose my life”—calmly reports the calamity (40). Rukeyser’s presentation of Blankenship reinforces Allen’s earlier description of the natives of West Virginia as “bewildered.” This impression is countered in the next poem that Mrs. Jones, who has acted on her own terms, narrates. “Absalom” (27–30) begins with Mrs. Jones recalling her involvement: “I first discovered what was killing these men” (1) (figure 6.2). The poem grounds her family as natives to the region when she recounts that her husband and three sons “used to work in a coal mine, not steady work” (4). When drinking mountain “home brew” with the “Co. foreman,” they were persuaded to work for higher pay in “the tunnel” where her three sons contracted silicosis and died (6, 12). Mrs. Jones tells about her search to verify that her sons’ sickness resulted from silicosis and how she initiated the series of suits against Union Carbide. But more important for her was her motherly quest to replace her son’s lost voices. Speaking of her youngest, Jones concludes, “I shall give a mouth to my son” (80). Indeed, only through Mrs. Jones does her son speak his dying wish: he lay and said, “Mother, when I die, “I want you to have them open me up and “see if that dust killed me. “Try to get compensation (41–44) The poem then breaks into a lyrical over-voice that manifests the spirit of their transaction in terms of the Egyptian Book of the Dead:

Figure 6.2 Page 27, “Absalom,” U.S. 1 (Covici·Friede, 1938). Designed by Robert Josephy. Courtesy of William Rukeyser.

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I have gained mastery over my heart I have gained mastery over my two hands I have gained mastery over the waters I have gained mastery over the river. (40–51) The italicized “I” joins mother and son together within a metaphor that resonates with the cause of death and the Book of the Dead. After this mystical interlude, Mrs. Jones continues to recount the difficulties of the company’s response to the lawsuit, of hiking eighteen miles to get relief, and of the eventual death of her other sons. Recourse to working in the tunnel by area natives was called for because coal production in West Virginia fell by 40 percent from 1929 to 1933, and unionization was low (Eller 164, 167). However, of 4,887 workers that Union Carbide identified as having worked in the tunnel, 3,197 were black migrant workers, and of the whites who worked the tunnel, only half— 845—were not migrants (Cherniack 119). By relating the experience of local whites, Rukeyser calls upon the reader-witnesses’ associations with coal and the mountains. Moreover, mountain women were seen as in touch with the spiritual world. Although Christian, mountain spirituality was thought to be deeply connected to the locality, which made Rukeyser’s use of The Book of the Dead a powerful stand-in for Mrs. Jones’ self-understanding. Mrs. Jones’ struggle to give voice to her son also represents Rukeyser’s struggle to give voice to the situation; indeed, of all the speakers in the sequence, Mrs. Jones’ perspective is closest to Rukeyser’s own. The permeability between voices is pivotal: the son’s voice is only spoken via the mother. The mother’s narration in the monologue, however, is broken by an associated spirit-narrator who speaks in italics from The Book of the Dead. Moreover, in writing about a mother named Jones who was fighting for miners, Rukeyser raises the ghost of Mother Jones, who had just died in 1930 and who had long campaigned for miners. Those four levels of intimate and struggling voices—a mother, a son, spirits, and history— form the lattice through which the poet gains authentication to also stand in line to “give a mouth” to the losses at Gauley Bridge. The mother’s work to document the disease is taken over by a doctor in the next poem, “The Disease” (31–32), in which Rukeyser reports his exact, medical testimony before the senatorial subcommittee. Given the switch from the mother-son-spirit, Rukeyser gains credence from her reader-witnesses who granted authority to physicians. Holding up an X-ray, the unnamed speaker explains: “Between the ribs. These are the collar bones. / Now, this lung’s mottled, beginning, in these areas. / You’d say a snowstorm had struck the fellow’s lungs” (10–12). The poem conducts a careful review of

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the disease, and the voice of a white professional is powerfully juxtaposed to the next poem that is spoken by a black migrant tunnel worker. As the sequence progresses, the poems illustrate how social systems in the 1930s structured social relations. Rukeyser discusses who held authority, how they had attained it, and what they did with it. She does what the social order strives to avoid: she reveals the connections among seemingly isolated actors. Thus the normally authoritative image of the white doctor amplifies the next dramatic monologue called “George Robinson: Blues” (33–34). Written in an approximation of the blues, the poem starts slow, rises in anger, and ends in understatement. The first stanza recounts the image from the fourth poem of the sequence (“Gauley Bridge”) where a “Negro” stands quietly on the street corner, but Robinson draws the reader behind the scenes: Gauley Bridge is a good town for Negroes, they let us stand around, they let us stand around on the sidewalks if we’re black or brown. Vanetta’s over the trestle, and that’s our town. The hill makes breathing slow, slow breathing after you row the river, and the graveyard’s on the hill, cold in the springtime blow, the graveyard’s up on high, and the town is down below. Did you ever bury thirty-five men in a place in back of your house, thirty-five tunnel workers the doctors didn’t attend, died in the tunnel camps, under rocks, everywhere, world without end. (1–13) Through Rukeyser’s approximation of the blues, one can hear the heaving of the miners’ lungs in these elongated lines and the airy rhymes in the second stanza. The voice associated with black orators erupts two stanzas later, and shortened lines punctuate his voice’s rise and drop: I’ve put them DOWN from the tunnel camps to the graveyard on the hill, tin-cans all about—it fixed them!— (18–21) Robinson then drops into a melancholic consideration of the seemingly irresistible circumstance when the miners hurry to follow the boss through the

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white cloud back into the “falling rocks and muck” (30). He relates how their drinking water “had dust in it” (31) and the dust covered the entire “camps and their groves” (32): As dark as I am, when I came out at morning after the tunnel at night, with a white man, nobody could have told which man was white. The dust had covered us both, and the dust was white. (38–42) The popular image most readers held of mines was of a man rolling out of the mineshaft with his (white) face covered in (black) coal dust. But in the last stanza, Robinson, a black man, now covered with silica, wears a deadly whiteness in the Appalachian mountains, that region that the era thought exemplified Anglo-Saxon culture (even though in 1931 black miners— mostly from the South—represented 22 percent of all miners in the state, with immigrants constituting another 17 percent [Laing 417]). Through a modulation of speakers—the outsider Allen, the choking Blankenship, the mother Mrs. Jones, the exact doctor, the unexpected Robinson—Rukeyser maps her readers’ associations with authority and Appalachia to bring them inside the story. The relationship between poet and speakers in the poem is critical. The poet is a young, middle-class, white Jewish woman from New York in 1938 writing blues in the voice of an African American miner. Do we call this act an appropriation? Or is it a witnessing? Most of those who died in the mines were migrant African American workers from the South who had been imported to do the work that few of the whites (or blacks) in the mountains would do. In the end, Rukeyser honors the circumstances of the black miners, if not an individual’s voice as some critics believe. Robinson’s voice is one of a dozen in the poem and has a central power. Rukeyser’s induction of the reader-witness through the sequence of speakers in the proceeding poems allows Robinson to be heard. If Robinson functions as a “type” (a black man reciting the blues), he serves a similar role to Mrs. Jones and other speakers who each reflect upon a differing aspect of the story. The next two dramatic pieces (the monologue “Juanita Tinsley,” the waitress, and an ensemble of voices in “The Doctors”) reinforce the circumstances. A critical switch, however, occurs in “The Cornfield” (42–44). The narrator relates how H. C. White—who runs the town’s Funeral Services— buries “Negroes” in his family’s cornfield “five at a time, / pine boxes” for “$55 / a head” (30–32). The poem describes farms with “cornfield, white and wired by thorns, / old cornstalks, now, the planted home” (49–50),

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but in a farther field “mounds” rise with “wooden takes, charred at the tip” (54, 52). Rukeyser then widens the scene with a biblical metaphor: “Abel America, calling from under the corn, / Earth, uncover my blood!” (56–57). If the black miners are Abel, the narrator asks if Cain is Andrew “Mellon’s ghost” who prowls the “furrows of corn, still sowing” (62, 63). While the reader might be angry at White for burying blacks and angry at American industrial capitalists, Rukeyser suddenly turns the tables: Voyage. Think of your gardens. But here is corn to keep. Marked pointed sticks to name the crop beneath. Sowing is over, harvest is coming ripe. (65–68) The narrator uses a single word (“Voyage”) to command reader-witnesses to imagine their involvement. By demanding introspection, Rukeyser ties the capitalist “harvest” with the reader’s and everyone else who partakes of the “crop.” Rukeyser makes a gesture toward America’s long plunder of the mountains—that garden of America’s raw resources whose fields have been richly fertilized with the “blood” of America’s Abels. But Rukeyser does not ask her readers to turn off their electricity. After a sequence of poems that demonstrate the macabre synthesis of human love, the organic world, and silica mounds that “blow” like a “disintegrating angel” (“Alloy” p. 47, ll. 25, 27), Rukeyser creates an analogy between the power of workers and electricity. In “The Dam” (54–58), Rukeyser appreciates hydroelectrics because “All power is saved, having no end” (see ll. 1–63). In such sophisticated, scientifically informed poetry (including equations), Rukeyser condemns only those who exploit power and whose “stocks went up” when they blasted the tunnel and “wrote their own graphs upon / roadbed and lifeline” (67, 70–71). But the poem concludes with a hopeful meditation upon the nature of power: Nothing is lost, even among the wars, imperfect flow, confusion of force. It [power/workers] will rise. These are the phases of its face. It knows its seasons, the waiting, the sudden. It changes. It does not die. (105–109) Rukeyser then begins to range from the consideration of the workers in order to address issues of social transformation. The next poem, “The Disease: After-Effects” (59–61), shows Gauley Bridge from the perspective of “a Congressman” who barely notices “A bill to prevent industrial silicosis”

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at the end of a list of abuses and bills, including munitions embargos against Germany and Italy for their support of Franco in Spain (15). Therein, the reader is removed from the fate of the workers at Gauley Bridge and is given a national (and international perspective): “500,000 Americans have silicosis now. / These are the proportions of a war” (37–38). However, just as the American government refused to become directly involved with Spain, so the silicosis bill is “blocked; investigation blocked” (60). Beyond the empty tiers above the legislative gallery, the poem ends with “a million [who] look from work, / five hundred thousand stand” (65–66). But the weight of 1.5 million absent workers is hardly enough to sway the legislative process. The process of gaining reparations is shown to be hollow in the sequence’s penultimate poem, “The Bill” (62–65). The poem relays the subcommittee’s grim findings but ends by admitting that nothing can be done by the subcommittee except to call for more investigation. In an empty offering of hope, a Senate subcommittee notes that the deaths of workers at Gauley Bridge may not have been “in vain” if new legislation is passed. Against such empty gestures, the poem ends forecasting the resurrection of righteous insurrection: The origin of storms is not in clouds, our lightning strikes when the earth rises, spillways free authentic power: dead John Brown’s body walking from a tunnel to break the armored and concluded mind. (72–79) If justice cannot be claimed for the dying miners by their appeal to the American system, Rukeyser implies that it is time for those who feel moral outrage to act. In Rukeyser’s analogy, just as the nation was in denial about the dehumanizing violence of slavery upon which the economy depended, so America in the 1930s was standing in denial of the consequences of industrial exploitation. Just as John Brown acted, so too Rukeyser hopes her poem will “break the armored and concluded mind” of her reader-witnesses, if they dare to follow the roads into their “own country.” “These roads will take you into your own country,” begins the first line of the final poem called “The Book of the Dead” (66–72). The poem addresses a “you” (middle-class intellectuals) about a “they” (the working class). Rukeyser is careful not to use any class terminology, but the constituency of the you is named at the start of the fifth page: “surveyors and planners,” poets, and “men of fact” (82–90). The address you is used six times in eight lines, and Rukeyser recognizes them as literal social workers, or better, engineers—“you workers and hope of countries, first among

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powers” (83). The difference between the you and the they is initiated in the poem’s third stanza, where the narrator asks the reader three riddles and provides the answers: What one word must never be said? Dead, and these men fight off our dying, cough in the theatres of the war. What two things shall never be seen? They : what we did. Enemy : what we mean. This is a nation’s scene and halfway house. What three things can never be done? Forget. Keep silent. Stand alone. The hills of glass, the fatal brilliant plain. (7–15) “These men” are the workers whose labor provides a high standard of living to the you in the culture. When the answer to the first question—“What one word must never be said?”—is “Dead,” Rukeyser asks the reader to admit the consequences of their way of life upon millions of the working class. She confronts the repressed conflicts of the social order in the next stanza by claiming that “we” are the “Enemy” who has wrought a quiet havoc upon the “They” who “cough in the theatres of war”—or in the theaters of industrial production. The next fourteen stanzas (ll. 16–57) admire how “they took the land” during the settling of America and “planted home-land that we know” (25, 35). The review of America’s settling then shoots through four hundred years of history, and within that “sum of frontiers” are the “unmade boundaries of acts and poems” that are confronted with the “fact” of the “disease” of industrial exploitation that stands “between the seas” (58–60). Rukeyser hopes that “we” will be roused by “friends in the old world [Spain]” whose signal for “intercession” falls like a “Blow . . . full in the face” (77–78). Or, if that jolt does not induce action, America’s intellectuals— poets and “men of fact”—might “measure our times again” and thus witness the potential of the working class: “These are our strength, who strike against history” (91). “These” people are the miners “carrying light . . . on their foreheads / . . . drilling their death” (94, 96); they are chemical workers who, “touching radium,” “glow in their graves” (97, 99); they are weavers and steelworkers who “stand at wheels until their brains corrode” (101); they are farm workers who “starve” (102); they are “known as strikers, soldiers, pioneers” (106). With the valued Other (the working class) identified, Rukeyser renews her call for reader witnesses to “widen the lens” and see beyond their “myths

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of identity” (109, 110). Leaving behind location in a particular place, she calls for “new processes” that would allow readers to transcend the “fanatic cruel legend at our back” (118, 130). In a metaphor of continued expansion, she calls for growth beyond class and geographical identity: speeding ahead the red and open west, and this our region, desire, field, beginning. Name and road, communication to these many men, as epilogue, seeds of unending love. (131–135) In this transcendence of region, inspired by the moral daemon of John Brown, these intellectual angels of “desire” would recognize the common humanity of people from every region and struggle to communicate and nurture everyone’s “beginning.” Yet even though Rukeyser hoped her poem might offer a mechanism to transcend the boundaries of class, region, and race, those distinctions held firm. In many ways, Rukeyser seems to have removed herself from the critiques of interference and self-aggrandizement that later scholars of Appalachia—such as Richard Hevener and David Duke—claim against Dreiser. But they also point out that such national attention was part of the process through which the La Follette Civil Liberties Committee (a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Labor and Education) coordinated its efforts with the CIO and the Department of Justice to prosecute sixtyeight coal operators in Harlan in 1937 (Hevener 128–129). This federal attention led to the State of Kentucky to dispatch state troopers to protect United Mine Workers organizers in April 1937, and outlaw private deputies in 1938 (141, 142). Kentucky was the last state to do so. With belated concerns for the mostly migrant black workers, national attention to Gauley Bridge had little effect (Cherniack 87–90). And Rukeyser functioned as a low-profile, almost retrospective participant (U.S. 1 was published years after the final decisions about the Gauley Bridge workers had been made and two years after the subcommittee had been disbanded). Is Rukeyser to be critiqued or praised for this removal? Rukeyser presents all her actors with calm compassion, generally avoids Appalachian stereotypes, and only writes negatively of the funeral director, the tunnel’s designer, and of capitalists (in the abstract). More to the point, the cosmopolitan reader is carefully inducted, given empathetic connection to those seeking restitution, and then has their own values and implicit involvement confronted. In doing so, Rukeyser makes the “Book

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of the Dead” be much more about herself and her reader (who shares her identity as a highly literate, urban outsider). Indeed, Rukeyser emphasizes the victims’ need of help from outsiders, and while poem generally featured a single character, personal focus is minimized to demonstrate the national politics at play. As with the case of Dreiser, Waldo Frank, and the students who visited, the case becomes the failure of the federal system to account for basic rights. To the extent that Rukeyser focuses on the victims rather than her own loss of rights, she has learned a valuable lesson from those earlier Harlan County adventurers. But the sequence is framed and addressed to a you that includes Rukeyser and her reader-witnesses. In this sense, the poem is honest about its audience and its purposes. It was not written for the working class but to help leftist intellectuals to consider their role in their world. To say so recognizes the poem’s construction and forecasts its social life. “The Book of the Dead,” which focuses so sharply on relations between region and class, has become the most well known part of U.S. 1, even to the exclusion of the other sections. However, Rukeyser moved closer to her contemporary readers’ own region and class issues in the book’s next section. “Night-Music” consists of twenty-one poems (including two short sequences) and acts almost as a book unto itself. The poems can be generally characterized as intimate lyrics, and the narrator is closely associated with Rukeyser—a young person, coming to political awareness within the boundaries of an urban center and the strictures of the middle class. These poems are about Rukeyser’s struggle with her habitus, and each poem acts as a piece of Marxist Bildungsroman: a cycle of becoming conscious of history and diagnosis of those social forces that suppress such difficult awakening. Much more classically poetic than the sequence before, these poems use highly compact language in tense, at times disjunctive, arrangement to illuminate, in striking fashion, how personal struggles interface with the social world. Within the lair of the poems, the poet shares her own struggles and dilemmas about maintaining moral clarity in relation to the power of American culture. I focus on the four-poem sequence “Night-Music” (96–104), which is dedicated to Mayra Zaturenska and was first published by Horace Gregory as the final section in his “Social Poetry Number” in Poetry (1936). Each part of the sequence narrates an encounter with a different set of temptations to mollify narrator’s awareness. In the first part, “Time Exposures,” the poem’s narrator is driving home from work through the suburbs, but even as she speeds toward escape in the countryside’s “black basin always spilling stars,” she is haunted by “factories” that “bellow mutilation” (39). The narrator tries to find relief, and “Goes into the street, / adventures everywhere . . .” (43–44). But the world’s suffering cannot be lost through

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the lipstick that the narrator is “jotting” on in order to “sexualize her thistle thought” (55–56). Yet only through “fornicating” does the narrator manage to sleep like “children sleep” (58, 59). The second part “The Child Asleep” moves back and forth between a child who imagines a nameless night and a parent who disciplines that imagination. As the poem progresses, the child learns to ignore the “Immortal,” the sea, and “dirty children” (72, 76). The parents scold, Quiet, music is playing! Never move your face. Wear a mask if your face moves with your love or anger moving. God first, then us. Friday candles. Never discuss. (77–80) In staccato half-lines, parental and religious commands stifle emotion. The next stanza relates the narrator’s first realization of her father’s wealth juxtaposed against the “[f]irst strikers seen” (88). By the section’s end, even quietly reading, lying still in a bath, weeping alone at night, or “at last sleeping” all seem forbidden. The next part “Adventures, Midnight” recounts three further attempts to find solace. In the first, the narrator encounters a beggar for whom minor financial aid is not enough: “The wasted pity. Thieving charity” (116). The narrator’s empathy for the suffering leads to being confounded. The second encounter tells the story of the narrator’s travel to a park in the middle of the night with two friends. Their “comfortless” attempts to find sexual fulfillment in each other exclude the narrator, who feels grief and anger at “this crying, frantic at removal, the dark, the sor- / rowful danger” (127, 135–136). The third escapade, which describes watching boaters enjoying the waterfront, proves just as empty. The narrator’s heart is “smothering” when she observes the cruise passengers’ fear at getting their “feet wet in a drowning world” (155, 151). In response to first three parts of “Night-Music,” each of which leaves the narrator more dyspeptic, comes the final section titled “Night-Music.” Therein, after a dinner and a movie, the narrator finds herself caught in “demonstrations / sweeping the avenues” (158–159). After the demonstrators confront police and the march is broken up, the demonstrators retreat “down / night-streets to unique rooms” where “strike-song are sung and old songs remain” (169–170, 171). This unity with those who confront the circumstance faced by laborers during the day causes the narrator to embrace a “Changeable spirit” that can “build a newer music” by recognizing the “scenes of horror, among / children awake, lands ruined, begging men” (178–179). Anger at the “torment,” “fear,” and “cruelty” allows the narrator to seek redress and sleep only after articulating a creative dictum: “Make

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music out of night will change the night” (180–184). The music is made from confronting ideology, recognizing suffering, and taking action with others to change circumstances. U S. 1’s third section, “Two Voyages,” consists of two long poems, each of which addresses issues of American’s interconnection with European nationals, facing fascism in Italy, Germany, and Spain. The first poem, “The Cruise” (117–134), first published by Gregory in New Letters in America, serves as a sociological allegory for America’s international relations. Crew members and passengers represent segments of the American social order, much as figures in English morality plays represented aspects of religious travail and hope. The ship is a leisure ocean liner with “dancing and games” and “polo ponies in the hold” (15, 16). Around these passengers are arrayed the resources—human and mechanical—of the ship: the corresponding allegory is that the nation’s resources are arrayed around the play and comfort of the wealthy. The poem’s narrative demonstrates the key role the poet plays in reconciling the ship (the state) to reality. By line fifty, the ship finds that it cannot land at its destination due to a mysterious war that has erupted, and there are rumors of disturbances back home as well. While all ships are ordered to “make for port” (p. 120, l. 76), the captain finds the port under attack and decides to keep the passengers amused, and he heads to the south for “languid warless lands” (p. 121, l. 111). However, no safe harbor is found—battles are raging or towns are quarantined due to plagues. Slowly, both the ship’s passengers and her crew grow uneasy as the ship’s stores are being consumed. The metaphors in this contemporary social-morality play are obvious and reinforce the poem’s argument. The representations are clear: the union man stands for the Popular Front; the blonde equals the middle class; the captain represents the government that takes orders from the capitalists represented by the financier; and the sailor is the workingman who supports the others’ needs and whose support the others need (p. 125, ll. 186–201). As the poem continues, the ship’s population grows more desperate in their isolation and lack of resources. Babies who are born during the voyage die, and passengers grow ill. In Rukeyser’s vision, those who can communicate with others outside their own circumstance (and social order) prove the leaders. Thus, the poet “stands with his face into the vocal night” and translates the ringing he hears coming from the Spanish shore where “bells invite, strong, with their Latin chiming” (p. 129, l. 288). From the poet’s translation of the night’s music, the sailor and blonde understand that vital commonalities are shared with others, but they are unsure what is being communicated. What the poet hears—“vox ego sum vitae; voco vos”—he translates to reveal the empty life of the ship: “our age broken like stone, all grace run out of grasp, / perfected

