High Mountains Rising

by Richard A. Straw

  In the last two decades of the twentieth century Appalachian migration patterns changed from long-range streams into Northern, Southern, and Western states outside the region to short-range urban-suburban exchanges principally centered around cities in and immediately adjacent to the region. For instance, between 1985 and 1990 the main sources of new residents in Appalachia were short-distance movers coming primarily from southern metropolitan areas that abut the region such as Montgomery, Alabama; Atlanta and Marietta, Georgia; and Greensboro, North Carolina. There are similar exchanges in Alabama, on the Birmingham-Tuscaloosa axis and in the Huntsville area, and along South Carolina’s Greenville-Spartanburg-Anderson corridor.

  During the same period most of the migration within the region took place between a metropolitan core and its suburban ring communities. For example, more than a quarter of the forty largest county-to-county migration streams in the Appalachian region were simply exchanges between Pittsburgh’s core and periphery counties. Knoxville, Chattanooga, and Johnson City were also focal points for core-perimeter exchanges.

  A similar phenomenon occurred among migrants leaving the region. In the late 1980s the chief Appalachian donor counties were on the peripheries of major cities situated just outside the Appalachian region. These counties abut Greensboro and Thomasville in North Carolina, Marietta and Atlanta in Georgia, and Cincinnati and Youngstown in Ohio. The only exception, Nashville, is located only one county away from the region.40

  At the end of the twentieth century, migrants entering Appalachia had lower-status jobs, lower incomes, and less education and were more likely to be poor than the people migrating away from the region. However, the impact of these migration patterns was not even across Appalachia. The northern and central parts of the region were losing population while becoming a refuge for low-income, blue-collar workers with little formal education. Southern Appalachia, on the other hand, was gaining population from in-migration. Overall, the southern in-migrants were more ethnically and racially diverse, better paid, more educated, better housed, and worked at higher-status jobs than migrants to the other two subregions.41

  Anthropologist Allen Batteau insightfully points out how deeply Appalachia is embedded in the American psyche and how symbolic it is of the American experience.42 The nexus of that interaction is migration. For two centuries Appalachian migration flows have been influenced by broad national economic and social trends. Over that same period, Appalachian migrants have carried the influence of their heritage and skills into every corner of the nation. The exchange has not always been fair, but it has never stopped. Pioneers, farmers, lumberjacks, sharecroppers, mill hands, miners, migrant workers, union organizers, auto workers, urban poor, and suburban middle-class black and white Appalachian migrants have lived a great deal of American history. At the outset of the twenty-first century it will be interesting to see the new patterns that emerge, for Appalachian migration is an unending and endlessly changing part of the American social landscape.

  NOTES

  1. See Ronald D Eller, Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South, 1880–1930 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982); William H. Turner and Edward J. Cabbell, eds., Blacks in Appalachia (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985); Ronald L. Lewis, Black Coal Miners in America: Race, Class, and Community Conflict, 1780–1980 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987); William L. Anderson, ed., Cherokee Removal: Before and After (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991); Robert D. Mitchell, ed., Appalachian Frontiers: Settlement, Society, and Development in the Preindustrial Era (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991); Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); Mary Beth Pudup, Dwight B. Billings, and Altina L. Waller, eds., Appalachia in the Making: The Mountain South in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); John C. Inscoe, ed., Appalachians and Race: The Mountain South from Slavery to Segregation (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001).

  2. Arthur H. Estabrook, “Is There a Mountain Problem?” Mountain Life and Work 4 (1928): 9.

  3. See Arthur H. Estabrook, “The Population of the Ozarks,” Mountain Life and Work 5 (1929): 7–12.

  4. See Terry G. Jordan, “The Texan Appalachia,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 60 (1970): 409–27.

  5. Woodrow R. Clevenger, “The Appalachian Mountaineers in the Upper Cowlitz Basin,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 29 (1938): 123.

  6. See Woodrow R. Clevenger, “Southern Appalachian Highlanders in Western Washington,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 33 (1942): 3–25.

  7. Shields McIlwaine, The Southern Poor White from Lubberland to Tobacco Road (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1939), 102–3.

