When I first began my career in folklore, a friend’s mother gifted me an original edition of A Treasury of American Folklore. I am sure that it was not an uncommon occurrence; Botkin’s treasuries graced many a family’s bookshelf at that time. For our parents’ and grandparents’ generations, the Treasury (and its sister regional collections) defined folklore for the general reading public. During the post-War era, Ben Botkin’s treasuries became the bestselling folklore books of all time. Within the academic and professional circle of folklorists, Botkin’s reputation has gone through several cycles of waxing and waning. Most folklorists are familiar with Botkin as a member of the mostly left-leaning New Deal proto-public folklorists or as a victim of Richard Dorson’s attack on “fakelore,” but few really appreciate the full depth of Botkin’s eclectic career.
Lawrence Rodgers’s and Jerrold Hirsch’s America’s Folklorist: B. A. Botkin and American Culture is a bit of a treasury in itself. The edited volume includes previously published articles, obituaries, family remembrances, new pieces of analysis, as well as a variety of Botkin’s own writing, including essays and original poetry. Botkin’s professional career had three distinct eras: his years as an academic at the University of Oklahoma, his stint in Washington working with the Federal Writers’ Project and the Archive of American Folk Song, and finally his decades as a professional writer. America’s Folklorist is similarly tripartite in nature: a section on biographical background and folklore contexts, a middle portion examining Botkin and his contemporaries, and finally, in part three, a collection of Botkin’s own writing. Inevitably, as with anthologies of this type (particularly ones which utilize previously published materials), there is a healthy dose of redundancy. Certain biographical facts get repeated: Botkin was the son of Lithuanian immigrants (and cousin to George and Ira Gershwin) and with scholarships he was educated at Harvard and Columbia and ultimately earned his Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska, studying under Louise Pound. (The various articles state that his degree was in either English or Anthropology, or it was in both.)
Of the articles in the beginning section, Hirsch’s “’The Ben Botkin Bulldozer’: Toward a Reassessment of A Treasury of American Folklore,” is the most illuminating. As Hirsch astutely notes, although Botkin practically has been granted sainthood status among public folklorists, the contributions of Treasury have been largely ignored. Have we, as Hirsch suggests, been negatively influenced by the critiques of Richard Dorson, even as we celebrate Botkin’s vision of “giving back to the folk”? In truth, as several articles point out, Botkin was hardly an academic pariah when Treasury was published. He was the president of the American Folklore Society, and Wayland Hand’s review in the Journal of American Folklore lauded the book as a major achievement. While Hirsch pushes us “toward” a reassessment of Botkin’s Treasury, he doesn’t quite answer the question of whether Dorson irreparably damaged the book’s reputation or whether it would probably still, in the post-New Folkloristics era, be seen as rather quaint, and would mostly be appreciated as a relic of a different era of folklore. As Hirsch notes, Treasury was a novel synthesis, but as a book aimed for commercial trade, it lacked the experimental and political dimensions of Botkin’s earlier work on Folk-Say and with the Federal Writers’ Project.
A few pieces in the first section feel essentially like filler. Are two obituaries necessary? The interview with Botkin’s children, originally published in New York Folklore, unfortunately does little to illuminate the character of the shy Botkin. There were lots of books in the house and plenty of interesting visitors, the children recalled. Ronna Lee Widner’s article, first published in 1986, is meatier and reflects (as do the obituaries) the reassessment of Botkin after his death. Widner ends her story with the founding of City Lore. With almost three decades more of the maturation of public folklore behind us, it is a lost opportunity that the editors did not find someone to update this story and view Botkin’s contributions to public folklore from a more contemporary vantage point.
The second part of the anthology, “Botkin and his Contemporaries,” is surprisingly less varied than it might have been. Out of the four new essays, two deal with the Seegers (one essay focuses on Ruth Crawford Seeger and the other on Charles) and two examine Botkin’s relationship with poet Sterling Brown. Only in Nancy Cassell McEntire’s republished essay from 2002 is Botkin’s formal education as a folklorist (especially his relationship with his mentor Louise Pound) addressed, although the bulk of the essay focuses on play-party scholarship in general. Most essays about Botkin tell us little about this era of his life. Most telling perhaps is Botkin’s own statement in his essay on Folk-Say: “Having got the research bug out of my system, I could now relax and breathe freely in the more congenial atmosphere of literature.” Still, as Robert Cochran notes, Botkin and Pound remained close friends throughout her lifetime.
On finishing this portion of the volume, I couldn’t help but long for additional essays. Hirsch commends Botkin for his unique synthesis of literary and anthropological folklore. However, Botkin was not alone among his contemporaries in attempting to cross this divide and some interesting comparisons could be drawn between Botkin and individuals such as Herbert Halpert and Zora Neale Hurston. Botkin’s work on Folk-Say (which included literature about the folk as well as of the folk) could also be compared to the Chapel Hill based “folk drama” movement, which also had strong roots in Nebraska. Botkin would have undoubtedly crossed paths with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, Paul Green, as they both served as central advisors to Sarah Gertrude Knott’s National Folk Festival. Finally, why not take the bull by the horns and inspect more closely the relationship between Botkin and Richard Dorson? As Rodgers and Hirsch note in their introductory essay, the two men actually shared many of the same interests, and one might note a similarity of biography as well. In temperament, they could not be more different. Was the unforgettable argument really about professionalization and popularization for the discipline? Or was Dorson’s virulence fueled by the fact that Botkin was an academically trained folklorist who shared his fascination for the range of American regional folklore? Aside from the regrettable belligerence of Dorson’s attack (Botkin seemingly kept his own dislike of Dorson confined to personal correspondence), can we find merit in both sides of the argument? Academic folklorists owe more to Dorson that we often care to admit. Perhaps we also need to move toward a much-needed reassessment of Dorson’s career.
The final third of the volume, “Botkin in his Own Words,” neatly complements the opening essay of the volume, an article by Lawrence Rodgers on Botkin’s literary legacy. Although Rodgers himself has reservations about Botkin’s talents as a poet, the editors include nine of Botkin’s poems, as well as an assortment of his professional writing. Public folklorists may find the 1953 “Applied Folklore: Creating Understanding through Folklore,” to be the most interesting from a historical point of view. Although most folklorists are aware of the New Deal era work, Botkin’s first line from the 1953 article confounds our stereotypes of the era: “One can hardly pick up a copy of a folklore journal these days without coming across an article on some phase of utilization, from ‘Folklore in the Schools’ to ‘The Plight of the Folk Tale in the Comics.’” The same year Indiana University conferred its first PhD in folklore (not as a sub-specialty of another field), Botkin laid out a vision for applied folklore: “At this moment in history, when the creation of understanding in the world community is essential to survival, students and users of folklore and the folk arts must become ‘members of the whole world.’” Botkin’s and Dorson’s visions of the field were not mutually exclusive; there was no winner or loser in the “folklorists’ war.” Rodger’s and Hirsch’s “treasury” of Ben Botkin enhances our knowledge of the complexity of an individual folklorist as we move toward a more comprehensive understanding of the history of our discipline.
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[Review length: 1352 words • Review posted on September 17, 2014]