Our Carolina highlanders

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Our Carolina highlanders /

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West Virginia University Library

This book is due on the date indicated below.

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UNIVERSITY o/ NORTH CAROLINA
Extension Bureau Circvilar^No. 2

Chapel Hill, July, 1916

OUR CAROLINA HIGHLANDERS

E. C. Branson

Rural Economics and Sociology, University of North Carolina

What I shall say or try to say concerns the 17 Highland counties
of North Carolina, and the 243,000 people who dwell in this land-locked
area. This is the region and these are the people I best know in our
southern mountain country. I assume to speak for no others.

L OUR HIGHLANDERS ARE NOT A PECULIAR PEOPLE

First of all I want to claim for the whole of North Carolina an
identity with our mountain people. They are our very own kith, kin,
and kind. They are not a peculiar people — in illiteracy, poverty, degree
of isolation, fiery individualism, or organizable qualities. They differ
in no essential particular from the democratic mass in North Carolina
in mood, humor, temper, and attitudes. Their economic and social
problems are not regional ; they are state-wide. There are no differ-
ences in kind, and few in degree, between the civilization of our hill
country and that of the State as a whole. Its virtues and its deficien-
cies are ours, and I claim them as our own.

Their Civilization is Dominantly Rural ^ j ,

Our Carolina Highlanders are a rural people. Only 37,000 of them
live in towns of any size whatsoever, and almost exactly half of the
town dwellers in this region live in Asheville, while 6,300 more live
in Canton, Waynesville and Hendersonville, the only other towns with
more than a thousand inhabitants in all our mountain country. That is
to say, 85 out of every 100 of our mountain people live in the open
country; but then, 79 people in the 100 the whole state over live out-
side all incorporated towns and cities. Four mountain counties in the
southwest have fewer than 20 country people to the square mile ; but
then, another group of four counties in the lower Cape Fear region
has fewer than 20 country people to the square mile ; while three other
counties in the Pamlico region have fewer than 15 people to the
square mile.

An address. Conference of .Southern Mountain Workers, Knoxville, Tennessee,
March 29, 1916.

APPAL. RM.

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jVeSl »i^& North Carolina is Primarily Rural

Our civilization in Nortli Carolina is primarily rural. Both the
strength and the weakness of our democracy lie in this fact. We
are saturated with a sense of equality. We stand unabashed in kingly
presences. We revel in assured freedom. We have a fierce passion for
self-government. We have always held high the spirit of revolt
against centralized power, and we have been quick to wrest from
tyranny its crown and scepter. All of which is magnificent. But we
are learning that untaught and unrestrained individualism needs to
develop into the wisdom and power of safe self-government. The
civic and social mind supplants the personal and individual view of
life all too slowly everywhere.

Our dwellers in the open country number 1,700,000, and they
average only 39 to the square mile. In Ashe, Madison, Mitchell, and
Buncombe the country people are 40 or more to the square mile,
while four more of our mountain counties are just below the state
average. The ills attendant upon sparsity of population in rural regions
are social isolation and insulation, raucous individualism, illiteracy,
suspicion, social aloofness, lack of organization and cooperative enter-
prise ; but our mountain people suffer from these deficiencies not a
whit more than the people in definite areas of the tide-water country
and in the state at large. I will undertake to duplicate a hundred
times over, in sparsely settled rural areas beyond mountain walls in
North Carolina and in other states, every virtue and every failing of
our kinspeople in the hill country.

The Deficiencies of Sparsely Settled Ruralism

Everywhere in thinly settled country regions we find people here
and there who are suspicious, secretive, apathetic, and unapproachable ;
who live in the eighteenth century and preserve the language, manners,
and customs of a past long dead elsewhere, who prefer their primitive,
ancient ways, who are ghettoed in the midst of present day civilization,
to borrow a phrase from President Frost. They are the crab-like
souls described by Victor Hugo in Les Miserables, who before ad-
vancing light steadily retreat into the fringe of darkness. People
like these abound in Clinton and Franklin counties (New York)
where an eighth of the native white voters are illiterate, in Aroostook
county (Maine) where nearly a fifth of the native white voters cannot
read their ballots or write their names; in Windham county (Connect! — Yy^oJt
cut), where a seventh of the ■v€>t«i=s- are illiterate. Windham, by the VA^fe^
way, lies midway between the academic effulgence of Yale on the
one hand and of Harvard on the other. You can find within the
sound of college bells anywhere what we found the other day in a
field survey that took us into every home in a mid-state county in
North Carolina — a family of whites all illiterate, half the children
dead in infancy, and never a doctor in the house in the whole history
of the familv.