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music I could never reach” (p. 130, ll. 308, 315–316). In response he strides the “length of the deck, rising up tall” toward the bells and dives overboard, becoming lost in sea foam (p. 131, ll. 318–319). This act catalyzes the ship’s social order’s dissolution, and over the next four pages the union man, barmaid, and radio operator seek the shore, leaving the rest to “slaughter polo ponies for meat” and divvy up the remaining supplies (p. 132, l. 347). In his log the captain records the “faltering engines” and despair as the ship drifts “through continual waste of waters” until all aboard either abandon ship or float, mad, on board (p. 133, l. 364, 371). America’s ship of state, Rukeyser entails, is no longer a place of refuge. But neither is there refuge in the war-torn and plagued lands. Instead, those who can communicate with each other beyond their own social orders discover “obtainable things” that can change the world. The poet’s role is to undertake translation across the debilitating ideological boundaries of the everyday world. “The Cruise” served as Rukeyser’s setup for “Mediterranean” (135–145), a six-part poem that gives her personal testimony about the violent outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and her prediction that “hypocrite sovereignties go down / before this war we must win” (p. 144, 1. 208–209; emphasis in the original). The events narrated occurred in July 1936. Rukeyser had come to Barcelona to cover the People’s Olympics, and her experience with Republicans and foreigners against Franco’s forces there revealed that opposition to the Olympics in Berlin was indeed a matter of life and death. “Mediterranean” was one of myriad poems written by and translated by Americans about the Spanish Civil War, and its particular place as the finale to U.S. 1 casts the earlier poems in a global perspective. Unlike her retrospective reconstruction of others’ fates in “The Book of the Dead,” Rukeyser was a participant witness in Spain. Concluding the book with her personal confrontation with violence and fascism posits the regional conflict in Appalachia as proof of America’s looming internal confrontation with such forces. While it is a poem of memory that represents the violence of war, “Mediterranean” is a summoning prediction that authenticates the role of the poet in the social order. The poem begins with Rukeyser’s personal memories of violence, and part one concludes by recounting the necessary withdrawal of foreign nationals who could not fight or tend the wounded. Part two seeks to answer a question asked by a French printer on the escaping boat: “In Paris there is time, / but where its place now; where is poetry?” (p. 138, ll. 74–75). Rukeyser scans through Western history, searching for correlations, in other times of “madness and persecution” (p. 139, l. 85) from the Minoans to Franco’s contemporary troops who mutter, “ ‘Do not burn the church / . . . it brings tourists’ ” (82, 84). She then answers: “Whenever we

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think of these, the poem is, / that week, the beginning, exile / remembered in continual poetry” (89–91). The poet’s work is to document resistance to dissolution. With this declaration, the poem turns from the singular “I” into the plural “we.” This stage of unified resistance is key for Rukeyser, but the we here is not the plural we of America. In part three, she instead speaks to the we being evacuated on the ship—those who have adventured beyond their strictures to witness what seems their coming fate. If we had not seen fighting, if we had not looked there the plane flew low the plastic ripped by shots the peasant’s house if we had stayed in our world between the table and the desk between the town and the suburb slowly disintegration male and female If we had lived in our city sixty years might not prove the power this week the overthrown past (p. 140–141, ll. 126–139) These lines resonate with ideological freedom discovered in the book’s middle section. For Rukeyser the solution to “corruption of consciousness” is to situate oneself in the world by leaving one’s place—both by taking the roads that lead into one’s own place and by breaking out of borders. With this sense of interconnection, parts four and five of “Mediterranean” relate an almost scenic description of her ship’s voyage to France. Part five ends with a burning Yeatsian meditation when the narrator notices, “Deep in the water Spanish shadows turn” (p. 143, l. 189): Once the fanatic image shown, enemy to enemy, past and historic peace wear thin; we see Europe break like stone (p. 144, ll. 204–207; emphasis in the original) If the national past is broken, people find their new definitions in response to international crisis. Part six describes how the labor to be conducted

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unifies. In Spain, the German athlete Otto, who is tenderly described throughout the poem, must now fight like “No highlight hero” (216). In Europe and America, Rukeyser and others must spread the news and gather resources because “we believe, we remember, we saw” (235). Modeling action on her own panegyric, Rukeyser went on to organize support and kept up correspondence with Otto (until he was killed) and her fellow poet and friend Edwin Rolfe. However, reviewers did not find themselves so inspired. U.S. 1’s Social Life Did U.S. 1 affect American’s understandings of pluralism and Appalachia? Until recent scholarly attention, the book did not have a palpable effect upon more than a few people; indeed U.S. 1 sold fewer than 544 copies in its first year (“Agreement”). Yet the book’s architecture shows Rukeyser’s desire to affect readers: “The Book of the Dead” draws upon accumulated associations between labor and Appalachia within regionalism and proletarian writing; “Night-Music” orients its reader-witnesses to a familiar world in urban New York; and “Two Voyages” confronts the readers with their role in fighting international fascism. Yet most reviewers dismissed “The Book of the Dead” as journalistic, “Night-Music” as elitist, and “Two Voyages” as dated. Each of the twelve reviews primarily discussed “The Book of the Dead.” Reviewers were split, with half seeing the sequence as banally journalistic and unorganized (see Walton in the New York Times, Zabel in the Southern Review, and Mass in Poetry). Reviewers on the other side of the split, such as William Carlos Williams in the New Republic, valued Rukeyser’s “documentary sense” and “moral indignation” (141). Yet even Williams called the sequence “very uneven,” with some poems being nothing more than “a piling up of words.” In the end, reviewers’ reproach or praise depended upon the venue for which they were writing. As a whole, opinions were inverted about the lyrics in “Night-Music.” In the Southern Review, Morton Zabel panned the “Book of the Dead” but admired “Night-Music” for its “lyric realism” and “pathetic force,” calling Rukeyser one of the “best social realists.” Similarly, the reviewers who found “The Book of the Dead” successful had little or nothing to say about “Night-Music”: Williams praised its “compactness,” and Untermeyer described the poems as “tart yet tender.” At conflict were the rising ethos of New Critical and confessionalist modes against socially oriented critics. In the New York Times, “Night-Music” was found to fuse “personal emotion and its social cause” (Walton, “Review of U.S. 1”). These poems were valued by the more academic and New Critical reviewers because

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they were the most difficult. Rukeyser’s accessibility was at issue; she was deeply engaged in social critique, yet her poems seemed inaccessible. When “Two Voyages” was mentioned at all, reviewers spent a sentence either acknowledging or dismissing them. William Rose Benét explained why most were silent: “ ‘Mediterranean,’ which ends the book and throws sidelights on the Spanish Civil War, is less successful. We have learned so much since she wrote it, and so many heroic things have happened, that the Barcelona she then left seems to have existed in another world” (“Four American Poets”). In short, Rukeyser’s poem was seen as a worn occasional piece, engaged as it was in summoning support at the start of an war that carried continuing, difficult importance and to which hundreds of Americans had already sacrificed their lives. Benét spent most of his review, however, discussing Rukeyser’s accessibility: “Miss Rukeyser is incisive. But for a poet so interested in a cause she maintains a particular intellectual aloofness from her audience.” Benét was editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, and like his brother Stephen, he was a champion of making literature a part of a common American culture, and he thought that Rukeyser’s obscurity served as a barrier. Similar complaints came from the mainstream and the right. The New York Herald-Tribune review identified Rukeyser’s “chosen public” as “intellectuals” rather than any “particular audience which demands comprehension before appreciation” (Quinn). Time’s condescending review most precisely located the audience: “Taken all together, the poems are an exciting and, on the whole, a trustworthy appeal to all the belligerents who (and only who if you ask Poet-Rukeyser) know the world” (“Rukeyser 2”; emphasis in the original). Literary intellectuals were just as unkind. In Poetry, Willard Mass praised “Night-Music” but noted that the lyrics were “obscure” because they drew upon a “complicated symbolism and imagery” (103). Rukeyser was similarly attacked from the left by John Wheelwright in the Partisan Review. He noted that with a “proper audience poets are the best agitators,” but they needed to win that audience (54). Wheelwright judged that Rukeyser failed to do so because her literary “manners” rose from “the accepted canon of culture of a ruling class.” Her poems, he continued, “do not flatter our self esteem, making us feel bright, meeting us with knowledge, but rather do they browbeat us by making us feel stupid even before their erudition” (56, 55–56). With attacks upon her accessibility from every side, Rukeyser was caught in the ideological cross-fire of competing arguments for the proper relation of poetry to language and audience. Yet, if one looks closer, Rukeyser’s place in the literary field shows who did or did not support her. If most reviewers appreciated that Stephen Vincent Benét had selected Rukeyser for the Yale Younger Poets award, her close relations with Gregory

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eventually led to exile. Gregory’s poems engaged the crisis of modern life through the dramatic synthesis of popular culture and formal poise. R. P. Blackmur would later describe Gregory’s work as “nostalgic” and “elegiac” but only as a means “to recover what is still living” (66). Gregory not only railed against capitalism but wrote as a deeply read poet of hope. Rukeyser too was a poet of hope and engagement who used modernist techniques to portray the relational truths—personal, political, historical—that she witnessed. Rukeyser was clearly of the next generation, so Gregory promoted and aided Rukeyser whenever possible, including securing her place at Yaddo in 1934, reviewing Theory of Flight for the New Republic, publishing her poems in his New Letters in America (1937) and in the New Masses, and securing a relationship with his publisher. But the most telling example of both Gregory’s and Rukeyser’s place in the literary field—straddling the Communist and the high literary sets, which ultimately accepted neither author—came when Gregory served as guest editor for Poetry’s 1936 “Social Poets Number.” Harriet Monroe had published an editorial in July 1934 against the New Masses. Stanley Burnshaw, literary editor of the New Masses, defended the “revolutionary poem” and “the dozen little proletarian magazines flourishing from coast to coast—John Reed Club organs as well as Blast, Dynamo, The Anvil, etc.—fighting with and for the class that is rising into power, fighting against your solid front of reaction” (23). However, literary battle lines were not easily drawn because many writers who published in “proletarian” magazines also published in Poetry and other journals. Moreover, the New Masses gained prestige with the presence of writers such as MacLeish, and Poetry, by publishing socially committed poetry, gained credence with a literary field that was greatly influenced by the Communists. In the 1930s, the New Masses held as much influence in the literary field than any other weekly such as the New Republic or the Nation, both of which it outsold in 1935 and all of which had tremendous influence (Test; Wald 108). To clear the air, Monroe asked Gregory to edit the “Social Poet’s Number.” The issue included the work of fourteen poets, beginning with Edwin Rolfe and ending with Rukeyser. Gregory published “Night-Music” to which he granted three times as much space (six pages) than other poets received. As the final author, Rukeyser also served as an introduction to Gregory’s editorial about his selection of “class-conscious literature” (92). Gregory explained that his selection sought to show how “poetic belief” had changed when “poets consciously assume social responsibility.” A poet’s and an era’s “Poetic myth” formed via a “synthesis of the literary heritage, of the geographical or physical environment, and of the political, moral, or religious conviction, as well as upon the social adjustment of the poet” (97).

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Yet that myth changes when some facet of those influences comes about, which results in controversy about what poetry is and how it works. Such a diagnosis partially accounts for reviewers’ dismissal of “The Book of the Dead,” which melded documentary representation, proletarian writing, and modernist poetry. Rukeyser overcame Tate’s early critique of regionalism as a “still-born . . . documentary,” because the material in her sequence— although drawing upon the techniques of documentaries—held a “vital rapport with [Rukeyser’s] own moral temper” (Tate, “Regionalism” 158). Gregory’s and Rukeyser’s alliance continued when he published “The Cruise” in his annual New Letters in America (1937), which can be seen as a belletristic counterpart to Granville Hicks’s and Mike Gold’s more influential Proletarian Literature in the United States (1935). However, in late 1937, Gregory had a severe falling-out with the Communist Party over the role of poetry and its relationship to audience. As narrated by Alan Wald, New Letters—although it represented young writers allied with the Popular Front—was attacked in New Masses by Hicks and others who saw Gregory’s selections as failing to adequately represent class struggle for those who needed to hear about it (123–135). With the weight of opinion against him, Gregory left the New Masses (and later muted his leftist associations). And it is within the conflict about the proper relationship of intellectuals to the working class that the halting appraisals of U.S. 1 are best read. With the waning of regionalism and the ascendance of New Criticism, anxiety about accessibility grew to a fevered pitch in the 1940s. Rukeyser had few literary allies in the debate, and her work was the site of sustained debate in the Saturday Review of Literature (August 1940). Louis Untermeyer— who had included Rukeyser as the youngest poet in the fifth edition of American Poetry, A Critical Anthology (1936) and wrote reviews that defended Rukeyser and Zaturenska as “New Lyricists”—served as Rukeyser’s champion and even sent her a draft of the essay for her approval (June 21, 1940). His essay “The Language of Muriel Rukeyser” recognized her poetry as a “new speech” that was “swift, abrupt, syncopated” and used “mingling fragments” for kaleidoscopic effect (11). U.S. 1 was praised as a “nightmare of responsibility” constructed from “many points of view” that were rendered in a “condensed diction” that alternated between “abstractions and concrete images.” Untermeyer then declared his unhesitating support for her poem “The Soul and Body of John Brown” that had just been published in Poetry and unabashedly called Americans to stand up against exploitation rather than, as Untermeyer relates, resorting to “disciplined militant unity” or abandoning “all our gains.” However, William Rose Benét and Selden Rodman decried the same complexity that Untermeyer praised.

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Rodman wanted writers to realize a “socialized democracy” by composing poetry that had a clear narrative and drama. Drawing upon the poets’ awareness of their place in and relationship to the world, this poetry should show that “labor . . . is sacred” and help people “work with dignity” (15). Fascism had succeeded, he pointed out, because such leaders “spoke in a language that could be understood,” while many middle-class poets inspired by Marxism were guilty of “Hegelian . . . gibberish” (14). Benét wrote in less political terms but also condemned “inchoate, obscure, and highly specialized” poetry that made the “average reader . . . apathetic” (3). Poets guilty of obscurity wrote “as though [they] were a member of an esoteric cult who desire to appeal only to other members” (4). Instead, he called on poets to use accessible formal features that would allow them to share “something that cannot be said.” This oxymoron expresses Benét’s belief in poetry’s ability to acknowledge what lies beyond the boundaries of the symbolic order’s recognition. The urgency (and difficulty) of such creative “order and precision” was seen by Benét as a necessity because of America’s diversity: “After all, we are a polyglot nation. In that lies our greatest weakness and greatest strength in this challenging hour” (17). While Benét’s editorial practices and publications did not reflect the scope or hierarchy of that “polyglot,” Rukeyser sought a poetic practice to engage in intercultural relations. John Malcolm Brinnin—who Gregory also published in New Letters— evaluated the juncture between accessibility and social creativity in his essay “Muriel Rukeyser: The Social Poet and the Problem of Communication” (Poetry 1943). Brinnin defined a “social poet” as one who strives to “develop his talent in the full resources of language and accumulated techniques” in order to communicate (555). But the social poet also wishes to express issues of social plight that the culture represses and that the reader might not be able to grasp. Brinnin considers this issue in “Night-Music,” which he finds “is built upon a use of language so complex and a compression of ideas so intense, that it is unquestionably removed from the grasp of the lay reader, not to mention the proletarian” (567). Yet without such compression, Rukeyser’s renovations might not be communicated. Brinnin explains that the problem is whether to depend on established forms of representation, “even though that means a static repetition of familiar ideology, or to exercise full imagination and the resources of language” for expressing what conventions had previously blocked (567–568). Brinnin catches the contradiction of Rukeyser’s work and explains that while she gained a range of expression by leaving behind “the radical vernacular,” her “revolutionary ardor” is lost within “the tangled welter of symbols” that prove inspirational only to other similarly minded poets (569).

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Rukeyser was not surprised that critics came to such conclusions, even if she hoped for more. Poetry, she felt, was capable of showing the “inter-dependent elements” of systems (Life 19) and revealing their emotional energy. Rukeyser sought to bring the reader into relationship with their “resistance” to poetry (and society), which she saw repressing and sublimating hegemony’s interlocked brutality: “There are relationships which include so much that we can bring to them our own wishes and hostilities, our value judgments and our moralities; they will serve to illuminate all our other relationships. . . . the Negroes, the Jews, . . . the ‘place’ of labor, the ‘place’ of women, and poetry” (9). Rukeyser fancied her readers to be a “prepared” audience capable of emotional honesty, whose imaginations could fully engage “imagination,” “belief,” and “experience” (Life 50, 49). She hoped to express the multiplicity and tensions in society via poetry that causes social “growth” (rather than social change): “Possibility joins the categorical imperative. Suffering and joy are fused in growth, and growth is universal. A society in motion, with many overlapping groups, in their dance” [sic] (211). Given her focus on the contingency of relational semiotics, Rukeyser understood why New Critics negatively appraised her, and she warned readers to shield themselves by depending upon their own authority (Daniels 258). Yet to follow a poet as she unravels the emotional charge of such symbols—rather than merely using them—is a trying task for readers. Rukeyser found Americans had an “aversion . . . to emotion,” which led to “contempt for people” such that readers (and publishers and critics) would turn their heads from representations (such as poetry) that revealed the ideological psychodynamics of Othering. However, Rukeyser failed to note her limited audience. She was not writing for varying literacies but asked readers to assume her practices, which were derived from an elite education and participation within a politically and aesthetically avant-garde interpretive community. Instead, Rukeyser blamed her readers’ “corruption of conscious” that caused them to disown emotion and imagination (Life 48). That “corruption” was, in turn, caused by a culture that turned repression into “dissociation,” which was structured into “fantasy” (49). Rukeyser’s purpose was to break those fantasies. Thus Rukeyser wrote poems that cultivated artful complexity to reveal the relationships upon which the American social order depended but repressed. She hoped her readers would throw off their protective reticence and leap into her poems, whose meaning she saw as a mutually creative act: “Both artist and audience create, and both work on themselves in creating” (“Usable Truth” 208). In this belief, Rukeyser forwarded an idealist version of pragmatism, wherein meaning is created through a community’s labor. Thus, Rukeyser cultivated

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a dynamic, critically aware interpretive community within whom she might discover, build, and act on usable truths. To generate a matrix within which new truths could be made, Rukeyser borrowed a wide set of references and conventions from different interpretive communities. Yet, most readers were hard-pressed to function in systems outside of the mainstream culture, and almost all found difficulty in suspending their semiotic training. Conclusions The year 1938 was a fateful one. The tides of literary history were against Rukeyser and centered upon a conflict about aesthetics versus politics and accessibility. Louise M. Rosenblatt authored Literature as Exploration that taught how to educate high-school readers based on their personal experience. Commonly cited as the start of reader-response, Rosenblatt’s book was washed away in the slew of New Critical texts initiated that year by Ransom’s The World’s Body and Warren and Brook’s Understanding Poetry. Rukeyser suffered another reversal from Covici·Friede’s bankruptcy in late 1938 when their printers (Little and Ives) demanded payment. Covici went to remarkable lengths for his authors and had overextended advances. Although Covici was about to typeset The Grapes of Wrath—which would outsell every other book in 1939 when published by Viking—Little and Ives dismissed the battered manuscript (Friede 130). When Covici became an editor with Viking Press, he invited Rukeyser and her “friends” to come along (Aug. 8, 1938). Gregory distrusted Viking, but Rukeyser went with Covici, who delivered her extra copies of U.S. 1 before Covici·Friede’s holdings were sold (“Agreement”; Friede 130). Viking would buy the 756 copies at 20 cents per copy from Rukeyser. Although she would publish her next book A Turning Wind (1939) with Viking, they had a sour relationship. She was insulted by Best’s demeaning attitude (he called her “a nice girl” with “too many ideas”), and press’s refusal to do more than minimal publicity and allowing her books to go out of print (to Gregory, Aug. 10, 1942; from Eisenberg, Nov. 9, 1939; from Covici, May 24, 1944 and April 3, 1947). Although Rukeyser quickly came to national attention through the aid of Benét and Yale and her close alliances with Gregory and the far left, her notoriety occurred during the height of proletarian writing. With the rise of New Criticism, the dissolution of the Popular Front, the defeat of Republican forces in Spain, and the U.S. entry into the war, not only would regionalism’s prominence fade but so would Rukeyser’s. In the seven books of poetry that she published before 1950, the number of reviews steadily decreased with each book, from fifteen in 1935 to six in 1949 (Daniels 257). In Rukeyser’s studied attempts to develop a “usable truth” that worked

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across discursive fields, she defied the principles of interpretive communities who dismissed her work. Rukeyser’s relationship with Gregory and Zaturenska was also failed, as shown in Zaturenska’s diary and letters. As the United States entered the war, Gregory and Zaturenska grew further from Rukeyser, who kept up her support of the far left. In their 1946 history of twentieth-century American poetry, Zaturenska and Gregory would praise only Rukeyser’s first book of poems, stating that the next three “were conceived in terms of slogans and commands” (438–439). The year 1948 saw the publication of Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry as well as Allen Tate’s On the Limits of Poetry. Few more opposing poetics can be found. In his role as consultant for poetry at the Library of Congress (which he had held since 1944 when MacLeish chose him rather than Rukeyser), Tate sought to shape literary landscape. While his most defining work was to see that Pound received the Bollinger award and that the role of consultant would proceed into the hands of his associates, Tate also compiled an annotated bibliography called Sixty American Poets, 1896–1944 (1945). Upon Rukeyser, he pontificated, “Her poems, however, are less impressive as a whole than as brilliant fragments . . . [S]he is primarily a lyric poet who has inherited the tradition of the thirties . . . [so] she has written a kind of poetry which is not congenial.” Nevertheless, Rukeyser continued as a leader who joined social justice and poetry in a progressive cadre. Following W. E. B. Du Bois’s introduction to Primer for White Folks (1945), Rukeyser’s essay “The ‘Amistad’ Mutiny” assumed a mantle of authority about race relations. Rukeyser focuses on the work of Josiah William Gibbs, a professor of theology and language at Yale, to defend the Africans aboard the Amistad in 1840. Gibbs worked with the “Mendi Committee,” a group of abolitionists who would go on to form the American Missionary Association (as touched on in my first chapter). Gibbs served as the communicator whose language skills bridged continents and peoples. That work, Rukeyser emphasizes, was a “combining occasion” in which Gibbs synthesized his “religious belief in the value of the human being” and his long years of study (39). Gibbs’ tale serves as an apt analogy for Rukeyser’s work in the liminal gulfs.

CHAPTER 7

The Tight Rope of Democracy and Don West’s Clods of Southern Earth (1946)

D

on West composed poetry to catalyze political action. The son of a small farmer turned sharecropper from the north Georgia mountains, West first attended Lincoln Memorial University and then Vanderbilt, where he trained as a preacher of the Social Gospel. After cofounding Highlander Folk School in 1932, West served as a Communist organizer in Georgia, North Carolina, and Kentucky through 1937. From 1938 to 1941, he worked as a Congregationalist minister in Ohio and Georgia, and during World War II he earned national recognition as a public school administrator who taught democracy in rural Georgia. Yet at each step of his varied career, West had written and published poems. He mobilized all his skill as a poet (and an activist and organizer) to help create a society where the working and lower classes could join together across categories of work, race, gender, or locality to struggle for political, social, and economic rights. In May 1946, West’s poetry became the center of his work when the leftist, New York press Boni and Gaer brought out West’s Clods of Southern Earth as their first book (figure 7.1). The book selected the strongest of his poems from the previous fifteen years, and its publication (along with his work as an educator) earned West a professorship of Human Understanding and Citizenship at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta. In Clods, West sang as a mountaineer who proclaimed his own ancestors’ resistance to slavery; he sang as a preacher of justice who decried the class system that set black against white (see figure 7.2); he sang as a white

Figure 7.1 Front cover, Clods of Southern Earth (Boni & Gaer, 1946). Courtesy of Linda McCarthy.

