These are of course partial truths, often oversimplified, romanticized, or much embellished. Again, no one expects historical authenticity from Hollywood. And yet each of these films gives students entrée into very real issues and aspects of the Appalachian experience, which allows them to recognize and examine them in very concrete and tangible terms.15 In his book The Invention of Appalachia, Allen Batteau stresses the extent to which the region has often served far more national than regional agendas; he points out that in the American imagination Appalachia has long represented far more than deprived and depraved hillbillies. As pervasive as those images are, Batteau argues that they have been offset by more positive images, which “have become less symbols of Appalachian particularity than of shared American values—the dignity of labor, self-sufficiency, pioneering spirit, patriotism, and independence.”16 In essence, much of what he labels “Holy Appalachia” was also Hollywood’s Appalachia. That’s certainly the case in most of the films considered here.
Alvin York and the filmmakers reproducing his story on-screen certainly bought into this notion that “Appalachia is somehow a special repository of ‘fundamental Americanism,’ ” the one region in the country that has “preserved traditional American values in their purest form.”17 York, his family, and his neighbors represented for filmgoers as well the spirit of what made this nation great; that these patriotic sentiments were expressed on the eve of the United States’ entry into another world war no doubt contributed to the film’s success.
But Hollywood’s sense of “Holy Appalachia” was neither unique to 1941 nor limited to periods of national crisis. In some sense, almost all these films share to one degree or another ennobling depictions of the values of home, of family, of land, of tradition, and it is as important to recognize and discuss these themes as “inventions” as it is to debunk more denigrating stereotypes and distortions. Yet even if those positive images of the region are not necessarily any more historically accurate than the negatives are, the mere fact that these films take on real issues and events should allow us to approach them as glasses half full rather than dismiss them as glasses half empty.
This is certainly the approach Robert Toplin has taken in his defense of Hollywood history. To grant him the last word, he claims that such screen depictions of the past are successful when “audiences receive a modicum of information about broad historical events but are, nevertheless, emotionally and conceptually rewarded. Memorable films address important questions about the past and attach viewers’ emotions to them. Hollywood gives life and personality to individuals and groups that often appear rather sterilely in the pages of history books. Cinema helps transform stale, one-dimensional stories into lively, two-dimensional experiences to which audiences can relate.”18
So it is, I would argue, for all of the films discussed here. Their redeeming value lies not in any literal truths that they convey, but in the mere fact that they embrace real issues and present them in dramatic contexts that provide students—as they have American moviegoers for much of the past century—accessible, appealing, and multifaceted introductions to the region, its people, and the struggles they have undergone.
Notes
1. For brief descriptions of each of these films except Foxfire, see individual entries in Rudy Abramson and Jean Haskell, eds., Encyclopedia of Appalachia (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006). The fullest scholarly assessment of Appalachia on film is J. W. Williamson, Hillbillyland: What the Movies Did to the Mountains and What the Mountains Did to the Movies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). Three of the films I teach were released after the publication of Hillbillyland; of the others I use, Williamson offers extensive commentary on only two: Sergeant York (207–24) and Deliverance (155–67).
2. The literature on Appalachian stereotypes and imagery is increasingly vast. The best of these works include Cratis D. Williams, “The Southern Mountaineer in Fact and Fiction” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1961); Henry D. Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978); Rodger Cunningham, Apples on the Flood: The Southern Mountain Experience (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987); Allen W. Batteau, The Invention of Appalachia (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990); and Dwight B. Billings, Gurney Norman, and Katherine Ledford, eds., Confronting Appalachian Stereotypes: Back Talk from an American Region (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999).
3. David Whisnant, All That Is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 110.
4. Robert Brent Toplin, Reel History: In Defense of Hollywood (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 1.
5. For a debate on the merits of The Journey of August King, see Jack Wright and John C. Inscoe, “Hollywood Does Antebellum Appalachia and Gets It (Half) Right,” Appalachian Journal 24 (Winter 1997): 192–215. My half of that debate appears as chap. 11 in this volume.
6. Jeff Young, Kazan: The Master Director Discusses His Films—Interviews with Elia Kazan (New York: Newmarket Press, 1999), 258–59. See also William Baer, ed., Elia Kazan: Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000).
