Journal of the Kentucky-Tennessee American Studies Association

/r Pubiiihed by Middle Tenneiiee State Univenity 2 Kentucky-Tennessee American Studies Association

CONTENTS

"PRIDE 4ND DEPRAVITY" : A PRELIMINARY REEXAhIINATION OF THE BEAUCHAhlP-SHARP AFFAIR J. \V. Cooke

LETTERS OF ANN COOK: FACr OR FACTOID? Fred hl. Johnson

THE RESPONSE OF PHILANTI-IROPISTS TO SELF-SUPPORTING WOMEN IN AMERICA, 1880-1930 Margaret Spratt

WHAT MADE SENATOR TAYLOR RUN? Robert L. Taylor

PHI LANTHROPY AND ANTAGONI Shl : KENTUCKY hfOUNTAIN SCIIOOLS IN THE 1920s Nancy Forderhase

ENVIRONMENTAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL FORhlATIVE INFLUENCES ON CAROLINE GORDON AND EVELYN SCOTT, TMO CLARKSVILLE, TENNESSEE, WRITERS Eleanor H. Beiswenger

PENHALLY AND BRACKETS: THE HOUSES THAT CAROLINE GORDON BTJI 1.T Rebecca R. Butler

THE LIFE-AFFIRMING DOLLMAKER Sandra L. Ballard

THE BURDEN OF SUCCESS: HIGHLANDER, 1962-1982 John hl. Glen EDITORS' NOTES

The papers in this issue of Border States were made available to the editors by panelists at the last two meetings of the Kentucky-Tennessee American Studies Association, held in 1985 at Barren River State Park, Kentucky, and in 1986 at Fall Creek Falls State Park, Tennessee. Because of the unusual number of excellent presentations at these meetings, the editors were forced to exclude some papers not exclusively focused on the Kentucky-Tennessee region. In order to include as many other papers as possible, the editors asked several authors to reduce their documentation to simple bibliographical notes. The authors' prompt and courteous cooperation with these requests was deeply appreciated.

The publication of this issue of Border States was made possible by financial support supplied by the following sources:

Better English Fund, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Department of English, Eastern Kentucky University

Department of English, Middle Tennessee State University

Department of History, Eastern Kentucky University

Department of History, Middle Tennessee State University

Univerilty of Kentucky

The editors wish to express their gratitude for this support. The editors wish also to thank Mrs. Cindy Duke for her dedication in the preparation of the manuscript. It was printed at Middle Tennessee State University under the direction of Tony Snook. "PRIDE AND DEPRAVITY": d PRELIMIKARY REEXAMINATION OF THE BEAUCIIAhIP-SHARP AFFAIR

J. W. Cooke Tennessee State University

This paper is a severe, bare bones reconstruction of a notably murky and gory incident that occurred during the middle 1820s in Kentucky. For those who are unacquainted with the Beauchamp-Sharp affair, this will be, 1 believe, a sufficient introduction. Those already familiar with this bloody sequence of events will note that my reconstruction modifies earlier versions in two significant ways. First, I understand the Beauchamp-Sharp affair to be an affair of honor, an affair in which politics played an important but secondary role. And second, I have shifted the locus of action away from the public acts of Colonel Solomon P. Sharp and Jereboam 0. Bcauchamp and placed it, instead, in the person of Anna Cooke Beauchamp, a diminutive Fury whose passion for revenge brought violent death to three people.

Anna was the fifth child and first daughter of Giles and Alicia Payne Cooke of Fairfax County, Virginia. She was born February 7, 1785 (or 1786), and probably named for a younger sister of her mother. Giles Cooke was a moderately prosperous planter who had acquired 1,115 acres of land in Kentucky during the 1780s, probably as a result of service in the Virginia militia during the American Revolution. He died in 1805, perhaps in straitened circumstances. His family liquidated their Virginia properties and moved to Warren County, Kentucky, by stages between 1806 and 1810. The Cookes prospered modestly, but between 1817 and 1823 disaster struck. Five brothers and Anna's only sister died. She was now alone in the world except for her mother and her younger brother, Peyton.

There was also a personal disaster for Anna. In May or June, 1820, she had givcn birth to a stillborn child. The reputed father was Colonel Solomon P. Sharp. Her sins were compounded because she had, perhaps justly, already acquired a reputation as a bluestocking, an intellectual with unconventional habits and ideas, at a time and in a culture that tended to regard women with intellectual pretensions skeptically. She took long walks in the fields and woods outside Bowling Green, and dismissed contemptuously those who questioned thelr propriety. She read books and "delighted to converse upon scenes of romance and fiction." IIer religious opinions were equally unorthodox. She ridiculed Christianity as a "fraud upon mankind" and rejected the ideas of Heaven and Hell. She allegedly scoffed at matrimony as well, and avowed herself a "disciple of hlary M'oolstonecraft" (sic). Anna was also accused of being sexually promiscuous. Her enemy, Dr. Leander Sharp, gathered the testimonies of countless men and women in an attempt to prove that Anna was guilty of the "criminal act" with half the male population of Bowling Green.

Her marriage to a man sixteen years her junior was, to say the least, unconventional, and the union evoked intense, even bizarre, emotions. Anna's tenacity in seeking Sharp's death was extraordinary. She made his death a condition for marriage. She practiced with a pistol so that she might dispatch him personally and, when this appeared impossible, she collaborated with her husband in planning the colonel's assassination. She sewed Beauchamp ' s disguise and poisoned the tip of the knife he used to kill Sharp. She brought laudanum and a file with her when she was carried to Frankfort and lodged with her husband. And it was Anna who induced Beauchamp to join her in a suicide pact.

And last, she wrote poetry. Not surprisingly, her verse is marked by an obsession with the idea of honor. It is not, however, an idea of feminine honor; h,in the words of Bertram Wyatt-Brown, to be "subordinate and docile," to abjure a "revengeful spirit," and to practice "restraint and abstinence" in the face of humiliation and slander. Rather, Anna conceived of honor in masculine terms: she hated Sharp and sought to destroy him, if not by her own hand then by the hand of another. And she did.

The victim, Solomon P. Sharp, was born in Washington County, Virginia, August 22, 1787. His father, Thomas, was probably Scotch-Irish. Born in Pennsylvania, Thomas emigrated to Washington County in 1770. He was a veteran of the Revolutionary War, having served with Isaac Shelby's regiment at King's Mountain. After peace returned, Thomas moved to the vicinity of Nashville, and then on to Logan County, Kentucky, where his name would appear in court rec.ords as early as 1795.

Solomon received little formal education, although he may have attended Newton or Logan Academies in Russellville for a time. He was, nevertheless, admitted to the bar at nineteen and began the practice of law at Russellville in 1806. He soon dec,ided, however, that Bowling Green offered a wider scope for his ambition, and moved to the latter settlement shortly before 1810. He then entered politics and represented warren- County in the Kentucky legislature in both 3810 and 1811.

Sharp next sought national office and ran successfully for a seat in the Thirteenth Congress. He was subsequently reelected to a second term. His record was respectable but unexceptionable, although President fdadison was reported to have said that Sharp was the "ablest man of his age that had ever crossed the mountains." Sharp also served his country briefly in the war of 1812. He joined Lt. Col. Young Ewing's Regiment, Kentucky Mounted Militia, in September, 1812, as a private. Later he was promoted to captain, then to major, and eventually became Adjutant-General of the state. The colonel was equally successful in acquiring land. Before 1824, he had obtained title to 11,660 acres in Narren, Logan, Christian, and Livingston Counties, and acquired another 1,870 acres in partnership with his younger brother, Dr. Leander Sharp. Following service in the militia and in Congress, Sharp returned to state politics. He was sent to the legislature twice more by the voters of Warren County in 1818 and 1819. While in Frankfort, he met his wife, Elizabeth, a daughter of Col. John Scott of the 1st Regiment, Kentucky Militia. They were married December 17, 1818.

Inevitably, Sharp became embroiled in the famous Old Court-New Court controversy that dominated Kentucky politics between 1819 and 1829. "No period in all Kentucky's first hundred vears," wrote Arndt Stickles, "was more exasperating or laden with peril. . . ." The colonel early became a fervent New Court partisan; &, he supported the claims of those Kentuckians who sought to save their property from foreclosure by the passage of replevin laws, inllating the currency, and other expedients to avoid bankruptcy. New Court partisans also urged the abolition of the pro-creditor Court of Appeals, and the creation of a new court that would be friendly to debtors.

Sharp seems to have been one of those Relief candidates (as the New Court supporters were called) who "actively cultivated the popular vote without regard to the 'propriety' of their techniques." That is, he rejected a politics of deference. In this sense, his political rise may have been perceived as a threat to the established order. Whatever the reason, by the middle 1820s Sharp was becoming what Jim Klotter calls a "high risk" politician--a man whose opinions and actions make him a possible target for violence, and a certain target for vituperation and abuse.

In 1821 the colonel bec,ame a candidate for the state senate from Warren County. Two months before the election, however, Governor John Adair offered Sharp a position as Attorney General in his pro-Relief administration. The colonel accepted Adair's offer, withdrew from the senate race, and went to Frankfort in September for confirmation hearings. His family, escorted by Dr. Sharp, followed the next month. These hearings, held in October, proved unexpectedly embarrassing. In June a handbill had appeared rehearsing a rumor that Sharp, although already a married man, had fathered the stillborn child of Anna Cooke of Bowling Green. The author of the handbill was probably John U. Waring, a lawyer, killer, and land speculator who had become Sharp's bitter enemy. The story concerning Anna Cooke was brought up by someone at the confirmation hearings, but Sharp's denlal was apparently convincing and he was confirmed unanimously October 30. Sharp continued to find the campaign trail alluring, however, and in 1825, he agreed to oppose John J. Crittenden, an old supporter, for a seat in the legislature from Franklin County. He resigned his position as Attorney General and announced his candidacy on June 29. The contest between these two distinguished Kentuckians, wrote L. F. Johnson, "soon became of State and almost National interest." Charges of fraud and falsehood were common; so were threats of violence. John U. Waring and Patrick Henry Darby, an Old Court lawyer, former editor of the Frankfort Constitution and speculator, were particularly vehement in their denunciations of the colonel. The latter was quoted on several occasions as predicting that even if Sharp should be elected, he would never live to take his seat. Out of some 1,600 ballots cast, Sharp won the election by 69 votes.

The legislature was set to convene on Monday, November 7. At about two in the morning of the seventh, Colonel Sharp was called to a side door of his home at 408 Madison, Frankfort. After a brief conversation, followed by a struggle, he was stabbed to death. Dr. Sharp reached his brother's side within minutes of the stabbing. The death wound, as he later described it, was about one inch wide, six inches deep, and located about two inches below the breast bone. The colonel died without ever recovering consciousness.

The assassin was Jereboam 0. Beauchamp, a young lawyer living in Simpson County five or six miles from Franklin. He was the second son of Thomas Beauchamp, a farmer and land speculator of the same county. Born in September, 1802, young Beauchamp was educated at Dr. Benjamin Thurston's academy in Glasgow until he was sixteen. Subsequently he tried keeping store and teaching school before returning to Dr. Thurston's as an assistant for two more years. It was while living in Glasgow that he heard of Colonel Sharp's alleged seduction of Anna Cooke.

At eighteen Beauchamp moved to Bowling Green with the intention of reading law. There he made the acquaintance of Colonel Sharp, already a well known attorney and politician. The colonel may have solicited Beauchamp to study law with him but the young man, according to his own testimony, curtly rejected the idea. Sharp was already dishonored in his eyes and he wanted nothing to do with him.

After a few months of study Beauchamp retired to his father's farm for a rest. To his surprise, he learned that Anna Cooke and her mother lived not far away. Beauchamp soon contrived a reason for a visit to the Cooke residence. There he met Anna for the first time. She told him that she did not desire his company, but courteously offered him the use of her library. Beauchamp accepted, chose one volume, and rode away. He returned frequently to read in the library and to borrow more books, but he saw no more of Anna for some time. When they met again Beauchamp remonstrated with her reclusion, and requested that his sisters be allowed to visit her. She agreed, but did not return their visit.

Eventually, Beauchamp succeeded in putting his visits to the Cooke farm on a regular basis. He fell violently in love, but when he spoke of his passion to Anna and proposed marriage, she refused. "Why?" he asked. At first she declined to answer but after some hesitation explained that marriage to her would entail a momentous obligation: "to revenge the injury a villiam (sic) had done her." "She said," wrote Beauchamp in his Confession, that "her heart could never cease to ache, till Colonel Sharp should die through her instrumentality. . . . She would kiss the hand, and adore the person who would revenge her; but that no one save myself should do it." Beauchamp assured her that he already regarded Sharp's death as "necessary consequence" of their marriage. 1:pon these terms, she consented to be his wife. Beauchamp was then eighteen, his fiancee at least thirty-five.

The courtship and proposal apparently occurred in the spring and summer of 1821. The engagement continued for three years, possibly because Thomas Beauchamp refused his son permission to marry, perhaps because, as Beauchamp explained, he wanted to finish his studies before making Anna his bride.

According to an unconfirmed account, Beauchamp rode to Frankfort shortly after his engagement to gain immediate satisfaction from Colonel Sharp. He had an interview with the older man in which Sharp acknowledge paternity of the stillborn child, declined a duel (as Anna had predicted), and begged Beauchamp repeatedly not to humiliate him with a public whipping. When the latter, however, warned the colonel to expect daily chastisement until he would fight a formal duel, Sharp secretly left Frankfort.

Beauchamp and Anna next planned to await the colonel's visit to the Circuit Court in Bowling Green, and then lure him to the Cooke house with a conciliatory letter. Anna would then shoot him. "She ever," wrote Beauchamp admiringly, "seemed to esteem the possibility of killing him with her own hand, as what she most desired of all things in the world." This plan also failed. Sharp did not rise to the bait.

In the interim Beauchamp continued his studies, taught a country school, and perhaps even solicited Sharp for legal business. Anna and Beauchamp were finally married in June, 1824. A second effort was now made to entice Sharp to Bowling Green. Beauchamp drafted a letter using the name of Zebulon Y. Yantis and requested that the colonel consult with him in Bowling Green concerning some land claims. Sharp apparently refused the unknown Yantis a definite answer, and Beauchamp began to believe that he would have to hunt the colonel down. In the summer of 1825 the young lawyer received a letter from someone in Frankfort who wrote that Sharp had publicly denied the paternity of Anna's child. Instead, the colonel claimed the baby was a mulatto, and offered a certificate from the midwife who had attended its birth to support his contention. Driven to an even more intense hatred by this report, Anna and Beauchamp now devised a fourth plan to kill the colonel. This time the assassination would be done in secret, the young lawyer wrote, because he believed himself foredoomed to death by Governor Joseph Desha and other friends of Sharp if their champion were killed openly in a duel. Beauchamp rationalized that he did not feel obliged to obey any law (as, for example, that forbidding murder) if it contravened the laws of honor. Considering the enormity of Sharp's crime against Anna, "worse than murdering my wife," what except death at the hands of the avenging husband was appropriate vindication?

Beauchamp first let it be known that he planned to sell his property and move to Missouri, where his wife had relatives. A business trip to Frankfort would be necessary to facilitate the removal, and while there Beauchamp planned to kill Sharp.

On November 1, the young lawyer departed for Warren and Edmonson Counties to wind up his affairs there. He then rode on to the state capital. Beauchamp arrived about half an hour before sunset on Sunday, November 6, and procured a room at Joel Scott's, warden of the state penitentiary, and a relative of Mrs. Sharp. There he unpacked his disguise, a mask that would give him a Negroid appearance, and a butcher knife with a poisoned point, both prepared for him by his loving spouse. He left Scott's about nine p.m. Someone whose identity the young lawyer never revealed had already given him the location of Sharp's house, and, perhaps, the situation of the colonel's bedroom.

Beauchamp strolled about Frankfort and, while passing the mansion house, caught a glimpse of his intended victim. He then positioned himself so that he might kill the colonel before the latter entered his home. Beauchamp also observed Dr. Sharp walking by. He had anticipated killing the latter as well as his older brother, but Anna, he claims, pled successfully for the physician's life. She argued that to kill Colonel Sharp would be punishment enough for the doctor. In fact, she said, it would be a greater charity to kill Leander after killing Colonel Sharp, so great would be the grief of the former at the death of his idolized older brother.

Beauchamp failed to intercept Sharp before the colonel gained his residence. IIe therefore put on his mask, drew his dagger, and knocked three times at a side door. According to Beauchamp, the following dialogue took place:

Colonel Sharp said, "Who's there?" "Covington, " I replied. Quickly Colonel Sharp's foot was heard upon the floor. I saw under the door, he approached without a light! I drew my mask from my face, and immediately Colonel Sharp opened the door. I advanced into the room and with my left hand, I grasped his right wrist, as with an iron hand. The violence of the grasp made Colonel Sharp spring back and trying to disengage his wrist, he said, "What Covington is this?" I replied, "John A. Covington, sir." "I know John W. Covington." "My name," said I, "is John A. Covington," and about the time I said that, Mrs. Sharp, whom I had seen appear in the partition door as I entered the outer door, disappeared. She had become alarmed, I imagine, by the little scuffle Colonel Sharp made when he sprang back to get his wrist loose from my grasp. Seeing her disappear, I said to Colonel Sharp, in a tone as though I was deeply mortified at his not knowing me: "And did you not know me sure enough. " "Not with your handkerchief about your face," said Colonel Sharp. For the handkerchief with which I had confined my mask upon my forehead was still round my forehead. I then replied in a soft conciliating persuasive tone of voice, "Come to the light Colonel and you will know me." And pulling him by the arm, he came readily to the door. I stepped with one foot back upon the first step out at the door, and still holding his wrist with my left hand, I stripped my hat and hankerchief from over my forehead and head, and looked right up in Colonel Sharp's face. . . . IIe sprang back and exclaimed in the deepest tone of astonishment, dismay, and horror and despair I ever heard, "Great God! ! It's him!" And as he said that he fell on his knees, after failing to jerk loose his wrist from my grasp. As he fell on his knees I let go his wrist and grasped him by the throat, and dashing him against the facing of the door, I choaked him against it to keep him from hallowing, and muttered in his face, "die you villain." And as I said that, I plunged the dagger to his heart.

Beauchamp now deliberately exposed himself to Mrs. Sharp's view in his disguise as a Negro. He then fled the scene, disposed of his clothing, buried his knife, and dressed again in the clothes he had been wearing earlier in the evening. The assassin then returned to Joel Scott's and slipped upstairs to his room. He burned the mask, and washed his hands. Then, within five minutes, he fell into a sound and lasting sleep.

Beauchamp discussed the crime with Scott the next morning and then went to take care of some land warrant business, the ostcnsible reason for his visit to the state capital. To his dismay, however, he discovered that the warrants had not been prepared. Beauchamp now decided to leave Frankfort as quickly as possible. Scott questioned him while the young lawyer's horse was being readied for the journey south. It was clear the landlord was suspicious.

Beauchamp left Frankfort early on the morning of November 7, only remembering later that he had left a handkerchief soiled with a few drops of old blood at Scott's. He rode on, however, toward the Green River country, telling several people along the way about the murder while withholding the information from others. Near sunset on November 11, he reached his home. As prearranged, Beauchamp hoisted a "flag of victory ," a red handkerchief that signalled success in killing Colonel Sharp. The flag was presented to Anna, who fell on her knees, embraced him, cried, and then called "upon the spirits of her father, her brother's (sic), and her sister to bless me and to intercede with a just Providence, to protect me . . . for the righteous deed I had done."

Meanwhile, in Frankfort, $4,000 had been voted as a reward for those who would apprehend Sharp's assassin. A posse was quickly formed, and set out for Simpson County, some 160 miles away, to arrest the most likely suspect. They rode into Beauchamp's front yard on the evening of November 12. William Jackson, spokesman for the group, requested that Beauchamp accompany them back to Frankfort for interrogation. Beauchamp agreed, although reminding them that he was going voluntarily, "as a gentleman." Had one of the posse been a Sharp, he tells us, he would have fought it out.

As requested, Beauchamp produced his dirk for examination and allo\%ed his shoes to be measured. The latter measurement alone convinced some of the posse that the young lawyer was the murderer. The handkerchief left at Scott's was also produced by the posse as evidence, some of them claiming that it had been found at Sharp's door. Beauchamp, however, managed to dispose of this potentially damaging item on the way to Frankfort by stealing it from one of the guards while the latter was drunk and then throwing it into the fire.

Beauchamp and the posse arrived at the capital on November 15. Speculation concerning the motive for the assassination was rife. Amos Kendall, editor of the Argus, seems to have been the first to suggest that the colonel's death was a political murder, the assassination of a prominent New Court man by a partisan of the Old Court. This pleased the fancy of the Sharps, claimed Beauchamp, because they did not wish it to be that the colonel was "not so immaculate as his family would have the world believe."

It was Amos Kendall and other New Court leaders who sealed his fate, Beauchamp thought, by uniting both Old and New Court factions against him. This was done by fabricating a conspiracy to assassinate Sharp between Beauchamp and Patrick Henry Darby. Beauchamp treated Darby with utter contempt in the Confession: "one of the greatest fools 1 ever met with in the world." Fool or not, the lawyer's testimony contradicted much of what was claimed both hy the assassin and by Dr. Sharp. Darby testified he met Beauchamp or someone who might have been Beauchamp near Duncan's Well in Simpson County about September 1, 1824, and that the latter asked Darby to represent him in collecting a debt owed his wife by Colonel Sharp. During the course of their conversation, Darby averred, the alleged Beauchamp had threatened to kill Sharp.

Dr. Sharp, on the other hand, believed Darby to have inspired his brother's murder. He asserted that Darby had written from Frankfort to Beauchamp, falsely claiming that Colonel Sharp had said Anna's baby was a mulatto, and that the lawyer had subsequently visited Beauchamp in Simpson County. Dr. Sharp further charged that Darby had called upon the colonel for sinister reasons the day before the latter's assassination, and that he had probably shown Sharp's house to Beauchamp, and identified the colonel's bedroom. Darby , of course, denied any connection with the crime.

Beauchamp was questioned by two justices of the peace on November 16, and a preliminary Grand Jury examination was set for the first Monday in January, 1826. On the third Monday in March he was indicted. John Pope and Thomas Lacy of Springfield and Samuel Q. Richardson of Louisville were employed by Senator J. 0. Beauchamp, "Old Jerry," to defend his nephew. Charles S. Bibb and J. W. Denney prosecuted for the Commonwealth with the assistance of Daniel hlayes, a lawyer retained by the Sharp family. Judge Henry Davidge presided.

After two delays the trial began May 8. It lasted thirteen days exclusive of Sundays. Thirty witnesses were called by the prosecution, twenty for the defense. Beauchamp did not take the stand in his own defense. The jury retired about five in the afternoon on Friday, May 19, and after about an hour's deliberation brought in a verdict of guilty.

Anna, meanwhile, had been brought to Frankfort and lodged in her husband's cell. On May 20 she was examined by Justices of the Peace John Brown and E. S. Coleman to determine if she should be charged as accessory. Four persons presented incriminating testimony, including Captain .John Low, a Simpson County neighbor who had already done much to convict Beauchamp. The magistrates, however, were clearly uneasy with their role. Confessing "they felt some difficulty in the case," the justices recommended dismissal of the charge. And so it was done.

Beauchamp was now sentenced to die July 7 between twelve and three in the afternoon. He received the verdict calmly, losing neither "his fortitude or self command." John Pope sought to overturn his client's conviction, but his efforts were unsuccessful. Both Judge Davidge and the Court of Appeals rejected his arguments for a new trial without comment. Beauchamp, meanwhile, had begun his apologia. He had, in fact, sought a postponement of his execution so that he might have "time to write something for the benefit of those nearer and dearer to him than life itself" (his empahsis). Originally, there were two confessions. The first, for some reason, was destroyed. Only the second, expurgated version exists today.

