>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
[ Silence ]
>>Margaret Kruesi: Good afternoon everyone.
[laughing] I don't need applause but our speaker certainly does and I'd
like to welcome you to the Benjamin Botkin Folklife Lecture Series
at the American Folklife Center.
On behalf of our director Peggy Bulger and the entire Center staff,
we are, have a special presentation
in the Benjamin Botkin Book Folklife Lecture Series.
The series was, provides a platform to professional folklorists
and ethnographers working both in the academy and in the public sector
to present findings from their ongoing research.
The series allows us to interact with the foremost scholars
in folklife and cultural heritage today while building the collections
of the library.
So this lecture today will be videotaped for our collections
and ask you all now to remember to turn off your cell phones.
The Benjamin Botkin Folklife Lecture Series helps the American Folklife
Center to fulfill it's mandate to present
and preserve the Folklife Scholarship.
And now I've, you've noticed that I've used the word "folklife"
at least four times in the last few moments [laughing] and it is due
to the scholarship and life's work of today's distinguished speaker
that our center at the Library of Congress is known
as the American Folklife Center.
Today I have the honor of introducing Professor Don Yoder
who is an Emeritus professor in folklore and folklife
and religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania
and he introduced the term folklife to scholarship in the United States.
He received his PhD from the University of Chicago
and joined the faculty at Penn in 1956, retiring in 1996.
So during those 40 years, he founded the first Folklife Studies program
in the United States as part of the folklore department at Penn
which was later renamed the Department of Folklore and Folklife,
based on his knowledge of folklife studies movement in Scandinavia
and in other parts of Europe.
He advocated for an interdisciplinary study
of folk culture including folk agriculture,
vernacular architecture, cookery, costume, crafts, folk literature,
folk medicine, belief, religious folklife,
and customs of the calendar year.
Dr. Yoder testified before the United States Senate in 1970
in favor of the establishment of the American Folklife Center
at the Library of Congress.
And from 1976 to 1978 he served on the Board of,
on its first Board of Trustees.
At Penn he was known as an extraordinary teacher
and he directed more than 50 dissertations there
in four academic disciplines.
Professor Yoder's publications number in the hundreds
and if I started listing them then he would never get a chance to speak
so I'm going to just mention that he is a past president
of the American Folklore Society
and was awarded its Lifetime Scholarly Achievement Award in 2006.
In the 15 years since his retirement, he has continued
to publish, and has published more than half a dozen new books and one
of them is a new edition
of "Discovering American Folklife" a classic text in that field,
and also a definitive work, a major work,
on the "Pennsylvania German Broadside: A History and Guide."
And my personal favorite which is "Groundhog Day."
I love that book.
He's the world's leading scholar on the top- subject
that he will address today, The Two worlds of the Pennsylvania Dutch.
Please give him a warm welcome.   [ Applause ]
>> Don Yoder: Thank you very much for that beautiful introduction.
I hope I deserve it.
I'm going to speak very briefly before I show the slides.
My topic is The Worlds of the Pennsylvania Dutch.
And the Pennsylvania Dutch culture is an American hybrid culture.
It's a very mixed culture.
Ideas were brought from Europe, from Germany, Switzerland and Alsace,
mostly from the Rhineland which is where the immigrants came
from 300 years ago and into the early 19th century.
They settled an area in Pennsylvania
which is exactly the size of Switzerland.
Pennsylvania is three times the size of Switzerland in geographical terms
and the Pennsylvania Dutch country from east into the central part
of the state and the lower western part is exactly the size
of Switzerland.   I think that's extremely important.
While the culture is a unified culture in language,
we still speak Pennsylvania Dutch [repeats this phrase
in German] I speak Dutch when I must.
I learned it as a boy and my father spoke it perfectly
and he was the 8th generation in Pennsylvania.
Anyway we still have a language of our own and we have,
we brought the Lutheran and Reformed and Mennonite and Amish
and Brethren religions to Pennsylvania.
And when the Pennsylvania Dutch, who had large families
in the 19th century spread in what I call the Pennsylvania Dutch Diaspora
into the south, into the North Carolina areas--
western North Carolina has whole counties
that have Pennsylvania Dutch families -- the --
Canada in Ontario and New Brunswick they still talk Pennsylvania Dutch
in many parts of Ontario and especially the Midwest.