  8. Lois MacDonald, “Mountaineers in Mill Villages,” Mountain Life and Work 4 (1929): 3.

  9. See Jack Temple Kirby, “The Southern Exodus, 1910–1960: A Primer for Historians,” Journal of Southern History 49 (1983): 585–600.

  10. Marshall E. Vaughn, “The Southern Mountains: Their Current Problems and Future Hope,” Mountain Life and Work 16 (1941): 15.

  11. Henry Hill Collins Jr., America’s Own Refugees: Our 4,000,000 Migrants (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1941).

  12. U.S. Department of Labor, “Industrial and Labor Conditions: Labor Conditions in the Onion Fields of Ohio,” Monthly Labor Review 40 (1935): 324–35.

  13. Carey McWilliams, Ill Fares the Land: Migrants and Migratory Labor in the United States (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1941), 130–31.

  14. Ibid. In the early years of the Depression, poor housing, low pay, harsh working conditions, and an abnormally high incidence of tuberculosis led the onion workers of Ohio’s Hardin County to unionize. In June 1934 the workers formed the National Farm Laborers’ Union, affiliated with the American Federation of Labor, and 600 members voted to strike for an eight-hour work day at thirty-five cents an hour. McWilliams (ibid., 134) describes the strike scene: “From the inception of the strike, an effort was made to ship the striking Kentuckians back to the hill counties. Officers of the Ohio National Guard appeared on the scene; fifty-four deputies were sworn in, and strikebreakers were imported. But these onion weeders were a fighting lot. To every threat they had but one reply: ‘We ain’t agoin’ back.’” After a summer of violence on both sides of the picket line, the strike ended unsuccessfully in September. Among the workers, many returned to the mountains, but nearly 300 families were stranded in the county. The owners turned to a new crop, sugar beets, and to new migrant workers, Mexicans.

  15. Ibid., 144.

  16. Carter G. Woodson, “The Negroes of Cincinnati prior to the Civil War,” Journal of Negro History 1 (1916): 4.

  17. Grace G. Leybourne, “Urban Adjustments of Migrants from the Southern Appalachian Plateaus,” Social Forces 16 (1937): 238–46.

  18. See Carter Goodrich et. al., Migration and Economic Opportunity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1936).

  19. Bureau of Agricultural Economics, Economic and Social Problems of the Southern Appalachians, U.S. Department of Agriculture Miscellaneous Publication No. 205 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1935), 3.

  20. Rupert Vance, Research Memorandum on Population Redistribution within the United States, Bulletin No. 42 (New York: Social Science Research Council, 1938), 21–22.

  21. Carter Goodrich, Bushrod W. Allin, and Marion Hayes, Migration and Planes of Living, 1920–1934 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1935), 10.

  22. Ibid., 78.

  23. Ibid., 56.

  24. For more on Appalachian rural-to-urban migration and urban Appalachians, see J. Wayne Flynt, Dixie’s Forgotten People: The South’s Poor Whites (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979); Lewis M. Killian, White Southerners, rev. ed. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970); William W. Philliber and Clyde B. McCoy, eds.,
The Invisible Minority: Urban Appalachians (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1981). The black components in Appalachian migration streams are discussed in Neil Fligstein, Going North: Migration of Blacks and Whites from the South, 1900–1950 (New York: Academic Press, 1981); Turner and Cabbell, Blacks in Appalachia; Ronald D. Lewis, “From Peasant to Proletarian: The Migration of Southern Blacks to the Central Appalachian Coalfields,” Journal of Southern History 55 (1989): 77–102; J. Trent Alexander, “Great Migrations: Race and Community in the Southern Exodus, 1917–1970” (Ph.D. diss., Carnegie Mellon University, 2001).

  25. Morris G. Caldwell, “The Adjustments of Mountain Families in an Urban Environment,” Social Forces 16 (1938): 395.

  26. Ibid., 392. Caldwell’s dismal picture of the mountaineers derives in part from the fact that the fifty-seven families selected for the study were all clients of the Lexington Family Welfare Society. Moreover, the fifty-seven comparison families from the Bluegrass counties had resided in Lexington substantially longer than the mountaineers. It is also telling that Caldwell could find only fifty-seven mountaineer families receiving welfare services out of a metropolitan population of some 60,000.

