Tag Archives: Arthur Dodd

DANCING IN THE CABBAGE PATCH Harmful Settlement Schools Debate

Pine Mountain Settlement School
Series: Blogs
DANCING IN THE CABBAGE PATCH
Series 09: Biography
Series 17: Publications Related to PMSS

The “Harmful Settlement Schools” Debate

HARRY ROBIE “Resolved: That on Balance the Settlement Schools Were Harmful to the Culture of the Southern Mountains.”

Jane Bishop Hobgood Response to Harry Robie

John Deaton Response to Harry Robie

Vivian Sexton Flannery-Dees Response to Harry Robie

TAGS: Jane Bishop Hobgood; Harry Robie; John H. Deaton; Vivian Sexton Flannery-Dees; Pine Mountain Settlement School; settlement schools; Settlement Movement; Settlement Schools Southern Appalachians; rural education; Hindman Settlement; Red Bird Mission; Sidney Saylor Farr; Stuart Robinson; Glyn Morris; progressive education; Alonzo Turner; Katherine Pettit; Martha Burns; Arthur Dodd; ballads; environmentalism; Burton Rogers; Ann Cobb; cultural pluralism;

In 1991, Harry Robie, faculty in the English Department at Berea College (1985-1992), wrote an article about his research related to the settlement schools in the Southern Appalachians. [Published : Robie, Harry. “Resolved: That on Balance the Settlement Schools Were Harmful to the Culture of the Southern Mountains.” [Appalachian Heritage 19.1 (1991): 6-10.] This article was followed by a second article in which the Settlement Schools responded to the Robie thesis.

The two opposing articles created mixed responses among scholars but settlement school students waged a much more personal rebuttal. Their immediate angry and palpable emotional rebuttals constitute one of the most persuasive of the counter-arguments to the Robie “harmful culture” thesis.

The articles created mixed responses among scholars as it was evident that Robie had purposefully started a firestorm to try to drive home what he identified as a fragile romanticism associated with the rural settlement movement. But, the settlement schools and their students, particularly Red Bird Mission, Pine Mountain and to a degree, Hindman Settlement, pushed back against the Robie thesis.

Many of the administrators, teachers and particularly the former students of the settlement institutions responded swiftly to what Robie identified as the “harmful culture” thesis. Overwhelmingly, the response to Robie was oppositional. Robie was pleased. Most of the respondents declared their experiences were not as described by Robie in his articles. The resistance to the idea that the settlement school education was “harmful to the culture” of the southern Appalachians was particularly fierce from the Pine Mountain Settlement School students and staff.

“Me and kids.” Birdena Bishop and Jane and Jim Bishop. [bishop_06_005.jpg]

Three students, Jane Bishop Hobgood, John H. Deaton, [Pine Mountain] and Vivian Sexton Flannery-Dees [Hindman], were all educated within Robie’s perceived “harmful” environments. And, as they read and reread Robie’s thesis, they refused to position themselves within the framework that Robie described as “culturally harmful.” For them, the settlement school was a way of life that was enriching, nurturing and well-integrated with the Appalachian cultural elements they had experienced growing up and that had been emphasized at the settlement schools. Finding harmful elements in the sea of opportunities offered by the settlement schools was for the three students, an alien idea.

The clash of the former student perceptions with those of Harry Robie, was explosive with its language of anger and rebuttal, but it was also tempered with a nostalgic sadness and reflection on a culture that was slowly slipping away.

They nudged many to query, “Whose culture was it, anyway?” The cultural appropriation and/or clash that was described as a debate was not unique to just this southern Appalachian educational instance. While the argument resonated deeply with the students who had been schooled at Pine Mountain Settlement and Hindman Settlement in particular, it also touched the nerve of the other cultural appropriation debates that were taking place in the 1990’s. Appropriation, if it can be called that, is a human response to natural hazards that threaten a perceived way of life. This appropriation was and is not new, and today perceived human hazards, or appropriations, and strong diverse human responses continue at an even more rapid pace in the charged environment of Presidential election and other political elections.
Fueled by new social media and technological innovation, appropriation comes at us with a ferocity not just from our rapidly changing local environments, but from all corners of a changing world. Cultural isolation is near impossible for the “wired” and technological savy twenty-first century and is primed to become even more disruptive.

The idea of “Cultural studies” was a late-comer to the long tale and tail of the academic community. In England, for example, the work of Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, both of whom had working class origins, began to attract attention in the late nineteen-fifties and early nineteen sixties with their exploration of cultural studies. The authors moved away from the traditional educational cannon believing that the new popular culture and the growing mass communication technologies were changing the relationship of the masses to power and authority and also to one another. They founded the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies, which in the nineteen-seventies was directed by Stuart Hall, a Jamaican who has been characterized by some as the “God-Father” of multiculturalism. Stuart Hall was a disrupter, and one much more radical and far-reaching than Glyn Morris, the Director at Pine Mountain [1931-1941], who was arguably the most far-reaching Director of Pine Mountain Settlement. Yet, Hall was not as radical or as far-reaching as the current disruptive dialogs found within and without the two current Trump administrations.