There are whole counties of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas,
Nebraska which were settled by Pennsylvania Dutch immigrants
from Pennsylvania in the 19th century and they brought all
of the elaborate and multi-splendored culture
that the Pennsylvania Dutch had created here
out of building blocks from European ideas.
They borrowed ideas from the English Quakers
and the Scots Irish Presbyterians who were the other main settlers
of Pennsylvania in the 18th century.
And they borrowed things from the American Indians.
One of the favorite dishes that I grew up on is mush and milk.
I'm sure none of you have ever eaten that.
A cornmeal mush.
And we borrowed mush and the whole complex of corn culture
from the American Indians.
We also borrowed things from the Blacks who were in Pennsylvania
and very often the Blacks
in the Pennsylvania Dutch country were the cooks in the little towns
in the hotels, or they were the fiddlers at the country dances.
We have many references to to that.
So I like to stress that the Pennsylvania Dutch culture
which has been developing in America over 300 years now,
since 1683 when the first German speaking settlement
in America was founded, the town of Germantown, we have a mixed culture
and which is still developing.
The two worlds of the Pennsylvania Dutch are the worlds
of the so-called church people and the worlds of the Plain people.
The church, the culture had a had words for these two types
of subgroups of their culture.
The [German] or church people were the Lutherans and the Reformed,
and they came over, they were the products
of the Protestant Reformation in Germany and Switzerland
in the 16th century and they formed the majority.
They formed at least 80% of the Pennsylvania Dutch population--
They're the, the church people.
And then the Plain people, the word for for them was [German],
the sectarians, and that's a sociological term of course.
And these two worlds were very different and you sense it
in driving through eastern and central Pennsylvania.
You see high towered churches on the hills, Lutheran and Reform churches,
representing that culture, and you drive to another valley
and find simple meeting houses with plain glass windows
and where the Mennonites and so forth operate.
It's a very different culture.
The, while they are united in language and customs of the year,
the Fraktur art which has captured the interest of art historians
and the whole nation, is used in both of the worlds;
the sectarian world as well as the church world.
They both created many stunning pieces which are in collections all
over the United States and in the world.
They also have the same cookery.
I'm always amused when I see a new book
on Amish cookery or Mennonite cookery.
I don't think there is such a thing.
There is a Pennsylvania Dutch cookery, which all the groups had.
And there, for instance there are no books on Lutheran cookery
or Presbyterian cookery [laughing], so I would like to deflate that idea
which unfortunately is growing
that the Amish have a very special type of food way practice.
They really do not.
Anyway, I'm going to illustrate most of this by slides and I have to say
that while the culture is united, it's one culture in language
and a lot of things, there's a line down the middle which separates it
into two cultures and that is the line of religion.
And these two groups have never been able to agree on anything,
the church people and the sectarian people.
They often are friends with each other.
They're both farmers and small town craftsmen and so forth,
but they have never agreed for instance even on the keeping
of the High German language in Pennsylvania when it was threatened
in the 1830's, when the state said we must have English schools
in Pennsylvania, we must get rid of German and so forth.
The, there was a movement to petition against this
but the Mennonites and Amish and the Lutherans
and Reform did not unite on this.   If they had united, it's possible
that Pennsylvania might have created a linguistic enclave
in America something like Quebec in Canada,
when high German would still be the language, but that was not to be.
High German lasted until the 1940s in the Lutheran and Reform churches
of the two Dutchiest Counties of Pennsylvania, Berks and Lehigh.
1948 was the last time when there were regular German services
in the country churches of Berks and Lehigh Counties.
I think that's very important.
The two world wars did not kill the the use of high German in America.
There was some hysteria in the first world war
but most Americans realized that the Pennsylvania Dutch were here
by that time for over 200 years and they were completely American
in much of their feeling.
I want to say something about the difference
between these two groups religiously speaking.
I think the church groups are yea-sayer's
to the culture, to the world outside.
The word "world" to the Plain people means sinful
and dangerous and worldly.   We have that word worldly
in our English language which suggests that.