7. Tandy followed Foxfire, for which she won an Emmy, with starring roles in Driving Miss Daisy (1989), Fried Green Tomatoes (1991), and the television film To Dance with a White Dog (1993).
8. Williamson, Hillbillyland, 157–58.
9. Fonda made the statement on “Private Screenings: Jane Fonda,” an interview with Robert Osborne on Turner Classic Movies, March 28, 2007.
10. For a full discussion of Ma York’s pivotal role in Sergeant York, see Williamson’s chapter on “The Mama’s Boys,” in Hillbillyland, esp. 215–22.
11. For a discussion of the role of race in Cold Mountain, both book and film, see “Appalachian Odysseus,” chap. 14 in this volume; Martin Crawford, “Cold Mountain Fictions, Appalachian Half-Truths,” Appalachian Journal 30 (Winter–Spring 2003): 182–95; “Roundtable Discussion on Cold Mountain, the Film,” especially comments by Tyler Blethen, John Crutchfield, and Gordon McKinney, Appalachian Journal 31 (Spring–Summer 2004): 316–53; and a film review by Inscoe in Journal of American History 91 (December 2004): 1127–29.
12. Matewan was filmed in Thurmond, West Virginia; Deliverance and Foxfire in Rabun County, Georgia; Wild River in and around Cleveland and the Hiawassee River in Tennessee; Songcatcher primarily in Madison County, North Carolina; and The Journey of August King in several other western North Carolina counties. The Kentucky-based scenes in the first third of The Dollmaker were filmed in Sevier County, Tennessee, and Chicago doubled for Detroit. Excellent book-length accounts of the filming of two of these films are John Sayles’s Thinking in Pictures: The Making of the Movie Matewan (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), and Christopher Dickey’s Summer of Deliverance (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998). Christopher Dickey is the son of James Dickey, who was with his father during the making of the film.
13. See a chapter on the scoring of Matewan in Sayles, Thinking in Pictures, 107–13. For another good discussion of the film, see Eric Foner, “Matewan,” in Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies, ed. Mark C. Carnes (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 204–7.
14. The details of Sergeant York’s production are recounted in Williamson, Hillbillyland, 207–24; Robert Brent Toplin, History by Hollywood: The Use and Abuse of the American Past (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), chap. 3; and David D. Lee, Sergeant York: An American Hero (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985), chap. 6. For a discussion of the film within the context of other frontier films of the era, see J. E. Smyth, Reconstructing American Historical Cinema: From Cimarron to Citizen Kane (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), chap. 8.
15. Other films might reveal different patterns and different “truths” about the southern highlands. Thunder Road (1958), The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1936
), I’d Climb the Highest Mountain (1951), Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980), The Molly Maguires (1970), and October Sky (1999) are all mainstream films that I would consider adding to an expanded version of my course, either because they address other significant aspects of the Appalachian experience, or because they offer contrasting views and treatments of issues covered in the nine films I currently teach.
16. Allen Batteau, The Invention of Appalachia (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990), 17–18.
17. Lee, Sergeant York, 104. Jerry Williamson has noted the irony in the fact that in Tobacco Road, another major film released in 1941, filmmakers applied some of the same hillbilly stereotypes to portray its characters as degenerates that were used in Sergeant York to “stoke the fires of patriotism in painting the young ne’er-do-well Alvin York as an ideal foot soldier in the nation’s defense.” J. W. Williamson, “Feature Films,” in Abramson and Haskell, eds., Encyclopedia of Appalachia, 1710.
18. Toplin, Reel History, 204.
Credits
“Appalachian Odysseus: Love, War, and Best-sellerdom in the Blue Ridge” is a composite of a review essay of the novel that first appeared in Appalachian Journal 25 (Spring 1998), the author’s section of a roundtable discussion of the film version of Cold Mountain entitled “Mountain Women, Mountain War” in Appalachian Journal 31 (Spring/Summer 2004), and a review of the film in the Journal of American History 91 (December 2004). Reprinted with the permission of Appalachian Journal and Journal of American History.