After an appeal for a second delay in the execution had been rejected, Anna and Beauchamp determined to end the affair by killing themselves with doses of laudanum that Anna had brought to Frankfort. On July 5, she made her will. Husband and wife took the poison together about ten that evening, and Beauchamp composed a postscript to his confession justifying their action. By two the next afternoon, however, it was clear that they would not die by this means. Anna vomited most of the laudanum, and a second dose proved equally ineffectual.

The desperate lovers now decided to stab themselves to death with a butcher knife which had been smuggled into their cell. It was Anna's will which, once again, prevailed over that of her husband. "I can refuse her nothing she prays of me to do," he admitted. On the morning of July 7 Beauchamp took the knife and drove it deep into his stomach. Anna then wrestled the weapon from his hand and stabbed herself. IIis wound was serious but not mortal; her injury proved fatal. She was dead by 12:30, about an hour before her husband was hanged.

Shortly after Anna's death Beauchamp was readied for his journey to the gallows. He demanded a final interview with Darby, and publicly exonerated him of any complicity in Sharp's death, although continuing to assert that the Frankfort lawyer had perjured himself concerning the Duncan's Well interview. The wounded man was then lifted into a dearborn and, accompanied by the bugles, fifes, and drums of the Twenty-second Kentucky, carried through the streets of Frankfort. His progress was observed by some six thousand spectators who lined the streets and surrounded the gallows erected at the intersection of the Lexington and Glenn's Creek roads. Upon his arrival, the condemned man was removed to a small cart and placed upright on his own coffin. He was then asked it he had any last request. Beauchamp called for a glass of water, and entreated the musicians of the 'Iiventy-second to play "Bonaparte's Retreat ." The rope was then adjusted about his neck, and the condemned man was told that all was in readiness. Beauchamp was helped to his feet and, turning to John M'Intosh, he said, "Drive Off, I am ready to die."

The horses were started. Beauchamp struggled briefly but, within ten minutes, he was dead. The body was then turned over to his father and his uncle, who departed Frankfort before nightfall carrying the corpse to Bloomf ield. There Beauchamp and his beloved Anna were buried together in a double coffin, his arm around her shoulder, her head on his breast. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Although all are suspect, there are, nevertheless, three indispensable sourccs for students who want to pursue the murky complexities of the Beauchamp-Sharp affair. First, and most reliable, is Beauchamp's Trial . . . (Frankfort, 1826). Much lcss trustworthy are Dr. Leander Sharp's Vindication of the Character of the Late Col. Solomon P. Sharp . . . (Frankfort, 1827) and The Confession of Jereboam 0. Beauchamp, ed. Robert D. Bamberg (Bloomfield, Ky . , and Philadelphia, 1826, 1966). The latter two are often contradictory and self-serving. They are to be used with great care and considerable skepticism. The Letters of Ann Cook . . . (Washington, D.C., 1826), as Fred Johnson has so skillfully demonstrated, are spurious, although they may be of some value in suggesting the intellectual set and the emotional intensity of their subject.

In establishing the probable social milieu in which the principals moved, the Autobiographv of Peter Cartwright, ed. Charles L. Wallis (New York and Nashville, 1956); Edward Coffman, The Story of Logan County (Nashville, 1962); and Richard Maxwell Brown, "The American Vigilante Tradition," in Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr, eds., The Historv of Violence in America (New York, 1969) were particularly helpful for Sharp.

For Anna, see Ann Firor Scott, The Southern Lady (chicago, 1979); Nan Netherton, et. Q., Fairfax Count : A Historv (Fairfax, Va. , 1978); ~athprineClinton, The Planzation hlistress (New York, 1982); and Jan Lewis, The Pursuit of Haopiness Cambridge, Eng., 1983).

In trying to comprehend Reauchamp's motives, Dickman D. Bruce, Jr., Violence and Culture in the Antebellum South (Austin and London, 1979); Jack K. Williams, Dueling in the Old South: Vignettes of Social Historv in the 19th Century American South (New York, 1904); Bertram Wyatt-Rrown, Southcrn Honor (Oxford, 1983); Edward L. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the 19th-Century American South (New York, 1984); and Elliott J. Gorn's "Gouge and Bite, Pull Hair and Scratch: The Social Significance of Fighting in the Southern Backcountry," The American Historical Review, 90, 1 (February, 1985), 18-43, were most enlightening.

The intense, violent political world of Kentucky in the mid-1820s is described in Arndt Stickles, The Critical Court Struggle in Kentucky. 1819-1829 (Bloomington, 1929); L. F. Johnson, Famous Kentuckv Tragedies and Trials (Cleveland, 1916, 1933, 1943), 58-67; Thomas B. Jones, "New Thoughts on an Old Theme," Register of the Kentucky State Historical Societv, 69, 4 (October, 1971), 292-312; Dale Maurice Royalty, "Banking, Politics, and the Commonwealth, Kentucky, 1800-1825," unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, U of Kentucky, 1971; and Frank F. Mathis, "The Relief and Court Struggle: Half-Way House to Populism," Register of the Kentuckv State Historical Societv, 71, 2 (April, 19731, 154-176. Sharp's rise to prominence and the decline of the Cookes is in part recorded in Warren Countv Will Books B and C; Warren Countv Index of Taxpa~ers. 1797-1810, Warren Countv Kentuckv 1810 United States Census; and Willard Rouse Jillson, Kentuckt Land Grants (Louisville, 1925), 162, 289, 339-400, 708-709. There are, of course, significant gaps in the record. Beauchamp may have written an earlier version of his confession but it apparently no longer exists. The published account was censored. Dr. Sharp hinted at the existence of incriminating documents, but they are not to be found today. Patrick Darby apparently left only a few newspaper articles defending his character from calumny. Amos Kendall was remarkably reticent concerning the affair. Court records from Simpson County (Beauchamp's home) are virtually nonexistent before 1880. LETTERS OF ANN COOK: FACT OR FACTOID?

Fred I¶. Johnson Eastern Kentucky University

The Letters of Ann Cook . . . To Her Friend in Maryland consists of fourteen letters published anonymously at Washington, D.C., in 1826, just after the end of the Kentucky Tragedy, then at a kind of apogee of interest. Previous items concerning the event included, of course, The Confession of Jereboam Beauchamp, three accounts of his trial, and many newspaper articles. Letters is, therefore, one of a large number of items related to the Tragedy. Indeed, had the Sharp family not decided to suppress its Vindication--an attempt to salvage the reputation of the murdered "seducer"--there would have been yet another version of the events by 1827.

In an odd sense, all of these accounts, even the more self-serving, such as Confession and Vindication, contain moments when they ring true, and even square with the facts. But there is something about Letters that gives one the feellng that they are somehow just not quite right. In fact, J. Winston Coleman's Bibliographv of Kentuckv Historv gives Letters the following skeptical annotation: "~ettersof an intimate and confidential nature purporting to have been written by Mrs. Beauchamp during her youth and through the period of her intimacy and alleged seduction by Colonel Sharp, to her school glrl chum in Maryland." An identical volume also exists, with the title page saying that the addressee is Ann's friend in England. This also gives one pause.

Norman Mailer coined a useful term for those kinds of legendary elements that can't be ignored and won't go away. He called them factoids--things that may not be true or even very plausible, but are somehow "part of the recordu--those things that "everybody knows" but won't swear to. Letters, I hope to show, is factoid. The first problem with these letters is that they don't read like letters, but as if someone has stretched a fabric of rodomontade over a scaffolding of notoriety, the result being a short epistolary novel. For it is the overly literarv tone permeating Letters that contributes to their unbelievability, although it is not the only factor. Let us examine this "literariness."

There are three stereotypical devices used in Letters straight from the conventions of the sentimental/epistolarp novel. First, the convention that what we are reading is a record of something that actually happened, and just happened to surface when an audience would be most interested. This is sometimes called the "resurrected manuscript" device. In the case of Letters, the presenter/cditor, one W R n, has been given the material by his wife, Ellen, who, just now confronted with the final letter, has realized that this was -the Ann Cook! (At least this seems to be what the author wants us to believe.) The husband decides that the documents will provide the public with an object lesson on the evils of the passions, and so releases them to the world. In this manner, then, Letters just happens to turn up.

Second of the novelistic conventions is the effacing of names and dates, which is a highly suspicious thing to see happening in a document allegedly a part of the historical record. Thus we see S--p for Sharp, B p for Ann's husband and the like. Novelistically, the rationale for this effacing was the attempt (or pretense) at verisimilitude, inasmuch as the author would pretend to be protecting the identities of "real" people. Effacing dates is also part of this procedure, the theory being that one had to avoid a too-specific time frame for fear that some literary snoop could deduce events and therefore identities by calculating dates. If one were really zealous at this, the names of glaces could be left blank, although the author of Letters does not go this far. What -is done, however, is that the places mentioned in Letters are usually just wrong, of which more anon.

Third is the elaborate pattern of foreshadowings and parallels established early on in the Letters. Ann has her character and typical experience brushed in retrospectively, as it were, "preparing" the reader in Letters I and I1 for the "public record" Ann of the Tragedy. Her opinions, tastes, and deeds as a child and youth reflect what she will later call being "tremblingly alive to every thing like insult and neglect . . . whether real or imaginary ." We also learn of her desire to be "placed in a situation where I could be distinguished and appreciated." She also insists upon her "contempt for those meek and humble beings who tamely submit to be trampled upon, and patiently endure every species of wrong that can be heaped upon them. . . . What may be the consequence of it, time will unfold." Of course, time did just this.

The qualities Ann displays in her deeds and motivations in Letters I and I1 in every way predict what she was to become. For example, we are told of her nearly drowning little Frank D , who had told a lie about Ann's sister Mary; of her braining an overseer with a rock for beating an eight-year-old slave; of her penchant for wandering alone through sublime landscapes; of her nude swimming (with the by-now matronly Ellen, who surely would not have appreciated being reminded of this indiscretion!); and of other reactions and attitudes concerning men, literary tastes, and the like. What strikes one as strange about these first two Letters is that they deal with events that the putative Ellen would already have known about, yet are presented in a form that can onlv be called novelistic exposition. The style, in other words, is that of an epistolary novel, not, strictly speaking, epistles. Having established Ann's typical experience in Letters 1-11, the author now intensifies the foreshadowing and parallelisms-the predictors, as it were, of what Ann was to become during the period of the Tragedy. We hear Ann complain about the banality of the local suitors; of her rescue of one of them when he freezes on a mountain ledge because of his acrophobia; more seriously, her shooting of her sister Mary's seducer, who also just happens to be the swindler who caused her father's financial ruin; of her taking on the burden of being her aging parents' sole comfort upon the suicide of Mary and her brother's death. As for her literary tastes, her favorite poem is Pope's Eloisa to Abelard; another favorite is William Dunlap's play Pizarro in Peru: Or. the Death of Rolla (1800). Ann's interpretation of these works is that they are about heroines whose lovers prove unworthy of them. In the case of Eloisa, Abelard's failing is that he is guilty of undervaluing and underappreciating the loyal Eloisa; in the case of Elvira, the heroine in Pizarro, Rolla's failings are more serious, requiring that Elvira stab him to death. The foreshadowing/parallel technique should be apparent by now. Ann is Mary, seduced and abandoned, but she's also her avenger--both victim and victor. The Elvira/Ann combination intensifies the technique, for here the heroine resorts to a calculated, coldbooded stabbing. Inasmuch as Solomon P. Sharp had been stabbed to death, this is naturally something that an audience would have been quick to notice. Examples are numerous throughout Letters of the treachery/avenger motif in the lives of others besides Ann. Other women, she reports--of course without citing any names--are abandoned by husbands, have their life-savings stolen, and generally are victimized by untrustworthy husbands or lovers. But it is in her own relationship with Sharp beginning in Letter VII that the foreshadowing begin to overstrain credulity. After their involvement has matured--although as pet unconsummated-- Ann starts having lurid nightmares in which she discovers that Sharp has betrayed her with another. Given what we have seen of Ann, it should be easy to guess what occurs next: she stabs him to death, then awakens. As in the case of Mary, Ann is pregnant, making the betrayal all the more heinous and deserving of the condign punishment meted out. This all-too-neat episode strikes one as literary to a fault, even for what might be called "spiritual" autobiography such as Rousseau's Confessions. In fact, it was at this point that I became convinced, many years ago, that Letters was spurious, to put it mildly.

However, it was just this implausibility that had suffused the accounts of the very facts in the Tragedy, and had created the enormous interest in the event initially. The episode was larger than life, a melodrama that was somehow also "real." In Beauchamp, there seemed to be the perfect avenger of wronged womanhood; in Sharp, the perfect slimy, seduced villain. In Ann, the perfect lovely woman who had "stooped to folly." That her vengeance was terrible, all acknowledged, but as the putative editor of Letters, W R n, says: This awful tragedy will, I trust, have a beneficial moral tendency, by exhibiting the dreadful effects of seduction and treachery, and the consequences which flow from the first fatal aberration from the paths of virtue and innocence. . . . The dreadful end of Colonel Sharpe [sic], too, strikingly admonishes the young and vicious to be cautious how they trifle with the affections of a tender and confiding female. . . . the tragedy lately . . . must be attributed to his criminal seduction of the ill-fated writer of the following letters; and on his head should principally rest . . . the odium and the censure of society . . . and though in this case vengeance should have been left to God . . . we . . . cast over their guilt and their frailty the mantle of extenuation.

Here we see the sort of special pleading that instructs one how to read the Letters. That the audience probably wanted to read them in just this way is perfectly in keeping with the more-sinned-against-than-sinning essence of the typical female character in the sentimental novels of the day.

A reader alerted by such contrived literary devices might well question the historical accuracy of the Letters and seek verification elsewhere. This reader would be advised, first of all, to do as I did and consult Jack Cooke, Professor of history at Tennessee State University, and a descendant of our subject. Dr. Cooke referred me to a genealogy of the Cooke family compiled by Dr. and Mrs. William Carter Stubbs, published in 1923 in New Orleans and entitled Decendants of hlordecai Cooke. Loren J. Kallsen's 1963 edition of the Confessions, Sharp's Vindication, and Dana and Thomas's shorthand summary of Beauchamp's trial also afford pertinent information that will allow an interested reader to extrapolate easily back and forth from the Letters to what we can state as historical "fact." Also useful are the various newspaper accounts and broadsides published at the time of the events. Armed with these sources, a perpetual calendar, and a modest "fudge factor," we can establish a highly credible version of these fascinating events, one clearly more in accord with historical plausibility than the Letters.

When I first became interested in the Letters around twenty pears ago, however, I did not know about the Stubbses' Descedants or those other helpful secondary sources. For this reason, the only means available to test the historicity of Letters was by internal analysis, to see whether the universe it posited was viable even in its own terms. As it turned out, the author not only was ignorant of the facts of Ann Cook's life, but was also inept at constructing a believable narrative. Although Descendants renders the following analysis academic in a number of senses, I hope to show that even without the aid of that study, sufficient doubt can be generated to vitiate Letters as canonical in the Tragedy. I choose for analysis the group of letters numbered VIII through XIV.

According to Ellen, an assiduous annotator and moralistic nag, there was a gap between VII and VIII of "many months." Then appears a "short letter" (not collected for some reason); then "another year" passes and finally Ellen receives Letter VIII, "after two years of anxious expectation." Ann is living in Laurenceburg, Kentucky (an egregious variation of the facts) and while she avers that the Kentuckians are friendly, Ann bemoans her declined circumstances. How long is the interval? It can be calculated variously, in keeping with the author's technique of the "elastic internal." It could be two years in all, which would be the commonsense way of figuring it; or the total of "many months," "another year," and "two years." On the latter basis the interval would be close to four years. But internal evidence from Letter VII would make it at least five years. In VII, dated July 10, 18-, Ann had referred to her father's death "last Wednesday evening after a lingering illness of several weeks." The author actually needed Giles to linger yet a while longer for the real date was September 26, 1805. Ann actually arrived in Rowling Green around 1810, so even the most "elastic" interpretation fails by almost a year of squaring with the facts, not to mention Ann's getting the date of Giles's death wrong. But it is Letter VIII we need to examine.

Letter VIII relates Ann's infatuation with Sharp and Sharp's response. They exchange meaningful glaces, converse earnestly, and do most of the things typical in sentimental novels. Ann mentions not only a date, but a weekday, although she is still effacing the year. In an entry labelled Wednesdav, Ann alludes to a ball she attended with Sharp the "previous night." Since it is impossible to determine just how long writing the letter required or just how many days elapsed between the events within it and the writing, the commonsense reading of "Tuesday" for "previous" is not necessarily compelling. So, let us posit blonday, or Tuesday. Consulting a perpetual calendar gives us Monday August 4 in either 1817 or 1823. The latter is completely out of court because Ann's illegitimate child was born in 1820, which we know from many sources. The year 1817 is impossible also because it becomes clear during the next few Letters that the affair was a brief one, eventuating almost immediately in Ann's becoming pregnant. (This is, of course, not to say that the real Ann and Sharp might not have "carried on" for a much longer period, but this is not the case in Letters' universe.) If we assume that August 4 was indeed a Tuesday, then the years are 1812 and 1818, neither congruent with the date of Ann's stillborn child's arrival. But if we assume that Ann has her weekday wrong, and that it was in fact on Wednesday that the date fell, then we get the year 1819, well within the time-frame for Ann's becoming pregnant and delivering. However, Letters IX and X afford us some additional inferential materials. Although the year 1814 is not remotely possible in any case, Ann does tell us that she's reading Byron's Corsair, published that year--so this Letter cannot be before that date. But more to the purpose, IX is dated September 1, and Sharp has announced to Ann that he must ride to Frankfort for three weeks, but will return. This return is announced in X, dated October 5, a good five weeks later. But the events described therein occur on Tuesday 22nd and Thursday 24th, which one can only assume are in September, and which coincide nicely with Sharp's three-week absence. Presumably the date is October 5 because Ann has been spending the near three-week interval screwing her courage to the sticking-place to confess to the censorious Ellen that she has "yielded" on what turns out to be Tuesday 22nd, when she and Sharp consummate their affair with unseemly haste on the very day of his arrival' However, the year containing such a date turns out to be 1818; close, but still off by a year.

The events as recorded in XI-XIV illustrate even more graphically the degree to which chronology and fact are distorted. In XI, dated April 14, Ann confesses, "I am a mother." The child is alive, not, as was actually the case still-born, and Ellen comments that there had been "an interval of near twelve months" since receiving X. Given the length of XI it may well have taken time to compose, and indeed, includes events that in the real world had required two years to transpire--Sharp's marriage to Eliza Scott in 1818 and the birth of Ann's baby in 1820.

But the purported narrative of events goes like this in XI. Ann says that Sharp was "attentive tor several months after my fatal weakness" and that she was unabashed even though "The fruits of our intercourse began to be apparent." But a closer examination of this putative chronology reveals certain anomalies. For example, although the interval between X and XI is stated to be nearly twelve months, Letter X had been dated October 5. This has to mean that: Ellen can't count, for October to April is but seven months; that Ann may not have gotten around to mailing XI at a time even close to its dating; that there has a been an unusual delay in mail delivery (however, during the 1820s even the slowest delivery time between Nashville and Washington was eleven weeks, the usual time being eleven days); or that the child was born prematurely, lived one month, then died, giving us the seven months. In the real world, of course, none of this applies, but even in Letters' elastic time-frames it is impossible to accommodate the alleged events occurring therein with any plausible intervals. It is rather like the attempts of non-Copernican astronomers to make the solar system conform to the Ptolemaic model, by positing "cycle upon epicycle, orb on orb. " The tergiversation required to maintain it twisted it apart. In other words, it became easier to accept the new model than to maintain the old. So it is with Letters. Even without the Stubbses' help, there is no way to account for the errors of fact we are confronted xith at every turn, and even less can we believe in the chronological contexts within which the "howlers" are scattered.

In Letter XII, dated May 4, the ostensible event-chain has to run something like the following. Ann says that after Sharp abandoned her, she fell into a delirium for "some weeks," recovered sufficiently to confront Sharp once more, but relapsed in yet another period of delirium, again lasting "weeks. " Then, Ann says, "In a short time I became a mother." The baby lives only six months. All this while Beauchamp has been in consoling attendance. Then they are "some months after" married. But if we recall the date on the preceding Letter, XI (April 14) wc are again brought up short. The period cannot be only a (short) month. Furthermore, the usually pedantic Ellen has mentioned nothing about a gap or interval. The author has made a serious miscalculation here, for this interval has to be thirteen months. Even this emendation, however, while allowing time for a child to be carried to term, still does not accommodate its alleged death at six months.

Letter XI11 is dated May 12, but it is, again, not the eight days later that one might think. The author has availed himself/herself of the "elastic interval" ploy. This time it is Ellen's family problems that occasion a hiatus in the correspondence: "considerable time elapsed before I had an opportunity to answer Ann's letter." Further leeway is provided by Ann's not replying until "several months after." One has to infer, then, that at least one year has passed between XI1 and XIII. Ann alludes to the miscegenation libel Sharp is alleged to have used on her, and to the fact that he has "married another." The use of the present perfect tense implies that the marriage has been a comparatively recent one, therefore making the year 1818. (In fact Sharp had been married to Eliza Scott for nine months before his "real world" seduction of Ann on 18 September 1819 in his law office.) But what the author has really done with the chronology is to telescope it. Using the miscegenation libel as the means, the author combines three separate defamations, those of 1820, 1821, and 1825. We know that we are expected to understand this libel as the one in 1825, because Ann says that Beauchamp is even more indignant at Sharp now "from some new cause." What this new cause might be we are not told until XIV. Why Ann wanted to keep Ellen in suspense is difficult to fathom if we continue trying to believe that we are reading real letters. The "new cause" is of course the pamphlet supposedly circulated by John U. Waring excoriating Sharp for his treatment of Ann. That Beauchamp acted on this stimulus is agreed upon by all parties in the Tragedy, even though it may have been only a good, as opposed to the real, reason for killing Sharp.

According to Ellen, XIV arrived after "another interval of several months." This one is dated July 4, and comes from Frankford [sic] Prison. Inasmuch as this is a year we can be absolutely certain of--1826--then XI11 should also be 1826 if we are to accommodate Ellen's "several months." But as \\e have already seen, Ellen's method of numbering is odd. Surely the number of months in the interval is fairly obvious: May 12 to July 4 represents 53 days, or close to two months. Sharp had been killed November 1825, Ann had been arrested for suspicion of being an accessory around May 18, 1825, and had been in jail with her husband since May 22. Inasmuch as XI11 is from Franklin'County, where "Frankford" is located, we might assume that she's writing from jail, but there's nothing of this nature in the letter itself, nor any mention or hint that she had been avenged. As mentioned numerous times in this essay, Ann's grasp of facts and her presentation of them is strange. Why keep Ellen in suspense about the miscegenation calumny in XI11 when she (and everybody else for four years!) knew the reason for Beauchamp's "exasperation"?

After all this discussion I hope sufficient doubt has been cast upon the Letters as a legitimate record of the Tragedy. Many of Ann's statements are just plain wrong. This is almost certainly due to the author's ignorance of the non-public Ann: For example, how many siblings she had, her father's financial circumstances, the date of his death, when she moved to Kentucky, where she lived in Virginia and Kentucky. However, the author does build upon facts within the public record--when it suits a narrative purpose. Then, the author willfully ignores certain things that could have been incorporated into the narrative, had he/she exercised just a bit more effort. Although we may be able to excuse an ignorance of certain facts, what cannot be accepted is the fiction that Ann's affair with Sharp eventuated in a child that lived. Eclually implausible are the circumstances of her first meeting with Beauchamp (Sharp introduces them!) Nor can the reader swallow the eerily predictive events of Ann's obviously fictionalized childhood. To be sure, the author maximizes the more melodramatic aspects of the real Ann, but does so selectivelv, ignoring certain inconvenient facts, and inventing others evocative of the sentimental novel.

