Hillbilly Hellraisers: Federal Power and Populist Defiance in the Ozarks. By J. Blake Perkins
2018; Oxford University Press; Volume: 53; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/jsh/shy043
ISSN1527-1897
Autores Tópico(s)Mormonism, Religion, and History
ResumoFor over a century, journalists, historians, and other observers have written about the Ozarks—a region that ranges over Missouri, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Arkansas—as if it was untouched by the trends of modernity. Backward hill people were the reverse mirror image of their more sophisticated and progressive urban cousins. That was a theme that had long animated local color stories of the rural South in general. Even as early as the 18th century William Byrd II heaped scorn on the common folk in the hinterlands. The Virginia aristocrat skewered what he saw as low-bred, uncivilized Carolinians on a 1728 surveying expedition. The locals were lazy, indolent thieves and whores. H.L. Mencken, a master of the genre, was equally disparaging. In the Baltimore journalist’s estimation, the mountains and valleys of the South, and the hills and hollers of the border South, had isolated men and women from society, education, and the enlightenment. Arkansas, sneered America’s gadfly in the Roaring 20s and the Dirty Thirties, was a lawless wasteland. Mencken thought that any youngster with enough sense would flee the state as soon as possible. Following his trip through Arkansas, he felt like “a man emerging from a region devastated by war. Such shabby and flea-bitten villages I had never seen before, or such dreadful people.” Mencken’s understudy WJ Cash expanded on this outlook in his classic The Mind of the South. Arkansas and Mississippi, with their anti-evolution laws, were “the most benighted” in the region, Cash claimed.
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