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| Erskine Caldwell (Carl Van Vechten) |
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| Miriam Sizer |
When I first started hearing about Miriam Sizer, I couldn't understand her motivations. She seemed to be putting far too much effort into her studies of the mountain people. I knew about her contributions to the book, 'Hollow Folk' and the government study that preceded it. Yet there seemed to be nothing else that came out of her studies. Though she does get some credit in the book, that didn't explain the sustained effort that she put into her studies over several years.
Again I went to the historical record to see what was going on. I wanted to see if Miriam Sizer reflected her times. What I found that seemed to explain things was a book titled Tobacco Road. At the top of the NY Times Bestseller list during much of the thirties (a list that only began in the thirties), Tobacco Road seemed to dominate the literary scene. Written by Erskine Caldwell, the book told a sordid story about a poor southern family named the Bunglers.
What eventually became clear to me was that this book exemplified what the literary world was doing at the time of Miriam Sizers' study of the mountain people. Everyone who was anyone was writing about the poverty of the south. The book had even been turned into a major Broadway play, launching Hollywood careers for many of its actors and making a fortune for Caldwell. It seemed Miriam Sizer might have thought 'Hollow Folk' could be her Tobacco Road.
Later I would find that Erskine Caldwell had been Miriam Sizer's classmate at the University of Virginia. Caldwell had attended UVA at the same time she was completing her Masters in English. More than that, her thesis adviser, Atcheson Hench, was the same man whom Erskine Caldwell credits for teaching him how to write.
In fact, two years after Rothstein's assignment, Atcheson Hench would himself work with Rothstein's subjects. With the help of Miriam Sizer, he and Archibald Hill would in 1937 make twelve audio recordings of many of Rothstein's subjects up at what had been the popular resort Skyland.
What bothered me about this was that it seemed to be driving a stereotype about the mountain people. There was a Hillbilly stereotype that pervaded the way the mountain people were perceived by the very people trying to help them. Even the title of the discredited scientific study of the mountain people, Hollow Folk, spoke to this stereotype.
In turn the park also appeared to promote this stereotype. For one they sold the book Hollow Folk up until 1995. Only when a group of park descendants protested did they remove it from their shelves. This was odd considering that Hollow Folk had long been discredited. Additionally I found in their archives an image of a woman smoking a pipe. This was such a clear reference to the Lil' Abner stereotype that it startled me. With the image being used by the Reeders for the cover of their book Shenandoah Heritage, The Story of the People Before the Park, it too promoted this stereotype. The Hillbilly stereotype is also on display in the Department of Interior film, A Trip to Skyland and Shenandaoh National Park. In the film there are scenes of people dressed up as hillbillies. In my interviews I was told that mountain people had been paid by Pollock to dress up as Hillbillies for events at Skyland.
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| The Beverly Hillbillies |
To illustrate the influence of this background stereotype, I used the TV program, The Beverly Hillbillies. Since the program takes two of its characters from Tobacco Road, Pearl and Ellie Mae, it had a clear connection to Caldwell. Though Ellie Mae no longer has a harelip and there is no public seduction scene in the front yard, there is much that reflects on Tobacco Road.
The episode I chose, "The Clampet Look, " has a storyline that closely matches that of my film. With a plot that explores the perceptions of those endeavoring to feed and clothe the poor, it provided an ideal undercurrent to my narrative. In this episode, the Clampets' misjudge the situation of their 'poor' neighbors. They do not realize that their neighbors are not poor but only want to dress like them. This reflects the misperceptions of Miriam Sizer and the guests of Skyland towards their 'poor' Corbin Hollow neighbors. Hollow Folk is full of its writers' biases and repeatedly ignores facts that contradict its main thesis. As the story of "The Clampet Look" is being told through an obvious Hillbilly stereotype, using The Beverly Hillbillies also worked to raise important questions about that stereotype. Indeed it worked so well that it troubled me.
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| Image from Goddard's The Kallikaks |
Later I came to learn that after The Beverly Hillbillies ceased production in the early 70's it was replaced by a sitcom called The Kallikaks. Staring Bonnie Ebsen, the daughter of Buddy Ebsen (Uncle Jed) from The Beverly Hillbillies, and Peter Palmer who starred in the film Lil Abner, the TV program depicts an Appalachian Family that has moved out to California to run a gas station.
This was stunning yet confirmed the logic of using the Beverly Hillbillies in my film. To understand why you have to look to the origin of the name Kallikak. Kallikak is an invented name created for the famous eugenic book titled, The Kallikas. Written by Henry H Goddard in 1912, The Kallikaks was the model for eugenic thought before it was soundly discredited. Prior to the book, the name didn't exist.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the family at the center of Caldwell's book, Tobacco Road, was also part of a eugenic study. Before the publication of Tobacco Road, Erskine Caldwell's father, Ira, had written about the 'Bunglers' in three separate articles for eugenic periodicals. It is believed that his father's studies of this family formed the basis for Tobacco Road. Paul Lombardo writes about Caldwell's link to eugenics in his book, A Century of Eugenics in America.
IMDB Link to the TV Show, The Kallikaks
Wikipedia Description of Goddard's Book, The Kallikaks
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