But the Lutherans and Reform participated in politics
and they lived as citizens and they were there following Martin Luther's
teaching that the Christian can be both Christian
and a full participating member of the state.
The Plain groups did not always do this.
There used to be some Plain groups that did not even vote
in the national elections and they were not allowed to hold office.
Some of them still have practices like that,
so there is a great difference in spirit and acceptance of the world
or rejection of the world
between these two American Pennsylvania Dutch subgroups.
And with that I will shift to the pictures
if we can turn that hideous light off.
[ Laughing ]
Yes. And [pause] I mean who who is working the machine?
>> It's fine.   [Inaudible]
>> I have this but [laughing].   >> Nancy Groce: Did it.
. .   >> Don Yoder: I am not a technician.
>> Nancy Groce: But we have a technician coming, yes.
>> Don Yoder: Yeah good, good we have one.
>> Nancy Groce: It might've shut itself off.
>> Don Yoder: Yes.   If if it could be a little darker.
. .
>>Nancy Groce: Yeah they're going to.
. .
>> Don Yoder: I think the light should--
you'll see the slides much better.
And I took every one of these slides and I want you
to look at them carefully.   [laughing]
>>This is the, a reminiscence of 1983, a very important year
in the history of the Pennsylvania Dutch culture
and the Germans were very excited about this
and they published a stamp with this picture of the Concord ship
which was the first ship that brought the 13 Krefeld people.
They were mostly Quakers.
All Quakers except one family which was Mennonite and they came
to Philadelphia and went six miles north
and founded the town of Germantown.
And this is, it says from Rhine, from the Rhine to the Delaware,
Krefeld people, Krefelders found in 1893, Germantown.
We owe Pennsylvania Dutch culture,
I wonder if this light could be turned?
>> Nancy Groce: I I think that one [inaudible].
>> Don Yoder: Oh, all right.
We owe all of this, the culture of Pennsylvania
and the Quaker beginnings
and the Scotch Irish Presbyterian contributions,
and the Pennsylvania Dutch contributions to a remarkable man
in the 17th century, one of the religious leaders
of Protestantism, William Penn.   His dates are 1644 to 1718.
He, I like this picture which is in a, an office in Philadelphia.
It shows William Penn at the breast of a hill
and behind him are the huddled masses of the English cities
and they're coming to come to America, some of them.
And down below you see the ocean, the ships,
and beyond that a stylized America.
And William Penn in 1682 founded 1681 and -2, founded the state
of Pennsylvania, the colony of Pennsylvania
which I became I think the model
for the modern multicultural America that we have today.
This is the type of setting that the immigrants
of the Pennsylvania Dutch culture had, came from,
in the 17th century, 18th century.   This is the village of Lomstein.
It's in the Palatinate near Gormst and it shows
that in the 17th century, security was a local thing.
It had a stone wall around it and there were guards, of course.
Security is a national, international thing today
but it was a village thing then.
It shows the huddled houses - I used the word huddled there twice --
and a church which was a central aspect of every village.
It was everyone belonged to the church, the Lutheran
or Reform church, and so forth, and they were farmers very often.
They had to keep their cattle with their houses in a very close range
and they had a village cow herd who took the cattle
out to the fields every morning and brought them back.
It was a new way of life; a way of life which was involved very,
very urban in a way and yet these people were farmers.
When they came to Pennsylvania, they decided to skip the city --
they were suspicious of cities by this time --
and they had individual farms.
This is Pennsylvania and the black outlined area is what I consider the
major portion of the Pennsylvania Dutch country starting from Easton
up above to the right on the Delaware River and going up in
into central Pennsylvania to my favorite county, Centre County,
where I have 10,000 cousins in the hills [laughing] and down
to part of western Pennsylvania.
It includes, it doesn't include much of Philadelphia
or Chester County although part of that was Pennsylvania Dutch.
And this is the area, this is slightly larger than Switzerland,
and it wasn't a complete settlement of Pennsylvania Dutch because some
of the counties had little Quaker settlements
or little Scotch Irish settlements but most of the Scotch Irish seemed
to have gotten tired of farming in Pennsylvania and moved
to North Carolina and Virginia, and so forth.
