Deep Thought: What Would Davy Crockett Do?
Created | Updated Aug 10, 2024
Deep Thought: What Would Davy Crockett Do?
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Say not thou, What is the cause that the former days were better than these? for thou dost not enquire wisely concerning this.
– Ecclesiastes 7:10, Authorised Version
Right now I am deeply engrossed in a book by Harriette Simpson Arnow (1908-1986) called The Flowering of the Cumberland, published in 1963. Its approach to ethnography and history is a little unorthodox and very rambling, but the book is enlightening to me. I'm learning a lot about the history of Middle Tennessee, where my paternal ancestors lived.
Ms Arnow grew up on the Kentucky side of that region. She later taught school in remote parts of Pulaski County. She wrote both fiction and non-fiction: one of her novels was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize, losing to William Faulkner. I became interested in her after seeing the tv movie version of The Dollmaker, which starred Jane Fonda. She obviously knew a lot about life in the Appalachians.
It is obvious that for The Flowering of the Cumberland, Ms Arnow read every source she could get her hands on: historical works, yes, but also primary documents of every kind from school primers to magazines to personal letters and diaries. If it was there, she found it. And the picture she paints of those people is. . . not at all what you'd expect, unless of course, you had access, as I have, to childhood memories of some very old people who lived in that region. In which case, you might say, 'Oh, hey. That makes sense.'
For example, this is something she wrote about people who lived in the Cumberland River area in the early 1800s. She's talking about their aversion to the legislation of morality.
Such troubling questions as birth control, public funds for religious schools, or what books a public library should and should not possess, could not of course vex the pioneer. Most believed in individual responsibility; if a book were bad, the individual could refrain from the reading of it; nobody believed that the function of society was to protect the individual from either strong drink or lewd women.
Now, I wouldn't mention this if it were not for the fact that this information would be likely to astonish the Nashville school board these days.
Tennessee has become ground zero for book banning and challenges at local schools. It has even been found on numerous lists of states with the most book bans.
– WKRN, Nashville
This would have appalled Harriette Arnow, but not surprised her: she knew where the bodies were buried. Like me, she had traced the first stirrings of squeamishness to that true culprit: the horrible 1830s, which made everybody afraid to talk about chicken legs. She found more or less the exact moment when somebody's grandchildren told people, 'Don't come to our house: Grandmother is a horribly foul-mouthed old woman.' Grandma, of course, called a spade a spade, because she was honest and forthright and didn't believe in hypocrisy. In that, she was like my grandmother, an open-hearted mountain woman who'd never heard of political correctness or euphemisms.
For her book, Harriette Arnow sought out evidence of the books the early people owned and read. The Bible, sure, but also the works of Benjamin Franklin. Josephus, too, and Hume and Locke, and all of the serious 18th-century works: Voltaire, Whitefield (a famous preacher, don't sweat it), John Wesley (ditto), and Thomas Paine (an atheist). Novels they read, but wouldn't have considered teaching in school, too frivolous. They thought Shakespeare was kind of a parvenu compared to Homer. And they loved to read.
It seems safe to say the average Cumberlander spent more time with and money on books than does the average citizen of the United States today; and certain it is the books furnished sturdier intellectual fare. Taken as a whole they also represented a much less narrow intellectual pattern than could be found in a community of comparable size today.
How do you like them apples? Yeah, they talked and spelled in finest 18th-century disregard for what the censorious 21st was going to think about them. And they had puncheon floors, so they kept the babies in bed with them because snakes sometimes came up through the floorboards. Oh, and the mothers breastfed their babies in church during the sermon. Take that. But they read more than most people today. Their heads were not full of sawdust, so there. It still hurts my brain to think about the kinds of mathematical things they could do without a calculator. So don't sell them short, these people of mine.
The reason I bring this up is not to brag on a particular subgroup of humanity. Nor is it to dwell in the past (see Bible quote above). It is so that I can yell at the present. Because those loony politicians are at it again and sensible people need to call a halt to the grift.
No, you nincompoops, banning books isn't going back to basic values. In fact, it's a newfangled, wrong-headed idea that even Andrew Jackson, that perfidious Middle Tennessee politician, wouldn't have dared to try and foist on people. Congressman David Crockett wouldn't have stood for it – and he hunted bears to pay for his education.
It is a common tendency of people, when the going gets tough, to want to call out, 'Back to basics!' As Colleen McCullough describes Caesar's wife, they ask, 'What would Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi do?' Sure. But if you're going to do that, please go and find out what they really did. Otherwise, some slick-talking used-car salesman of a political huckster – naming no names, but one of them has written a book rightly hated in all Appalachian Studies departments – will try to sell you what my ancestors called 'a pig in a poke.' Don't fall for it.