Figure 7.2 Page 28, “What Shall a Poet Sing?” Clods of Southern Earth (Boni & Gaer, 1946). Courtesy of Linda McCarthy.

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Southerner whose father had died sharecropping and who now dared to ask his fellow working-class whites to, as he puts it in the introductory poem, “clasp the hand of a Blackman / And say: / Brother!” (“Look Here” 13). West sang for 148 pages, an impressive amount of poetry regardless of the time period or target audience, which makes the number of copies sold—over fourteen thousand in the first year (“Boni & Gaer”)—even more impressive. In addition to regular sales, Clods was bought and distributed within a penumbra of leftists from which the 1948 Progressive Party in part arose, including the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW), readers of New Masses, and the People’s Institute for Applied Religion (PIAR). From Region to Race Clods’s wide readership came about because of a shift in the focus of pluralism from region back to race. Book after book published in 1944 mark how that shift registered the coalitions that would mobilize Clods. In seeming response to Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem in Modern Democracy, W. T. Couch, director of the University of North Carolina Press, commissioned Rayford Logan, a historian at Howard University, to edit What the Negro Wants. Although the book’s purpose was simple—“that the country, particularly the South, ought to know what the Negro wants” (Couch, Publisher’s Introduction ix)—its publication was not. Logan requisitioned or reprinted essays from fourteen of the most well-known African Americans in the country, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Willard S. Townsend (member of the CIO’s Executive Board and secretary of the CIO Committee to Abolish Race Relations), Mary McLeod Bethune (educator, founder of the National Council of Negro Women, and boardmember of the SCHW), Fredrick D. Patterson (president of Tuskegee and member of the SCHW), Sterling Brown, and Langston Hughes. Although these essays represented both conservatives and radicals, they unanimously called for the full desegregation of America. Couch and the press were taken off-guard because even though white liberal Southerners had long lobbied against Jim Crow, they had not imagined that blacks would forthrightly condemn segregation. Manuscript reviewers demanded major changes, including the deletion of all references to racial intermarriage (Janken 166). Couch feared for the press’s reputation and for the consequences to race relations, so he refused to publish the book. Couch sent the critiques to Logan, who shared them with his authors, but they refused to change their essays and encouraged Logan to seek legal action (166–171). When Logan so threatened, Couch gave in but wrote a publisher’s

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introduction to the book that disclaimed responsibility and shared his own vision of race relations. Racial equality, Couch defended, was only possible in terms of racial difference: the call for full integration might destroy American (i.e., white) culture. Couch argued that only certain aspects of equality were possible given black’s racial inferiority; he held that they had to earn the right to become part of white culture through first demonstrating “qualities of greatness.” To reconcile white readers, Couch soothes, “The White Southerner, reading this book, must remember that the task of the superior man is not to prate of being superior but to be really so” (xx). Another book tying place and race was the novel Deep River by Henrietta Buckmaster, a well-known white author who championed the Negro cause and was nationally recognized for Let My People Go: the Story of the Underground Railroad and the Growth of the Abolitionist Movement (1941). The protagonist of Deep River is the daughter of a slave-owner in Georgia in the 1850s who falls in love with a young abolitionist, Simon Bliss, whose real-life model, Buckmaster explains in her blurb on the cover of Clods of Southern Earth, was Don West. Rufus E. Clement, the president of Atlanta University and who sat on the SCHW’s executive board, praised the book as a “credible” model that “shows how white men and women came to see and know their brothers in black (and serfdom) as human beings” (387). Although Clement had not met West at the time he wrote the review, his conclusion anticipated the work West would undertake upon moving to Atlanta: The central figure, Simon Bliss, gives us the real feeling of the book, of himself, of his mountain followers—free and poor whites, and of all liberals of whatever time and place when he says: “I guess when a man comes to set store in free ways of living, he just naturally thinks about the whole world. It’s hard to leave anything out.”

Radical Coalitions, Radical Publishers West’s book served to rally progressive intellectuals and the working class. Designed for accessibility, the poetry authenticated its audiences’ struggles, language, and desires. Labor and civil rights organizations that opposed segregation distributed the book into their networks to foster cross-class interracial unity and action. Released the year after Georgia abolished the poll tax and white-only political primaries, Clods instigated waves of support and backlash. West converted that cultural capital into political clout and led Georgia’s Progressive Party in the 1948 presidential campaign.

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This chapter demonstrates how a chorus of actors used Clods as one rallying point to cohere a cross-class, interracial coalition that intervened on behalf of rights and justice for all American citizens. The history of how this coalition formed, functioned, and dissolved has been laid out by such scholars as Patricia Sullivan in her Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (1996). Given their recuperative work, these histories have rarely had the opportunity to evaluate the rhetorical tools that the coalition used to coalesce Americans of diverse identities (races, classes, and regions). Among those interested in artfully building such tools were West’s publishers Charles Boni and Joseph Gaer. Although nationally few knew West’s name, when Boni and Gaer brought out Clods, papers throughout the country jumped to review it because of Charles Boni’s reputation as a publisher of key modernist texts in the 1920s (such as The New Negro) with the firm A. & C. Boni (see chapter two). Boni, however, did more than publish modernist literature that wrestled with American identity—his production techniques also broke new ground. In his pamphlet advertising the Charles Boni Paper Back Book Club (which he founded in 1928), Boni declared his “adventure” to grant “a spiritual enrichment of American homes through the widest possible distribution of some of the cultural benefits of the printers’ art, the writers’ skill and an improved public tastes have multiplied in our world of shops and machines” (iii). Uniting skilled production mechanisms and quality art, Boni produced a high-quality line of seventeen books, all designed by Rockwell Kent who would go on to design Viking’s colophon (Russell and Dzwonski 57). Boni’s pluralist work also continued, and in collaboration with Horace Kallen (who served on Boni’s editorial board), C. Boni would release Charles Reznikoff’s By the Waters of Manhattan in 1930 (Reznikoff and Hindus 134–135). While C. Boni failed due to conflicts with booksellers, Boni also opened the first dollar book club in 1929, which he sold to Doubleday, Doran in 1931 who ran it profitably for decades (“Charles Boni”). Boni was ten years ahead of the curve of affordable, high quality “trade” paperbacks (Tebbel 7), but his experience set the stage for collaborating with Gaer. Joseph Gaer was also calmly and fiercely committed to helping diverse peoples realize the hope and rights of American citizenship. Gaer’s Yiddish family immigrated from Bessarabia (a province on the southwest edge of Imperial Russia on the Black Sea) in 1910, and his literary aspirations flourished in California during the 1920s. Thereafter, he became a Federal Writers’ Project field director, worked in the federal government, and was the publicity director of the CIO’s Political Action Committee (PAC) from 1943 to 1946 (Walbridge). In short, Boni and Gaer’s new press joined Boni’s

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reputation and skill in literary publishing with Gaer’s expertise in crafting political material for the public. Boni and Gaer’s quartet of foci—progressive politics, fascism, the Jewish people, and Soviet Russia—reveals their goal: to rally Americans to support human integrity against internal fascism. From 1946 through 1948, they released twenty-four books. That these books sold well in postwar America represents both the sales savvy of the publishers and the strength of leftist networks.1 Their choice to herald their project with Clods demonstrates that they believed West’s poetry (the only poetry they published) would speak to the core of the nation’s progressive political hope from the South. Anticipating diverse literacies, Clods sought to articulate the mutual interest of an array of parties whose fates, it argued, were closely tied. Rather than asking its readers to shed their identities and varied literacies, West called for a revision of relations between seemingly discordant groups by revealing their locations within a phalanx of common cause. But the proving ground for West and his publisher’s poetics of relations can only be gauged by tracing the book’s distribution, reception, and use by its varied intended readerships. Thus, I first examine newspaper reviews, whose responses were largely based on regional context. Second, I demonstrate how West’s poetry formed a moral and political manifesto for the hidden readers from PIAR. Third, I examine the extra matter—its blurbs, cover bio, and introduction—to see how West and the publishers worked to bring poetry to nonliterary readers. Fourth, I delve into the specifics of coalition building between the CIO and the SCHW, which sets the stage for the final part of my chapter that reveals the role of West’s poetry in the 1948 elections in Atlanta and Georgia. Reviewing West from the North, South, and Left In Southern newspapers, leftist politics were not casually discussed and, when discussed, were commonly dismissed. Nevertheless, readers and reviewers praised Clods for presenting a realistic version of the world they knew. In the Atlanta Constitution, Alex Hite turns what might be understood as a stylistic problem into praise: “[West’s] writing is powerful and earthy and crude. He is Walt Whitman in overalls.” Glad to read a work that dares to state its morality clearly, Hite calls West “a born crusader” and jovially notes how West “satirizes the pusillanimous Southern poets who make pretty songs about Greek culture and an antebellum South.” While not quoting any poetry in the review, Hite undoubtedly refers to “They Take Their Stand (For some professional Agrarians)” (Clods 29).2 Composed in ballad form

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(ABAB iambic tetrameter), the poem rails against the Agrarians’ denial of the South that West knows: In Dixie Land they take their stand, Turning the wheels of history back For murder, lynch and iron hand To drive the Negro from his shack. (9–12)3 On the previous and facing page (28), West juxtaposes the poem “What Shall a Poet Sing?” which is also a ballad, although one paradoxically constrained to eight lines. Written in an iambic trimeter over-meter, the poem’s rhythm breaks at the beginning of lines with either gasping anapests or harsh trochees. This stifling of the rhythm emphasizes the brutal breakdown of life: / ˘ | ˘ / |˘ / ˘ What is a poet saying / / |˘ / ˘| ˘ Down by a Georgia pine / |˘ / | ˘ / ˘ ˘ ˘ Where a broken body’s swaying / /| ˘ / ˘|˘ Hung to a cotton line . . . ? / | ˘ /| ˘ / ˘ ˘ With his folk all burdened down, / [˘] | ˘ / | ˘ / Pinched by hunger’s pang, / ˘ | ˘ / | ˘ / Whether he’s white or brown, / | ˘ / |˘ / ˘ What shall a poet sing . . . ? [Entire poem quoted; ellipsis in original] When the final iambs slice the word “poet” in half, the last line paradoxically fulfills the iambic trimeter that has haunted the poem. The consequences of metrical fulfillment are echoed by the aching slant rhyme of “pang” and

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“sing.” Ending in an open, lingering question about how to address the suffering and grief of poverty and power in the South, the humorous “They Take Their Stand” takes on a throat-clenching quality that assumes the level of condemnation. While on the surface West presented himself as a poet whose work Hite lauded as “blunt” and “crude,” West was anything but—as seen in the metrical nuances of “What Shall a Poet Sing?” Clods’s first review, which appeared in Mountain Life and Work (the voice piece of the Council of Southern Mountain Workers), aptly outlines its structure. In Clods’s first section, “No Anger in a Dead Man,” West takes the stance of a “compassionate observer” who “holds up the wrongs and needs of the Southland, and heralds the waking and rising complaint of the wronged” (27, 26). The second section, “Folks A-Living,” conducts portraits of the mountain people with whom West came of age, and they “speak, quietly, often with pathos” (27). After establishing “the passionate appeal” of the first section and the “patient poignance” of the second, the third section, “No Lonesome Road,” deliberately reviews the “social wrongs” that West wants people to address. The section rings with a “note of excitement, of prophecy, of optimism” as West gives “the final realization that in the suffering, the grieving, the struggle, no group and no one bears a lonely burden.” That the review praises West is not surprising: its readers felt heroized in their labors to uplift the poor. Although they may not have been thinking about their origins when Southern uplift and educational workers retreated into the mountains before the onslaught of Jim Crow, certainly they were glad to see what they believed about the mountains— the integrity of its culture as demonstratively American—being deployed in a call to unify the South. Just as West structured each section of the book to create a compelling argument, so he crafted each poem in straightforward language to facilitate engagement with a brief but richly rendered experience. The New York Times Book Review recognized this quality and called West “a homespun writer, with a fondness for short-lined free verse compositions and with a strong didactic bent” (1946). However, the reviewer continues, those qualities are “not sufficient in themselves to make a poet.” The review exactly excises and recounts West’s thesis about the oppression and division of the Southern “mass of workers” by “a small minority of land-owning Southerners and factory-owning Northerners.” Yet, read in the context of modernist poetry and the ensuing Cold War, the reviewer ends by condemning the book: “It is a romantic, simplified South which will be readily recognized by every school boy from Moscow to Vladivostok, but it has several features which will bewilder most Southerners, white and black—and especially those ‘workers’ who have just gotten through sending Bilbo . . . back to congress.”

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The reviewer notwithstanding, Bilbo’s supporters were a narrow segment of Mississippi’s population: the poll tax in Mississippi, the state that sent Bilbo to the U.S. Senate, caused only 15 percent of eligible voters to vote in 1944, while non-poll-tax states averaged 63 percent (“Votes Cast”). The New York Times Book Review demonstrates that the world of readers who valued poetry in the North was not necessarily cognizant of the complex, oppressive political realities in the South. Nor could they hear poetry as Southerners did. In the New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review, Ruth Lechlitner, who once conducted reviews for the New Masses, denounces West’s poetry as “militant regionalism” whose theme is “over simplified and over sentimentalized.” After dismissing his free verse as “chopped-up, cliché-studded, indifferently bad prose,” she attacks his lack of “appeal to the ear,” which she tells the reader must be well done if West is to appeal to a Southern audience who she imagines is “conditioned to the strong rhythm of work in field or factory; to the musical variations of wind-blown tree or cloud or of running creek water; to country dances and songs; to the full sweeping poetry of the Bible.” This appeal to a Whitmanesque verse invokes a different sense of culture than that held by Southerners themselves. Reviewing the book for New Masses, Harold Preece declares that Clods “has let in a fresh, clean wind” across the hills and rivers “where we thought blood and rope to be eternal phenomena.” While few “croppers and miners” had read Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel, Preece praised the fact that trade unions had ordered dozens of copies of Clods. To illustrate the poem’s effects, Preece relates witness from a farm-wife with ten children from the mountains of Tennessee, who shared her love of the poem “Naked Words” (19–20), which she had heard West read. Preece quotes the last two stanzas that begin by describing the “Hard old hands” and “Bent young bodies— / Crooked, like old iron pieces” and end with those “bent iron pieces / Sit[ting] in solemn judgment” (24–26, 39–40). Perhaps the most startling and vivid image of the entire book comes at the start of the third stanza: I’ll speak of babies, too, Bent-boned and sallow Sucking on tired breasts At dusk time— Of black hands, Hard as hickory In the warped plow-handles They clutch [.] (12–19)

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Here the rhythm and sound of West’s “free-verse” speak with accord and power, weaving together lines with alliteration (“babies” and “Bent-boned”; “sallow” and “Sucking”; “Hard as hickory”) and the careful spill of assonance and rhyme (“bone” and “sallow”; “Sucking” and “dusk”; “black hands,” etc.). These tight three- and two-beat lines move slowly because they are packed with hard words, and each foot demands its rhythmic space. Key to the careful gait, the feet alternate meters in such a way that stresses are bunched and accentuated as the broken rhythm straddles enjambed lines. Indeed, as the lines break in the middle of syntactic units, the syntax yokes them together unifying the distribution of beats (rhythm) across lines rather than within lines. Consider, for instance, lines 16–19. Noting line breaks in the text as well as foot changes in the stress notation. I have transcribed the lines into two eight-syllable sets, which correspond with major syntactic units: / / | / ˘ | /˘˘ ˘ Of black hands, / Hard as hickory / | / / ˘ | ˘ / ˘ ˘ In the warped plow-handles / They clutch In this metrical mix, there is an even distribution of stress: four stresses in each eight-syllable syntactic unit. Furthermore, three of those four stresses—which are separated by line breaks—are both clumped in the middle of the syntactic unit while coming at the end and start of the feet. While the poem may appear gnarled and broken, its form, like the bodies of the people it describes, has adapted to its work. West depicted how people’s bodies were shaped by their suffering and survival, and he was aided by the skillful typography of the collection. The typeface, Linotype Benedictine, is set in twelve point—a large face for poetry and rare for literary texts (see figure 7.2). Moreover, the use of fourpoint leading results in a maximum of twenty-six lines per page, a small number compared to other poetry texts. In an era when textuality was being reduced to tight print in mass-marketed books, the clear layout and type (size and face) convey to the reader that these poems and their stories are worthwhile. Indeed, the clarity and expanse of the type stand out against the normal poetic typography of “cultured” books from which the target audience felt excluded. This design by Joseph Gaer harkens back to his skills as the director of publications for the CIO’s PAC. Two months after being reviewed in New Masses, West’s book was offered in the December 17, 1946, issue as a Christmas Premium (28) and continued

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to be advertised through October 28, 1947, when it sold out. Each issue of New Masses provided a list of books, one of which readers selected as a gift when they subscribed. By including West’s book among those titles, the editors put West on par with Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Karl Marx’s Capital, Ann Petry’s The Street, and Du Bois’s Color and Democracy; though it is unclear how many copies were distributed, the audience for New Masses has been described as “middle-class intellectuals” and Communist “sympathizers” (Harrison 4). Yet after the Communist support of Stalin and the USSR—both before and after their alliance with Germany—New Masses’s audience had dwindled since its heyday during the Depression when its influence outstripped that of either the New Republic or the Nation (Aaron 354–364).4 The praise of Mike Gold, the Daily Worker’s literary editor, is not surprising. Gold begins by denouncing the reactionary Eugene Talmadge, who had just won the 1946 gubernatorial election, and states that West demonstrates most Georgians’ anger and dignity: West conducts a “defense of the redneck Georgia cracker, an elucidation of him as a confused and struggling human figure who is capable of all love and humanity.” While discussing West’s poetry, Gold also describes his countenance as “a tall man . . . with deep set eyes . . . [and the] rugged eye brows, strong chinbone, the high-cheek bone, powerful nosebone of a mountaineer.” For Gold—as for others outside the literary field—a man’s image was an argument for why his poems would be worth reading. Similarly, the back cover (on the paper version) or jacket (on the hardcover version) of Clods presents a large photo of West in an open front shirt and sweater, his eyes deep and shadowed but wrinkled with smiling. A bare tree trunk rises behind him. The decision to print the photo announces the publishers’ intention to play upon West’s demeanor as an intellectual who is down-home, worn, joyful, and white. At the end of World War II, sacrifice, hard work, honesty, and physicality were statements of worthy participation—particularly in light of the trials of trust to come over Communism, when Americans had already begun to worry about identifying fascists in their midst. On August 30 the Atlanta Constitution announced West’s new professorship at Oglethorpe, emphasizing that his book “broke a publishing record when 13,000 copies [sic] were sold” before the book was released (“Poet Don West”). The article explains West’s background as a rural Georgian who frankly declared that “he comes from stock commonly known as ‘pore white trash.’ ” This article represents the approval and excitement that the South was feeling at West’s success, as can be seen in reviews from the Mobile Register, the Atlanta Journal, and the Chattanooga Times. Such praise was not at first reflected by Martin, who wrote about Georgia culture in his columns

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for the Atlanta Constitution—the same newspaper in which Ralph McGill would red-bait West in 1948. Like the reviewer from the New York Times, Martin asserts that even though West dares to speak for “the sharecropper, the mill worker, the man down in the mine,” they will “repudiate him when he says the black man has an equal right to economic opportunity” (“New, Angry”). But Martin found himself inundated by reader mail, which led him to grant a retraction: “I was surprised to learn that West is a controversial figure, much loved and deeply hated” (“West’s Poems”). One reverend wrote in and explained that “there are thousands and thousands of workers who will tell you that paternalism has been replaced by exploitation and bitter hate.” After considering such opinions, Martin agrees, “Don West is one of us. He knows what’s wrong with us . . . The trouble with us is there are too many folks who say that Georgia is the finest State in the United States and Georgians are the noblest people, and that anybody who questions that is a traitor to his homeland.” Martin would prove prophetic. The Earth below the Grassroots: Clod’s Hidden Readers The number of copies that Clods had sold was essential to garnering mainstream credence. What the reviewers failed to ask was to whom these copies had been sold. We have seen that New Masses was one node of distribution, and I will later discuss the book’s most public audience, members of the SCHW, with whom West would play out his political moves in 1947 and 1948. Yet eight thousand of the fourteen thousand copies sold in the first year were purchased and distributed by the PIAR (“Boni & Gaer”; Williams to President). PIAR was founded by Claude Williams in 1940. Williams was West’s fellow student under the guidance of Alva Taylor at the School of Religion at Vanderbilt. After Vanderbilt, Williams went on to develop a system of radicalizing literacy when organizing sharecroppers in Arkansas and Mississippi for the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU), from which he was later exiled because of his Communist sympathies. PIAR sought to realize democracy and equality (of wealth and race) via the radicalizing power of religious literacy to join together the tenant farmer, the impoverished family farmer, and the working class. West served as a board member and organizer for PIAR, and Williams acted as West’s political confidante in 1946 and 1947. PIAR brought together groups of some fifty people for three–ten days, uniting whites and blacks—many of whom, Williams recounts, “had never sat down for a meal together” (quoted in Troy and Williams 48)—in common learning. Literacy levels were low, and even those who could read were not

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prepared to delve into tracts on economics and politics. Yet Williams desired to educate them in just such knowledge. West’s book proved the perfect pedagogical tool for this radical literacy, which can be demonstrated through showing its similarity to hand-designed posters that PIAR used to convey its theories of the social, moral, and economic order. The posters translated stories and concepts from the Bible into contemporary content via pictorial representation and precise language (Troy and Williams 49–50). For instance, one poster, “The New Earth” presented an equation: “Victory + Faith – World = Righteousness,” which it explained meant, “Victory is the faith that overcomes the world and equals righteousness.” Each word served as an acronym for key terms and supporting Bible verses: F – ellowshiping with one another (1 John 1:7) A – dmonsihing (Rom. 15:14) I – nstructing (2 Tim. 3:16, 17) T – rusting one another (James 2: 1–4) H – elping one another (Gal. 6: 2–5) (quoted 50) On the one hand, considered bluntly, Williams taught Marxism through religion: “I know that Mark is not Marx . . . I know that Luke is not Lenin and that Joe Stalin is not Jesus Christ. But these men all have one thing in common—they were and they are all despised by a common enemy” (quoted in Belfrage 272). On the other hand, Williams had developed a system that was capable of uniting, responding to, and guiding America’s lower and working classes. Given PIAR’s goal of catalyzing unity and reforming circumstance through unionization and common action, Clods served as an excellent educational device. Working with images and symbols rendered in accessible language and form, West’s poems articulate the interconnection between people that Williams hoped to reveal. When the poems are working at their best—with the right reader, in the right circumstances—they seem to dissolve the distinctions between region and race, between culture and nature, between self and group. Some of West’s earliest poetry addressed the religious issues that continued to inform his moral resistance. In Clods, “I Have Seen God” (52) operates with two other poems (“Lord, I Prayed” [31] and “Preachers” [54]) in the first section to muster support for the Social Gospel: justice and love should manifest in earthly action. Beginning with a description of God in the weather and earth, “I Have Seen God” insists that God is manifest: I’ve seen God— In the tired eyes

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Of a factory worker Bound by chains Of circumstance. (10–14) Similarly, “Lord, I Prayed”—a dramatic lyric, composed in couplets, synthesizing William Blake, Langston Hughes, and the blues—explores the consciousness of an impoverished figure who is bound by his situation and is trying to discern who is morally responsible for his actions. Opposing those conditions—that Jesus is most with the impoverished, who are more prone to and more blamed for sin—stands the poem “Preachers” (54–55). Written as a choral apostrophe, the poem takes a similar stance toward religion as “They Take Their Stand” assumes toward poetry: “Preachers” condemn the “platitudes” spouted by preachers from “a limousine,” who do not know the “toil-racked bodies / and gaunt eyes hard and keen” of “working folks” (1, 6, 13–14, 11). The working-person chorus in the poem speaks out against those preachers “Who rant and rave and yell / About a poor man’s sinning” (18–19; emphasis in the original). They reclaim religion in the name of struggle. Untwining the contradictions instilled in working-class moral systems, West’s poems investigate the systems’ moral foundations and re-weave them in a system that focuses attention on the circumstances of daily life. When the participants of PIAR acknowledged the possibility of their suffering’s resolution through social action, Williams and West succeeded. Yet, aside from the ones attested to by Williams’s biographer Cedric Belfrage, the methods used are difficult to pinpoint because such work was undertaken with those who had low levels of written literacy. Nevertheless, Williams and PIAR relentlessly distributed and used West’s book. But this dissemination only became possible through an important revolution in publishing—the development of the low-cost paperback book. It is of some irony that the book’s value in the popular literary field increased because of sales that resulted from great economy on the part of the publishers, who discounted the book to bulk buyers such as PIAR, SCHW, CIO, and New Masses. While the hardback version of Clods sold for $2, the paperback version sold for only $1. This allowed the wholesale prepublication price to drop under 30 cents and the postpublication price to remain at 37.5 cents per copy, with 7.5 cents going to West’s royalty (West to Williams, Nov. 18, 1946). The goal was not to make money, but to make poetry available. But just because a book is available and affordable does not mean that a reader, especially a resistant one, will pick it up—a difficulty that was in part overcome through specific networks of distribution and in part through West’s and Gaer’s textual strategies.

