Through the words and (in)actions of his three nearly identical Tolliver brothers (Luke, Willy, and Jake), and their family and neighbors, Paul Webb presented endless variations on the standard tropes that defined hillbillies throughout popular culture: social isolation, physical torpor and laziness, unrefined sexuality, filth and animality, comical violence, and utter igno-rance of modernity. Although all familiar ideas, Webb’s portrayal was novel in the sense that such negative qualities were not offset by a correspondingly mythic vision of these folk as rugged pioneers, the inheritors of a proud Anglo-Saxon cultural heritage.2
Beyond his published artwork, the public record of Paul Webb’s life is scant. Born in north-central Pennsylvania in 1902, he received professional art training at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and in Europe. After several years as a freelance cartoonist for his regional newspaper and various national magazines, he began drawing his hillbillies for the Saturday Evening Post and soon thereafter for Esquire, his primary venue for the next two decades. Webb did not set foot in the southern mountain region until six months after he began The Mountain Boys, nor is there any evidence to sug-gest he had read much of the by-then voluminous literature on this popula-tion and region. Instead, he based his imagery solely on the popular concep-tion of mountaineers in film and periodical literature as filtered through his own imagination. As he told a reporter much later, his artwork “didn’t come from the Ozarks or anywhere else but out of my own head.”3
At first glance, it seems strange that this cartoon series, peopled by slovenly laze-abouts and overflowing with rural animality, should have ap-peared in such a self-consciously sophisticated publication as Esquire. Itself an outgrowth of the Depression and first published in October 1933, Esquire was designed to appeal to what its editor Arnold Gingrich labeled the “ne-glected male,” newly middle-class urbanites eager to acquire the products and knowledge of worldly modern living but hesitant about defining them-selves primarily as consumers (traditionally conceived as a feminine realm).
Brilliantly blending a woman’s magazine format (mixing fiction, illustrations, and lifestyle features) with a male-oriented (and in many cases, outrightly misogynist) outlook, and “high brow” culture with “low brow” sex-driven car-toons and “pin-ups,” Esquire sold 100,000 copies of its premier edition and reached a circulation of 750,000 by the spring of 1938.4
Webb’s cartoons differed starkly not only from the advertisements and features on high culture in the magazine but also from the majority of other cartoons, most of which featured white middle- or upper-class urban men in-volved with seductive young women. Yet, they were not as anomalous as they might first appear. Like Esquire cartoons of urban working-class men and women, usually portrayed as European ethnics or African-Americans, Webb’s work often featured an inordinate number of children and a general igno-rance of modernity. Unlike working-class cartoon characters whose identity revolved around their labor and their place in the economic hierarchy, how-ever, the Mountain Boys’ identity stemmed from their total disconnection from the real world of work and the social power structure. In this regard, the most analogous Esquire cartoons of the 1930s and 1940s to The Mountain Boys were those of white men with comely women of color in South Pacific island huts, Eskimo igloos, or Arabian harems (fig. 4.2). Although not iden-tical to these other cartoons that emphasized white male dominance over non-Western females and escape from familial and economic obligation, Webb’s portrayal of rustic characters in a primitive setting, defined by the predominance of nature and their own physical urges, parallels these same ideas in cartoons of white men with enticing native women and clearly re-flects the comparative exotic “other” status of the hillbilly.
Figure 4.2
“Then I threw a hammer through the time clock”: A typical example of the dozens of Esquire cartoons showing white men escaping to primitive paradises beyond the world of work, bosses, and wives. Everett Shinn, Esquire, August 1934, 80. This artwork is copyright of its owner(s) (if applicable) and is used solely for
historical and scholarly illustrative purposes.
Webb’s cartoons also reflect Esquire’s overriding themes in its first years—
conspicuous consumption, refined sexuality, and urbanity—precisely because The Mountain Boys represent a complete inversion of the Esquire ideal and exist in a realm wholly removed from the magazine’s fantasy world. The fact that no specific locale or region is ever mentioned in the text heightens the sense that these characters live in a mythic land outside of time and space.
Their isolation is so complete, that the boys wonder, in a 1935 cartoon, about the “rumor” that “Hoover ain’t president no more” and later speculate about the “legend” that they have neighbors on the opposite side of a small copse of trees. Such an absolute disconnection results naturally in their utter ignorance of all things modern, from the proper use of soap bars (“Shucks—it tastes ter-rible” says one of the boys) to the safe operation of automobiles (a recurring visual trope was the boys crashing their ancient Model T).5
Because of their seclusion, the hillbillies exist in a state of animality and filth. Webb presents an absurd inversion of the proper social order, with barn-yard animals eating and sleeping in the cabin, and the menfolk spending most of their time sitting, or more commonly lying, in the front yard, with a whiskey jug close at hand. Like George Washington Harris’s Sut Lovingood, most of Webb’s gags revolve around the seminaked body and bodily functions. Dozens of the cartoons feature jokes about Gran’pappy spending an inordinate amount of time in the outhouse, and male characters are invariably barefoot and often in their long underwear. Underwear, in particular, is a central signifier for Webb.