All the ages of race history and every level of civilization can be
found in any county or community, even in our crowded centers of
wealth and culture. We need not hunt for 18th century survivals in
mountain coves alone.

We Need a Consciousness of Kind

We shall not make headway in well-meant work in the mountains
unless we can bring to it what Giddings calls a consciousness of kind.
We need to be less aware of picturesque, amusing, or distressing differ-
ences, and more keenly conscious of the kinship of the mountain people
with their kind elsewhere and everywhere. Otherwise we shall bring
to noble effort in the mountains a certain disabling attitude that is
fatal to success.

And so over against the types we find in the pages of Craddock,
Fox, Kephart, and the rest, let us set the mountain people as they
are related to the civilization of which they are a part. I therefore
urge upon your attention the fact that they are not more poverty-
stricken, nor more lawless and violent, nor more unorganizable than
the dem.ocratic mass in rural North Carolina.

Our Highlanders Are Not Poverty Stricken

1. In the first place and quite contrary to popular notions, our
mountains are not a region of wide-spread poverty. In per capita rural
wealth Alleghany is the richest county in North Carolina. Among our
100 counties, five highland counties. Alleghany, Buncombe, Ashe,
Henderson, and Watauga, rank 1st, 5th, 6th, 13th, and 14th in the
order named, in the per capita farm wealth of country populations ;
and two more, Yancey and Transylvania, are just below the state
average in this particular. The people of these counties are not poor,
as country wealth is reckoned in North Carolina. They dwell in a
land of vegetables and fruits, grain crops, hay and forage, flocks and
herds. It is a land of overflowing abundance. It is not easy for such
people to feel that they are fit subjects for missionary school enter-
prises. ' As a matter of fact, they need our money far less than they
need appreciative understanding and homebred leadership. Their
wealth is greater than their willingness to convert it into social ad-
vantages. They need to be shown how to realize the possibilities of
their own soils and souls. Mountain civilization, like every other,
will rise to higher levels when the people themselves tug at their own
boot-straps ; and there is no other way.

It is true that three of the poorest counties in the state in per
capita country wealth are Graham, Cherokee, and Swain — counties set
against the steeps of the Great Smokies. They rank in this particular
92nd, 94th, and 96th respectively; but their poverty is duplicated by
that of Moore, Brunswick. Carteret, and Dare — four counties in our
coastal plain. The rank of these eastern counties is 93rd, 95th, 97th,
and 98th in the order named. The two poorest counties in North

3

714152

Carolina in per capita farm wealth are in the tide-water region, not
in the mountains.

Approaching the poverty of our mountain people from another
angle, let us consider indoor pauperism in 11 mountain counties that
maintain county homes or poor houses. The 1910 Census discloses
an average rate for the United States of 190 almshouse paupers per
100,000 inhabitants. In North Carolina the rate was 96; in these 11
highland counties it was only 79. Six of the mountain counties make
a far better showing than the state at large. Buncombe with a rate of
125 and Watauga with a rate of 139, the two highest rates in this
region, make a better showing than all the North Atlantic and New
England States, where indoor pauper rates range from 153 in New
Jersey to 447 in Massachusetts.

But we may make still another and better approach to the subject
of poverty in our mountains by examining the outside pauper rates;
better, because outside help is less repugnant to the feelings than resi-
dence in the poor house. In 1914 the state rate for outside pauperism
was 234 per 100,000 inhabitants. In 12 highland counties the average
rate was 205. Seven of the counties have rates far smaller than the
state average, ranging from 35 in Mitchell to 184 in Cherokee ; three
are just below the state average; and only two. Buncombe and Clay,
are near the bottom.