  27. For more on urban Appalachian stereotypes, see Phillip J. Obermiller, “Paving the Way: Urban Organizations and the Image of Appalachians,” in Confronting Appalachian Stereotypes: Balk Talk from an American Region, ed. Dwight B. Billings, Gurney Norman, and Katherine Ledford (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 251–66.

  28. Leybourne, “Urban Adjustments of Migrants,” 241, 243.

  29. Goodrich et al., Migration and Economic Opportunity, 119.

  30. Bureau of Agricultural Economics, Economic and Social Problems of the Southern Appalachians, 5.

  31. Leybourne, “Urban Adjustments of Migrants,” 242.

  32. Goodrich et al., Migration and Economic Opportunity, 120.

  33. Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrill Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929), 58.

  34. Ora Spaid, “Southerners Shuttle North, Back,” Louisville Courier-Journal, Oct. 21, 1959, p. 6.

  35. See E. J. Eberling, “Recent Economic Changes in the South,” Mountain Life and Work 23 (1947): 13–15.

  36. Olaf Larson, “Wartime Migration and the Manpower Reserve on Farms in Eastern Kentucky,” Rural Sociology 8 (1943): 153–54.

  37. For more on the Great Migration, see James S. Brown and George A. Hillery Jr., “The Great Migration, 1940–1960,” in The Southern Appalachian Region: A Survey, ed. Thomas R. Ford (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1962), 54–78;Harry K. Schwarzweller, James S. Brown, and J. J. Mangalam, Mountain Families in Transition: A Case Study of Appalachian Migration (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1971); Phillip J. Obermiller, Thomas E. Wagner, and Bruce Tucker, eds., Appalachian Odyssey: Historical Perspectives on the Great Migration (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2000).

  38. See Thomas E. Wagner and Phillip J. Obermiller, “Going Home without the Trip: Appalachian Migrant Organizations,” in Appalachian Odyssey, ed. Obermiller et al., 215–30.

  39. Thomas Shaw, “The Greater Cincinnati Survey: Project Report for the Urban Appalachian Council” (Cincinnati: Institute for Policy Research, University of Cincinnati, 2001).

  40. Phillip J. Obermiller and Steven R. Howe, “New Paths and Patterns of Appalachian Migration, 1975–1990,” in Appalachia: Social Context Past and Present, 4th ed., ed. Phillip J. Obermiller and Michael E. Maloney (Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt Publishing, 2002), 89–97.

  41. Ibid.

  42. See Allen W. Batteau, The Invention of Appalachia (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990).

  8

  Stereotypes

  David C. Hsiung

  What images does the word Appalachia evoke? Perhaps one sees parallel ridges of steep, densely wooded mountains, narrow valleys, twisting rivers, small cabins surrounded by gardens and a handful of livestock, and generations of thin, bearded men and pale women surrounded by a throng of children. And what are the people like? As this chapter’s title hints, they may appear to be poor, lazy, isolated, violent, illiterate, and hard-drinking but perhaps also as having common sense, the spirit of individualism, a strong sense of loyalty, and a deep knowledge of their environment.

  Such images come from the countless references to Appalachia floating about in American culture. For example, consider redneck jokes. The Appalachian writer and storyteller Anne Shelby gives some examples: “How to tell you’re a redneck: You go to a family reunion to pick up dates. Your family tree doesn’t fork. . . . Your truck has nicer curtains than your trailer. Your two-year-old has more teeth than you. . . . A trip to the bathroom in the middle of the night involves shoes and a flashlight. . . . Directions to your house include, Turn off the paved road.”1

  Also consider the Sunday New York Times Magazine crossword puzzle for December 26, 1999, titled “Words Hillbilly-Style.” Some of the clues, with their answers, include the following:

  Ah like to ——— with diffr’nt huntin’ spots. [“spearmint,” for “experiment”]

  Don’t let the man stand outside.———. [“Vitamin,” for “Invite him in”]

  ——— tard of this bad weather. [“Armageddon,” for “I’m a-getting”]

  ——— pa? He feelin’ better? [“Anheuser,” for “And how’s your”]

  ——— up, why dontcha grab me a beer? [“Sensuous,” for “Since you is”]

