On Apr. 22, 1921, Mrs. William A. Servin and her daughter-in-law, both members of the Nyack Women's Club, went for a hike in Pearl River, New York, a hamlet located roughly twenty miles from Manhattan and just north of the New Jersey border. After traveling along a grown-over path, the two women happened upon four children they later described as “so wretchedly clad and so encrusted with dirt as to seem scarcely human.”Footnote 1 Disturbed by the children's unkempt appearance and fearful for their overall well-being, Mrs. Servin summoned the county truant officer and local law enforcement to investigate.
Investigators returning to the scene discovered an entire family—father, mother, and four children—occupying an abandoned shack that might have housed “primitive people.”Footnote 2 Attempts to determine the origins of this “wild family,” as the press dubbed them, were hampered by the family's inability to speak Standard English. According to multiple reports, the family only communicated in “wild grunting noises.”Footnote 3 The father, the only one capable of effectively communicating with authorities, revealed that the family's surname was “Thompson,” although he was unable to provide a first name for himself, his wife, or any one of his children.Footnote 4
The Thompsons were believed to have traveled from the Ramapo Mountains, specifically part of the northern region of the Appalachian Mountains. Stretching across Bergen and Passaic counties in northern New Jersey and Rockland County in southern New York, this area was home to a multiracial group known as the “Jackson Whites.”Footnote 5 Believed to be a distinct race, the Jackson Whites were “not black, nor white, nor yet red, but an admixture of all three.”Footnote 6 The Jackson Whites were one of approximately 300 communities of white, Indian, and black ancestry residing predominantly in the Appalachian region of the eastern United States. In the 1960s, social scientists coined the term “triracial isolate” to signify the perceived geographic and genetic isolation of these communities. During the early twentieth century, however, these groups were variously known as “creoles,” “mestizos,” “in-between people,” and “racial outliers.”Footnote 7 As these names suggest, one of the central characteristics of these tripartite communities is that they existed outside the American racial orthodoxy of monoracialism, whereby citizens are granted one and only one race.
Alongside their tripartite mixture, the Jackson Whites were unique because despite their close proximity to one of the largest urban metropolises, they, like the Thompsons, exemplified the consequences of insufficient modernizing forces. However, despite their way of life closely resembling that of the Jackson Whites, Pearl River authorities “claimed for the Thompsons the identity of a pure-white people, in this respect different from the clan inhabiting the Ramapos.”Footnote 8 Pearl River authorities used the Thompsons’ whiteness to justify their access to the various “civilizing efforts” of local institutions—both private and public—including the Nyack Women's Club, the Red Cross, and New Jersey's Vineland Training School for Feebleminded Boys and Girls. Yet despite efforts to rhetorically distance the “pure white” Thompsons from the racially mixed Jackson Whites, news outlets continued to label them the “Ramapo family,” thereby cementing in the minds of the reading public the connection between the atavistic Thompsons and their equally backward and racially mixed neighbors.
As the tale of the Thompson family suggests, Progressive Era reform was a profoundly racial endeavor. At first glance, it would seem that the mobilization of uplift efforts on the Thompsons’ behalf affirms depictions of northern Progressives as keenly invested in the practice of white social uplift.Footnote 9 However, the Thompsons were not the only beneficiaries of this reform-minded intervention. The family's discovery also helped bring attention to the plight of their cultural doppelgängers, the Jackson Whites, as they too were singled out for rehabilitation through various public health initiatives. In both cases, middle-class reformers were motivated by more than just their benevolence. Race—particularly the threat posed by racial mixture—played an important role in how outsiders framed each group as deserving of intervention.
Between 1890 and 1930, both northern and southern reformers worried about the consequences of racial mixture for both the public and national health. This is the backdrop against which white mountaineers, the Jackson Whites, and scores of other “in-between peoples” came to the attention of reformers as they flocked to the Appalachian region in order to understand the biological and social consequences of white racial degeneracy and racial mixture. Though initially framed as separate concerns, white racial degeneracy and miscegenation became inextricably linked in the minds of reformers working in both white and triracial mountain communities. Not only were “red-white-black” communities seen as racially degraded due to their “mixedness,” their close physical proximity to their Scotch-Irish neighbors raised concerns that these communities actually promoted white racial degeneracy, the implication being that only the most degraded of any race would participate in an interracial liaison. The Jackson Whites—described as “the descendants of Indians, escaped slaves of revolutionary days, and bad whites”—epitomized this line of thinking.Footnote 10 As such, social degradation served as a cause and a manifestation of miscegenation, which in turn signaled poor biology.Footnote 11 Furthermore, the poor social and biological conditions of white and triracial mountaineers precipitated a host of other ills, including poor health, licentiousness, and sexual promiscuity. Thus, it was each group's proximity to the other—the pure white Thompsons and the mixed-race Jackson Whites—that necessitated outside intervention, as each were framed as a potential threat to white racial purity and, by extension, the overall health of the nation.Footnote 12
By giving attention to how Progressive Era reformers understood the unique racial condition of the Jackson Whites, this article places the question posed by racial mixing at the forefront of Progressive Era discourse and examines how social scientists, journalists, and eugenicists used theories of atavism, social degeneration, and race suicide to make sense of and reform the conditions of white and triracial mountaineers. Jonathan Spiro, Thomas Leonard, and Paul Lawrie have established that northern and southern Progressives were keenly concerned with the race question, especially as it pertained to black Americans and European immigrants—though they overly emphasize progressive reformers’ efforts to maintain racial boundaries in strictly black and white terms.Footnote 13 Lawrie for instance, has argued that the absence of “mulatto” as a racial category in the 1920 census signaled the success of Progressive Era attempts to enforce strict racial boundaries, marking the rise of a biracialism in American society.Footnote 14 As a result, mixed-race persons become impossibilities in both a legal and social sense.Footnote 15 However, I contend that attempts to diagnose the social, biological, and psychological problems of the Jackson Whites actually provided an intellectual space in which triracial persons were legible, despite being dismissed as legal impossibilities. In fact, progressive reformers helped to constitute the category of “triracial,” as well as the systems of meaning that informed how outsiders viewed these populations.