It ought to be clear that poverty in the mountains of North Caro-
lina is actually and relatively less than elsewhere in the State. Here
both indoor and outside paupers in 12 counties in 1914 numbered only
559 in a population of 209,000 souls.

State-Wide White Illiteracy

2. In the second place, illiteracy among native whites in our moun-
tains is not more distressing than white illiteracy elsewhere in the
state. In Alleghany, Buncombe, Graham, Henderson, and Transyl-
vania the rates of white illiteracy are less than the state average; in
Macon, Haywood, and Watauga the ratios are near the state average
of 12.3 per cent. The average rate for the mountain region is 15.1
per cent, due to excessive white illiteracy rates in eight counties ;
namely, Jackson 15.3, Ashe 15.6, Clay 16.3, Swain 18, Madison 18.7,
Cherokee 19.4, Yancey 19.5, and Mitchell 22.4. More than one-seventh
or 15.1 per cent of all the white people ten years old and older in 17
mountain counties are illiterate. It is appalling ; but the fact that
nearly one-eighth of all the white people of these ages the whole-
state over are illiterate is also appalling. But nearly one-fifth or 18.5
per cent of all our people, both races coinited, are illiterate ; and
this fact is still more appalling. There is comfort, however, in the
further fact that with a single exception North Carolina lead the
Union in inroads upon illiteracy during the last census period, and
we are running Kentucky a close second in Moonlight Schools.

Our mountain people are not peculiar, even in their illiteracy.

True, 11 of the 16 highland counties reported in the 1910 Census are
illiterate beyond the state average of white illiteracy ; but 53 counties
east of the Ridge are also above the state average. In Surry, Colum-
bus, Stokes, and Wilkes the white illiterates number from 19 to 21.7
per cent of the total white populations. Sparsely settled rural people
are everywhere apt to be fiercely individualistic, incapable of con-
certed effort, and unduly illiterate ; both behind and beyond mountain
walls, in New York State, Maine, Connecticut, and North Carolina
alike. The problems of developing democracy in our highlands, I
repeat, are State-wide, not merely regional. They concern a sparsely
settled rural population, socially insulated, fiercely individualistic, un-
duly illiterate, unorganized, and non-social, both in the mountains and
in the state at large.

Our Homicide Rates
3. For instance, the bad eminence held by North Carolina in homi-
cide rates among the 24 states of the registration area is due to the slow
socialization of a population that is still nearly four-fifths rural. In
1913, we lead the registration states with an urban rate of 274 homi-
cides per million inhabitants, and a rural rate of 173, against a general
rate of 72 in the registration area.

I may say in passing that Virginia, Kentucky, and North Carolina
are the only southern states in the registration area, and that 24
states are all told still on the outside. I wish it were possible to have
the facts about all the states in a subject like this.

Town rates are higher than country rates in 21 states, largely be-
cause the steady cityward drift of country people introduces into the
organized life of American towns an element that is slow to learn the
lessons of social adjustment. Thus, 57 or nearly half of all the homicides
in 16 mountain counties between 1910 and 1914 occurred in Buncombe,
Haywood, and Henderson, in four towns of which dwell 25,000 people
or nearly seven-tenths of all the town dwellers in this entire region.
On the other hand, the high spirited retreat into inaccessible coves
before advancing civilization. They climb into the high levels of the
Great Smokies in Haywood, Swain, and Graham, where they settle
personal difficulties in the highland style of primitive times. These
counties lead the mountain region in homicide rates. Madison ranks
87th with an average annual four-year rate (1910-1914) of 174 homi-
cides per million inhabitants ; Swain ranks 92nd with an average rate
yji 217; Haywood 95th with a rate of 238; and Graham 98th with a rate
of 242. These are the people, by the way, among whom Kephart
dwelt and who colored his impressions of our entire mountain civili-
zation.

But just as might be expected, three of our lowland counties have
just as fearful records. Anson, for instance, ranks 93rd with a rate
of 235, Scotland 97th with a rate of 277, and Robeson is at the very
bottom of the list with an appalling rate of 408 homicides per million
inhabitants.