  The puzzle not only distorts the mountaineers’ pronunciation and grammar but also emphasizes stereotypical hillbilly concerns: hunting, drinking, weather, neighbors, and kin.2

  Sometimes the images come from the news media. Dan Rather of the CBS news program Forty-eight Hours invited viewers to take “a disturbing journey to a separate world close to home,” to Floyd County in eastern Kentucky. “What is it that keeps them [the residents] tied to a place that seems like something out of another country? Come along with us now for 48 hours to the isolated beauty of Appalachia, to hills and hollers most Americans have never seen and a life most Americans will never experience.”3 Other images come from Hollywood in movies such as Silence of the Lambs (1991), Cape Fear (1991), The Beverly Hillbillies (1993), Nell (1994), Fire Down Below (1997), and The Songcatcher (2001).4 Cable television’s endless rebroadcasts of older films such as Deliverance (1972) and 1960s and 1970s television shows such as The Beverly Hillbillies (which was far more popular than the later movie), The Andy Griffith Show, The Dukes of Hazard, and The Waltons guarantee that today’s viewers can grow up on a steady diet of the images that shaped their parents’ and grandparents’ understanding of the mountains.5

  Of course, mountaineers are not the only people who suffer from stereotypes. What about that big burly guy with a thick neck? Obviously a “dumb jock.” And the woman with the carefully applied but excessive makeup? The skateboarder with headphones draped around his neck? We create stereotypes by taking the characteristics of a few individuals we know and applying them to a whole group. Sometimes this process helps us make our way through the world in one piece. We cannot possibly know the driving record of every cabbie in New York City, but perhaps all it takes is one white-knuckle ride through Manhattan to convince us that all New York cabbies drive like maniacs and that it would be safer to walk. Similarly, we have acquired experience negotiating the social minefield of getting along with our peers. Before long, we can categorize people on sight as jocks, nerds, beautiful people, burnouts, gearheads, Greeks, townies, or whatever labels have evolved at various schools or in different neighborhoods.

  Every stereotype has some basis in truth, but the danger comes when stereotypes make it easy to generalize and paint everyone with the same brush. Everyone knows some dumb jocks but also some smart athletes. Do examples of poverty, violence, illiteracy, inbreeding, and laziness exist in Appalachia? Certainly, but that does not mean the entire region should be characterized by such terms. The sociologists Kathleen Blee and Dwight Billings argue tha
t many media representations “work by universalizing common stereotypes of hillbillies and implying that these images represent all that is essential about Appalachian peoples—black and white, straight and gay, rural and urban, rich and poor,” and they reduce “a complex regional society that is peopled by diverse groups to a set of simplistic caricatures.”6 The analytical study of stereotypes teaches us that no people or place can be described uniformly. The details—the specifics of who, what, when, and where—do matter. Stereotypes deceive us into seeing the world as black and white when we should be looking not only for the many shades of gray but also the entire palette of other colors.

  However familiar we are with the act of stereotyping, to understand it we need to examine how the images came to be applied to the mountains. Let’s consider two theories. First, Henry D. Shapiro has argued that the idea of Appalachia as a distinct region and culture came about when Americans outside the mountains felt a need to square the “otherness” of Appalachia, as described by visitors to the region, with their assumptions about the unified and homogeneous character of American civilization. Until the mid-nineteenth century, Americans typically regarded the Southern mountain region pretty much like other unexplored or undeveloped parts of the United States: worthy of study mostly for its geological features rather than for any human society that had developed there. By the 1870s, however, Americans began to see Appalachia differently. According to Shapiro, the writer Will Wallace Harney was “the first to assert that ‘otherness’ which made of the mountainous portions of eight southern states a discrete region, in but not of America.”7 Popular writers such as Mary Noailles Murfree and John Fox Jr. then put their stamp on the “local color” genre of fiction. Shapiro argues that this literary movement “emerged as a response to the existence of a substantial market for descriptive pieces which the readers of the new middle-class monthlies would find interesting.” Editors particularly sought topics that would provide “a perception of the peculiarity of life in the ‘little corners’ of America.”8 Readers gobbled up these stories. Murfree’s pieces for Atlantic Monthly, collected in the volume In the Tennessee Mountains (1884), went through seventeen editions in two years and seven more by 1922.9