For men and women, it simultaneously represents poverty and backwardness (he frequently portrayed men in flannel longjohns and women with underpants made from flour sacks); the sexualized body (reinforced by repeated references to new babies and excessive numbers of children); and uncleanliness and time-lessness (as the once-a-year ritual of airing out or changing of underwear is one of the few ways the characters mark the passage of time) (fig. 4.3). The moun-tain folk’s willingness to publicly display their underwear also represents their lack of social decorum and propriety, a theme exemplified by Webb’s “Christ-mas” offering of 1939, showing the men in the family (including the baby) peek-ing through a door as “Gran’ma” tries on new underpants (fig. 4.4).
The fact that Webb frequently shows men in their underwear also un-derscores their laziness, which he contrasts with the drudgery of female char-acters. In one typical example during World War II, one of the boys laments that the army inspectors who turned down their mule as unfit for service over-looked the real workhorse on the farm: “too bad they didn’t git a look at Gran’maw,” he tells his brother as she strains to push a plow across a scrabbly field. Yet despite their constant toil, Webb’s hillbilly women are perpetually pregnant and fertile—conditions defined solely as yet another onerous chore.
From showing a father worrying that his twelve-year-old daughter will be an
Figure 4.3 The semiotics of underwear:
“Gawdamighty! Time flies—don’t it?
There’s Gran’pap gittin’ his winter underwear aired out already.” Paul Webb, Esquire, June 1936, 54. This artwork is copyright of its owner(s) (if applicable)
and is used solely for historical and scholarly illustrative purposes.
Figure 4.4 An utter lack of social decorum and propriety: “Y’oughta see the ones we got Gran’ma fer Xmas—they got lace on the bottoms and buttons up the back.” Paul Webb, Esquire, December 1939, 81.
This artwork is copyright of its owner(s) (if applicable) and is used solely for
historical and scholarly illustrative purposes.
old maid to the appearance of infant “Oncle Rafe,” the offspring of the broth-ers’ grandmother, Webb presents both the women and, by extension, the men as almost supernaturally fecund. Gags abound about fathers who cannot re-member which are their own children and which are their neighbors’, and childbirth is portrayed as an event so commonplace that men see it as an in-adequate reason for women to interrupt their unceasing toil (fig. 4.5).6
As well as representing through inversion the key themes of Esquire in its early years, Webb’s cartoon was also a visual manifestation of a powerful new myth of southern society and culture that developed in the 1920s and 1930s, what historian George Tindall later labeled “the Benighted South,” a society characterized by a degraded culture, oppressive economic and polit-ical institutions, staggering inequality, and widespread poverty. Challenging the long-standing view of an idyllic antebellum society of stately plantations and cultural sophistication, this reconceptualization was one result of a much broader struggle over the nature of modern America that was part of the shift from a country grounded in localized commerce and social relations to one characterized by mass production and consumption. Battles between “wets”
and “drys,” over whether or not women should smoke or “bob” their hair, and about the role of local and regional identity were all part of a general
ques-Figure 4.5
Webb’s hillbilly women: A strange blend of drudgery and fecundity: “Oh—so that’s it—another brat! Shecks—Ah was beginnin’
to think you was a-goin’ to be gone all day.”
Paul Webb, Esquire, September 1937, 38.
This artwork is copyright of its owner(s) (if applicable) and is used solely for historical and scholarly illustrative purposes.
tioning of the proper place of rurality and traditional ways of life in an ever more urban and industrial nation.7
The key figure in this redefinition of the South was H. L. (Henry Louis) Mencken, Baltimore Sun columnist and editor of such influential magazines as Smart Set and American Mercury. In his many writings about southern so-ciety and culture, especially his hyperbolic critique “The Sahara of the Bozart,”
Mencken bemoaned the loss of the antebellum southern aristocracy during the Civil War and the subsequent emergence of a society dominated by “the poor white trash” in whose veins flowed “some of the worst blood of western Europe.” The 1925 Scopes “monkey” trial in Dayton, Tennessee, in the hill country of the Cumberland Plateau, provided Mencken with a galvanizing opportunity to lampoon rural southerners, in general, and hill folk, in par-ticular. To Mencken, the rural people living in the environs of Dayton were
“gaping primates from the upland valleys,” who “sweated freely and were not debauched by the refinements of the toilet.”8
Mencken’s simian references, suggesting that the hill people were not only uncivilized but also evolutionarily less advanced than urban Americans, mirrored contemporary “scientific” studies of mountain backwardness, most notably Mandell Sherman and Thomas Henry’s Hollow Folk (1933). A study of five communities in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, its authors con-ceived of this work as an effort to trace “the human race on its long journey from primitive ways of living to a modern social order.” Focusing especially on what they considered the least advanced community, Colvin Hollow, they describe a place of sheer animality and squalor, where a six-month-old infant, his face “covered with flies,” lies on a “bed of dirty rags” that “had not been
‘changed’ since he was born.” Although later scholars have challenged the preconceptions and methodology of this study, this supposedly scientific ac-count reinforced widely accepted ideas of mountaineer wildness. It also matched similar literary portrayals of southern poor whites, both within and outside of the hill country, by such influential authors as William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, and above all, Erskine Caldwell.9
While Webb’s unflattering picture of the hillbillies was generally less mean-spirited than that of Mencken, Caldwell, and some social scientists, on a few occasions he matched this darker and more morally debased portrait of mountain society. His November 1940 presidential election cartoon is one such example (fig. 4.6). The fact that the hill folk are lining up to vote in an outhouse is demeaning enough, but the gagline’s reference to a “two-headed cousin” clearly suggests inbreeding (if not incest). Potentially even more of-fensive are Webb’s few cartoons featuring the dog-faced man Uncle Baldo—
presumably the product of a human-canine sexual encounter—who can tree a raccoon like a bloodhound and has spent time in a carnival show. Webb’s
exact intent in creating these cartoons remains unclear, but one might con-clude that these drawings were intended to represent how little removed from outright animality these characters are. This conception of dangerously in-bred and imbecilic mountain folk was increasingly common in 1930s public discourse, not only in Hollow Folk but also in popular medical periodicals.