In other words, the author could have done a better job with what was known. There was really no necessity to resort to the elastic interval technique to bridge over gaps in the record. Try as one may, there is no method of correlating dates and events with the real world. Even more damning is the impossibility of establishing a rational time-scheme even in Letters' own universe. What we are left to postulate is that a moderately talented "catch-penny scribbler1'--as they are called in Vindication--knew something about the denouement of the Tragedy, the rumors concerning the events that had led up to it, Ann's public reputation which emerged during the trial, her subsequent shared imprisonment and death with Beauchamp, and her cultured background. This writer then proceeded to create a retrospective childhood for the by-now legended Ann Cook, bridging ox7er gaps by having Ann fall (uncharacteristically) silent during periods lacking melodrama, and hoping for the best insofar as the audience's willing suspension of disbelief is concerned. If Letters had been avowedly published as historical fiction, it would have been better all around as far as the historical record is concerned. THE RESPOIiSE OF PHILANTHROPISTS TO SELF-SUPPORTING WOMEN IN AMERICA, 1880-1930

Margaret Spratt University of Kentucky

Duringthe latter decades of the nineteenth century, the progressive reformers identified and became concerned with a new urban problem: the "woman adrift." Products of the industrial system, thousands of women lived on their own, surviving without the economic and, often, emotional support of a family. For social investigators, they presented a threat to established ideas of family structure. These women lived outside of a traditional family atmosphere for many reasons. Perhaps they had been unsuccessful in finding work near their homes: perhaps the family had been broken up because of death or desertion; or they felt unhappy at home and desired a different way of life. Whatever the reasons, by 1900 single self-sufficient women comprised approximately one-fifth of the urban female labor force. Urban reformers labeled this group "women adrift," conjuring up images of helpless women drifting through their working lives in the urban environment, victimized by ruthless employers and immoral men. These "women adrift" were seen as innocent victims of the cruel city and of failed family responsibilities.

In 1922, the directors of the Boston Society for the Care of Girls sent a letter to prominent members of the Boston elite. They stated that "For over 122 years the Boston Society for the Care of Girls has been performing an invaluable service to countless girls." For $1.00 a friend of the society could help provide:

Summer vacations for worn out, dejected girls. Much needed clothing. Food. Comfortable homes in wholesome surroundings. A chance for education and-- A chance for many girls to lead a clean moral life.

By giving to the Society, contributors could be "a part of this big movement, 'Better Girls, Finer Women."'l

Charitable organizations like the Boston Society for the Care of Girls had been soliciting funds for their work with women for decades. These organizations were concerned with the plight of destitute women, and in most cases did not single out the self-supporting working woman as the target of their services. It was not until 1859 when Lucretia Boyd, a Boston missionary, recognized the unique problems of independent women workers and appealed to an association of church women to support a "permanent institution." These women founded what was to be called the Young Women's Christian Association. By 1873 there were associations in thirty-six cities throughout the East and Midwest. The original purpose of the YWCA was to provide for the "temporal, moral, and religious welfare of women, especially young women, who are dependent on their own exertions for support." As the Association grew and conditions changed, their methods, goals and image underwent many alterations, but their main concern remained with the self-supporting woman.2

Although the central purpose of the YWCA was to maintain "A Christian Home" for working girls, it became apparent very early that in order for women to find skilled or semi-skilled jobs they needed education, particularly in the trades. According to the head of the employment bureau of the Cincinnati YWCA: "I could make a fortune for the Association, if girls were competent. What is most needed, is a training school." This was a difficult problem for the directors of the Association. As early as 1869 the Cincinnati branch addressed the issue when they wrote in their Annual Report: "Unskilled labor is a drug in the market, and it seems a superficial charity merely to supplement by low-priced board the small wages for a few, instead of giving the means of industrial education to the whole class."3

The problem of the skilled woman workers was universal throughout every major industry. Seen as temporary, "casual" members of the work force, women were often overlooked by the experienced and skilled workers who could help them receive the training they needed to move into better positions. Also, skilled work had traditionally been held by unionized craftsmen who had no desire to encourage women to join their ranks. Neglected by their employers and ignored by their fellow male workers, many self-supporting women turned to charitable organizations for help. Other women who were trying to enter into the work force were in desperate need of training. Many of these women wished to avoid domestic service, often the only job open to an inexperienced woman without much education. They, too, turned to organizations such as the YWCA for job referral and industrial ed~cation.~

The YWCA was not alone, however, in offering training for the woman worker. Many settlements throughout the country were early to recognize the problem and offer classes for women. Industrial schools were also established, some of which included women as students. For instance, the South End Industrial School in Boston was founded in 1882 "for the education of the poor to the point of self-support." Several labor activists, such as Leonora O'Reilly, believed that training would "act as an incentive to unionization" and strongly supported the establishment of vocational schools specifically for women. The Manhattan Trade School for Girls and the Boston Trade School for Girls were both started to teach women "the relation between the brain and the hands." Also by the 1900s, public school systems in urban areas were offering night school classes. Many of these classes were specifically aimed at new immigrants, but wage-earning women often took advantage of the free tuition to learn a new trade. In 1910, thirty-three public night schools in New Pork City admitted only women. Other organizations which restricted their concerns solely to women, such as the women's Educational and Industrial Union, provided lectures and classes.

Many social workers found very early that one way to reach self -supporting women, who for whatever reason shunned the classroom, was through the formation of working girls' clubs. Grace Dodge, a strong advocate of education for women and a major supporter of the YWCA, believed that an informal club setting was the most successful way to work with young women. In 1881, she began meeting with a small group of working women on Tuesday evenings in New York City. Dodge liked to center the activities of her club around talks she would give the girls on "practical" matters such as personal hygiene, fashion trends, setting an attractive table, morality, and other current issues. They soon became known as the 38th Street Working Girls Society, and within ten years rew into a network of seventy-five clubs with over 2100 members. C?

The clubs were in many ways self-governing, but they usually were led and advised by a governing board of middle-class supporters and working women. If, however, the club meetings were held in a settlement house, the social workers oversaw their activities. The Shawmut Club of Boston, patterned on Grace Dodge's 38th Street Working Girls' Society, was described by Edith Howes as follows:

It is now in its twelfth year, has its own rooms, and represents a high degree of intelligence and character in its membership. The club has a strong intellectual bent. The feeling and the habit of independence are studiously inculcated, and the relations existing between the women of leisure who take the lead and the young working women has that wholesomeness which comes of mutual respect and long-continued cooperation.

These working girls' societies were extremely popular for a relatively short period of the 1880s and 1890s. They stressed the importance of ladylike behavior, dress, morality, and promised the working woman that she would be rewarded with a pleasant and useful life, particularly if she was to marry.

By the late 1890s, working girls' societies were not as popular as they once had been, but the club idea did not disappear. Clubs for working women, school-age girls, and mothers were held in practically every settlement house in urban areas throughout the country. For example, in New York City in 1911, at least thirty-four settlement houses had girls' or women's clubs. The YWCA also adopted this approach for reaching self-supporting women who lived outside their walls. The group of wage-earning women that caused the YWCA the most concern was the factory workers or the "industrial girls," as they were labeled. These workers were difficult to teach because they often worked and lived far from the YWCA centers. Their hours were long, and work was physically exhausting. Even if they had the desire to attend night classes or cultural events at a Y\\'CA or other organization, these conditions would often prevent their participation. By 1900, the National Roard of YWCA, realizing that their branch associations were reaching very few factory workers, embarked on "extension work." The essence of the extension idea was that if the industrial worker could not come to the YWCA, the YWCA would go to her.9

The Cincinnati chapter of the YWCA established its Industrial Girls' Club in 1907, the same year its Business and Professional Women's Club was begun. In most cities, the Industrial and Business Departments had been combined originally, but the national board stressed the separation of the two groups very early. They convinced the branch association that having two departments would not only be more efficient, but would be beneficial to the women involved. Obviously, it also separated women workers into two distinct groups: low-paid, poorly educated, unskilled factory workers and sales girls; and the higher-paid, white collar office and professional women. The YWCA no longer viewed self-supporting women as a monolithic group whose needs and goals were the same. lo

The YWCA's work with the "industrial girls" took them into the factories and the neighborhood. In some areas the local YWCA would open a lunch room "suitable for girls to visit." These business ventures were often disasters; for instance, in Cincinnati the YWCA was forced to close their restaurant in the factory district just a few months after it had opened. The reason for its failure: "Whereas numbers of young men came, the girls did not, as a rule, leave the factory on account of a noon hour too short to admit of the necessary change from working clothes to street dress.1'11 The major success of YWCA extension work, however, came in recruiting workers and in persuading factory owners to use their facilities for noon meetings and classes. It was hoped that once a woman realized the benefits of the YWCA during her lunch break, she would find a way to become involved in the other activities of the YWCA. The factors working against evening participation were considerable, and were listed in this way by one club worker: "the Catholic influence, the extra carfare and membership, and the wary, weary bodies after ten hours of tedious devitalizing work. "12

The Industrial Girls' Clubs were to a certain extent self-governing, just as the Working Girls' Societies had been. But like their predecessors, these clubs were also tightly controlled by the YWCA workers and the volunteers who were basically middle-class women of leisure. The activities of each club reflected the major interests and ideas of behavior that the local and national associations espoused. The noon meetings in the factories, and later in the department stores, included discussions ranging from "what is best to give a beau for Christmas" to "which hospital is best to enter for training." Classes were also offered, many of which stressed the need for education in homemaking skills. Not surprisingly, many of the women showed their preference for instruction in more recreational activities. For instance, in 1918 the Cincinnati YWCA offered classes in cooking, question hour (current events), dramatics, dressmaking, needlework, gymnasium, and ukelele. The most popular classes were in dramatics, gymnasium, and ukelele; the least popular were cooking, dressmaking, and needlework. The decision as to what classes to offer was often based on trial and error. For example, one report stated that "the work at the Procter & Gamble factory has been more promising. The Bible class . , . has grown to an enrollment of thirty-three. Both the soap and Crisco girls have been most responsive, and entered into all our plans most enthusiastically. The sewing class with an enrollment of twenty, was forced to disband after three meetings." The YWCA soon found that the best way to keep their membership strong was to encourage participation in recreational activities, and slip in a little teaching on the side.13

With their extension work in the factory districts of Cincinnati, the YWCA began to face a difficult problem--not all of the "industrial girls" were white. What to do with the "colored" women became the main area for discussion in many meetings directly before and during World War I. In a history of the YWCA written in the 1930s, the question of segregation was discussed. Although the author defended the policies of the YWCA, she admitted: "There is evidence that in some places Negro women and girls not living in the Negro community but coming to the central Association are referred to the Negro branch if they wish to enter activities." This was certainly the case in both Cincinnati and Louisville. In Cincinnati, black factory women were organized into the Blue Triangle Club. The club met at either factory lunch rooms or black churches until the YWCA purchased a house in 1919. This branch, known as the West End, by 1923 had facilities for housing and a "tea room" which served two meals daily. The Louisville YKCA began their Phyllis Wheatley Branch in 1918 and recruited over 800 members that year. The YWCA workers concentrated on the tobaccoprocessing plants where many black women were employed and the "California" neighborhood of Louisville, "a thickly settled colored district." They established four clubs for "colored girls": the hlerrp hlakers Club, the Girls with Pep Club, the Literary and hlusical Club, and the Betsy Ross Club. The activities of the black clubs \rere verv similar to those of the YWCA's other industrial

clubs.I4 ' The YWCA stressed self-improvement classes and lectures, but to attract self-supporting women, it offered recreational activities to counteract the growing influence of commercial recreational establishments. By 1920, many members of the Cincinnati YWCA were lobbying for a swimming pool. This was nothing new to the directors, since club members had pressured their leaders into allowing other recreational activities, such as dancing, for some time. For instance, the Cincinnati YWCA sponsored "parties in return for courtesies shown by men friends" in 1915. Of course, the directors also pointed out that the "girls have not neglected the more serious matters, such as the sending of Christmas baskets to the poor, flowers and visits to the sick. . . .It The inherent problems of control of recreational activities for self-supporting women were of major concern to many social work groups by 1900, not only the YWCA.~~

All recognized that self-supporting women who worked in factories and department stores long hours were going to seek some type of activity after the work day was finished. In her plea for organized recreation, Belle Israels said: "Industrial activity demands diversion. Industrial idleness cries out for rational recreation." The problems of recreation and the self-supporting woman were unique, however. After her work was completed for the day, she had no family obligations to fill. Most self-supporting women naturally sought out other activities after washing clothes, preparing meals, and other, limited domestic duties were performed. The real problem, at least to social reformers, was that self-supporting women were often paid such low wages, they were forced to accept the hospitality of men. Since these women were beyond the controlling influence of a family, many who worked with charitable organizations believed they had a responsibility to provide those restraints. Robert Woods, in a book to young working girls, listed what he considered to be the four major reasons for "moral confusion" among working women: 1) deficiency of f amily , 2) poorly organized industry, 3) neighborhood breakdown, and 4) commercialized recreation. He also stated that "the young girl naturally craves a share in the profusion of pleasure which she sees everywhere on sale; and, as such participation only too often calls for the more ample resources of some man, the way is open for moral compromise." This view toward the temptations of commercialized recreation was held by practically all social reformers of the time. When discussing the lives of sales women, one surveyor observed: "This starvation in pleasure, as well as low wages and overwork, subjects the women in the stores to a temptation readily conceivable." She went on to suggest that most women "find it wise, for fear of the worst suspicion, to forego all sorts of normal delights and gayeties and youthful pleasures." This abstention seems highly unlikely, however, particularly in view of the concern growing over attendance at dance halls, movie theatres, skating rinks, and amusement parks. Frances Donovan, in her study of waitresses in Chicago, remarked that a waitress spends practically all her leisure time "at the movies, cabarets, and restaurants where she goes with her ' friend' or with some other girl ."16'

One solution to the problem was to offer alternatives to commercialized recreation. Robert Woods suggested that glrls be "encouraged to acquire skill in embroidery and fancy work, to read aloud at home, and to visit among friends who have a helpful and stimulating influence." When compared to seeing a moving picture show, reading aloud at home was hardly seen as a stimulating diversion by most self-supporting women. Certainly the YWCA acknowledged this by offering recreational activities for working women other than their usual classes and lectures. The many different clubs often held teas, suppers, group sings and other parties, but they had a difficult time competing with the dance halls, theatres, and amusement parks that sprang up in American cities in the 1910s and 1920s.17

Dancing was the major concern to most social reformers of the time. The dance hall was a meeting place for men and women without the restrictions that a chaperoned environment provided. One social worker stated in 1909 that the unchaperoned dance hall bred immorality, for "the man is ever on the hunt, and the girl is ever needing to flee." Commercial dance halls were thought to be places of great evil, where liquor flowed and prostitutes were proc.ured. Many believed that the dance hall was one of the obvious places where young girls were drugged and kidnapped into white slavery. Others were concerned over the presence of liquor in many of the halls and dancing academies, since they thought alcohol made "the distinctions between right and wrong a little more puzzling."18

The environment of the dance hall was not the only objectionable feature of this recreation, however. Many social workers also felt that the physical act of dancing was indecent and immoral. In a survey of subsidized working girls' homes in Manhattan, one matron was quick to point out that she did not allow dancing in her home. She did concede, however, that "on a Wednesday or Saturday night I play a Virginia Reel tune and let them skip . . . ." Robert Woods believed that it was imperative for social workers to try to eliminate "the dangerously prevalent indecent dances of the past few years." Undeniably, the fear of dancing centered on the commonly-accepted idea that women were basically weak and could not resist the charm, most likely wicked, of a man. Belle Israels e.xpressed this idea when she said: "You cannot dance night after night, held in the closest of sensual embraces, with every effort made in the style of dancing to a peal to the worst that is in you, and remain unshaken by it."lg

It was obvious to most social workers by the 1910s that dancing was not going to disappear. Realizing that organizations such as the YWCA mould suffer a loss of popularity if they did not offer dances as part of their activities, many social workers agreed that dancing would he acceptable if supervised. If a dance was held in a settlement or YWCA, under the watchful eyes of responsible chaperones, and no indecent dances were allowed, it could be a healthy and innocent amusement for young men and women. This compromise would take the self-supporting woman out of the public dance hall and place her within the confines of a supervised environment. In the words of one social worker, the community center "affords protection of a high order in helping the girl maintain her standards." The rules were often strict, and the number of chaperones was often excessive at such organized dances. At the YWCA, the dances were not often held, and were used as a kind of reward for participation in other activities. For example, the Cincinnati YWCA held a "Popularity Night" every Friday evening where the women could enjoy "Good Fellowship, Good Times, 'Pep Songs,' Story Tellers, and Social Dancing." Once a month, "brothers and sweethearts" were invited. Another club posted a set of rules for their dances:

Rules for Correct Dancing

1. Correct dancing position must maintained.

1. The man's hand must be on the girl's back above her waist, between the shoulders.

2. The girl's left arm must be on the man's arm, NOT around his neck.

3. Dancers' heads must not touch.

11. Any dance with conspicuous movements of the hips or shoulders is absolutely prohibited.

111. No deep dips allowed.

IV. No undue display of hosiery.

V. Chaperonage must be permitted pleasantly.

VI. The management reserves the right to expel persons not following these rules, or who for good reasons seem ~ndesirable.~o

Dancing and dance halls were not the only commercial recreations to come under attack. Other activities such as attending the theatre or moving picture show, roller skating, or going to an amusement park were highly suspect leisure activities for independent women. The theatre "demoralized." The movingpicture show was dangerous because of "the crowds outside the door, the lurid and sensational advertisements, and the absence of all chaperonage." Also, the dim lights in a movie house made possible the "danger of undue familiarity." The roller-skating rink promoted "general promiscuity." Worst of all was the amusement park, such as Coney Island or Paradise Park in New York. These recreational areas consisted of dance halls, saloons, movie theatres, penny arcades, hotels, and excursion boats. One advocate of organized recreation believed that it was "the promiscuity of the evening that makes these places danerous, as well as their opportunities for carousing. "28 To social reformers, there were two solutions to the problem of commercialized recreation: either provide alternatives and hope that self-supporting women cooperate; or, regulate the type and places where public recreation is offered. The YWCA, settlements, and girls' clubs tried the first solution with varying degrees of success. Other reformers believed that liquor should be prohibited, prostitution eliminated, and dance halls, if not outlawed, heavily supervised. All of those social workers interested in the problems of commercial recreation believed that the situation was the responsibility of government and the social agenc,y. One advocate voiced her solution when she wrote: Let us frankly recognize that youth demands amusement. when the cities begin to see their duties to the little ones, playgrounds come. Youth plays too. Instead of sand-piles give them dance platforms; instead of slides and see-saws, theaters; instead of teachers of manual occupations, give them the socializing force of contact with good supervising men and women. Replace the playground, or more properly, progress from the playground to the rational amusement park.22 In many ways, self-supporting women were considered as children. Middle-class social reformers believed that these women must be supervised at work, at home, and at play. Charitable organizations believed it was their responsibility to provide instruction and protection for the independent woman who lacked the traditional social restraints of a family environment. The self-supporting woman had few alternatives to the structured life which organizations such as the YWCA provided. She could either cooperate and prepare herself for a traditional feminine role, or ignore the social workers and run the risk of losing the label of respectability. It was a difficult choice to make. NOTES

l~ouisaHunnewell to Mrs. Bigelow, 3 July 1922, The Boston Society for the Care of Girls Papers.

2b1a~y S. Sims, The Natural History of a Social Institution--The Young Women's Christian Association (New York, 1936), 6-7; Marion 0. Robinson, Eight Women of the YKCA (New York, 1966), 6; Cincinnati Young Women's Christian Association, First Annual Report (1868), 1, hereafter cited as the Cincinnati YWCA.

3~e~ortof the Employment Bureau, Cincinnati YWCA, Twelfth Annual Report (1881); Twenty-Xinth Annual Report (1898), 22.

4~aryVan Kleeck, Women in the Bookbinding Trade (New York, 1913), 207; Virginia Penny, Think and Act: A Series of Articles Pertaining to Men and Women, Work and Wages (Philadelphia, 1869), 53; Annie Marion MacLean, Wage-Earning Women (New York, 1910), 175; Women in the United States (New York, 1982), 171.

j~eeRobert Woods and Albert J. Kennedy, eds., Handbook of Settlements (1911; rpt. New York, 1970) for a listing of settlements in the U. S. in 1911 and a description of their activities; See Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, A Generation of Women: Education in the Lives of Progressive Reformers (Cambridge, MA, 1979), 102-08, for a brief description of Leonora O'Reilly's involvment in the Manhattan Trade School for Girls.

6~agemann, 21-22; In 1887, Dodge published A Bundle of Letters to Busy Girls on Practical Matters (rpt. in Grace Dodge: Her Life and Work, New York, 1974) which included several of her "practical" talks aimed at women who could not attend a club; Robinson, 16.

7~raceH. Dodge, ed., Thoughts of Busv Girls Who Have 1,ittle Time for Study Yet Find Much Time for think in^ (1892), Dodge: Her Life, 133; See also 105, 137; Robert Woods and Albert J. Kennedy, Young Working Girls: A Summarv of Evidence from Two Thousand Social Workers (Boston, 1913), 133-34.

8~peechon the Shawmut Club to the W.E.I.U., 24 October 1936, Marion Niles Papers; Robert Woods, ed., The City Wilderness: A Settlement Storv (1911; rpt. New York, 19701, 262.

g~oodsand Kennedy, Handbook, 188-244; Francis Irins Rich, Wage-Earning Girls in Cincinnati: The Wages. Ernplovment. Housin~,Food, Recreation and Education of a Sample Group (1927 ; rpt. in Working Girls in Cincinnati, New York, 1974), 61; Sins, 44.

10~ouisvilleYWCA, Annual Report (1928). ll~incinnatiYWCA, Thirtv-Fourth Annual Report (1903).

l2Louisville YWCA, Renort on the Industrial Committee, 18 November 1912.

13~ims, 60; Louisville YWCA, Report on the Industrial Committee, 18 Kovember 1912; Cincinnati YWCA, Report of the Industrial Committee, 1918; Forty-Sixth Annual Report (1915).

14sims. 174-75: Cincinnati YWCA. "West End Branch History"; Louisville '~CA, ~ndustrialReport df Phyllis Wheatlev ranch, March, 1919, April 1919.

15~incinnati YWCA, Letter to Board from Industrial Department, 6 July 1920; Forty-Sixth Annual Report (1915).

I6~elleLinder Israels, "The Way of the Girl," The Survev, 22 (3 July 1909). 486; Woods and Kennedy, Young Working Girls, 2-6; Sue Xinslie Clark and Edith Franklin Wyatt, Making Both Ends Meet: The Income and Outlay of New York Working Girls (New York, 19111, 28-29; Francis Donovan, The Woman Who Waits (Boston,

l7woods and Kennedy, Young Worlkilng Girls, 126.

l8~oodsand Kennedy, Young Working Girls, 109; Israels, 495.

19~stherPackard, "The Or~anizedHomes. " A Study of Living Conditions of Self-Suuing Women in New York City (Kew York, 1915), 142; Woods and Kennedy, Eun~Working Girls, 109; Israel~, 495.

20~oods and Kennedy, Young Working Girls, 116; Cincinnati YWCA, Poster of "Popularity Night," n.d.; "Rules for Dancing," n.d., hlarion Niles Papers.

21b'oods and Kennedy, Young Working Girls, 114-16; Israels ,\$lay," 491.

z2~he National League of Women Workers, " ' Getting Together': A Plea for Coordination in Recreation Work," June 1917, Marion Niles Papers; Israels, 497. WHAT MADE SENATOR TAYLOR RUN?

