Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South (review)

68Southeastern Geographer raphy the wealth ofmaterial that awaits in libraries and archives, and he has provided a primer on how it might be interpreted. Karl B. Raitz, Department ofGeography, University ofKentucky, Lexington, KY 40506. Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South. Grady McWhiney. Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 1988. xliii and 290 pp., illustrations, appendix, and index. $29.95 cloth (ISBN 0-81730328 -6) Grady McWhiney's new book on Cracker culture is yet another historian 's attempt to account for the differences between plain folk of the South and their Northern neighbors. Contemporary observation based on travelers' accounts, primarily their journals and letters, is used to support the regional/cultural distinctiveness of the South. The approach in and of itself is not controversial. The author does, however, take a bold and definite stand that the source of the South's regional distinctiveness lies in the Celtic heritage of its early settlers. The author's insistence upon the pervasiveness of Celtic influence is controversial among historians and is likely to spark debate between cultural geographers and historians as to the validity of the hypothesis. Professor McWhiney has accumulated an impressive collection of primary source material to support his contention that Celtic traditions, not English, form the cultural foundation of the Old South. Geographers of many persuasions have written for some time about the cultural and regional distinctiveness of the South. McWhiney has been at this topic for many years as well. He makes it clear from the outset that the term "Cracker" has been misinterpreted over the years as referring to an economic condition, but in reality it defines a culture. The principal actors in the drama of rapid and extensive settlement across the antebellum South were migrants from the Celtic regions of the British Isles—from Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and Cornwall. These migrants not only implanted their tradition across a broad swath of frontier territory, but they survived and even prevailed as the dominant population element by the time of the Civil War. Vol. XXIX, No. 1 69 The poor white economic stereotype associated with Cracker culture is biased because Crackers were not a particularly learned group of people. A weak writing tradition has resulted in their history and image being formed largely by writers who were "passing through" on the way to other, more desirable destinations. In spite of the somewhat misleading stereotype of poor whites, McWhiney confirms that the various culture traits contained in the description of Crackers by these same travelers does define the ideal standard; it is not an attractive caricature. The Southern Cracker was courageous, lazy, lustful, quarrelsome, violent , ignorant, and superstitious, as well as a drunkard, gambler, and livestock thief. Every Cracker need not possess all of the essential attributes , but any significant deviation is assumed to be an indication of cultural dilution. If your heritage is rural white Southern, the book is both thoughtprovoking and aggravating. One gets the uneasy sense that the author is indeed onto something, and one can even begin to put family names to some ofthe descriptions ofpeople and places. At the same time, the text is so full of scurrilous accounts of no-count, low-down, white trash that the reader either begins to wonder if it was possible to have so much depraved humanity firmly ensconced across a region as large as the South and the region still be able to survive into the 20th century or to dismiss the thesis as overkill. I found the book interesting initially but tedious as it progressed; perhaps as a native white Southerner with a rural heritage, I became anesthetized to the depravity of my ancestral stock. The author has approached his subject topically rather than chronologically and includes chapters on settlement, heritage, herding, hospitality , pleasures, violence, morals, education, progress, worth, and collision . McWhiney's long-time collaborator and research colleague, Forrest McDonald, has written a lengthy prologue. A major weakness of the text is the failure of the author to offer any synthesis of his copious data. Rather, the reader must labor through strings of repetitious descriptive material, each chapter bleeding into the next, with a mere cursory summary of each chapter's thesis. Interspersed...