5

No, our Highlanders are not peculiar even in their fierce and fiery
individualism. Human life is just as safe west of the Ridge as east
of it.

Good Roads in North Carolina

4. Kephart urges that the mountain people cannot pull together,
except as kinsmen or partisans. "Speak to them of community in-
terests, try to show them the advantages of co-operation," says he,
"and you might just as well be proffering advice to the North Star.
They will not work together zealously even to improve their neighbor-
hood roads." But these are the faults of sparsely settled rural popu-
lations in the mountains and on the plains alike. Nothing could be
worse, for instance, than the country roads of southern Illinois in the
bad winter seasons. Failure to organize and co-operate is the cardinal
weakness of country people everywhere.

True, there were no improved country roads in four counties west
of the Ridge on January 1, 1915; but also, four neighboring counties in
the Albemarle country fall into the same category. Thirty-one of our
counties in 1914 had 10 per cent or less of their public road mileage
improved. Seven of these were west and 24 were east of the Blue
Ridge. Five mountain counties, Henderson, Cherokee, Yancey, Hay-
wood, and Buncombe, are among the forty counties that made the
best showing in the state in improved public road mileage in 1914;
the per cents of improved road mileage ranging from 17.7 in Hender-
son to 72 in Buncombe. Avery, a mountain county with no improved
roads in the last report, is now spending $150,000 in road construction.
Our mountain counties are falling into line about as rapidly as
other sections of the state. And North Carolina is doing well in
highway building. In 1914 she stood ahead of 29 states in per cent
of surfaced roads, and outranked 32 in the expenditure of road
funds locally raised.*

Mountain Public Sctiools

5. As a last word in my attempt to show that our mountain condi-
tions and problems are state-wide conditions and problems, let us
consider the investment made by our Highlanders in their schools and
children ; say, their per capita investment in country school property
in the census year. In 1910 it was only $1.86 per rural inhabitant. But
then, it was only $2.08 the whole state over. Seven mountain counties
were well above the state average with per capita investments ranging
from $2.56 in Swain, one of the three poorest counties in the state, to
$4.56 in Transylvania. Two other counties, Macon and Madison, were
not far below the State average. The seven remaining counties had
per capita investments in rural school property as follows : Cherokee
$1.78, Watauga $1.56, Mitchell $1.42. Yancey $1.34, Haywood $1.26,
Graliam $1.09, and Ashe, a county that stands 6th from the top among
our 100 counties in per capita rural wealth, foots the list with 78 cents.

*Based on the Report of the Federal Office of Public Roads covering^ the year 1914.

6

Ashe and Watauga, both of them among our 14 richest counties,
are capital illustrations of wealth without corresponding willingness
to convert it into community weal.

Our mountain counties are moving forward in rural school propertj'
about as rapidly as the rest of the state. Between 1900 and 1914 the
value of such property in 17 highland counties rose from $408,000
to $637,000, an increase of 56 per cent, against an increase of 45
per cent in the state at large. Ashe and Yancey more than doubled
their investments in rural school property during these four years.
In Cherokee the investment was more than trebled. And it is proper
to add that under the superb leadership of Hon. J. Y. Joyner, the
State School Superintendent, our State as a whole has made marvelous
gains during the last ten years in the education of all our people.
As a matter of fact, these gains make a story of unparalleled achieve-
ment.

II. A COMING, NOT A VANISHING RACE

The mountain people I know are democratic by nature, high
spirited, self-reliant, and proudly independent. They scorn charities,
and scent patronage afar. They are not a weakling people. They are
sturdy and strong in character, keenly responsive to fair treatment,
kind hearted and loyal to friends, quick to lend help in distress ; and
salted unto salvation by a keen sense of hum.or.

They are not a submerged race. They are not down aiid out, after
a hand to hand struggle with advancing civilization. They are not
victims of social mal-adjustment. They are as yet, the unadjusted.
They are not decadents like the country people in the densely popu-
lated industrial areas of the North and East. They are a coming,
not a vanishing race. Their thews and sinews are strong, their brains
are nimble and capable, and at bottom they are sane and sound, health-
some and wholesome, in wind and limb, body and soul. They are a
hopeful element in developing democracy in North Carolina. There
is immense lifting power in the people of our hill country. They
need, to be sure, to be organized for economic, civic, and social effi-
ciency ; but this need is state-wide, not merely regional.