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Defending Poetry The response of common readers in the South differed so greatly from book reviews because Clods was designed for them rather than for participants in the mainstream literary field. What led New York and Atlanta reviewers to call West’s work “crude” led nonliterary readers to praise West’s poetry. The biography on the jacket’s back flap sets the stage for the introduction by recounting West’s working-class experience, which was juxtaposed to his education and his new professorship at Oglethorpe University. This biographic statement demonstrates West’s credentials as an organic intellectual, highlighting his connection to his roots, showing his determined selfeducation and travel to Europe, and ending with his return to his “native Georgia.” Advancing the sense of native-intellect, the first sentence on the cover’s back flap announced that this was West’s “first book,” when in reality it was his fifth and functioned more as a compendium of his new and selected poems: three-fourths (61) of the poems were reprinted from earlier collections, from which West harvested and revised for the task at hand. So, although West appeared as a beginner, his book was designed to influence readers who would value him more because this was his first book. One can hear the stories of the mountaineers’ native intelligence and ability with language—if not with the formal tools of academic literacy—ringing in the background. Similarly, unlike other poetry books, this book did not highlight the venues in which West had published, minimizing his readers’ associations with these titles: New Masses, the Daily Worker, the Christian Century, Negro Liberator, and Mountain Life and Work. This portrait of literary innocence encouraged most nonliterary readers, but it began the book’s exile in the literary establishment. Inside the book proper, West prefaces the poems with a 12-page introduction followed by the poem “Look Here, America,” which invited the reader into a relationship with the 133 pages of poetry that follows. West writes in a conversational tone of direct, familiar address, speaking to the reader as “you.” He employs tropes and conventions that any Southern reader would instantly recognize, such as Southern heritage and family. West’s inversion of these tropes shows that he knows how they work, but that he also thinks they tell mistruths, which he then corrects by sharing stories and experiences that the trope would normally exclude. These revisions evoke material from the storehouse about the target audience’s common experience. That is, West attempts to persuade a wide range of readers of their common substance. Speaking desire, West writes, “You say you want a poem with its roots in the earth . . . and perhaps a poem that may sometimes show the reasons for heart ache and sorrow of plain folks and sometimes point the way ahead. I don’t blame you.

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I sort of feel that way too” (2). West wins a range of readers through the use of tentative, open recognition in his diction: “perhaps,” “sometimes,” “sort of.” Seeking to disestablish the alienation of cultured authority that threatens to lecture about what is correct, West admits to his own lack of knowledge and uses generalities to allow a range of readers to link their experiences. The introduction goes on to argue that the common poverty of Southerners is the result of exploitation by the slave-owners and the resulting Southern oligarchy. West explores his “family background” from “an old Southern family”—a motif he turns on its head by identifying his ancestors as working poor, as indentured servants of colonialists, and as American Indian (2–6). With grim humor, he unleashes another inversed motif by mentioning that families do not like to talk about how an ancestor was a “ ‘horse thief ’ ” and agrees that Americans want better: they want to tell about an ancestor who was bold enough to “steal a continent, a nation; steal the lives and labor of thousands of black men and women in slavery; steal the wages of underpaid workers; steal a railroad, a bank” (4). And some of the victims of that thievery were West’s own ancestors. He then asserts that this story is not abnormal but shared by “the real men and women of the South” who were taught by the whites from “the big houses” to say “the hateful word ‘nigger,’ ” just as Hitler taught Aryan Germans to speak of Jews (6). Furthering his claim to speak for America, West details his family’s life in the mountains where the Cartecay “crawls and gurgles” over “the cataracts and through the fords.” Drawing upon associations with Appalachia generated in magazines, novels, and movies, West assures his readers that his are “plain people to whom it is natural to ask a stranger to stay all night.” The ethics of kindness, indeed, are what West claims drove them to the mountains to escape “the ever-encroaching wave of slave-holding planters in the lowlands” (7). Through the hard work of making a life in the mountains, they escaped the “[d]isease, starvation, and illiteracy” of those whites “forced to live in the hard, unfertile regions of the South” (8)—a perfect description of one major audience that West sought to mobilize. After outlining the daily struggle his family faced (and the deaths of three of his eight brothers and sisters), West shows that he could move from mountain roots to succeed in American education (11). West then dismisses higher education (even as he still realizes the value his readers would recognize in it) and insists, “real education has been beaten into me by the ever lasting toil and hunger I’ve seen” in the struggles of miner, textile workers, and sharecroppers. He states that “this education” instills in people the desire “never to rise upon the shoulders of others” but to work together so “the great mass of plain people can also have a richer life.” He concludes by

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offering the reader his poems: “So I pass these poems on to you who may care enough to read,” inviting the embrace of these “little pieces of life—and death—picked up along the way.” This act of physical giving, of communal holding, of care-taking is then manifested by the poem on the facing page, the only poem in the book entirely set in urgent italic script, “Look Here, America” (13–14). The title phrase, “Look Here, America,” is a locution directed at a listener who needs to pay attention to something about which the speaker feels strongly. The poem begins by recognizing that “America” and “victory” live in “sharecroppers, tenants / Black men and Crackers” (ll. 1–4). In short lines, West is insistent about the need to learn: “And you must listen / And look / And think deep . . .” (4–6, ellipsis in original). He replaces earlier suggestions and generalities with a language of gentle imperative. In the second stanza, West forecasts a future where a “Georgia Cracker” would proudly “clasp the hand of a black man / And say: / Brother!” (12, 13–15). After that hopeful instigation, West repeats the title, “Look here, America,” and pulls the reader back to the page after such a radical consideration of interracial brotherhood (16). “Bend your head toward me,” he calls, listen to these “tales,” and touch these “little pieces / Of twisted life” (17, 20, 21–22). The poem concludes in a dwindling voice in the final stanza set on the next page. America, West implores, “must” look because even he . . . a Georgia Cracker— One of your own mongrels— Am grieved By looking At what I’ve seen . . . [27–31; End ellipsis in original text] The facing page quietly introduces the title of part one, which deepens the reader’s consideration as it brews together the threat of purposeful death with the resulting vacancy: “no anger in a dead man” (15). Coalitions “Bowed over a few charred bones” Publication of Clods coincided with eight years of careful coordination between the CIO and the SCHW. Attempting to mobilize voters and expand their membership, both organizations were involved in political action in the South. Together, the CIO and the SCHW sought to negotiate alignments between identity divisions—between insider (Southerner) and outsider (Northerner), between black and white, between working/lower and professional/middle classes—necessary to promote progressive politics and

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pluralistic values. Not only would West’s poetry affirm such alignments, but the esteem that West’s book won would allow West to help radicalize the SCHW’s direction.5 To appreciate West’s intervention, one first needs to understand the history between the SCHW and the CIO, as well as Joseph Gaer’s influence upon the shape of Clods. The CIO’s move south sought to build upon their voter mobilization in the 1944 legislative and presidential campaign, which Joseph Gaer had helped to mastermind as publicity director of the CIO-PAC (1943–1946). To mobilize a broad voter base who would support labor, the CIO-PAC sought to show people the commonality of need regardless of race, gender, or locality (Foster 5). To achieve this goal, Joseph Gaer authored pamphlets that served as architecture prototypes for Clods. Familiarity with the rhetorical strategy of this pamphlet genre is also critical because the working class knew it better than the design of contemporary poetry books. This is Your America, Gaer’s first pamphlet, ran thirty-two pages and orchestrates simple, clear writing with full-page photos of landscape—natural and industrial—and facial portraits of men and women coded to show their ethnic backgrounds. The pamphlet begins by appealing to a wide range of work-identities—“a worker, earning your living honestly— / . . . a farmer, a small business man, or a housewife”—based on their belief in a common America (Gaer 19). Facing the image of a hydroelectric dam, the next page lists the variety of people who had immigrated to America (20–21). While acknowledging diversity to garner identification, the pamphlet’s explanation of pluralist politics comes in answer to the question, “What is it is we love about America?” The question is repeated through the following pages, which show America’s natural beauty, the wealth of its urban expanses, and its vast resources (natural and industrial). But the answer comes on the pamphlet’s sixteenth page where a black man (the first portrait of an African American seen) looks straight at it: “WE LOVE FREEDOM ABOVE ALL” (32). Asking “How can you tell an American?” (34), the pamphlet answers, “[anyone] who lives in the United States . . . and who believes in . . . the Democratic Way” (37). The “Democratic Way” is forwarded as belief in equality for “all men” regardless of “race, religion or nationality,” belief in freedom of speech and freedom from want, belief in equal opportunity for “men and women,” belief in educational opportunity, and belief “in the right of all workers to organize, protect and improve their conditions.” These beliefs, the reader is then told, are realized by the duties of understanding and participating in democracy “to create a more perfect union.” This point is emphasized by showing a photo of a black woman in a welder’s mask and a group of older white men on the facing page, who are clearly voting at a meeting by raising

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their hands (39, 42–43). The pamphlet ends by discussing the CIO’s role in the 1944 elections to realize those goals. Gaer authored ten other pamphlets, and four hundred and fifty thousand copies of This Is Your America were distributed, along with over two million other pamphlets, sixty million leaflets, half a million posters, and fourteen million flyers (307–309). The CIO-PAC helped to instill in American workers a particular brand of positive pluralist rhetoric, upon which West’s book would capitalize. Drawing upon her work with the CIO-PAC and the trust placed in her as Southern public relations representative for the CIO, on October 30, 1944, Lucy Randolph Mason wrote a personal letter to the president of the CIO and initiated its substantial financial support of the SCHW. Speaking as a Southerner, she explained, “Both among the progressives outside the labor movement and inside the CIO, many people want to see a coordinated, widespread movement in the South, composed of CIO, other labor groups, and all liberal non-labor people who can be drawn in.” Mason articulated her fear of fascism developing in the South and explained that the CIO held the resources necessary to counter the threat and to unite “all the liberal forces [in the South] that have the courage to fight for democracy—democracy at home.” She goes on to argue why the SCHW would be the best instrument: “It represents as no other southern institution does a people’s movement— CIO members, AF of L members, miners, little farmers, social workers, newspaper editors, professors, and too many other groups to be named.” The CIO wanted to spread industrial unionism to the fourteen-million-person labor force in the South (Zieger 228). And with unionization in the South, the question of race was key because unions such as the AFL held little promise for African Americans, so validation from the SCHW offered double substantiation to blacks because CIO organizers were also seen as outsiders desiring to “subvert traditional southern values” (Patton 233). From the end of 1944 to early 1947, the CIO and the SCHW would provide mutual support. By 1945, the CIO had 225,000 Southern members, but cooperation between the CIO and the SCHW began to show signs of stress brought on by changes in power relations and the organizations’ differences in how to manage the relationship between labor, race, region, electoral politics, and Communism. Furthermore, the CIO was no longer in need of support from nonlabor cultural organizations since they could now strike, so they initiated the ill-named “Operation Dixie” in 1946. Moreover, the SCHW had also begun to come under fire for their connections to the Communists. Thus, when an African American SCHW field representative accused the CIO organizers of racial attitudes akin to those of the AFL, Van A. Bittner

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(head of the CIO’s Southern Organizing Committee and an experienced United Mine Workers organizer in Kentucky and West Virginia) withdrew support. The twenty-eight thousand dollars in union contributions in 1945 dropped to under eighteen thousand in 1946, with the national office cutting off all donations in April (Krueger 142). Even as the SCHW’s membership would peak in 1946, their total income would be cut in half. Despite the outward conflicts and as a result of the direct collaboration between members of the CIO and the SCHW, Don West’s Clods was released in May 1946. Involved in defending the African American community since his days of activism (he was suspended from high school for protesting the showing of Birth of a Nation at the school), West’s poems unified class and race in terms of rural, working-class moral and religious rhetoric. Accordingly, the book served to articulate the commonality of purposes shared by the CIO and the SCHW. But West’s vision of justice, equality, and democracy—while directed at the situation in the South and Georgia—went far beyond the realm of polite resistance. He spoke of a spontaneous democracy that would arise when people gave aid to each other’s mutual suffering. The highly literate activists from the SCHW formed an influential readership of Clods. The books ordered by the conference were advertised in the November “Southern Farmer Issue” of the Southern Patriot to entice new subscribers with a free copy of West’s book for every three subscriptions ordered (“Christmas Offer”). In mid-1945, there were some ten thousand subscriptions to the Southern Patriot (Krueger 164), which sometimes published runs of as many as seventeen thousand copies (P. Sullivan 202). Highlighting issues critical to both middle-class progressives and the lower-class Southerners, the Southern Patriot published stories and data about interrelated social problems that could be pragmatically addressed through influencing political and judicial mechanisms: unequal education for the races, the need to raise the minimum wage, medical conditions, problems of women in the workplace, unionization, the poll tax, Negro veterans, support for farmers, white-only primaries, and so on. Each issue of the eight-page tabloid also dedicated a page to new books, including reviews of Margaret Walker’s For My People (January 1944), Lillian Smith’s Strange Fruit (March 1944), Howard Fast’s Freedom Road (October 1944), and Henrietta Buckmaster’s Deep River (November 1944). Attention to these texts and their authors’ direct involvement show that the members of the SCHW understood literature as an essential tool of social explanation and engagement. By late 1946 the conference had ten thousand members, the most in its brief history (Krueger 143). Thousands had joined at the behest of Mary McLeod Bethune, who undertook a speaking tour for the conference (137), and thousands joined because the SCHW established state committees to

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involve more nonprofessionals and nonintellectuals. This infusion of newly politicized, grassroots members had been a long-term goal of Mason, who had first raised it with the founding of the SCHW in 1938. In April 1945, Mason wrote to Clark Foreman, president of the SCHW, and warned, “I have a deep, uneasy feeling that plans are being made with too little reference to their effect on Southern membership.” In order to survive and be effective, Mason held that the SCHW must “really be a membership organization,” which it could not do “unless its roots are in Southern soil.” West could not have agreed more, except he was talking about clods rather than soil. Don West’s book was a powerful tool for illuminating non-Southerners, validating progressives, and activating new Southern members such as black and white factory workers and sharecroppers. Signaling his appreciation of Mason’s work, West dedicated the poem “My South” (36–39) to her. One of West’s most sensual pieces, the poem drifts over four pages, touching the Southern landscape wherein he writes of his love for those who toil—both of “You whose skin is ebony / . . . / and my own bleached skinned brothers” (34, 36) whose songs of “deep sorrow” (43) he wished to “tune . . . / Into keen blue blades” (48–49). Certainly, Mason would have been flattered by West’s dedication, maybe more so because the poem is also about blood and struggle, and its smooth description of landscape highlights the pain in the final, closely measured stanzas whose tight rhyme knits together anger, grief, violence, and hope. The promise of the poem, which began in such lush images of nature, is that people—“ebony” and “bleached”—will stop lynchings when they “clasp” hands “Bowed over a few charred bones” (73, 75). Significantly, Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps would republish the poem (minus the dedication to Mason) when they edited The Poetry of the Negro, 1746–1949: A Definitive Anthology (1949). When West was working as a school superintendent in northern Georgia, he had contacted Hughes, leading Hughes to promote West as a candidate for a Rosenwald Fellowship. Winning this fellowship allowed West to attend Columbia University, where he likely met Boni and Gaer.6 And the publication of Clods announced West’s entry into Atlanta in August 1946, as a professor of human understanding and citizenship at Oglethorpe University. Poetry and Progressives in Atlanta Oglethorpe University was a bold experiment designed to enact creative citizenship and democracy. Phillip Weltner—who had been the liberal regent of Georgia’s new university system until dismissed in 1934 by Governor Eugene Talmadge—had taken the presidency of Oglethorpe in 1944 after the previous president had led the school into bankruptcy and

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disaccreditation.7 With Oglethorpe, Weltner sought to heal the “schism of the soul” that had arisen in higher education between the practical and the spiritual ([1947], 4). By the time West arrived in the fall of 1946, the school had 166 students and was well on its way to establishing the five-hundredthousand-dollar endowment needed for accreditation. West’s professorship drew upon his skills as an artist, a preacher, and an organizer. He took the initiative to educate students and promote Oglethorpe, becoming a faculty adviser to the student newspaper, the Stormy Petrel, and speaking on the college’s behalf at local high schools. With the attention that swirled about him from the success of Clods, he promoted Oglethorpe at every opportunity. West had a heady time that September, when his book was displayed in the front windows of Atlanta bookstores. He would sign four hundred copies at a sitting and was interviewed as a “ ‘celebrity’ ” on the radio (West to Williams, Sept. 4, 1946). He had come a long way from “so damn many years scraping the bottom” with the small-run, low-profile editions of his earlier books (West to Horton, April 5, 1946). In a letter to Williams, West reveled that key members of the SCHW were asking him to become an executive board member: “Not that I am horsing to get such a place, but it always amuses me these days to have groups like that [ . . . ] come courting my affections. It is true these days even of the cp” (Tuesday AM [Sept. 1946]). West and Williams also were planning how they could reinforce each other’s positions through mutual advertising and distribution of Clods with books about Williams’s work. Notably, West had mailed Williams at least eight hundred copies of Clods from his personal stockpile at Lula: West’s investment in buying and distributing his own book was key to its success and making his reputation (West to Williams, Oct. 7, 1946 and Monday morning [Nov. 1946]). A month into his tenure West published a poem about “clean and holy” sexuality and citizenship in the school newspaper. Using West’s poem as an example, Phillip Weltner—the university’s president, who had long fought for academic freedom—wrote a detailed memo called “Liberty and Law” that asked faculty to mindfully represent Oglethorpe because they were raising funds needed for accreditation. He also noted that the school only had two hundred students, so they had to appeal to local high schools. In response, the next week West took his journalism students directly into the center of racial conflict in Atlanta, where they interviewed and wrote stories on the Columbians—a white fascist organization that held ferocious rallies in support of absolute segregation (“Columbian Menace”). In 1947, the Atlanta metropolitan area had about four hundred and fifty thousand residents, some third of whom were black, and 90 percent of blacks

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were confined to the same crowded areas (Bayor 161; Silver and Moeser 37). Thus, as overcrowding increased, wealthier blacks began to rent and buy housing where available, causing the cost of rent to rise, which forced the eviction of white tenants whose homes were sold to those blacks willing to purchase the property. White mobs led by the Columbians dynamited porches and stoned the homes and their residents. Moreover, white business leaders wanted to shift blacks away from downtown and confine them behind a commuter expressway (Stone 32). But after Governor Ellis Arnall abolished the poll tax in 1944 and courts struck down Georgia’s white-only primaries in 1945, an infusion of seventeen thousand black voters forced the mayor and his allies to compromise and agree to decrease Jim Crow, stop white-on-black violence, and permit black developers to build new residences (R. Holmes 52–53). Statewide, 135,000 black Georgians became registered to vote, but with the opposite results (Grant 36). Many whites rallied to Eugene Talmadge— the former governor whose racist policies Arnall struggled to reform. That July, the Talmadge Democrats mailed thousands of forms and instructed their recipients on how to challenge the voting rights of black registrants (Bernd 497). As a result, 16,097 black voters were purged and violence kept thousands more from voting (505). Moreover, Georgia’s electoral system judged winners by county rather than by popular vote, so while the candidate to whom Arnall had given his support received more popular votes than Talmadge, Talmadge won the election by winning twice as many counties. But in December, Talmadge died of cancer, and in a planned move, his son, Herman, usurped power from Arnall, using state police to evict him. And when these reactionary meteors began to fall, Don West stepped up to bat. In January 1947, West gave a radio address and called for political organization against the “Talmadge machine,” which West declared moved in “the Hitler pattern” and used the same language about Negroes in Georgia as Hitler had used against Jews. Against “the dust of prejudice in our eyes,” West called for educational opportunities, housing programs, jobs, and living wages, which “can only be achieved by guaranteeing them for everyone, including the Negro.” That February, the Southern Conference mailed out copies of the broadcast to its members, proclaiming, “Don West’s radio speech . . . should be read quickly by hundreds of thousands of people all over the country” (“Don West’s”). Such was West’s introduction as a popular political leader, from which he began organizing Georgian Progressives to support Henry A. Wallace. That summer Wallace toured the South, and at his final engagement in Washington, DC, which was sponsored by the Southern Conference, he declared the need to form a third party to oppose Truman’s antilabor, prowar

