Mar 28th, 2017: America: It’s Folklore

[xoxoxoBruce]

During World War II, the painter, illustrator, and cartoonist William Gropper offered his services to the U.S. Treasury Department and the White House’s Office of War Information. He received a “Citation in recognition of fine assistance” from the Treasury Department and personal thanks from Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for “giving pictorial form to specific war information objectives” through propaganda posters and paintings.

In 1945 Gropper painted, “America: It’s Folklore”, and between 1946 and 1953, the State Department’s Overseas Library Program collected and distributed some 1,744 copies to disseminate “facts and solidly documented explanations of the United States.”
The 34-by-23-inch pictorial map was published by Associated American Artists, and sold by mail for $5, in the NY Times, Life, and other popular publications.



The State Dept loved it.
Teachers loved it.
Librarians loved it.
The people loved it.
Joe McCarthy didn’t love it.

Gropper was subpoenaed to appear before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations

Chief counsel Cohn asking, “Are you a member of the Communist Party?” As far as Cohn and McCarthy were concerned,
they already knew the answer. But after the artist invoked the Fifth Amendment, refusing to answer so as not to bear
witness against himself, Cohn pressed:
Mr. Cohn: Are you the William Gropper who has prepared various maps?
Mr. Gropper: I don’t understand that question. Prepared various maps?
Mr. Cohn: Did you prepare a map entitled “America, Its Folklore”?
Mr. Gropper: Have you got the map here?
Mr. Cohn: No; I don’t have the map here. Did you prepare a map entitled “America, Its Folklore”?
Mr. Gropper: I painted a map on American folklore, yes.
Gropper explained that he had received an advance from Associated American Artists, but that “no royalties came in.”

Gropper earned the dubious distinction of being among the first blacklisted artists in McCarthy-era America.
Joe McCarthy was a bad man, a very very bad man, a prototype for many later scumbag politicians.

link

[Griff]

A straight up asshole whose tune is being sung today.

Cool map Mr Gropper.

[glatt]

It's a fun map.

Growing up in Maine, I was taught that Paul Bunyan lived in the Maine woods. A French Canadian dude chopping trees in our north woods. I've since seen that states further west also claim him, but I certainly don't associate him with Idaho.

And John Henry raced the steam drill in West Virginia.

But I suppose the artist wasn't a folklore historian and didn't have the internet to fact check shit.

[Snakeadelic]

It's a glorious map! I also grew up with Paul Bunyan stories, but where I spent my early childhood was the Willamette Valley in northwestern Oregon. Our Bunyan tales were set in the Coast Range and Cascades and even some in BC's boreal forests. I think he's one of those folklore icons (along with Babe, who skidded trees for him in place of a draft horse) whose area of origin is often tailored to where the story's told.

And the whole point of folklore is the tales aren't history, but they're there to teach a lesson or reveal a theme. I think if you asked 10 people who grew up in different places but all loved Johnny Appleseed stories, they'd all give his home town as somewhere in the state where they grew up. Locations and even names can be changed but the lessons remain .

[Snakeadelic]

I've even read the story of the Pacing Mustang, a visually white wild horse that used the lateral gait still found in harness racing horses (pace) rather than the vastly more typical diagonal gait (trot). He was regarded as a menace because he had a habit of breaking into government-run 'remount stations' where cavalry horses were bred for the Army and stealing all the best mares for his harem. I believe the story I remember best was by Earnest Thompson Seaton (spelling may be off), who wrote many stories of adventure, some based on the actions of real people. Dunno about the Pacer as far as real, though I've read that eyewitness accounts from the time claim he was real. The story I remember ended with the horse having to be "creased"--stunned by a shallow gunshot grazing the neck in the right place to knock it out without breaking bones--and refusing to eat or drink once he was confined.

Same author also wrote about real folks like Jim Corbett, one of the foremost explorers and big-game hunters of his day. Killed the Champawat tigress who had eaten something like 300 people, and was one of the first white men ever to find evidence of the existence of snow leopards.

[xoxoxoBruce]

There is another tradition that John Henry's famous race took place not in West Virginia, but rather near Leeds, Alabama. Professor Johnson in the late 1920s received letters saying that John Henry worked on the A.G.S. Railway's Cruzee or Curzey Mountain Tunnel in 1882, and a third letter saying it was at Oak Mountain in 1887, but he discounted these reports after the A.G.S. told him that the railway had no such tunnel.[3] Retired chemistry professor and folklorist John Garst, of the University of Georgia, has argued that the contest happened at the Coosa Mountain Tunnel or the Oak Mountain Tunnel of the Columbus and Western Railway (now part of Norfolk Southern Railway) near Leeds on September 20, 1887.[9]

Based on documentation that corresponds with the account of C. C. Spencer, who claimed in the 1920s to have witnessed the contest, Garst speculates that John Henry may have been a man named Henry who was born a slave to P.A.L. Dabney, the father of the chief engineer of that railroad, in 1850.[9] Since 2007, the city of Leeds has honored John Henry's legend during an annual September festival, held on the third weekend in September, called the Leeds Downtown Folk Festival & John Henry Celebration.[10]

Garst and Nelson have debated the merits of their divergent research conclusions.[11] Other claims have been made over the years that place Henry and his contest in Kentucky or Jamaica.[12]

Folklore, not factlore.

[glatt]

Sure. Of course.


It's just that by putting it on a map, you are taking a casual oral tradition and claiming that it happened in a certain place. You are turning it into factlore. There is a responsibility to get the facts right.

Although your link touches on this issue and basically says it misses the point.

But to quibble with the American scene that Gropper depicted would be scholarly inside-baseball indeed. What matters is that overnight—thanks to what he would later describe as the “American Inquisition”—his work became the most notorious pictorial map in history.

[xoxoxoBruce]

That's why teachers and librarians loved it, the map stimulated imagination and inquisitiveness in children of all ages. McCarthy, setting the stage for Gingrich and Limbaugh, twisted the facts for personal gain.

[Diaphone Jim]

Everybody knows Paul Bunyan worked the redwoods in Mendocino County, hence his "Days" annually in Fort Bragg as well as various sculptures of him and Babe in the area. I always liked the image of greasing the pancake griddle by skating with sides of bacon.
I think I need to do some reading about others on the map, having to admit some are new to me.
Cohn and McCarthy were assholes large enough to appear on some kind of epic map themselves.

BTW, it should be "America, Its Folklore," not "...It's..."

[xoxoxoBruce]

You're right, my bad.

[Diaphone Jim]

This could take a while.
Found a little bit on Joe Magarac, a shanty song about the Little Brown Bulls but nada on the Sissy from Hardscrabble County.
Anyone else with successes or failures?

[xoxoxoBruce]

Sissy.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Tony Beaver.

Tony Beaver is a character in several tall tales, often in tandem with stories of Paul Bunyan. Beaver was a West Virginian woodsman located up Eel River, often described as a cousin of Paul Bunyan, and champion griddle skater of the southern United States. The stories appeared in print in the early 20th century and were later compiled by Mary E. Cober.

[Diaphone Jim]

I found both of those.
There is not much about the sissy, except that the toughest of the miners got kicked out for being one.

[xoxoxoBruce]

What more do you need? That's the Sissy legend told in several locations.
Like most folklore stories, they were an oral tradition, there was a beginning (name), middle (lesson), and end (result of lesson). Every time it was retold everything in between was ad libbed, embellished, and adjusted for the location.