A Liability, Not an Asset

The Highlanders have long been a segregated, unmixed, ethnic group
— a homogeneous mass without organic unity. Miss Emma Miles,
herself a mountaineer, says in The Spirit of the Mountains, "There
is no such thing as a community of mountaineers. Our people are
almost incapable of concerted action. We are a people yet asleep,
a race without consciousness of its own existence." All of which
means that here is a social mass that lacks social solidarity. It lacks
■the unity in variety and the variety in unity that social development
■demands in any group of people.

A fundamental need in the mountains is an influx of new people
with new ideas and enterprises.

The homogeniety of our Highlanders has long been a liability,
not an asset. Appalachia needs the mingling of race types. The
English Midlands offer an illustration in point. Here is where the
Cymric, Pictish, and Irish tribes of Celts struggled for long cen-
turies with the Anglo-Saxons, Danes, and Scandanavians. Here they
finally coalesced, and here is the seed-bed of national supremacy in
intellect. Here is the England of Shakespeare, Macaulay, Ruskin, and
George Eliot, Hogarth, Turner, and Burne-Jones, Watt, Hamilton, and
Farraday.

A New Era in Our Hill Country

But a new era is at hand in our hill country. Industrialism is
rapidly invading and occupying this region. The timber, mineral, and
water power treasures of the mountains have at last challenged the
attention of organized big business. The blare of steam whistles, the
boom of dynamite, the whir of machinery, the miracle of electric
lights and telephones, the bustle of business in growing cities announce
an economic revolution in our mountain country. Industrial enter-
prises will introduce the needed elements of population. They de-
mand railway connections with the outside world. Automobiles in
increasing numbers demand improved public highways. This economic
revolution will mean better schools, stronger newspapers, another type
of religious consciousness, and a more liberal social life. The indus-
trial transformation of Appalachia has begun, and the next generation
of Highlanders will be well in the middle of this new era.

III. THE CHALLENGE TO MOUNTAIN WORKERS

Main enquiries for mountain workers are : How will the people in
our hill country react against the new order that is rapidly develop-
ing here?

Will our Highlanders adjust themselves advantageously to new'
economic and social conditions ? Will they surrender a sturdy man-
hood for the subservience that industrialism demands? Will they
be content to stand quite discrowned in the presence of invading
aliens?

Will they withdraw into their shells like periwinkles, or in re-
mote coves seek freedom from the annoyance of an impious new order
of things?

Or will they decline the struggle for adjustment and drop into
chronic apathy, or develop the dependency that afflicts modern civi-
lization like creeping paralysis?

These various social results will follow — inevitably so ; but one
or another of them will at last become the regnant humor and atti-
tude of tlie mountain people, as modern civilization with its curious
mixture of good and ill conquers the life of this long sequestered
territory. Which result shall it be? It is a question for devoted social
servants in this region to predetermine.

8

)ring to the people we serve let us bring no standards, plans, or
'huTcli and Sunday school workers in the mountains must think
their way sanely through these various social alternatives, and choose
wisely far in advance of the thinking of the people they serve ; and
not only must the goal of school and church efforts be clearly visioned,
but direct, effective ways, means and methods of approach must be em-
ployed. Here is a great opportunity to try out to a conclusion the last
word in educational thinking and spiritual seership. Whatever we
methods that have long ago been tried out and abandoned elsewhere by
the common sense of mankind. We ought not to pitch our tents in the
graveyard of dead traditions, however ancient and honoralile.

The Main Problem to be Solved

We ought to keep clearly in mind a concern of primary importance
to the mountain people. The question, says President Frost, is whether
the mountain people can be enlightened and guided so that they
can have a part in the development of their own country, or whether
they must give place to aliens and melt away like the Indians of an
earlier day?

