More Historic Screenings

Last week there were two more historic screenings of Rothstein's First Assignment.  On Wednesday, November 9th there was a screening at Sweet Briar College in Amherst, Virginia, while the previous Saturday,  Rothstein's First Assignment was screened at Vinegar Hill Theater in Charlottesville as part of the Virginia Film Festival. 

The Sweet Briar screening on Wednesday evening was important for two reasons.  First, Sweet Briar played its own role in eugenics.  One of the authors of the famous eugenic book, Mongrel Virginians: The Win Tribe (1926), had been a Sweet Briar Professor just before its publication.   The Win Tribe focused on a poor interracial community in Amherst County so called 'WIN'  due its 'White, Indian and Negro' heritage.   Its authors falsely connected the community's poverty to this interracial makeup.  Funded by the Carnegie Institution in Washington, DC, The WIN Tribe's lead author was Arthur Estabrook.  Below is a link to an image from Estabrook's photograph's of The 'WIN Tribe. '  Estabrook kept a scrapbook of photographs as part of his 'documentation.'  His photographs reflect the role of photography in eugenic studies. 

"Callie Black" from Estabrook's Scrapbook

http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/html/eugenics/static/images/1255.html


The second reason the screening was important was that it was attended by Mary Francis.  To a large degree Mary Francis is Rothstein's First Assignment's central character.  Though her appearance comes at the end of the film, it is her family that was a the center of Rothstein's First Assignment.  Virtually all of her aunts and uncles had children that were sent to the Colony. For reasons that are still not clear, Rothstein gave more attention to her family than any other.

At the age of 7 she was sent to the Colony in Amherst County where she was forcibly sterilized.  As Mary Bishop reported,  the operation almost killed her. Mary wasn't released from the Colony until the late fifties.  She believes her marriage dissolved because she couldn't bear children.



Having Mary Francis at the Sweet Briar screening of Rothstein's First Assignment was also important for Mary Francis.  Mary Bishop, who has reported extensively on eugenics in Virginia and first reported Mary Francis's story,  explained to me that most former residents of the Colony slip into obscurity.  The shame that comes with being labeled "feebleminded"  creates its own exile.   Few are willing to talk about their experiences.  Of the thousands of individuals who were sterilized in Virginia, only a handful have been willing to go on the record. 

When Mary Bishop heard that Mary Francis was going to come, she decided to also attend.  She wanted to witness the event.  It was an emotional experience for everyone.  Mary Francis's caretaker was so moved that she cried. 

Mary Bishop with Mary Francis (seated) at Sweet Briar

The second historic screening occurred as part of the Virginia Film Festival in Charlottesville.  On Nov 5 at Vinegar Hill Theater in Charlottesville, Rothstein's First Assignment opened to a packed house.  The screening had sold out the day before and by some counts there were over 60 people without tickets who wanted to get in. Even those of us on the panel had difficulty getting tickets for our spouses.

Part of the reason it was so popular was that RFA had received a large amount of press leading up to the event.  The local paper, The Daily Progress led with RFA in its coverage of The Virginia Film Festival ('Rothstein's First Assignment' examines documentary truth).  Sandy Hausman of NPR covered it (A Dark Part of Virginia's Past Comes to the Big Screen) while even the local TV station, Channel 29 picked it up (Experimental Documentary Tells a Different Story).

The other part of its popularity likely had much to do with the fact that Rothstein's First Assignment is largely a local story.  Many elements of the story connect with Charlottesville and the University of Virginia.  The social worker, Miriam Sizer who apparently worked with Rothstein (she was photographed by him) received her Masters from UVA.  While Shenandoah National Park is popular with Charlottesville residents. 

There was also the local support of Madison and Orange Counties.  In what has been a bit of a surprise,  there has been more support than I anticipated from descendants of mountain residents who were displaced when they created the Park.  I had feared that with the unorthodox approach I took in making the film (it was originally intended to be an experimental film), I would lose this local audience.  In my efforts to have RFA structurally explore the idea of documentary truth while it conventionally questions the 'truth' of Rothstein's assignment, I feared I might alienate local residents.

To my surprise it turns out that they have given Rothstein's First Assignment a large amount of its support.  Indeed at a screening in Madison one descendant came to my defense during a Q and A asserting the truth of the sterilizations,  while a viewer at a screening in Orange asked how she could have her daughter see it.  Local screenings have often brought to light stories unknown to me.  

