Aprendizaje por refuerzo

Even though local color writers firmly established the “fact” of Appalachian otherness, for the most part, their vision was of a picturesque landscape and colorful, even quirky men and women oddly out of step with modern society.

More of a curiosity than a concern, this fictionalized Appalachia served pri-marily to point out the benefits of advanced civilization and to offer northern urbanites a welcome sojourn in a mysterious (but ultimately safe) wilderness

Figure 1.10

Mountain woman as pipe-smoking crone.

Illustration by E. W. Kemble captioned

“A Mountaineer Dame”; James Lane Allen,

“Through Cumberland Gap on Horseback,”

Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 73 (June 1886): 62.

from which they could return refreshed to their place in the cosmopolitan social order.

Beginning in the 1880s and accelerating rapidly in the 1890s, however, a strikingly different conception of the region developed—a notion that the people of the southern Appalachian mountains (and eventually of the south-ern mountains more generally) were not just out of step with but actually were a threat to civilization. The new ideological construction of the moun-tains as a land of lawlessness, cursed by the twin “evils” of “moonshining” and

“feuding,” was not entirely without foundation. Organized resistance to fed-eral excise tax collection and violent, interfamilial conflicts did indeed de-velop in the southeastern mountain region in the last two decades of the cen-tury. Small farmers in this region had long converted a portion of their corn crop to alcohol for personal consumption and to trade or sell to rural neigh-bors and townspeople. The federal government had sporadically tried to collect excise taxes on this product since the late eighteenth century (the

“Whiskey Rebellion” of 1794 in western Pennsylvania is the most famous ex-ample of upland opposition to these attempts), but not until the Civil War did they make a concerted effort to require licenses for and collect revenues from all distillers, no matter how small. Southern mountain farmers, who depended on the sale of corn whiskey to supplement their meager incomes and saw its production as a long-enjoyed right, deeply resented what they viewed as the unwarranted and dangerous intrusion of centralized power into properly lo-cal affairs. Many of these small-time distillers, increasingly labeled “moon-shiners” and “blockaders” in the popular press, as well as much of their clien-tele, held deep grievances against the often heavy-handed methods and sometimes corrupt and illegal practices used by agents to enforce the law.

These tensions and animosities climaxed during the 1890s when the combination of economic depression, the expansion of nationalizing market forces and urbanization into previously exclusively rural locales, and the spread of local prohibition legislation threatened the livelihood of many mountain distillers in northeast Georgia and elsewhere in the region. The re-sult was the rise of semiformal organized efforts to maintain local control over liquor production through collective violence. In a region where many white men also felt threatened by increasing black political and social autonomy and the growing number of women moving into the industrialized paid work-force, such collective opposition was often closely tied to concerns about per-ceived challenges to white supremacy and traditional morality. These efforts by “white caps” and “night riders” to enforce the economic, social, and racial status quo largely ended by the late 1890s, as federal authorities arrested and broke up resistance organizations and as modernizing forces continued to erode rural life. But by this time, the image of mountaineers as lawless

“moon-shiners” forever battling “revenooers” had become firmly entrenched in the popular imagination and would remain a central component of the hillbilly mythos from that time forward.³⁶

At the same time that moonshine-related violence was drawing wide-spread government and press attention, local, and often, interfamilial conflict in the southeastern uplands (particularly eastern Kentucky) was also garner-ing national headlines. From the 1870s through the first decade of the next century, regional and national newspapers reported on dozens of family-ori-ented conflicts, forty-one between 1874 and 1893 alone. Although most of these disputes lasted only briefly and involved few casualties, some, such as the Martin-Tolliver conflict called the “Rowan County War,” continued for over three years and resulted in twenty deaths. Journalists initially tended to view such conflicts as first a southern, and later a Kentucky phenomenon, the inevitable result of ongoing political power struggles and a uniquely violent past. By the mid-1880s, however, a series of murders in Appalachia shifted the focus from the entire state to the mountains, in particular. Increasingly, news-papers of both political parties, most influentially the Democratic Louisville (Ky.) Courier-Journal and the Republican New York Times, condemned the people of the mountains as degenerate barbarians whose conflicts stemmed not from political or economic disputes but from cultural, or even genetic, traits inherited from their wild Scottish highland ancestors. Reporters’ shift in terminology from vendetta (with its Corsican context) to feud in labeling these battles, and their references to the disputing parties as family clans, un-derscored this new emphasis on Scottish heritage.³⁷

Newspapers such as the Courier-Journal and the Times argued that the mountain people threatened national economic prosperity and social stabil-ity, not just that of eastern Kentucky. The only solution to this crisis, they as-serted, was regional “progress” in the form of industrialization, railroad con-struction, and the growth of towns and cities. Eager to attract northern capital and to portray their region as a secure investment opportunity, regional news reporters and elites defined any local people who opposed industrial “pro-gress” as backward and deviant—in other words, as white savages on par with African and Native Americans and opponents of European imperialism worldwide. A Baltimore Sun editorial of 1912, responding to a deadly shootout in the mountain town of Hillsville, Virginia, most explicitly expressed this ar-gument. The paper thundered:

There are but two remedies for such a situation as this, and they are education and extermination. With many of the individuals, the latter is the only remedy. Men and races alike, when they defy civilization, must die. The mountaineers of Virginia and Kentucky and North

Car-olina, like the red Indians and the South African Boers, must learn this lesson.³⁸

Somewhat more severe in its prescription than most discussions of southern mountaineers, this editorial is nonetheless representative of hundreds of sim-ilar press accounts in its conflation of the actions of a single family with the entire regional population and in its comparison of southern mountaineers to other “primitive” peoples beyond the pale of civilization.