That is to say, both the church and the school problem are funda-
mentally economic and social. The highest values, of course, are
spiritual. As invading industrialism turns into gold the natural re-
sources of these mountains, will it enhance the value of their largest
asset — the men and women of the hill country? Keeping the King's
daughters all beautiful within, and making men that are finer than
gold, yea than the golden wedge of Ophir, are purposes far beyond
the making of money here and everywhere.

IV. THE TYPE OF EDUCATION NEEDED

With this said to indicate that I do not have in mind any crass
materialism, I may venture perhaps to add :

1. John Frederick Oberlin's life-long work in the Ban-de-la-Roche
of the Vosges mountains well nigh perfectly types the ideals, the
spirit, and the methods of effective social service work everywhere.
Baird's account of it ought to have a large place in the required courses
of church seminaries, and teacher training schools the world over.

The School Must Educate for Usefulness at Home

2. Our mountain schools ought to be directly and effectively re-
lated to the resources, opportunities, and possibilities of the hill
country. They ought to be busy with the problems of hill-country
farming — terracing, crop rotations, fruits and nuts, cabbage, potato
and celery culture, ham and bacon production, beef animals, dairy
farming, cheese and butter factories, poultry and eggs. The school
farm is, at present, the most important department of the school — far
more important than formal grammar, algebra and geometry, Latin and
Greek.

9

However, we see in the mountain schools, as elsewhere, a lingering
belief that the further away a thing is in time or space the better
worth studying it is. There are schools that somehow cannot connect
up with the near-here-and-now ; that cannot or will not become ef-
fective agencies of social adjustment to immediate social surround-
ings. What value they have lies in transplanting boys and girls into
other social soils — and thus the mountains are bereft of their choicest
social treasures. The acid test of success in our mountain schools lies
in this : Do they set the thinking of our young Highlanders sanely
against the background of the big, wide world, and at the same time
keep alive in them a homing instinct true as the carrier pigeon's.
It is the final test of success in country high schools everywhere.
Training young people in the countryside for useful lives elsewhere
may be good for them, but it steadily decreases leadership in country
regions where it is most sorely needed.

School Farms Must Show Profits

3. I may add that the school farm must show a clean balance
sheet from year to year. It cannot be a laboratory or experiment plat,
with its unavoidable deficit. The farm manager must here apply the
results of expensive experimentation elsewhere, and demonstrate be-
yond all doubt or debate the value of other and better types of farming
than the mountain people as yet know much about.

It ought also to be clear that it is folly for the school farm to
illustrate activities that do not yield a profit. The production of farm
wealth in forms that cannot be turned into ready cash at a fair price
under neighborhood conditions is absurd. And nobody sees the ab-
surdity any more quickly than the keen people in our mountains. It
ought to be equally clear that profit in farm products lies in access
to markets and in capable salesmanship ; and that the local market
problem is related to improved public highways, railway facilities, and
co-operative selling. And here is where the uncommercial mind of
the mountaineer fails him. The mountain school, therefore, ought
to step adroitly into leadership in local taxation for good roads, for
consolidated, well-equipped public schools and in co-operative market
and credit associations. Otherwise it will be repeating the oldtime
mistake of agricultural high schools and colleges the whole country
over; a mistake that a few of them are attempting to remedy in very
recent years.

The Need for Vocational Education

4. The work of the mountain school must be strongly vocational;
and the head of it will know about the direct, simple forms of worth-
while activities in country schools. Recent bulletins of the Federal
Department of Agriculture offer invaluable plans and details in this
field of country school activity. The old order of manual training is
out of place in our mountain schools. The shop and tool work here
must have a direct applicancy and an unmistakable value.

10

The Mountain Home a School Concern

5. And the mountain school must keep the mountain home clearly
in view, and must develop courses and activities that concern home-
building: simple, tasteful, inexpensive decoration; possible conven-
iences and comforts; vegetables and fruits, pigs and poultry; health
and sanitation ; dietaries, nursing and emergencies ; books, magazines,
and the reading habit; housewifery, and household arts and crafts
that develop taste, invention, and skill.