In reframing the role of mixed-race persons in America's racial imagination, this essay exposes the complicated nature of whiteness in both the Appalachian region and in America writ large. Scholars have tended to ignore the presence of race in Appalachia as they perceive the region and its inhabitants as predominantly white (and thus lacking in racial problems).Footnote 16 This focus on the region's monolithic whiteness not only facilitates the erasure of Appalachians of color, it also ignores the ways in which whiteness was—and continues to be—negotiable, varied, and context-specific: not all white Appalachians were racialized as equally white, or solely white for the matter.Footnote 17 Furthermore, the tendency of newspaper journalists, social reformers, and eugenicists to draw cultural parallels between white and triracial mountaineers, and in some instances even attribute the cultural degradation of “pure” white mountaineers to miscegenation with their triracial neighbors, provides a useful opportunity to recount the histories of multiracial mountaineers typically excluded from the historical record.
Finally, this essay reconsiders how race has influenced conceptions of modernity. Both white and triracial mountaineers stood out because both their way of life and their appearance seemed to harken back to a precivilized society. Despite the parallel characterizations of both groups as “barbarians,” as “uncivilized,” and as “primitive,” racial mixture remains an underexplored aspect of early twentieth-century discourse on atavism, which has more often posited disease and cultural degeneration as the causes of reversion. Yet as Dana Seitler has convincingly argued, because atavism functioned as a way to exteriorize certain characteristics commonly concealed within the body's interior, the embodied subject functioned as a contested site of debates on national health and progress.Footnote 18 The problems posed by miscegenation—namely, detectability and the threat of recapitulation—were therefore central concerns for reformers who posited neat racial boundaries as a cornerstone of a modern and civilized society. As such, the focus on white and triracial mountaineers provides an important opportunity to understand how anxieties over racial degeneration helped to construct triracial and white mountaineers as a people apart from the rest of urban, industrial society. Ultimately, this construction carried profound implications for the mountaineers and the Appalachian region more generally. Far from being fixed in place, the problems of Appalachia's residents proved imminently threatening because of their close proximity to urban, industrializing America. In a period characterized by vast modernization efforts and industrial innovation, the Appalachian mountaineers’ ability to retain seemingly outmoded ways of life served to remind the American public of their potential for both biological and social degeneration. In focusing on the discourse surrounding racial mixing, it becomes clear that racial distinctiveness not only unified northern and southern Appalachia, regions only rarely discussed together, but it also helped to distinguish the entire Appalachian region from the rest of the United States.
This article is divided into three sections, which together examine the role that region, race, and modernity played in helping to fashion Appalachia as a distinct region. The first section examines the early discourse on the Jackson Whites and other “mixed-blood” communities and argues that, although a legal impossibility, both popular writers and scientists concerned themselves with working through the meaning of racial mixture from a social and biological standpoint. The second section examines the discourses that fashioned the mountaineer as possessing a tainted whiteness through an exploration of the popular discourses surrounding the “hillbilly” and the “triracial.” These discussions were rooted in early twentieth-century concerns over national health, race purity, and the nature of social change and isolation. As the discourses on white and triracially mixed Appalachians aligned between 1900 and 1920, each helped to fashion the racial identity of the other. The final section examines the eugenic family studies taking place during this same period. In locating the roots of rural white degeneracy in mixed-blood ancestors, the eugenic family studies provide a useful entrée into understanding the conceptual blind spots in the eugenicists’ understanding of whiteness and racial purity.
Problem and Promise: Progressive Era Scientism and the Creation of the Mixed-blood
The major technological and demographic shifts of the Progressive Era brought about an increased scientific interest in the effects of miscegenation.Footnote 19 As the diversity of the American population increased, so did anxieties about the biological and social future of the nation. Many social commentators worried that the body politic was being polluted with inferior racial stock. Both the courts and state legislatures swiftly acted to protect white racial purity by passing anti-miscegenation statutes that prohibited interracial sex and marriage, while simultaneously defining racial identity through the language of blood quantum.Footnote 20 As the century progressed and race science produced new racial categories, the law followed suit as state legislatures increasingly expanded the definition of what it meant to be nonwhite. Between 1900 and 1935, at least a dozen states passed anti-miscegenation statutes that added new races to those already prohibited from intermarriage, a move that reveals the multiracial nature of America's white supremacy project.Footnote 21 Georgia's 1927 anti-miscegenation law, one of the most expansive examples of this type of legislation, included Negroes, American Indians, West Indians, Asiatic Indians, Malays, Japanese, and Chinese as races prohibited from interracial marriage with whites.Footnote 22 By enumerating populations like Malays and Asiatic Indians, populations with an almost negligible presence in the state, the Georgia statute illustrates that the threat of miscegenation loomed large, even in the absence of would-be violators.
Though the early twentieth century witnessed widespread efforts to collapse racial meaning into monoracial terms, popular and scientific studies of race ensured that racial mixture remained an animate discourse. This discourse is one space in which to locate what historian Gary Nash has termed “the hidden history of mestizo America.”Footnote 23 While anti-miscegenation laws and rules of hypodescent were believed to make multiracial identity a legal and social impossibility, investigators’ commitment to delineating racial difference, even for the purposes of better policing that difference, preserved a conceptual space for multiracial identity, despite legal and social prohibitions. By the end of the 1920s, separate enclaves of triracial persons came to represent a distinct racial phenomenon of the Appalachian region. In attempting to understand the biological conditions and lived experiences of the Jackson Whites, these writers helped to inform what it meant to be mixed-race in early twentieth-century America.
