So (as the first word of every narrative must be these days) let's say you're in a bookstore and you notice a book. Across the top the title yells in black caps WHAT YOU ARE GETTING WRONG ABOUT APPALACHIA, and so your first thought is, "Who, me?" Elizabeth Catte's book is meant to serve as a counterpoint to J. D. Vance's popular Appalachian Elegy. But there's no subtitle to that effect, and the introduction clearly indicates that, yes, you -- whoever you are -- are getting stuff wrong about Appalachia.
The comforting news for all of us wrong'uns is that we're wrong about something that apparently has no real substance. Commenting on whether or not Vance should be considered "authentically Appalachian because he migrated outside the region," Catte says, "I don't give a damn about geography." On the other hand, she gives such a damn about culture that she refuses to "ascribe" one to those who "self-identify as Appalachian." This really is like saying that Appalachia doesn't exist. I wish Catte would make that argument -- it very much needs to be made -- but she doesn't.
The actual meaning of Appalachia -- whatever it is and if indeed there is one -- is very much beside the point in this book. Catte does pose the question, "What is Appalachia?" at the outset, but she-who-doesn't-give-a-damn-about-geography gives a perfunctory geographical definition based on the Appalachian Mountains and then -- because it has no weight -- immediately shoves it aside in favor of a definition imposed by the "top-down process, in which individuals with power or capital tell us who we are or what we are." This definition of Appalachia -- a sort of geographical zombie arising from a pauper's grave -- is the Federal government framework devised to administer the War on Poverty. Thus, says Catte, "the region came to be defined by poverty, and subsequently poverty came to be defined by the region."
This sounds like a 3-card monte game of agency in which you-who-are-wrong-about-Appalachia are the mark, trying to follow Catte's fluid misdirection: "I'm hesitant to tell you who Appalachia is, but I can tell you who keeps it alive: young individuals who work in racially diverse fields, including education, hospitality, and healthcare." Because in Appalachia there are no retirees delivering Meals on Wheels.
Catte also favors tortuous argumentation pursuing tendrils of supposed influence, e.g. into a discussion Vance's association with IQ controversialist Charles Murray and their shared interest in Scots-Irish culture she drags an account of forced re-settlement, institutionalization, and sterilization at the time of the creation of the Shenandoah National Park, a story that features New Deal-era photographers, sociologists, politicians, and farmers. Tenuous conspiracy-theory connections demonstrate to her satisfaction a "strange bond between up-and-comers on the Appalachia circuit and salivating eugenicists" (maybe the audiobook will have creepy background music) and justify her condemnation: "I don't dislike Vance because he talks about 'hillbilly culture.' I dislike him because I think about children stolen from their parents."
Catte is right to take on Vance's superficial ethnic determinism and teases out his more recent influences: Colin Woodard's American Nations ("Greater Appalachia") and Jim Webb's Born Fighting, even though her quote from the former invokes a more diluted ancestral pool than just Scots-Irish. And when she hacks at the root of the myth, the best she can do is allude to the "sharp corrective" of historian Wilma Dunaway and archeologist Audrey Horning to the effect that "eighteenth-century Appalachia was a fusion of a variety of European ethnic groups and other groups that reflected African and indigenous descent." Sharp? That's like shaving with a butter knife. It would've been sharper to refer readers to Harry Caudill's Darkness at Dawn, in which he pooh-poohs the idea of Scots-Irish (meaning specifically Ulster Scots) influence in the Kentucky mountains by noting the relative paucity of the real markers of Scots-Irishness: not "feudin' and fightin'," as Vance's good ol' boys would have it, but enduring Scots Reformed churches and schools -- "enduring" meaning that once established on the frontier, they remained and flourished because not to have those churches and schools meant abandoning your Scots-Irishness.
Alas, Catte can't use Caudill because he was another one of those up-and-comers on the Appalachian circuit who bonded with salivating eugenicists. If you don't know who Caudill was, here is historian (and Catte-approved) Ronald D. Eller's take on his influence: "Probably the most widely read book ever written about Appalachia [Night Comes to the Cumberlands], Caudill's passionate account of the human and environmental devastation wreaked by the coal industry on his native eastern Kentucky was a cry from the exploited heartland for government assistance to a desperate people." Catte's rendering has a twist: "Caudill became the spokesperson for Appalachia and a translator of white mountain poverty to the nation."