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policies. In anticipation, two days before the speech, House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) released a report citing the Southern Conference’s Communist influences, and Don West was one of the names mentioned. Such red-baiting caused the conference to lose half its members; so in November, Wallace returned South under the sponsorship (and for the benefit) of the Southern Conference. Although Weltner forbade West from introducing Wallace, thirty students from Oglethorpe under West’s guidance ushered Wallace’s speech in Atlanta, which was given at Wheat Street Baptist Church to an audience of more than three thousand, 60 percent of whom were black, “one of the largest nonsegregated gatherings in Atlanta’s history” (Lorence 134; P. Sullivan 245). Wheat Street was Atlanta’s largest black church, whose reverend W. H. Borders had been a key figure in the voting drive and now saw fit to have his church be a meeting place for progressive whites and Negroes. Wallace concluded his talk by discussing the flaring tensions between the United States and the USSR, emphasizing that red-baiting “is used by men whose great fear is democracy, not Communism” (“Henry A. Wallace”). The Communists, he pointed out, were just offering solutions to problems they did not create, and hence instead of persecuting them, Americans needed to “prove that we can produce abundantly and distribute fairly.” The week before, Ralph McGill, editor of the Atlanta Constitution, joined the fray, writing that the Southern Conference was a “Communistinfiltrated” organization whose officers bore the mentality of “Ku Kluxers.” On New Year’s Day 1948, when the Freedom Train rolled into Atlanta, Georgia Progressives, led by Don West, launched a movement to place Henry Wallace’s name on the Georgia ballot. The following day, the Constitution’s editorial praised Phillip Weltner’s success at Oglethorpe. West’s crevice between a rock and a hard place was growing ever more narrow. Then, in February, Rosa Lee Ingram and two of her sons—who were black sharecroppers—were put on death row after a one-day trial by an all-white jury, which convicted them of murdering a white sharecropper. Blacks all around the nation rallied against that “legal lynching” (Raymond 11). Georgia’s Citizen’s Defense Committee began its work under the chairmanship of Reverend Borders, and the NAACP sent in lawyers as did the Communistaligned Civil Rights Congress. Moreover, the same black lawyer who had snuck West out of Atlanta in 1934 wrote the introduction to a Daily Worker pamphlet about the Ingrams. The Communists and the NAACP were again, as with Scottsboro, fighting over the right to defend a client. This time, however, the NAACP won, and the judge commuted the death sentences to life imprisonment but denied a retrial. West became involved when he was asked, as the only white who might dare to do so, to speak at a rally in support of the Ingrams’ defense, and

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he speculated that doing so would cost him his job at Oglethorpe. West’s speech was given to “an almost all-black audience in Macon” (Lorence 136). In doing so, West publicly crossed the racial border and openly showed his allegiance to the cause along with the Community Party, the NAACP, the Civil Rights Congress, the Progressive Party, and Wallace who issued a public statement decrying Georgia’s prosecution of the case as “the epitome of the traditional oppression of Negro womanhood” (qtd in Lorence 137). It is unclear who organized the event, but knowing would be an important clue as to West’s allegiances—did he, for instance, speak for the Georgia Citizen’s Defense Committee at the behest of Reverend Borders? Or did he speak at the Wallace-for-President rally at the behest of the CRC? West spoke as a populist, a Progressive, and a Communist—which were not exclusive categories at all. West’s involvement in leftist politics was brought to the attention of university trustees and funders, necessitating Weltner to examine West’s politics. West denied any “connection” to “communist organization” for over ten years, so Weltner defended the faculty’s right to free speech and publicly honored West’s contract and paid his salary through August 1949 (qtd in Lorence 137).8 Nevertheless, West was not allowed to return to teach in the fall, not so much because of his defense of African Americans but because of his associations with Communists (137). His quiet dismissal came in purges, with faculty losing jobs all over the country. On May 8, the Progressives held their state convention in Macon, with West serving as executive vice chairman. That July, when crosses were burned in the front yard of Larkin Marshall, the Progressives’ Negro leader who was running for the U.S. senate, the Atlanta Daily World (the only daily Negro newspaper in the country) decried the act but did so only after stating its disagreement with the Progressives and questioning “the wisdom of [Marshall’s] candidacy” (“Let the People”). Later, the same newspaper called West “Oglethorpe’s pet poet,” and it refused to publish more than minimal materials about the Progressives. While violent support of segregation and Jim Crow was a daily experience for blacks in Georgia, the majority of the Negro reform elite in Atlanta, who had recently made such great gains, chose not to back the Progressives’ radical politics of full racial equality. On June 11, a few weeks before Paul Robeson visited Atlanta to support the Wallace campaign, McGill, the Constitution’s editor, unleashed another barrage, calling Robeson a “trouble maker and trouble hunter” (quoted in “Don West and”). The next week, McGill went after West, as the person in “executive charge” of the Georgia Wallace committee (“Don West and Wallace”). Writing that West refused to answer queries about his connections with the Communist Party, McGill cites the appearance of West’s

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name in the HUAC report on the Southern Conference and quotes the HUAC testimony about West’s appearance in the Daily Worker and in Party records. The following week on June 20, the day before the height of summer, Robeson appeared at Wheat Street Baptist Church and spoke to an interracial crowd of some fifteen hundred. McGill declared that the event was really “an anti-Ralph McGill evening” and reasserted Don West’s connections to the Communist Party (“Anger”). As the Progressive’s national convention in July approached, McGill, having identified West as the Achilles heel of the Progressive Party in Georgia, fired verbal arrows at West’s strongest and most vulnerable point: his poetry. In a late-June column, McGill (“Don West Signs”) explains that West published a poem called “Listen, I am a Communist” in the Daily Worker of March 13, 1934: “Do you, toilers of the South, Know me?” I am speaking. I, the poet, Don West, Communist, Bolshevik, Red——. In this and later columns, McGill lists West’s connections to Communists active in the region. McGill continued attacking West through the summer. Then, in anticipation of Wallace’s October speech to a gathering of radical ministers in Dalton, a Georgia mountain town, McGill reprinted West’s poem “Listen, I am a Communist” in its entirety (“All Right”). A revised version called “Listen, I’m an Agitator” (24) is the centerpiece of Clods. The poem modulates through proclamations of anger and resistance, punctuated with testimony to the suffering poverty of West’s grandfather and father. And the poem begins with an important shift: Listen . . . ! I’m an agitator — They call me “Red,” The color of Blood, And—“Bolshevik!” But do you of the toiling South Know me? (1–7)

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And as proof that he is “no foreigner,” West says that he was raised on the land where “my Daddy’s sweat / Salted down the red clay” (47, 66–67). From that point, he reasserts: And I’m an Agitator! And that means I want bread And homes And clothes And beauty For all the hollow-eyed babies. Against the sway of anger, grief, and love, the poem closes with the plea from this “poet / in overalls,” this “working man,” this “Mountaineer,” this “Agitator” for readers to listen (91–94). West must have taken great satisfaction in Wallace’s speech in Dalton, which was heard by over five thousand “poor, white mountain people” (Wigginton 197). And preach Wallace did—of Mammon, monopolies, and Wall Street; of cross-racial brotherhood between CIO workers and farmers. Spoke Wallace, “Ours is the old, old fight against the Golden Calf, against those who bend the knee to Baal, against the worshippers of Mammon, against the hate-mongers, the war-makers, those who divide men, Christian from Jew, American from Russian” (4). However, while realizing both West’s vision and McGill’s nightmare, Wallace’s rally did little good, for only 1,636 votes were cast for Wallace in Georgia (“The Vote”). Thus did West end the most high-profile moment in his life, when he fought for outright racial equality in the South. Conclusion After vigorous support of Wallace, Charles Boni left Boni & Gaer in 1948, and Gaer closed operations in 1950. Seeming to predict the demise of cultural and political distinctiveness, in 1944 Waldo Frank had warned Jews to preserve their “mystical disciplines”—which were woven into the daily fabric of “religious culture” that distinguished Jews—because the “democratic destiny of man is based primarily on the intuitive knowledge that God is . . . the seed of freedom” in each person (156). Thus, “when the Jews loses his distinctiveness, when willfully or blindly he merges into the surface civilization of America, he not only denies his own values but alienates himself from the root energy of his country” (149). Appropriately, Joseph Gaer would later write book after book about Judaism and become founder and director of Jewish Heritage Foundation, Beverly Hills, in 1958.

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Similarly, eleven days after the 1948 election, the SCHW’s educational arm (the Educational Fund) officially broke connections from the SCHW, which they felt had become too politicized. On November 20, 1948, at Thomas Jefferson’s home in Monticello, Virginia, the Fund brought together fifty people “who adopted a declaration of independence for America’s Negroes” (Krueger 190). The Fund would go on to become a central player in mobilizing whites to help with desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s. The day after the Fund’s declaration, the SCHW was disbanded and laid to rest by its old core of activists, including Myles Horton, Clark Foreman, and Virginia Durr. That same day, W. E. B. Du Bois’s lengthy essay “The Negro Since 1900: A Progress Report” appeared in the New York Times. Du Bois dedicates the majority of the essay to taking stock of how the situation of Negroes in 1948 measured against 1900: life-expectancy had increased from thirty-two to fifty-seven years; college enrollment had increased from 5,000 to 88,000; and in 1900 few African Americans voted outside of Northern cities, but in 1947 more than 2,500,000 blacks in the West and North voted, with 600,000 registered voters in twelve Southern states (24). The change in American attention to racial pluralism was readily shown through all three parties addressing Civil Rights in the 1948 elections. Perhaps Du Bois began by praising these advances because the majority of the New York Times’ readers were well-heeled whites. No doubt it is in consideration of that readership that, before Du Bois notes how much work remains to be done, he examines “the long record on the part of white Americans to help black folk.” Right next to the General Education Board, The Commission on Race Relations, the ACLU, the CIO’s Committee to Abolish Racial Discrimination, and the Rosenwald Fund, Du Bois wrote that the Southern Conference for Human Welfare “took a strong stand on civil and political rights for Negroes” (54). Of all those organizations, the SCHW was a remarkable for coordinating a far-flung networks of whites and blacks to confront racial discrimination and economic inequality in their extreme manifestations. Those foci gave common ground to a wide set of educators, activists, labor-organizers, mothers, preachers, lawyers, workers, academics, and artists with divergent concerns. Beginning his involvement with the SCHW in the second-half of its life, Don West perhaps more than any of the others saw his own identities and concerns reflected in the SCHW’s constituency and struggles. Clods melded those identities and struggles into an inspiring whole. Following Lucy Mason’s impetus, West attempted to bring the SCHW more directly into the lives of the people whose rights it fought for. Certainly, West’s own work in the 1940s as Southern (and Appalachian) preacher, teacher, poet,

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professor, and political activist sought to rouse Georgians to awareness of their mutual circumstance. Stripped of his professorship, West returned to the family farm in Douglasville, Georgia, where he lived with his family and peddled vegetables, rather than poems, in Atlanta where most of his customers were from the black community that valued the work he had done (Byerly 324; Lorence 146). McGill continued to publish columns condemning West, but the poet kept a low profile and his wife secured a job teaching school in Florida in 1949 and kept their two daughters with her, only returning to Georgia in the summer (Byerly 321; Lorence 145–147). West would weather the Cold War’s persecution and continued to publish prose and poetry, fight for justice, and educate the people, but never again would West—by virtue of the interplay of his poetry with a widespread coalition in crisis—wield the prestige he had held from 1946 to 1948. Nevertheless, Clods was woven into the very identity-narratives of the working class readers for whom West wrote. In a 1979 interview, when West was director of the Appalachian Folklife Center in Pipestem, West Virginia (where he lived from 1966 through 1982), he shared the following anecdote about reading and poetry: A few years ago I was out here on Bottom Creek just visiting with an old disabled miner . . . We were talking and he said, “I used to read a fellow named West.” And I said, “Well, tell me a little more about that.” And he said to his wife, “Go back there and get that book.” So she went back there and brought out an old dog-eared copy of Clods of Southern Earth. (K. Sullivan 56) That aged Appalachian miner is emblematic of the national working-class network in which the book circulated. As those readers organized labor unions and fought for civil rights in the postwar era, Clods—a book produced by Yiddish immigrants who embraced the cause of American equality and pluralism—was by their side. West would teach writing again at Antioch Appalachia in Beckley, West Virginia, in the mid-1970s, and in 1982 West End Press would bring out In a Land of Plenty: A Don West Reader. West’s life and work are spoken about as legend among activists and scholars who study and fight for Appalachia. One story shared by Bob Henry Baber, who studied with West in the early 1970s at Antioch Appalachia, catches the essence of what West’s work continues to mean: “Don was the bedrock, you could read his stuff and you could feel this deep, resonant, awesome, heavy, preachy, political stuff coming up through it” (8). He

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went on, “Don is writing that old time stuff, rhymed stuff, but Don is a force to be reckoned with and you can find his inf luence weaved through all [our] work” (25). For those poets, coming to self-awareness and discovering their voices in the mountains, West was the earth itself lifted forth. Many of those West mentored would form the core of the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative (SAWC) in 1976. Those writers and activists from all over Appalachia came together at the Highlander Center to answer the following questions: What is an Appalachian writer? What should be the balance between politics and art? How does a writer break that catch-22 that says no one can be published until they have published? Is it time for a new direction in style and content in mountain literature? Is writing a form of cultural revolution? Those same questions were initiated, ruminated, and answered by West, Still, Stuart, and Rukeyser. In 2009, members of SAWC keep answering those questions and inventing Appalachia with poems and stories of celebration and justice9. Not as obvious is how American pluralism has been defined by its circumlocutions through the Appalachian mountains, from the Spanish American War to the United State’s rise as a superpower. Actors as far-flung and diverse as Don West, Phillip Weltner, Charles Boni, Lucy Mason, Harold K. Guinzburg, James Still, Muriel Rukeyser, Pat Covici, Theodore Dreiser, B. A. Botkin, Alaine Locke, Horace Kallen, Josiah Royce, Henry Fairchild, and Justice Harlan—to name but a few—formed a network of allies across ethnic, racial, religious, geographic, and class lines. This dispersed ensemble validated diverse cultures whose participation in democracy and poetry, under the ever-increasing pressure of standardization, broadened and deepened both.

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Notes

Introduction 1.

2.

3. 4.

5.

Among hundreds of books that can be categorized as “Appalachian Studies,” interested readers should consult Henry D. Shapiro’s Appalachia on Our Mind (1978); John C. Inscoe’s “The Discovery of Appalachia: Regional Revisionism as Scholarly Renaissance,” in A Companion to the American South (2002): 369–386; John Alexander Williams’ Appalachia: A History (2002); and Rudy Abramson and Jean Haskell’s Encyclopedia of Appalachia (2006). The best bibliographies are “Marie Tedesco’s Selected Bibliography,” http:// www. appalachianstudies.org/resources/bibliographies/tedesco/index.php and “Appalachian Studies Bibliography, 1994–2004,” http://www.libraries. wvu.edu/appalachian/bibliography.htm. See Richard H. Brodhead, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (1993) and Stephanie Foote, Regional Fictions: Culture and Identity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2000). See Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse, Writing Out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and American Literary Culture (2003). Notably, Ohio University Press has recently started a series on ethnicity and gender in Appalachia. For a start on scholarship about African Americans in Appalachia, see William H. Turner and Edward J. Campbell, eds., Blacks in Appalachia (1985) and John C. Inscoe, ed., Appalachians and Race: The Mountain South from Slavery to Segregation (2001). Important scholarship also exists on other groups such as Cherokees and Appalachia’s Jewish population. Regarding whiteness in Appalachia, see Dwight B. Billings, Edwina Pendarvis, and Mary Kay Thomas, eds., “Appalachia via Whiteness and Racialization,” Journal of Appalachian Studies 10.1–2 (2004): 3–166. See James C. Klotter, “The Black South and White Appalachia,” in Blacks in Appalachia, edited by Turner and Campbell (1985): 51–67; Shannon H. Wilson, “Lincoln’s Sons and Daughters: Berea College, Lincoln Memorial University, and the Myth of Unionist Appalachia, 1866–1910,” in The Civil War in

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Appalachia: Collected Essays, edited by Noe and Wilson (1997): 242– 264; and Nina Silber, “ ‘What Does America Need So Much as Americans?’ Race and Northern Reconciliation with Southern Appalachia, 1870–1900,” in Appalachians and Race, edited by John Inscoe (2001): 245–258. 6. Johnson developed his theories at the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, England, in the 1970s. In league with contemporary international cultural theorists, Johnson has updated those theories in The Practice of Cultural Studies (2004).

1

Evangelizing an Anglo Equality (1883–1908)

1. See Shannon H. Wilson, “Lincoln’s Sons and Daughters: Berea College, Lincoln Memorial University, and the Myth of Unionist Appalachia, 1866–1910,” in The Civil War in Appalachia: Collected Essays, edited by Noe and Wilson (1997): 242–264. 2. This network of evangelical educators and missionaries represents a distinct subset of a group that the historian Ralph E. Luker in his The Social Gospel in Black and White has wisely called the “neo-abolitionists,” who helped to establish the Social Gospel and pluralism. 3. The history of the AMA’s work in the mountains is yet to be written, but the vast archival resources call for closer attention: see the American Missionary Archives at the Amistad Research Center, Tulane University, http:// amistadresearchcenter.org/ama-research.htm. 4. Regarding interpenetration of mountain and mainstream culture and economy as well as class diversity in the mountains, see Dwight B. Billings and Kathleen M. Blee’s The Road to Poverty: The Making of Wealth and Hardship in Appalachia (2000). 5. Rev. A. A. Myers and Mrs. A. A. Myers were the names that Aaron Arthur Myers and Ellen M. Myers (née Green) publicly used. 6. See McPherson’s The Abolitionist Legacy and Richardson’s Christian Reconstruction. For a fifty-year comparison of the four major mission societies’ budgets, see McPherson 147. 7. In addition, the AMA had started twenty graded schools and sixty-nine common schools (Beard 193; Luker 123). 8. Such a pattern of enrolment was normal for mission colleges. As related by McPherson, “Largely because of denominational rivalry there was a surfeit of black schools bearing the name of college or university. By 1895 at least 54 such schools existed in the United States even through only 22 of them offered genuine college-level courses [with] scarcely 750 students” (151). 9. Ellery Sedgwick—the scholar who compiled this list—leaves out Frost’s essay, just as many scholars have not been able to see Appalachia’s role in the larger American ethnic mosaic. 10. Donald Davidson (whose is discussed in chapters three and four) grew up in Giles County, some ninety miles to the southwest of the area about which Du Bois wrote.

Notes

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11. In March 1897, the New England Magazine published Barton’s “The Cumberland Mountains and the Struggle for Freedom” (65–87) that announced the nation’s need to provide educational and religious uplift for the (white) Southern mountaineers, who, Barton explained, had stood vehemently against slavery even before the founding of the Antislavery Society. 12. See President Kehr Papers and President Larry papers, LMU; and Howard to Kehr, August 23, 1900 (Howard Papers).

2 New York City’s Cultural Pluralists (1906–1930) 1. See Walker Gilmer’s Horace Liveright (1970), 1–19; George Hutchinson’s The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (1995), 342–386; Jonathan Freedman’s The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America (2000), 168–75; George Bornstein, Material Modernism (2001), 148–153; Catherine Turner’s Marketing Modernism between the Two World Wars (2003), 33–35 and 40–79; and James C. Davis’s Commerce in Color (2007), 189–191. 2. See Susanne Klingenstein’s Jews in the American Academy, 1900–1940 (1991): 34–50; Milton Konvitz’s “Horace M. Kallen,” in Carole S. Kessner’s The “Other” New York Jewish Intellectuals (1994): 144–159; Stephen Fredman’s A Menorah for Athena (2001): 106–13; and Victoria Hattam’s In the Shadow of Race (2007): 46–50, 54–62, 73–76. 3. Locke argued this case in his 1935 essay “Values and Imperatives” that was published in an anthology of pragmatist philosophy edited by Horace Kallen and Sindey Locke. 4. Even Donald Davidson paid this essay close heed as shown by a heavily annotated copy in his papers at Vanderbilt. 5. A copy of the manuscript, which MacKaye had his wife type, is held with MacKaye’s papers at Dartmouth College. 6. The New Citizenship: A Civic Ritual (1915) was commissioned by the mayor of New York City as a ceremony for newly naturalized citizens at the City College Stadium, a school whose students were primarily Jewish.

3

Reactionary Regionalism versus Critical Quarterlies (1925–1945)

1. For an excellent overview of regionalism, see Robert Dorman’s Revolt of the Provinces: The Regionalist Movement in America, 1920–1945 (1993). 2. See Frederick J. Hoffman, Charles Allen, and Carolyn Ulrich’s “Regionalism and the Little Magazine” in their book The Little Magazine: A History and Bibliography (1946), 128–147. 3. The conflict around unionizing mills in Gastonia, North Carolina, united Appalachian, feminist, and labor identities in two important 1932 novels that portrayed mountain farm culture, the family’s migration to mill towns,

234

4.

5.

6.

7.

●

Notes

the conflict of cultural identities, and the transformation of mountain farmers into union radicals: Olive Tilford Dargan’s Call Home the Heart (authored under the penname of Fielding Burke) and Grace Lumpkin’s To Make My Bread. The twelve Southerners therein, while by no means unified, would develop their various positions on Agrarianism throughout the 1930s. Through the leadership of Ransom, Tate, and Warren, one strand gave rise to the New Criticism. Other contributors headed in different directions: Donald Davidson, a professor of literature at Vanderbilt, proved the conservative regionalist extraordinaire; and H. C. Nixon joined with progressive forces to attack tenant farming and help build the progressive, cross-racial Southern Conference for Human Welfare. The most important scholarship on the Agrarians includes John Stewart’s The Burden of Time: The Fugitives and Agrarians (1965); Paul V. Murphy, The Rebuke of History: The Southern Agrarians and American Conservative Thought (2001) and Paul K. Conkin’s The Southern Agrarians (2001). Investing those connections more closely than I have room to here, Walter Kalaidjian has clearly laid out the connection between the Agrarian’s racialized nationalism and the New Critic’s racialized literary theory. See his “Marketing Southern Poetry and the Southern Public Sphere” in Marketing Modernisms: Self-Promotion, Canonization, Rereading, edited by Dettmar and Watt (1996): 297–319. Established in 1917, the Julius Rosenwald Fund also proved a central means of distributing resources and assembling networks of actors around issues of Negro and Southern welfare.

4 1.

2.

3.

4.