Scientific concern with the consequences of miscegenation originated in nineteenth-century debates concerning the origins of the separate races. Monogenists claimed that human origin derived from a single source, with racial groups undergoing differential development that led to some races being more advanced than others. Polygenists, on the other hand, argued that human races were as separate as biological species, each with distinct developmental capacities. Many notable American anthropologists subscribed to the theory of polygeny, and their work represents the beginning of an American intellectual tradition independent of European influence. In fact, polygeny was so associated with American anthropology that it was often called the “American school.”Footnote 24 Although scientists disagreed on the origins of the different races, they agreed that the offspring of interracial unions held the key to unlocking the mystery.Footnote 25
Early interest in racial mixture, then, was an opportunity to understand the qualities of the single races— “red, black, and white”—as well as their relation to one another. To that end, commentary on race mixture generally addressed three types of mixture: between individuals of the same race, between different but nearly related races (i.e., Nordic and Mediterranean races), and between distantly related races (i.e., black and white).Footnote 26 For many race purists, it was black-white mixture that drew the most criticism. Many scientists understood the “mulatto” to be the human equivalent of crossing a donkey and a horse, and, like the resulting mules, mulattos were thought to be infertile.Footnote 27 Even still, “mulattoes” were often considered biologically and intellectually superior to the “pure-blood Negro,” but less so than the “pure-blood Caucasian,” though physically weaker than both in terms of their stature and disease resistance.Footnote 28
Individuals with mixed ancestry presented a host of problems for twentieth-century scientists and social reformers. From the biological standpoint, the failure of mixed-race unions to produce an easily classifiable type worried those who relied on physical characteristics to make racial distinctions. The assumption that mixed-race people could and did slip out of racial categories at will antagonized those committed to the maintenance of strict racial separation. Because mulattoes were believed to shun their “mixedness” in order to gain recognition as white, they were presumed to be mentally unstable. Sociologist Edward Byron Reuter referred to this condition as the “psychic condition of the mulatto.” According to Reuter, mulattoes who failed to fulfill their “personal wish complex”—that is, to become white—were doomed to become “discontented, unhappy, unadjusted persons … mulattoes in the psychological and sociological sense.”Footnote 29
Early investigations of the Jackson Whites echo much of the discourse around racial mixture happening among social and biological scientists during this period, especially as it pertained to the physical variations found within the population. In one 1913 article, the author documented the presence of a “black skinned, full-bodied negress with her small white baby” and a “little young Indian” playing with his “clumsy wooly-headed brother” all within the same nuclear family.Footnote 30 A single body could also exhibit the racial variability notable among the Jackson Whites, which the same report summarized thusly: “There in one face is to be found the impress of three continents, in one voice the intonation of three races, in one form a trinity of blights and blemishes.” Footnote 31 According to the author, the Jackson Whites were so varied that “students of heredity characteristics would find these mountaineer children a problem.”Footnote 32 The question of physical diversity also raised questions about racial classification. In alternate instances, the Jackson Whites were classed as “white,” as “negro-Indians,” and as “creoles.” In one instance, a writer goes so far as to use the lynching of a group member as evidence of the group's “Negro” ancestry, which shows that in the absence of conclusive physical evidence, a group's social conditions often functioned as a proxy for its racial status.Footnote 33 The lynching example also underscores the fact that public perception of a group's racial identity carried profound consequences.
For all the problems posed by the Jackson Whites, they were also immensely alluring to scientists. Their allure derived from the notion that their so-called “racial” characteristics—skin color, hair texture, nose width, lip size, and speech—recombined within the population in unpredictable and potentially troubling ways. Though early twentieth-century science had not fully unpacked the mechanisms of genetic inheritance, several studies published during this period pointed to a number of physical disharmonies resulting from interracial unions. For instance, physician K. B Aikman argued that racial mixing was dangerous because inherited characteristics could become “jumbled” and contribute to a “chaotic constitution” in the offspring. Aikman pointed to skeletal maladaptations—such as skulls too large to permit natural childbirth, or teeth that were disproportionately larger than the jaw—in order to substantiate his claim that miscegenation was a biologically dangerous endeavor.Footnote 34 Conversely, a small cohort of investigators subscribed to the theory of “hybrid vigor” and opined that racial hybrids were biologically stronger because they combined the best of both parent stocks.Footnote 35 Biologist Edwin Conklin, who argued that while some hybrids were inferior, others could be vastly superior to both parent stocks, represents this line of thinking.Footnote 36
Despite notable exceptions, however, the bulk of popular and scholarly opinion stressed the biological dangers of race mixing over any advantages, though very few studies involved actual human populations.Footnote 37 Investigators typically bred separate plant or animal species and then extrapolated their findings onto humans. This practice lent popular appeal to these studies, as it offered the public readily accessible proxies for understanding racial mixing. It also explains the abundance of studies speculating that racial crossings would lead to biological disharmonies like sterility, blindness, and skeletomuscular maladaptations—problems commonly associated with interspecies crossings.
After 1910, investigators increasingly turned their gaze to human populations in order to gather more accurate data on racial mixing. Whereas social scientists had conducted most of the prior research on human populations, biological research proliferated during this period. These researchers went to distant locales like the Yucatán, South Africa, India, and Hawaii to conduct their fieldwork—places with racially diverse populations that also offered researchers alternative models of race relations that they hoped might elucidate racial patterns observed in the United States. Distant locales also appealed to researchers who believed that mixed-race populations were harder to come by in the United States, as evolutionary theory taught that new races of people only developed over several centuries. Even then, because of the legal restrictions and stigmas attached to miscegenation, researchers found it difficult to find willing subjects.