As case in point, though Rothstein's First Assignment  has been screened locally three times, there were still surprises at the Virginia Film Festival.  For one I was able to fill in a missing link in one of Rothstein's photographs.  A woman came up to me after the screening and identified her mother in one of Rothsteins's images.  Most of the children are not identified in Rothstein's captions making it difficult to track them down.  While during the Q and A after the screening, a man made a claim that individuals from UVA were not only connected to eugenics, but also to the famous Tuskegee experiment.  A claim I had not heard before.*
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* It has been brought to my attention that Paul Lombardo explains the link to Tuskegee in an article with Gregory Dorr titled, Eugenics, Medical Education, and the Public Health Service: Another Perspective on the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. 

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Cecil Brown, the Roman Coliseum and Fennel

Cecil Brown with Coliseum photograph in background

Cecil's interview was another instance of one thing leading to another. When I had interviewed his relative, Jimmy Brown, Jimmy told me that Cecil had the photograph of the Roman Coliseum in Rothstein's portrait of his grandfather, Postmaster Brown. That was my original intention for interviewing Cecil. Since with John Dodson, I had located the sign for the Nethers Post Office, I thought that adding the photograph of the Coliseum to the mix would give a re-photographic texture to my film.

Postmaster Brown   A Rothstein

It also seemed odd to me that someone who was described as poor would have such a large and wonderful photograph of the Coliseum in 1935. To my mind this indicated education and something beyond poverty. It contradicted the narrative I was familiar with, that all the mountain residents were poor and uneducated. Not to mention Postmaster Brown is posing with a book in Rothstein's photograph.

Mrs Dyer with child  A Rothstein

What I didn't know was that Cecil had guided Rothstein up into the mountians to take his photographs of Mrs Dyer and her children. This came up when I was showing Cecil, Rothstein's book of photographs. When we came to the page with the caption reading 'Mrs Dodson,' he corrected the book and preceded to tell us his story of taking Rothstein to the Dyer home. He didn't remember much about Rothstein. All he could remember was the car that he drove. He agreed to take Rothstein up into the mountains just to get a ride in the car.
That change in identification would later prove important when I went to look up the records, though I didnt understand it at the time. It would also explain Rothstein's curious edit of the this family's images. When looked at as a whole, Rothstein's images of this family tell us a very different story.

Another story came up when we got to Rothstein's picture of Fennel Corbin. The first thing Cecil said about Fennel is that he had shot a man. Its a bit of local lore that Fennel shot and killed a Dodson boy. Everyone seems to have their own version of this story, even Pollock, the owner of Skyland. Cecil's version seems to combine two stories of shootings in Corbin Hollow as Fennel couldn't have been old enough to serve in the Civil war. Yet Cecil's version tells much about Fennel's reputation in the community. Fennel's family seems to have been the poorest in the neighborhood and his neighbors had various responses to that poverty.

Fennel as photographed by Rothstein

Fennel from A Trip to Skyland

What was intriguing to me was how much media attention Fennel's family got for their poverty. They were featured in the film, Trip to Skyland and Shenandoah National Park. They were at the center of the book, Hollow Folk. The Park photographed them both before and after Rothstein's visit and there are even audio recordings of the family made in 1937. Not to mention the newspaper articles in The Washington Post and the New York Times. That Rothstein spent most of his time photographing just this extended family clearly wasn't accidental. It was more likely preordained. The key to this media attention of course was Miriam Sizer.

Who Was With Rothstein on His Assignment?

Arthur Rothstein

In doing my research before setting out, I came across Paula Rabinowitz's "Voyeurism and Class Consciousness: James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men." The article raised a number of questions for me. Most notably, what was Rothstein's relationship to his subjects? We often think that Rothstein just stumbled across his subjects. That like a city street photographer he came across his subjects in his random walks in the mountains. Rothstein largely makes that claim in the Richard Doud interview.

"I went out there and was in a cabin on the top of a mountain for a few weeks, walked around and became acquainted with these people. At the beginning they were very shy about having pictures taken, but I would carry my camera along and make no attempt to take pictures. "

Oral history interview with Arthur Rothstein, 1964 May 25, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

But I sensed that that wasn't the case. As a photographer myself, I felt that someone must have arranged for him to photograph the people that he did.  It made no sense that he could've have found his subjects on his own.   He was twenty years old and by his own admission had rarely been outside of New York City.

Rothstein's assignment reminded me of an assignment I had done in Nepal on AIDS/HIV. In this situation, even though I had gone to school in Nepal and was familiar with it, I was dependent on an NGO (non government organization) to lead me to my subjects. Though I  didn't usually photograph them, a social worker was always present while I worked. I was dependent on my subjects relationship to this NGO to get my photographs for the story.  

So I was curious, who was with Rothstein on his assignment? What was their relationship to his subjects? Did it reflect the same sense of class consciousness that Rabinowitz writes about? At first I thought Rabinowitz overstated things. After all, the FSA narrative suggests Rothstein was there to help the poor. Indeed the Washington Post article that was published with Rothstein's photographs is titled,  Government Moves Mountain Residents from 19th century to 20th century.  

