by Steven Stoll
Seen this way, the walker’s posture and the futility of his journey mark him as degenerate. Metropolitans increasingly saw the persistence of agrarians as a social disease. A varied literature of rural degeneracy claimed that such people lived in social isolation from communication and commerce, resulting in a low order of intelligence and a higher incidence of criminality. “The claim that rural places were rearguard,” writes the scholar Maria Farland, “found its counterpart in the view that the habits of mind found in the cities were more forward-looking and avantgarde.”31
Degeneracy is an aspersion, a projection from those supposedly forward to those supposedly backward. On the Wilderness Road near the Cumberland Gap, the novelist James Lane Allen watched a wagon approach, “faded and old, with its dirty ragged canvas hanging motionless, and drawn by a yoke of mountain oxen which seemed to be moving in their sleep.” A boy drove the wagon, “a faded, pinched, and meager mountain boy.” Allen doesn’t speak to the boy. In the moment it takes for the wagon to pass him, he sees an expression of “mental excitement” on the face of the driver and notices that “in one dirty claw-like hand he grasped a small paper bag, into the mouth of which he had thrust the other hand, as a miser might thrust his into a bag of gold.” The boy eats something and enjoys it. Allen spins the scene into a Tarzan-like story. “He had just bought, with a few cents he had perhaps saved no one knows how long, some sweetmeal of civilization which he was about for the first time to taste.” Allen watches as boy and oxen roll toward the gap, passing behind steam from a sawmill. “Hidden in that steam, they disappeared. It was the last of the mountaineers passing away before the breath of civilization.”32
Allen entirely invented the grotesqueness of this scene. Where did the boy’s pennies really come from? He had just come from town. He probably spent the small change he received after buying something on an errand. There is no reason to believe that pie or candy would have been so very extraordinary to him. This is why boys liked to go to town. Instead, Allen eliminated consumption and money from mountain life, rendering the boy a stranger on his own road, a foreigner in his own county. The sawmill did represent the seizure of the forest and its conversion into commodities that produced capital, but Allen wrongly identified it with town and set both against the boy’s home in the hills, which he assumed to be a pocket of irredeemable degeneracy.33
Degeneracy also carried a sense of moral danger. As Farland shows, the image of the deviant farmer saturated social science and fiction at the turn of the century, in books like Henry Goddard’s The Kallikak Family: A Study of the Heredity of Feeble-mindedness (1912), Charles Davenport’s The Hill Folk: Report on a Rural Community of Hereditary Defectives (1912), and more obliquely in Liberty Hyde Bailey’s report for the Commission on Country Life (1908), Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome (1911), and Robert Frost’s “The Mending Wall,” in which the narrator describes his neighbor as “an old-stone savage.” The genre’s sociological watershed might have been Robert L. Dugdale’s The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease, and Heredity (1877), in which Dugdale attributed the criminality of the anonymous Juke family to their “ancestral breeding spot … along the forest covered margin of five lakes so rocky as to be at some parts inaccessible.” Thomas Cole, Frederick Church, and Asher B. Durand—foremost among the painters who cherished the countryside of upstate New York—would have been surprised to read Dugdale describe a wooded lakeshore in Ulster County as “one of the crime cradles of the State of New York” and a seething nest of convicts.34
The book promotes the libel of rural depravity. The shiftless ancestor of the clan was a single Dutch settler about whom Dugdale knew nothing except that “he lived much as the backwoodsmen upon our frontiers now do,” drinking often, fishing and hunting rather than farming, and hating hard work. The old Dutchman committed the Jukes’ original sin. He owned no land and all who followed him lived as “squatters upon the soil,” in “log or stone houses similar to slave-hovels, all ages, sexes, relations and strangers ‘bunking’ indiscriminately.” This last bit gives The Jukes its prurient quality. Somehow, illegitimate occupancy made him think of sexual impropriety. During the winter the family slept fanned out on the floor, feet toward the hearth. For hundreds of thousands of years, no one had a better idea for how to pass a frigid night. Dugdale, however, saw something creepy about it (which makes him seem creepy). That kind of “proximity, where not producing illicit relations, must often have evolved an atmosphere of suggestiveness fatal to habits of chastity.” Incest, in other words, followed directly from sleeping in a heap. Inbreeding, however, was little more than a libel against outliers whose distance from the urban core exiled them from civil society, just as unmarried women who lived a little too far from church in seventeenth-century Salem were more likely to be accused of witchcraft.35
