The American Concept of Tradition: Folklore in the Discourse of Traditional Values

Abstract

In 1990, Burger King Corporation bought half-page advertisements in hundreds of newspapers to issue a pointed Letter to the American People. The text trumpeted the company's support of American The hamburger franchiser swore to support programs reflect the that they [the American people] are trying to instill in their (Quillen 1990). An example was the television adaptation aimed at children of folktales with ethical interpretations from William Bennett's Book of Virtues (1993).' The opening segment called Zack's Tall Tale related what happens when a boy lies to his father about breaking an expensive camera. Aristotle the prairie dog reads him the story of George Washington chopping down the cherry tree to illustrate the importance of honesty. Intoning a different take on folk wisdom, Hillary Clinton offered a message of community's power, rather than individualism, when she published a book taking its title from the proverb Takes A Village to Raise A Child (Clinton 1996). How should folklorists read these popular commentaries on American tradition, and their statement on the beliefs Americans pass from one generation to another? The discourse regarding American tradition often made reference to wars pitting forces of values against progressivism and multiculturalism. Indeed, the public debate on values drove much of American cultural politics in the late 1980s well into the 1990s. It was led by political candidates, educational reformers, and religious leaders rather than folklorists. But by most accounts, it involved a keyword of folkloristic practice-tradition-and a national audit, if you will, of some of its basic texts-folktales and beliefs (see Ben-Amos 1984; Bauman 1992; Glassie 1995; Bronner 1998). By stepping outside of folkloristic discourse to analyze a national political debate for its application of tradition and its expressions, I reflect on two levels of tradition-first, the biformity of tradition in American public usage, and second, American folkloristic ambivalence toward its defining concept of tradition. Political debates on tradition in America are not unique to the postCold-War era, but the controversy around the idea of values at that time was distinctive for its intersection of family structure and religious beliefs in guiding an American sense of self at a time of perceived moral change. During the high tide of immigration, the Great Depression, and after World War II, an American public rhetoric of tradition became significant symbolic capital for the restructuring of American culture in the midst of perceived rapid, and critical, social changes. One recent demonstration of this pattern is the divergence between scholarly and public discourse on traditional values. While the American scholarly discourse on tradition, much of it produced by historians, sociologists, and folklorists, tended to express tradition as progressive, multilayered, emergent, and creative, public discourse conceptualized tradition as part of values associated with a past-oriented, unified, and inherently stable society. In accordance with my two levels of analysis, the structure of what follows is to consider issues of scholarly discourse in tradition, then take up the national debate on traditional, and conclude with remarks on folkloristic ambivalence. What has come to pass, I argue, is a political confrontation of multiculturalism as a future-oriented emphasis on emergent community and the ability to break tradition, and culturalism, with emphasis on intergenerational transmission of beliefs within social institutions of family and church. This confrontation, and the coded rhetoric used within it, suggests a difficulty of dealing with the meaning of childhood and cultural continuity in a modern context. THE SCHOLARLY PROBLEM OF TRADITION The central problem of tradition is explaining the ways that people rely on one another, with reference to precedent, for their wisdom, their expression, their identity. …