Selling Tradition: Appalachia and the Construction of an American Folk, 1930-1940 (review)

Selling Tradition: Appalachia and the Construction of an American Folk discusses the purposeful manipulation of culture in the selling of products. “It is so important and so controversial it should be read out loud on the radio,” exclaimed a woman in my Appalachian History seminar after she read this book. Another student, an African American male, saw parallels between the story Becker tells of cultural manipulation in Appalachia in the 1930s and corporate America’s current tampering with the meaning and character of inner-city Hip Hop music. Selling Tradition is a powerful yet depressing story of cultural deceit in Appalachia that has implications that reach far outside the mountain South.

In this study Jane Becker examines the Arts and Crafts Movement and its connection to the Appalachian craft revival of the 1930s in order to gain “insight into the very intricate complexities of the process of defining a group of people as folk and interpreting their culture as traditional” (xi). Her study is primarily concerned with the marketing boom of the 1930s and 1940s that latched onto Appalachian crafts in its effort to “revive and integrate particular traditional ways of life into the contemporary world” (4). The Arts and Crafts Revival Movement, along with hosts of missionaries, school teachers, and other “culture workers,” generally marginalized Appalachian people and set them aside as the keepers of certain traditional and authentic American folk customs. In her analysis, Becker seeks to answer such questions as: How and by whom are tradition and the folk defined? What is the relationship between the folk, tradition, and the marketplace? What consequences do interpretations of the folk and traditional culture have for those named as its bearers?

Like David Whisnant and others, Becker examines the late-nineteenth-century movement when many Americans began to look to southern Appalachia as the repository of the nation’s otherwise lost Anglo-Saxon folk traditions. Between 1880 and the Second World War middle-class social reformers and educators sponsored a revival of mountain handicrafts and music that was fueled by a network of schools, guilds, government projects, marketing and retail experts, and companies involved in the production and sale of products made by southern mountain people. Many of these craft enterprises were nurtured in mountain settlement houses under the leadership of middle-class women, many of whom came to the region from the urban Northeast.

The women leading the craft revival believed that the methods, aesthetics, and community ethic of pre-industrial labor offered an antidote to the ills of industrial society, as well as a foundation for social and economic uplift of the mountaineers. They encouraged what they considered the most valuable aspects of surviving Anglo-Saxon culture and worked to reintroduce presumably “traditional” forms. But this was never so simple, nor was it ever so innocent. In their zeal to satisfy some need of Americans to embrace a variety of folk cultures in their decorating schemes, those interested in Appalachia felt they had to make the region’s crafts less strange and more familiar to an industrial-capitalist cultural system. By the 1950s, mountain crafts and those who had used them in their homes had little to do with what was sold in catalogs and in stores.

The mountain craft traditions that became popular in the mid-twentieth century were shaped somewhat by local culture, but much more by reformers from outside the region, by the government, by the marketplace, and by middle-class consumers. Of Becker’s many sorrowful conclusions, what is particularly revealing is the fact that the people of southern Appalachia did not participate either in the creation of the idealized and romanticized past that made them attractive, nor generally in its physical representations, the crafts themselves. Professional designers drew up plans for the southern Highlands-style products and company executives generally dictated both the terms of employment and the work...