Despite the physical variability and social degeneration of the Jackson Whites, they represented a promising opportunity for researchers to study racial mixing at home. A multipage feature reporting on the work of the Carnegie Institute's Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and the American Museum of Natural History in New York perfectly encapsulates why the Jackson Whites were such promising research subjects: “In the Ramapo Hills, a stone's throw from New York a new race of men is in the making. Other races reckon their existence by ages; this is the product of a single century. Other races have had vast stretches of territory in which to develop; this has had one lonely, wild mountainside.”Footnote 38 Here, within a fifty-mile radius of New York City, lay a new race of people who were “patiently working out the experiments scientists did not dare make.”Footnote 39 While controversial, if successful, the experiment promised to reveal essential truths about human evolution, the origin of the so-called pure races, and the consequences of racial mixture.
Taken together, popular writing as well as social and biological studies helped to transform triracial from a physical type into an idea. Physically variable, yet scientifically important, these are the conclusions that early researchers developed about triracial Americans like the Jackson Whites. These studies not only helped to draw attention to disparate populations, but they also provided the conceptual framework for linking otherwise disparate groups. When eugenicist Arthur Estabrook wrote about the need to study “triple-crosses” of white, black, and indigenous peoples in 1926, he was alerting colleagues to the presence of communities that posed a problem due to their low moral condition and physical variability, but also a testing ground through which “these [race] questions may be answered biologically and eugenically and not on the bases of prejudice alone.”Footnote 40 And the passage of time did little to alter this image. When in 1957 demographer Calvin Beale wrote that the Jackson Whites were “a distinctly new racial element in society” providing a new frontier of genetic research into human evolution, he did not break new ground so much as reinforce what these early works had laid out in terms of the scientific promise of triracial identity.Footnote 41
Blood Seeks Environment: Region and Race in the Construction of Appalachia
At the same time that popular writers and researchers were becoming interested in triracial groups like the Jackson Whites, writers wishing to emphasize the distinctiveness of mountain life were also acutely focused on white mountaineers—particularly the more nefarious aspects of mountaineer culture like moonshining, incest, and pervasive poverty, all of which were posited as endemic features of mountain life. These pejorative stereotypes of white mountaineers find their clearest expression in the image of the “hillbilly,” perhaps one of the most enduring icons of mountaineer life to emerge from the local color writing of the nineteenth century.Footnote 42 Local color writing also served to transform Appalachia's residents into “the purest Anglo-Saxon stock in all the United States.”Footnote 43 The characterization of Appalachia as an Anglo-Saxon stronghold did more than just garner support to combat the region's socioeconomic issues; it helped to reconcile Appalachia with the rest of America. In much the same way that the Nyack residents used whiteness to justify aid for the Thompsons, social reformers used the mountaineers’ whiteness to justify a broad range of social and political agendas that would integrate Appalachia back into modern America.
The mountaineers’ purported racial purity also propelled the rewriting of the region's racial history. For example, Charles Dudley Warner has argued that the absence of foreign and “Negro” elements made the mountaineer “more distinctly American in his characteristics.”Footnote 44 The erasure of mountaineers of color was a deliberate attempt to mythologize Appalachia as a land of poor whites beset with “white problems,” and not the racial problems that plagued the rest of America.Footnote 45 And yet, despite Appalachia being cast as an exclusively Anglo-Saxon stronghold, the region was actually home to a small yet visible population of nonwhite mountaineers. In addition to a sizable black population, Appalachia was home to several major Native American tribes, including the Cherokee and the Creek, as well as hundreds of triracial communities. Thus, even as Appalachia was being fashioned as a predominantly white region, Native Americans, African Americans, and eastern Europeans constituted at least 30 percent of the region's population.Footnote 46
Yet for a certain set of reformers, particularly those coming out of social purity and eugenic campaigns, the mountaineers were not only facing the same racial problems as the rest of the nation, they were succumbing to them.Footnote 47 Even for those scholars wedded to the notion of Appalachia as an exclusively white region, there is much to suggest that depictions of the region's problems were racial in nature. The focus on the physical characteristics of white mountaineers, such as their physical deformities and illnesses—laden with connotations of backwardness and atavism—reflected anxieties about white racial degeneration. These tropes mirrored the racializing discourse targeted at communities like the Jackson Whites, who were singled out for their mixedness as well as their poor biology, geographic isolation, and general backwardness. Thus, the spatial, psychological, and “biological” proximity of white and triracial mountaineers was central to how the public imagination conceived both groups as racially degenerate.
Derogatory in nature, the terms “hillbilly” and “triracial” represent dual stereotypes of Appalachia's inhabitants that are rarely, if ever, discussed together. Appalachians, whether white, black, or triracial, have shared the same backgrounds, patterns of speech, and cultural practices, and yet are often culturally categorized as different.Footnote 48 Early twentieth-century writing, both popular and social scientific, is one area in which the similarities between various mountain communities became evident. The inclusion of Appalachians of color, particularly those triracial communities of white, Indian, and black extraction alongside discussions of white mountaineer otherness, makes clear that the racial degradation of white mountaineers—either through cultural degeneration but more often through sexual contact with their nonwhite neighbors—not only informed how reformers thought of each racial group, but was also central to the framing Appalachia's regionalism.