Hall was someone who, like Morris, was more interested in “being alive during disruptive times,” than in doing battle or taking sides in a power struggle. This appears to have been the same approach taken by Harry Robie. The multi-cultural Stuart Hall saw the social changes surrounding him as a newly forming culture trying to “grasp at these changes, to wrap one’s head around what is newly possible….”

Like Morris and other leaders who passed through the Pine Mountain Settlement School, leadership, Hall’s writing in 1973 considered the idea of “culture” as a “site for ‘negotiation,'” [Hua Hsu, “Stuart Hall and the Rise of Cultural Studies,” New Yorker, July 17, 2017]. Like his predecessors, Hoggart, and especially Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall spoke to similar cultural longing that one senses in the passionate letters of Jane Bishop Hobgood, John Deaton, and Vivian Sexton Flannery-Dees, settlement school students writing in the early 1980s. Hall in many ways captured the essence of the arguements that are at the heart of the Robie challenge.

Jane Bishop Hobgood in her response did not create a threnody, (described as a wailing ode or hymn of mourning composed as a memorial to an idea), but certainly the analogy of the mountain ballad is suggested. Jane Bishop Hobgood did not seem to believe that the “culture” she experienced was dying nor dead nor even harmed, but she saw it as under attack, though much of that culture had borrowed extensively across the centuries. She responded with an informed exploration of what she believed was a powerful and driving life experience during her educational years at the Pine Mountain Settlement School. Her’s was an experience she believed to be shared with the other respondents giving her argument the strength of a supported conviction that lingers even now in the descendents of the trio — Hobgood, Deaton and Flannery-Dees.

For most of the students who experienced Pine Mountain Settlement School, it would be near impossible to distance themselves from their lif-changing experience or to be introspective without emotion as the experience with the school was often so integral to the shape of their later lives. The response of many students to Robie was often not captured in writing, but, like Jane’s, John’s, and Virginia’s responses, other settlement school students were known to speak out strongly in oposition to many of his views with an equal amount of sincerity and anger. How could Harry Robie presume to declare that settlement schools harmed the Appalachian culture? He had not experienced the schools as a student? He did not grow up in hard-scrabble Appalachia. How could any student who experienced the hard scrabble of Appalachian life and then the settlement school be anything but deeply reflective and reflexive? Jane and John and Virginia refused to accept Robie’s view of settlement work. But, the question still remains. Did they really speak for all who attended the institutions?

A TURBULENT TIME

1937 was a difficult and turbulent time for Pine Mountain Settlement and for Glyn Morris, the Director of the PMSS School. Along with staff, he initiated a questionnaire to be sent to students who had attended Pine Mountain during its first three decades. Compiled by Everett K. Wilson, a teacher and counselor schooled at Antioch College in Ohio, and eventually an internationally recognized sociologist, Wilson’s questionnaire pried loose some of the answers that the School was searching for. One student, a member of the local Tolliver family, responded curtly to the survey. Tolliver’s response and other similar responses, suggests that memories do not always form one voice or reflect one reality. Tolliver wrote back to Wilson that the heart of the issue at Pine Mountain was that the School “hired too many old maids.” This was an early shot at what has become the greater gender debates we continue to engage in the twenty-first century.

[…instead of old maids…? [look up the exact quote, hw]

In light of other student responses, Jane Bishop Hobgood’s heartfelt ballad to Pine Mountain is not a piece of cynical fatalism, but a word-song that pays tribute to an institution that allowed its students to explore what it might mean to recreate self in a safe and supportive environment. She points out that while many of the “cultural tools” used at the School were English and European in origin, they were not narrowly defining. They played to the strengths of the shared familial heritages of the area and tugged at much of the familiar and pervasive regional ethos. The education of students like herself was elevated by the specialness of their perceived common heritages. This is something that some scholars have called an “internal colony, ” and can be associated with many institutions.

In her heartfelt response to Robie, Jane details how the settlement workers did not lock the students into the same rigid social trajectories that culture sometimes imposes on peoples throughout the world. She underscores the benign and positive influences of a multicultural education and gives no hint of cultural omission or domination or suppression in describing her settlement school experience.

Today, the massive migrations of peoples across the face of the earth have left trails of angst and scars from cultural clashes that dwarf the Appalachian experiences. As migrations and immigration increases so does the call to look more closely at the role of education in building emotional and educational bridges to future success. There has never been a unified viewpoint to regional or cultural studies and the trail of anger and misunderstanding stirred up by perceptions and solemn pronouncements was in the 1940s (the war years) long and emotional. Today the toxic trail of anger and misunderstanding is longer, louder and more damaging than the perceived assault on a way of life experinced at the settlement schools during war-time. The forced boarding schools for Native Americans, the lack of schools in immigration camps, and the current generations who will never have the support system to even think about an “education”, is difficult to even imagine.

When a way of life is threatened or demeaned it can evoke and stoke strong emotions in the identified self. When Robie made his pronouncement that the settlement schools were agents of “harm” it was perceived as a threat to a way of life and a rebuke to the school’s efforts and that of the teachers and their students. Robie’s “harm” appeared to negate the perceived inherent cultural gifts and well-intentioned exchanges. Robie, accordingto some, generated one of the most valuable debates in the history of rural settlement schools. The kernels of wisdom and perception found in the student responses paints a vibrant multicultural canvas of how education can shift cultural perceptions and sometimes, destiny.