But some of them stayed.
This is a typical Pennsylvania farmhouse
and note the manure pile out front.   This is very typical.
They brought that idea from Germany and Switzerland.
This, there's a stone house to the right
which was the original house built in the 1770's
and the brick house was built probably in the eight- around 1810.
This is a Lancaster County farm.
Lancaster County is of course still a very important
agricultural county.
The, one of the differences between the two groups
that I'm discussing is that they had a different concept of the ministry.
The Plain groups choose their ministers by lot.
They're very much against higher education which is suspicious
to them; it's too worldly and sinful.
And so they, the Amish, the older Amish cut off the possibility
of going to school after the age of 14.
High school and college are simply vetoed.
But so they have to pick farmers who have no training
in preaching as their ministers.
They pick them by lot, using a biblical precedence there,
and they have to get along with them.
They have to learn how to preach and so forth.
They only know the Bible.
They have no other religious helps and so forth.
But in the church world, we had educated ministers
like the Muhlenberg family who came over from Hanover in 1742
and the father is up above and the three sons - he sent them back
to Halle to the university to study --
and they all became university graduates
and helped the Lutheran church.
So there's a very great difference and also these people,
these educated ministers
who had university training often were scholars.
And one of the, the Muhlenbergs, the one to the right
with the clerical bands on his
around his neck was Gotthilf Henry Ernst Muhlenberg who was the pastor
of Trinity Lutheran Church
in Lancaster Pennsylvania from 1780 to 1815.
He was America's greatest botanist at the time and he corresponded
with European botanists and American botanists.
And so he was not only a devoted Lutheran minister,
but he was a scholar, helping American scholarship.
His brother, Frederick Augustus Muhlenberg was a Lutheran minister
for a while but went into politics, much to his father's dislike,
and he became the first speaker of the American House
of Representatives in Philadelphia when that was the capitol in 1789.
This is an example of the type of book
that the European educated Lutheran and Reform ministers published.
This is the Mirror of the Heart, the [German] and there is a portrait
of the, the minister himself and so forth.
Pennsylvania Germans wrote books like that too in the 18th century.
Let's look at the church world now, the Lutheran and Reform world.
This is, strangely enough, a Lutheran church.
It's the St. Michael's Church at Strasburg in Lancaster County.
In Lancaster County, the countryside was often Mennonite or Amish -
Plain that is, and sectarian,
but the little towns had Lutheran and Reform churches.
This was a Lutheran church.
It's what I call a meetinghouse church,
because it doesn't have a tower, and it looks, it's kind of in
between a Mennonite meetinghouse or Quaker meetinghouse,
and the high towered gothic churches of the 19th century.
It had plain glass windows and inside it was very different
from churches that came, that succeeded it in the 19th century.
This is what it, what the pulpit looked like.
It was halfway up the wall and it faced the people down below
and the people in the balcony.
And down below there was no altar as there is
in many Lutheran churches now, there was a communion table surrounded
by a little fence and people came to stand at the fence
to receive the elements of communion.
This is what a Lutheran and Reform union church looked
like in, after the Civil War.
They added a tower which they shouldn't have done,
but they did that because they felt (they didn't ask me
so I didn't give, [laughing] so I didn't give my opinion)
but the church, the little building here
to the left is the schoolmaster's house.
And one room was the school room and the rest
of the house was for the schoolmaster.
And the schoolmaster was a kind of assistant minister
because the Lutheran and Reform ministers of churches
like this often had other churches to deal with and were not here
for all of, for every Sunday.
So I think this picture is rather interesting and unfortunately
that church was torn down in my time, I remember it.
It was on a, the churches were always built in hills
where they were symbolic of pointing to heaven.
And there's now a Howard Johnson's-type modern church built
there, not on the hill, but down over the hill.
Again, they didn't ask me about that.
[laughing] This is the type of church
that succeeded the meetinghouse church
in the Lutheran and Reform world.
This is up in the Lykens Valley where my father's people come
from in Schuylkill and Dauphin County.
It was three stories.
There was a Sunday school room down below.