“Between Bondage and Freedom: Confronting the Variables of Appalachian Slavery and Slaveholding” is an expanded version of a lecture delivered at Berea College in October 2005 as part of a symposium on the black experience in Appalachia and America, in commemoration of the college’s sesquicentennial.
“Coping in Confederate Appalachia: Portrait of a Mountain Woman and Her Community at War” originally appeared in North Carolina Historical Review 59 (October 1992), and is reprinted with the permission of the North Carolina Historical Review.
“A Fugitive Slave in Frontier Appalachia: The Journey of August King on Film” appeared as half of a “debate” with Jack Wright in “Slavery, Freedom, Frontier . . . and Hollywood? ‘The Journey of August King’ in Historical Perspective” in Appalachian Journal 24 (Winter 1997). Reprinted with the permission of Appalachian Journal.
“Guerrilla War and Remembrance: Reconstructing a Father’s Murder and a Community’s Civil War” is an expanded version of an essay that appeared in Appalachian Journal 34 (Fall 2006). Wilson’s memoir is reproduced, along with background information on the circumstances under which it was written, in Neighbor to Neighbor: A Memoir of Family, Community, and Civil War in an Appalachian Community, ed. Sandra L. Ballard and Leila E. Weinstein. Boone, N.C.: Center for Appalachian Studies, 2007. Reprinted with the permission of the Center for Appalachian Studies, Boone, N.C.
“Highland Households Divided: Familial Deceptions, Diversions, and Divisions in Southern Appalachia’s Inner Civil War.” From Enemies of the Country: New Perspectives on Unionists in the Civil War South, ed. John C. Inscoe and Robert C. Kenzer. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001. Reprinted with the permission of the University of Georgia Press.
“In Defense of Appalachia on Film: Hollywood, History, and the Highland South” was commissioned for an essay collection, Patricia Gantt, ed., Appalachia in the Classroom (Athens: Ohio University Press), forthcoming in 2009.
“Mountain Masters as Confederate Opportunists: The Slave Trade in Western North Carolina, 1861–1865” originally appeared in Slavery & Abolition 16 (April 1995).
“ ‘Moving through Deserter Country’: Fugitive Accounts of Southern Appalachia’s Inner Civil War.” From The Civil War in Appalachia: Collected Essays, ed. Kenneth W. Noe and Shannon H. Wilson. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997. Reprinted with the permission of the University of Tennessee Press.
“ ‘A Northern Wedge Thrust into the Heart of the Confederacy’: Explaining Civil War Loyalties in the Age of Appalachian Discovery, 1900–1921” was commissioned for Andrew L. Slap, ed., The Civil War’s Aftermath in Appalachia (forthcoming from the University Press of Kentucky).
“Olmsted in Appalachia: A Connecticut Yankee Encounters Slavery in the Southern Highlands, 1854” originally appeared in Slavery & Abolition 9 (September 1988) as “Olmsted in Appalachia: A Connecticut Yankee Encounters Slavery and Racism in the Southern Highlands, 1854,” and was reprinted in John C. Inscoe, ed., Appalachians and Race: The Mountain South from Slavery to Segregation (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001).
“Race and Racism in Nineteenth-Century Appalachia: Myths, Realities, and Ambiguities.” From Appalachia in the Making: The Modern South in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Mary Beth Pudup, Dwight B. Billings, and Altina Waller. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Reprinted with permission of the University of North Carolina Press.
“Race and Remembrance in West Virginia: John Henry for a Postmodernist Age.” Previously published in the Journal of Appalachian Studies 10 (Spring/Fall 2004). Copyright © 2004 by Journal of Appalachian Studies. Reprinted by permission.
“The Racial ‘Innocence’ of Appalachia: William Faulkner and the Mountain South” is an expanded version of an article that first appeared in the South Atlantic Quarterly (Summer 1991) and since has been published in Confronting Appalachian Stereotypes: Back Talk from an American Region, ed. Dwight B. Billings, Gurney Norman, and Katherine Ledford. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999.