On February 15, 1917 Cecil Sharp the noted English ballad collector, in an address to the prestigious Pen & Plate Club gathered in Asheville, North Carolina, said of his visit to Appalachia and his experience with the “… mountaineers of this section [Appalachia] …

I was deeply impressed with the native courtesy and chivalry or the Mountaineers. Their culture is hereditary, I found no such thing as ‘arrested development’; rather I should say I found arrested degeneration.

While this may seem at first to be a somewhat back-handed compliment, what Sharp was alluding to was his profound racist belief in the superiority of the “Anglo-Saxon” stock. But he was also commenting on the cultural and social deterioration of cultures not supported by their host countries. The British and sometimes brutish arrogance of culture bashing is not full-blown here, but suggests a trope that shows up on many assessments of the Appalachian region: Did imported cultures help or harm the people of Appalachia?

The many perceived threats, cultral, racial, social, educational, etc., perceived in Robie’s pronouncement were personal to Jane Bishop and to many of her fellow students, and as an affront to the “perpetrators”, the settlement schools themselves. The three students described experiences that screamed at the limited framing Robie tried to give to a collective historical and cultural and personal experience.

The resulting contestations and perceptions of the three students and the settlement schools as institutions reflect how individuals and institutions and the shared experience can yet transcend the pervasive stereotypes of identified cultures. The “harms” were not a part of the student’s shared perspectives and attitudes and the declared sense of place the schools shared with one another and with the students and the students with each other, but, continues to be a tight cultural bond. In fact, in the minds of some, Robie was waging a battle for Eden — a non-reality — a constructed paradise that would not face knowledge. Whether the “harm” was to a utopian perception or to Robie’s own lost culture, or a smoke-screen for debate, is difficult to untangle. But, the cultural discussion came at a time when “cultural pluralism” was being discussed in academe and when held-fast ideas were being pulled apart in lively debates. The right of each side to hold close their perception of “authentic” culture and the belief that the authentic culture has its own unique vision with its own scale of values, is understood by many Appalachian scholars to be an almost sacred right.

But, did Robie actually believe what he wrote or was he “baiting” an audience that he saw as endangered by culture changes? Was he aiming to “save the culture.” Culture is in constant flux and changes as rapidly as do visions and values. People are at once both subject and object in the fast moving stream of culture. The act of sharing is a political act and political acts are rarely balanced in the resulting sea of cultural pluralism. And, these seas are themselves often fragile seas that flow together with unpredictable tides of intolerance and anger against the dominant system — or, even the entire ecosystem. We have no difficulty in finding examples in today’s culture.

Sensing, perhaps, the brewing controversy surrounding cultural pluralism, Sidney Saylor Farr, then editor of Appalachian Heritage, called for responses to the Robie article in the journal. She did not have to wait long. The anticipated push-back came in the three essays from former settlement school students. Sidney Saylor Farr, herself an Eastern Kentuckian and a former student at Red Bird Mission School published the settlement school student rebuttals in issue #3 of the same Appalachia Heritage volume, “Those Settlement Schools: Harmful or Benign? Three Responses to Harry Robie,” in Appalachian Heritage 19.3 (1991): 45-52. The publication launched a broader round of debate, discourse, applause, and anger.

PUSH BACK – The Responses

Of the three contrarian student responses, Pine Mountain Settlement School’s Jane Bishop Hobgood‘s refutation stands out as one of the most articulate, deeply felt and vivid voices against Robie’s “harmful culture” thesis. Her role on the Pine Mountain Settlement School Advisory Council was particularly important as her settlement school perspective was both internal and external and extended over years and across related institutions (Hindman, Berea College and Warren Wilson College). She had been an integral part of tracking the progress of the School through her many years of association as a student, as a daughter of a Pine Mountain Settlement School worker [Birdena Bishop], as a Berea College graduate, and as a member of the Pine Mountain Settlement School Advisory Board. Her response, which she sent to Pine Mountain as well as to Appalachian Heritage magazine, was placed in the archive at Pine Mountain Settlement School and is reproduced and transcribed in full, in Jane Bishop Hobgood’s Response to Harry Robie.

Jane Bishop Hobgood’s response was soon accompanied by that of John H. Deaton, also a Pine Mountain Settlement School graduate and by that of Vivian S. Flannery-Dees a graduate of Hindman Settlement School.

The fires of the debate surrounding Robie’s cultural survey and the “harmful” settlement schools thesis still smolders but has been eclipsed by the current and growing national cultural debates that have unleashed current angers much less reasoned than that of Jane Bishop Hobgood and the other settlement school students. Further, the increasing tensions surrounding our current national identity is proving to be an extensive firestorm of debate and one that threatens the very constitutional fabric of the United States, not just the culture of the Appalachian region.

Cultural brawls today have erupted on a multitude of national and cultural borders, within our systems of worship, in our democratic institutions and in the major media channels and social media. Throughout the centuries in our multi-cultural nation “Cultural pluralism” has had a host of critics and many of those critics have now taken up a chant against cultural pluralism or for their own new —“ism —the “tribalism” of many names — their chosen identity. The language of criticism has evolved and new words have crept in, but the debates sound familiar. Today our cultural debate is rending the fabric of society at all levels and in all regions. It has spilled into all corners of our educational systems, work-place, communication networks, social networks, or, more noticeably the communication networks have spilled into all corners of our lives with their fractured and factionalized and frequently fictionalized debates.