Racing the Land with Jesse Stuart’s Man with a Bull-Tongue Plow (1934)

These books are nearly equally split between poetry (eight), short stories (twelve), novels (eight), juvenile novels (eight), autobiography (eight), and essays (eight). See, for instance, Everatta Love Blair’s Jesse Stuart: His Life and Works (1967), Ruel E. Foster’s Jesse Stuart (1968), or J. R. LeMaster’s Jesse Stuart: Kentucky’s Chronicler-Poet (1980), the best aesthetic appreciation of Stuart to date. Stuart’s tenant farmer father had bought a fifty-acre farm in the early 1920s. Additionally, Greenup county had only one “Colored” farm owner (who owned just thirteen acres) and two Colored tenant farmers (who worked five acres apiece), which avoided the awkwardness of Davidson’s native Giles County, just north of the Alabama border where about 40 percent of farmers were either African American or tenants. Halperin’s derives her cultural evaluation from data she gathered in 1980s; nevertheless, her observations about “the Kentucky way” are readily applied to Stuart’s Kentucky sixty years earlier.

Notes 5.

6.

7.

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235

See, John Crowe Ransom, Foreword to The Noise that Time Makes by Merrill Moore (1929); Louis Untermeyer “Merrill Moore” in Sonnets Reprinted from the Sewanee Review, 1928–1935, by Merrill Moore [Sewanee Review Jan. 1935] (1938): 34–36; and William Carlos Williams’ “Merrill Moore’s Sonnets” in Sonnets From New Directions by Merrill Moore (1938). Stuart reassembled 139 poems for the manuscript of Songs of a Mountain Plowman in 1969 (although some later poems were included), but it would not be published until after his death in 1986. It is important to note that Stuart (in publications in the late 1930s after he visited Europe on a Guggenheim fellowship in 1938) defended Jewish rights.

5 “Authentic Folk Feeling” in James Still’s Hounds on the Mountain (1937) 1. 2.

3.

See Ted Olson and Kathy Olson, eds, James Still: Critical Essays on the Dean of Appalachian Literature (2007). For example, see Allen Eaton, “Mountain Handicrafts: Their Importance to the County and to the People in the Mountains Homes,” July 1930: 22–30 or Mary Ela, “Made by Hand,” Fall 1940: 1–9. Grover refers to Radclyff Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928). Originally published in England, when the public reacted to the scandal over its portrayal of lesbianism, American publishers scrambled for rights. Donald Friede was first, having secured a ten-thousand-dollar loan (an unheard of amount), an investment whose returns allowed for Covici to expand the list’s number of leftists texts (Friede 93–94).

6 Rebinding “The Book of the Dead” into Muriel Rukeyser’s U.S. 1 (1938) 1.

2.

The same day that Frank’s group came to Kentucky, a young Jewish National Miners Union organizer was killed in Harlan. After his body was returned to New York, an estimated ten thousand people gathered at the Bronx Coliseum, where his body was set forth in the boxing ring where “a gigantic picture” of him “surveyed his mortal effigy” (Ross 181). Because scholars have depended too strongly on Rukeyser’s stated poetics rather than on her life in the literary field, they have had difficulty approximating Rukeyser’s audience. When evaluating “The Book of the Dead,” critics espouse its readership in terms of Rukeyser’s hope for her poetry to activate a “multiplicity” of readers through expressing the “tension between the parts” of society in an “organic structure” (Rukeyser, Life 211). Rukeyser continues, “Then the multiplicities sing, each in his own voice. Then we understand that there is not meaning but meanings; not liberty but liberties. And multiplicity is available to all.” Such a vision is certainly worth realizing, but rather than analyzing how

236

3.

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Notes

“The Book of the Dead” situates the reader or determining who the readers were, critics have created an ideal audience based on Rukeyser’s poetics. Under the pseudonym Bernard Allen, Phillipa Allen had published the first articles about the Gauley Bridge disaster in the New Masses: “Two Thousand Dying on a Job” (Jan. 15, 1935: 18–19) and “How the Tunnel Workers Lived” (Jan. 22, 1935: 13–14). Rukeyser’s endnotes cite that testimony was taken from “Hearings before a Subcommittee of the House of Labor” (146), and she thanks Allen for making the poem possible (147).

7 1.

2. 3.

4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

The Tight Rope of Democracy and Don West’s Clods of Southern Earth (1946)

The two big sellers in 1946 were The Great Conspiracy Against Russia by Michael Sayers and Albert Eugene Kahn, which sold 161,273 copies that year, and Wind in the Olive Trees (about Franco) by Abel Plenn, which quickly sold fifty thousand copies (“Boni & Gaer”). The titles in the book are printed in bold and italics, a typography that continually emphasizes the book’s energy. The poem was first published in New Masses (Aug. 27, 1935: 13). The previous issue of New Masses contained the article “Way Down South” that contextualized the poem by writing about the prison system in Georgia, the current state of Angelo Herndon’s defense, and black miners’ struggle to unionize in Birmingham, Alabama. West had long published in Communist or Communist-influenced venues. Granville Hicks had included two of West’s poems in Proletarian Literature in the United States, An Anthology (1935). The narrative related in this chapter is ably supplemented by James J. Lorence’s careful examination of West life during this period. See A Hard Journey: The Life of Don West (2008): 118–142. See Embree (1949) 143 and 153, as well as letters from Don West in Langston Hughes’s papers. For more on Philip Weltner, a progressive educator who deserves significant attention, see Weltner’s Recollections (1970) and Noell Wannamaker, “ ‘Mr. Anonymous, Jr.’: Philip Weltner and Uplift from Progressivism to the Great Society.” Journal of the Georgia Association of Historians 16 (1995): 16–51. West had been CP organizer from 1933 through 1937, when he was dismissed by the party because of his resistance to following their mandates (Lorence 38–38, 73). Nevertheless, West spent the rest of his years striving to realize his egalitarian ideal, which often meant that he worked closely with CP members For more on the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative see http://www. sawc.us. Their occasional journal is called Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, which acts as an evolving anthology of their work. Also see New Ground, eds. Donald Askins and David Morris Jenkins, KY: Southern Appalachian Writers' Co-operative, 1977 and Wind 88 (2002): 74–161.

Bibliography

Archive

In Citation Abbreviation

Dean Cadle Papers, 1919–1986, 1M87M46, Special Collections and Archives, University of Kentucky.

Cadle Papers

William Goodell Frost, 1892–1920 (RG 3.03), Berea College Archives, Berea College Special Collections & Archives, Berea, Ky.

Frost Papers

Donald Davidson Papers, Vanderbilt University, Special Collections.

Davidson Papers

Highlander Research and Education Center, Archives Wisconsin Historical Society.

Highlander Archives

O. O. Howard Papers, George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections & Archives, Bowdoin College Library, Brunswick, Maine.

Howard Papers

Papers of the Institute of Public Affairs, University of Virginia 1927–1953 (RG2/4/1.891), Special Collections, University of Virginia Library.

Institute Papers

James Still Papers, 1915–1997, m87M12, Special Collections and Archives, University of Kentucky.

Still Papers (Kentucky)

James Still Manuscripts and Correspondence, 61st02, Department, of Special Collections and Archives, Camden–Carroll Library, Morehead State University

Still Papers (Morehead)

M. H. Ross Papers, Southern Labor Archives, Special Collections Department, Pullen Library. Georgia State U.

Ross Papers

Oglethorpe University Archives, Weltner Library, Oglethorpe University, Atlanta, Georgia.

Oglethorpe Archives Continued

238

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Bibliography

Archive

In Citation Abbreviation

Papers of the Virginia Quarterly Review, 1925–1935 (RG 24/3/1.391) Special Collections, University of Virginia Library.

VQR Papers

Papers of Muriel Rukeyser. Library of Congress.

Rukeyser Papers

Southern Conference for Human Welfare, Atlanta University Center, Robert W. Woodruff Library.

SCHW Papers

Jesse Stuart Collection, Special Collections, Murray State University.

Stuart Collection

Archives, Jesse Stuart Foundation, Ashland, KY.

Stuart JSF Archives

Claude C. Williams Papers, 1929–1979, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Water P. Reuther Library.

Williams Papers

Abbreviations for Consistently Cited Titles AMA MWBTP NYT VQR

American Missionary Association Man with a Bull-Tongue Plow New York Times Virginia Quarterly Review

Aaron, Daniel. Writers on the Left. 1961. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977. Abramson, Rudy and Jean Haskell, eds. Encyclopedia of Appalachia. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 2006. Agee, James and Walker Evans. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1941. “Agreement.” Rukeyser Contact with Viking Press. Rukeyser Papers, Part II, Box 5, Folder “Curtis, Brown Ltd.” Allen, James Lane. “Mountain Passes of the Cumberland.” Harpers New Monthly Magazine (Sept. 1890): 561–576. “American Book Production, 1937.” Publishers’ Weekly, Jan. 15, 1938: 210. Anderson, Sherwood. Beyond Desire. New York: Liveright, 1932. ———.Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life. New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1919. Arnow, Harriette. Mountain Path. New York: Convici·Friede, 1936. Askins, Donald and David Morris, eds. New Ground. Jenkins, KY: Southern Appalachian Writers' Co-operative, 1977. Avery, Fred B. “Board of Directors.” 1926. Hanging files. LMU Archives. Ayers, Edward L. “A Southern Chronicle: The Virginia Quarterly Review and the American South, 1925–2000.” VQR 76.2 (2000): 189–202.

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Baber, Bob Henry. Interview with Chris Green. Mar. 14, 1991. Conscientizaçao: A Theory of Community in Little Magazines. Thesis, Gaines Center for the Humanities, U of Kentucky, 1991. Banard, John. From Evangelicalism to Progressivism at Oberlin College, 1866–1917. [Columbus]: Ohio State UP, 1969. Barr, Stringfellow. Letters to Donald Davidson. Davidson Papers, Box 1, Folder 15. ———. Letters to Jesse Stuart. VQR Papers, Box 42, Folder Correspondence with Jesse Stuart 1932–1935. ———. “Round Table.” July 9, 1931. Institute Papers, Box 24, Folder 83. ———. “Shall Slavery Come South?” VQR 6.4 (1930): 481–494. ———. “The Uncultured South.” VQR 5.2 (1929): 192–200. Bayor, Ronald H. Race: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Atlanta. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1996. Beard, Augustus Field. A Crusade of Brotherhood, a History of the American Missionary Association. Boston: Pilgrim Press, 1909. Becker, Jane S. Selling Tradition: Appalachia and the Construction of an American Folk, 1930–1940. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1998. Beleman, Ludwig. My War with the United States. New York: Viking, 1937. Belfrage, Cedric. A Faith to Free the People. New York: Dyrden Press, 1944. Benét, Stephen Vincent. Foreword. Theory of Flight. By Muriel Rukeyser. New Haven: Yale UP, 1935. 5–6. Benét, William Rose. “Four American Poets.” Review of U.S. 1. Saturday Review of Literature, April 30, 1938: 19. ———. “Poetry in America Today.” Saturday Review of Literature, Aug. 10, 1940: 3–4, 17. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. 217–264. Bennett, Tony. Culture: A Reformer’s Science. London: Sage Publications, 1998. Berea College v. Commonwealth. 1906 Ky. Lexis 139. 1–34. Court of Appeals of Kentucky. June 12, 1906. Berea College v. Com. of Kentucky. 211 U.S. 45. 45–70. Supreme Ct. of the U.S. Nov. 9, 1908. Bernd, Joseph L. “White Supremacy and the Disenfranchisement of Blacks in Georgia, 1946.” Georgia Historical Quarterly 66.4 (1982): 492–513. Best, Marshall. “In Books, They Call it Revolution.” Dædelus 92 (1963): 30–41. ———. “The Viking Years.” In McCullough: 368–407. ———. Letters to James Still. 14.5. Still Papers (Morehead), Box 14, Folder 5. “Best Sellers of 1934.” Publishers’ Weekly, Dec. 15, 1934: 2154. “Best Sellers of 1939.” Publishers’ Weekly, Jan. 20, 1940: 211, 217. Billings, Dwight B. and Kathleen M. Blee. The Road to Poverty: The Making of Wealth and Hardship in Appalachia. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2000. Blackmur, R. P. “Horace Gregory’s Poems.” Review of Poems 1930–1940 by Horace Gregory. Decision 1.5 (1941): 65–67.

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———. Let My People Go: The Story of the Underground Railroad and the Growth of the Abolition Movement. New York: Harper & Bros, 1941. Burger, Nash K. “Homespun Poems of the South.” Review of Clods of Southern Earth. New York Times Book Review, July 1, 1946: 22. Burke, Fielding. Call Home the Heart, A Novel. London: Longmans, Green, 1932. Burnshaw, Stanley. “The Poetry Camps Divide.” New Masses, July 31, 1934: 21–23. Burnside, Jacqueline. “Suspicion Versus Faith: Negro Criticisms of Berea College in the Nineteenth Century.” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 83.3 (1985): 237–266. Byerly, Victoria Morris. “What Shall a Poet Sing? The Living Struggle of the Southern Poet and Revolutionary Don West.” Diss. Boston College, 1994. Cadle, Dean. “Man on Troublesome.” Yale Review 57 (1968): 236–255. ———. “Pattern of a Writer: Attitudes of James Still.” Appalachian Journal 15.2 (1988): 104–143. ———. “Reviews of James Still Works, Hounds on the Mountain.” From manuscript of “Man on Troublesome.” 208–211. Cadle Papers, Box 8, Folder 2. Caldwell, Erskine and Margaret Bourke-White. You Have Seen Their Faces. New York: Viking, 1937. Campbell, Olive D. “Testing Æ’s Philosophy.” Mountain Life and Work, April 1931: 2–4. Carpenter, John A. “Architects and Builders of a Living Memorial.” Lincoln Herald 59.1 (1957): 6–13. ———. Sword and Olive Branch: Olive Otis Howard. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1964. Cerf, Bennett. At Random: The Reminiscences of Bennett Cerf. New York: Random House, 1977. Chamberlain, John. “Books of the Times.” NYT, Dec. 28, 1934: 19. Chambers, Clarke A. Paul U. Kellogg and the Survey; Voices for Social Welfare and Social Justice. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1971. Chapman, Maristan. The Happy Mountain. New York: Viking, 1928. ———. Homeplace. New York: Viking, 1929. ———. The Weather Tree. New York: Viking, 1931. “Charles Boni, Publisher, Dies.” NYT, Feb. 15, 1969: 27. Cherniack, Martin. The Hawk’s Nest Incident: America’s Worst Industrial Disaster. New Haven: Yale UP, 1986. Christman, Henry E. “Poet Looms Powerfully.” Review of MWBTP. Knickerbocker Press (Albany, NY): 24. “Christmas Offer.” Southern Patriot, Nov. 1946: 7. Clement, Rufus E. “This Side of Jordan.” Review of Deep River by Henrietta Buckmaster. Phylon 5.4 (1944): 386–387. Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988. “Clods of Southern Earth.” Review of Clods of Southern Earth. Mountain Life and Work, Fall 1946: 27.

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———. “The Trend of Literature: A Partisan View.” Culture in the South. Ed. W. T. Couch. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1934. 183–210. ———. “Wither Dixie?—Mr. Barr and Mr. Ransom in the Great Debate at Richmond.” Chattanooga News (Chattanooga, TN), Nov. 22, 1930: 25. Davidson, Donald, and Allen Tate. The Literary Correspondence of Donald Davidson and Allen Tate. Ed. John Tyree Fain and Thomas Daniel Young. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1974. Davis, James C. Commerce in Color: Race, Consumer Culture, and American Literature, 1893–1933. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2007. Davis, Lambert. Letters to Jesse Stuart. VQR Papers, Box 42, Folder Correspondence with Jesse Stuart, 1932–1935. ———. “The Green Room.” VQR 11 (April 1935): ii–iv. Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. New York: Verso, 1996. Dettmar, Kevin J. H. and Stephen Watt, eds. Marketing Modernisms: Self-Promotion, Canonization, Rereading. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1996. Diner, Hasia R. A Time for Gathering: The Second Migration, 1820–1880. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992. “Donald Friede, a Senior Editor of Double Day & Co., Dies at 64.” NYT, May 31, 1965: 17. “Don West’s Radio Speech ‘Georgia Crisis.’ ” Southern Patriot, April 1947: 8. Dorman, Robert L. Revolt of the Provinces: The Regionalist Movement in America, 1920–1945. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1993. Dos Passos, John. “Free Speech Speakin’s.” Student Review, Jan./Feb. 1932: 5–6. Draper, Theodore. “Communists and Miners 1928–1933.” Dissent 19 (1972): 371–392. “Dr. Horace Kallen, Philosopher, Dies.” NYT, Feb. 16, 1974: 66. “Dr. Ransom Charges Barr’s ‘Regulated’ Industrialism Would End in Communism.” Times-Dispatch (Richmond, VA), Nov. 15, 1930: 1, 2. Du Bois, W. E. B. Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace. New York: Harcourt, Brace 1945. ———. “The Negro Since 1900: A Progress Report.” New York Times Sunday Magazine, Nov. 21, 1948: 24, 54–59. Duke, David C. Writers and Miners: Activists and Imagery in America. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2002. Dunbar, Anthony. Against the Grain: Southern Radicals and Prophets: 1929–59. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1981. “Dutton Royalties Statement for Jesse Stuart.” Oct. 31, 1934. JSF Archives. Eaton, Allen. “Mountain Handicrafts: Their Importance to the County and to the People in the Mountains Homes.” Mountain Life and Work July 1930: 22–30. Edman, Irwin. Letter to James Still. 28 March 1940. Still Papers (Kentucky), Box “Correspondence,” Folder “1940s.” Eisenberg, Esther. Letter to Muriel Rukeyser. Nov. 9, 1939. Rukeyser Papers, Part I, Box 12, Folder “V Misc.” Ela, Mary. “Made by Hand.” Mountain Life and Work Fall 1940: 1–9.

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Index

abolitionists, 17, 23, 26, 90, 92, 203 evangelical, 9 See also neo-abolitionists A. & C. Boni (publishing house, 1923–30), 43, 44, 45, 49, 56, 57, 204 African Americans, 2, 4, 10, 18, 22, 28 Appalachians, compared with, 38, 85 folk, as, 57, 65, 85, 87 Georgia, 164–5, 225; political empowerment, 222–5 passim Gullah, 10, 60 hatred against, 215, 222–5 higher education, 17, 23, 36–7, 38–9, 49, 119: American Missionary Society, 18, 24–5, 28. See names of specific schools; See also under Harvard intellectuals, 58, 92, 202 lynching, 92, 202, 206, 220, 223 miners, 179, 181, 182, 185, 236n3 “Negro Problem, The,” 47, 57, 92, 202 1948, in, 225–6 poets, 4, 119, 220 religion, 19, 223–4 representations, 67, 87, 91, 164: Rukeyser, Muriel, 165–6, 175–81; West, Don, 202, 205–7, 216, 220 rights, 18, 19, 20, 30–1, 203, 223, 227, 228

settlement schools, 134 Studies, 97 See also Du Bois, W. E. B.; education, interracial; Locke, Alain; “separate but equal” under pluralism; See also under American Missionary Association; Berea College Affrilachian Poets, 4 AFL. See American Federation of Labor Agee, James, 159, 166 agency, 5 arts, 56 education, 23 political, 159. See also Southern Conference for Human Welfare pluralism, 6, 41, 59, 228, 229 Rukeyser, Muriel, 168, 175, 183, 186–7, 189 value transformation, 1, 7 West, Don, 214–16, 220 agrarian lifestyle, 76, 82, 84, 137–8 Kentucky way, the, 103–4, 105–6, 120–2, 234n4 Agrarians. See Nashville Agrarians Alabama, 18, 29, 80, 125, 137, 234n2 Birmingham, 92–3, 236n3 Scottsboro, 164–5 Tuskegee, 134 Albert and Charles Boni (publishing house, 1914–15), 43, 51, 57 Alexander’s Magazine, 38

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Alfred A. Knopf (publisher), 44, 52, 103, 144 Allen, James Lane, 3, 32, 42, 133, 138 Amburgey, Jethro, 132, 140 American Anti-Slavery Society, 23 American Association, Limited, The, 32–3 American Dilemma: The Negro Problem in Modern Democracy (Mydral), 202 American Federation of Labor, 218 American Jewish Committee, 143, 158 American Mercury, 11, 63, 90 American Missionary, 18, 20, 23, 60 American Missionary Association, 9, 17–28 passim, 133, 134, 198 African American education, 18, 24–5, 28 culturalism, 19, 23, 24 Lincoln Memorial University, 35, 36 values, 19, 23 See also Berea College American Regionalism (Odum), 69 American Review, 70, 90–1, 100 Amistad Mutiny, 198 Anderson, Sherwood, 60, 76, 77, 144, 145, 163, 164 Anglo Americans Anglo-Saxonism, 4, 9, 27, 29, 32–3, 37–9, 115, 118, 123, 127 culturalism, 19, 23, 24, 29–30, 39 culture, 54–5, 56 nativism, 5, 11, 27, 28–30, 43, 97, 116 naturalization, Anglo Appalachian. See under Appalachia See also sonnets; whiteness anti-colonialism, 145 Anti-Imperialist League, 37 anti-modernity. See under modernity Antioch Appalachia (college), 228 Appalachia, 67 African Americans, 231n4–5

African Americans, compared with, 38, 85 American identity, roots to, 28–30, 61 Anglo-Saxons, as, 2, 9, 12, 29, 116, 123, 167, 181 anti-slavery, as, 13, 19, 119, 203, 215, 233n11 authenticity: Atlantic literary tradition, 236–9; local color, 127; national essence, 118; Rukeyser, Muriel, 179; Still, James, 125, 132, 148, 159 Civil War, 33, 174, 231n5 culture, 19–22, 28–30, 61–2: “Kentucky” way, 103–4, 105–6, 120–1, 234n4 exploitation, raw-resource, 2, 4, 11, 19, 21, 32–3, 66, 134. See also coal; silicosis folk, as, 10, 64, 85: primitivism, 64, 85, 114, 127, 138, 156 geography, 29, 85 handicrafts, 29, 118, 127, 134, 135–6, 235n2 higher education. See names of various schools literary field, in, 41–2, 50, 71, 118, 125, 138–9, 228–9 migration, 76, 135, 136 mountain whites, as, 4, 9, 18–23 music and song, 63, 132–3 naturalization, Anglo Appalachian, 97, 119: Still, James, 125, 140–2, 147, 149; Stuart, Jesse, 97, 99, 104, 107, 113, 116–19: West, Don, 215, 225 pioneers, as, 2: Allen, James Lane, 32; American, consumption of, 118; American Missionary Association, 19–20; Dos Passos, John, 163; Frost, William Goodell, 39–40; Hindman Settlement School, 135; local