Although these accounts insisted that industrial development was the only solution to inherent mountain violence, historian Altina Waller and oth-ers have argued convincingly that, in reality, these violent outbreaks in the 1890s most likely resulted from the climax of the region’s post–Civil War eco-nomic and social transformation. The advent of extractive industries (such as lumbering and iron and coal mining) and construction of railroad lines needed to bring these products to national markets, increases in land speculation and rising rates of absentee land ownership, and decreasing agricultural opportu-nities all led to a violent struggle between forces advocating modernization and those fighting to maintain local autonomy and a traditional agrarian sys-tem. Most Americans, unaware of the tremendous changes taking place in the southern mountains, however, had no reason to question the position of myr-iad press accounts that the widespread “lawlessness” of eastern Kentucky re-flected a cultural and genetic inheritance of the southern mountain people.

Thus, by the turn of the century, the idea that the southern mountaineers were a race of violent savages who threatened the progress of the rest of Amer-ica had become firmly entrenched in the AmerAmer-ican psyche.³⁹

Of all the conflicts in the southern mountains, none fired the public imagination more than the Hatfield-McCoy “feud” of the 1880s. Neither the first, longest, nor bloodiest interfamilial conflict in the southern Appalachi-ans, the two families nonetheless rapidly became household names, a dubi-ous distinction that has lasted for over 100 years. Countless articles and sev-eral books, most notably New York World journalist T. C. Crawford’s An American Vendetta: A Story of Barbarism in the United States (1889), pre-sented a portrait of “Devil Anse” (William Anderson) Hatfield and “Old Ranel” (Randolph) McCoy and their relatives as savage and isolated moun-tain people living in “Murderland” to whom family loyalty mattered above all else and who were ready, even eager, to use deadly violence against rivals and law enforcement officials. The actual conflict had much more to do with economic disputes and interstate rivalry than a “culture of violence,” but most accounts eschewed any such political and economic analysis and in-stead presented it as a prime example of the irrational violence and danger-ous ignorance of all rural people of the region.⁴⁰

Iconography that solidified a new, more degraded and violent image of the mountaineer powerfully reinforced this vision. The frontispiece of Craw-ford’s An American Vendetta featured a rendering by a New York World illus-trator of “Devil Ance” [sic] as a tough-as-nails, rifle-toting mountain patriarch with a flowing dark beard and a wide-brimmed hat (fig. 1.11). Predicting the importance of these visual representations in creating the iconic savage mountaineer, in his preface Crawford asserted that the illustrations “caught in a most striking manner the spirit and character of the people and country”

and “alone give a value to the book, whatever may be said about the rest.”

Hatfield may not have fully consented to this representation of himself, but he became quite a media celebrity and actively participated in contrived pho-tographs taken long after the feud violence had ended. He posed repeatedly for cameramen with his rifle always at the ready (“Armed for Action” in the words of one caption) or with bandoleers of shotgun and rifle cartridges strapped across his waist and chest. In 1897, “Devil Anse” accepted the re-quest of an itinerant photographer to pose with his family with their guns prominently displayed (fig. 1.12). Widely reprinted in the ensuing decades, these photographs of the Hatfields as grim-visaged desperadoes came to rep-resent the image of all mountain folk to “modern” Americans. Hatfield even

Figure 1.11

The construction of the ominous mountaineer:

“Devil Anse” Hatfield. Frontispiece illustration by Mr. Graves; T. C. Crawford, An American Vendetta: A Story of Barbarism in the United States (New York: Bedford, Clarke and Company, 1889).

played a role in later film depictions of mountaineers. Prior to the shooting of the 1915 mountaineer spoof The Cub in the Virginia mountains, director Maurice Tourneur traveled to Mingo County, West Virginia, to meet “Devil Anse,” apparently to lend authenticity to his portrayal of his mountaineer characters. Film scholar Jerry Williamson speculates that Hatfield was such a prominent symbol of the mountains to the national public, he may have served as the origin of the archetypal hillbilly of later films, cartoons, and other popular culture forms.⁴¹

The new conception of a savage mountaineer feudist quickly spread be-yond the specific context of the Hatfield-McCoy conflict to fictional accounts Figure 1.12 The crystalization of mountaineers as violent feudists: “Devil Anse” Hatfield (bottom row, second from left) and his family, 1897. Photographer unknown.

Courtesy of West Virginia State Archives.

of Appalachian life by John Fox, Jr. and a host of lesser talents. Through his dozens of short stories and novels, most famously A Cumberland Vendetta (1895), The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come (1903), and The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1907), Fox presented his vision of the chasm that separated civilized society and the degraded culture of violent and backward mountain moonshiners and feudists. The accompanying illustrations in these works re-inforced this concept of the ignorant, degenerate mountaineer. For example, a drawing accompanying Fox’s 1892 short story “A Mountain Europa” por-trays the heroine’s father as an unkempt moonshiner leaning on his gun (fig.

1.13). Drawn, perhaps not surprisingly, by E. W. Kemble, the picture is the earliest I have discovered that brings together nearly all the visual tropes of the later iconic hillbilly: a surly disposition, barefeet, long scruffy beard, sus-pender-clad overalls, shapeless oversized felt hat, moonshine jug or flask, and long-barreled rifle. Although this iconic hillbilly would not be universally rec-ognized until the 1930s, the textual and iconographic portrayals in sensational newspaper accounts and the novels of John Fox, Jr., and others collectively established the public perception of savage and degenerate mountaineers.⁴²

Figure 1.13

The emergence of the iconic hillbilly.

Illustration by E. W. Kemble captioned

“Dad”; John Fox, Jr., “A Mountain Europa,”

Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine 42 (October 1892): 846.