Debates such as that surrounding the harmful influence of settlement schools have escaped the boundaries once imposed by historical anthropology and have become the essence of life and death struggles of economic classes, political zealots, and wanana-be dictators, in many areas of the world. The Jane Bishop Hobgood Response to Harry Robie has served to remind us again of the fragility of this “Crooked Timber of Humanity” as Isaiah Berlin called it. He was paraphrasing Emanuel Kant who first said, “Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be built.”

Today’s culture wars are still being waged in the academic sector, the federal government, the press and in the publication of culturally contentious works such as J.D. Vance’s book, Hillbilly Elegy (2016), Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash (2016), and other much-debated monographs, such as Elizabeth Catte’s What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, (2018) and the thoughtful work of Stephen Stoll in Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia ( 2017).

Cultural opposition proliferates in electronic blogs and other social media. “Regionalism,” whatever that is or was, has given way to what many describe as fractals that spin away from the Appalachian experience with a furiousity heightened by AI and other forms of collective information. Labels such as “regional colonialism” and “internal colony” and labels such as “tribalism,” whatever that is or was, … abound.

Today other imagined geographies and borders and their collective perceptions continue to proliferate. The arguments are now reshaping our political and judicial maps and in the process, we are creating new cultural landscapes that few seem to feel quite fit their personal inderstanding of “their” space. Gerrymandering, gentrification and “mediated media were, in the past viewed as inevitable harbingers of cultural shifts that ususally prompted defensive political responses. Today the knee-jerk reaction is more frequently the offensive weapons designed in the eras of Postmodernism and its spin-offs, the cultural war of “other”. What is ‘pure Anglo-Saxon” stock? What happens when a newscaster in New York refers to the “indigenous” people of South Carolina who hide behind their “culture”? Who are these “indigenous people”? What is this uniform culture the newscaster believes exists in South Carolina? In Louisiana? Appalachia? What was once a culture is now tangled in the political thickets of economic class, race relations, immigration, and ethnic and religious preference. What perception is to be understood as THE culture of a region? Of a people? The artist Blake has warned us

Robin Red-Breast in a cage
Puts all of Heaven in a rage

Harry Robie retired from Berea in 1992 and died in the small college town of Berea in 2009 at age 75. His passing was marked by the many sympathies and tributes received from his former students at Southwestern High School in Jamestown, NY, where he taught for many years and at Berea College where his students still cite his subtle journeys into our inner psyche. He was a man who stimulated ideas. He shook the tree of complacency and set many to thinking about their fragile relationship to their “culture,” and to their commonly held ideas and beliefs.

Jane Bishop Hobgood continued to live in Urbana, IL and slowly reduced her longer visits to the School as she struggled with dementia. On Jane’s last visit to Pine Mountain, this editor, also educated at Pine Mountain Settlement School, promised Jane that her vision and that of others who believe in the value of settlement schools to help shape the future of the Appalachian region, would not be silenced nor distracted by criticism. Nor would they be seduced or distracted by cultural wars such as that waged in the late eighties and nineties, and today by our political divides. An informed debate, a sense of place, passionate beliefs and clear thinking all have a place in our race toward prosperity and peace — those values were taught at Pine Mountain — and they continue. As Uncle William Creech said in a letter written in 1915, now commonly referred to as “An Old Man’s Hopes for the Children of the Kentucky Mountains,” Creech captures a universal dream for the people of the world. The land he deeded to found Pine Mountain Settlement School over one-hundred years ago, was to be used to pave the way for education, the door to opportunity.

“I don’t look after wealth for them. I look after the prosperity of our nation. I want all our young uns taught to serve the livin’ God. Of course, they won’t all do that but they can have good and evil laid before them and they can choose which they will. I have heart and cravin’ that our people may grow better. I have deeded my land to the Pine Mountain Settlement School to be used for school purposes as long as the Constitution of the United States stands. Hopin’ it may make a bright and intelligent people after I’m dead and gone.”

Pine Mountian has over 100 years of success in strengthening not just Appalachian culture (if viewed as a single entity) — or THE culture, but ALL cultures. Uncle William also said that he hoped that the settlement school would serve not just the local populations but would also influence “the people here and across the seas.”

The Pine Mountain Settlement School realized early on that culture today, has few boundaries and borders. Pine Mountain and other settlement schools had much to offer in the past and a deep dive into the missions of these institutions now reveals that they have even more to offer in today’s fragmented world. Pine Mountain is a school where access to a folk culture that educates and uplifts will continue to be promoted as an integral part of both the legacy and the future of the School. Rural settlement schools have always had a deep commitment to place, to the land and to the people of the Southern Appalachians. They are deeply committed to environmentalism and the responsible stewardship of land and resources including people. Those who experienced the rich education of the settlement school will always be mindful of the “world beyond the seas’ —- just as Uncle Henry would have wanted it and the settlement school experience will continue to be there as mountain doorways open every day to new ways to meet life’s challenges.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Robie, Harry. “Resolved: That on Balance the Settlement Schools Were Harmful to the Culture of the Southern Mountains. “ Appalachian Heritage 19.1 (1991): 6 – 10.]