Attention to the discourse surrounding the cultural degradation of white and triracial mountaineers is one space to rethink the meaning of Appalachian regionalism. Though the Jackson Whites were from northern Appalachia, which is often framed as culturally distinct from southern Appalachia, researchers often noted that their way of life mirrored those of white southern mountaineers. In an article titled “Backward Americans,” the author compared the Jackson Whites’ way of life to the “Old Americans gone to seen in the Appalachian highlands,” as both owed their pitiful plight to the economic failure of the eastern United States.Footnote 49 So low were the Jackson Whites on the social evolutionary scale that “the most ignorant ‘Crackers’ of middle Georgia or the ‘Clay-eaters’ of the South” paled in comparison.Footnote 50 Though largely derogatory in nature, these comparisons represent one of the few instances in which northern Appalachia was positioned as culturally similar to the southern region, and make clear that the circumstances of northern mountaineers were also central to framing Appalachia as a distinct region.
Progressive Era investigations of Appalachia, regardless of region, are notable for the ways in which impoverished living conditions proved so central to characterizations of both the region's white and nonwhite residents. Sketches of the region often focused on dilapidated “huts” or log cabins wherein one to three windowless rooms were the norm.Footnote 51 One writer discussing the status of white mountaineers commented that he had “never before seen so dismal and desolate a haunt of human life.”Footnote 52 The living conditions of mixed-blood mountaineers evoked parallel descriptions, with one writer stating that their “surroundings of dirt amidst their huts built of logs are of the rudest possible sort.”Footnote 53 Surveys of both populations also posited a causal feedback loop between their living conditions and their degraded mental condition, as poverty served as both a cause and manifestation of the group's mental degradation.Footnote 54 The mountaineers’ poverty took on added significance in the twentieth century as the concept of “fitness” gained traction among white elites. Though a eugenic term denoting physical vigor, the term provided a conceptual framework that linked race, class, and biological superiority as the markers of the ideal citizen
Researchers during this period also cited the practice of consanguineous parings, particularly those involving cousins, as a defining feature of both white and triracial mountaineers. Arthur Estabrook documented first cousin marriages among the mountaineers of Kentucky, although he noted that it was “not as common as second or third cousin marriage.”Footnote 55 Sociologist George Vincent noted the incidence of “intermarriage of three or four generations.”Footnote 56 In a sketch of the Jackson Whites’ living conditions, one writer suggested that their sense of racial superiority actually discouraged the Ramapo people from marrying outside their community.Footnote 57 However, it was not just racial pride that facilitated intermarriage among these groups. In the case of one triracial community in Virginia, Estabrook suggested prolonged social isolation as a major reason for intermarriage.Footnote 58
Discussions of mountaineer morality naturally extended to questions of their sexual morals. Not only did white mountaineers exhibit a “low standard of morality in their domestic relations,” they were also, in the words of one author, “a most fecund race.”Footnote 59 Large families were also common among “White-Indian-Negro” groups.Footnote 60 And researchers noted that both white and nonwhite communities were surprisingly tolerant of illegitimacy. According to John C. Campbell, children born out of wedlock to white mountaineers were not at all ostracized; researchers attributed the illegitimacy found among the Jackson Whites to “the licentious conduct [and] concubinage with both black and white men.”Footnote 61 Combined, these depictions contributed to the social construction of white and triracial mountaineers as possessing the worst moral qualities in the nation. As eugenics gained inroads as a palatable social movement aimed at biological improvement, the loose sexual morals of both societies singled them out as biological threats, which then justified programs of compulsory sterilization and institutionalization.
In addition to similar depictions of their pathologies, both communities garnered the interest of researchers seeking to understand the role of environment, particularly geographic isolation, as a source of pathology. Eugenicists stood at the forefront of the push to consider the link between geography and human heredity as a means of understanding the causes of feeblemindedness. In one of his early writings on the matter, biologist Charles Davenport, who would later found the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, suggested that negative human traits multiplied in areas with long-standing isolation and inbreeding, while positive traits increased most rapidly in areas with emigration.Footnote 62 In his 1926 address before the Eugenics Research Association, Estabrook explicitly linked Davenport's theory to his observations of Appalachian degeneracy. Whereas the first settlers had been a pioneering stock, as evidenced by their willingness to settle in a region as inaccessible Appalachia, for Estabrook, the fact that they stayed in Appalachia without seeking out a more comfortable existence “point[s] directly to the rule that energetic individuals will not in general remain in areas that do not afford opportunity for development. Blood of good stock seeks good environment or overcomes or improves poor environment.”Footnote 63
The incidence of pellagra, trachoma, undernourishment, and poor medical care also marked Appalachia as a “backward civilization.” For white and triracial Appalachians, this backwardness was especially conspicuous when compared with the urbanization of places like New York City. In constructing both the hillbilly and the triracial as backward, popular and social scientific writers linked these problematic populations together through the concept of degeneration. As an umbrella term, degeneration helped to signal disparate populations as a singularly harmful threat to an otherwise healthy nation.Footnote 64
