Traditional Hospitality

I like to watch the historical videos by James John Townsend. He is easygoing and always informative. The channel’s focus is on early America. Many of the videos are about food, but he also talks about how people lived. Some of my favorites are when he references the accounts described in travel journals.

In one video I just watched (the first below), Townsend talks about backwoods hospitality. It was expected that travelers would be welcome at almost any house or cabin, for food and shelter. An extra setting might be placed at the dinner table, just in case someone stopped by. Visits were common, whether from strangers or neighbors, friends, and family. Townsend mentions that a large part of their lives was filled with socializing. And it didn’t matter how poor the household. Almost anyone would be made to feel welcome, sometimes including local or traveling Native Americans.

Some of this custom may even have been learned or modeled after the lifestyle of Native Americans who were in the habit of coming and going as they pleased. There was often an open door policy on the frontier, a detail I’ve come across in reading history books. Even as villages formed, this friendly attitude was maintained. It was expected that what happened in your home was of relevance to the entire community. This nosiness could even be rather imposing, sometimes to the point of being oppressive. Neighbors might come right in, if they thought you were having affair. A bit too ‘friendly’ at times.

The idea of a home as a place of utmost privacy is a rather recent invention, as are locks on doors (when I was a kid, my family never locked the door except when we went on vacations). What is interesting is that some of the commenters point out that their own grandparents used to maintain similar practices of hospitality. For example, keeping a candle in the window was a way of signalling that visitors were welcome. Something similar was done with lamps to signal refuge for Jews escaping the Nazis. Likewise, candles and lamps were used as a signal on the Underground Railroad. In some parts of the world, especially in rural areas, welcoming strangers and those in need remains a living tradition.

That exemplifies how much the modern world has changed in industrialized societies. The kind of hospitality that would have existed for millennia, would have been the norm under most circumstances, that has faded from living memory for most of us Westerners. Something has been lost, a sense of community and common humanity, of interdependence and basic kindness, and we don’t usually even think about what has been lost, if we ever notice it’s missing.

This isn’t to romanticize the past, as Townsend also points out that the frontier was a dangerous place where not everyone was friendly. Still, it was a far friendlier place than the world we live in today. People had to be open and welcome in relation to others because survival depended upon it. Isolation wasn’t a choice. Yet the daily lived experience of community doesn’t exist for many people at this point, much less the attitude of hospitality toward strangers. We go about our lives as if we don’t really need anyone else.

I’ve known family members complain when others in the family stopped by unannounced. On the other hand, my mother remembers her family getting in the car on a weekly basis to make random visits to friends and family, and they were always welcome, often with a massive meal being prepared on the spot with no advanced notice. That was probably a carryover from my mother’s family having lived in what was the frontier not many generations before.

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Joe Bageant: On the White Underclass

I highly recommend reading Joe Bageant. I’m reading my second book by him, Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir, and I’m impressed by his insight.

He grew up in a poor white family living in rural Appalachia. His family and neighbors made their livings through subsistence farming. In the early to mid 20th century, most of these people moved to the cities where they became the poverty-stricken working class, that is when they could find work.

This is the white underclass that are rarely discussed by either liberals or conservatives, although the latter loves to rile up this demographic for political gain. This white underclass has little money, education, or opportunity. The only way they can experience the larger world is by enlisting in the military.

 

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This interests me personally because this is where my mom’s family is from. Bageant’s description of his own family more or less describes my family on that side. The main difference is that my mom’s family moved to the cities a generation before Bageant’s family. Also, my mom’s family moved into more Northern Indiana and so was able to escape the much worse poverty of Appalachia.

 

The first book I read by Joe Bageant was Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches From America’s Class War. I happened upon it by accident. From what I understand, Bageant may be more popular abroad than in his home country. Certainly, he is speaking a truth that the American MSM has little interest in.

 

The book Deer Hunting With Jesus woke my mind up like few books ever do. The topic wasn’t dissimilar to what Thomas Frank Tackled in What’s the Matter with Kansas?, but there is a big difference between the two books. Bageant isn’t looking in as an outsider, isn’t studying the Appalachian people as a journalist or academic or economist. Bageant was able to portray these people, his people, as genuine human beings. They weren’t strange characters or mysteries to be dissected. They are just people struggling to get by, people trapped in their circumstances.

 

In reading that book, I immediately recognized my own family. I never before quite grasped who were my mom’s family or where they came from. I regularly visited Indiana as a kid, but I never lived there. Plus, my maternal grandparents were already a generation removed from the rural Hoosier communities of Southern Indiana and several generations removed from the Appalachia of Kentucky. Still, the Appalachian culture and dialect clung to them, even though it had lost its regional context.

 

I only knew them as working class whites, and the bias of my middle class Midwestern upbringing disconnected me from the Appalachian culture. But as Bageant makes clear, there is a lot more going on with working class whites than would first be apparent. Like most things in life, there is a long and complex history behind it.

 

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I recommend Bageant’s writings to others because he offers a unique glimpse into the dark heart of America as well as offering a remembrance of what came before. In my endless readings, I’ve never come across any other author who quite as fully sheds light on this particular issue.

I would add that this isn’t just about America for this country is representative of the larger shifts that have happened all over the world. All countries have similar underclasses. And most of these countries have a history of subsistence farming that was common just a few generations ago.

Joe Bageant isn’t just a voice for an often unheard sector of society. He speaks as one who personally knows about this world hidden out in the open. He speaks as a member of this culture for this underclass has had a hard enough time understanding themselves much less explaining how they came to be that way.