Deaton, John H, Vivian S. Flannery-Dees, and Jane B. Hobgood. “Those Settlement Schools: Harmful or Benign? Three Responses to Harry Robie.” Appalachian Heritage. 19.3 (1991): 45-52. Print.

Cobb, Ann. Kinfolks & Other Selected Poems. Hindman, Ky: Hindman Settlement School, 2003. Print.

Hobgood, Jane B. “Walter Crane.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly. 6.4 (1981): 30-32. Print.

Isenberg, Nancy. White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America: with a New Preface. New York, N.Y: Penguin, 2017. Print.

Morris, Glyn. Less Travelled Roads. New York: Vantage Press, 1977. Print. Chapter 11, Part 1

Ritchie, Jean. (1955). Singing Family of the Cumberlands. Illustrated by Maurice Sendak. [Reminiscences.]. Pp. vi. 282. Oxford University Press: New York.

Vance, J D. Hillbilly Elegy. , 2016. Print.

Wells, Evelyn K. The Ballad Tree: A Study of British and American Ballads, Their Folklore, Verse, and Music, Together with Sixty Traditional Ballads and Their Tunes. London: Methuen, 1950. Print. Chapter 13

Whisnant, David E. All That Is Native & Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Print.

DANCING IN THE CABBAGE PATCH: 1936 Pine Mountain Settlement School and Mexico

Pine Mountain Settlement School
DANCING IN THE CABBAGE PATCH
POST

1936 Pine Mountain Settlement School and Mexico

1936_mexico_009

ADVENTURE

In 1936, the country of Mexico was opening up to travelers and cars. Some travelers were now able to make long journeys in the country and find the needed road assistance along the way. The Pan American Highway was still under consideration after it was first introduced at the Fifth International Conference of American States in 1923 but agreements to begin construction were underway and in July of 1937 when the participating countries signed the Convention on the Pan American Highway, construction began in earnest. The roads in the rural countryside, like those at Pine Mountain, were rustic and treacherous, at best. But it is unlikely that roads presented an obstacle to an adventuresome group from Appalachia.

Intrepid souls were venturing farther than just across the border and they navigated the roads of Mexico and beyond just as they navigated many of the rough roads that marked a large section of the rural United States. In the mid-1930s some of those intrepid travelers to Mexico were from Pine Mountain Settlement School. Following the closure of the 1936 school year, the Principal of the School, the secretary to the Director, and a rising star who had just graduated from the Pine Mountain Settlement boarding high school were given the opportunity to explore the world outside the United States. Accompanied by a proper school marm/administrator from Perry County, the quartet struck out for Mexico City and surrounding towns. Arthur Dodd apparently supplied the car and the camera, Fern Hall took notes, and Georgia Dodd supplied the vibrant dialogue, while all were observed by the quiet and reserved school administrator and first cousin of Fern Hall, Grazia Combs. In one touring car the group drove first to New Orleans where they explored the gulf port and the energetic life of one of America’s oldest cities.

1936_mexico_035 New Orleans

Leaving New Orleans, the group then headed for Texas where they planned to cross the border at Brownsville which sits just north of the large Mexican border town of Matamoros, Mexico. All we know is that they crossed the border into Mexico. Apparently, Arthur Dodd hoped to repeat the trip he had made in 1934, just two summers previous. What happened at the border is not certain. It is possible that the group took a train to Mexico City and rented a car within the country, or they may have driven the distance. That part of the story remains to be discovered.

The Mexican Highway 101, or the Carretera Federal 101, starting at Brownsville to Matamoros, is today a spur of the Pan American Highway that leads to one of the most treacherous highways in Mexico. But in 1935, it was an adventure, not a life-threatening drive, but also not for the faint of heart. To get some sense of highways in Mexico at this time, the home movie shot by adventurers in 1935, “Touring Mexico by Car, 1935“ should give some indication of the experience of driving to Mexico City during the early 1930s.

By 1936, Mexico’s Revolution had ended, Cardenas was installed as the new President of the country and oil was providing the country a new economy. Diego Rivera, Frieda Kahlo, Jose Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros were making their revolutionary voices heard in the murals and paintings shared with the Mexican people, as well as with new and eager North American adventurers. North American artists and educational and recreational adventurers began to frequently travel to Mexico. For example, Anni and Josef Albers who were in residence at Black Mountain College in North Carolina in 1935, drove from North Carolina to Mexico City, an adventure of close to 28 hours or 1,740 miles. Steeped in the art of the Bauhaus, the couple fell in love with the culture and the lively art of Mexico. Their interest and that of other icons of the day stimulated a surge of travel to Mexico and southward.