George Inness did not have to look far for a model of degeneracy. New Jersey had its own Appalachia. Just twenty miles northwest of Watchung Station (and a mere six hundred feet higher in elevation) lived a community of Scots-Irish and African-American ancestry who maintained a subsistence economy. Appleton’s Journal wrote of the supposedly reclusive residents of the Ramapo Mountains: “They buried themselves deep in the fastness and gorges of the mountains, and reared children, wilder and more savage than themselves.” But their real transgression was to live outside of the expanding capitalist economy, or as Appleton’s put it, “Their desire is simply to live. That they must live for something never occurred to them.” The proximity of the Ramapo Mountains and the popular characterization of the people there is at least suggestive of the figures in Short Cut.36
Whomever Inness saw in and around that meadow, he seems to have looked upon their dispossession as an injustice. We know that he embraced Henry George’s single-tax reform movement. George believed that profits from the ownership of land, including rents, should be redistributed to all the members of society. The steam engine was supposed to set people free so they could philosophize, he wrote; instead, it enslaved and pauperized them. Wherever machines and capital spread, George saw insufficiency replace sufficiency. “Go to a new community where the race of progress is just beginning,” he wrote in Progress and Poverty (1879), meaning before the transformation to a capitalist economy took place. “No one makes an easy living, or even a very good one—yet everyone can make a living. While you won’t find wealth and all its effects, neither will you find beggars.” He was talking about the household mode of production.37
Viewed through Progress and Poverty, Short Cut doesn’t depict degeneracy but dignity. The walker becomes the universal peasant, who belongs to land that does not belong to him. The footbridge becomes the perfect inverse of the railroad, an authentic means of getting around, made by the hands of the people who used it. Short Cut could be interpreted as the critique of a public policy that failed to protect or compensate the rural poor for the land they were quickly losing to suburbanization and capitalist agriculture.
The same could be said for Inness’s other canvases from his Montclair series of the 1880s. Many of these stand out in his catalog because they don’t depict tiny figures at the edges of immense landscapes. They show people up close and doing things: gathering (In the Orchard, Milton [New Jersey], 1881); herding lambs (End of Day, Montclair, 1885); collecting firewood (The Old Barn, 1888 and Winter Morning, Montclair, 1882); bringing in a stray cow (Homeward, 1881); and chatting during the workday (Gossip, 1884). In another departure, he left the studio and used live models, perhaps in an attempt to meet local residents. One painting that illuminates some of the themes is The Old Veteran (1881). An infirm man walks on crutches made of branches. Climbing beans weave through a broken enclosure behind him. The image feels journalistic, even voyeuristic, like a domestic moment we’re not supposed to see. (The contrast with Winslow Homer’s veteran couldn’t be sharper.) It’s the same man, or nearly, whom Inness painted two years later inching his way over a waterless creek.38
The Old Veteran and Short Cut both convey los
s. Framed in terms of Henry George’s political thought, Inness’s paintings imply that the old veteran is owed a public debt for serving the Union and an income from the rents collected by wealthy landowners. Such policies would ease the old veteran’s agedness and help him care for his grandchildren. As Inness lectured before a gathering in honor of George, “At present we can not help seeing [that poverty] arises out of false social conditions.” By false conditions he meant property relations that undermine basic human needs. Individuals deserve to profit from what they create, he believed, but “that which he [the individual] does not create belongs to the community, and that is land.”