Strong Courses in Science and Literature

6. The physical and social sciences ought to dominate the formal
courses and activities of our mountain schools : ecological and eco-
nomic botany directly connected with field studies ; economic mineral-
ogy that leads to intelligent acquaintance with local deposits ; dy-
namic geology with outside studies in soil erosions, terracing, year-
around cover crops, deforestation and its results ; general physics, soil
physics, and farm mechanics ; chemistry and particularly soil chemis-
try ; bacteriology, physiology, sanitation and health ; rural sociology
general and local ; applied mathematics, and the like. Strong courses
in drawing, work in light, shade, and color, music, and noble literature
ought to cap and crown the work.

It is not easy to function the country school properly; but it has
been done, and I take it that mountain school workers are thoroughly
familiar with the Agricultural High Schools and the Folk Schools of
Denmark. If not, they ought to be, and Foght's bulletins on the
Danish schools can be had for the asking from the Federal Edu-
cation Bureau.

Common Causes of Failure

7. Even when properly functioned, such schools frequently do not
reach and serve the people who need them most. Sewing, cooking, and
farming have no place in their notion of what education means. Why
teach in a school what we know all about already, is an exclamation
heard every day and many times a day everywhere. Like most of
us, the mountain people are acutely conscious of what they want, and
feebly conscious of what they need. Arousing appetency for really
worth-while things, getting people to crave what they need most
is the finest of the fine arts — in the mountains and everywhere else.

8. I have so often seen well-planned, well-equipped schools fail
in splendid purposes that I want to single out for brief comment
two of the commonest causes of failure.

The first is sensitiveness. It is hard to be both sensitive and sen-
sible ; and so hard, that I have never yet seen these two qualities in
happy combination. Social workers cannot afford to be offended or
to manifest consciousness of offended feelings in dealing with children.
We patiently and graciously overlook and look beyond the faults of
the little people, and most grown-ups are really children of a larger
growth. What the French call amour propre muddies, minimizes, or

11

nullifies the influence of social servants in the mountains with fatal
certainty. We must always consider it in others ; we must never suffer
from it ourselves. Social workers cannot afford to be thin-skinned ;
really, they must grow skins like the pachyderms — a foot thick, say.
The second common source of failure lies in a deficient sense of
humor. The mountain worker needs a joke center somewhere in his
system, almost more than he needs hands and feet. The mountain
people are themselves so keen and droll that a mirthless soul is out of
place anywhere in Appalachia. If he cannot share with relish in the
fun and abundant good humor of these people, and bear with credit
his part in an exchange of wit, his usefulness is at an end. A genuine,
fun-loving soul quickly establishes a comfortable, folksy, home-folksy
relationship with his parishioners in the mountains, and no other
type of personality is quite so effective. It is good to recall that —

The wisest men that e'er you ken

Have never deemed it treason,
To rest a bit — and jest a bit,

And balance up their reason ;
To laugh a bit — and chaff a bit.

And joke a bit, in season.

Here and there mountain schools are solving their problems with
wonderful directness. But for the most part they exhibit the old
type of culturistic education, without any decent regard for immediate
social conditions and urgencies. Such schools are unhinged and out
of joint; ancient, musty and fusty in their notions of education;
bewildered, befogged, and belated. They are 18th century survivals
far more truly than the mountain civilization they are set up to serve.

The Mission Call

9. And I may also say, somewhat diffidently but very earnestly,
that the task of defending, preserving and enriching our mountain
civilization calls for men of God who study social conditions with
the insight and foresight of Isaiah of old. It calls for teachers who
read and think and serve their fellow kind far beyond the walls of
their school rooms ; for physicians who campaign public health and
sanitation as faithfully and as earnestly as they battle with death in
their private practice; for business men, editors, and statesmen who
are wise enough and brave enough to turn a keen, untroubled eye home
upon the instant need of things.

The mission call, says Samuel Bane Batten, is a call to make the
world a brighter world for children to be born into, safer for boys
and girls to grow up in, happier for men to travel through, and more
joyous for departing saints to look back upon. His Kingdom for
which we pray may well mean much more than this ; but it is certain
that it can never mean less.

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