George Brosi on Ramp Hollow

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Towson University *

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120

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History

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Oct 30, 2023

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Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia by Steven Stoll, released on November 21st of this year, is clearly one of the most important books about Appalachia in recent years. It was published by Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux/Macmillan, one of America’s “Big Five” publishers. The author is a formidable scholar who did his undergraduate work at Berkeley and received a master's degree and a doctorate in history from Yale. He has taught throughout his career at Fordham. This is his fifth book from a major publisher. In a nutshell, he takes Harriette Arnow’s thesis that 19th Century Appalachia was a land of relatively equal yeoman farmers and Wilma Dunaway’s antithesis that Appalachia has always been integrated into American capitalism and establishes a synthesis around his concept of a makeshift economy. Importantly he expands upon the central concept of Kathryn Newfont’s Blue Ridge Commons emphasizing how important common ground is to sustaining smallholders, and how devastating the appropriation of common ground has been to freeholders throughout the world. Not since Rodger Cunningham’s Apples on the Flood has a book about Appalachia incorporated an international perspective so thoroughly. This book could easily be seen as a contribution to Atlantic history, rather than Appalachian history, except for the fact that beyond mentioning campesinos on eight pages, it doesn’t focus on South America as much as Africa and Europe. One of the keys concepts of this book is that peasant societies around the world have been oppressed by mainstream ideas of stages of economic development. He rejects the idea that any culture depended exclusively on barter and posits that barter is necessarily dependent upon converting the value of goods into monetary terms. He rejects the notion of purely subsistence farms and insists that they are always a part of a makeshift economy that includes some money. And he points out that a makeshift economy is not simply a stage of economic development inexorably and beneficently leading to a fully monetized laboring life. He traces the history of Appalachia, first focusing on the Whiskey Rebellion as a conflict between Alexander Hamilton’s belief in the benefits of a money economy and Appalachian devotion to a makeshift economy. He then centers on the effort to incorporate freeholders into coal camps as a similar fundamental conflict. He ends his book with a plea for a Commons Community Act which would allow the government to institute land reform and create communities with common land complemented by small homesteads allowing a makeshift economy to flourish again. I predict that Stoll’s book will not receive the widespread influence of Harry Caudill’s Night Comes to the Cumberlands or J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy because of its scholarly depth. It often reads like the transcript of a professor’s fascinating lectures in a class where the students have learned how to game the system by getting the professor to veer off-topic. Yet this weakness is also a strength. His treatment of how African- Americans were prevented from land ownership during Reconstruction is an important complement to his argument, but not, in my view, his consideration of George Inness’s 1883 painting, Short Cut Watchung Station, New Jersey which he considers “interesting for reasons other than the tension it expresses between Nature and Culture” (p. 195). I personally love it - but I don’t think all readers will rejoice - when he insists on, for example, starting his treatment of the rye whiskey produced in Appalachia in the 18th century in this way: “Archaeological evidence for a domesticated cultivar of secale cereale links it to Anatolia and Iran where its wild relatives can still be found. By the Bronze Age, it had arrived in what is now Poland and the Czech Republic. It showed up on the frontiers of the Roman Empire, along the Rhine and the Danube” (p.109). Stoll’s command of primary sources, including coal company archives, is impressive, and he demonstrates an awareness of most of the academic literature of Appalachia. He brings to the forefront a handful of lesser-known books which deserve to

receive the respect he gives them including Paul Salstrom’s Appalachia’s Path to Dependency, Robert S. Weise’s Grasping at Independence , and David C. Hsiung’s Two Worlds in the Tennessee Mountains. He appropriately also relies on the work of well-known scholars including Altina L. Waller and John Gaventa. He includes Harry M. Caudill’s Night Comes to the Cumberlands without considering Theirs Be the Power and Ron Eller’s Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers without taking into account Uneven Ground. His book would have really benefited from considering some other books. For example, Rodger Cunningham’s Apples on the Flood would have helped his portrayal of the British “enclosures” which deprived freeholders of their common ground. Donald Davis’s Where There Are Mountains would have contributed to his treatment of regional environmental history. At times his clarity of expression and his depth of understanding are striking as in this transition to a comparison between the appropriation of Appalachian land and Native American land - “The Civil War should be understood as a conflict with two Union fronts, one in the South and the other in the West” (p. 178). At other times, his lack of familiarity with our region detracts, for example when he refers to McDowell, West Virginia, not McDowell County (p. 269), or identifies Harry M. Caudill as a “journalist,” not a lawyer (p. 259), or asserts that the Appalachian Volunteers was a program of the Appalachian Regional Commission not the Council of the Southern Mountains (p. 260), or states that Emma Bell Miles “grew up” in Red Bank, not Walden’s Ridge (p. 219). The book’s argument would be stronger if there were sub-headings to the chapters, and more chapters as when the final chapter slides over from a consideration of the Vanderbilt “Agrarians” manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand and Scott and Helen Nearing’s “Back to the Land” movement to his personal prescription for the future of the region. This book is certainly an important contribution to Appalachian scholarship, exemplary in its international perspective, its use of primary sources, its willingness to include a prescription for ameliorating the problems it explicates, and the importance and clarity of its fundamental thesis. I believe it makes a significant contribution to the illumination of how Appalachia came to be the way is.

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