Notice that word "white." Catte very much wants her readers to understand that Appalachia is more racially diverse than the white sheet Vance covers it with. This is an excellent goal: Appalachia is part of the South and as such was shaped by African-Americans even when it seems not to have been (see also "banjo" and "fiddle" and "buck dancing"). But Catte won't achieve that goal by covering Caudill with that sheet, as she clearly does: "Both Caudill and Vance set themselves to the task of drawing the nation's attention away from social unrest and racial inequality at a particular moment in time and refocusing it instead on the conditions of white poverty." Vance might have set himself to that task, but it is plainly evident that Caudill did not. Caudill's Night is subtitled "a biography of a depressed area," and that biography includes African-Americans (whom he calls "Negroes") as slaves, railroad workers, and miners. No, he doesn't separate them out for special treatment, but he does include them in an even-handed, matter-of-fact way. Might this not be considered an accomplishment, given the Civil Rights-era year of publication (1963)?
Catte's take on the racial component of Caudill's influence might be unfair, but all's fair in love and war, and Catte is engaged in a polemic against Caudill ("polemic" comes from the Greek word for "war," as no doubt the classicist Catte knows) apparently because -- in Catte's telling -- 11 years after the publication of Night, frustrated with the lack of progress, Caudill came to consider his region's poverty to be "genetic in origin" and "largely irreducible," which viewpoint he shared in a "fan letter" to eugenicist William Shockley. The two went on to meet once and continued to correspond, discussing the possibility of voluntary sterilization and intelligence testing, with Caudill's advice tending to be how to, in his words, "avoid some critical and troublesome newspaper publicity."
Catte includes Caudill's widow's opinion that publication of this part of his correspondence in 2013 was an effort to "besmirch" his reputation. Whether or not that is the case, this information is hardly shocking to anyone who's read Caudill. It was abundantly clear in Night that Caudill's belief in "brain drain" dilution of a "seed stock" rested at least on a dysgenic notion, even if it outlined no eugenic solution.
So, what should this mean for Caudill's influence? Catte clearly wants him read out of the Appalachian canon and bemoans the "fatigue" that comes from living at a time when Amazon links Caudill with Vance in a two-fisted vise of recommendation, which to Catte means that the two most influential books about Appalachia were "used by their authors to win the esteem of white supremacists and eugenicists."
Her warrior rage blinds her to the missed opportunity that would come from a side-by-side consideration of the two. And why should Americans not exercise the ability to choose the lesser of two evils? They are politically condemned to it anyway. The books provide a dramatic contrast: they are vastly different, not only in structure and in content, but more importantly in the nature of the solutions proposed for the region. Vance -- from the narrow confines of a memoir -- might counsel a simplistic Horatio Algerism, but the lesson of his personal experience is "get out." Caudill -- from the expansiveness of his deep and broad study -- might be absolutely brutal on everyone in eastern Kentucky, not just the poor, for permitting the wastage of their mountainous Eden, but what he proposes in essence could easily be updated into a Green New Deal for Appalachia. In other words he says, "Stay and make it right." Which side are you on?
Catte's real, overarching villain -- whose freshest, most recent stooge happens to be Vance -- is a "monolithic" narrative of Appalachian "otherness" controlled by power that enriches some at the expense of others: "[C]redibility falls easily to those given the privilege of defining who or what Appalachian [sic] is. It also shows the rewards that fall to individuals, universally men and exclusively white, regardless of the company they keep. It is the power to grant yourself permission for continued exploitation of vulnerable subjects. It is the power to have your work selected as emblematic of a cultural moment by individuals and organizations that didn't care one iota about Appalachia until their gaze could fill the region with pathologies."