But then I realized the proximity of Rothstein's subjects to the elite resort, Skyland, and I began to question my assumptions. There clearly was a relationship between the poor residents of Corbin Hollow and their rich politically powerful neighbors nearby. A relationship that had been developing for over thirty years before Rothstein showed up. Many Corbin Hollow residents worked at Skyland and there were also Corbin Hollow residents who begged at the resort.

In my interviews I heard many stories about the financial relationship of Corbin Hollow residents and the resort Skyland.  Some residents cleared trails and supplied firewood for the resort. Other residents even sold  George Pollock rattlesnakes for his famous snake dance.  And there were the begging boards that poor residents used to ask for money.   Everyone it seemed had a financial relationship to Pollock and his resort.

Eddie Nicholson home 1933 or 1934

Eddie Nicholson 1935 (Rothstein)

There also was a curious photograph in Audrey Horning's book, In the Shadow of Ragged Mountain. In the chapter on Corbin Hollow there is a picture that shows a group of 'outsiders' visiting Corbin Hollow. This picture was significant to me because it showed what is normally cropped out of a picture, the photographer and the 'others' who are with him. Instead of the normal framing, it showed a group of men with a
photographer, probably Dr Sexton, visiting Eddie Nicholson's house and filming his wife, Blanche. You can see Sexton leaning over in the foreground looking into his viewfinder.


When I finally tracked this image down at the Park's Archives in Luray, the caption on the back said they were visiting the 'Hollow Folk,' a direct reference to the book Hollow Folk. It spoke volumes to me about the relationship between Corbin Hollow residents and their benefactors. It was starting to look like Rabinowitz was right. When I realized that Rothstein had gone up to that same house less than three years later and photographed Eddie Nicholson sitting on the back porch I wondered,  could he have been accompanied by a similar entourage?

I found my answer in a Washington Post Article published on November 3, 1935. In a feature article, Rothstein’s photographs are used in what is presumably his first published piece.  Titled, Blue Ridge Hillbillies Get a Transfer-From 19^th to 20^th Century, the article by Virginia Warren highlights the upcoming Resettlement of mountain residents to make way for the Park. 

Warren’s article provides a clear idea of how Rothstein worked. She tells us that she was accompanied by, ‘a Rural Resettlement Official, a photographer and a reporter for a great British newspaper.’[1] With the added information that they had a guide, the local school teacher, Warren presents us with scenario similar to what we see in the Sexton photograph.

 

Like Hollow Folk, Warren’s article focuses on the same extended Corbin Hollow family.  At times paraphrasing the book, Warren’s article is clearly influenced by it.  She even repeats the odd assertion that the happiness of Corbin Hollow residents is a sign of their backwardness.   Though she changes the names from the book, names that have already been changed by Hollow Folk’s authors, it is clear that she is talking about the same people.  ‘Mazie,’ a central figure in Hollow Folk becomes ‘Mattie’ and is likewise central in Warren’s article.  She is also central to Rothstein’s archive on this project.  

Yet in her description of Rothstein’s working situation, Warren seems to contradict Rothstein.    From Rothstein’s description we are led to believe that his selection criteria was random and that he was alone.  But with Warren’s article it’s clear that the Corbins essentially all lived next door to one another in upper Corbin Hollow.  In her article Warren describes going door to door in what appears to be an organized tour, 
 

 “The party halted at every cabin in the vicinity…[1]” 

Further contradicting Rothstein’s account, this ‘party’ has been set up to promote the Resettlement Project and had gone so far as to invite a foreign reporter.  In sharp contrast to Rothstein’s description, his subjects were part of a display that had been selected for him to photograph.

Indeed it would have been difficult for Rothstein to get to know the Corbins. There were a limited number of outsiders who could venture into Corbin Hollow.  Outsiders needed an introduction to the community, they reportedly could not wander in freely. Additionally Rothstein would have had difficulty communicating with his subjects.  They were well known to have an Old English dialect.  Only one outsider, Miriam Sizer, is reported to have learned this dialect.[2] That Rothstein could have just wandered around and gotten to know this extended Corbin Hollow family contradicts Warren’s article and all other accounts I could find. 

 

But even Warren’s article is wrong on its most basic point. The residents of Corbin Hollow did not participate in the Resettlement Project. Despite all comments to the contrary, the Corbin’s were not moved to any of the Resettlement camps.  Though the government still characterizes Rothstein’s project as,

 ‘to document the lives of some Virginia farmers who were being evicted to make way for the Shenandoah National Park and about to be relocated by the Resettlement Administration,’ [3]

this was not what happened.   