Inness moved to Montclair in 1885, joining the middle-class strivers who commuted to work on the railroad. At some point during the 1880s, according to a local historian, as many as six thousand people traveled to work every day. Land changed hands furiously in the decades between 1870 and 1890, part of the transformation of Montclair into a suburb of New York City. The population of Essex County, including the Township of Montclair, increased by 32 percent between 1870 and 1880 and another 34 percent during the next decade, driving up real estate prices and property taxes. The irony of these changes and Inness’s participation in them was that they displaced the herders and gardeners he painted. A number of self-sufficient agricultural colonies, founded by Italian and Jewish immigrants, failed during the 1880s. Inness witnessed the transformation of New Jersey from farm to suburb.
All of which hints at a final possibility for the meaning of the painting. The limping walker is himself a new commuter. He wears a white shirt and vest appropriate for a clerk. He crosses from agrarian subsistence to wage work, using the footbridge to save a few minutes before the next train. In a world in which the single tax did not become law, the only escape for the figures in Short Cut was to sell their labor. For them, survival meant finding the fastest way to Watchung Station, thereby traveling in a straight line between past and future.39
* * *
FEW PEOPLE AT THE TIME ever viewed one of Inness’s paintings. If they had, many in New York City or Chicago would have recognized themselves or their parents or their grandparents in the figures he drew and would have felt something of the pathos he expressed for gardeners and herders. They read another kind of description in newspaper accounts of feuds and shootouts in mountains not far away. These stories recast the society and sufficiency of Appalachia as the cause of pathological behavior. The stories made an implicit argument. If isolation was the cause of violence and degeneracy, then extractive industry was the solution.
City newspapers began to carry articles about depraved people living high and away. When The New York Times learned of an ongoing conflict between families named Hatfield and McCoy, editors used it to comment on the barbarity of the region and its people.
This is a queer story to be told of a civilized country … The McCoys and Hatfields and other “well-known families” of the mountain region will doubtless go on bequeathing freedom’s battle from bleeding sire to son until either they are all killed or the region they inhabit is brought into the pale of civilization. The discovery of metals and minerals in paying quantities would have the latter effect, but so long as a difficult agriculture is the only employment that can be followed in the mountains, their population will be small and scattered.
Industrial discipline, not legally constituted democratic authority, the equality of women, or education, would bring an end to such conflict. “Just as the feud was blamed on some inherent moral failing in the mountaineers,” writes Altina Waller, “social disruption caused by economic transformation was blamed on their inferior culture.” The disruption itself contributed to, if it did not cause, the feud, but metropolitans blamed mountain people for their hardship either way. And plain people had no way of countering the stories told about them. Yet those stories exercised real power. They justified people’s dispossession as progress.40
Consider the example of John Fox, Jr., a Kentucky-born social climber with ties to the coal industry. He was born near Lexington, in the Bluegrass, and brought up the son of a schoolteacher. He didn’t fit in at Harvard—not into the culture of affluence or the social display of masculinity. Fox attempted a career as a playwright and moved to New York City. Needing an income, he agreed to raise funds for his brother’s coal-mining venture. (“It takes monumental cheek to … talk to a man about investing $10,000 when you have but $10 in your pocket. It makes me feel like a fraud,” he wrote in a letter.) Fox finally moved back to Kentucky, where he joined the swindle that deprived mountain people of land. He learned how to bust unions by hiring convicts as scabs and by calling in state troopers. He bragged about his membership in a “guard,” a racist death squad made up of college graduates who lynched a black railroad worker near Big Stone Gap, Virginia. For our purposes, Fox referred to coal companies as “missionaries in the cause of culture” who offered to save the souls of Anglo-Saxon primitives. Fiction was his way of promoting these ends.41
On a tour of the mountains near the Cumberland Gap, Fox’s brother James and the writer James Lane Allen saw a young woman riding an ox. They declared her an Appalachian version of the mythical Europa, the Phoenician woman who rides a bull that turns out to be Zeus in disguise. This became the premise for Fox’s first novel, A Mountain Europa, begun in 1888 and published in 1892.
