Our Southern Highlanders - Criticism

Criticism

Criticism of Our Southern Highlanders typically revolves around Kephart's focus on backwoods outlaws or people living in extreme poverty while paying scant attention to the region's middle class landowners and town dwellers, many of whom would not have been too far out of place in mainstream America. Historian John Puckett wrote that Our Southern Highlanders "projected a jaundiced view of the region" in which the mountaineers were portrayed as "'half-wild' creatures." Kephart scholar Gary Carden has argued that while Kephart was an excellent observer, he had a tendency to "romanticize" the mountaineers' more offensive qualities. Hazel Creek historian (and native) Duane Oliver recalled that Our Southern Highlanders "angered" many Hazel Creek residents for the manner in which it portrayed them, but argues that, as a writer, it was natural that Kephart would seek out the region's more colorful personalities.

Other critics take issue with Kephart's notion that radical isolation in Southern Appalachia had created a race of "contemporary ancestors"— relics of the nation's pioneer period who were largely untouched by modernity— a belief popularized by Berea College president William Goodell Frost in the late 1890s. Historian Durwood Dunn, in his seminal work on the history of Cades Cove (a region on the Tennessee side of the Smokies culturally related to Hazel Creek), lambasted Kephart's constant emphasis on isolation in Southern Appalachia, and argued that people in typical mountain communities were constantly intermingling with people in nearby cities via mail, travel, and (later) telephones. Dunn also argued that, contrary to popular belief, the populations of mountain communities were in constant flux, and that new migrants would have consistently brought new ideas and customs to these communities, regardless of their isolation.