The automobile also played a role in the excitement of journeying to the neighboring country. The advantage of traveling “off the beaten path” in a car brought large numbers of adventuresome folk to cross the border. These eager adventurers then returned many times from 1935 to 1967 and brought back elements of the culture that were literally woven into their art. As a weaver, Anni Albers was particularly sensitive to textile patterns and textures and also intrigued by the ceramic patterns of decoration. Motifs taken from native Mexican weaving and ceramics show up in many of the Albers work and the vivid and subtle colors of native arts and natural landscapes were evocative inspirations for Josef Albers’ fascination with color theory. This new freedom of travel and excitement educators to flock to Mexico in the 1930’s ad early 1940’s.

AN EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENT

Pine Mountain Settlement School had much in common with the educational experiment of Black Mountain College in North Carolina, and the educational exchanges between the Directors of the two institutions occurred with some regularity. Glyn Morris, a Welshman by birth, became the Pine Mountain director in 1932. He had been deeply schooled in the Progressive educational models of John Dewey and nurtured by the reformed theology of Reinhold Niebuhr. John Andrew Rice, the Black Mountain College Director at the time, was a follower of John Dewey and later became a friend of the progressive educational reformer. Both Morris and Rice ran institutions that favored an educational model that was less a traditional educational institution and more a controlled educational experiment to test their theories of how best to teach and to learn.

John Andrew Rice, just fired from Rollins College in Florida, because he wished to abolish grading and other progressive ideas, was in a hurry in 1933. He wanted to try out his ideas as soon as possible. When he came to Black Mountain as the Director, he rushed the framework of a new institution into reality through what one observer noted was like a “pick-up game of football.” Born during the Great Depression, founded on the pragmatism of John Dewey, Black Mountain College was a model of great appeal to educators and students. The views so broadly adopted at Black Mountain were less in evidence at Pine Mountain under the guidance of Glyn Morris, but the young teachers and workers who came to the School had picked up the vibrations of the times and were eager to integrate them into the curriculum.

Glyn Morris, just out of Union Theological Seminary in New York City, was also in a hurry to make his mark on the world in another corner of Appalachia. When Glyn Morris had landed at Pine Mountain Settlement School in Harlan County, Kentucky in 1932, the country was in the beginning stages of the Great Depression. It is not remarkable that the two directors were looking for diversions, and both looked south of the border.

One major stumbling block in this new and exciting world was the conservatism and the poverty of their surroundings the deep Appalachians. Black Mountain College and Pine Mountain Settlement School, had very different educational objectives but similar sources of influence. Rice, for example had some disaffection for Robert Maynard Hutchins. Hutchins aimed to promote a kind of general education that would be comprised of fundamental ideas but would aimed to end in intelligent action guided by practical wisdom. Rice did not envision his educational model following Hutchins’ strict fundamentalism and by 1937 he felt secure enough in his own model to attack Hutchins “General Education” plan in an article in Harpers, titled “Fundamentalism and Higher Learning.”

Robert Maynard Hutchins (1899–1977), a legendary scholar who, at the age of 30, served as the President of the University of Chicago and later Chancellor, was the brother of Francis Hutchins, who became President of Berea College in 1939, following his father, William, in the role. Francis Hutchins was a major force in shaping the later years (after 1940) of Pine Mountain when he became a member of the Settlement School’s Board of Trustees. Hutchins, the son of a missionary, had been in China in the mid-1930s as the director of the Yale in China program, working with the emerging nation and it’s struggle to educate itself out of poverty and to build a future for a large and growing rural population. As the newly hired Berea President, Francis Hutchins, had found an ally in Glyn Morris amd he became a key supporter of Morris near the end of Morris’s tenure at Pine Mountain.

The relationship of the two Hutchins brothers with Pine Mountain did not, however, appear to dampen the friendship of Rice and Morris and both Schools adopted a “no-grades” approach to their educational programs. But, when Robert Maynard Hutchins, then President of the University of Chicago published his book, The Higher Learning in America (1937), which outlined what he sought to do at Chicago with regard to reforming the curriculum. Robert Maynard’s reforms infuriated John Rice at Black Mountain and confounded Glyn Morris at Pine Mountain.

At Pine Mountain, Glyn Morris walked a delicate line between John Rice’s preferred experiential model of education, one not so fundamentally grounded in text, and the more sequential and proscribed program of Hutchins at Chicago. In his 1937 article for Harper’s magazine, “Fundamentalism and the Higher Learning,” Rice blasted Hutchins’ model as “removed from experience.” “Why,” Rice asked, “include what can be printed and leave out what must be seen or heard? …… ” [Reynolds, K. Visions and Vanities, p.147.] Rice elaborated …..

“Why include what can be printed and leave out what must be seen or heard: To some, Aeschylus and the sculpture of Chichen-Itza are in quality very near together. But we are to exclude one because it cannot be got from a book?”

“…Education, instead of being the acquisition of a common stock of fundamental ideas, may well be a learning of a common way of doing things, a way of approach, a method of dealing with ideas or anything else. What you do with what you know is the important thing. To know is not enough.”

THE EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENT

While this discussion of Rice and Morris may seem outside the scope of the Pine Mountain connection with Mexico, there is a thread. It is found in the dual role educational experimentation had on Pine Mountain and Black Mountain which paved the way for the groups’ travels to Mexico. What could be more experimental than such a far-flung journey of educators and students. It was something on the equivalent of today’s educational “travel abroad” … somewhat.