The Corbin’s were not even farmers.  Though Rothstein does photograph a number of farms in the region, they have no known connection to the Corbin Families at the center of his project.  That he photographs these farms and not the farmers who worked them is curious.[4] Given the characterization of Rothstein’s project by the government, it seems Rothstein’s photographs of these farms are meant to imply falsely that these were Rothstein’s subjects farms.        

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[1] Ibid.

[2] A recording I found of one of Rothstein’s subjects, ‘Mazie,’ made in 1937, makes clear that Rothstein could not have understood her.  This recording was made by UVA Professors Atcheson Hench and Archibald Hill and has Miriam Sizer doing the interview. 

[3] Documenting America.  Tenant Farmers. Library of Congress.  memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsahtml/fachap05.html. Accessed May 26, 2013.

[4] Further complicating this issue is the Via Case where a group of Apple Orchard owners were contesting the condemnation of their land to build the Park.  At the time of Rothstein’s project this case was before the Supreme Court.  The Supreme Court ultimately chose not to review their case.   

   

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[1] Warren, Virginia Lee.  Blue Ridge Hillbillies Get a Transfer -- From 19th to 20th Century

The Washington Post. Nov 3, 1935

[2] For reasons that are not entirely clear, the authors of Hollow Folk changed the names of both the locations and their residents.

Margaret Dodson, Uncle Benny and Pollock's Snakes

Margaret Dodson ©RRobinson

Finding Margaret Dodson turned out to be an incredible stroke of luck. While scouting to see if I could figure out where the mountain people had been settled in Madison County, I discovered that there was a road in Madison County named Resettlement Rd. On a lark, one day I decided to take a drive and see what I could find. I took my camera with me just in case.

While driving down Resettlement I came across a man named Wayne who was working in the yard. He was the only one outside so I pulled over and asked him if this was where they had sent the mountain people after moving them out. Surprising to me, he confirmed that it was. If fact he told me, his mother had lived up in the mountains before it was a Park. She was inside and he said he would ask her if she would agree to being interviewed. She did and so I went inside with my camera and a small microphone.

At the time I didn't really know what questions to ask, so I let Rothstein's images stir up Margaret's memories. It was clear when she got started that Wayne and her daughter Kitty, had been told all her stories many times. They seemed to know them almost better than she did and they often corrected her. And were a lot of stories to tell. She told me about how her mother (Wayne and Kitty's grandmother) had worked at Skyland, Pollocks resort for over seventy years. How she used to walk over two miles each way down a mountain trail to get to work.

'Uncle Benny' Arthur Rothstein

As we were going through Rothstein's book, unexpectedly, she came across a picture of her brother sitting on a porch with a guitar. No one knew this. The Dodson's had never seen Rothstein's book and he had simply captioned the picture, "son of a squatter." Luckily the camera was rolling and we got it on film. You can hear Wayne and Kitty's surprise to have their mother identify their uncle Benny.

Later Margaret Dodson told me a curious story. A story about how George Pollock, the owner of the Skyland, used to perform with snakes. And not just any snake but rattlesnakes and copperheads. It was the thing that she most remembered about him. She told me about how he kept his snakes in a bathtub. Until that is, one escaped and climbed into bed with him. That marked the end of it.

It was this snake story that would help me understand an important discovery. After interviewing Mrs Dodson, I went to the National Archives in College Park to see if they had any archival footage that I could use for my film. I was looking for anything that would help give context to Rothstein's images. Something to help tell the story and put things in context.

George Pollock from A Trip to Skyland

What I found was this strange film titled, A Trip to Skyland and Shenandoah National Park. Dated with a question mark 1936?, the film at first seem to be just what I was looking for. It had black and white footage of the Park from the 30's. The perfect sort of thing a filmmaker wants. But as I watched it further it started to become very strange. At one point, all the people in the film were dressed up in costumes. They were performing what appeared to be a ritual all dressed up as Arabs in black face. There was even a man performing with snakes who was at the center of this ritual. For awhile this puzzled me. I thought it might be some unrelated footage. But then I realized it was Pollock performing his snake dance up at Skyland. This was what Margaret Dodson had told me about, Pollock's famous snake dance. Without Margaret Dodson I might have overlooked it.

Later I would return to interview Margaret Dodson again to see if she could tell me more about this film. It was then that she would tell me her story about Miriam Sizer and the seven Corbin Hollow children who were taken to Washington DC to have their tonsils taken out.

Miriam Sizer, Erskine Caldwell and The Kallikaks

Erskine Caldwell (Carl Van Vechten)

What I thought would be a major theme in the film, but ended up being an undercurrent was that of social worker Miriam Sizer's connection to the bestselling writer of Tobacco Road, Erskine Caldwell.

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.

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.  

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