Index color, 139; MacKaye, Percy, 60; Rukeyser, Muriel, 174, 184; Still, James, 138, 149; Stuart, Jesse, 107, 114, 116–18; West, Don, 216 racial composition, 2, 4 race, 231n4 regionalism (literature), 4 religion, 22 representations, 2, 28–30, 41, 61, 163–4, 166. See also Clods of Southern Earth, Man with a Bull-Tongue Plow, and U.S. 1 Scotch Irish, as, 2, 35, 122, 149 speech, 29, 60, 61, 65, 163, 175 Southerners, as, 30, 231n4 whiteness, 10, 11, 12, 231n4–5 See also Hindman Settlement School; Rukeyser, Muriel; Still, James; Stuart, Jesse; West, Don Appalachian Heritage, 153 Appalachian Studies, 4, 97, 123, 125, 159, 231n1 Appalachian Writers Workshop, 155 Arnall, Ellis, 222 Arnow, Harriette Simpson, 142 Atlanta Constitution, 92, 205, 210, 224–5 Atlanta Daily World, 224 Atlanta University, 18, 25, 203 “Atlantic Group, The” (magazines), 28, 127 Atlantic Monthly, 12, 28, 37–8, 42, 115, 127, 138–9 See also Weeks, Edward See also under Still, James Atlantic Monthly Press, 42, 127, 139, 148 Auden, W. H., 118, 123 audiences, 1, 6–7 African American, 59 American Mercury, 103 B. W. Huebsch, 145 Boni & Gaer, 204–5 Covici·Friede, 142, 171 E. P. Dutton, 113

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educated, 91, 118, 119 folk, 89 Jewish, 233n6 leftist, 10, 12, 140, 142 liberal, northeastern, 12, 23, 27, 28, 29–30, 43, 127 Mountain Life and Work, 136, 208 middle class, 89, 113, 126, 151 New Masses, 209–10 New Republic, 210 New York City, 100, 113 New York Times, 207, 227 poetry, 192–6, 203 popular, 11, 115, 117, 118, 122, 192 Popular Front, 161 settlement schools, 62, 133 Southern, 209 Southern, white middleclass, 73, 101, 85–9 passim, 203 Southern, working class, 203, 207, 208 Socialist, 51 Virginia Quarterly Review, 73, 101 working class, 12, 217 Austin, Mary, 61, 64, 69 authenticity, 3–4, 69, 181 See also under Appalachia authors European, 39, 52, 144–7 passim audience choice, 88, 89 New Critical, 191 modernist, 77, 117, 144, 145, 163–4 leftist, 163–4, 169, 171, 174, 192, 194 Southern, 87–9 subject matter, 82 Avery, Fredrick B., 33 Baber, Bob Henry, 228 ballads folk-poetry, as, 101, 116, 123 narrative, Appalachian cultural, 106, 107, 121–2 study of, 62

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ballads, poetic form, 129, 130, 166, 177, 205 Barr, Stringfellow, 70–6 passim, 101, 103, 104 debate with Ransom, 75–6 “Shall Slavery Come South?” 75 Barton, William E., 35 Becker, Jane S., 136 Benét, Stephen Vincent, 166–7, 192 Benét, William Rose, 149, 172, 192, 193, 194 Bennett, Tony, 5 Berea College, 9, 17, 18, 21, 24, 34–5, 85, 92, 134 enrollment, 25, 39 model for interracial college, 25, 26 mountain whites, 27, 28–30 racial makeup, 25, 26–7, 38–9 segregation mandated, 30–1 Berea College v. Commonwealth, 31, 55 Berea College v. Com. of Kentucky, 31 Berea Quarterly, 27 Best, Marshall, 9, 147–8 passim, 153, 154, 197 Bethune, Mary McLeod, 202, 219 Bishop, John Peele, 89 Bittner, Van A., 218 Blair Mountain, 60 Blowing Rock School of English, 142, 152 Boaz, Franz, 69 Boni, Albert, 10, 51–2 See also A & C Boni; Albert and Charles Boni; Boni and Liveright Boni, Charles, 10, 41, 229 A. & C. Boni, 45, 57 Albert and Charles Boni, 43, 51 Boni & Gaer, 13, 45, 204, 226 Charles Boni Paper Back Book Club, 45, 204 Boni and Gaer, 13, 45, 204, 226 sales, 204–5, 235n1 Boni and Liveright, 43, 44, 52, 171 Bontemps, Arna, 220

Book and Magazine Guild, 171 Bookman, 90 Borders, W. H., 223, 224 Bornstein, George, 5 Botkin, B. A., 10, 62–6, 85, 87–9 passim, 229 Bread Loaf Writers Conference, 151, 153 Brooks, Cleanth, Jr., 89, 90, 91 Brown, John, 24, 161, 169, 174, 183 Brown, Sterling, 67, 202 Brown, Thomas Edward, 62 Buckmaster, Henrietta, 203, 219 Bureau of American Indians, 60 Burnshaw, Stanley, 193 B. W. Huebsch (publishing house), 51, 60, 143, 144–5 caste, 20, 24, 54 Caldwell, Erskine, 89, 91, 114, 148, 151 Cather, Willa, 3, 70 Cerf, Bennett, 44 Chamberlain, John, 123 Chapman, Maristan (Mary and John Chapman), 85, 138, 139 Charles Boni Paper Back Book Club, 45, 204 Chief Joseph, 34 Child, Francis James, 62 Chinese Americans, 18, 60 Chesnutt, Charles, 3 Cincinnati (OH), 83, 145 CIO. See Congress of Industrial Organizations citizenship, 24, 37–8, 65 Civil Rights Act of 1875, 20 Civil Rights Congress (Communist), 223 Clement, Rufus E., 203 Clifford, James, 3 Clods of Southern Earth, 1, 13; African Americans, 202, 206, 216, 220 Appalachia, 215

Index audiences, 1, 203, 205, 210, 213, 218, 227, 228 audience, People’s Institute for Applied Religion, 211–13 audience, script for, 215–16 audience, Southern, working-class, 215–16, 219 Boni & Gaer, 199, 204–5 cost, 213 design, 200, 201, 209, 210, 235n2 distribution, 202, 211, 213, 221 forms, poetic, 205–6, 209, 221 naturalization, Anglo Appalachian, 214–15, 225 overview, 207 publication, 87, 213 readings, by West, 208, 221 reception, 87 review, con, 208 reviews, pro, 205–7, 209–11 religion in, 212–13 sales, 202, 208, 210 See also social life of poetry under West, Don See also titles of specific poems under West, Don coal, 60, 83, 85, 130–1, 173–4, 179 strikes, 12, 60, 67, 163–4, 218 unionization, 174, 185 Collins, Seward, 90 Columbia University, 53, 92 Appalachian authors, 154, 220 Jews, educated at, 44, 45, 45, 62, 143, 144 Jews, excluded from, 43 commodification. See under modernity communism, 76, 211, 218 Communists, U.S., 163–4, 193, 223 See also under Muriel, Rukeyser; West, Don Congregationalists, 23, 34 Congress of Industrial Organizations, 171, 185, 202, 216–19, 226, 227

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Political Action Committee, 204, 216–17 Conkin, Paul, 90 Core, George, 78 Couch, W. T., 11, 70, 86–7, 91, 202–3 See also University of North Carolina Press Council of Southern Mountain Workers, 135, 207 Covici, Pat, 171, 197, 229 Covici·Friede, 161, 167, 168, 171–2, 197, 235n3 Still, James, 140, 142 Cowley, Malcolm, 12, 53, 84, 140, 164 Crawford, Bruce, 85 Cullen, Countee, 120 cultural circuit. See social life of poetry cultural pluralism, 36, 53–5 critique against, 47 Davidson, Donald, 85 Judaism, 48, 127, 226 Kallen, Horace, 10, 43 pragmatism, 39 precursors, 28, 30, 66 publishers, Jewish, 5, 56–7, 127, 142, 146 “separate but equal,” compared to, 20 Survey Graphic, 59–60 See also pluralism cultural studies, 5, 64, 232n6 Culture and Democracy in the United States (Kallen), 43, 48, 56 Cumberland Mountains, 9 cummings, e. e., 120 Daily Worker, 210, 225 Dargan, Olive Tilford, 42, 138, 234n3 Davidson, Donald, 11, 87, 128, 153, 233n4, 234n4, 234n3 Attack on Leviathan, 88–9: sales, 91 character, 70–1 Couch, W. T., 84

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Davidson, Donald—Continued debate with Knickerbocker, 77, 80–2 I’ ll Take My Stand, 74 “Mirror for Artists, A,” 155 Nashville Agrarians, falling out, 90–2 racism, 91–2 regional literature, 89 “Trend of Literature: A Partisan View, The,” 85–6 See also under Stuart, Jesse Davis, Lambert, 73, 87, 101 Davis, Rebecca Harding, 3 Denning, Michael, 169 Dillon, George, 148 Diner, Hasia R., 50 documentaries, 165, 194 Dorman, Robert, 3 Dos Passos, John, 12, 67, 163 Dreiser, Theodore, 51, 56, 67, 77, 82, 163, 185, 186, 229 Du Bois, W. E. B., 25, 28, 38, 39, 46, 47, 198, 202 Dykeman, Wilma, 4 education, interracial, 165, 212, 227 See also American Missionary Association; Berea College Eliot, Charles William, 38, 39, 46, 47, 48, 54 Eliot, T. S., 78, 118, 123 Embree, Edwin R., 92 E. P. Dutton, 11, 97, 104, 113–16, 142 See also Yewdale, Merton Esquire, 139 Estill, Harry, 69 Ethical Culture Fieldston School, 143, 163 Europe, 58, 188 See also under fascism farmers (Southern), 81, 226 African American, 80, 81, 211, 234n3

migration, 76 sharecropper, 80, 148, 199, 211 small, 80, 81, 228, 234n3 tenant, 76, 80, 81, 97, 211, 234n3, 234n4 Farrar, John, 153 fascism, 91, 188, 205 America, 90, 161, 205, 221 communication, 194 Europe, 158, 167, 183, 188, 191, 205: America, complicity with, 183 pluralism, unifying force for, 12, 168, 222 writing, about, 59, 147 Fairchild, C. P., 27 Fairchild, E. P., 17, 35, 36, 38 Fairchild, Henry, 25, 26, 229 Fast, Howard, 219 Faulkner, William, 3, 85–6, 89, 148, 168 Federal Writers’ Project, 62, 204 Federation for the Support of Jewish Philanthropy, 143 Fee, John G., 24, 25, 26, 92 Fieldston School, 143, 163 Fisk University, 18, 25, 28 Fletcher, John Gould, 67, 71, 87, 88, 90, 151, 154 folk, 1, 10, 62, 64–6, 67, 115 ballads, 101, 106, 107, 116, 121–2, 123 culture, 89 law, and, 92 national essence, 69, 89 oral tradition, 64–6 passim primitivism, 64, 85, 114, 127, 138, 156 regionalist debate, 69 song, 57, 62 See also authenticity under Appalachia

Index “Folk in Literature: An Introduction to the New Regionalism, The” (Botkin), 64–5 folklore, 62, 89 Folk-Say: A Regional Miscellany, 10, 64, 66–7, 70 Ford, Madox Ford, 87 Foreman, Clark, 92, 220 Fourteenth Amendment, 20, 31 Fox, John, Jr., 3, 29, 42, 64, 133, 138, 157 Frank, Waldo, 163, 164, 186, 226 Freedmen’s Bureau, 24, 34 Freeman, 144 Freeman, Joseph, 163 Friede, Donald, 142, 171 From Servitude to Service: Being the Old South Lectures on the History and Work of Southern Institutions for the Education of the Negro, 25 Frost, Robert, 148, 153 Frost, William Goodell, 23, 25–30 passim, 34 Fugitives, the, 86, 88, 120 Furman, Lucy, 42, 127, 138, 139 Gaer, Joseph, 13, 204, 217–18, 226 Garrison, William Lloyd, 37, 38 Gaventa, John, 33 German Americans, 28 See also under Jews Germany, Nazi, 158, 183, 188, 210, 215 Gershwin, Ira and George, 63 George, Henry, 79, 144–5 Georgia, 164–5, 199–228 passim Atlanta, 220–6 passim Dalton, 225, 226 Douglassville, 228 Macon, 224 Gerstle, Gary, 2 Glasglow, Ellen, 89 Glazner, Nacy, 126 Glebe, 52 Glick, Milton B., 126, 141, 148

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Gold, Mike, 194, 210 Goodell, William, 26 Gorky, Maxim, 51, 145 Green, Paul, 85, 89, 153 Gregory, Horace, 118–19, 140, 169 See also under Rukeyser, Muriel Grover, Edwin, 127, 139–40, 142, 153 Grover, Frances, 139, 142 Guinzburg, Harold K., 8, 44, 143–4, 158, 229 Guinzburg, Henry, 143–4 Guinzburg, Lenore, 143 Hackett, Francis, 53, 145 Hall, Radclyffe, 171, 235n3 Halperin, Rhoda H., 105, 234n4 Hampton Institute, 134 Harding, Warren G., 55 Harlan, John Marshall, 20, 31, 54, 229 Harlan Miners Speak: Report on Terrorism in the Kentucky Coal Fields, 67, 85, 163–4, 170, 174 Harlem Renaissance, 39, 42 Harpers, 28, 32 Harrow School, 31 Harvard, 26, 38, 39, 45–52 passim, 153 philosophers, 10, 46 See also under Jews Hatcher, J. Wesley, 85 Hebraism, 47 Hebrew Union College, 145 Hicks, Granville, 169, 194, 236n3 Highlander Folk Center, 199, 229 Hillyer, Robert, 148, 153 Hindman Settlement School, 12, 126–7, 132–4, 136, 139, 158 Holmes, John, 149–50 Home Missionary Association, 34, 35 Horton, Myles, 221, 227 Hounds on the Mountain, 1, 11 Appalachian culture, 127–32, 135, 137 audience, 1, 126, 133, 147 awards, 152

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Hounds on the Mountain—Continued design, 126, 141, 148 language, 147, 149 mining, 130–1 naturalization, Anglo Appalachian, 125, 140–2, 147, 149 overview, 128–32 print run, 148 reviews, 149–51 sales, 125 subject, authorial relationship to, 128 See also social life of poetry under Still, James See also titles of specific poems under Still, James House Un-American Activities Committee, 223, 225 Howard, O. O., 33–6 passim American Missionary Association, 33 Director of Freedmen’s Bureau, 24–5, 34 See also Lincoln Memorial University Howard University, 34, 58, 202 Howells, William Dean, 37, 138 Huang-Tiller, Gillian, 119, 120 Huebsch, Adolph, 145 Huebsch, Ben W., 8, 53, 143, 144–7 See also B. W. Huebsch (publishing house) Hughes, Langston, 202, 213, 220 Ickes, Harold, 92 I’ ll Take My Stand (Twelve Southerners), 10, 11, 70, 73–7 passim authors, 234n4 poets, Appalachian, 99, 148, 155, 206 reviews, 77, 93 See also Nashville Agrarians Imagists, 52 India, 145

Indian Citizenship Act, 43 Indians. See Native Americans industrialism. See under modernity. Ingram, Rosa Lee, 223 Intercollegiate Menorah Association, 48, 144 In the Tennessee Mountains (Murfree), 138 immigrants, 2, 19, 22, 53, 57, 65, 80, 146–7 German, 83 See also eastern European under Jewish immigration, 9, 119, 143–4, 169 historians, 2 See also under Jewish Immigration Restriction League, 46 imperialism, U. S., 27, 31, 36–8, 127, 216 Irish, 59 nationalism, 146 Irish Americans, 28 Italians, 28, 59 International Labor Defense, 164 Jacobson, Matthew Frye, 2 James, William, 48, 53, 85 Jewett, Sarah Orne, 3 Jewish Heritage Foundation, 226 Jews, American, 10, 39, 123 anti-Semitism, 48, 57, 158, 215 Communist, 235n1 eastern European, 46, 47, 48, 50, 63, 66, 143, 205 exclusion from Ivy League, 43, 49 German-American, 12, 39, 47, 48, 49–50, 51, 125, 143–6 passim Harvard, 42–50 passim, 62, 125, 143, 144, 171 immigration, 43, 47, 51, 158, 205 New School for Social Research, 56 New York City, 11, 43, 50, 142–6 passim, 163

Index post World War II, 205, 226 Reform, 145 Russian. See eastern European under Jews socialism, 49, 50, 143–4 upper class, 143 Zionists, 48, 49, 50 See also Rosenwald Fund See also under publishers Jim Crowe, 18, 19, 202 J. J. Little and Ives Company, 172, 197 John Reed Clubs, 161, 165 Johns, Orrick, 117 Johnson, Alvin, 53 Johnson, Gerald W., 89 Johnson, Richard, 5, 7, 231n6 Johnson-Reed Immigration Quota Act, 43 Josephy, Robert, 148, 162, 171–2, 178 Joyce, James, 144, 145 Julius Rosenwald Fund, 92, 220, 227, 234n7, 236n6 Kalaidjian, Water, 234n5 Kallen, Horace, 10, 85 Charles Boni Paper Back Book Club, 204 Culture and Democracy in the United States, 43, 48, 56 critiques of ideas, 48 “Democracy v. the Melting Pot,” 53–5, 118 Harvard, 29, 46, 47, 48 heritage, 48 influence, 42, 56, 127 James, William, 48, 52–3 Menorah Society, 42, 48 New School for Social Research, 10, 42, 52, 56 poetry, regional, 64 scholarship on, 233n2 See also cultural pluralism Kehr, Cyrus, 33–6 passim

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Kellogg, Paul, 59, 71 Kent, Rockwell, 144, 204 Kentucky, 18, 20, 24, 36, 60, 64, 218 Ashland, 83, 114 Bell County, 163–4. See also Middlesboro Harlan County, 12, 60, 61, 163–4, 185, 186 London, 157 Middlesboro, 32–3 Williamsburg, 19, 21 Winchester, 83 See also Berea College; Hindman Settlement School Kenyon College, 91 Kenyon Review, 70, 91, 100 Kittredge, George Lyman, 62 Klingenstein, Susanne, 49 Knickerbocker, William S ., 70, 77–80 Knopf, Alfred, 44, 103 Korelitz, Seth, 48 Kreymborg, Alfred, 52 L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poets, 77 Lanier, Lyle H., 77 Larry, John Hale, 36 Lawrence, D. H., 144, 145 League of American Writers, 169 Lee, Robert E., 80 leftists-networks, 11, 13 New York City, 161, 193 Southern, 202, 216, 218 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Evans and Agee), 159 Lewis, Sinclair, 66, 210 Lincoln, Abraham, 27, 36, 37 Lincoln Memorial University, 9, 17, 18, 31–6 Lippman, Walter, 51, 54, 145 literary field canon, 196, 197–8. See also under New Criticism discourse, 6, 93 periodicals, 70, 102, 193

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literary field—Continued proletarian, 42, 67, 117, 142, 159 scholarship, 78, 97 venues, 101 See also local color; Imagists, modernism; poetry; realism See also literary field under Appalachian; regionalism; Southern Literature and Reading in the South and Southwest (conference), 87–9 Liveright, Horace, 43, 44, 52, 56, 171 local color (literature), 2, 3, 27–8, 64, 138–9, 151, 231n2–3 Locke, Alain, 10, 39, 43, 46, 47, 67, 229, 234n3 New Negro, The, 10, 43, 57–9, 204 Logan, Rayford, 92, 202 What the Negro Wants, 92, 202 Longmans, Green, and Co., 42, 65 Lorence, James J., 236n5 Louisiana State University, 87 Lowell, Abbott, 46, 49 Lumpkin, Grace, 73, 89, 234n3 (upper) lynching, 92, 202, 206, 220, 223 Lytle, Andrew Nelson, 73, 77, 80, 89 MacKaye, Benton, 60, 71, 72 MacKaye, Percy, 10, 42, 60–1, 65, 66, 70, 71, 233n5 “Kentucky Cycle, The,” 10, 61, 62, 65, 127, 142 New Citizenship: A Civic Ritual, The, 233n6 MacLeish, Archibald, 153, 193 Macmillan (publisher), 42 Macrae, John, 113 Mailloux, Steven, 6 Man with a Bull Tongue Plow, 1 aesthetics, 117 agrarian lifestyle, in, 102, 104–13 anti-modernism, 108, 109, 110 audience, 1, 11, 104, 113, 115, 118, 122

audience, script for, 103–4 audience, ideal, 108, 110 ballads, 101, 106, 107, 116, 121–2, 123 design, 98, 112, 116 naturalization, Anglo Appalachian, 97, 99, 104, 107, 113, 116–19 overview, 104–8 poetry, narrator’s relationship with, 103–4, 105, 107, 111, 120 production cost, 115–16 promotion, 114–15 publishing, narrator’s relationship with, 111 sales, 11, 97, 115 sonnets, 103, 110, 119–22 See also social life of poetry under Stuart, Jesse Marshall, James, 143 Marshall, Larkin, 224 Marshall, Louis, 143 Marx, Karl, 210 Mason, Lucy Randolph, 218, 227, 229 Mass, Willard, 192 Masses, 51 Masters, Edgar Lee, 61, 66 Matthiessen, F. O., 151 McCauley, Deborah, 22 McCullers, Carson, 153 McDowell Writers Colony, 142, 154 McGann, Jerome, 5 McGill, Ralph, 211, 223, 224–5, 228 McGinnis, John, 88 McGraw-Hill, 97 McKenzie, D. F., 6 McKinley, William, 34, 36, 37 Mencken, H. L., 90, 101, 103 Menorah Journal, 42, 40, 127 Menorah Society, 39, 42, 46, 48, 127, 144 Middlesboro Land Company, 32–3 Millay, Edna St. Vincent, 120 Miller, Jim Wayne, 4 Mims, Edwin, 116–17, 149

Index Missionary Review of the World, 27 Mississippi, 208 modernism (literature) leftist networks, 161, 194 periodicals, 193 publishers, Jewish, 43. See also A. & C. Boni; B. W. Heubsch regionalism, as, 66 modernity, 46 anti-modernity: Anglo nativization, 88–9; Barr, Stringfellow, 72; Davidson, Donald, 81; Fletcher, John Gould, 71; Kallen, Horace, 53–5; MacKaye, Percy, 61; New Republic, 55; Royce, Josiah, 46–7 commodification, 41, 76–7, 81, 89, 118: handicrafts, Appalachian, 136 commodification, literary, 8, 88, 89, 128, 156, 171–2, 204 industrialism, 3, 32–3, 76–7: race and region, versus, 67, 183; Southern, 74–5, 79. See also exploitation, raw resource under Appalachia regionalism, 47, 55, 58–9, 67, 72, 89 standardization, 10, 41: education, 71; English, 65, 83; Locke, Alain, 57–8; Kallen, Horace, 53–5; MacKaye, Percy, 60; New Republic, 55; Royce, Josiah, 46–7 tradition, Southern, 1, 72–82 Modern Language Association, 78, 91 Monroe, Harriet, 193 Moore, Deborah Dash, 50 Moore, Merrill, 120, 235n4 morality plays, 188–9 Morrison, Theodore, 151, 153 Mother Jones, 76, 179 Mountain Life and Work, 135–6, 157, 207 “Mountain Passes of the Cumberland” (Allen), 32–3