Glyn Morris, the Director, and Arthur Dodd, the Pine Mountain School Principal, and leading advocate of the Mexico trip, had frequently entertained Black Mountain faculty and students at Pine Mountain and the two educators had also visited in North Carolina, meeting and speaking with many of the faculty there and at the nearby Asheville Farm School (now Warren Wilson College). The institutional cross-experimentation planted some educational seeds.

In the coal fields of eastern Kentucky, unionization was heating up and the so-called “Coal Wars” were underway. Charges of Marxism and Communism were creeping into the language of the area and Europe was undergoing major political shifts. The mixed forms of energy were driving the push for more coal to support the growing industrialization and education and the arts were experimenting with models of education while debating the advantages of creativity and pragmatism. Trotsky was still in Norway but he would sail for Mexico within the year and arrive in Mexico in 1937 where , for a short time he shared a residence with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in the famous Casa Azul or Blue House in the Coyoacan area of Mexico City. “Mexico,” as the largest Mexican city is called, was in 1936 a sprawling cosmopolitan city. It was generating enormous creative, political, and social energy that flowed North to a young and welcoming and eager intellectual population. In some ways it was the frugal traveler’s European vacation and the Progressives international immersion. It was their early travel abroad, the experiential education, and a test case for all of those challenging educational models.

1936 GLYN MORRIS AND EXPERIENTIAL EDUCATION

In his autobiography, Less Travelled Roads, (1977) Glyn Morris, the Pine Mountain Director, makes a case for experiential education and cites the growing trend across the country which found that educated rural youth were not returning to their rural home areas but were joining the growing numbers in suburbia and urban centers, and ultimately to countries abroad. Morris’s educational plan was progressive but it was also pragmatic. What Morris and Dodd and all the early Progressive experiential eduation pioneers at Pine Mountain would not live long enough to see was the migration back to the rural home areas by the youth who years earlier had departed. There was a gradual retrenchment in the heightened exploration and curiosity of the youth about the world as they measured what they had against what they thought they desired. For men, the ultimate re-shaper was the going away and coming back of War. But, that came later.

Morris, for example, declares

Regardless of the school’s program, its net result was to whet the students’ appetites for a quality of living simply not possible in an isolated, sparsely settled mountain community. It is a well-established historical fact — and is a fateful and challenging human problem, very obvious today. Even a relatively prosperous and self-contained family farm of twenty-five years ago can’t make it today on good soil, let alone in the Appalachian Mountains. In addition to this fact, a number of our students came from coal camps in the surrounding counties, and to expect the student to route himself into a career as a coal miner was unrealistic. I began, early in my term at Pine Mountain, to question the goals not only of Pine Mountain but of all the many private secondary schools and colleges in the mountains which asserted this unrealistic goal. My viewpoint on this matter was expressed to Dr. Harold Spears, formerly Superintendent of Schools, San Francisco, California, now Professor of Education at San Francisco State College, during his visit to Pine Mountain late 30s.

THE JOURNEY AND THE TRAVELERS

This long detour into educational philosophy has a relationship to the Mexico trip. As an experimental settlement school, Pine Mountain was continually looking for innovative ways to open up the educational experience for both its teachers and its students. When Arthur Dodd headed to Mexico for the second time with a car full of single women, he may have been thinking about the very good odds for himself, but he was also doing just what Pine Mountian did best. He was providing an optimum opportunity to expose the students to a new world and to give his very proper chaprone, the School Principal from Perry County, an opportunity to open up her own educational perspectives.

Georgia Ayers, a Pine Mountain student who had just graduated was invited to be among the Mexico travelers. She was one of five girls selected from the graduating class of 1935 to remain at Pine Mountain and to participate in a rural education program. Dodd and Morris had devised and implemented a program in which the high school girls would visit homes in the community to nurse sick children or mothers, carry library books to homes, and assist in instruction in the area’s one-room schools. A catalog of responsibilities was constructed that acted as a guide for each girl’s participation in the program. Morris’s and Dodd’s new program became the core of the 11th-grade experience in a new curriculum. Georgia Ayers became the first supervisor of this experimental program as it was built into the new progressive curriculum. The Mexico trip was, in essence, her training and her interview. Fern Hall, a recent Pine Mountain Graduate and a Secretary in training at Pine Mountain was to accompany Dodd, Georgia, and her cousin, a highschool principal, from Perry County, who had collaborated with Pine Mountain for many years. With three female companions, Dodd was in favorable territory.

1936_mexico_047. Gladys Morris, Georgia Ayers, Fern Hall.

1936_mexico_047. Grazia Combs, Georgia Ayers, Fern Hall.

THE ITINERARY

Arthur Dodd‘s earlier itinerary (if it can be called that) to Mexico in 1934 in the company of Caleb Shera, son of a former art teacher at Pine Mountain, and August Angel was very loose. The trio had planned to travel by car to Mexico City but when they reached the border they found that the road was impassable in some sections. August Angel, in assembling his memoirs recalls the journey of the trio

In the summer of 1934, Caleb, Mr. Dodd, Principal of Pine Mountain Settlement School from which Caleb graduated from high school, and I, drove to Mexico in a Ford touring car for a summer vacation. We took turns at the wheel as we traveled. In Georgia, we stopped at Mr. Dodd’s home and stayed overnight. After a sumptuous evening meal and memorable homemade ice cream topped with fresh sliced peaches for breakfast, we drove south to Laredo, Texas, to cross the border into Mexico and toward Monterey.