In the early twentieth century, the “hillbilly” and the “triracial isolate” offered those concerned with racial purity the chance to situate their anxiety in a particular geographic location. On the one hand, locating these communities in a specific area made the threat they posed to white racial purity alarmingly real; on the other, because of the perceived distance of most Americans from these territories, the danger posed by white and triracial mountaineers seemed less immediate. Furthermore, the discourse surrounding white and triracial mountaineers served a racializing function, as their backwardness and degeneration positioned both groups outside the bounds of normative whiteness. The fact that important segments of the decision-making public viewed white and triracial mountaineers in a similar manner carried profound implications for both populations, ultimately informing how these communities came to understand their own racial identity. Firstly, triracial communities laid claim to the hillbilly appellation as a badge of honor and testament to their pioneer stock.Footnote 65 Outsiders also fashioned triracial communities as part of the same pioneer/hillbilly heritage as white Appalachians. For example, in his documentation of the cultural and religious institutions of the South's triracial populations, E. Franklin Frazier attributed their success to the Anglo-Saxon stock of their pioneer ancestors.Footnote 66 Likewise, white mountaineers used their relationships with their multiracial neighbors to elevate their status, specifically to lay claim to a more diverse past. For example, the many white mountaineers who claimed a Native American grandmother gained access to a multiracial identity that preserved a comfortable distance from the stigma attached to blackness.Footnote 67
Rethinking White Racial Degeneracy: The Eugenic Family Studies Revisited
The work of eugenicists represents the final major contribution to the racial construction of both poor white and triracial populations in Appalachia. Throughout the first three decades of the twentieth century, researchers, largely funded by the Eugenics Record Office (ERO), produced sixteen family-based studies in order to scientifically prove that rural whites were “mental defectives.” As Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz put it, “the central image these studies created was the degenerate hillbilly family, dwelling in filthy shacks, and spawning endless generations of paupers, criminals and imbeciles.”Footnote 68 Despite the fact that most studies centered on rural whites, at least two—the unpublished “The Jackson Whites: A Study in Racial Degeneracy” (1911), authored by Elizabeth Kite, and Arthur Estabrook and Ivan McDougle's Mongrel Virginians (1926)—dealt explicitly with rural communities of triracial ancestry. Still, the majority of these family studies implicated “mixed-blood” ancestry as the source of the white family's feeblemindedness. Even when a mixed-blood progenitor could not be located, researchers pointed to contemporary interracial coupling as an indication of the white rural poor's defective germplasm. Although there has been a great deal of scholarship on the family studies, especially regarding what they signal about ideas of white racial degeneracy, there has not been sustained analysis of how these investigations treat miscegenation. Though they have principally targeted white rural populations, the eugenic family studies are also a useful starting point to uncover the hidden history of multiracial mountaineers.
In effect, the eugenic family studies helped to draw a causal link between miscegenation and mental degeneracy. As a medical term signifying a broad range of mental defectiveness, “feeble-mindedness” served as a conceptual umbrella that allowed eugenicists to implicate both rural whites and “mixed-bloods” as threats to white racial purity.Footnote 69 The “feeble-minded” (those of a mental age between eight and twelve years) were considered a greater eugenic threat than “idiots” (those of a mental age of two years or younger) and “imbeciles” (those with a mental age of about seven years) for the same reasons that “mixed-bloods” were seen as more threatening to white racial purity than black Americans. While idiots and imbeciles were generally identifiable to the layperson, the feebleminded shared with the mixed-blood the ability to “pass” into unsuspecting white communities.Footnote 70
As a biosocial movement, “eugenics”—which derived from the Greek term eugenes, meaning “of good birth”—represents the utilization of hereditary theories to ensure the production of the “better” segments of society through selective mating.Footnote 71 In the American context, eugenics not only encouraged the “better” populations to reproduce (positive eugenics), but proponents also advocated intervention, often coercive in nature, through sterilization and segregation programs designed to prevent those deemed less fit from reproducing inferior offspring (negative eugenics).Footnote 72 Together, these efforts would ensure that eugenicists reached their chief aim: the prevention of white racial degeneracy. Declining birthrates among the eugenically “fit” and increased immigration from abroad, coupled with high birth rates among those deemed eugenically “unfit,” convinced a large segment of the decision-making public that racial degeneracy was well underway.Footnote 73
The ERO served as the American eugenics movement's basecamp. In 1904, Davenport lobbied the Carnegie Foundation for a grant to establish a research center at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island. Two years later, Davenport lobbied the American Breeders’ Association (later the American Genetic Association) to fund a research center to investigate human heredity and “to emphasize the value of superior blood and the menace to society of inferior blood.”Footnote 74 Founded in 1910, the ERO was funded by an endowment provided by Mary Harriman, widow to the railroad magnate R. E. Harriman.Footnote 75 Its original function was to serve as an archive of genealogical records on American genius. The initial pages of The Eugenics Review, the movement's flagship journal, featured genealogical sketches that attempted to trace the hereditary origins of genius in prominent Americans such as Alexander Graham Bell, Madison Grant, and Theodore Roosevelt.Footnote 76
Under the direction of Harry Laughlin, the ERO soon shifted its attention to documenting the lower strata of the population through intelligence testing and the publication of family studies. The ERO studies used observation, genealogical mapping, and phenotypic variations to measure social degeneracy. The authors of these family studies came from a variety of backgrounds: at least one was a minster, two were sociologists, and the others were researchers employed by the ERO with training in various fields including biology, psychology, and linguistics. Family studies represented just one aspect of a multipronged approach to documenting mental defectiveness. In addition to the family studies, Davenport, along with psychologist Henry Goddard, administered intelligence tests to southern and eastern European immigrants entering at Ellis Island. They also pioneered intelligence testing among army recruits during World War I.Footnote 77 According to Laughlin, the job of eugenics was to seek out “the submerged tenth, the socially inadequate persons who must be prevented from reproducing … the insane, the feebleminded, the paupers, the epileptic, the criminals, and so on.”Footnote 78