Robert L. Taylor Middle Tennessee State University

As this paper is a sequel to the one read by the author at the 1985 meeting of the Kentucky-Tennessee American Studies, Ass~ciation,~it seems appropriate to begin with a brief resume of the earlier paper. Like its sequel, it concerned the frequent candidacy of Tennessee Senator Robert Love Taylor, great-uncle of the author and maternal grandfather of the writer, Peter Taylor.

In the earlier paper it was argued that Senator Taylor suffered from a compulsion for political office and for a political party--the Democratic Party--and that that compulsion made him miserable. It was also pointed out that Senator Taylor had great gifts as an entertainer and communicator. He could make people laugh and could use his fiddle to perform and to convey an appealing image. His manager said that he was the "king of the American platform for twenty years" and that lecturing was "the true destiny of his talent^."^ His critic and political opponent, Governor Ben II. Hooper called him "the greatest public entertainer in the S~uth."~He earned substantial income and praise as a comic lecturer. Yet he gave up a full-time career in entertainment to seek a third term as governor in 1896, a position that had made him unhappy and probably ill when he first held it and would do so again. He was heavily criticized during his governorship for granting too many pardons. He was elected to the Senate in 1907, fulfilling a long-held ambition. Then he jeopardized that happy career by agreeing--mysteriously--to run for a fourth term as governor in 1910. In so doing he demonstrated a self-destructive commitment to the Democratic Party. He lost the race, but there is no evidence that this was intentional. My earlier paper argued that he did some of these things because he overidentified with a maternal uncle, Landon Carter Haynes, a former Confederate senator. In fact, my entire paper tried to demonstrate the imprisoning effect of his identification. I did not attempt to explain its origin, as I will try to do in this paper.

Bob Taylor was born July 31, 1850, the third son in a family of ten ~hildren.~His place of birth was a farm known as Happy Valley on the Watauga River in Carter County, which is near the North Carolina line in northeastern Tennessee. In 1851, his father, Nathaniel Greene Taylor, bought a thousand acres of the farm of Nathaniel's father-in-law, David Haynes. It was located only ten miles to the southwest and up the Buffalo Creek valley, which is an extension of Happy Valley. The family lived on the farm for ten years. Bob Taylor was frequently ill during those years, and as a consequence he did not start school until he was nine (Taylors 60ff.). When the Civil War broke out in 1861, the father sold the Buffalo farm to pay off a debt which he figured the war might keep him from paying and took the family back to Happy Valley (Taylors 80). Thus, in 1861 Nathaniel Tyalor lost a portion of his wife's father's achievement.

Nathaniel Taylor' s failures were not financial only. After graduating from the College of New Jersey, now Princeton University, in the early-1840s, he had served variously as a llethodist preacher, without a church, and a four-time candidate for First Congressional District representative, with one victory. He was elected as a Whig in the special election of 1854. And though he was to be on the victorious Unionist side of the Civil War, to win one more term in Congress in 1865, to serve as Andrew Johnson's Commissioner of Indian Affairs, and eventually to take a Church in Knoxville, he continued to suffer defeats in the things that may have counted most to "significant others." He had little money after the war and, in 1865, the year his brother-in-law was finishing his term in the Confederate Senate, he lost a bid for a United States Senate seat.6 It is noteworthy that R. N. Price, the friendly historian of the Holston Conference of the Methodist Church, regarded Nathaniel Greene Taylor as only "partially successful." He said that Taylor spoke well, and was "finely educated, widely read, a man of great dramatic power, a keen wit, an incomparable humorist, and a perfect mimic." But "instead of concentrating his energies on one thing, he diffused and dissipated them in too many undertakings. He was a lawyer, farmer, merchant, preacher, politician." To Price, he was "an accomplished farmer" and an "incomparable preacher," but he "began pastoral work too late in life, and he had not learned the art of preaching sermonettes." He was on1 y a "partially successful" politician, a failure as a merchant, and he "once prepared a lecture which he intended to deliver throughout the country ." But "having delivered it a few times and finding that it did not draw as well as he wished, he quit the platform. !l7

On paper, at least, he was far less successful in votegetting and on the lecture platform than his two sons, Bob and Alf (Alfred Alexander), were to be. Alf, the second son, won the congressional seat three times as a Republican, and, in 1920, the governorship. Bob won the congressional seat once, the senate seat once, and the governorship three times. In 1886, in his first race for governor, he defeated his older brother -4lf.

The record of Bob's early life depends heavily on a biography Life and Career, published in 1913. The authors were his surviving brothers, James Patton Taylor, Alfred Alexander Tay 1or, and Hugh Lawson Taylor. Hereinafter, references to this book will be made by designations of the authors--"the surviving brothers" or "the surviving sons." The book contains memoirs of those who knew Bob Taylor.

Bob Taylor did not identify with his father in a primary way. He identified with his mother's brother, Landon Carter Haynes, although, up to a point, Nathaniel Taylor and Landon Haynes led parallel lives and shared characteristics that Bob Taylor acquired. Both were politicians, grandiloquent orators oP some success, and had the comic touch. This touch for comedy was much more pronounced in the father than in the uncle. "He was a born comedian and tragedian combined," the surviving sons wrote,

and was scarcely surpassed as a mimic. Although never behind the footlights in his life, he could, on occasion, inject these arts into his addresses, where propriety permitted, and convulse an audience with laughter almost to the point of prostration, and then plunge them into tears and weeping as if they were so many helpless infants. He was a man of the mental and physical type of Edwin Booth, whom he somewhat resembled in features. . . . (Taylors 33)

The prodigious use of humor became the primary characteristic which separated the platform style of Bob Taylor from that of his uncle. But, as was demonstrated in the companion paper, the chief identification, conscious and unconscious, was with Landon Carter Haynes. Taylor's identification with his mother's brother can be traced to the personality of his mother, Emma Haynes Taylor. Not much has been written about her. But for a nineteenth-century housewife, she received a fair amount of coverage. And there is enough information left about her to suggest a way to understand a motivation of her son, Bob. There are two accounts, both published around the year 1913. One is the surviving brothers' biography of Bob Taylor cited earlier. The other is the volume of Methodist history by Price, also quoted earlier.

The surviving brothers record that Emma Taylor was born on April 20, 1822, at Mount Pleasant, which was the name of her father's homestead. She was educated in the high schools of Elizabethton and Jonesboro, which were relatively near her Carter County home. They report that she studied "in all the branches there in the curriculum for young ladies, including music, in which she was exceptionally proficient, and, among other fine attainments, became an accomplished pianist." Price says that as an adult she read the prose of Addison and the poetry of Shakespeare, Milton, Burns, and "all that was pure and noble in Byron" (383-84). The surviving sons and Price report that she used her musical talent to win her husband.

Nobody said she looked like an actress, but Price was obviously impressed with her personality. He gave three pages of his history (381-84) to her. Among his other relevant remarks were that "to the poor and needy she was the Lady Bountiful. She seemed to find her own happiness in the happiness of others." In addition, more than in reading, "she delighted in listening to a good sermon delivered by a forceful and eloquent preacher. She despised the soporific preacher with his thirdlies and sixthlies." And finally, "she was herself unconsciously an orator in private conversation, and that without effort. Her soul was poetry, and her tongue was elogence." She was one of twelve children--seven boys and five girls. While the surviving brothers give nothing but the name of her mother, Rhoda, they devote several pages to her father. Because he lived until 1868 the grandchildren probably knew him well (Taylors 35ff.). In addition, he was colorful. He was a millwright, farmer, and successful businessman who became a fiery Confederate sympathizer during the Civil War. But the surviving brothers called him an "artful dodger," as Alf would call Bob in 1886.8 Possibly Bob acquired this identity fragment from the grandfather, although I am not prepared to say that his grandfather was the only or even the major source.

In speaking of their mother, the surviving sons testify that she was "deeply religious in her feelings and led a pious lifeU.9 Furthermore, "in orginality, mental grasp and brilliancy, in force of character, strength of will, in energy of action and executive ability, she was like her father, but unlike him in her equability of temper, equanimity of soul and gentleness of nature--except when aroused by some intolerable provocation." When aroused, she could be compared by the sons to a "thunderstorm or a tornado" and her "indignation to the forked lightnings or a whirlwind." The offenders were then assailed by her wrath in the form of "thunderbolts and fiery darts of righteous denunciation, which would make us young sinners feel small enough to crawl into an electron and never come out again! But, like the tornado, it was a matter of but a few moments, and then all was over."

Nevertheless, a portrait of Emma Taylor as fear-inspiring is limited, the surviving brothers write. She had a "far greater capacity for gentleness . . . and affection." She "overflowed with sympathy and compassion for the sick and the unfortunate." This compassion no doubt had its influence on Bob, the son who would become known, partly through his own publicity, as a pardoning governor.

But she had standards. The surviving sons report that "she loved her own kindred and her husband's people, and was proud of all among them who were worthy of pride" [my italics]. It seems quite likely that a woman of such exacting standards might make her love for her children as conditional on performance as her pride in them, especially when that condition was coupled with her ambition. To that extent (as well as in her piety and good deeds), she resembled the frustrated mother of that other southern story-telling politician, Lyndon Johnson.lO My contention is that Emma Taylor thereby created in her "pet" son a need to go out and do the things that neither she nor her husband had been able to do--to be Senator, just as her brother, Landon, had. The surviving brothers report that their mother:

felt a special pride in her brother, Landon C. Haynes, though she differed from him in politics before and during the great Civil War.

One day during that war he was chiding her for being on the Union side, to which she replied, not in anger, but with real sisterly affcction: "My dear brother, it is most fortunate for you that I am on that side, for the day will surely come when I shall obtain your pardon, for the political mistake you are making, from the President of the United States."

Emma Taylor's prophecy came to pass (possibly because her sons concocted its details after the event).

Finally, the surviving brothers wrote:

she was a woman of high and noble ideals and of towerinv ambition for hcr husband and sons [my italics]. She always thanked God that among all her children there were no idiots [her sons' political opponents no doubt believed that she had had some close calls] nor criminals nor worthless vagabonds. It was her daily aim and effort to mould the characters and develop the minds of her sons for honorable and useful careers in life, and she never ccascd her efforts as long as he lived [my italics].

According to the brothers, Nathaniel Taylor prohibited youthful farm debates because they distracted the "hired men," but the father was "hardly ever at home." Emma Taylor, however, was "friendly to this system of forensic training" and allowed the debates to continue in Nathaniel's absence, although she would not "tolerate the least disp1.a~of ill-temper" (Taylors 112-13, 23).

But if Emma Taylor had hopes for her husband and sons, she especially had hopes for one of them. As the surviving sons said: "One of her special ambitions was to see her son, . Robert, made a United States Senator, but [since she died in 18911 she did not live to see the fruition of her hope" (53).

But why was Bob singled out? James, the eldest brother, says that Bob "was a great pet of his mother" because of his childhood illness (Taylors 62). There are two convincing reasons explaining why she wanted Bob to be senator, as opposed to governor or actor or tycoon. In a family of twelve children, it would be remarkable if there were no sibling rivalry. Emma Taylor's brother was a senator and her husband, who lost a senate bid in 1865, never won the office.

But Landon Carter Haynes had gone to the wrong senate. He had made a serious "political mistake." He gave Emma reason to believe that he was no better than she since she had been forced to rescue him from his folly. Price had said that she was "unconsciouly an orator." Might she not plausibly consider herself of senatorial caliber?ll Yet Tennessee law did not allow a woman to be a senator.

Frustrated by a society that would not allow Emma Taylor to fulfill the ambitions her talents may have qualified her for, she became a woman seeking what the psychiatrist Helm Stierlin has called "a bound delegate."l2 "Such a delegate," he has written, "tries to sustain or recoup his parent's (or lord's) approbation and love, a love now made contingent on how he executes his mission(s) ." Or, as he put it in more technical language, "where the delegate principally serves his parent's ego-ideal, he is sent out into life to realize unfulfilled parental aspirations" (49). He adds that "the parent expects the adolescent to become the actor, scientist, physician, or financial tycoon that the parent himself failed to become."

The psychoanalyst, Erik Erikson, supplies an additonal explanation. In writing of the teenage American boy, Erikson observes that "the boy's male ideal is rarely attached to his father, as lived with in daily life. It is usually an uncle or friend of the family, if not his grandfather, as presented to him (often unconsciously) by his mother."l3 In Bob Taylor's case, his male ideal and model was the uncle, Landon Carter Haynes, evidence of which was presented in "The Case of Senator Taylor: Part I."

Emma Taylor, in additon to guiding her son Bob to acquire her brother's oratorical style and office, gave him his commitment to his political party. When the surviving brothers said that she differed from Landon Carter Haynes "in politics before and during the great Civil War" (531, they must have meant that she opposed secession. Elsewhere, they write that like her brother she was a Democrat (323). And in the first paragraph of his opening speech in the 1886 gubernatorial campaign, Bob Taylor says of his brother against whom he was running: "Our political histories vary in this, that in my budhood I was transplanted tender and loving hands [my italics] into the sweet garden of pure Democracy; while he, like the 'last rose of summer, ' in the desert of Republicanism, was left blooming alone."14

Although Bob Taylor professed not to want the burdens of public life, he did not consciously link his mother to them or confess that he wished to escape her as he wished to escape them. On the contrary, throughout his life--literally--he exprcssed his wish to be with her. An unidentified writer described the following deathbed scene. Bob Taylor had suffered a severe gallstone attack in Washington and was to die on Sunday, March 31, 1912. "On Saturday before he dicd," the writer recalled:

about midday, he suddenly returned to a moment of consciousness, opened wide his eyes, and with a smile brighter than had ever been seen to light his countenance in the vigor of health, he raised himself off of his pillow, and at the same time extending his arms as if to embrace her, he exclaimed: "Mother! Mother! Mother!" Then he sank back and this was his last conscious moment. The smile on his face was never brighter, his eyes were never more brilliant, and his voice never clearer. His watchers affirm that he was entirely conscious. This happy incident, taken in connection with the Senator's touching remark, oft repeated, inspires the consoling thought that the spirit of "Our Bob" did not depart alone. It must have been accompanied by the Angel Mother. (Taylors 265-66)

The same writer reports that during Bob Taylor's last trip to Tennessee, when he was over sixty years old, he told "a circle of friends," that "when I die, I expect my mother to be around and about my death-bed, waiting to take me where she is" (Taylors 265). Here is a truly ironic inversion, because in life she had acted to send him where she could not herself go. NOTES

l~hispaper, when presented at the 1986 meeting of the Kentucky-Tennessee American Studies Association, was titled, "The Case of Senator Taylor: Part 11."

2~hefilm based on Peter Taylor's short story, "The Old Forest," was shown during the night session of the 1986 Conference.

3~eL,ong Rice, "A Tribute by IIon. De Long Rice, of Nashville, Tenn., a Life-Long Friend, Associate, and Admirer of the Late Senator Robert Love Taylor," quoted in "Address of Mr. [Luke] Lea, of Tennessee," in Robert Love Tavlor; Memorial Addresses Delivered. in the Senate and the House of Representatives of the United States, 62nd Cong., 3rd sess. (Washington, 1913), 15,13.

4~verett Robert Boyce, ed., The Unwanted Boy: The Autobiographv of Governor Ben W. Hooper (Knoxville, 1963), 70.

5~lfA. Taylor, Hugh L. Taylor, and James P. Taylor, Life and Career of-Senator Robert Love Taylor (Our Bob) (Nashville, 1913), 26. Hereinafter this book will be referred to as Taylors.

6~homasB. Alexander, Political Reconstruction in Tennessee (Nashville, 1950), 76.

7~.N. Price, Holston Methodism: From its Origin to the Present Time, Vol. 5: From the Year 1870 to th_e Year 1897 Nashville, 1913 or 19141, 379. The copyright for this book is listed as 1913; the title page date is 1914. Hereinafter this volume will be referred to as Price.

8~ashvilleAmerican, 29 September 1886.

g~aterialfor this and the following five paragraphs is taken from pages 48-53 of Taylors.

losee Doris Kearns, Lvndon Johnson and the American Dream (New York, 1976), 385-86, and 24ff.

ll~ccording to her obituary, Emma Taylor had an "intellectual brilliancy and force equal if not superior to that of her distinguished brother, Landon C. Haynes," Knoxville Journal 17 November 1890.

12~elm Stierlin, Adolph Hitler: A Fwlv Persaective (New York: paperback ed., 1976), 45.

13~rik Erikson, Childhood and Society, 2nd ed., revised and enlarged (New York, 1963), 312.

14~ashvilleAmerican, 10 September 1886 PHILANTHROPY AND ANTAGON ISM : KENTUCKY MOUNTAIN SCHOOLS IN THE 1920s

Nancy Forderhase Eastern Kentucky University

In 1911, a fund-raising letter soliciting support for a new school in the mountains of Kentucky went out to potential donors:

Let me tell you how a remote country people of the Kentucky mountains, whose stock is the purest Anglo-Saxon in America and whose old fashioned speech and customs, harking back two hundred years, give them a singularly romantic interest, are longing and longing for a school, I believe you will think that we can do our country a unique service if we help these "contemporary" ancestors to do what they are beseeching us for . . . . They have the primitive virtues of the Anglo Saxon kindness, bravery, hospitality, and loyalty. Immense resources of strength are latent in them. We believe there is no better material in the United States to train for the uses of good citi~enship.~

Compare this appeal for funds at Pine Mountain Settlement School in Harlan County, Kentucky, with another description of mountain society from Caney Creek Community Center in Knott County, Kentucky, written in 1917:

The Three 1's--Isolation, Ignorance, Inter-marriage and the Three D's--Degeneration: mental and physical, Disease, Death. . . . "When a race of people in ISOLATION, led by IGORANCE, has been marrying its own double and twisted cousins for a century, it is not any wonder that a single strain had deteriorated into producing as its sole asset to the nation:--a 28 year old idiot, blinded by red-sore-eyes, stiffened into a perpetual fit by congenital handicaps." It is needless to explain how DEGENERATION, mental and physical has been produced through such conditions. It is needless to supply statistics to show the preventable DISEASE that has sapped the strength of these Anglo-Saxon people; it is needless to dwell on premature DEATH that has killed off hundreds through infection, exposure, hardship, bad li~ing.~

The contrasting styles exhibited in promotional literature of Pine Mountain Settlement School and Caney Creek Community Center could not have been greater. Both were written by women from the East who had come to the Appalachian region to work with the mountain peopxe . The f i-rst , mo-re optimistic desc-ription came from Ethel delong, graduate of Smith College and principal of the Pine Mountain Settlement School. The author of the second, negative assessment of the plight of the mountain people was Alice Geddes Lloyd of Caney Creek in Knott County, Kentucky, a former newspaper woman from Boston who had attended Radcliffe College. The differing styles exhibited in promotional literature were symptomatic of a rivalry which developed in the late teens and early twenties between the Caney Creek School and the sister institutions of Hindman Settlement School and Pine hlountain School.

Hindman School and Pine Mountain School were exemplary models of the settlement idea developed by Jane Addams and others. What was unusual about these efforts in the mountains of Kentucky was the attempt to adapt the concept of the urban settlement house to a rural environment. Katherine Pettit and May Stone, the founders of Hindman School, had worked at Neighborhood House, a settlement institution in Louisville, Kentucky, and were familiar with settlement work in Chicago through contacts with Sophonisba Breckinridge, the prominent Kentucky woman who was associated with the University of Chicago. In 1902, with financial support from the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, these two women opened the fledgling school 1oc.ated near the tiny town of Hindman. Despite several potentially disastrous fires, the school survived. By 1912 it was an accepted institution in Knott County.

In 1913 after several trips to Harlan County, Katherine Pettit founded a new school in that remote section of eastern Kentucky on the "far side" of Pine Mountain. It appears that she was eager to escape the negative aspects of the rapidly-developing area near Hindman where the railroad had penetrated the region, and coal mining and its negative consequences were disrupting traditional life in the mountains. In its initial stages, the isolated site of the proposed Pine hfountain School was far removed from the kinds of problems which accompanied a rapidly modernizing process. While Pettit hoped that the cherished values she found in the mountain culture could be retained in the hill country, she also worked to develop a program to equip the mountaineers with skills which would enable them to cope with the modern world.4

For the work at Pine Mountain, Pettit recruited Ethel de Long, a school teacher from New Jersey. Ethel de Long's presence as principal of Pine hlountain School was essential not only to the organization and structure of the academic program but also because as a Smith College graduate, she had valuable contacts with philanthropic interests in the East where necessary funds for operating the school had to be raised. Furthermore, de Long frequently used those school-girl connections to recruit idealistic young women to work at Pine Mountain. A high percentage of the workers at both Pine hlountain and Hindman Schools were graduates of Smith, Vassar and Wellesley , all elite eastern women's colleges. Alice Lloyd, the daughter of well-to-do parents, graduated from Chauncy Hall, a preparatory school in Boston. She attended Radcliffe College for a year. However, when her father died, she left college, and launched a career in journalism. She published a weekly newspaper, the Cambridge Press, in Boston for a time, and later moved with her husband to Wakefield, hlassachusetts, where she became managing editor of the Wakefield Citizen and ~anner. The details of Lloyd's move to Kentucky are unclear. Apparently she, her husband, and mother came to the remote location in Knott County, Kentucky, in 1916. After a few months, a local mountaineer, Abisha Johnson, donated the land to establish a school on Caney Creek, and a one room school was built to house the first pupils in the neighborhood. By 1919, Lloyd had opened a high school; in 1924, it became the Knott County High School at Pippa Passes. Lloyd like the women leaders at Hindman and Pine Mountain Schools, depended upon wealthy contributors from the East for funds, and recruited both teachers and community workers from the elite eastern women's college^.^

On a superficial level, therefore, the three mountain schools appeared to be very similar. Certainly, the Hindman and Pine Mountain workers enjoyed cordial relations with other denominational schools in the mountains as well as with workers in community centers sponsored by such organizations as the Presbyterian Church. Both Hindman and Pine Mountain workers wcre active in the Conference of Southern Mountain Workers. Frequent correspondence among mountaln schools revealed an active network of dedicated workers who shared ideas and cooperated in sending students from school to school. Yet, this cordiality did not exist in regard to Alice Lloyd and the Caney Creek Community Center. By 1918, May Stone, Katherine Pettit, and Ethel de Long had developed a deep-seated antagonism toward the Caney Creek School administrator. This hostility continued until the mid-1920s, when it gradually abated.

