Scholarly connection interpreting traditions shaped by experiences and settings in the United States. American studies arose during the 1930s with folklore research as an important component. This interdisciplinary academic movement strove to interpret American society in a national perspective by combining American history, literature, and culture. The driving mission of identifying a national tradition led many American- studies scholars to folklore research, which had been used in Europe to examine the cultural basis of regions and nations. A basic split occurred in early American-studies scholarship between those examining a distinctively national folklore, thus underscoring the case for an American exceptionalism, and those emphasizing the adaptation of international folk traditions on the American scene, thus suggesting a multicultural society. Since the 1980s, the argument has shifted to issues of multiple identities held by Americans, often expressed through folklore and the processes of cultural production. Before Harvard University established the first formal degree-granting program for American studies in 1936, a substantial shelf of American-studies scholarship using folklore research had emerged. Constance Rourke (1885–1941) published American Humor in 1931 and cited American folklore—including traditionally learned tall tales and legends of tricksters and “ringtailed roarers”—as the distinguishing influence on American literary humor. Rourke believed that a distinctive American folklore formed out of the special circumstances of the new nation, such as its frontier. This folklore influenced the rise of an American literature based on vernacular characters such as James Fenimore Cooper’s Leather-stocking and traditional themes such as “rags to riches” and the “noble and ignoble savage.” In fact, she observed that the American tradition—in art, architecture, and literature—overall contained a unity of folk or vernacular spirit. For Martha Warren Beckwith (1871–1959), formerly a colleague of Rourke’s at Vassar College, American society was too diverse and derived too greatly from foreign sources to describe as a single tradition. Established as America’s first chair of folklore at Vassar, Beckwith outlined many living ethnic and religious “strains in the process of creating an American cultural life” in Folklore in America (1931). Henry Nash Smith, the first graduate of Harvard’s History of American Civilization program, examined folklore sources of Edward Eggleston and Mark Twain, among other American fiction writers, in his dissertation, which led to the influential book Virgin Land (1950). In his work, Smith introduced an American-studies approach of “myth, symbol, and image,” drawn largely from folkloristic ideas of the consciousness-building powers of cultural mythology, and he used the development of the American West, an interest he cred-ited toTexas folklorist J.Frank Dobie (1888–1964), to demonstrate his approach. American “myths,” scholars such as Smith and Russell Nye held, were not narrative texts in the usual sense; they were driving concepts or “collective representations” that unified Americans; examples were Smith’s “myth of the garden” (power of Americans to transform wilderness and desert into a new Eden-like garden)
and Nye’s “myth of superabundance” (popular belief that resources are endless in America). Smith suggested that historical patterns such as the westward movement were influenced by such myths and the lore and literature that arose from them. Philip D.Jordan pointed out, for example, that terms such as “manifest destiny” in the American experience were folk mottos of crucial themes that characterized the “essential narrative of this nation” (Jordan 1946). Such themes included westward movement, immigration, and industrialization. To this list, Nye added character traits of individualism, free enterprise, and progressivism that are evident in the nation’s emergent folklore. Smith encouraged the folklore research of Richard M. Dorson (1916–1981), a fellow graduate student at Harvard, who went on to become the strongest voice within folklore studies for building a relation to American studies. As director of Indiana University’s Ph.D.-granting Folklore Institute, Dorson guided many students (he claimed he directed more than 200 dissertations) and devoted many books, especially American Folklore (1959), American Folklore and the Historian (1971), America in Legend (1973), Man and Beast in American Comic Legend (1982), and two special issues of the Journal of the Folklore Institute (1978, 1980) to the conceptualization of “American folklore” as opposed to “folklore in America.” His work followed an agenda set out in “A Theory for American Folklore” presented in 1957 at the first joint meeting of the American Studies Association and the American Folklore Society (see Dorson 1978). He called attention to a unique set of historical forces—exploration and colonization, Revolution and the establishment of a democratic republic, westward movement, immigration, slavery and the Civil War, and industrialization and technology—that “shaped and created new folklore, or new adaptations of old folklore themes” peculiar to American society. Dorson argued, for example, that the case of Davy Crockett required the perspective of both folklore and American studies. The frontier, he wrote, not only bred “new species of men