Catte appropriates the idea of Appalachia as "other" from America from scholar Henry Shapiro (Appalachia on Our Mind), but by the time it emerges from her Procrustean bed, Shapiro's concept is both stretched and squeezed. What Shapiro says about local color writers and home missionaries of the 1880s and 1890s Catte applies to "outside entrepreneurs" and "industrialists" of the early twentieth century. Shapiro's concept of otherness embraces all conceptions of Appalachia between 1880 and 1920, even those of reformers who, sensitive to the interests of the mountaineers, wanted to work with them on their (the mountaineers') own terms seasoned with the lessons of the Danish folk school. One of the exemplars of that effort was the Highlander Folk School of upper east Tennessee, which is on Catte's short list of heroes. But to Catte there is only one purpose for otherness: exploitation, so that "Appalachians could be tamed and put to industrial purpose" in order to "be spared the bloodshed, vice, and moral degeneracy natural to their primitive existence."
That narrative certainly exists, but it was not the only one used by the exploiters. Catte seems to be unaware of an entirely different portrayal of mountaineers as possessing positive, desirable characteristics for developers. These portrayals were used by town boosters to attract industry to the region. It is remarkable how unchanging they were over the course of many years during the 20th century. Tom Lee, author of The Tennessee-Virginia Tri-Cities: Urbanization in Appalachia, 1900 - 1950, cites a 1985 promotion of Johnson City: "Over 200,000 conscientious workers uphold the dedicated 'pioneer' work ethic in our Right-to-Work State. … A fair day's pay for a hard day's work." This "rhetoric of promotion," Lee says, was largely unchanged from the beginning of the century when boosters boasted of the "unlimited supply of intelligent, white female workers." Of course, paternalistic, capitalistic exploitation of unorganized workers was still the purpose, but the labor force was depicted positively, not as morally degenerate primitives.
(It is odd that Catte should describe the narrators of the Appalachian "other" to be "universally men." From the beginning women have been among the most articulate and influential definers. Local colorist Mary Noailles Murfree was there at the creation; Emma Bell Miles was an early interpreter of the mountains for valley folk and other furriners; Ellen Churchill Semple's 1901 "anthropogeography" was one of the first true scholastic studies of the human aspects of Appalachian geography; and Olive Dame Campbell, besides being a folksong collector, took her late husband John C. Campbell's "mass of notes" and an outline to write the book that he could never bring himself to write.)
If there is a defective, monolithic narrative abroad these days about Appalachia, it is that Appalachia is all about coal. Catte seems happy to accept that monolith shaft, tipple, and flue. Granted she is reacting to the latest incarnation of Appalachia as coal-crazy "Trump Country," and she is most concerned to show how Appalachians have struggled against the economic, social, and geophysical depredations of coal extraction. The result, however, is that effectively Appalachia becomes eastern Kentucky and West Virginia. It's time to bring back the Georgian "expatriates" of the Appalachian Studies Conferences from the 1980s who adopted the refrain "Not in North Georgia" to remind their coal-leagues that Appalachia is neither monochrome nor monotone and is nothing if not complex. Catte gets the complexity, but the reactiveness of her approach allows the monolith of coal to dictate her narrative to the extent that it weakens her advocacy for an expansive understanding of the region. If we knew more about the breadth and variety of Appalachian geography, history, and culture, and understood that Appalachia has a future that transcends coal -- even in Kentucky and West Virginia -- maybe we'd have a better chance of not being wrong about it. Maybe we'd feel some hope and start getting things right about it.
But to do that, you have to give a damn about geography and its economic, political, and human consequences. Because if you're talking about Appalachia, that's pretty much all you got. If you try to erase it, as Catte seems to want to do, you got nothing. The irony is that she cares more than she lets on. After a Tennessee upbringing, it was during a brief hiatus in a Texas town as polluted by oil as Appalachia was by coal that she was somehow convinced to return to her Appalachian homeland, and so back she came, as she says, "to fight smarter" on behalf of everyone who was "not important enough not to be poisoned." How somehow was she convinced to return? It seems to have been at least in part the aesthetics of geography: Silas House's "language in the kudzu and it is all ours" or the "bright purple of ironweed" that is a "symbol of Appalachian women."
She now works with others "with the hope that we might call into being the end of what Rebecca Scott called 'the dismal banality of the dominion of coal.'" How to call into being that end? We have to multiply the possibilities, and they are endless, once you start looking at the land and, yes, the culture, and see the infinite ways it can nourish and inspire, and then build on those ways that create rather than destroy.
If that sounds like moonshine, so be it. It wouldn't be the first time for Appalachia.