One of the major sources of tension between the schools was evident in their literature describing the problems relating to the mountain culture. After Alice Lloyd had been in the mountain for a year, she prepared and circulated a report, entitled "Constructive Plans for 1917." Lloyd described the plight of the mountaineers in very unflattering terms. For example, a typical description of mountain life from this report described Caney Creek inhabitants in this way:

Each year, not having the incentive of marching with an advancing civilization, they have been sinking lower and lower in the scale of human types until in this generation many are not bodily clean, are infested with fleas and other vermin, have no regular habits, and live more akin to hibernating animals than 20th century human being^.^ In spite of this kind of discouraging portrait, L.loyd's report proposed an ambitious plan for "constructive regeneration of this Anglo-Saxon stock; a remedy that is not a sedative to ease a dying race; but a cure." She called for the construction of better roads, schools, improved farming techniques, pure water supplies and improved sanitation fa~ilities.~

Lloyd's sensational, journalistic portrait of conditions in Appalachian Kentucky represented an approach to mountain problems that was distasteful to the workers at Hindman and Pine Mountain Settlement Schools. Since their earliest days in the highlands, workers at both settlement schools had labored to present a positive image of the people residing in the mountains. All publicity efforts and fund-raising letters that were sent outside the region consciously avoided negative comments about mountain dwellers. While admitting that people in Appalachia lacked material comforts, adequate school facilities, and health care and sanitation, school administrators were careful to portray them in a positive light. For example when the investigators from the National Child Labor Committee came to the mountains to conduct a survey of conditions in coal mining camps, Ethel de Long Zande read their initial report and suggested that while it was important to describe the physical shortcomings of these mountain communities, the report should be careful not to make disparaging remarks about mountain life. As she put it:

. . .the pamphlet will have great strategic value if you refer once or twice through it to the fact that the children living in such deplorable conditions are the children who a few years ago would have had the old-fashioned mountain hackground for their own, with its tradition of good manners, its wholesome hard work, its free play in beautiful country and its heritage of song and play. . . . I think it would be well to make it clear that restricted as mountain life has been in many ways and unhygienic as it has been, still there are spiritual riches to redeem the severities of life.1°

As much as was possible, Pettit and de Long Zande monitored publicity about Pine Mountain School. In 1923, when a woman from Berea, writing an article about Pine Mountain for the Christian Science Monitor, requested photographs of the school, they asked to see the article before it was printed, explaining that they were eager to avoid publicity which would be objectionable to the mountain people. They explained:

We have so far been able to avoid the sort of misunderstanding and strained relationship that come when the mountain people feel the institution is allowing them to be written up in a way which is not quite to their liking. . . . Hindman had a number of highly unfortunate experiences and we are just praying, every year, that we may get through the year without having anything published about us which inevitably will get back to the mountains in some way. . . . Of course, we welcome every effort made to win new friends for us, but on the other hand the most important thing for us is to conserve our friendship with all our neighbors. l1

Experience had proven to the settlement workers that sensational accounts of mountain life always returned to the mountains and caused ill feelings among the local populace.

Another early source of conflict between Alice Lloyd and the Hindman/Pine Xountain women arose from Lloyd's aggressive fundraising efforts among eastern philanthropists. When she began soliciting money, the Caney Creek administrators, claiming that her work was associated with Ethel de Long and Pine Mountain, sent appeals to alumnae of Smith, Radcliffe, Mount Holyoke and Wellesley Colleges. An additional incentive to attract alumnae support came from the publicity gimmick of naming buildings after the various schools--Radcliffe Cottage, Mount Holyoke Public School, and Wellesley Recreation Hall. l2

In protest against Lloyd's use of her name in these publicity efforts, Ethel de Long wrote a letter to Lloyd, denying her personal endorsement of the Caney Creek School. She also wrote to the Smith Alumnae Quarterly , as she put it, "disclaiming any connection with her and saying that I believed her literature had many misrepresentations in it.l3 Alice Lloyd responded by threatening a libel suit against the Quarterly if it printed de Long's denial statement without investigating the statements included in her letter. She continued to send out thousands of letters containing de Long's endorsement.14

Apparently Lloyd's threat against de Long worked, because from 1918 on, the Pine Mountain school principal was very careful not to make any negative public statements against Alice Lloyd's mountain work. These were years when Pine Mountian School was involved in an extensive construction program and aggressively sought out eastern financial support, so the administrators wanted to avoid any adverse publicity. Yet the Pine Mountain School records abound with examples of their distrust of Alice Lloyd. In discreet letters to donors who inquired about the Cancy Creek operation, they usually ref erred inquiries to John C or Olive Dame Campbell, the leading authorities on the southern Appalachian region. If they knew the correspondents well, they were more candid in their responses and advised them not to give money to Alice Lloyd whom they described as sincere, but emotionally unstable. l5

In the early 1920s the women at the Hindman and Pine Mountain Schools in private correspondence with one another and friends in the East became increasingly critical of Alice Lloyd's fund raising techniques. Lloyd had acquired a valuable contact, Mr. Elliot Robinson, the author of the popular song "Smiles," who was providing introductions into important clubs and schools in the Boston area.16

In an effort to solicit funds from sympathetic audiences, hlrs. Lloyd brought young children with her on this and other expeditions. Her publicity letters, addressed to friends of the Crusaders, made extravagant claims that 40,000 people had heard their pleas for money, and other Pilgrimages were planned. The following claim is representative: "The Crusaders are poised. They can make their message known clearly to as many thousands as gather. They are spontaneous. They are equally at home at any meeting. . . . 1117

May Stone, the chief administrator of the Hindman School, happened to be in Boston when Lloyd was speaking and so attended one of these meetings. She reported to the Pine Mountain workers that she had been surprised to find that Mrs. Lloyd was a rather uninspiring speaker. The Caney Creek promoter gained the sympathy of the crowd, however, by using young children to deliver memorized speeches extolling the virtues of the mountain school. Stone was critical of Lloyd's extravagant claims that she had given extensive training institutes for training teachers for the mountains, and was especially ap alled at the use of the children for her fund-raising purposes.?8

Ethel de Long Zande expressed the sentiments of the settlement schools on the subject of using children for fund raising in this way:

There is no doubt but what any one who sees mountain chil~drenis enthusiastic about them. It is a wonderful kind of publicity. We have seldom taken children on speaking trips ourselves, because the few times when the children have helped to make speeches, the effect on them has been undesirable. It really amounts to exploitation of the children, such as we wouldn't expose our own children to, and it takes a child a long time to get over even a little publicity.19 In 1921 school officials at Pine Mountain began corresponding with Geddes Smith, the secretary of the National Information Bureau. Describing itself as "a cooperative effort for the standarization of national social, civic and philanthropic work and the protection of the contributing public," the National Information Bureau investigated a wide variety of charitable associations to ascertain if they were legitimate concerns. Among its many standards cited for approval were:

an active and responsible governing body holding regular meetings, or other satisfactory form of administrative control; a legitimate purpose with no avoidable duplication of the work of another efficiently managed organization; reasonable efficiency in conduct of work . . . no solicitors on commission . . . ethical methods of publicity, promotion and solicitation of funds; agreement to consult and co-operate with the proper social agencies in local communities . . . complete annual audited accounts prepared by a certified public accountant or trust company; and itemized and classfied annual budget estimate~.~o

Pine Mountain submitted the necessary information requested by the National Information Bureau, and received its endorsement as a legitimate charity.21 That endorsement, however, was not extended to the Caney Creek Community Center. The National Information Bureau described the Knott County enterprise in this manner:

The Community center itself consists of a settlement school with a variable attendance, together with certain pieces of Neighborhood work. Its self stated purpose is to train selected boys and girls, chiefly boys, for leadership in their own communities. The emphasis is therefore laid on ethical training especially in connection with a curious pedagogic scheme, called "the purpose road" and on the training of teachers to a point where they can qualify under the rather lax Kentucky laws for public school certificates. . . . The center has failed to meet the Bureau's technical standards for endorsement with its financial administration. The accounts of the Center are kept by Mrs. Lloyd's mother and are far from businesslike. There has also been an account for the Rnott County Community Improvement Association and the relations between the two accounts have been very loosely handled. It is impossible to secure an adequate financial statement.22

This refusal to endorse the Caney Creek enterprise did not deter Alice Lloyd, who continued to raise funds from around the country. In 1922 a newsletter from the Caney Creek Community Center contained an urgent request for supporters to send American flags and basketballs to the children of Knott County. She also managed to recruit young women from eastern colleges to work at Caney Creek. One such worker was June Buchanan, a graduate of Wellesley College who had come to the moutains in 1919. Buchanan, who remained at the school on a permanent basis, became a loyal supporter of Alice Lloyd and an important link with financial resources in the ~ast.24

Another early worker was Olive Marsh, a young woman who left Caney Creek to begin community work at an extension center at Dirk Kentucky. In the early 1920s hlarsh corresponded with Ethel de Long about the problems of mountain work. Marsh was aware that de Long Zande, Pettit, and May Stone did not totally approve of Mrs. Lloyd's unorthodox mountain work, but she defended the Boston woman:

While 1 believe that in the past there has been plenty of just criticism of the work and methods of Caney, chiefly the methods--at the same time, I do think there has been considerable unfounded prejudice as well. Having been there nearly two years myself, I can't help seeing both sides. Mrs. Lloyd is a strange mixture, but she certainly has her good points, as well as those which may perhaps most be charitably be designated as her "other" points, and she has done much good work .25

In 1923 Evelyn Wells, the secretary at Pine Mountain, and a group of other settlement workers visited Caney Creek. As they reported, they received the impression that "our visit was being taken as an official recognition by Pine hlountain!" Impressions of Lloyd's efforts were mixed. The visitors enjoyed meeting and talking with the young people in the school and with the Nrorkers, "working together responsibly . . . dealing with the same problems we all have in much the same way; so eager to know about other mountain schools."26

At the same time, their descriptions of the Caney Creek facilities, recorded in this letter, were less than flattering: ". . . ramshackle buildings falling down the side of the hill in a disorganized way that reminds you of the most squalid mining town." They also wondered about the presence of unsanitary privy conditions, inadequate access to a pure water supply and lack of typhoid innoculations. One account described the educational program as "Billy Sunday on education."

In spite of the negative sentiments expressed in the descriptions of Alice Lloyd's school, it appears that by 1924, the administrations at Pine Mountain and Hindman School became less concerned about the existence of the school. In that year, the National Information Bureau announced it was endorsing the Caney Creek Community Center since Alice Lloyd had complied with its bookkee ing requirements and was keeping a better accounting system.3 7 The attitude after 1924 seemed to be one of "live and let live" although it is likely that the women of Pine hlountain and Hindman never wholly approved of the operation at Caney Creek. From their earliest days in the Appalachian region of Kentucky, Stone, Pettit, de Long, and others at Hindman and Pine Mountain had sought to create a positive image of the mountain people. They viewed their work as a profession and worked hard to establish and maintain high quality educational standards in their institutions and in their community work at large. In their view, Alice Lloyd's sensational, journalistic approach to mountain work was undermining the image of the professional mountain workers. They believed Lloyd's extravagant claims of activities in the mountains to be exaggerated, if not untrue, and were skeptical of her educational goals. Finally, dependent as they were upon outside philanthropic support, the leaders at Bindman and Pine Mountain had created an image of mountain culture that appealed to potential wealthy donors. It is obvious that they resented Caney Creek's negative characterization of the mountaineers and Alice Lloyd's aggressive competition for funds from the same sources who would provide support for Hindman and Pine Mountain schools.

By the early 1930s the generation of progressive leadership provided by the founders of Hindman and Pine Mountain was coming to an end. As support for public education and improved schools came to the mountains of Kentucky, the original objectives of these private institutions were revised, and leaders searched for new ways to serve the Appalachian people. Today Hindman School survives as a center for teaching dyslexic children and as a conference center. Pine Mountain School has become an environmental center where groups from around the state and nation meet.

Alice Lloyd's flair for publicity helped her school to survive. In 1955 she appeared on Ralph Edwards' television program, This is Your Life. The story of the little woman from Boston who labored to provide an education for disadvantaged children in the isolated mountain region of Kentucky caught the imagination of Americans. Donations poured in. Although her publicity methods may, at times, have been unorthodox, the Boston journalist had managed to persevere. Today Alice Lloyd College, named in her honor, survives as a four-year college in Knott County. NOTES

l~thelde Long to My Dear Friend, [c. 19111, Microfilm edition of the Pine Mountain Settlement School Collection, Berea College Archives, hereafter cited as PMSS.

2~rthurW. Lloyd, Alice Spencer Geddes Lloyd, "Constructive Plans for 1917," pp. 1, 3, Linda Neville Papers (Special Collections, Margaret I. King Library, University of Kentucky). Hereafter cited as L. Neville Papers.

3~llenSemple, "A New Departure in Social Settlements," Annals of the American Academv of Political and Social Sciences 15 (Mar. 19001, 301; Mary Anderson Hill to Alice Cobb, Oct. 1, 1942, PMSS.

4~ames S. Greene, 111, "Progressives in the Kentucky hlountains: The Formative Years of the Pine Mountain Settlement School, 1913-1940" (Ph.D. Dissertation, Ohio State University, 19821, 37-39.

G~arbara Sicherman and Carol Hurd Green, eds., Notable American Women: The Modern Period (Cambridge: Belknap Press of IIarvard University, 19821, 423-4; William S. Dutton, Stav On. Stranger (New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1954), 15-17.

7~otableAmerican Women, 423-4; November 6, 1918.

8~loydand Lloyd, "Constructive Plans for 1917," 2

g~loydand Lloyd, 4-5.

loEthel Zande to Mabel Brown Ellis, n.d. [1919]. General correspondence file, 1919, PMSS. In 1918, Ethel de Long married Luigi Zande, an Italian stonemason who had been working at Pine Mountain School. Therefore, when I am using references after their marriage I refer to her as de Long Zande in the text.

llEthel Zande to Muriel Kinney, August 10, 1923, Gen. Corr. file, 1923, PMSS.

12gthel de Long to Mrs. W. W. Adams, January 23, 1918, Gen. Corr file, 1918; Copy of Wellesley College Alumnae Association, abridged report, June 18, 1923, Gen. Corr. File, 1923, PMSS.

13Ethel Zande to Mary Lane, April 2, 1923, Gen. Corr. file, 1923, PMSS.

14gthel Zande to Breta [Child], May 29, 1919, Gen. Corr. file, 1919, PMSS. 15~letter from John C. Campbell to Miss Neville, hlarch 21, 1918, reflects his skepticism about the work being carried on at Caney Creek, L. Neville Papers.

16~ay Stone to Ethel Zande, April 20, 1922, Gen. Corr. file, 1922, PMSS.

17copy of letter from Alice Lloyd to "Friend of the Crusaders," Janaury, 1923, Gen. Corr. file, 1923, PMSS.

18May Stone to Ethel Zande, April 20, 1922, Gen. Corr. file, 1922, PMSS.

lg~thelZande to Alice Danforth, March 24, 1922, Gen. Corr. file, 1922, PMSS.

20~amphlet from the National Information Bureau, Inc., 1922, Gen. Corr. file, 1922, PMSS.

21~eddes Smith to Ethel Zande, October 1, 1921, Gen. Corr. file, 1921, PMSS.

22May Stone to Ethel Zande, April 20, 1922, Gen. Corr. file, 1922, PMSS. Stone's lengthy letter contains a copy of the letter from Geddes Smith of the National Information Bureau where endorsement of Caney Creek is denied.

23~aney Creek Newsletter, June and July, 1922, Gen. Corr. file, 1922, PMSS.

2501ive Marsh to Ethel Zande, December 15, 1923, Gen. Corr. file, 1923, PMSS.

26[~vel~nWells] to Olive Marsh, Dec. 22, 1923, Gen. Corr. file, 1923, PMSS.

27~inifredPutnam to Katherine Pettit, June 24, 1924, Gen. Corr. file, 1924, PMSS. ENVIRONLIENTAL AND PS'ICHOLOG1C:'iL FORIlATIVE INFLUENCES ON CAROLINE GORDON AND EVELYS SCOTT, TKO CLARKSVILLE, TENNESSEE, WRITERS

Eleanor H. Beiswenger Austin Peay State University

The lives and works of Caroline Gordon and Evelyn Scott epitomize two clear and contradictory impulses in the history of American culture. One impulse in this symbolic tug-of-war--Scott's-strains toward discovering new frontiers of independent thought, it embodies skepticism and criticism of the status quo, and it makes a fierce commitment to individualism. The other--Gordon's--pulls toward creating an established community of citizens who declare a loyalty to defined codes of conduct and convention, and who desire to conserve and preserve time-honored traditions and values. It is especially interesting that these divergent philosophies derive from important local influences on the two writers and that they are traceable in their lives as well as their published works. Because Gordon and Scott were born within two years of each other (1895 and 1892, respectively), and only a few miles apart, one might expect more similarities than differences in their beliefs and values. They did share certain key observations. Both perceived a significant moral crisis in post-Civil War southern society as money values became pervasive. Both writers examined the transformation of southern life with an unrelenting eye. They pointed to the importance and necessity for discovering a new faith by which to live. Finally, Gordon and Scott demonstrated in their fiction and in their lives that it required an individual effort to achieve salvation. At the same time, they arrived at these similar views from diametrically opposing poles of thought. Gordon believed in values that had been internalized in the individual, having their source in family commitment to the land and to traditions of courtesy and hospitality. Along with this went a fully codified developed sense of honor and an expection that one's behavior and reputation would be judged by family and community members. She grew up as part of an interdependent community which imposed on each individual obligations to others. In her writing, Gordon implies that individuals achieve serenity and self-approval when they can objectify their own behavior in acts of generosity, compassion, and justice. Thus, it seemed crucial for Gordon to find a balance between obligation to the self and obligation to others in order to achieve personal stability and fulfillment. While Scott recognized the same tension between the individual and the society, in her fiction she stresses the need to insulate and defend oneself from values that she saw as externally imposed by society. She rejected Gordon's idea that responsibility to others is a necessary obligation. For Scott what seemed paramount was the commitment to self and to truth as defined by the self. In fact, she believed that the individual became trapped and hurt by society's conventions, and that the individual was reduced to bitter unfulfillment when those conventions were adopted. Her solution was to maintain the stance of a warrior on guard against vulnerability to the opinions and criticisms of others. She saw as especially debilitating the individual's need for acceptance and admiration by those outside the self.

Gordon's set of internalized values rested fundamentally upon those ancestral attitudes she absorbed as a child among the Meriwether clan. Beliefs in primogeniture, entailment of property and extensive intermarrying among cousins to preserve control of property were upheld and practiced on the extensive plantations along the Tennessee-Kentucky state line between Trenton and Guthrie. Chance Llewellyn's thoughts in Gordon's first novel, Penhallv, express these attitudes well:

There was something about entailing property. It made a man feel that he was not really the owner, or at least that he had heavy obligations to his successor. He had noticed that about his grandfather. He was sure that the old fellow--and he was the best man of the whole caboodle--had never regarded himself as owning a stick or stone. When he made any changes on the place, cut down a piece of timber or anything like that, he would say, "I think that will be all right," reflectively, as if he were appealing to the verdict of somebody else. And he had made his son, Chance's father, entail the property on his eldest son as soon as he came of age. (232-33) The importance of extending courtesy and hospitality to guests but especially to family members and close acquaintances was also habitual, an honored convention in Gordon's fiction and personal life. These visits, of course, were not always without ironic or troublesome consequences, such as one that occurs in a late Gordon novel, The hlalefactors. Tom Claiborne's Aunt Virginia was welcomed as a temporary guest for a couple of months at most, but she took to her bed shortly after arrival and continued in residence for several years, usurping the best bedroom in the house along the way. In Gordon's own life with husband Allen Tate, one period of which is captured in her published letters to her friend Sally Wood, the household was constantly expanded by the visits of many friends, relatives, and acquaintances. From the very start of the Gordon-Tate marriage in the mid twenties, Sally Wood comments, the Tates habitually extended a time-honored southern hospitality to anyone who visited, despite their own real poverty at the time: Caroline had to cook far more than I, and this mas when her southerness became apparent. Never did it occur to either of the Tates that they couldn't invite a guest for a meal. Many were people they didn't even know, young men who came to discuss their work with Allen. To them, Caroline was the mistress of the plantation; Allen, a southern gentleman--despite the fact that these hereditary roles didn't fit the real scene. (15) At Benfolly during the thirties, Gordon's letters mention the names of those who have just departed and those who are next to arrive, some for extended periods of time and with the intention to write during the stay: Ford !.ladox Ford, Andrew Lytle, Robert Penn Warren, Katherine Anne Porter, Robert Lowell. Even more important than courtesy and hospitality in Gordon's life was the commitment to honor and to honorable behavior. To her, premarital and extramarital sex represented serious breaches in family honor. When this deviation appears in Gordon's fiction, her treatment of it implies that a destruction of personal integrity takes place. The 1937 novel, The Garden of Adonis, includes an example of the first sin in the romance between Ote Mortimer and Idelle Sheeler, both offspring of tenant farmers on Ben Allard's land. Idelle makes clear that her father will expel her from the family if he discovers her sexual waywardness. The consequence is in fact that the couple's hope for a life together is totally destroyed soon afterward. However, infidelity to one's marriage partner seemed to Gordon to be a more serious flaw. The majority of Gordon's novels dramatize this problem and inevitably cause a crisis in the marital relationship, sometimes with disastrous consequences. In Green Centuries Cassy dies shortly after discovering her husband Rion's affair with Ann Mulroon. He has been mainstay and hero, and her disillusionment is overwhelming. In The Garden of Adonis Letty Allard's flight with her married lover, Jim Carter, reflects the loss of honor associated with the decline in the Allard family's position in the community. In Gordon's The Women on the Porch, equal guilt must be borne by Catherine and Jim Chapman after each drifts into an affair with someone else; their reconciliation can only occur following repentance and redemption. The Strange Children gives us both childish and adult narrative views of marital infidelity when Uncle Tubby and Kevin Heardon's wife, Isabel, run off together. Here we see the bankrupt souls of an egocentric pair. Finally, in The Malefactors, Tom Claiborne's affair with Cynthia reflects his loss of faith and integrity and a demoralized stage in his life. A kind of preoccupation with this problem reflects Gordon's own dilemma concerning her husband's periodic unfaithfulness. From the beginning, as a theme in her novels, it assumes importance as a social concern; subsequently, she implies that the relationship between partners must be cleansed of this breach of honor through forgiveness, following confession and repentance.

A personal code of honor extends beyond one's partner to one's family as well, according to Gordon. Respect for one's elders is taken for granted. In the story "Old Red," she dramatizes a situation based on actual experience when Sarah, Aleck Maury's daughter, reminds him he is expected to attend the funeral next day of Aunt Sally Crenfew. Sarah is scandalized that he is planning to fish instead and "could not spare one afternoon, one insignificant summer afternoon, from his fishing long enough to attend the funeral of his cousin, the cousin of all of them, the oldest lady in the whole family connection . . ." (143).

Gordon may have noted from time to time the eccentricities and weaknesses of other individual family members, but she never rejected the importance of the family community in human life. Her letters and memoirs reveal especially Gordon's dedication to her maternal grandmother, "Miss Carrie" Meriwether. Despite her grandmother's reputation as the family tyrant, Caroline always remained her favorite, and Miss Carrie held a special place in her granddaughter's life. More than once Gordon and her husband stayed at Merry Mont for several weeks, and Gordon apparently found it easy to deal with Miss Carrie's obstinacy and eccentricities. One of these habits is mentioned when Andrew Lytle refers to Miss Carrie's refusal to have window screens in her house because "it didn't suit her to breathe sifted air" (Wood 6). Gordon tells Sally Wood that it is easy to feel "at home" at Merry Mont: "After you're here awhile you sort of settle into the place. The dirt which appalls at first comes to seem an advantage. One simply picks one's way about over stacks of old magazines--and it is a relief never to have to think of cleaning up. I am really quite addicted to the place . . . " (108-9). Gordon does not attempt to criticize or change her grandmother; she accepts and loves her as she is, regularly attending family holiday celebrations with their "ritual observances" (204).

These attitudes concerning courtesy and honor fit into a larger framework of interdependence in Gordon's life. Gordon responded repeatedly to friends who needed help. Early in the Tates' marriage, they offered asylum to th? poet Hart Crane for several months. (It proved to be difficult for the Tates, unfortunately, and Gordon reports that communication at times was reduced to slipping notes under doors.) Andrew Lytle was welcomed to Benfolly for a period of weeks when he hit a snag in his Civil War novel; Gordon believed that he would solve the problem, once in the Tate household with its productive atmosphere. In return, Gordon felt perfectly at ease in suggesting a visit to Lytle's ancestral home in Alabama when she felt pressures interfering at home. Once at Cornsilk, Gordon set up a card table in the dining room and proceeded to make daily progress on her current novel. While Gordon offered encouragement and opportunity to other writers, she also expressed her candid opinion and judgment of their work and anticipated the same of them.

