The Invention of Appalachia (review)

"Oscar Bennett, another of the detectives , escaped because of a lucky choice. Just before the first shot was fired, he went in search of a pack of cigarettes, when the shooting began, he . . . calmly walked to the railroad station. There, in the waiting room, he quietly stood at a window and watched the battle, while silently tearing up his identification papers. When the train pulled in, he walked to the Pullman loading area and waited, still silent. When the train pulled away, Bennett was safely inside." Throughout, Savage is a master of narrative tension. When Sid Hatfield and Ed Chambers are shot on the steps of the McDowell County courthouse— Chambers' wife "beat[ing CE. Lively] with her parsol and scream[ing] 'Don't shoot him anymore! '"—when the miners organize and invade Logan County while coal operators and government officials plan to bomb the marchers, the reader is there. The book's bibliography reveals the author's extensive research in books, government documents, and newspapers of the time, as well as personal interviews with local residents still living. The book also contains a fine collection of photographs. And Savage was able to draw upon the reminiscences of his own father, a World War I veteran and West Virginia University student who volunteered to fight on the side of Chafin and the coal operators. The result is an invaluable historical work which appeared just in time, before those with memories of the events of knowledge of family stories had passed on. Savage has done the work of a detective , probing deeper than surface events to piece together a time when secrecy on both sides has left many questions unanswered. The work is highlighted by Williams' fine introductory essay, which provides historical background and draws attention to the federal government's plan to "use air power against civilians . . . nothing less than a foretaste of Guernica, Dresden, and Hiroshima in the West Virginia hills." According to John Sayles, "As we began shooting the movie [Matewan], we discovered Lon Savage's Thunder in the Mountains. For the first time I felt there was someone with a feel for the people and place who had gone out and done the legwork, had tracked down the stray bits of story, poked and probed at what was already on the record and dug up whatever new information was available." In the midst of writing Storming Heaven when Savage's book first appeared , I can also attest to its importance . Thunder in the Mountains confirmed and expanded on my own research, giving me added impetus to retell the story of Blair Mountain in fictional form. Since its original publication , labor history buffs have been aware of its importance and guarded their rare copies. Now a wider audience will be fortunate enough to benefit from Lon Savage's scholarship and storytelling. —Denise Giardina Batteau, Allen W. The Invention ofAppalachia . University of Arizona Press. Tucson, Arizona, 1990. Part of the Anthropology of Form and Meaning Series. Bibliography and Index, 239 pages. $29.95 clothbound. This book is an anthropologist's explanation of the myths about Appalacnia. Of course, as any anthropologist would insist, myth and reality are intertwined. What people think—as Walter Lippmann put it, "The pictures we have in our minds, even the stereotypes we hold—are somehow based on reality and are legitimate artifacts of culture so that anthropologists are interested in them." Batteau's book is a study of these pic63 tures and how they have changed across time. Batteau's is not an attempt to destroy Appalachian stereotypes, but is a most insightful effort to understand various stereotypes, archetypes, and images (terms which he makes no effort to separate ) principally in terms of the changing needs of the larger American society. In this respect, this book is rather like Henry D. Shapiro's Appalachia On Our Mind, which focused upon the perception of Appalachia in the literate American mind between the Civil War and the 1920s. But Batteau's volume is more than Shapiro's book, for in little over 200 pages, Batteau traces the changing views of Appalachia from colonial times to the War on Poverty. One gets from Batteau a more multi...