Simon J. Bronner - Folk Nation: Folklore in the Creation of American Tradition

SIMON J. BRONNER is distinguished professor of American Studies and folklore and coordinator of the American Studies Program at the Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg. He has also taught at Harvard University, the University of California at Davis, and Osaka University (Japan). He has published widely on American folklore and history, including books on intellectual history such as Lafcadio Hearns America (2002), Following Tradition: Folklore in the Discourse of American Culture (1998), and Popularizing Pennsylvania: Henry W. Shoemaker and the Progressive Uses of Folklore and History (1996); on material and consumer culture, such as The Carvers Art: Crafting Meaning from Wood (1996) and Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display of Goods in America, 1880-1920 (1989); and on the folklore of youth, such as Piled Higher and Deeper: The Folklore of Student Life (1995) and American Childrens Folklore (1988; winner of the Opie Prize). Professor Bronners Old Time Music Makers of New York State (1988) won the John Ben Snow Foundation Prize for best book on upstate New York and the Regional Council of Historical Societies Award of Merit. Formerly the editor of the journals Folklore Historian and Material Culture, he now edits book series on Material Worlds for the University Press of Kentucky and on Pennsylvania German History and Culture for Penn State Press and the Pennsylvania German Society. He has received the Mary Turpie Award from the American Studies Association and the Wayland Hand Prize for folklore and history from the American Folklore Society.

SIMON J. BRONNER

As aging former president Theodore Roosevelt stepped to the podium of the National Institute of Arts and Letters on November 16, 1916, his patriotism obliged him to comment on the previous speakers cachet in the eyes of the gathered American intelligentsia. He followed the haughty Monsieur Lanson who riveted the audience with his celebration of French fine art and refined literature, claiming for it a national genius. Roosevelt fumed as he noticed the audiences embrace of European tastes, even though they had been born and raised with things American. Relishing a good fight for national pride, he mustered all his energy to advocate for the greatness of an American soul evident in emerging national expressions. His inspiration, he said, was Irelands Lady Gregory, who had collected folklore in Irish villages to rouse a national literature. He noted that her work along national lines had not diminished her international reputation. She found her genius in the common ground of the peoples lore. The greatest work must bear the stamp of nationalism, he puffed. Rather than being embarrassed by the earthiness of American literary and artistic settings, he pointed to them as the nations strength. In fact, he offered a cultural proclamation as heartily as any political decree: American work must smack of our own soil, mental and moral, no less than physical, or it will have little of permanent value.

For Roosevelt, that soil, and the grounding it represented for the flowering of American civilization, were nowhere more evident than in folklore. Enamored with the West and the hardy values it generated, Roosevelt while in the White House was especially taken with the effort of folklorist John Lomax to collect cowboy songs. The president became excited at the prospect of the material being elevated to the status of the ancient European sagas he admired so much as a student of classics. He also was astute in realizing that these sagas became national symbols as well as sources of literature as they persisted through oral tradition. Roosevelt praised the primitive and striking beauties of Irish and Norse epics; he extolled them as a treasure-house of literature that stirred national purpose. The pioneer experience in the expanse of the West, he thought, loosened old ethnic and regional ties and reconstructed them into a medley sounding an enlivened American identity. In the oral tradition of cowboy songs resonating with high mountains, grand rivers, and vast plains of the frontier and rugged characters engaging in bold adventures, Roosevelt heard keynotes stirring his robust national type.

Roosevelt and Lomax met in a place that is imbued with a good share of western legend and songCheyenne, Wyomingon August 28, 1910. Lomax sought Roosevelts endorsement of his forthcoming Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (1910), often considered the first important collection of American folk songs. Although his folklore teachers at HarvardGeorge Lyman Kittredge and Barrett Wendellencouraged his work for what it could reveal of ancient ballad origin and composition by an isolated and lonely folk to the development of literature generally, Lomax ended up framing the songs in terms of the traditionoccupational and regionalthey contributed to a national mythology.

Lomaxs use of tradition was hardly an idle reference. Rather than offering a literature of forms and structures that diffused across borders, he presented the accumulation of songs as an overarching, almost spiritual force he called tradition. For him, cowboy songs captured the rough-hewn essence of America. While acknowledging the significance of the songs as a survival of the Anglo-Saxon ballad spirit that was active in secluded districts in England and Scotland even after the coming of Tennyson and Browning, Lomax changed direction when he offered: They are chiefly interesting to the present generation, however, because of the light they throw on the conditions of pioneer life, and more particularly because of the information they contain concerning that unique and romantic figure in modern civilization, the American cowboy. It was a generation that witnessed America becoming the worlds industrial giant, and with that development, it noticed the passing of the frontier and community life. It was a group that witnessed the greatest wave of immigration to that date on Americas shores, and it raised questions of what it meant to be American. And it was also a generation that in the wake of the countrys centennial celebrated the nations coming of age and made its claim as the new great civilization in history.

In 1934, Lomax took a giant step after representing the American type in the cowboy by compiling a national canon of folk song entitled American Ballads and Folk Songs . In his foreword, Kittredge with his love for the literary epic expressed happiness that the old familiar fields are not neglected while admitting that the whole thing is intensely American.

At their meeting in 1910, Roosevelt nodded knowingly as Lomax iterated his complaint about the lack of appreciation that Americans had for their own traditions. The older man had, after all, campaigned vigorously as a firebrand candidate for president to rally public commitment to both environmental and cultural conservation. Roosevelt chimed in that Lomaxs songs were comparable to the Heroic Age ballads of England because life on the frontier repeated conditions of the Middle Ages. In his view, legendary outlaw Jesse James took over for Robin Hood; and, in reference to Norse saga, the American expansion of the frontier was the old Viking spirit pressing westward and overcoming and dispossessing an inferior race. Lomax was taken aback by the racial idea, which he recorded in a letter to his wife, but the conversation returned to the lesson of the cowboy songs for the country. Roosevelt then took out some paper and resolutely handlettered a page-and-a-half note that was reproduced over the years in the many editions of Lomaxs book. Roosevelt wrote of the folk song collections appeal to the people of all our country. The phrase is noteworthy for the rhetorical emphasis on all. The frontier was indeed one of the distinctive characteristics he spoke of to the National Institute of Arts and Letters for work best worth doing for Americans because it represents our own national soul. In light of industrialization and expansion causing dramatic changes in society, Roosevelt became more concerned for the disappearance of the folkloric treasure house of literature from the frontier. With that legacy in the back of his mind, he concluded his note for Lomax with a call for preservation, referencing the specialness of this native folklore as American poetic texts. He averred the real importance to preserve permanently this unwritten ballad literature of the back country and the frontier.