and new institutions remote from European influences, but it cradled folk heroes and released a flood of legends” (Dorson 1971:32). Other “unique” heroes he described were Mike Fink the Keelboatman, Mose the Bowery B’hoy, Sam Patch the Mill Hand, Yankee Jonathan the Countryman, and Gib Morgan the Oil Field Liar. The folklore of these figures represented a new national consciousness. In America in Legend, he fashioned a history of the United States that followed the development of American folklore. The “religious impulse” represented by lore of providences, witchcraft, and judgments characterized the colonial period. The democratic impulse represented by ring-tailed roarers and folk heroes characterized the early national period. In the later national period, the economic impulse dominated and fostered lore of cowboys, lumberjacks, miners, oil drillers, and railroaders. In the contemporary period, Dorson concentrated on the folklore of youth culture and its “humane impulse.” Besides helping to frame a history or narrative of the United States, the connection of folklore to American studies held a methodological and theoretical significance. In the introductory textbook Folklore and Folklife (1972), Dorson divided the folklore of the Old and New Worlds for analytical purposes. Espousing a nationalistic approach, Dorson asserted that “the folklore of each New World country needs to be analyzed in terms of its ethnic-racial and historical ingredients” (Dorson 1972:44). In addition, he emphasized “special historical and environmental factors that have shaped traditions.” Accordingly, in the Handbook of American Folklore (1983), Dorson further organized folklore in relation to American studies. At the outset are “American Experiences” followed by “American Cultural Myths” and “American Settings.” These categories lead to a consideration of “American Entertainments” and “American Forms and Performers” as preludes to the “Interpretation of Research.” Folklore, Dorson and others argued, was especially convincing evidence because it represented deep-seated values and long-standing beliefs held by a society. Alan Dundes, who had studied with Dorson, especially developed the concept of “folk ideas as units of world view” and examined folk ideas basic to American national character. For example, he made a case for the future orientation of Americans as well as their reliance on the number three (Dundes 1980). He called for American studies to be more comparative and cross-cultural in its use of folklore as evidence of national character. As the historically oriented Constance Rourke had her detractor in Martha Beckwith, so, too, did Dorson have challenges from folklorists seeking less of a nationalistic connection to American studies. Collections such as Folklore in America (1966), edited by Tristram Potter Coffin and Hennig Cohen, and Folklore on the American Land (1972), edited by Duncan Emrich (1908–1977), emphasized the continuities of folklore in America with sources elsewhere rather than the existence of a distinctive “American folklore.” Jan Harold Brunvand’s introductory textbook The Study of American Folklore (1968) took a middle ground in the debate covering both folklore traditions “found in” America and those “originated” there. Writing in American Quarterly, Richard Bauman and Roger D.Abrahams with Susan Kalcik (1976) reiterated the split between American folklore and folklore in America and surveyed the familiar categories of region, ethnicity, race, occupation, and genre. They closed with attention to “a social interactional perspective, centering around the notion of performance,” that they believed was modifying the traditional organizing principles of American folklorists. Influenced by anthropological approaches to linguistics and communication, in this perspective researchers observed varying individual “performances” of traditional behavior influenced by the immediate sociocultural context. The performance-centered approach led to more consideration of the lives of individual American folk performers and artists from a wide range of backgrounds and the processes for learning and expressing folklore under various American conditions. Thus, Bauman, Abrahams, and Kalcik pointed to studies of biography, repertoire, and performance style of folk performers leading to increased interest in “community, locale, and personal experience as formative influences” in diverse American contexts. In the attention to community and personal experience, scholars implied a shift in the mission of American studies from one of uncovering, in Rourke’s words, the “common storage of experience and character,” usually centered on literary arts, to one of seeking to describe American lives and identities, centered on everyday cultural practice. This shift suggested leaving behind the issue of whether American traditions were created or imported (seen as a process, they are both), and moved to the complex use of traditions by and for individuals in various settings that are part of American life. Additionally, inquiry followed the ways that Americans carry multiple identities through their lives and the patterns of forming, expressing, and manipulating those identities. This kind of inquiry opened American Studies to global applications, since these identities are in question when Americans or American expressions enter into surroundings outside the United States.