For reasons most likely related to convenience and availability, early studies focused on communities in close proximity to the ERO's Long Island headquarters. However, as the 1920s progressed and the ERO obtained more funding, researchers were able to expand their studies into rural communities in central and southern Appalachia. In addition to a variety of geographic locales, the family studies also presented varied opinions on the usefulness of social intervention. Though some authors believed that job assistance or other forms of charity might improve the conditions of their subjects, others were wholly committed to the idea that sterilization programs provided the only viable solution to the problems posed by the eugenically unfit.Footnote 79 The authors of Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem, published in 1919 and based on family history studies made at the Minnesota School for the Feeble-Minded, likened poor relief for mental defectives to “trying to stamp out malaria or yellow fever in the neighborhood of a mosquito breeding swamp.”Footnote 80 Despite their differing approaches, the authors of the eugenic family studies remained united in their belief that social problems were rooted in biology, and that the effective control of the mentally defective would be the only successful way to ameliorate these issues.Footnote 81
Family studies typically began when a member of a group came to the attention of researchers either because they had been institutionalized or they exhibited an exceptional degree of negative traits. The 1912 study, The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness, which became a major success for the ERO, began with the story of Deborah Kallikak, a resident at New Jersey's Vineland Training School.Footnote 82 Researchers then used public records, interviews with neighbors, and recollections by other family members to trace particular traits across generations in order to prove the hereditary basis of the group's most characteristic traits. The family studies followed those of the natural sciences in terms of being interested in the biological basis of human difference, but they embraced new sociological principles in terms of their desire to translate their findings into social programs, most notably institutional segregation and the coerced sterilization of the feebleminded.Footnote 83 The authors of the “Sam Sixty” study were explicitly clear on this point: “Society has the right and the duty to save such ever increasing expense from increasing numbers of dependents … by keeping the feeble-minded in custody while they are of child rearing and child be-getting ages.”Footnote 84
Eugenic studies capitalized on the marginality of interracial unions by positing miscegenation as a cause of feeblemindedness. Authored in 1911 by Elizabeth Kite, a field worker with New Jersey's Vineland Training School, “The Jackson Whites: A Study in Racial Degeneracy” is the first eugenics study to explicitly consider a mixed-race population, and as a result, made the strongest argument for a biological link between miscegenation and mental defectiveness. Kite trained under Henry Goddard, the director of research at Vineland, and served as a fieldworker from 1909 until 1918. During this period, she put her French skills to use by translating several key works on mental testing by Binet and Simon for use in Vineland's intelligence testing program. Kite was among the first wave of female professionals in the sciences. Like the other 250 female fieldworkers to emerge from the ERO's training camp, Kite gained access to a predominantly male field by possessing a skillset believed to be the special domain of women, most notably the ability to perform the careful documentation of genealogical histories and a trustworthiness that made social observation possible.Footnote 85
The Jackson Whites first came to the attention of researchers at Vineland when they went in search for the relatives of one of their young female patients, Lucy DeGroat. Lucy had been the subject of a newspaper story about a woman and her four children who had been found living in a woodchopper's shack in the Ramapo Mountains. Described as “a pitiful little idiot girl,” Lucy had been placed in the care of the New Jersey Children's Home Society while her siblings were adopted out to childless couples. Beginning in 1911, the study included two years of research among the Ramapo community and drew on extensive interviews with neighbors of the Ramapo clan to determine their racial and moral quality. Like the other family studies, the Jackson White study made extensive use of genealogies to trace the inheritance of defective traits. Yet unlike the other studies, Kite made no attempt to conceal the location or identity of the 2,600 subjects. Coming so closely on the heels of the Kallikak study, it is no surprise that Kite believed the studies were related, despite the fact that the Jackson Whites were of mixed heritage. Not only did the studies “belong logically to the same series,” Kite argued that though both groups were in totally different environments, they were all “closely related by blood and are fundamentally of the same life.”Footnote 86
A triracially mixed community of Negro, Indian, and European ancestry, Kite documented the Jackson White ancestry as follows:
These loose living descendants of slaves were gradually crowded back into the mountain districts where they lived from hand to mouth and where their numbers were from time to time recruited by whites whose tendencies were similar to their own…
But how account for the Indian blood that shows itself so conspicuously among this race today? Undoubtedly a large part of it comes from Indians who were formerly held as slaves…Footnote 87
The consequences of this deleterious racial mixture expressed itself in a number of ways, mainly in the “temperamental laziness” and “liquor heart” of the Jackson Whites.Footnote 88 Not all of the inherited racial characteristics were negative: Kite documented among many of her subjects a combination of the “Indian reserve” and the “Negro independence,” traits she considered to be responsible for the Jackson Whites’ love of nature and physical freedom. Unfortunately, these qualities did not overcome the sexual immorality of the group, as Kite noted that “sex laxity [was] universal” among the entire community.Footnote 89
The danger of the Jackson Whites stemmed not only from their degraded racial status, but also from their close proximity to the region's wealthy elite. In her annotations on the manuscript of the study, Kite notes with alarm the fact that many Jackson Whites were no longer secluded in the isolation of the Ramapos, but had migrated en masse to Hillburn, New York, a small village located at the bottom of the Ramapo Mountains that was also the summer home to many elite New Jersey and New York families who had taken a “paternalistic stance against this defective race.”Footnote 90 Such elite paternalism posed a problem in terms of artificially propping up a community that might otherwise self-destruct, but the ultimate danger of the Jackson Whites was their physical form. According to Kite, the “picturesque” and “attractive” qualities of the Jackson Whites could fool a casual observer as to the true nature of their racial and moral character.Footnote 91 As a precursor to Estabrook and McDougle's Mongrel Virginians, a 1926 study on a triracial group from Virginia called the “Issues,” the Jackson Whites study laid the groundwork linking physical appearance, sexuality, and place in the construction of the “mixed blood.” When in 1932 scientists concluded that the “White-Indian-Negro” blood combination had bred “moron people,” the racial construction of triracial groups as breeders of mental deficiency had largely been finalized.Footnote 92
