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Creoles of the Mountains: Race, Regionalism, and Modernity in Progressive Era Appalachia
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 September 2020
Abstract
This article investigates how Progressive Era writers, both popular and scientific, helped to construct multiracial identities alongside competing efforts to enshrine race into strictly black and white terms. Existing scholarship on race in the Progressive Era has not sufficiently analyzed the presence of multiracial populations. Instead, scholars have treated state and federal efforts to police racial boundaries, namely through anti-miscegenation laws and the census, as evidence that multiracial persons were a legal impossibility. However, scientific and popular writing on Appalachia provides a conceptual space in which multiracialism was not only a conceptual possibility, but was engendered. Appalachia took on increased importance during the Progressive Era as both intellectuals and reformers used the region to frame their anxieties about the limits of modernity and the threat of racial mixing. The region was home to white mountaineers who appeared arrested in time, existing in uncomfortable proximity to newly discovered groups with white, black, and Native American ancestry who also seemed to have been shunned by civilization. In attempting to understand the peculiar conditions of Appalachia, these Progressive Era writers helped to advance some of the first ideas about what it meant to be mixed-race in America.
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- The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , January 2022 , pp. 19 - 39
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE)
References
Notes
1 “Hill Dwellers Live Like Nomads,” Duluth News Tribune, May 29, 1921, 4.
2 Ibid.
3 “Town Puzzled by Wild Family,” New York Times, May 2, 1921, 16; William James Dobbin, “Wild Men Within Commuting Distance,” New York Tribune, June 12, 1921, D1; and “Village Shrinks From Contact with ‘Poor, Unwashed Whites,’” New York Tribune, May 1, 1921, 2.
4 “Family Living Like Barbarians,” Tulsa World, May 22, 1921, 4.
5 “Finds Wild Family From the Ramapos,” New York Times, May 1, 1921, 7. The racial ambiguity of communities like the Jackson Whites is also borne out in their name, which carried as much lore as the population itself. While two separate origin narratives are thought to explain the etymology of the Jackson Whites, the most common claims that the term is a contraction of “Jacks”—the term used by white northerners to refer to freed slaves—and “Whites”—the white mountaineers who lived in the region and intermarried with the freed slaves and local Native Americans. It should be noted that the term “Jackson White” is held in disrepute by a majority of this community, as the term is seen as pejorative in nature and a denial of their long-standing claim to indigenous ancestry. Known today as the Ramapough Mountain Indians, the shift in nomenclature is evidence of a decades-long battle to determine the boundaries of black and native identity. For the purposes of this paper, the author will use the terms “Jackson White” as well as “Ramapo people” as the historical texts used them. However, this usage should not be read as a commentary on the racial identity of the group in question, but merely in keeping with the usage of the time. For more on the nomenclature and identity struggles of the Ramapough Mountain Indians, see Cohen, David Steven, The Ramapo Mountain People (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986)Google Scholar.
6 “Hill Dwellers Live Like Nomads.”
7 Calvin Beale coined the term “triracial isolates,” although these communities are known by a number of derisive names, including “racial dropouts,” “racial miscreants,” and sometimes “racial islands.” Beale, Calvin L., “American Triracial Isolates: Their Status and Pertinence to Genetic Research,” Eugenics Quarterly 4 (Dec. 1957): 187CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 “Hill Dwellers Live Like Nomads.”
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12 In this essay, I rely on Jill Olumide's definition of “mixed-race,” which she defines as “the patterns and commonality of experience among those who obstruct whatever purpose race is being put to at a particular time.” Olumide, Jill, Raiding the Gene Pool: The Social Construction of Race (London: Pluto Press, 2002)Google Scholar.
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36 Conklin, Edwin G., Heredity and Environment in the Development of Men (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1915), 15CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The perceived moral character of a racial group also impacted views on race mixing. Marjorie MacDill, a journalist who typically wrote on issues related to zoology and ecology, posited that the “thrift” and “mental superiority” typical of the Chinese-Hawaiian qualified this group as a successful hybrid. By contrast, the Filipino-Hawaiian, a mixture of “Japanese, Chinese, Caucasian, and Negro blood” was “overly emotional and weakly inhibited,” most likely due to the conflicting racial strains present. See MacDill, Marjorie, “Will the Blending of Races Produce Super-Men?,” Science News-Letter 12 (Nov. 1927): 338 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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47 Despite a long history of depicting Appalachia as a solidly white region, scholarship of the more recent past has begun to explore the region's diversity, particularly in regard to the racially transgressive nature of the region's social relations. For example, Darlene Wilson and Patricia Beaver have attributed the high incidence of interracial coupling in Appalachia to the social and geographic isolation of the region, which shielded residents from the same legal and social regulations against miscegenation operating in other parts of the country. See Wilson, Darlene and Beaver, Patricia D., “Transgressions in Race and Place: The Ubiquitous Native Grandmother in America's Cultural Memory,” in Neither Separate Nor Equal: Women, Race, and Class in the South, ed. Smith, Barbara Ellen (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999), 50Google Scholar.
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55 Ibid., 30.
56 Vincent, “A Retarded Frontier,” 4.
57 “The Jackson Whites: Strange People Living Between New York and New Jersey.”
58 Estabrook, “Triple Crosses in the South,” 58–59.
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88 Ibid.
89 Ibid.
90 Ibid.
91 Ibid.
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