Notes
Notes Preface 1. For the most part, Stewart has been portrayed as a hero whose selfless dedication to the Moonlight School movement made her a legend in her own time. See James M. Gifford, “Cora Wilson Stewart and the ‘Moonlight School’ Movement,” in Appalachia/ America: Proceedings of the 1980 Appalachian Studies Conference,ed. Wilson Somerville (Johnson City, TN: Appalachian Consortium Press, 1981), 169–78; and James McConkey, Rowan’s Progress (New York: Pantheon, 1992). Willie Nelms was similarly uncritical. Although his work fleshes out the details of Stewart’s career and provides important information about the literacy crusade, his analysis does not address the important gender and class aspects of her life and work. Willie Nelms, Cora Wilson Stewart: Crusader against Illiteracy (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1997), 1–4. His book is an extension of his master’s thesis of the same title, University of Kentucky, 1973; see also his two articles “Cora Wilson Stewart and the Crusade against Illiteracy in Kentucky,” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 74 (1976): 10–29; and “Cora Wilson Stewart and the Crusade against Illiteracy in Kentucky, 1916–1920, Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 82 (Spring 1984): 151–69. Florence Estes’s doctoral dissertation critically examined the rhetoric of the crusade and Stewart’s motivations as an agent of educational change in a balanced account that exposed some of the contradictions of the literacy campaign and of Stewart herself. See Florence Estes, “Cora Wilson Stewart and the Moonlight Schools of Kentucky: A Case Study in the Rhetorical Uses of Literacy” (Ph.D. diss., University of Kentucky, 1988). 2. In his introduction, McConkey, cited previously, calls for an analysis of Stewart and her work within the context of Progressive Era reform, but it was beyond the scope of his study; Nelms, also cited earlier, correctly characterizes Stewart as a progressive and calls her an “educational entrepreneur” who created a career for herself in educating adults. Estes, cited earlier, established some of the reform context as well. Historians disagree about progressive individual and group identity; thus, characterizing Stewart as a progressive becomes problematic, since she fits few of the traditional descriptions of 194 195 the progressive reformer. Hers was clearly a popular movement with middle-class elements , but she was not a privileged white male. In a sense, the literacy movement can be meshed with the “search for order,” but it had a rural rather than an urban cast. Thus, neither the older interpretation of Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Knopf, 1955), nor that of Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), provides an adequate model for analyzing her movement. Certainly the forces of conservatism were at work in the literacy movement , and Gabriel Kolko’s influential work, The Triumph of Conservatism (New York: Free Press, 1963), and other organizational models shed light on some of the struggles within the education profession. Much more useful, however, are revisionist interpretations that note the diversity of progressivism and the coalitions that afforded momentum for its disparate impulses. Elizabeth Sanders, in Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), maintains that Populists inspired a great deal of progressive legislation and suggests that agrarianism needs to be reexamined as a catalyst for reform. She argues that historians should focus on what progressives did as opposed to what they thought and move backward from legislation to the ideas that shaped it, rather than from ideas to the legislation progressives managed to pass. Influential interpretations of southern progressivism generally locate reformers in the middle-class urban environment described by Arthur S. Link’s seminal article “The Progressive Movement in the South, 1870–1914,” North Carolina Historical Review 23 (1946): 172–89; and C. Vann Woodward’s classic Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge: University of Louisiana Press, 1951), 369– 95. Jack Temple Kirby’s placement of the progressive impulse in the “frustrations and yearnings of the rural and small town masses” and his articulation of the rural protests of the nineteenth century as a link to those of the twentieth offer one of the least problematic analytical niches for categorizing Stewart and the illiteracy crusade. See Darkness at the Dawning: Race and Reform in the Progressive South(Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1972), 1–3, 26–27. Introduction 1. See, for example, Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform , 1890–1935 (New York: Oxford...
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