Mountain Stereotypes, Whiteness, and the Discourse of Early School Reform in the Arkansas Ozarks, 1910s–1920s

Abstract

Dallas T. Herndon, the first director of the Arkansas History Commission and State Archives in Little Rock, opened his short study on the conditions of Arkansas's mountain schools in the 1910s by writing that he was “fully convinced… that no such extreme backwardness in reality exists anywhere in Arkansas as to be found in the most isolated parts of such states as Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Kentucky.” Herndon followed this statement with a comical story he had heard about a conversation between a Georgia mountaineer and a “traveler from the outside world.” The traveler, he told, asked the mountaineer if he knew who President Woodrow Wilson and John Slayton, the governor of Georgia, were. The mountaineer openly replied that he did not. Taken aback by such ignorance, the stranger then asked the mountaineer if he knew God. The Georgia mountaineer answered, “Yes, I think I'se heard uf him; his last name be's Damn, ain't it?” Herndon was sure that in the Arkansas hills, no one could find a “man, woman or child who is quite so ignorant as that Georgia mountaineer…”