A letter to Sally Wood in May, 1932 offers an example: Dear Sally: . . . I am going to ask--in desperation-- what is probably the greatest favor I've ever asked of you. I've asked it in vain of Allen. It's to read the MS I'm sending. Allen's tried it twice and each time breaks down and says he simply can't . . . . If you find you simply can't go it [,I why [,I don't try[,] but if you do wade through tell me what you think. (112)

Another letter to Sally Wood in 1934 states:

I am not vain enough to think that Fate sent you journeying down here for my special benefit but I don't know where I'd be now if you hadn't come. I knew I was on the wrong trac,k but didn't know how to get off it--your comments set me right somehow. (I refer[, 1 as you may by this time have gathered[, 1 to my book.) (158)

A third example occurs in a 1933 letter:

Dearest Sally: I have just read: "He fixed her with two stern unwinking eyes that looked as if they were made of glass. . . . " and _then you go on and add "they had so little expression to them." You do this all the time. Why in the name of God do you do it???? If the man's eyes looked as if they were made of glass only a fool would think they had expression in them. It practically amounts to telling your reader every second paragraph that he is a fool, or at least he hasn't got enough sense to have a reaction to the picture you've given him. You make the picture and it's always good, then you tell the reader to react to it. . . . You have got to quit it. It perplexes and enrages me. (149-150)

Gordon practiced reciprocity with others as well. When she and Tate prepared to leave for Paris after her receipt of the Guggenheim award in 1932, she attempted to convince her cousin, Marion Meriwether, to join them for the summer and have a restorative experience. As Gordon writes to Sally Wood "She hasn't had a vacation in God knows when and leads the most desolate life in that girls' school and hates the whole thing so thoroughly I jumped at the idea of her going" (110). In addition, she accepted a responsibility to chaperone the adolescent daughter of acquaintances in the Clarksville area during the trip overseas and to see that she arrived safely at a European school. At the same time, Gordon accepted the invitation to deposit her daughter Nancy with her Aunt Margaret Campbell in Chattanooga for the months she and her husband would be in France. The expectation of the give-and-take in her close relationships was the norm for Gordon and made for her a fuller experience. All of these examples point to Gordon's commitment to a disciplined balance between a dedication to her writing career and an equal dedication to satisfying the needs of her husband, child, extended family and group of friends. She might complain about her difficulties in combining the two from time to time, but it appears that she did not expect her life to function differently.

For Scott (born, Elsie Dunn), however, the pressures to adhere to societal conventions produced resistance and rebellion. First of all, she did not experience an early environment with landed traditions and customs. Hers was a town environment, and there was much less insulation between the life of her immediate family and the lives of the other town families. Although she was born in the Madison Street mansion between Sixth and Seventh Streets and was encouraged by her mother to identify with the Thomas family's luxury, privilege, and eminence in Clarksville society, Scott was never able to claim this environment as her own. Before she reached the age of two, she and her parents removed to a small cottage on Commerce Street and to life on a much reduced scale of affluence. This move seems to have coincided with the assumption of the mansion's ownership by Scott's aunt and uncle. Scott's mother, Maud Thomas Dunn, bitterly resented her changed condition and seems to have solicited pity from her daughter for her suffering. Mrs. Dunn apparently contributed to a developing ambivalence in her daughter's mind toward a number of social issues. For Maud became increasingly preoccupied with presenting the appearance of affluence to the public, while privately she indulged in self-pity and resentment. Scott presents a haunting fictional example of Maud in her autobiographial work, Escapade, a prose poem reflecting lean years spent in Brazil. During the poorest period of Nannette's long stay with the narrator, her husband, and child, Nannette attempts to preserve the appearance of earlier, more affluent times by carefully coif fing her hair and changing her dress for the daily meal which consists of an equivalent of our pork and beans. Because Scott's father, Seely Dunn, was an L & N railroad executive, the family frequently left Clarksville during Scott's first decade and a half, spending weeks or months at a time in Russellville, Kentucky ; St. Louis, Missouri; Evansville, Indiana; and Memphis, Tennessee. Seely Dunn apparently strove to provide living quarters as close as possible to Maud's desires, and the family occupied quarters, for example, in a St. Louis mansion turned boarding house. Here again, is the appearance of affluence where the reality is a sharing of facilities with strangers. Thus, the sensitive young Scott early perceived contradiction between reality and a falsely created appearance of reality. While it is crue that Caroline Gordon's immediate family moved frequently, too, as Professor Gordon took up new teaching duties in different locations, the pattern did not begin as early in her life as it did in the life of Evelyn Scott. hloreover, Caroline continued to identify with Merry hfont as a home base because her grandmother, Miss Carrie, lived there until her death in 1939. Scott, too, regularly visited the Clarksville mansion for weeks or months during every year up to her twentieth birthday, but this experience never seemed to provide the firm conviction that she belonged, or had firm roots there. Instead, her mother's preoccupation with the change from luxury to a moderate standard of existence seems to have encouraged, from adolescence onward, an ambivalence in Scott toward upper class values and behavior.

Also unlike Gordon, Scott apparently did not receive a clear sense of family security or instruction in an unambiguous code of behavior. Because she was an only child and frequently in her mother's exclusive company, she looked on others with some fear and defensiveness. Her mother apparently sought Evelyn as an ally against her husband Seely, insisting on Evelvn's first loyalty and affection. In Scott's The Narrow House, the young mother, Winnie, makes this same appeal to her little daughter, May.

Maud seems to have been instrumental as well in preventing the development of any close friendship in Evelyn's childhood. In Scott's fictionalized autobiography, Eva Gav, Eva's mother scrutinizes the social status and reputation of every potential companion, and she succeeds in revealing a weakness or stigma each time. The young Eva yearns for peer approval and companionship, but can only achieve it through daring acts or when she misbehaves or rebels. This, in fact, became an established pattern in Scott's life, beginning with childhood experiences intended to court attention from others.

Scott recounts several traumatic childhood experiences in her autobiography, Background in Tennessee. While recovering from a bout with malaria at age five, she was crushed when her mother cut all her long, golden curls. Apparently in order to bolster her own self-image, she accepted a boy's dare to cross a stream by jumping from slippery stone to slippery stone. Sadly, she slipped, fell into the water, and afterward hid in shame from public view for hours. At age ten she daringly clambered along a dead log extending far out over the river in which her cousins were swimming. At eleven she responded to her thirteen-year-old cousin's dare that she hang for five minutes from a rope suspended over the river, although she was unable to swim. Despite her daring, however, Scott records in Background in Tennessee, that the approval she received was not satisfying because it did not last in her mind. She perceived that her cousin's praise was somewhat condescending because she was a girl. She recognizes her own lack of self-confidence when she writes, "His excellent opinion of me had to be bought and rebought" (282) And, she comments further on her lack of self-confidence: "It was as though I had, continually, to accumulate evidence which would prove me 'not guilty.' Though I never really knew of what I felt myself to be accused. Only that when praised me--even to tell me I wore a becoming dress--1 somehow always thought they were lying" (283-4).

As an adult, Scott did form friendships with several people. The close tie she formed with Cyril Kay-Scott lasted well into the 1930s, a decade beyond their married life together. However, the difficulties this relation imposed upon the ex-husband are expressed in his autobiography, Life is Too Short. By the same token, Scott and Lola Ridge, a more compassionate sort of Gertrude Stein, maintained a strong friendship for years. Ironically, Ridge became alienated from Scott only when the latter hurt her pride by trying to solcit funds for the medical help that Ridge sorely needed. Scott and anarchist Emma Goldman became and remained friends through correspondence until the time of Goldman's death. Another writer whose talent Scott early recognized, Kay Boyle, became a friend for several decades, again primarily through correspondence. In fact, Boyle commented somewhat wryly that it was much easier to maintain the relationship through letter-writing, Scott's attention seeming to be easily distracted by other people when they were together. Clearly, Scott's need for attention and approval from others, and her sensitivity to what she perceived as slights, put a serious strain on her relationship with friends.

Scott also began to regard sex and marriage with suspicion and skepticism from an early age. In an Eva Gay fictional account, Eva becomes trapped by an older male cousin and submits to a physical mauling. She feels too ashamed to report it because her mother has instilled in her an early fear and guilt toward anything sexual. In a similar way, Scott perceived that her father took little serious interest in her except for a concern that she preserve her virginity. Even more importantly, Scott's observations of her parents' unhappy marriage apparently created a feeling that marriage is a trap for the two persons concerned, and that it prevents individual fulfillment or happiness. A haunting fictional portrayal of her parents' relationship is given in Scott's first novel, The Narrow House. An atmosphere of unrelieved gloom and martyrdom pervades the household of the middle-aged Mr. and Mrs. Farley. They have been cowed by social convention into remaining together, though their mutual unhappiness is demonstrated in their every expression and gesture and in their mechanical performance of daily duties. Scott came to believe that she must avoid any situation which might result in male domination or the crippling of her independence. She tested this belief experientially during adolescence, and the unfortunate results of two fictionalized romances in her novel Eva Gav also demonstrate her wary attitude concerning marriage. In the first example, a naive Eva succumbs to Walter Ford's seduction, and she suffers intensely when he abandons her afterwards. She is mistaken in her choice of young men a second time with Mat Beers, although he is approved as a suitor by her parents. When F,lat suddenly repudiates Eva's unconventional ideas and informs her that he expects his future wife to behave differently, she breaks their engagement in anger and disgust. She becomes further mortified when she receives Mat's insulting letter, which implies her character is not worthy of his respect. Scott epitomizes these views in Escapade when she says: "True love is abnegation of self and in the relation of the sexes it is inappropriate" (4).

Evelyn Scott also became ambivalent toward the role she herself was encouraged to play. She enjoyed, as a growing girl, the compliments she received on her remarkable grey eyes and blond beauty, but she came to detest the image of the Southern Belle. Her adolescent romances and her recognition of the kinds of behavior she was expected to follow made the role seem full of falsity and hypocrisy. Instead, during adolescence she championed the right of women, not only to receive a good education, but to be able to employ it beyond the drawing room environment of a socially desirable marriage. She noted with pity her mother's narrowed world, and lamented that blaud's fine education and knowledge had no satisfying outlet. In New Orleans later Scott lent her support to the movement for women's suffrage, but she had begun to form her own individual priorities and could not join in any organized efforts.

Scott rejected the idea or practice of interdependence because of her skepticism. She had observed many times that human interaction resulted in one party's dominating and the other party's being forced to be subordinate. Thus, she was willing and interested in performing the role of critic toward the fic.tion of Kay Boyle and Flannery O'Connor, but apparently never submitted her own work to others. She struggled alone to perfect her craft, while Gordon relied on the mentorship of Ford Madox Ford and her editor, Maxwell Perkins. Scott achieved confidence in her ability to write and the discipline to produce, but it was a solitary endeavor.

While Scott felt concern from an early age about those who were racially, sexually, or economically exploited and while she desired solutions to these problems, she nevertheless vacillated between identifying with the exploited underdog and defensively identifying with membership in a prestigious Clarksville family. She found it difficult to adopt either position completely, and she backed away from joining any social group or organization. She ultimately concluded that the strengths of individualism served to found American society, and she would commit herself to it in her own life. She declared in Escapade while still in her twenties, "Because I alone of all the world can understnad and pity myself, I am God. I alone of all the world can offer equality to myself" (187).

The question of whether or not one should create a balance between commitment to oneself and commitment to others did not arise in Scott's mind. She developed a singleminded dedication to her writing, and apparently all other obligations paled beside it. She was not bothered to any great extent by social or domestic concerns; her second husband for more than thirty years, John Metcalfe, apparently occupied second place and recognized her as the dominant partner in the marriage. Scott paid little or no attention to domestic concerns or to entertaining others; her meals were eaten in restaurants and there was very little socializing during most of her adult life. The stance she adopted is an uncompromising one; the early habit of deploring human compromise carried over into her own personal life with a vengeance.

Scott's formative experiences, then, contrast sharply to those of Gordon. Instead of making a commitment to family and community through the practice of hospitable and courteous traditions, Scott expressed skepticism; she saw hypocrisy and falsity expressed in most social interaction. As an adult, Scott perceived slights and insults regularly directed at her, mirroring her mother's tendency. She could trust no one but herself, and so she had to be true to herself in order to realize a life of integrity. Although many persons may have had early experiences essentially similar to Scott's and yet have been able to forge strong friendships and marriages, Scott interpreted her own experiences as formative. She implies that persons cannot escape their consequences when she declares in Background in Tennessee : "We are such old men and women after five or six: we know already all that we shall ever know. Our knowledge of that early period--a knowledge gained before its day--is really ultimate; is never superseded" (301).

Evelyn Scott may here have had the last word concerning the opposing directions her life and the life of Caroline Gordon took. The combination of security and expressed approval in Gordon's youthful environment, along with an expectation of responsibility to others, seems to have provided her with a community from which she could draw beliefs and which could allow her ultimately to seek security in Christian faith. These factors were lacking or seriously undermined in Scott's formative period. As a result, she devised an individual faith which recognized that life contains uncertainties and probable failure for human hopes. Her faith thus focused on embracing death, which alone is certain, as a victory over life. WORKS CITED

Gordon, Caroline. Old Red and Other Stories. Ken York: Scribner ' s, 1963. --- . Penhally. New York: Scribner's, 1931.

Scott, Evelyn. -in Tennessee. Knoxville: U of Tennessee

--- . Escagade. New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1923.

Wood, Sally, ed. The Southern Mandarins: Letters of Caroline Gordon to Sally Wood, 1924-1937. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP. 1984. PENHALLY AND BRACKETS: THE HOUSES THAT CAROLINE GORDON BUILT

Rebecca R. Butler Dalton Junior College

By the time Carol.ine Gordon began her writing career in the third decade of the twentieth century, a literary tradition of the southern plantation had existed for one hundred years or more. That tradition, had, in fact, been defined and analyzed by Francis Pendleton Gaines in The Southern Plantation: A Studv in the Development and the Accuracy of a Tradition, published in 1924. Those romantic and sentimental stories of the Old South that had been so abundant at the height of the local color movement had all but disappeared. The times demanded more realistic fare, and Gaines discerned just such a shift toward a realistic treatment of the plantation materials as early as 1902 in Ellen Glasgow's The Battleground. In that novel Glasgow pictured, as Gaines put it, "the extinction" of plantation life "in the face of new conditions, in the tragedy of a great transition, in the clash of a new democracy with what remained of the old aristocracy" (91). It was just this extinction and tragedy to which Caroline Gordon turned her attention in two of her early novels, Penhally and None Shall Look Back.

Because she kept many of the traditional materials and built upon them, much of what Gaines has to say in The Southern Plantation applies to Gordon's work. Its appearance in 1924 on the very threshold of the southern literary renaissance makes Gaines' study a particular] y meaningful demarcation between the tradition as it existed in the nineteenth century and the revisions of the tradition that were just emerging. On the one hand, as Gaines saw it, was the romantic dream, fiction dominantly idealistic, sentimental, and nostalgic, fed by a )earning for an illusory Golden Age (a yearning, he strongly implied, that is slavelike in its attitude). On the other hand, the tradition was already passing into the preserve of writers, like Gordon, taking up Glasgow 's ringing challenge : "more blood and irony" (95). Writing from a relatively distanced perspective, and during a time that he saw as increasingly severe in its realism, Gaines was interested in more than simply cataloguing the discrete elements of mansion, planter, "genuine darky," winsome belle, dashing cavalier, and so on. He was especially interested in defining and explaining the popular conception of the plantation, the image that lived in the minds of the general audience across the United States, those who read romances (and perhaps serious fiction, too), attended Negro musical comedies, or a performance of The Emperor Jones, or watched the very new moving pictures and saw The Klansman.

It is the image that lives in the mind that interested Caroline Gordon, too, and it is the way the imagination works that seems so often to be just as significant as the history she retells: primogeniture and Nathan Bedford Forrest take on meaning in the minds of the characters who think about them, muse over them, or remember them. It was not a wealth of authentic historic detail, not inventories of the minutiae of furnishings, clothing, tools, weapons, and new accounts of the period that she wanted. It was the impression that living experience makes on the minds of perceptive witnesses that she saw as central to her aim. Her method was to show the concrete world in the act of being transformed hy the mind, preserved by the imagination. A number of southern writers of the period were also producing revisions of the plantation stories, but what distinguishes Gordon's work in this arena is her disciplined realization of the observed world, of perception made concrete, of the heart and mind of individual characters made visible.

The opening pages of both novels provide examples of this creation of very specific plantation images through the eyes of a patriarch. In Penhallv, Nicholas Llewellyn is looking over his lawn as he walks toward the slave cabins where he hears a woman crying. As he passes one tree and another he remembers when as a boy he first saw these trees, "all around the house. . . . The old place in Virginia had been like that, a long gray house, set in the middle of an oak grove. It was fated that a house should be built like that" (2-3). As Nicholas walks, drawing nearer the unpleasant noise, he is preoccupied with his younger brother Ralph's removal from the family home. Born into a tradition in which the elder brother exercises control over the family resources, he can neither understand nor accept Ralph's need to govern his own affairs, to establish a separate residence. Reaching a break in the trees, he stares down at the cabins. Even this problem in the quarters is part of the larger family division because the crying woman is nailing about being kept at Penhally when her husband is going with Ralph to Mayfield.

None Shall Look Back opens similarly, its focus on the planter and on his view of his home. Fount Allard watches his departing guests roll down his drive, then slips away to a summerhouse where he can enjoy a julep and look back at his house, "the long west wing covered in scarlet Virginia creeper" (41, and see his wife guiding some lingering friends to the rose garden where her favorite rose bush is in bloom. He cannot actually see the flowers from his seat, but he can imagine the women admiring the yellow roses.

In both of these scenic openings Gordon identifies the plantation with the planter. It is through his eyes that his surroundings take on shape and meaning. And although Nicholas is built on the lines of the strong-willed man of action while Fontaine is modeled on the more passive gentleman planter (so gracious and self-contained that when the Federals later invade his home he speaks not a word), the important similarity in the two portraits is that both men carry about with them images that serve as important connections between themselves and their place in the world. These interior images are consistent with, in harmony with, their exterior world. In both cases, furthermore, their ordered worlds are on the verge of disruption, a disruption that brings with it still more now-familiar images of the Old South, but images undergoing alteration.

To show the destruction of southern plantation civilization as planters saw it, as they lived it, called for, in the words of Henry James, "the vivid image and the very scene." And this was just Gordon's forte; her imagination was, like James's, a visual one. Gordon's debt to Henry James has been well-documented elsewhere, notably in her own anthology-textbook, The House of Fiction, and more recently in Rose Ann Fraistat's Caroline Gordon as Novelist and Woman of Letters. A reader who knows James's critical-technical concerns will recognize Gordon's discipleship in her creation of centers of consciousness, "authoritative" points of view, and her attention to "the vivid image and the very scene," including the cultivation of an image into a symbol. Remarkably, she was already adept in these methods in her earliest novels. First, she knows how to locate the imagination in the physical world, and that is with the eye. The observed world-the house, the trees, the roses, the quarters--is the starting point for the imagination. Next is the eye itself, particularly in None Shall Look Back, presented as the actual and the symbolic meeting place of the outer, visible world, and the inner, mental world. Finally, there is the visionary image, perhaps a dream, perhaps an indelible mental image or commitment. With these three kinds of visualization, Gordon enlarged the plantation tradition beyond the niche made for it by local color and reconciliation fiction. She brought the plantation image securely into the modern canon (Bradford 375, 379), and as she did so, she showed how it had become, for the Southerners who had lived with it, that powerful, transforming symbol.

Lucy Churchill, Fount Allard's granddaughter, is one of those perceptive witnessess who finds her life transformed abruptly and repeatedly as she watches the war sweep through the Kentucky plantation, then the north Georgia battlefield, Chickamauga. In contrast to the consciousness of the planter Allard, through whose eyes Gordon has introduced the place, and for whom farming is the noblest of occupations, Lucy's adolescent naivete provides some distancing irony in the early chapters of None Shall Look Back. When the troops visit Brackets, she makes the almost childish evaluation of General Forrest as looking "too stern" and reaches a similarly superficial estimate of the young men in their uniforms based on the looks of their mustaches and the color of their eyes. Then, only a short while later, after the young men have gone to war, she begins to sense her own changing reality, and this is associated for her with the plantation house. She seeks out a familiar haven, a place where the branches of a hemlock and thick vines covcring the columns of the house grow together so as to form a "cave" where she had always felt safe as a child. A few months ago when she had been away at school she had thought that if she could see the hemlock tree and the white columns under their greenery, she would be perfectly happy. Soon after arriving home she had darted away from the others and had come around to this side of the house merely for the pleasure of traversing the shady path. It was just as usual, the vines as green, the shade of the hemlock boughs as thick and yet the whole scene was in some mysterious way altered. (65)

Lucy is moving away from this comforting image, away from the innocence of childhood to the knowledge that life and love can be very "precarious. " She realizes that her unhappiness in life is just as likely as she once thought her happiness to be.

This sort of transition or transformation image appears with considerable frequency throughout both novels, and always the familiar is linked with the new, the strange. Memory rises up, it seems, to make sense of some threat, some change in the established order. Among the most striking of these scenes is the one in which Brackets is destroyed by fire:

The smoke rolled low so that sometimes they saw nothing, and then licked by the wind a great flame would rise and tower. Mrs. Allard saw one, a fiery mass that seemed to have fingers to tear the house apart. She watched the dividing walls melt away and suddenly saw revealed in the burning mass a rectangle of glowing logs, a cabin, it seemed, burning inside the house. She touched Cally's arm. "The old house," she said quietly, "the original old log house. See it burn." (159) Again, Gordon has taken a scene like many found in both historical and fictional accounts of the war, and, without sacrificing the traditional sense or intent, she has added symbolic depth to an experience of awesome loss, a loss that is seen to extend itself across the generations, in some sense obliterating a foundation that had been laboriously laid. In this one burning vision the past and the future are visible in the present catastrophe.

It is vision, in one sense or another, that is the guiding principle of both novels. Imagery and point of view operate convincingly together but still do not completely account for what it is that makes Caroline Gordon's plantation world live in the imagination. She does that by concentrating on what her characters see and on how and why they see it. It could be a dream, such as the one LUCY has of a coffin hovering over her the first night she sleeps in Rives's north Georgia home after their marriage; the coffin then dissolves into "an image of the wall of the Brackets house flaming higher and higher, and falling with a crash into the blackened wisteria vine" (175). Shortly thereafter Rives and Lucy walk out on his land and select a site for the home that they intend to build after the war. "She shut her eyes. It seemed to her that she was standing on the gallery." Leaving the hill, Lucy looks back once: "She could almost see the house standing there" (178). These examples are of the imaginary sort; others, particularly those connected with the legendary General Forrest, are real enough, and yet they too create an imaginative appeal. Most often he is glimpsed riding past, "a towering figure on a gray horse"; when the Confederate general Hill learns that the famed Forrest is at the Battle of Chickamauga, his eyes take on an intent look, "the expression of a child who is suddenly promised a treat. IIe said: 'General Forrest! I want to look at him"' (254). The act of looking is characteristically an act of power, of possession, perhaps, of creation or knowledge.