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mountain whites. See under Appalachians “Mountain White Work in Kentucky” (Myers), 21–2 Mumford, Lewis, 61, 66–7, 71, 72 Murfree, Mary, 3, 4, 133, 138 Myers, Aaron Arthur, 21, 31–5 passim Myers, Ellen M. (Mrs. A. A. Myers), 18–19, 21–2, 29, 31, 35 NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), 223 Nashville Agrarians, 10–11, 67–93 passim, 100, 149, 152, 205, 234n6 dissolution, 90–3 public debates, 77, 80–2 scholarship on, 234n5 See also I’ ll Take My Stand; names of members Nation, 77, 116, 193, 210 National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners, 60, 67, 163 National Miners Union, 163, 164, 235n1 National Student League, 164 Native Americans, 24 Appalachian, 4 citizenship, 43 Navajo, 10, 60 Nez Perce, 34 racial uplift, 2, 10, 18, 22 study, cultural, 28, 60 nativism. See under Anglo Americans neo-abolitionists, 1, 9, 19, 25 New Critics, 234n6 aesthetics, as ideology, 3, 93, 152, 156, 191, 196 Agrarianism, moving from, 11, 93, 152, 194 canon, affects upon, 77–8, 89, 123, 197–8 publications, 90, 91, 196 Stuart, Jesse, 97

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New Deal, the, 92 New Letters in America, 188, 193 New Masses, 161, 193, 202 audience, 209–10 Gregory, Horace, 167, 194 literary field, influence on, 193 mining in, 164, 173, 236n3 reviews, 116, 117, 207, 208–9 Rukeyser, Muriel, in, 169, 192 New Negro, The (Locke), 10, 43, 57–9, 204 New Republic audience, 210 leftist network, part of, 10, 41, 53, 55, 145–6, 161, 193 literary field, influence on, 193 publications in, 117, 139, 140, 192 regionalism in, 55, 66, 69–70, 82 reviews in, 151, 191 New School for Social Research, 10, 52, 56, 145 New School Theology (Presbyterian), 23 New York City, 1, 9, 12, 88, 140 Broadway, 41 Greenwich Village, 51 Harlem, 57–9 pluralists, 41–61 passim Rukeyser, Muriel, 161, 163, 167–8, 186–7 Still, James, 154 Stuart, Jesse, 123 See also under Jews New Yorker, 151 New York Times, 49, 123 Appalachia, 123, 131, 139, 164 Book Review, 93, 116, 118, 149, 191, 208 issues, Jewish, in, 49, 158 Nixon, H. C., 234n4 North Carolina, 18, 24, 135, 139 Appalachia, 21, 29, 36 Blowing Rock, 142 Gastonia, 76, 233n3

Oberlin College, 9, 17, 18, 23, 25, 26 Oberlin Theology, 23 Odum, Howard, 57, 69, 71, 85, 90, 91 Oglethorpe University, 220–4 passim Olympics (Berlin), 189 O’Neill, Eugene, 51, 52, 56 Oppenheimer, George, 144, 146 O’Rear, Cantrill, 30 “Our Contemporary Ancestors” (Frost), 28–30 Our Country (Strong), 27 Outlook, 27 Owen, Wilfred, 145 Page, Walter Hines, 28, 37–8 Pale of Settlement, 46, 47, 50 Partisan Review, 169, 192 Peabody College, 99 Peirce, Charles, 170 People’s Institute for Applied Religion, 202, 205, 211–13 People’s Olympics (Barcelona), 189, 190 Peterkin, Julia, 85, 89, 153 Petry, Ann, 210 Pettit, Katherine, 133, 134 Philippine-American War, 36 See also imperialism, U. S.; SpanishAmerican War PIAR. See People’s Institute for Applied Religion Pine Mountain Settlement School, 61–2 Pipkin, Charles W., 87, 88 Plessy v. Ferguson, 30 See also “separate but equal” under pluralism pluralism, 195 Botkin, B. A., 64–5 culturalist, 19, 23, 24, 29–30, 39 desegregation, 202, 227 essentialism, 3–4 liberal, 11, 127, 143–8 passim, 159 Locke, Alain, 57–9

Index networks affecting, 1, 9, 41–3, 228 New School for Social Research, 56 Popular Front, 12, 67, 169–70, 175, 184–5, 190, 195–6. See also pluralism under Rukeyser, Muriel Post World War II, 226–8 race v. region, 12, 36, 91–3, 202–3 regionalist, 69, 85 “separate but equal,” 30–1, 38–9, 46, 66, 85, 202 Southern, radical, 203–5, 217–18, 219, 226. See also pluralism under West, Don working class, interracial, 212, 217 See also cultural pluralism poll tax, 13, 208, 222 Poetry, 148 “Social Poetry Number,” 186 poetry criticism, 113 publishing, 7–9, 147 regionalism, 63 symbolic order, interaction with, 128, 131, 179, 188, 189, 193–6 passim See also under audience Poetry of the Negro, 1746–1949, The (Hughes and Bontemps), 220 Poetry Society of America, 140 Posnock, Ross, 47 Porter, Katherine Anne, 154 Pound, Ezra, 118, 123, 198 Pound, Louise, 63 Power and Powerlessness (Gaventa), 33 pragmatism, 10, 12, 170, 196, 233n3 See also James, William; Kallen, Horace; Locke, Alain; Peirce, Charles; Royce, Josiah Presbyterians, 23, 133 Princeton, 46, 48, 52, 91 Progressives (political party), 13, 205 See also under West, Don

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Proletarian Literature in the United States, 194, 236n3 publishers Anglo, 42, 44, 53, 142, 204 Jewish, 9, 10, 11, 13, 42–5, 49–50, 142, 144, 205: scholarship on, 233n1 leftist, 13, 205 New York, 9, 41–2, 86, 88, 89, 142 regionalism, 70, 88 Southern, 11, 86–9 See also names of publishing houses publishing, 7–9, 88, 145, 171–2, 205 See also commodification, literary under modernism; race, 3, 36, 58–9, 159 historians, 2 lens, 67 purity, 30–1 regionalism and, 12, 36, 91–3, 202–3 understanding, 198 See also education, interracial Rai, Lajpat, 145 Random House, 44 Ransom, John Crowe debates, 75–6, 77 endorsements, 120 Nashville Agrarian, 80, 100 New Criticism, 90, 91, 197 poet, as a, 151 “Reconstructed But Unregenerate,” 78 Southern literature, 89 Still, James, 148–9 Rawlings, Majorie Kinnan, 152 reader-response criticism, 6–7, 197 readers. See audiences realism, 3, 42, 138 Recca, B. D., 98, 112, 116 reception theory, 3 Red-baiting, 13, 211, 222–6 passim

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Reed, John, 51, 52, 56 regionalism, 3–4, 69–93 passim, 233n1 Botkin, B. A., 10, 62–7 passim, 88, 89 class discourse, 159, 167 conferences, 70, 71–2, 87–9 critical quarterlies, 70 cultural circuit, 87–9 Davidson, Donald, 70–1, 88–9 European, 58–9 literary field, 64–7, 87–9, 151 modernity, 46, 55, 67, 89 Nashville Agrarians, 76–7 race and, 12, 36, 91–3, 202–3 waning, 194 See also University of North Carolina Press; Virginia Quarterly Review See also under poetry Report on the Economic Conditions of the South, 92 Revolt of the Provinces: The Regionalist Movement in America, 1920–1945 (Dorman), 3 Reznikoff, Charles, 49, 204 Ridge, Lola, 145 rights, 20, 37, 186 African American, 18, 19, 20, 30–1, 202, 223, 224, 227 free speech, academic, 53, 222–4 passim middle-class, white, 164, 165 unionization, 185, 204 voting, 13, 208, 217, 222 Roberts, Elizabeth Maddox, 42, 85, 89, 142, 144, 157 Robeson, Paul, 224 Rodman, Selden, 194, 195 Roediger, David R., 2 Rogers, J. A. R., 24 Rolfe, Edwin, 191 Rosenwald Fund, 92, 220, 227, 234n7, 236n6 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 93 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 71, 92

Rosenblatt, Louise M., 197 Royce, Josiah, 39, 46–7, 229 Rukeyser, Muriel, 1, 11, 12, 67, 93, 148, 161–98, 229 accessibility, 192 Appalachia, 163, 170 audience, 1, 195 “Book of the Dead, The,” 12, 161 communist networks, 164–9 passim, 198 Gregory, Horace, 161, 165, 168–9, 186, 192–4, 197, 198 Judaism, 163, 169 Life of Poetry, The, 170, 198 pluralism, 169–70, 175, 191, 198 poetics, 12, 170, 179, 188, 189, 194, 195–6, 235–6n2 politics, 12 publishers, thoughts on, 172, 197 reception, 198 Scottsboro Nine, 164–5 social life of poetry (See figure I.1, p. 6), 186: node 1, 161, 163, 165, 169; node 2, 164, 165, 167, 168–9, 192–3, 197; node 3, 168–9, 192–3; node 4, 165, 167, 168; node 5, 171–2, 197; node 6, 191–2, 194 South, the, 163, 164–5 Spanish Civil War, 12, 158, 167, 168, 189–90 Student Review, 164–5 Theory of Flight, 165–7, 193: African Americans, in, 165–6; miners, in, 166; writers’ roles, 166 U. S. 1. See U. S. 1. Yale Younger Poets Award, 159, 167, 197 Russia, 47, 50, 51, 60 See also USSR Ryder, C. J., 21 Sandburg, Carl, 61, 70 Sanger, Margaret, 51

Index Santayana, George, 48 Sarah Lawrence College, 165 Saturday Review of Literature, 70, 99, 131, 139, 149, 153, 194 SCHW. See Southern Conference for Human Welfare Schwartz, Delmore, 154 Scotch Irish, 2, 35, 83, 122, 149 Scottsboro Nine, 90, 164–5, 223 “Scottsboro, the Third Crusade; the Sequel to Abolition and Reconstruction” (Davidson), 90 Second Great Awakening, 17 segregation, 70, 92 See also “separate but equal” under pluralism; Southern Conference for Human Welfare Seltzer, Thomas, 50, 51, 52, 145 Settle, Mary Lee, 4 settlement schools, 134 See also Hindman Settlement School “separate but equal.” See under pluralism Sever, Edwin, 164 Sewanee Review, 10, 70, 77–8, 100 See also under Still, James silicosis, 12, 172–86 passim Simon, Richard Lee, 144 Simon and Schuster, 144 Sinclair, Upton, 52, 173 slavery, 19, 77, 84, 92, 175, 203 Smith, Barbara Herrnstein, 5 Smith, Lillian, 219 Spivak, John L., 164 Social Gospel, 12, 133, 212 Socialists, 50, 51 social life of poetry, xi, 1, 5–7 Appalachian literature, 228–9 Botkin, B. A., 88, 89 regionalists, 87–9 See also authors, audiences, poetry, publishers

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See also under Rukeyser, Still, Stuart, West Soller, Werner, 47 Sonnets cultural marker, 120 Petrarchan, 119, 121–2, 129, 140 Shakespearian, 103, 110, 130 Still, James, 128–30 Stuart, Jesse, 119–22 Sound and the Fury, The (Faulkner), 86 South, the, 37, 67, 69, 199–229 passim culture, study of, 78, 84–5 literary field, 85, 89. See also Sewanee Review; Virginia Quarterly Review modernity versus tradition, 1, 72–82 New South, 32, 78, 87, 149 Old South, 74, 77, 79, 81, 215 poverty, 91, 92, 148, 210, 215 religion, 19 whiteness, 72, 92 See also I’ ll Take My Stand; Nashville Agrarians; Southern Conference for Human Welfare; Virginia Quarterly Review South Atlantic Quarterly, 91 Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative, 228–9, 236n9 Southern Conference for Human Welfare Communist connections, 218, 223 Congress of Industrial Organizations, 204, 216, 218–19 constituency, 218, 219, 227 ending, 226–7 formation, 87, 92–3 funding, 87, 218 leaders, 92, 202, 218, 219, 227, 234n4 leftist network, part of, 202 literacy, 219 membership, 220, 222 Progressive Party, 222 Red–baited, 223, 224

276

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Southerners, white, 10, 67, 72, 92, 165 liberal, 10, 11, 69–76 passim, 84–5, 91, 92, 202 racial anxiety, 13, 202, 209–10 racial hatred, 215, 221–4 radical. See Southern Conference for Human Welfare Southern Patriot, 219 Southern Review, 70, 87, 91, 100, 191 Southern Tenant Farmers Union, 211 Southwest Review, 88, 151 Spanish-American War, 36–8 See also imperialism, U. S. Spanish Civil War, 12, 158, 167, 168, 189–90 Spears, Monroe K., 78 Spenders, Stephen, 119, 123 standardization. See under modernity Stein, Gertrude, 56 Steinbeck, John, 148, 159, 171 Sterner, Lewis G., 119 Stewart, Albert, 153 Still, James, 1, 11–12, 67, 77, 229, 125–59 passim Appalachia, as subject, 128, 151, 153, 155–6 Appalachian literature, 125, 155, 156 Atlantic, 12, 125, 136–7, 142, 151, 157 audience, 12, 128, 136, 156 authorship, relation with, 128, 138, 152–6 biography, 125–6, 137–8 “Child in the Hills,” 136–7 “Dulcimer,” 135 “Heritage,” 140–2, 150 “Hill-Born, The,” 132 Hindman Settlement School, 125, 126, 132–3, 134, 151, 155 “Horseback in the Rain,” 150 “Hounds on the Mountain,” 128–9 Hounds on the Mountain. See Hounds on the Mountain

Lincoln Memorial University, 11, 17, 36, 125, 138, 140 Loomis, Guy, 132, 140 “Mountain Dulcimer,” 89, 135 “Mountain Heritage.” See “Heritage” oeuvre, 125 “On Redbird Creek,” 129–30 Poetry, 12, 131, 137, 151 Ransom, John Crowe, 148–9 River of Earth, 147 scholarship on, 235n1 Sewanee Review, 10, 128, 129, 132, 158 social life of poetry (See also figure I.1, p. 6): node 1, 133, 138, 153, 155; node 2, 127, 139– 40, 142, 148; node 3, 127, 128–32 passim, 135, 136 –7, 139, 140; node 4, 140, 142, 147; node 5, 140–1, 147–8; node 6, 148–52; node 7, 133, 136 Stuart, Jesse, 156–7 Vanderbilt University, 11, 99, 125, 140, 148, 158 Viking Press, 142–3, 147–8, 153, 154 Virginia Quarterly Review, 10, 89, 135, 137, 139 Yale Review, 12, 139 West, Don, 132–3, 157–8 Stone, May, 133, 134 Strauss, Harold, 140, 142 Streiby, M. E., 26 Strong, Josiah, 27 Stuart, Jesse, 1, 11, 67, 77, 80, 93, 97–123 passim, 142, 150 agrarian lifestyle, 100, 117, 234n3: Kentucky way (culture), 103–4, 105–6, 121–2, 234n4 American Mercury, 11, 99, 101–3, 116 Anglo Saxonism, 115, 122–3 audience, 97, 103

Index authorship, relation with, 99–104 passim, 113, 114–15, 116, 157 Beyond Dark Hills (Stuart), 115 Burns, Robert, 101, 115, 117, 123 canon, relation to, 97, 100 Davidson, Donald, 11, 99–101, 108, 111, 113, 120, 121 educator, public schools, 99, 101, 103–4 E. P. Dutton, 11, 97, 104, 113–16 heritage, 97, 100, 116, 122 Jewish rights, 235n7 Lincoln Memorial University, 11, 17, 36, 113 Man with a Bull Tongue Plow. See Man with a Bull Tongue Plow money, 103–4, 113 Nashville Agrarians, 100, 114–15 New York City, 122–3 Poetry, 11, 99, 100, 116 oeuvre, 97, 123, 234n1 representations of, 114–15, 122 “Sir: I am a farmer singing at the plow,” 102–3 scholarship on, 234n2 social life of poetry (See figure I.1, p. 6): node 1, 97, 99, 122; node 2, 99–103, 114; node 3, 99–103; node 4, 103, 104; node 5, 113–16; node 6, 116–19; node 7, 122–3 Songs of a Mountain Plowman (Stuart), 235n5 Stereotypes, Appalachian, 104, 113, 157 Still, James, 156–7 Taps for Private Tussie (Stuart), 123 Vanderbilt University, 11, 99, 101, 113, 158 Virginia Quarterly Review, 10, 11, 99–104 passim West, Don, 157–8 Student Review, 163, 164

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277

Sullivan, Patricia, 204 Survey Graphic, 10, 41, 59–60, 71 Takaki, Ronald, 2 Talmadge, Eugene, 210, 222 Talmadge, Herman, 222 Tate, Allen audience, on, 88, 114–15 authorship, on, 100 Davidson, Donald, 90, 100 heritage, 83–4 Nashville Agrarians, 74, 75, 80, 89 Poetry Consultant, Library of Congress, 91, 198 regionalism, 66, 67, 82–3, 87 Sewanee Review, 78 Taylor, Alva, 211 Tennessee, 18, 19, 21, 28, 29, 65, 77, 80, 208 Benfolly, 83 Columbia, 80 Giles County, 80, 234n3 Maury County, 80 textual theory, 5 Thomas, Jean, 114 Thurmond, Strom, 82 “To a Person Sitting in Darkness” (Twain), 36–7 Trilling, Lionel, 49 Trotsky, Leon, 52 Turner, Catherine, 43 Tuskegee University, 34, 202 Twain, Mark, 36–7 Understanding Poetry (Brooks and Warren), 91, 197 Union Carbide and Carbon, 172–3 unions anti-standardizing, 53 Appalachian, 185, 228 racial equality, struggle for, 13 See also specific unions United Mine Workers, 185, 219 University of Georgia, 92

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Index

University of Kentucky, 152 University of Nebraska, 63 University of North Carolina, 70, 87 University of North Carolina Press, 11, 57, 86–7, 88, 91, 202 University of Oklahoma, 10, 62, 63 University of the South, 78 University of Virginia, 71 Untermeyer, Louis, 101, 115, 120, 194 U. S. 1, 1, 161, 165, 167 African Americans, in, 175, 179–81 audience, 12, 186, 192 audience, idealized, 161, 170, 235–6n2 audience, script for, 167–8, 170, 173, 176, 181, 183, 190 “Book of the Dead, The,” 167–8, 172–86 Covici·Friede, 161, 167, 168, 171–2, 197 design, 162, 172, 178 intellectuals in, 183–4 “Night-Music,” 167–8, 186–7, 193 print run, 172 reviews, 191–2 sales, 191, 197 scholarship on, 191 structure, 167–8 subjects of, authorial relation to, 179, 181, 185 “Two Voyages,” 167–8, 188–90 See also social life of poetry under Rukeyser USSR, 114, 167, 205, 210, 223 Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 79 Vanderbilt University, 11, 79, 120 See also Nashville Agrarians See also under Still, Stuart, and West Van Doren, Mark, 115 Vassar College, 163 Veblen, Thorstein, 145 Victorian literature, 77, 119 Viking Press

Appalachia, 42, 136 authors, Jewish, 146 colophon, 144, 204 founding, 144, 145 German Jewish, as, 50, 127 Jewish, as, 12, 44, 45 publications, 57, 114, 147–8, 159 publishing, poetry, 8–9 Rukeyser, Muriel, 197 See also liberal under pluralism See also under Still, James Virginia, 72, 75, 227 Virginia Quarterly Review, 10, 70, 73–4, 75, 87–91 passim See also under Still, James; Stuart, Jesse Wade, John Donald, 89 Wald, Alan, 194 Wallace, Henry A., 82, 223–7 passim speech in Dalton (GA), 225 Walker, Margaret, 219 Warren, Robert Penn creative writer, 89, 151 Nashville Agrarian, 67, 100 New Criticism, 90, 91, 196 “Some Dont’s for Literary Regionalists,” 151 Southern Review, 87 Washington College (Washington and Lee College), 80 Watterson, Henry, 37 Weeks, Edward, 100, 127, 136, 138, 148, 153 Weltner, Phillip, 220, 221, 223, 224, 229, 236n7 Wendell, Barrett, 48 West, Don, 1, 10, 67, 123, 199–229 passim African Americans, 223–5, 227 Appalachian Folklife Center, 228 Appalachian literature, 229 authorship, relationship with, 199, 202, 221

Index biography, 199, 236n5 canon, literary, 213 Clods of Southern Earth. See Clods of Southern Earth Columbia University, 220 Communist Party, 12, 157, 199, 210, 222, 223–5, 236n3, 236n7 educator, public schools, 12, 221 Georgian, as, 210, 228 heritage, 12, 13, 199 Highlander Folk School, 12, 199 Hindman Settlement School, 132–3, 134 Kentucky Workers’ Alliance, 157 Lincoln Memorial University, 11, 17, 36, 199 “Listen, I am an Agitator,” 225–6 “Look Here, America,” 216 “My South,” 220 Oglethorpe University, 13, 199, 210, 220–4 People’s Institute for Applied Religion, 211 pluralism, 199, 203, 212, 216, 218–19, 222, 227 poetics, 214–16 political orientation, 224 Progressives, Georgia, 222–6 Red-baited, 211, 224–6 religion, 199, 213 representations of, 203, 210, 213–15 Rosenwald Fellowship, 220, 236n6 Social Gospel, 133, 212 social life of poetry (See figure I.1, p. 6): node 1, 199; node 2, 211; node 3, 214, 236n3; node 4, 219; node 5, 199, 204, 209; node 6, 205–11; node 7, 203, 205, 216–26 Southern Conference for Human Welfare, 221, 222, 223 Still, James, 132–3, 157–8 Stuart, Jesse, 157–8 Vanderbilt University, 11, 12, 132–3, 158, 199, 211

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“What Shall a Poet Sing,” 202, 206, 235n3 Williams, Claude, 211 West Virginia, 219 Gauley Bridge, 172–86 passim, 236n3 Pipestem, 228 Beckley, 228 What the Negro Wants (Logan), 92, 202 Wheat Street Baptist Church, 223, 225 Wheelwright, John, 192 Whipple, George, 25 whiteness, 4, 10, 198 historians, 2 South, The, in, 72, 92 See also Anglo Americans; sonnets; Southerners, white Whitman, Walt, 64 William-Morrow (publisher), 104 Williams, Claude, 211 See also People’s Institute for Applied Religion Williams, William Carlos, 44, 56, 120, 133, 191 Wilson, Edmund, 164 Wolfe, Thomas, 73, 89, 150, 159, 207 World War I, 53, 59, 144 Wright, Richard, 3 Yaddo, 154, 165, 193 Yale, 46, 52, 198 Yale Review, 12, 116 Yale Younger Poets Award, 159, 166, 192 Yeats, William Butler, 66, 99 Yewdale, Merton S., 114 You Have Seen Their Faces (Caldwell and Bourke–White), 91, 148, 151 Young, Stark, 73, 89 Zabel, Morton, 191 Zaturenska, Marya, 165, 167, 186, 194, 198