Although Kite's “The Jackson Whites: A Study in Racial Degeneracy” and Estabrook and McDougle's Mongrel Virginians are often believed to be the only studies to deal explicitly with racial mixture, of the remaining fourteen studies, at least six make mention of “half-breed” relatives or the propensity of their subjects to engage in interracial sex. Even when miscegenation was not marshaled as proof of degeneracy, researchers often implicated it as a cause by tracing their subjects’ defective germplasm to an interracial liaison among their ancestors.Footnote 93 In his description of a Kansas clan by the name of “Smoky Pilgrims,” sociologist Frank Blackmar attributed “moral defectiveness” and “dusky and possibly the sickly yellow color” to “the Negro blood in the veins of part of the family.”Footnote 94 Likewise, Oscar McCulloch's study of the “Tribe of Ishmael” attributed the group's degraded condition “to the wandering blood from the half-breed mother … [and] the poison and passion that probably came with her.”Footnote 95 Racial mixture also explained the group's tendency to “gypsy,” wandering across the Midwest by wagon when not occupying treehouses or abandoned homes.Footnote 96 In his 1912 study of the Nam family, an ominous palindrome for “man,” Estabrook argued that the “highly inbred community in New York State” sprang from a union involving a “roving” Dutch pioneer and an “Indian Princess.”Footnote 97 Another cacogenic family in rural Ohio, the “Happy Hickories,” were the progeny of “an Indian squaw,” while one of the families in Vale of Siddem had several children that all showed their “Negro heritage” due to their descendance from “Nigger Ned.”Footnote 98
The eugenic family studies did not just elide concerns of racial purity and rural mental degradation, they helped to blur the boundaries of whiteness. By rooting white racial degeneracy in mixed-blood ancestry, the eugenic studies served to position rural whites as racially impure in both a social and a genetic sense. Even if rural white Appalachians were not racially reclassified as nonwhite, they were clearly conceptualized as approaching the specter of nonwhiteness. By drawing genetic proximity between indigenous and black populations, the rural white mountaineer was transformed from “off-white,” the term used to describe their social degradation, to nonwhite, the language used to describe their genetic degradation. While whiteness is often conceptualized as monolithic, attention to the ways in which white and triracial mountaineers were cast as the “other” reveals that whiteness is contextually negotiated. It is also worth acknowledging that variations of whiteness did not necessarily deny the privilege that came along with “just being white.” After all, it was the belief that “in the context of United States’ racial formations, white people are not supposed to be poor,” which motivated reformers and later bureaucrats to wage the fight against mountain poverty.Footnote 99 Yet white Appalachians were not wholly helped. They, along with their triracial neighbours, were marginalized, castigated, and sometimes singled out for eugenic intervention. Therefore, attention to the “othering” of white and triracial mountaineers is a way to recognize that the privileges of whiteness are based on a multitude of circumstances that are not always open to all persons identified as white.”Footnote 100
Conclusion
The treatments of race mixing covered above have relied on a conceptualization of race mixing as the route to or manifestation of psychological, social, and biological degeneracy. In this vein, degeneration had as much to do with the particular behaviors and conditions thought to befall these groups as it did with the ambiguity of their racial status. Although people who were biologically black could not aspire to whiteness, as the eugenic family studies reveal, whites could easily descend into “mulattoness,” creating what historian John Mencke has called “a new and curious kind of mulatto—a mulatto who was in fact genetically white but morally black.”Footnote 101
As the Thompsons’ discovery suggests, their moral blackness served as a proxy for their degraded genetic whiteness, which in turn determined the types of social assistance available to them. Though distancing themselves from blackness is thought to have allowed white mountaineers to access the benefits of white privilege, the fact that mountaineer culture was also cast as backward and degraded placed significant limits on that privilege. For the Thompsons, this is best evidenced by the fact that many members of the family ended up in the care of the Vineland School, a controlled environment in which “human sub-normalities” like the Thompsons could survive in an environment suited for their limited intellect.Footnote 102 More than an institution that merely housed the feebleminded, Vineland functioned as “a laboratory to study and train individuals”; in this way, the school improved on the model of other eugenic institutions through its commitment to rigorous scientific scrutiny of its residents. Yet not all members of the Thompson family were institutionalized. Despite her troubled beginnings, state officials believed that, Ella, the family's oldest daughter, was “bright and promising,” and so she was allowed to enroll in a “normal” school.Footnote 103
In addition, the Thompsons’ proximity to the Jackson Whites also hugely impacted the latter group. As the news reports covering the Thompsons brought renewed attention to the triracial mountaineers, organizations such as the National Christian League for the Promotion of Purity and the ERO renewed their attention to the health and educational conditions of the Ramapo people. Eventually, the state of New Jersey assigned a teacher and a hygiene instructor to teach the community about sexual hygiene and other hygienic matters. Thus, both populations benefitted from the condition of their degraded whiteness in a way that allowed them to make claims to citizenship and national belonging that were significant, even if ultimately limited.
The tendency to link white and triracial mountaineers not only allowed both groups access to reform measures, but the investigations into the lived conditions of both populations served to challenge the supremacy of the “one-drop rule” of racial classification.Footnote 104 That outsiders found it so difficult to classify the Jackson Whites and other triracial populations illustrates that the Progressive Era did not witness a hardening of racial boundaries, but rather their expansion. The classification of the Jackson Whites as “white hillbillies,” “creoles,” and other markers of in-betweenness suggests that racial boundaries during this period remained porous, and, like other mediated spaces, reflected the political, social, and economic interests of their gatekeepers.
Acknowledgments
The author wishes to thank members of Vanderbilt University's Americanist Work-in-Progress Seminar as well as the University of Birmingham's Race: A Work In Progress Seminar for their constructive feedback on early drafts of this article; Nathan Cardon, Lorenzo Costaguta, Matt Houlbrook, John Munro, Mo Moulton, Sadiah Qureshi, and Gavin Schafer for providing thoughtful recommendations for the article's improvement; and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful and incisive critiques.