Clayton has just returned to Jersey City from a German university after a financial panic makes it impossible for his family to support his studies. His father abruptly sends him to Kentucky to make something out of the “mineral lands” the family had bought in the 1860s. Six months later, Clayton takes in the scene of the coal camp he founded and manages—miners stripped to their waists “bathing their blackened faces and bodies,” while their dirty children play and their wives cook. But Clayton has no connection to his workers or much interest in coal. He prefers to spend his time walking in the woods with his dog. One day, he sees a young woman riding a bull. Clayton wants her instantly, “her supple figure swaying with every movement of the beast.” He especially notices the way she carries herself, with confidence and strength, “so different from the timid mountain women who shrank with averted faces.” The golden-haired woman who meets his gaze and tells him to call off his dog is Easter Hicks. Her volatile father has recently disappeared after being implicated in a murder over moonshine. She lives with her mother, and Clayton starts hanging around the cabin.
Easter is defiant and unwilling to compromise, but she yields to Clayton. Fox has no sense of them as a couple and continually degrades Easter’s ability to do anything other than hunt. Clayton is a scholar and businessman, the Atlantic elite personified. He knows the past and owns the future. But Easter exists only in the present. Fox describes her as some kind of wild nymph with no capacity for thought. Seeing her looking out into the distance, Clayton wants to know her thoughts. “Probably she could not tell them, should he ask her, so unconscious was she of her mental life, whatever that might be. Indeed, she seemed scarcely to know of her own existence.”
Then Clayton goes home to Jersey City for a visit. Seeing old friends and familiar places makes him rethink what he’s doing in Kentucky. His father tells him that he is “fast making up his losses,” meaning that Clayton might not need to remain in the hills much longer but could get a job in his father’s firm. Should he cut ties with Easter and leave her to the mountain boy who loves her? Clayton loves her, too, but not very convincingly. Worse, he thinks he’s saved her, “lifted her above her own life” and “taught her to love him.”
Returning to the Cumberlands, Clayton sees everything differently. “Were these hovels, he asked himself in wonder, the cabins he once thought so poetic, so picturesque?… The novelty and ethnological zeal that had blinded him to the disagreeable phases of mountain life were gone; so was the pedestal from which he had descended to make a closer study of the people. For he felt now that he had gone among them with an unconscious condescension.” The romantic veil was somehow lifted, but Cla
yton’s unconsciousness persists. He no longer sees the people as noble savages, but he has no awareness that his own work and the movement of capital that he represents in any way contributes to their poverty.
With the local color draining from his picturesque fantasy, Clayton decides to marry Easter in order to take her away. He would end his industrial sojourn and live the metropolitan life promised him. She would be redeemed from ignorance and backwardness to realize her noble nature. That’s when Easter’s father returns. Bill Hicks hates all “furriners” and demonstrates his potency when he hands a flask to the soft-handed college boy. “Clayton took a swallow of the liquid, which burned him like fire.” But Hicks unexpectedly endorses the marriage. At the wedding, the moonshiner is drunk and disruptive. Suddenly he aims a gun at Clayton, who had just spent his first moment alone with his bride. As the gun goes off, Easter leaps forward and takes the bullet. She dies moments later and is buried on the mountain.
Easter’s death parallels the death of the animate environment—full of life, defiant, wild, unconscious, and being ripped apart. Her marriage to Clayton, however, seems even more dismal. It carries no hope for either society, and its bloody ending leaves everything as before. The novel’s controlling myth also contains Fox’s purpose. Zeus turns himself into a white bull to get closer to Europa by mixing in with her father’s herd. At first she wants nothing to do with this bull, though he is alluring. When she finally climbs onto his back, he carries her off to Crete, where the two become lovers. In Fox’s parallel, Clayton comes from a world of gods and tries to mix into the social world of eastern Kentucky. But that’s impossible.
