This book is about an American tradition—arguing about it. Americans through their history have stood up to claim tradition passionately, shape tradition, and break tradition to define their special status in the brave new world. The United States, an upstart nation of myriad communities, was assuredly a place to reevaluate tradition, and view it from various social angles. Americans have hailed their basic beliefs, customs, and myths—in short, their folklore—to epitomize this tradition. Basic indeed. Whatever this tradition was, it presumably beat at the heart of the society. As a point of social argument, “tradition” undoubtedly has...

The central problem of tradition is explainng the ways that people rely on one another, with reference to precedent, for their wisdom, their expression, their identity. The problem may not be immediately evident from the mechanical sounding definition of tradition in most dictionaries as the “handing down” of lore from generation to generation, especially by oral means. In common usage, tradition can refer to an item dependent on this process, such as a story or custom, or to a precedent given the force of repeated practice, or to knowledge whose official source cannot be verified but is held widely, or...

The nineteenth century had not even drawn to a close before E. Benjamin Andrews, President of Brown University, self-assuredly declared in his massive history of post-Reconstruction America that “few quarter-centuries in the world’s life bristle with salient events as does that following the year 1870” (Andrews 1896, vii). As speculation turned to the order of the new century, he and many other intellectuals offered justification for the “progress of civilization in the United States” in a brand of cultural history promoted by folklorists and anthropologists. This progress was an industrial vision of expansive empire and unfettered enterprise. It was an...

Considering that the settlement and language of America owe so much to Great Britain, one would expect more communion of folklore studies between the domains. This is not to say that great achievements have not been made. Receiving persistent use in the twentieth century are Francis James Child’s catalogue of British ballads, Cecil Sharp’s harvest of British folk songs in the southern Appalachians of the United States, Ernest Baughman’s type and motif index of English-American folktales, and Richard Dorson’s encyclopedic narrative of the Victorian British folklorists.¹ The assumption in these works was that American culture and cultural scholarship both relied...

When fairy tales are mentioned in everyday conversation or scholarly forums, reference is probably being made to the remarkable legacy of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (1785–1863, 1786–1859, respectively), known popularly as the Brothers Grimm. The work of the Grimms has gone through a complicated history of interpretation and application. Since the Grimms made a giant splash with their folklore collections in the nineteenth century, their successors have credited them with establishing often opposing positions in debates over the character of tradition. They have been commended for defining folklore romantically and scientifically, internationally and nationally, historically and contemporaneously. References...

If the “folklorist” was to be looked to as the expert and adviser on America’s traditions, then the folklorist label needed professional recognition in a society that increasingly valued institutional authority. While folklore as a field commenting on American culture had made substantial headway in museums and some notable Ivy League universities, its supporters did not necessarily identify themselves as folklorists. Franz Boas at Columbia, for many years editor of the Journal of American Folklore, called himself an anthropologist with an interest in the subject of folklore. The legendary Harvard professor George Lyman Kittredge billed himself a literary scholar who...

With the rise of folklife in the twentieth century as a term for the social basis of tradition, America took on the look of a nation of composite groups. Folklife averred America’s pluralism, its ethnic-regional diversity, and Pennsylvania became its model. Folklife was a rarely used term in America before Pennsylvania’s Alfred Shoemaker raised it most forcefully as an alternative to folklore after World War II. By 1972, Richard Dorson observed that folklife “has vied with and even threatened to dominate folklore” (Dorson 1972d, 2). By the time America’s bicentennial celebration rolled around in 1976, the United States had an...

On Octomber 2, 1947, the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission made history by unanimously adopting the following resolution:

RESOLVED, That the Historical and Museum Commission hereby authorizes the creation of the position of State Folklorist; and

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, That Henry W. Shoemaker, Senior Archivist, be transferred from the Public Record Division (Archives) to the New Division of Folklore.

Receiving front-page attention from Pennsylvania newspapers, Henry Shoemaker (1880–1958) officially began his tenure as America’s first state folklorist in March 1948 and served until February 1956. Despite leaving behind a documentary record of his accomplishment, his pathbreaking role for...

Richard Dorson (1916–1981) was once described as the man who did for folklore what Kinsey did for sex (Brunvand 1982, 347). It is an image of a man putting his subject forward before the public seriously, and controversially, and placing it on scholarly footing from the 1950s through the 1980s. The similarity between the two luminaries went beyond the fact that both Dorson and Kinsey were associated with institutes at Indiana University, and both had a cultural impact on attitudes of Americans about themselves. Dorson’s subject was, like sexuality, often considered raw entertainment rather than the stuff of science....

The twentieth century was the era of the great folk art exhibition and festival in America. Blockbuster folk art shows such as American Folk Art: The Art of the Common Man at the Museum of Modern Art in 1932 and The Flowering of American Folk Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1974 inspired countless collections, books, and commentaries harping on the essential national spirit of America found in its folk art. They also had their detractors who wanted to use the eye-catching forms of folk art to different social and aesthetic purposes. The Arts and Crafts of...

Nothing focused my attention on American traditions like being away from them. This book began as I contemplated the youth of America’s national relics against the ancient ruins of England and I heard countless times how the United States and England were two nations divided by a common language. It ended in Japan where I heard fewer hints of commonality with the United States. Pundits on both sides of the Pacific presented Japan to be essentially different from America. While England and the United States were both part of what has been called Western tradition, Japan and America split apart...