Founder of the first college department of folklore in the United States, cofounder of the
Pennsylvania Folklife Society, and influential American folklife scholar. Shoemaker
became assistant professor of American folklore in 1948 at Franklin and Marshall
College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he became head of the new Department of
American Folklore. The department adopted an innovative folk-cultural model
emphasizing the ethnological study of American regional-ethnic groups and their material
and intellectual culture.
Shoemaker was particularly influential in introducing folklife and material-culture
studies into American folklore studies. He offered groundbreaking courses on folk art and
Pennsylvania German folk culture. Along with the department, Shoemaker established
with Don Yoder and J.William Frey the Pennsylvania Dutch Folklore Center, which
added a public-outreach component to the college’s folklore research activities. Under
Shoemaker’s leadership, the Center produced a newspaper called Pennsylvania
Dutchman (later the journal Pennsylvania Folklife), which claimed the largest circulation
(more than 10,000) of any folklore serial in America, and it published more than twenty
pamphlets and books on folklife topics. The Center established the Pennsylvania Dutch
Folk Festival (later the Kutztown Folk Festival), which grew to be America’s largest folk
festival; seminars on folklife studies; cultural study tours to Europe; and a folklife
museum and archives.
Shoemaker was eminently qualified for the task of introducing European folklife
approaches into American academe. Born in the Pennsylvania “Dutch” country in Lehigh
County in 1913, he received his A.B. in 1934 from Muhlenberg College followed by
ethnological studies at universities in Munich, Heidelberg, Uppsala, and Lund. He
returned to the United States and in 1940 received his Ph.D. in German at the University
of Illinois. After World War II, he studied at the Irish Folklore Commission and the
Folklore Institute in Basel, Switzerland. In addition to teaching German at Lafayette and
Muhlenberg Colleges before going to Franklin and Marshall, he also served as curator of
the Berks County Historical Society in Reading, Pennsylvania.
After 1952 Shoemaker resigned his teaching position to devote himself to the Center,
and the department was dissolved. In 1956 he incorporated the Center and moved it from
Lancaster to Kutztown. In 1958 the Center changed the title of its serial to Pennsylvania
Folklife, still under Shoemaker’s editorship, and expanded its scope from the study of
Pennsylvania Germans to the full range of regional-ethnic groups in and around
Pennsylvania. It was the first American journal to carry the folklife banner. Reflecting the
broadening scope of Shoemaker’s activities, the center became the Pennsylvania
FolklifeSocietyin 1959. In 1959and 1960, Shoemaker published important studies of the
Pennsylvania barn, Christmas, and Easter, under the imprint of the Pennsylvania Folklife
Society. The society had a financial setback in 1963 and was reorganized without
Shoemaker in its management.
After being institutionalized with mental illness during the mid-1960s, Shoemaker
reportedly became homeless. He occasionally took up shelter in New York City at the
home of a former folklife associate, but his whereabouts became unknown after 1970.
Simon J.Bronner
References
Bronner, Simon J. 1991. A Prophetic Vision of Public and Academic Folklife: Alfred Shoemaker
and Americas First Department of Folklore. FolkloreHistorian 8:38–55.
Shoemaker, Alfred L. 1959. Christmas in Pennsylvania: A Folk Cultural Study. Kutztown:
Pennsylvania Folklife Society.
——, ed. 1959. The Pennsylvania Barn. Kutztown: Pennsylvania Folklife Society.
——. 1960. Eastertide in Pennsylvania: A Folk Cultural Study. Kutztown: Pennsylvania Folklife
Society.