“The Secession Crisis and Regional Self-Image: The Contrasting Cases of Western North Carolina and East Tennessee.” From Looking South: Chapters in the Story of an American Region, ed. Winfred B. Moore Jr. and Joseph F. Tripp. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1989. Reproduced with permission of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., Westport, Conn.
“ ‘Talking Heroines’: Elite Mountain Women as Chroniclers of Stoneman’s Raid, April 1865.” From Inside the Confederate Nation: Essays in Honor of Emory M. Thomas, ed. Lesley J. Gordon and John C. Inscoe. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005. Reprinted with permission of Louisiana State University Press.
“Unionists in the Attic: The Shelton Laurel Massacre Dramatized” originally appeared in North and South 10 (October 2007). Reprinted with permission of the Civil War Society.
Index
Abbott, Shirley, 145
Abingdon, Va., 30, 67, 74
Abolitionism, 50, 58, 72
in Appalachia, 22, 24, 27, 115–16, 197, 237, 246, 250–52, 260
Absalom, Absalom! (Faulkner) 227, 230–32, 237–38
Adams, Sheila Kay, 376
Agriculture, Appalachian, 81, 157–61, 166
Alabama, 67, 68, 191, 338, 357
Alamance, Battle of, 262, 279n18
Alcoholism, 151–52, 159
Alleghania, 1–2
Allen, Lawrence, 283, 286–90
American Revolution, 260–61, 264, 268, 273, 275
Andrews, Raymond, 19
Annalees (slave), 243–52, 370, 374
Appalachia
black population of, 15–17, 25–26, 32, 59, 67, 75, 98n8, 105–6, 229–30
class divisions in, 206, 211–15, 219–20, 230–33, 375
and Confederacy, 1, 4–5, 89, 111–12, 219–20
contrasted with South, 2–5, 13, 111–12, 231–33, 277, 304–6
discovery of, 196–97
as frontier, 244–45
geographical definition of, 3–4, 6–7
influx of blacks into, 31, 83–85, 245–46
mission workers to, 256, 258, 273
patriotism in, 260–62, 264, 269, 275–78
stereotypes of, 2, 75, 175, 197–98, 245, 256, 258, 272–73, 352–53, 366–67
whiteness of, 3, 4, 15–17, 21, 197, 227–32, 235, 257
Appalachian Regional Commission, 364
Appalachia on Our Mind (Shapiro), 257
Arkansas, 283, 286–87
Army of Northern Vi
rginia, 182
Arthur, John Preston, 284, 340
Ashe County, N.C., 80, 129–31, 134, 322–44, 340
guerrilla warfare in, 325–44
histories of, 340–41
Asheville, N.C., 17, 50, 67, 74, 84, 105, 112, 147, 150, 272
battle of, 298, 302n29
Civil War in, 206–7, 276, 280n34
Confederate armory in, 85–86, 87
race riot in, 31, 34
and Stoneman’s Raid, 205–11, 216–20
as tourist resort, 268
Atkins, Eileen, 317–18
Atlanta, Ga., 34, 154, 158, 184
Augusta County, Va., 46
Avery, W. W., 82, 96n3, 106
Ayers, Edward J., 31–32
Baker, Abner, 49
Bakersville, N.C., 67
Banner, Napoleon, 138–39
Bartram, William, 310, 314
Bates, Daniel, 48–49, 55, 63n6
Bates, John, 49
Bates, Stephen, 49
Batteau, Allen, 4, 7–8, 196–97, 259, 360–61, 377
Bell, Alfred, 90–94, 144–68
Bell, John, 106
Bell, Mary, 90–94, 144–68, 208, 318
Berea, Ky., 251
Berea College, 22, 23, 259
Berwanger, Eugene, 27
Big Bend Tunnel, W.Va., 351, 357–59
Biggers, Jeff, 4
Billings, Dwight, 48
Biltmore House, 268
Birdseye, Ezekiel, 47–48, 58
Blackmun, Ora, 284
Blalock, Keith, 328
Blalock, Malinda, 328
Blee, Kathleen, 48
Blue Ridge Mountains, 104, 207, 245, 262, 267, 304, 313–14
Boone, Daniel, 242, 270
Boone, N.C., 209–10
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