Sut Lovingood and the Germans

ROBERT DEWALT Independent Scholar Sut Lovingood and the Germans GEORGE WASHINGTON HARRIS WAS NOT A PROLIFIC WRITER, BUT BY MOST estimates he remains an important one. He was a master of a minor genre, Southwestern Humor, and a substantial influence on major writers such as Mark Twain and William Faulkner. The debt of the great to the small is usually a rich field of research and so a good deal has been written on Harris that also concerns Faulkner. Vernacular speech and folklore, rough physical comedy, poor white grotesques, the persistence of frontier conditions, the vexed politics of race—Harris’s methods and topics are all enhanced when viewed through the lens of his great successors. But Faulkner and Twain wrote relatively little about the immigrant populations of America. In this respect, a kind of textual vacuum surrounds Harris’s German characters and as a result, perhaps, they have largely been neglected. Harris’s Germans represented actual populations in East Tennessee that figured in his political concerns. This study examines two stories, “Sut Lovingood at Bull’s Gap” and “Sut Lovingood’s Allegory,” and an exchange of letters in the Nashville press between Harris and the newspaper editor E. G. Eastman. The Germans of these texts were caricatures of two different groups of German Tennesseans, groups comprised of two distinct immigrant cohorts. One arrived in Harris’s day and was part of the large nineteenth-century German immigration to America, which elicited public commentary that contributed to the rise of nativism and the anti-immigrant politics of the Know Nothing party. The other group arrived in East Tennessee with the earliest white settlers of the area and derived from the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch. These Germans and German-speaking Swiss had landed mainly at Philadelphia in the eighteenth century and, by the time of the Revolution, had spread into the southern backcountry, including the mountains of East Tennessee. By the time Harris was writing, many of this group were fourth- and fifth-generation Americans. The extent to which they also identified themselves as German, or at least of German descent, is a complex matter which has received very little attention from Southern historians. The absence of commentary on Harris’s Germans by literary critics must owe in part to the paucity of historical writing on Tennessee’s German population, a state of affairs in marked contrast to recent work 492 Robert Dewalt on Virginia’s early German communities. The references in Harris’s writing, however, are themselves strong historical evidence of the impression these people made on Harris and his contemporaries. Since Harris’s treatment of the Germans was largely political in nature, the absence of substantive criticism of this commentary forms a notable gap in the scholarship on an intensely political writer. My argument moves along two tracks simultaneously. I account for the historical background of Harris’s German references and the concomitant rhetorical effects of these references in the context of his politics and I provide a selective literary history of Harris criticism that entails the wider political and historical situation of prominent Harris scholars and critics. These two accounts intersect at points, and my focus also shifts back and forth between them, always in response to the particular Harris text under examination. It is perhaps an irony that Harris’s first use of German characters is connected to a kind of story that owes something to a German source. As Walter Blair has pointed out, the tall tale, a staple of American folklore and the literature it has informed, has an identifiable source in Rudolf ErichRaspe’seighteenth-centurycollectionofMunchausenstories.Blair did not claim that Harris or any other American humorist had actually read Raspe but argued that “without ever reading Munchausen’s Narrative or its sequels, our humorists could have encountered oral or written versions of the baron’s tales told by others” (71). Whether or not Harris read Raspe, he seems to have tapped into these oral channels of transmission. The Munchausen tale Blair singled out as an American favoritedeservessummarybecauseHarrishimselfprovidedaningenious, oblique variation on it. Blair recounts Raspe’s story of a hunter who is surprised in the forest by a stag. The hunter quickly charges his gun...