Arts and Culture

Obama's 'Appalachian Problem'? It's Not So Easy

editor — Fri, 16 May 2008 12:25:53 -0700

Above are photos taken by Andrew Stern in Letcher County, Kentucky. The older picture above was taken nearly 50 years ago. Stern recently returned to Eastern Kentucky and took the other photos in this slideshow. See Editor's Note on the next page.

Once again the American media’s compulsion to entertain rather than to understand has projected Appalachia to center stage of national politics.

Hillary Clinton’s landslide victory in the West Virginia Democratic primary has provided yet another opportunity to reduce economic and political issues in Appalachia to time-honored tropes about cultural differentness. Within the past week, an embarrassment of journalists, bloggers, and late-night television hosts have turned Senator Clinton’s support among blue collar voters in West Virginia into a confirmation of the white “otherness” of Appalachian culture rather than an expression of fundamental (and more complex) issues of class, gender, and race or even political organization in the Mountain State.

One correspondent, Jonathan Tilove, has even suggested that Senator Barack Obama has an “Appalachian problem” that goes beyond race to the peculiarities of “Appalachia’s whites and the Scots-Irish who settled there and forever branded its culture.”

Popular stereotypes and misreading of Appalachian history have long provided a convenient excuse to ignore Appalachia or to justify public and private attempts to bring the region into the cultural mainstream. Thus, the argument is offered that Clinton’s appeal in Appalachia should not be taken too seriously since mountain voters represent those “other whites” whose heritage has led them to be suspicious, pugnacious, and a little less civilized than the Anglo-Puritan whites of the Northeast.

Looking at Kentucky after 50 Years

editor — Fri, 16 May 2008 09:17:17 -0700

Andrew Stern first came to the coalfields of Eastern Kentucky in 1959. He'd read a series of stories stories in the New York Times by Homer Bigart about the depression that had spread through the region. Stern brought his camera, and over the next four years he took photographs in Harlan and Letcher counties.

The images he took back to Washington, D.C., helped spur President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty.

Stern returned to Letcher County earlier this year for the first time in nearly half a century. A show of his photos was hanging at the gallery at Appalshop in Whitesburg. About half the photos in the show were taken in and around Whitesburg, so Stern thought it would be interesting to visit some of the places he had photographed nearly 50 years earlier.

These are the photos Stern took one afternoon. Some things haven't changed, he realized. RC Cola is still big. So is tobacco. The sign on the curve on Rt. 15 above Whitesburg is new, but the message is the same as it was a half century earlier. The families have many of the same stories he heard in the early 1960s, but they now have cell phones.

Kentucky will hold its presidential primary this Tuesday.

Speak Your Piece: Men’s Achievement Hour, Adieu

editor — Sat, 10 May 2008 11:14:31 -0700

Stephanie Whetstone demonstrates hair farming on Dee Davis, host of The Men's Achievement Hour/Human Potential Show ~ WMMT, Whitesburg, Kentucky
Photo: Courtesy of Mimi Pickering

The thing about surprises is that you don’t expect them. Through a series of emails this week I was informed that WMMT (Whitesburg, Kentucky) has planned a new morning line-up and that in the plan there is no place for The Men’s Achievement Hour/Human Potential Show, and no place for me.

I’ve never been fired before, except if you count the time when I was just married with a little baby and making $75 a week. My buddy put me on his bridge construction crew for a month just to get an industrial wage into my household. I wasn’t great shakes as a bridge builder. And when the month ended and he had to look at me and say, “I’m going to have to lay you off,” it hurt him more than it did me.

It was before the invention of email. Before you could dump your girlfriend in a text message. Maybe human contact has gotten a little underrated.

Truth is this dismissal stings. Not that twenty years in a volunteer radio job isn’t enough. Sometimes I get tired of hearing myself myself. You got to pity the poor listeners.

Hunters Aim for Military Service

editor — Thu, 1 May 2008 08:18:53 -0700

James Lewis takes his children Shelby, 4, and Jack, 9, hunting near Potomac, Montana. “Jack has been hunting since he was five. He now carries his own .22 rifle and is on the lookout for grouse and rodents."

Photo: Denny Lester

People from small towns and rural communities are more likely to serve in the armed forces than those who hail from the cities. But why?

Are young people who enlist seeking tuition-free educations? Are they pushed out of their communities by high rates of local unemployment? Are they looking for a way to leave home?

Or, is it that there are more hunters in rural communities, and hunters are more likely to join the military?

The higher proportion of rural residents in the military — and among those killed in Iraq and Afghanistan — has been known for some time, but the reasons for this phenomenon aren't completely understood. Two sociologists from the University of Connecticut have concluded that there's a link between military enlistment and hunting. Hunters are more likely to join the armed forces.

"The ten states with the highest military fatality rates in the Iraq War during March 20, 2003 through May 5, 2007, Vermont, Alaska, South Dakota, Nebraska, North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Delaware and Arkansas, had an average of 2.06 military fatalities per 100,000 state residents and an average of 18.1 percent of state residents with hunting licenses," write James DeFronzo and Jungyun Gill in The Rural Sociologist. "In contrast the ten states with the lowest military fatality rates during this period, New Jersey, Connecticut, Utah, New York, Massachusetts, Florida, Illinois, North Carolina, Missouri and California, had an average of 0.86 military fatalities per 100,000 state residents and an average of only 3.3 percent of state residents with hunting licenses."

Tom Dula: The Murder That Sold 10,000 Guitars

editor — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 09:19:43 -0700

Tom Dooley's tale goes on haunting, even in French
Image: Courtesy of Steve Hill

In June 1865 a Confederate soldier just shy of his 21st birthday was released from a Union prison camp and began traveling back home to Reedy Branch, in mountainous Wilkes County, North Carolina. He probably thought himself mighty lucky to have survived since his only two brothers lost their lives to the war. Had he known what would transpire in three short years after he arrived back in the mountains, he would likely have chosen his brothers’ fate. It would have spared his neighbors a tragedy and been a nobler death for him.

May 1st marks the 140th anniversary of the hanging of Tom Dula for the murder of Laura Foster. Because of a ballad about this young man’s death, a song kept alive in the North Carolina mountains, the nation carries the event in its collective memory almost a century and a half later. That song, as recorded 90 years after the hanging by a little known folk group named the Kingston Trio, had an impact on American popular culture far beyond what the story alone -- or most any other story -- could have produced.

I tell this story having grown up in Statesville, N.C., where Tom was tried and hanged because it’s the biggest thing ever to happen there. It’s difficult to separate fact from myth 140 years out, but through the research of Dula historian John Foster West, court records, and witness testimonies, we have a pretty good grasp of the basic facts. Keep in mind, however, that good storytellers never let facts interfere with a true story, so there are many versions and discrepancies in the telling. To my mind, it’s the stories that mix historical fact and imagination that are most compelling and best illuminate the human condition.