A 1936 article on an isolated Virginia mountain clan, for example, argued that inbreeding and incest had created a whole community of feebleminded men and women. The description of one family living in a “one-room hut”
mirrors almost exactly Luke and his brothers: “In the room were three grown boys, all imbeciles, all illegitimate, one stretched out on a filthy bed in a drunken stupor. There was not a normal human being in the room.” But whereas Webb portrays such a scene as ludicrously comical, author Jack Manne saw this situation as a social crisis requiring a drastic response. “In view of the present inadequacy of medical science in curing these mental ills,” Manne concludes, “the only alternative seems to be the prevention of further propagation by sterilization.”10
Figure 4.6
Intimations of inbreeding and social devolution:
“Lem Hawkins promised to bring his two-headed cousin along . . . that’s three votes right there.”
Paul Webb, Esquire, November 1940, 56. This artwork is copyright of its owner(s) (if applicable) and is used solely for historical and scholarly illustrative purposes.
Cartoons insinuating such animality would have surely brought howls of protest if aimed at other American subpopulations, even minority and im-poverished ones, but no public outcry was evident in Esquire’s “letters-to-the-editor” section. Perhaps partly indicating readers’ unwillingness to publicly discuss something as seemingly insignificant as cartoons, the silence also sug-gests that many readers, predominantly self-defined urban cosmopolitans, ap-parently viewed such images as exaggerated, but at heart, truthful portrayals of southern poor whites. Most seemed to share the view of one man who wrote to defend the depiction of southern impoverished whites in an Erskine Caldwell short story previously published in Esquire and who concluded, apparently without irony, “the poor whites seem happy enough in all their squalor, so we may as well leave matters as they are.”11
The magazine’s editors reinforced the sense that Webb’s portrayal of moun-taineers was factually based by positioning his cartoons next to writings by Jesse Stuart, a native of eastern Kentucky and an important interwar commentator on the Appalachian experience. A mainstay of Esquire in its early years, Stuart cre-ated loving descriptions of the men and women of the “eternal Kentucky hills”
that stressed not only their rugged pioneer ways and their harmonious relation-ship with nature but also their lack of formal education, propensity for violence, unique cultural practices from moonshining to folk remedies, and isolation from modern civilization. The close association between Webb’s cartoons and Stu-art’s short stories encouraged readers to see both as somewhat farfetched, but at their core, essentially accurate depictions of the same mountain folk.12
This sense of quasi plausibility and Webb’s standard portrayal (with a few notable exceptions) of ignorant and hopelessly inept but basically gentle souls who calmly accept their fate made his work widely popular in the De-pression years. Despite an endless series of floods, wind storms, fires, and man-made disasters, Luke and his kin calmly endure all the crises they face with, in the words of media scholar Jerry Williamson, “placid equanimity and re-siliency” (fig. 4.7). In this regard, contemporary audiences could see them as models of human endurance and a heartening symbol that the nation too could survive the current economic and social upheaval.13
Webb’s cartoons remained popular throughout World War II and into the postwar era, and he produced a successful line of advertiser-sponsored calen-dars featuring his artwork. His appeal began to wane by the late 1940s, however (a 1948 internal Esquire memorandum warned that the company would be “ex-tremely fortunate to dispose of the 50,000 calendars” they had printed that year), and he had an increasingly icy relationship with David and Alfred Smart, the owner-publishers of the magazine who took over as editors in 1945. After an extended legal dispute with Webb, Esquire’s new management concluded in November 1948 that “Paul Webb has outlived his usefulness for Esquire” and
his cartoons were suspended shortly thereafter. Although Webb began to spo-radically recontribute cartoons to the magazine in the early 1950s (after David Smart’s death and Arnold Gingrich’s resumption as editor), by the late 1950s, Gingrich and his editorial board decided Webb’s hillbilly portrayals no longer resonated with the magazine’s target audience of young men, and he was let go along with many other cartoonists and writers of his generation as the magazine prepared to help launch the “new journalism” of the 1960s.14