Even the eye itself is drawn to our attention as the organ where the private and the public worlds meet. Again from None Shall Look Back, twice the eye is associated not merely with knowing but with life and death. After the first battle, at Fort Donelson, retreating past dead and dying men, Rives passes a wounded soldier. Although it seems impossible that he will survive, the soldier has crawled to a stream to fill his canteen and sits against a tree, carefully lifting the water to his lips: "The man as if arrested by Rives' scrutiny suddenly looked up over the edge of the canteen. His eyes, enormous in the shadow of his peaked cap, met Rives' for a moment, then his lids fell" (117). Musing on what he has seen, Rives draws a prophetic meaning from the encounter:

It seemed to Rives now that the wounded soldier gazing, and then letting his lids fall, had turned away much as he [himself] had turned away from the wounded men by the other fires. The dark glance had been enigmatic but there had been in it a flicker of the hostility with which men look on at unbearable suffering. It was as if the man dying in the circle of firelight could not endure the spectacle of the living, who were only riding toward death. (118)

A second extended description of eyes that have looked deeply into death comes near the end of the novel when Ned Churchill returns to Brackets from Federal prison camp. Ned's brother Jim notices the "shrunken, withered" eye sockets and "something" else: " . . . as if the man had stopped seeing. Yes . . . a veiled look. He thought of a toad that he and the other boys found once far back in a cave in the woods" (336). Jim has to fight off the revulsion he feels. Jim looks through Ned as he might look through a window in one of James's houses of fiction, and what he sees is foul. The issue here is one of competing visions. Jim sees the South as whipped and those who continue to fight as fools, just as he sees Brackets as finished, a "desolate burned-over place" (338). He is happy to work in the Bradley store and believes that "a man's first duty was to his dependents" (332). He has no transcendent view of war nor of his home and family. Ned, on the other hand, in spite of his almost fatal imprisonment, thinks first of reenlisting, then of moving back out to Brackets. Although convinced by Jim that no regiment would think him worth feeding, Ned remains adamant about returning to the homeplace: "I reckon the land's still there. . . . The Yankees couldn't burn that and they ain't strong enough to cart it off" (337). Gordon is here dramatizing in two views the terms of southern survival, views that would have implications for the future of the South.

The two brothers Nick and Chance in Penhallv see similarly divergent visions of the house and land. The Penhally house survived the cataclysm of war, but the men and women of the family do not see themselves as one with a civilization, a way of life, a house--none of them but Chance, that is. Nick is like Jim, the ambitious brother who moves to town and runs his in-laws' store in None Shall Look Back. Nick sees farming as a continual financial drain, and Joan Parrish's project for turning the mansion into a hunt club seems like a dream come true. But the new image created by the rich, bored Joan Parrish so violates Chance's deepest vision of his family identity that he is driven to avenge this outrage. The tragedy of None Shall Look Back is one of fire and sword and rushing cavalry; it is impersonal and implacable. The tragedy of Penhallv is a delayed tragedy of family division and fratricide.

It is not possible, in an essay of this length, to do more than outline the method by which Caroline Gordon fashioned afresh the meaning of the Southern plantation tradition for the twentieth century. These examples should suggest the importance of her ideas about visualization to her recreation of that tradition. Gordon's reputation is not that of a revisionist--quite the reverse--and still, she must be given credit for modernizing the legend and its symbolic value. Without abandoning a traditional stance (her characterization of slaves and other Negroes would be a good example), she takes the truly radical line that the irreparable divisions occur on the personal level, not the social, nor the national. The destruction that does the lasting damage comes not from without but within families, within the fabric of the southern community itself. Thanks to her talent for making visible correspondences between outer and inner worlds, the world of the eye and the world of the heart, her portraits of the planters, and of the planters' descendents, display more objectivity, more distance, and more irony than do the treatments of earlier traditionalists. At the same time, the world is pictured with as much poignance, dignity, and authority as it has ever been.

Much the simplest way to indicate what Gordon accomplished in Penhally and None Shall Look Back is to return to Henry James's figure of the house of fiction. Penhally and Brackets are houses, they are families, they are the highly visible architecturally elite of the southern panorama. The family observers are the windows into the life of the house. Furthermore, the house as subject here coincides with the house as craft. In making the plantation image distinctly visible from her twentieth-century vantage point, the novelist herself became a window in the expanding southern edifice.

WORKS CITED

Bradford, M. E. "The Passion of Craft." The Historv of Southern Literature. Ed. Louis D. Rubin, Jr. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1985: 375-382.

Fraistat, Rose Ann C. Caroline Gordon as Novelist and Woman of Letters. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1984. Gaines, Francis Pendleton. The Southern Plantation: A Studv in the Development and the Accuracv of a Tradition. New York: Columbia, 1924.

Gordon, Caroline. None Shall Look Back. New York: Scribner's, 1937. . Penhally. New York, Scribner's, 1931. , and Allen Tate. The House of Fiction: An Anthology of the Short Story with Commentary. 2nd ed. New York: Scribner's, 1960. Glasgow, Ellen. "The Novel in the South." Harper ' s Magazine 158 (1928): 93-100.

James, Henry. "Letter to William Howells." The Letters of Henrv James. Selected and edited by Percy Lubbock. New York: Scribner's 1920. 1. 163-166. . Preface. The Portrait of a Ladl. Riverside Editions. Boston: Houghton hlifflin, 1956. THE LIFE-AFFIRMING DOLLMAKER

Sandra L. Ballard University of Tennessee-Knoxville

Harriette Arnow's novels have been described by Barbara Baer, an interviewer for the Nation, as "chronicles of destruction" (117). Glenda Hobbs, who produced a Harvard dissertation in 1975 about Harriette Arnow, has called them "pessimistic novels" (159). In fact, Arnow's novels do record "the process of destruction" both in the culture and in the individual lives of the Southern Appalachian mountaineers who were forced by the world wars to migrate outside of their hill communities. Arnow herself remarked that she saw her work "as record of people's lives in terms of roads. At first it was only a path, then a community at the end of a gravel road that took men and families away, and finally, where gravel led to a highway, the highway destroyed the hill community" (Baer 117). She has explained in interviews that she meant her first three novels to be read as a trilogy: first, Mountain Bath, then her second novel which she wanted to entitle The End of the Gravel Road, but went along with the publisher's idea to call it Hunter's Horn, and finally The Dollmaker ,which she thought of naming The Highwav (Kotlowitz 29). In the novel The Dollmaker Harriette Arnow succeeds not only in recording the dissolution of a community and the personal suffering of its members, but more importantly she also succeeds in attributing to her characters incredible strength and the will to affirm life, not to destroy it.

Gertie Nevels, The Dollmaker's main character, faces social, economic, and psychological destruction, but the power of the novel comes not, as some critics suggest, from the forces that oppose her, but instead from Gertie's will to fight and her strength to endure. Even though Joyce Carol Oates contends that Gertie's "last real success" occurs in the opening scene of the novel, when Gertie saves her son's life (603), Harriette Arnow herself has pointed out that the people in The Dollmaker "endure, even at the novel's end" (Hobbs 168). Some critics call attention to Arnow's powerful depiction of the tragic events in Gertie's life, but it seems even more important to examine Gertie's responses to these events. This essay will examine the life-affirming responses of Gertie Nevels in the face of social, economic, and psychological destruction, and I will give special emphasis to the psychologically damaging forces that Gertie must handle as a daughter, a wife, and a mother. Arnow's The Dollmaker emphasizes the ability of the human spirit to survive destruction.

From the beginning of The Dollmaker, Gertie sees the social disintegration of Ballew, Kentucky, the hill community where she has always lived. Because of the war, the entire social structure of the community has changed: most of the men have had to leave, either to enlist in military service or to take jobs in the city to help with the war effort. Gertie responds by assuming responsibility for much of the work. She tells her father, "I recken I'll have to be the man in this settlement" (102).

And Gertie notices other changes as she walks along on the graveled road that leads to the highway six miles away. The road, once "so fine and new," now seemed "only a thing that took the people away." (51) One of the people it took away is the community doctor. So when Gertie needs medical help for her three-year-old son Amos, she carries the child on a mule out to the highway and stops a car. The unavailability of a doctor does not stop her from doing what is necessary to save her son's life. When he is choking, she performs a tracheotomy so that he can breathe. In one of the most powerful scenes in the novel, she uses her whittling knife to open her child's windpipe (18). Less courageous and less determined people might have been paralyzed by the absence of professional medical help, but Gertie refuses to consider herself helpless and her son's condition hopeless simply because the war has taken the doctor away from their community. She whispers to Amos, "I cain't let th war git you too" (17-18). She forces an unwilling officer to take her to get the additional medical attention she needs. She bravely, even fiercely, faces a terrifying obstacle brought about by social changes in the hill settlement where she lives, and she triumphs.

The war has also brought with it tough economic times, which Gertie faces with amazing strength. Even before the war, Gertie's husband, Clovis, has had trouble finding steady work. He sometimes takes a job "tinkering" on some mechanical thing or hauling coal, but he rarely gets paid. It is Gertie who has worked the land and put most of the food on the table for her family. With an eye on their economic future, she is dissatisfied with working land that belongs to someone else. She has a dream of owning a farm of her own and keeping the entire crop, instead of having to give back half to the landlord. To make her dream a reality, she has been saving money secretly for fifteen years, the entire time she has been married. She has been depositing in the lining of her coat the proceeds from selling eggs, molasses, poultry and livestock, until she has accululated the tidy sum of three hundred and ten dollars (41). That amount combined with the inheritance money she received after her brother Henley's death makes her economically independent for the first time in her life, and she strikes a deal with Uncle John to buy the Tipton farm.

But Gertie's husband, Clovis, not inducted into the army right away and faced with no job prospects back home, also acts independently: he goes on to Detroit, finds a job, sells his truck, and makes arrangements to move his family into a wartime housing project. Gertie never tells Clovis about her plans for the Tipton place until near the end of the novel, when they are so deep in debt that neither one of them can foresee a time when they will ever again have economic independence. Though no longer sharecroppers in Kentucky, they have fallen prey to buying "on time" in Detroit; their new "landlord" is the "installment plan." By the end of the novel, they are on the brink of financial destruction. Gertie, having spent some of Henley's money on children's clothes for the trip to Detroit, watches her savings dwindle steadily as she supplements Clovis's income to pay for things that she either would have raised herself back home or would have had no need for: the milk man, the produce vendor, the ice man, the gas bill, the electricity bill, and Clovis's union dues. Gertie tells Clovis about Henley's money because she knows that he would find out eventually from one of the children. But her other savings remain her secret. As long as she keeps the money in the lining of her coat, she feels financial security . But she loses that security in moments of blind grief over the death of her youngest daughter, Cassie, who has been killed by a train. Arnow writes that at the emergency room of the hospital Gertie for the first time had understood that money would bring Cassie out of this windowless place . . . she had shoved her hand down into the blood-encrusted coat, crying, "Money? Clovis, I 've got money--all the money--all them years." And she had laid it in his startled, trembling hands. (411-412) But Gertie sadly realizes when all the money is gone that she has not even held Cassie in her arms (412). Clovis explains later how the policemen at the scene of the accident recommended a funeral director who took advantage of them. There is not even enough left for a grave marker for Cassie, though Clovis promises that they'll soon have enough for a down payment on one (425). Though Gertie grieves for days and drinks "pink water" (phenobarbital), she gradually realizes that "she couldn't flop down and cry like some; she had to make money; a cross waited to be whittled" (445). So, after one of the most wrenching experiences of her life, Gertie shows tremendous will when she pulls herself out of her grief and begins her carving again to make money to support her family. Furthermore, she agrees to go along with Clovis's plan for increasing her production of "hand carved" work with a jigsaw. Though she obviously despises the work she is turning out, Gertie tries not to reveal her repulsion; she works "straight-mouthed, grimeyed; her hatred for the ugly dolls fading at times as she enumeratelsl in her head all their needs" (501). Gertie also continues to work on her cherry wood figure for a while. Arnow writes that "the man in the wood gave [Gertie] rest and peace" from the past and the uncertain future (499). But finally, the cherry wood carving fails to comfort her as she realizes that "the faceless man" seemed to be "whispering, 'There's no money in me"' (499).

Gertie has to assume responsibility for the family's economic survival even after Clovis finally returns to work, because Clovis is preoccupied with getting revenge on the man who had attacked him over some union activities. Arnow writes that the distracted Clovis looks at Gertie's work "with absent-minded eyes. His eyes were often like that now, unworried by the payments falling due" (545). Gertie, on the other hand, looks at Clovis's paycheck "for only $37.23" and figures that "after the November rent was paid, there would be almost three dollars left" (544). Even in the face of these dire economic straits, however, she tried "to silence her fears by reminding herself how lucky they were" compared to others she knows: "they had a ton of coal paid for; Clovis was getting well without a doctor; their credit was good" (544). She has even amassed small savings of slightly over thirty dollars from the sale of her carved crucifixes and dolls, and she has been taking in washing and ironing.

Gertie's efforts show her determination to face the problems that threaten her family's economic survival. She has lost the Kentucky farm land she loved and could have owned. She has lost her life's savings. But Gertie's determination to survive--particularly her interest in economic survival--ultimately enables her to pull herself together to do what is necessary to sustain her family. In the face of destruction, Gertie once again affirms life.

Not only does Gertie face social and economic crises with amazing strength and life-sustaining success, but her roles as grown daughter, wife, and mother expose her to potential emotional and psychological destruction and demand tremendous inner strength. Arnow's description of the mental challenges that Gertie faces often seem overwhelming, and Gertie does not emerge unscathed, but she does manage to survive.

First, as the daughter of a hypochondriac who constantly criticizes and accuses her, Gertie struggles with her mother's hateful words. On the same day that Gertie learns her brother Henley has been killed in the war, she must fight to save her son's life. Then she must stay away from home for several days to be with Amos, while a doctor monitors his recovery. Nearly three weeks pass as Gertie catches up on her farm work before she can visit her grieving mother. There she is met with her mother's words: "Oh, Gertie, Gertie, your own born brother dead in a foreign land, an never once do you come to comfort your poor mother a weepen her heart away. . . . Oh, Gert how could you do me thisaway" (61). Feeling tremendous loss because of her brother's death, Gertie has dreaded facing her mother, expecting this sort of response: "I cain't bear to think of it. Henley, my onliest son, a flamen there in Hell. . . . How could God do this to me?" (62-63). Gertie just "opened her mouth, but closed it" (64). Besides enduring her mother's pious, self-pitying grief, Gertie also must face her mother's accusations that she is responsible for her poor mother's suffering as well as for her brother's eternal damnation. Her mother declares, "Maybe if 'n it hadn't a been fer you, IIenley would ha give hisself to God. You was th oldest; he thought a sight a you, too much, I've thought many a time. If you . . . had set Henley a good example, he might ha been singen in heaven nowf' (63). Throughout her life, Gertie has repeatedly wrestled with her mother's God of Hellfire and damnation. As a child Gertie had listened to many sermons of a preacher called Battle John Brand whose words were designed, Gertie thought, to "stamped[e] the souls of his flock to Christ with his twin whips of Hell and God" (68). As an adult, Gertie listens to her mother remind her, "You ought to read yer Bible, Gert. It's all foretold. 'I come not with peace but a sword,' Christ said" (64). But Gertie still cannot accept her mother's wrathful Christ. Gertie replies, "Mebbe they's another side to Christ. Recollect he went to th wedden feast, an had time to fool with little youngens, an speak to a thief and a bad woman. An Henley was like Christ-he worked an loved his fellowmen" (64). Gertie's Christ is "a laughing Christ . . . a Christ who had loved people, had liked to mingle with them and laugh and sing the way Henley had liked people and singing and dancing" (64). Even though Gertie's mother charges her with having ideas that make her "mighty close to bein' a infidel" (651, Gertie's mind "made this Christ alive, the way Cassie made the witch child Callie Lou alive," or the way Gertie could give "life and heart" to "a piece of hicko~ysprout" (64). Gertie's creative imagination offers her emotional health and psychological salvation from her mother's accusations. Even more psychologically challenging than the worrisome nature of her mother's view of her, are the demands made on Gertie by her husband and children. Gertie struggles to adjust to the greatest psychological threats that she has ever faced when she gets to Detroit, where her responsibilities as a wife and a mother must be redefined. City life does not allow Gertie the independence and self-sufficiency she is used to. Because she has always defined herself as a provider for her family, she feels particularly frustrated in Detroit. She feels "hemmed in, shut down" (189). Though Clovis repeatedly asks his wife to accept what is good enough, as he says, for "millions an millions" of others, Gertie cannot. At one point, when Gertie angrily tells Clovis, "You know I'd hunt a factory job in a minute, but you won't hear to it" (2521, Clovis reminds her that she is "too big for the factory machinery, set for little slim women" (253). Clovis wants to place limitations on Gertie. He wants her to see her size, which had always been an advantage back home, as a handicap. He wants her to conform to his idea of a wife who is content to stay at home, cook, clean, and care for the children and let him earn the living.

In the same way that Gertie's creative imagination allows her to deal successfully with the guilt her mother wants her to feel, Gertie often copes with Clovis and life in Detroit by allowing her imagination to take her back to Kentucky. When she is "stooping over the too low gas stove, frying strange fish she had bought because it was cheap and unrationed . . . she saw herself back home. The red ball of the winter's sun was going down behind the hills across the river" (265). But interrupting Gertie's imagined scene, the disheartening reality of Detroit crashes in: the blaring radio, the roar of planes and trains, the stifling kitchen, the smelly fish, her children's dirty wet snowsuits--all intrude on her imagination (266). And Gertie feels almost literally "torn apart" by the oppressive noise and filth of this place where Clovis wants her to live and be happy. Clovis's expectations for Gertie challenge her independence, her self-esteem, and ultimately her identity. He asks Gertie for compromises that she cannot make, though she wrestles with his requests to "adjust" before she reaches the conclusion that she cannot "give in to bein like other people." Gertie loves her husband, but she cannot give up herself to be the wife he wants. Thus, she again affirms her active participation in life.

Gertie's role as a mother also causes her to struggle with the psychological problems of "adjusting." Her first encounter with the principal of her children's school well illustrates this point, for the principal tries to reassure Gertie that her children will "adjust." Because Gertie does not know the word "adjust ," the man explains, "Yes, adjust, learn to get along, like it--be like the others--learn to want to be like the others" (207). Gertie wants her children to be happy, but not at the cost of their individuality, and her maternal concerns soon prove to be well-founded as she watches two of her children--Clytie, her oldest daughter, and Enoch, her middle son--readily adapt to school and the neighborhood. She constantly worries that Clytie spends too much time by the radio and that Enoch is too streetwise. She worries as well about the two others--Reuben, her oldest son, and Cassie, the youngest daughter--who do not "adjust" to Detroit. Her. sullen son Reuben withdraws from everyone and eventually runs away from home to live with his grandparents. And Arnow describes Cassie as "quiet, forever quiet. More lost and lonesome than afraid, she always seemed like a child away from home" (210). Cassie spends most of her time with her make-believe playmate Callie Lou.

Clovis sees no harm in the ready assimilation of Clytie and Enoch to new ways associated with their new home; in fact, he is proud of them. But he blames Gertie in part for the problems with Reuben and Cassie. He tells Gertie "You've got to make her quit them foolish runnen an talken-to-herself fits. The other youngens'ull git to thinken she's quair, an you'll have another Reuben. An th more you play act with her . . . . , th harder it'll be fer her" (366-367). Gertie has her own thoughts about Cassie's playmate Callie Lou, whom Gertie recognizes as an imaginative creation that should be allowed to exist. Eventually, however, Gertie allows herself to agree with Clovis that Cassie would be better off without Callie Lou. On the day Gertie demands that Cassie stop talking to herself, Gertie immediately finds herself "fighting down a great hunger to seize and hug and kiss the child, and cry; 'keep her, Cassie. Keep Callie Lou. A body's got to have somethen all their own"' (379).

Gertie's emotional and psychological pain only intensifies as the novel progresses, for Gertie holds herself responsible for Cassie's death, which occurred in the train yard where Cassie went to avoid being scolded for playing with her make-believe friend. Cassie's horrible death from the blood loss that occurs when a train severs both her legs is the psychologically pivotal event in the novel for Gertie, who delves as deeply into grief and despair as anyone could. Glenda Hobbs describes Gertie after Cassie's death as "consumed by guilt and despair"; Hobbs states that Gertie "has lost the strength or the will to fight back" (138). At first, these words seem an apt description, for Gertie will certainly never be the same woman she was before the death of her child. But her actions eventually disprove Hobbs's conclusion and reveal Gertie's strength and determination to survive. She will not allow herself to remain in the fog of phenobarbital; she felt "she couldn't flop down and cry like some; she had to make money; a cross waited to be whittled" (445). Her art oIfers her solace, a way to endure as well as support her family.

Gertie's action at the end of the novel--her splitting of the cherry wood figure with an ax--has been interpreted as a sign of her defeat. But this dramatic conclusion can be seen instead as a climactic indication of her commitment to life--a crescendo of affirmation--an act that affirms her social, economic, and psychological survival. As the scene begins, Gertie eagerly responds to an unexpected request to make some small carvings for a church bazaar, some "real handmade things of good wood" (589). After accepting a fifty dollar advance for carvings, Gertie sets to work, but not on that project, on the cherry wood figure instead. She works, Arnow says, "as if time were running out and this were the one thing she must do with her time" (595). Gertie acts as though she is saying farewell to a friend as she stays up all night working on the man in the cherry wood. Then, the next morning, Gertie hauls the block of cherry wood to the scrap wood lot, where she must split it before it can be sawed into small boards. Gertie's wielding of the ax is met with "a great shout" from the children who have accompanied her to the lumber yard, but their cry accompanies an act of triumph, not of despair.

The closing dialogue in the novel between Gertie and the man at the lumber yard reveals that Gertie affirms life in the face of destruction. When the lumber man comments that Gertie must have meant for the sculpture to represent Christ, though she hadn't found a face for him, Gertie answers at first: "No. They was so many would ha done; they's millions an millions a fac,es plenty fine enough--fer him" (599). Hobbs thinks that "Gertie's remark is flippant" and that "she is echoing Clovis's repeated appeals to accept what 'millions an millions' of city people tolerate" (148); Hobbs explains that "when she says that 'millions an millions' of faces are suitable, [Gertie] suggests that the man in the wood is like the compromising city folk who buy sawed Christs" (148-149). Certainly, Gertie's words do echo Clovis's "millions an millions," but the man in the wood is not clearly an image of conformity. When Gertie "pondered, then slowly lifted her glance from the block of wood," Arnow writes that "wonder mixed in with the pain," as Gertie says, "Why, some a my neighbors down there in th alley-- they would ha done" (599). Her realization here, in the last sentence of the novel, is a testimony to her sensitivity. In spite of all that she has suffered, she is still capable of "wonder," and this revelation that the face for her cherry wood man could have been a person that she knew, one of her neighbors, seems to affirm that she has not abandoned her image of the common man Christ. Hobbs asserts that the "'crying, rending sound' the cherry wood figure makes as Gertie cracks it open with the ax signifies her own metaphoric screech at executing her own destruction" (149), but that statement does not consider the reason for Gertie's ac,t. She has split the unfinished wood figure so that she can use the cherry wood for commissioned work that will bring money to support her family. Her act destroys only the sculpture she has worked on throughout her stay in Detroit; her act in no way signals her own destruction. \+'hen Gertie splits the wood, she is doing what she feels she must to ensure the survival of her family. Fifty dollars in a time of post-war unemployment is a great deal of money that will buy many things her family needs. Gertie sees the opportunity to use the good wood that she already owns and keep the advance. Contrary to Hobbs's conclusion, with the splitting of the cherry wood sculpture, Gertie thus asserts her own determination to survive because she is now strong enough to give up the man in the wood who has helped her through the harsh, tragic events of her life in Detroit. She is so strong that she can give up what saved her in order to save others.

Arnow's Gertie Nevels faces every kind of destructive force--the social deterioration of the community she grew up in, the economic disasters that cause her to lose all hope of owning her own farm, and the psychological challenges-- in her roles as a grown daughter, a nife, and a mother. In each case, she relies on her creative imagination to sculpt a view of reality that she can live with. She thus exercises her will to survive. Gertie's conscious choices to endure, rather than to give up, demonstrate her commitment to life, and that commitment is a tribute to the strength of the human spirit. The power of Harriette Arnow's The Dollmaker lies in Gertie's affirmation of life.