We drove as far south as Tamazunchale, where we learned that the mountain road to Mexican DF [Mexico City] was under construction and we could not traverse. We decided to take the passenger train from Vera Cruz to San Luis Potosi, then transfer to a second, ending in Mexico City. We traveled second class, sat on slatted wood benches, and mingled with natives who were aboard with livestock, pigs, kids, fruit and vegetables to sell to passengers, or going from the countryside to nearby market places in towns along the railroad tracks. It was a day and night trip, and also a social encounter that shocked us to remember to this day.

In the city itself we did the usual sights – bullfights, opera, church, parks and museum tours, and a visit to the pyramids of the Sun and Moon. Mr. Dodd ate or drank something and caught the bug we dubbed “Montezuma’s Crud,” and spent a miserable month starving himself to get rid of it.

…. The six weeks we were on the trip cost me only $60. I started with $75 and returned to Kentucky with $15. Those were the good old days! It was a truly good vacation and affordable.

Though Dodd had a bad bout of dysentery it did not seem to dull his appetite for Mexico and this time he brought along a good body of film stock and camera.

In the 1930’s many tourists were traveling to Mexico and “the tour” was variously described by those who made the journey. One comprehensive travel account that has an interesting connection with Pine Mountain was recorded in 1936 by J.C. Nichols of Kansas City. Nichols was a friend of the Hook family of Kansas City and reportedly sold a lot he owned in the Rockhill Park area of Kansas City to Bertrand Hook who passed it along to his daughter. Mary Rockwell Hook, the daughter, was the architect for most of the buildings at Pine Mountain Settlement School. Because Mary was a fledgling architect in 1908 her father sought to further her career by purchasing the lot from Nichols so Mary could design and build her first house. To get a sense of a typical itinerary in Mexico see J.C. Nichols account “Our Trip to Mexico August and September 1936.”

The travels of the 1936 Pine Mountain Settlement School group took them to three major destinations: Mexico City, Puebla, and Taxco. Included in Dodd’s photographs are road shots of the countryside as the group drove along the roads connecting Mexico’s urban centers. In Mexico City, the photographs mainly concentrate on Chapultepec Park or “Bosque de Chapultepec” (Chapultepec Forest). It is the largest city park in the Western Hemisphere and covers just over 686 hectares or 1,695 acres.

1936_mexico_040. “Charros – Mexico City Park.” [Chapultepec Park]

From Mexico City the group went South to Taxco, a city known for its silver and beautiful ornate churches in the Mexican Churrigueresque style. There are two views of Mexico’s most famous volcanos, Popocatépetl, and Iztaccihuatl, that fill the skyline some 70 Km Southeast of Mexico City. The city of Puebla, is the fourth largest city in Mexico. It is located 40 kilometres (25 miles) east of the Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl volcanoes, Founded in 1531, it has some of the most significant Spanish Baroque cathedrals in Mexico.

1936_mexico_005. View of Popocataptle and Iztaccihuatl volcanos. 70 Km Southeast of Mexico City.

A highlight of the trip to Mexico City, if measured by the number of photographs, was a trip to the ancient bullring Toreo de la Condesa in the Condesa neighborhood of Mexico City. Today the older bullring has been replaced by a new stadium in another location and the capacity doubled. The older location was overwhelmed by the rapid development of the Condesa area of the city. Apparently, the group saw a mind-numbing number of bull fights. Fern Hall wrote in a postcard to her future husband, William Hayes, the farm manager at Pine Mountain, that she saw six bulls killed that day. We don’t know what he thought about that report but it is likely that he was not cheering for the matador.

1936_mexico_045. Postcard. “Pase Natural, 319”

So, outcomes? Arthur Dodd managed to stay healthy and to enjoy the second trip to Mexico and return to Pine Mountain where he administered the school programs until their closure in 1949. Georgia Ayers returned to Pine Mountain where she eventually married Arthur Dodd. On her return to the School, she was not only “interviewed” to head the new social services program at Pine Mountain, she had evidently also “sized up” by Dodd, the adventuresome single man. He asked Georgia to marry him and they became a Pine Mountain couple. She married in late December of 1940. After her marriage, Georgia became the dietitian for the School. Georgia’s trip was the first of many journeys that Georgia and “Dodd” would take later in their lives.

Fern Hall continued on as Secretary to the Director at Pine Mountain and in 1941 married Wiliam Hayes, a former student who had stayed on at Pine Mountain as the Farm Manager and instructor in the industrial training program. The Hayes’ stayed on until 1953 when most farming programs at the School were discontinued. It is Fern’s set of Dodd’s Mexico photographs that prompted this blog. Fern and Bill’s daughter, Helen, inherited the photographs and with them a curiosity for travel first in Mexico in 1963 and then in other regions of the world. Grazia Combs returned to Perry County where she continued to teach and assume multiple roles in education in the county including Principal of Dilce-Combs High School and later Perry County Superintendent of Schools.

GALLERY: 1936 PMSS & MEXICO