The United States of Appalachia: How Southern Mountaineers Brought Independence, Culture, And Enlightenment To America (review)

Jeff Biggers. The United States of Appalachia: Hoiv Southern Mountaineers Brought Independence, Culture, And Enlightenment To America. Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005. 238 pages with index, bibliographic notes and map. Hardback in dust jacket. $26.00. You have to admire a book like this—one that attempts to bring together so many various threads of culture and history, and proposes a new way of seeing not only a region but also American history. Anthologies like Appalachia Inside Out or Old Wounds, New Words, critical collections like An American Vein and Confronting Appalachian Stereotypes are much less risky than single author works, though equally important in compiling a comprehensive understanding of Appalachian culture. There's no mistaking Biggers's central thread, that is both multicultural and polemical. The first sentence reads: "Beyond its mythology as a quaint backwater in the American imagination, it [Appalachia] also needs to be embraced for its historical role as a vanguard region in the United States." This book takes the next step in trying to re-position and re-vision the idea of Appalachia in American consciousness. Written for both insiders and outsiders, Biggers takes what has already been documented, disparate historical and biographical narratives, some familiar, some not (no matter black, white, rich, poor, christian, jew, native, non-native, immigrant, or expatriate)—Anne Royall, Nina Simone, Sequoyah, Rebecca Harding, Cecil Sharp, W.C. Handy, Myles Horton, Adolph Ochs, Martin Delany, Elihu Embree, Benjamin Lundy, Isaac Shelby, and Booker T. Washington, among many others—and weaves them together into a sense that's quite surprising and quite challenging to our long held notions about the relationship of orphaned Appalachia to the hegemonic Daddy Warbucks idea of the United States. The author poses Appalachia as vanguard to the more daring American virtues—exploration and innovation, free thinking, and the need to be free. FIe begins the book with the pre-epigraph epigraph, the state motto of West Virginia—Montani semper liberi ("Mountaineers are always free")—and in a fitting way proceeds to tag the identity of a region to that basic impulse, an impulse, that perhaps, the rest of America has traded in for the bland ideals of comfort, convenience and the ready availability of pharmaceuticals to treat depression, sleeplessness and erectile dysfunction. 93 The book begins with an epigraph from Thomas Wolfe's "Return," published in 1937—"These things, or such as these, will come again; so too, the high heart and the proud and flaming vision of a child—to do the best that may be in him, shaped from his earth, as we, and patterned by this scheme to wreak with all his might, with humbleness and pride, to strike here from his native rock, his vision of his earth and this America, to hear again, as we, the wheel, the whistles, and the trolley bell; so too, as we, to go out from these hills and find and shape the great America of our discovery." And, of course, that's what Biggers has set out to do—to re-shape the idea of Appalachia and by so doing re-discover a great America. There's also a touch of loss and fear of Armageddon in this selected passage and an inference that America is less than "great" of what it could be, requiring new and urgent energy: "the high heart and the proud and the flaming vision of the child." This was also the sword that Don West carried, and one can readily notice how much Biggers has been influenced by West. (See No Lonesome Road: Selected Prose and Poems of Don West edited by Biggers and George Brosi, University of Illinois Press, 2004.) Included in that collection is the 1944 essay "Dreams," in which West wrote: "The American dream is strong, vigorous. It is not easily crushed, or discouraged, for it was born from the brains of strong men and women—revolutionists and pioneers. It has come down from generation to generation. It is a composite of all the fire and courage and laughter in history. It is sure and relentless. The American dream is bigger even than big America." West specifically connected this spirit to that of the Southern mountaineer. In The...