WORKS CITED

Arnow, Harriette. The Dollmaker. 1954. New York: Avon, 1972.

Baer, Barbara. "Harriette Arnow's Chronicles of Destruction." Nation, 222 (1976): 117-120.

Hobbs, Glenda. "Harriette Arnow's Literary Journey: From the Parish to the World." Diss. Harvard U.. 1975.

Kotlowitz, Alex. "At 75, Full Speed Ahead." Detroit News, 4 Dec. 1983: 14+.

Oates, Joyce Carol. "Joyce Carol Oates on Harriette Arnow's The Dollmaker. " Rediscoveries. Ed. David Madden. New York: Crown, 1971, 57-67. Rpt. in Oates's New Heaven. New Earth: Visionary Experience in Literature. New York: Vanguard, 1974, 99-110, and as Afterword to Avon ed. of The Dollmaker, 601-608. THE BURDENS OF SUCCESS: HIGHLANDER, 1962-1982

John M. Glen Ball State University

For most of its history the Highlander Research and Education Center has operated in the shadow of a past that was as much a burden as it was a standard of effectiveness in achieving social change in the South. Its predecessor, the Highlander Folk School, was founded by Myles Horton and Don West in 1932 near the small Cumberland Plateau town of Monteagle, Tennessee. Devoted in its early years to aiding mine, textile, lumber and hosiery workers in Tennessee, the folk school's staff anticipated the formation of the Congress of lndustrial Organizations and its drive to establish new unions in the region. Through workshops, extension projects, and direct organizing efforts, Highlander became the South's major CIO education training center by the mid-1940s. The school then served as a bridge between the labor and civil rights movements as the staff began an assault on racial discrimination in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Highlander achieved even greater prominence in the South between 1953 and 1961 as the education center of the civil rights movement. It attracted Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., and hundreds of black and white activists to its workshops. Its Citizenship School program initiated a massive literacy campaign among poor southern blacks and inspired them to vote, become political candidates, and participate in civic affairs. Highlander also forged productive alliances with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and other civil rights groups. But the growing importance of the school in the drive for racial equality also made it the target of attacks spearheaded by southern segregationists. After a barrage of legislative investigations, propaganda campaigns, and dramatic trials, Tennessee officials repealed Highlander's charter and confiscated the folk school property in 1962.

The Highlander Research and Education Center continued to serve the South's poor and powerless following its incorporation in 1961. But to their frustration, staff members sensed that their work lacked the focus and clarity of the folk school's programs. The center remained an integral part of the civil rights movement during most of the 1960s, well after IIighlander's leaders had concluded that it was no longer essential to the movement. Inspired by their participation in the Poor People's campaign of 1968, Highlander's teachers encouraged the formation of a multiracial coalition that made little progress and broke apart in the early 1970s. By then the staff had returned to Highlander's roots and once again foc,used on the troubles facing the people of southern Appalachia. There it struggled to help community groups comprehend and resist what is perceived to be the physical and cultural destruction of the region. By 1982, fifty years after its establishment, Highlander still reflected its original idea that education should empower people to take control of their own lives. Yet the center also was going through a period of transition, as its staff tried to anticipate the emergence of a new movement for political and economic justice in the South. The Highlander Center's programs during its first two years at its new location in Knoxville were largely a carryover from the Highlander Folk School. Workshops, seminars, and extension classes addressed such concerns as voter education, the development of black community leadership, and the problems blacks faced in seeking equal employment opportunities. The center was not free of the controversies that had surrounded the hlonteagle school, but financial support grew rapidly, as did the number of workshops and student enrollment. Yet by mid-1963, Highlander's leaders had already decided to curtail activities in the Knoxville area and to commit the center's resources to developing voter education and other extension projects in the Deep South. In part this shift came in response to SNCC's move in 1962 from an emphasis on student protests against segregated public facilities to a broader campaign of black voter registration. At the request of Robert Moses, head of SNCC's Mississippi Voter Education Project, Highlander staff member Bernice Robinson coordinated a series of voter education workshops, citizenship classes, and registration drives in Mississippi during the summer of 1962 and 1963. Participants studied the state's voter registration form, reviewed the parts of the state constitution on which registrars questioned black applicants, and developed plans to promote black voting and political involvement. Although white segregationists harassed, intimidated, and assaulted teachers and students, Highlander's 1963 voter education project eventually included over 1,500 participants. The number of black voters in Mississippi grew, but the overall voter registration campaign proceeded slowly. A "freedom vote" campaign in the fall of 1963, climaxed by a symbolic election in which over 80,000 blacks chose their own candidates, dramatized the desire of black Mississippians to vote, but it also heightened the frustration of the SNCC staff. The result was the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer Project. Shortly after the "freedom vote" election, hlyles Horton supervised a workshop for the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), where representatives of SNCC, SCLC, and the Congress of Racial Equality hammered out plans to bring northern white student volunteers to Mississippi to strengthen the voter registration drive and focus national attention on the state. The project also would help publicize the new Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party's challenge to the credentials of the all-white regular state party at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Highlander staff members helped COFO organize the Summer Project and directed COFO's experimental White Community Project, which sent eighteen southern white students into Biloxi to build support for COFO among middle-class white moderates. But the limited achievements of the program reflected the larger failure of the Freedom Summer Project to attain any major breakthrough in civil rights. Despite the bravery of the project workers and their success in mobilizing large numbers of blacks, there was no massive federal intervention in !rlississippi. The Democratic National Convention turned back the Freedom Democratic Party's attempts to unseat the regular Mississippi delegation. Although Horton urged SNCC leaders to continue their development of an education program, SNCC workers rapidly lost faith in the value of nonviolence and interracial harmony. "Black Power" would later become one of SNCC's basic responses.

Highlander's second major civil rights program during the 1960s was the Southwide Voter Education Internship Project, designed to cultivate greater political sophistication among new black voters in the Deep South. In the staff's view, Charleston County, South Carolina, had become a model for other southern black communities since the start of the first Citizenship School on Johns Island in 1957. An ongoing voter registration campaign had helped over 10,000 black citizens gain the franchise by mid-1963; black candidates had run for city and county offices; and schools and other public facilities had been desegregated. In 1963 Highlander staff members and black activists in the Charleston area launched a program combining residence workshops and internship training for black leaders across the South. Over the next four years the Internship Project attracted several thousand blacks and whites to its Citizenship and Political Education Schools. Khile the results of the internship program were less clear. the Highlander facultv could point to such inspiring examples as Fannie Lou Hamer, a leading figure in the Freedom Democratic Party, who became a congressional candidate in 1964, and the Reverend Franklin D. Rowe, who became the first black candidate for public office in Georgia's Ben Hill County since Reconstruction.

The growing number of southern blacks registering to vote and campaigning for public office prompted Highlander to offer a series of workshops for city, county, and state candidates between 1966 and 1968. One-week sessions at Highlander Center and in Mississippi and Georgia covered such topics as the techniques of political campaigns, the comparative advantages of working through existing parties and forming independent black organizations, and the duties of candidates once they won election. The Mississippi candidate training program proved particularly useful in 1967-eighteen of the twenty-two victorious black candidates in the state's off-year elections had participated in the workshops. Khen these victors encountered white opposition folloa~ing the election, the workshops focused on the problems of assuming office and on the development of long-range plans to encourage more blacks to run for public office.

Highlander Center thus attained nearly as much prominence in the civil rights movement of the 1960s as the folk school had gained during the previous decade. Yet the billboards bearing the caption "Martin Luther King at Communist Training School" that appeared across the South in 1965 were reminders that renewed importance also meant a resurgence of attacks against the institution. The assault on Highlander reached its climax between 1965 and 1968. Staff members endured a storm of adverse publicity, a Ku Klux Klan parade past the center, repeated vandalism, firebombs, burglaries, gunshots, and the loss of their fire and automobile insurance. State representative Odell Cas Lane of Knoxville introduced a resolution into the Tennessee legislature in early 1967 calling for a committee to investigate the supposedly "subversive" activities at Highlander and for closing the center by state law enforcement officials. In contrast to its aggressive prosecution of Highlander in 1959, however, the General Assembly only reluctantly approved the formation of a committee in hlay 1967. The inquiry itself never materialized. Highlander and American Civil Liberties Union lawyers secured a federal district court injunction in early 1968 blocking the legislature from proceeding further until it had found a constitutionally adequate definition of "subversion." State officials did not appeal the court's ruling, apparently reconciling themselves to the idea that Highlander would remain in Tennessee.

As the attacks on Highlander subsided, the staff moved beyond its commitment to the civil rights movement to the more formidable task of organizing the poor in southern Appalachia as part of a new multiracial poor people's coalition. This transition had been under way for several years. Between 1964 and 1968 Myles Horton and several young white activists had run a series of experimental projects in Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia, seeking to stimulate the region's poor whites and blacks into organizing and redressing their grievances through independent action or in cooperation with federal agencies created by the Johnson Administration's War on Poverty. The promising results of these initial efforts suggested that Highlander's approach could be applied throughout Appalachia; with some adjustments, it could be used by any impoverished group in the nation. The growing popularity of "Black Power" among black civil rights workers hastened the shift in Highlander's efforts. Conservative journalists inaccurately reported that Horton had taught SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael the idea of Black Power. But IIorton and his colleagues had held for some time that blacks should build their own institutions and serve their own needs and interests. They agreed with Carmichael that white sympathizers could best aid the civil rights struggle by organizing poor whites, the only group black Americans could accept as allies. The 1968 Poor People's Campaign thus seemed to present an unparalleled opportunity to mobilize a multiracial coalition demanding an end to economic injustice in America. Yet the failures of the Washington demonstration stood as a warning to the Highlander staff that it would be very difficult to forge this alliance, while at the same time respecting the integrity of the various groups that were part of it. Government officials were unmoved by the sight of several thousand poor people living in Resurrection City near the Lincoln Memorial. Furthermore, the campaign was plagued by poor planning, unspecified goals, chaotic administration, ineffective demonstrations, and conflicts between black leaders and Mexican-American and Indian spokesmen. A contingent from Highlander stayed in Resurrection City until police closed the shantytown in June 1968. Although disappointed that the campaign did not lead to a large-scale, radical program for social change, Horton and a young staff member named Michael Clark believed that Resurrection City furnished several valuable lessons for Highlander. The virtual absence of organizations representing poor whites reemphasized the need to strengthen the weakest link of the multiracial coalition. The discussions around the Highlander camp in Resurrection City confirmed Horton's view that poor people could learn from one another, and that the final solution to the problem of poverty lay with the poor themselves. Moreover, the rifts between blacks and non-blacks during the campaign showed that a successful multiracial coalition had to be an alliance of equals, communicating freely and acting in concert to achieve their respective goals.

The Highlander staff's decision, following the Poor People's Campaign, to focus most of its energies on Appalachia signaled a return to the -institution's original objectives of educating leaders for a "new social order" and enriching "the indigneous cultural values of the mountains." As the folk school faculty had contended in the early 1930s, staff members in the late 1960s and 1970s held that the poor quality of life for most people in the mountainous portions of Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee was due to the domination of outside industrial interests. Coal, lumber, railroad, and financial corporations had established their control over the region in the late nineteenth century, exploited it, and preserved their advantages by blaming any of the problems they caused on the ignorance or deficiencies of the Appalachian people. Making matters worse were the successive waves of missionaries who sought to "save" Appalachia by imposing their own cultural values on its inhabitants. The staff viewed the War on Poverty as merely the latest futile missionary effort that reinforced the perception that the poor were unable or unwilling to define their own problems and begin working toward their own solutions. Highlander's Appalachian Self-Education Program presented an alternative view. It aimed to build a movement among the rural poor of Appalachia who could join the civil rights groups, labor unions, and community organizations to push for a radical restructuring of American society. Beginning in 1969, staff members conducted residence workshops for potential leaders and musicians in the region who explored how they could hold workshops and build community organizations themselves. Highlander teachers also traveled extensively throughout eastern Kentucky and Tennessee to maintain contact with individual activists and poor people's groups in the area, such as the Boone County Association for the Needy, Marrowbone Folk School, and Pickett United for Self-Help. The strength of the Self-Education Program lay in its flexibility and nondirective teaching approach, but it also lacked structure and central direction. Unlike Highlander's work with labor unions and civil rights groups, there were few institutions or individuals through which to channel the program's educational activities. There was no one primary need in the region hut a number of localized problems varying considerably from one community to the next. The ultimate goals of the program were vague and distant. Despite readjustments in the early 1970s, progress came much more slowly than the Highlander staff had anticipated. No sustained protest movement seemed to emerge among the Appalachian poor. Meanwhile, Highlander's efforts to promote multiracial programs similar to the Appal-achian project in the Southwest and in Chicago produced even more discouraging results. In 1969, at the urging of New Mexico's fiery Chicano leader Reies Tijerina, Myles Horton organized Highlander West to help develop Chicano leadership and to assist Mexican-American and Indian groups in the Southwest gain greater economic and political power. Out of a succession of workshops in 1969 and 1970, Mexican-American women in Albuquerque spearheaded a drive to create child-care centers and win a higher wage scale; Chicano activists launched a leadership training project; and members of several Native American tribes protested white exploitation of Gallup's annual Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial. Yet Highlander West's activities were spread too thinly to achieve more than a set of isolated victories in a complicated and constantly shifting Mexican-American movement. The Chicago project begun in 1969 was equally frustrating. Although Horton had found considerable potential for using Highlander's services to support Appalachian and Puerto Rican youth groups in the city, there was little response to the idea of using education as the basis of a multicolored poor people's coalition. Indeed, by the early 1970s the possibility of a broad-based poor people's movement in America was rapidly disappearing. White and nonwhite activists splintered into rival factions and were forced to acknowledge that the poor did not constitute a unified class of racially and economically oppressed people. The millions of impoverished Americans of all colors represented only a fraction of the nation's population, making it increasingly difficult, especially in a time of growing conservatism, to achieve real social change. Highlander staff members understood these hard realities, but perhaps not the extent to which they would affect the future course of their programs.

Adding to the strain was the need for a new Highlander Center, Myles Horton's retirement, and bitter wrangling over the school's administration. Facing the prospect of an urban renewal project that would either raze the Knoxville headquarters or leave the center with no room for expansion, the faculty moved in 1972 to a 104 acre farm twenty-five miles east of Knoxville near the town of New Market, Tennessee. Although a nationwide fundraising campaign financed construction on the new property, Highlander's familiar financial shortages remained exceptionally severe well into the 1970s. Staff members found it difficult to describe current Highlander projects to supporters who still thought of the school in terms of its past civil rights activities. Sharp disputes arose among the staff not only over the allocation of funds but also over school policy and the management of Highlander programs. Myles Horton's retirement as an active staff member in the early 1970s was followed by such deep divisions among the staff that a beleaguered Conrad Browne left Highlander in 1971. His successor, staff member Frank Adams, failed to win the confidence of his colleagues. When Adams took an indefinite leave of absence for health reasons, the center's executive council elected Mark Clark president and educational director in 1972. The subsequent reorganization of the staff reduced but did not end the internal dissension at Highlander.

What was most troubling to the staff in the mid-1970s was the apparent lack of overall direction in Highlander's educational program. The demand for workshops was decreasing; enrollment was declining; the enthusiasm of those attending residence sessions was waning; and for all the time, money, and efforLL spent in Appalachia, staff members could .-eport few substantial accomplishments. They had not yet found a productive approach to Appalachia's enormous and complex problems. Clark pointed out to the staff that the issues confronting Appalachia were still very much alive and becoming part of larger, interrelated developments important not only to Appalachia but to the South and other countries as well.

Concluding that what Clark called "the myth of Highlander" was no longer valid, the Highlander staff began the difficult process of redefining its constituency, the geographic scope of its activities, and the issues that could be effectively addressed through its education program. While their efforts remained largely centered on Appalachia, staff members steadily broadened their curriculum to place the area's problems in a regional, national, and international context. Between 1972 and 1982 they held approximately 200 residence workshops and conferences on subjects such as strip mining, absentee land ownership and mineral leasing, tax and public school reform, the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Appalachian Regional Commission, rural economic development, synthetic fuels, toxic waste management, and Appalachian music and culture. They also conducted extensive field work in rural Appalachian communities in Kentucky, \Vest Virginia, Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina, and Ohio. After officials of the United Mine Workers asked the staff in 1975 to help strengthen community-controlled rural health clinics, Highlander's health program grew to encompass a wide range of environmental and occupational health concerns. Regarding both Appalachia and lesser developed nations around the world as the victims of exploitation by transnational corporations, the faculty brought union and community leaders from Tanzania, Wales, Brazil, Mexico, and several other countries to Highlander to share their perspectives on the effects of outside corporate control.

Highlander's research services also expanded to provide individuals and groups with information affecting their lives as well as the skills to investigate the causes of their problems. Union members, farmers, and local activists learned to become their own researchers and to use their findings to develop coalitions and strategies to battle the powerful and counter the information disseminated by large corporations and government agencies. Such an approach produced well-publicized results. In southeast Tennessee a probe into the record of a giant coal company helped stop the firm's plans to create the largest strip mine in Appalachia. In 1981 Highlander published We're Tired of Being Guinea Pigs, a handbook reviewing some of the potential health problems associated with major Appalachian industries and illustrating how citizens could confront local environmental health hazards. The center's staff was also involved in an unprecedented study of land ownership in Appalachia. Nearly one hundred activists, scholars, and individuals associated with the Appalachian Alliance pored over tax rolls and deed books in eighty selected counties in six Appalachian states to determine the primary owners of more than 55,000 parcels of land and minerals representing some 20,000,000 acres. The seven-volume, 1,800-page survey, completed in 1981, furnished solid evidence of the connection between the high concentration of land and mineral ownership among a few absentee and corporate owners and such long-standing regional problems as inadequate tax revenues, public services, and housing; the loss of agricultural lands; the exploitation of mineral resources; and environmental damage. To the Highlander staff the land study was a prime example of the way in which research and education could be used to build the power of ordinary southerners. It revived once again the hope that rural Appalachians could coalesce around a common issue and act to gain more control over and benefit from the land and its resources. If staff members had moved beyond the "myth" of Highlander by the time a thousand friends gathered to celebrate the school's fiftieth anniversary in 1982, they nonetheless remained conscious of the continuing influence of its history on their work. They had deposited Highlander's records in archives in Wisconsin and Tennessee, organized a social history collection at the center, and paid added attention to the institution's heritage in their publications. Hubert Sapp, a Harvard-educated black Alabamian who had served as Martin Luther King, Jr.'s special assistant in SCLC, became the center's new director in 1982, signaling a renewal of Highlander's efforts in the Deep South. There seemed to be a general sense among board and staff members that, in the absence of the strong unifying elements of the labor organizing and civil rights campaigns of previous years, there was a greater need to search for lessons in Highlander's past that would help shape its future.

Indeed, the history of Highlander is in many ways the history of dissent and reform in the South since the onset of the Great Depression. Highlander was only one part of the struggle to organize labor unions in the South during the 1930s and 1940s, to achieve racial justice during the 1950s and 1960s, and to redistribute wealth and power in Appalachia during the 1970s. But because it did one thing better than any other institution in the region--because it educated industrial workers, farmers, blacks, and the poor to find their own solutions to their grievances--it played a crucial role in contributing to the gains made by these groups since 1932. To be sure, in the long run the overall progress made by southern labor unions, civil rights groups, and community organizations in Appalachia was not determined by Highlander's work. Southern industry has remained basically nonunionized and anti-union; the full promise of the civil rights revolution has not been realized; and reform efforts in Appalachia have not yet brought any fundamental changes to the region. Yet Highlander's education programs made each movement different and stronger than it might have been otherwise.

While each phase of the school's history had its own issues, programs, and consequent successes and failures, and while its name, location, and personnel changed over the years, Highlander's principles and purpose remained constant. Staff members dedicated themselves to the idea that education could be used to push for fundamental social, economic, and political change leading to what they saw as a more democratic and humane society. They held firmly to the idea that the poor and powerless, whatever their racial or ethnic backgrounds, had similar characteristics as well as similar problems, and .by coming together in informal group discussions these people could identify their common goals and find ways of working collectively toward attaining them. The staff therefore sought to make Highlander a school where southerners could build on the knowledge they had gained from experience so that they could take greater control of their own lives. Highlander's history and its ongoing programs still generate both praise and controversy. In 1983 Representative Ronald Dellums of California and hlayor Andrew Young of Atlanta nominated Highlander for the Nobel Peace Prize. In that same year North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms objected to the passage of a bill honoring Martin Luther King, Jr., with a federal holiday in his name, citing evidence linking the late civil rights leader to the Highlander Folk School, "a Communist, or at least a pro-Communist, training school." Burdened yet animated by its history, Highlander now faced its greatest challenge: to perpetuate Myles Horton's vision of a school committed to social and economic justice.

BIBLIOGRAPHI CAL NOTE

This article is largely based on the following primary sources: the Highlander Research and Education Center Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison; the Highlander, Myles Horton, and hlike Clark Papers, Highlander Research and Education Center, New Market, Tennessee; Highlander Reports (1961-1982); Knoxville Journal (1961-1963, 1966-1968); Knoxville News-Sentinel (1961, 1966-1968); Nashville Tennessean (1965-1968); Southern Patriot (1966-1968); and the author's oral interviews with Horton in 1978, 1980, 1982, and 1983. For complete documentation, see the author's "On the Cutting Edge: A History of the Highlander Folk School, 1932-1962" (Ph.D. dissertation, Vanderbilt University, 1985). There is a wealth of material concerning Highlander and the major individuals and organizations associated with it in archives, libraries, and other institutions throughout the South and in other parts of the country. In addition to the manuscript collections, newspapers, and oral interviews previously cited, a number of secondary sources help place the school's recent efforts at radical reform in a larger context.

Carl Tjerandsen, Education for Citizenship: A Foundation's Experience (1980) provides an informative summary of Highlander's voter education projects during the 1960s. The evolution of black radicalism during the decade is ably recounted in Howard Zinn, SNCC: The New Abolitionists (1964); Allen J. Matusow, "From Civil Rights to Black Power: The Case of SNCC, 1960-1966," in Twentieth-Centurv America: Recent Interpretations, eds. Barton J. Bernstein and Allen J. Matusow (1969); Clayborne Carson, In Stru~gle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (1981); and Mary Aickin Rothschild, A Case of Black and White: Volunteers and the Southern Freedom Summers, 1964-1965 (1982).

Several studies elaborate on Highlander's contention that the persistent ills besetting southern Appalachia stem from the continued exploitation and domination of outside industrial interests. See James Branscome, "Annihilating the Hillbilly: The Appalachians' Struggle with America's Institutions," Katallagete 3 (Winter 1971); Roger M. Williams, "TVA and the Strippers," World, 19 June 1973; John Egerton, "Appalachia: The View from the Hills," Progressive 39 (Feb. 1975); Helen Matthews Lewis, Linda Johnson, and Donald Askins, eds., Colonialism in Modern America: The Appalachian Case (1978); David E. Whisnant, Modernizing the Mountaineer: People, Power and Planning in Appalachia (1980); Lewis and hlyles Horton, "Transnational Corporations and the Migration of Industries in Latin America and Appalachia," in Appalachia/America: Proceedings of the 1980 Appalachia Studies Conference, ed. Wilson Somerville (1981); Egerton, "Appalachia's Absentee Landlords," Progressive 45 (June 1981); Ronald D. Eller, hliners, Millhands. and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South, 1880-1930 (1982); Whisnant, All That is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region (1983); and The Appalachian Land Ownership Task Force, Who Owns A~palachia? Landownership and Its Impact (1983). IN AIEMOR I ALI

Henry Lee Swint longtime member and friend of the Kentucky-Tennessee A.S.A.