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Coming from sturdy independent stock, East Tennesseans cling to that tradition

by Jack Neely

Independence Day got its name because it’s the day that certain American leaders declared their independence from England. Independence, in that regard, implies nothing about freedom or democracy. Independence merely abolished our colonial status. In itself, independence has little moral meaning. North Korea is independent, too.

But independence has personal meanings in this region that go far beyond whether we have a king on our currency. For many, Independence means I can take care of myself, and I’ve got my own; you can’t tell me what to do.

The prototypical independent American is the mountain farmer who lived off his own land. We tend to be impressed with the homemade devices that mountain people fashioned to make hinges, cranks, churns. We assume they made these things because they didn’t have any choice. But they did.

John Muir, the future naturalist, was a young man when he walked through East Tennessee in 1867. In only a few days, he traversed the part of the state from Cumberland Gap to North Carolina. He stayed with some of the mountain people along the way.

Muir was no urbanite, but he was a practical man. He was astonished that the farmers and mountain people spent so much time making tortured, inferior versions of devices that could be found cheaply in the city.

The thing Muir didn’t get about our mountaineers was the insistence on being independent. Walking down into town and trading an egg for a brass hinge would have made one feel that he was bowing to some smartass flatlander.

He still exists in the 21st century, in many forms, on many points along a broad spectrum. Insisting on his rights to decorate his home as he sees fit, arm himself as he chooses, manufacture and drink what strikes his fancy, and resist taxes, he might call himself a Libertarian—except that such a political alliance might constitute a threat to his independence.

Independence is a sliding scale. At one end, absolute independence is something akin to evil. The purely independent man may regard himself independent of laws, independent of morals. She’s my daughter, not yorn, he might say. You cain’t tell me what to do with her.

In its extreme, independence shares some real estate with pure evil, which shouldn’t seem too surprising. The first being reputed to strike out on his own and declare his personal independence was named Lucifer. In some of these hollers, he would have fit right in.

At a friendlier point on the scale, independent men are moonshiners and bootleggers. They’re not bad fellows, their neighbors might say. They’re just independent—of the government, and of laws.

People express their independence with litter, with spit, with a bad hairdo or an unrepaired muffler. It could begin to seem like a bad thing, but we all strive for a certain degree of it. To those recovering from a stroke or a brain injury, independence can be as simple a thing as walking across a room.

Independence has especially deep roots here in East Tennessee. Many of our ancestors came here just to be independent. Not from England, necessarily, but from a church, or a wife, or a debt, or a city, or a prison term.

Throughout our region’s history we see Tennesseans and proto-Tennesseans demonstrating fits of unusual independence. John Sevier and his cronies started their own state, in Greeneville, called Franklin. They didn’t assume they needed sanction from the United States, and didn’t wait for it. Sevier drew up his own foreign policy, making his own personal deals with the Spanish.

Later, when they founded another state in Knoxville called Tennessee, they went ahead and elected officials without waiting for approval from Washington.

William Blount signed the U.S. Constitution, for form’s sake, but apparently figured it didn’t apply to him; he was after all, no mere American but a Tennessean and an independent man. He entered into his own separate negotiations with the British, an act of independence that got him expelled from the U.S. Senate.

This is the home of Davy Crockett and Sam Houston and other men so independent the idea of the United States was too much for them. Even the idea of Tennessee made them itchy about the throat. They headed west where they didn’t have to depend on anybody, and maybe without meaning to, started their own dadgum country.

When the Civil War came along, the South wanted to prove it was independent from the United States, economically, politically, and morally, and it seceded. But then, some in East Tennessee tried to secede from the South. East Tennesseans were too independent to join the independence movement. If everybody’s doing it, after all, it’s not really independence anymore.

One of the most independent East Tennesseans was probably fictional. George Washington Harris’s East Tennessee creation Sut Lovingood was perhaps the first popular caricature of the purely independent American. Sut had no use for any authority, be it religious, political, moral, or female. Sut was one of the most popular figures in the mid-19th-century South.

Some rural Southerners exhibit an independence from moral authority similar to that later described by Nietzsche. I won’t call him the �bergoober, but I’d like to think that Nietzsche, when he was coming up with his theories, had been reading some Sut stories.

Since then, East Tennesseans have most often expressed their independence in disgruntlement. We’ve opposed taxes and Communism and liquor and motorcycle helmets and fluoridated water. We tend to be agin’ it. Let’s be frank: independent is sometimes a euphemism for ornery.

In good measure, independence is a respectable and even enviable quality. The independent American may be good or bad—but at least he knows which he is.

It gets complicated, though. Automobiles are sometimes reputed to have done for the 20th century man what the Colt 45 did for the 19th century man: guaranteed his independence. But it wasn’t that simple, and people around here knew that—at first, at least.

Before 1930, automobiles didn’t sell as well in the South as in the rest of the country. Southerners had a reputation for resisting the automobile because it would render them dependent: on Northern industry, on salesmen, on banks, on foreign oil. As long as you had a horse or even a mule, you wouldn’t ever have to trade with anybody you didn’t like and trust. The automobile, and electricity, and the light bulb, and the telephone, and the credit card, hundreds of other conveniences invented in the North, changed all that. Now we’ve become acquainted with the thousand compromises to our independence, and serving the purposes of people we don’t know.

We gave in to automobiles, and cottoned to cell phones, but we’re still wistful. The most-sung song in East Tennessee, known by heart and sung even more often, and louder, than “God Bless the U.S.A.,” hails a mythical paradise of independence where there “ain’t no telephone bills.” Our Valhalla is Rocky Top.

But we keep kicking, trying to buck our way out of the harness. Breaking party ranks to vote against a then-popular invasion, as our congressman did; resisting a massive downtown development project even after our mayor called it the greatest thing to happen to Knoxville since TVA; refusing to consider a state income tax.

Most American states levy income taxes. From the point of view of an Iraqi or Afghanistani, a state income tax might well seem an integral part of the American Way. But Tennessee doesn’t, and probably won’t, even if it’s shown to be the only way to keep up with states that do.

It seems to be the chief issue for both of our state senator candidates. In their recent debate, they tried to outdo each other in proving how thoroughly on the same side they were. They were both agin’ it. Tennessee was considered to be part of North Carolina before 1790. Our neighbors 40 miles over the mountains dealt with the income tax 30 years ago, and now it’s no longer considered a big deal. But we ain’t them. We were once the western wing of North Carolina, but we busted loose from there over 200 years ago. And we’re agin’ it. We’re independent.

Independence can sometimes be frustrating for those who have visions of the city or state accomplishing impressive things as a cooperative community. This fellow doesn’t want to fix up his building. That one wants to tear his down. That one wants to open up a massage parlor with a lottery stand and a billboard on top. Independence can look, to the uneducated eye, like a jumbled mess.

But you have to admit that a reputation for independence gives all of us a certain level of security from tyranny. When Tennesseans opposed Communism, it was a matter of chivalry toward those parts of the world that were vulnerable to it. The politer regions might tend to be more cooperative with an occupying force, but Communism would never have worked here, even for one five-year plan. I bet Joe Stalin knew that.

(Continued)

July 1, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 27 © 2004 Metro Pulse