The Sunday school was not part of the colonial church world
and there was always a tower with a bell that rang out over the va-
over the valley to call the people to church.
And there are some churches -- Lutheran churches--
that look like this built around 1900 and I think they were trying
to build a church that looked like Martin Luther himself.
[laughing] Pardon that.   Let's look at the Quaker culture
which preceded the Pennsylvania Dutch culture in Pennsylvania.
This was the, the brochure that I --
was put out when I was Winterthur fellow some years ago
and had a whole day seminar on Quaker culture.
This is a Quaker meetinghouse built of brick and with two doors,
one for the men, one for the women.
It was actually, the land was given by an ancestor of mine.
It's in York, Pennsylvania.
It's the York Meetinghouse which is the oldest ecclesiastical structure
in the town of York today; older than any
This is a Schwenkfelder meetinghouse which was modeled
on the Quaker meetinghouse plan with the two doors and so forth,
and the interior is very similar to a Quaker meetinghouse.
The Schwenkfelders were a group of religious people,
Protestants who came, were driven out of Silesia which is now partly
in Poland in the 1720's and they fled to Germany and came
to Pennsylvania where there are the only living Schwenkfelder churches
in the world.
I like this picture, it's a canal boat picture
by an artist showing two Quaker women there who stand
out very distinctly from the very worldly women back of them,
on the bench back of them.
The Quaker costume was identifiable everywhere.
This is one of the things that made the Quakers have three testimonies.
One is equality, and when you dress alike you're expressing
equality silently.
And one is peace, a testimony of peace, and so forth.
This is a Quaker named Rebecca Lukens.
Rebecca Pennock Lukens and the Pennock's came from Ireland.
They were Irish Anglo Irish Quakers and very important in Pennsylvania.
And Rebecca married a man named Lukens,
one of the Germantown Quaker names and he was the founder
of the Lukens Steel Mill at Coatesville, Pennsylvania.
He died rather young, unfortunately, and Rebecca had
to take over the business.
And she ran the steel mill and she looks
like she could run a steel mill.
[laughing] She was a Hicksite, a liberal Quaker
and this is the costume that she wore.
This is a curious daguerreotype that I found one time at a flea market
and it's obviously a Pennsylvania Dutch young woman and of one
of the Plains sects, and I think it's the Old Order River Brethren
who have a curious cape like that extends far over the shoulders,
but I have no way of knowing whether that is true.
But it's a very beautiful picture.
They weren't supposed to have their pictures made,
the Amish especially are against photography.
They call them graven images and these are in the 10 commandments
that they mustn't have them.
This is a picture that came out in around 1900 of two Plain girls,
milkmaids carrying milk from the barn I guess,
and showing the beauty of the Plain costume.
They did create a life of simplicity.
The Quakers, they borrowed the word plain and the idea of simplicity
from the Quakers and the Quakers borrowed it from the Puritans.
[pause] As time went on, the Plain groups began to modernize
and I like this photograph --
I have a whole collection of Plain photographs
that should be published sometime in a book.
But this shows the grandmother who is still Plain -- Mennonite--
with a long dress and an apron.
They always wore a fancy, not a fancy but a parade apron,
a [German] in German and she's wearing the white cap
which is the married women's cap, but her daughter is dressed
in Victorian or Edwardian costume and the children certainly,
the child certainly is dressed in a modern way.
I think that is a very revealing picture.
And when I was went to teach at F & M in the 1940's,
some of the department stores still had Plain clothes departments.
And this is one, I collected all the information I could on this
because I was working on the costume history
of the Pennsylvania Dutch people and this is very interesting.
They, these are the men's costumes; very plain and so forth.
A strict Mennonite won't wear a tie
and I interviewed an old Mennonite woman on why that was
and she said a tie is neither for hot nor cold.
It won't make you warm in the winter, it won't make you cool
in the summer, so why wear it?
[laughing] The Plain groups have a lot of distinctive religious customs
and this is the one of washing the saints feet.
And if you noticed at Easter time they always show the Pope washing
the feet of seminarians or something, and it is in the gospel
of John that at the last supper, before the last supper
or afterwards, they washed saints feet.
Jesus did it as a sign of humility.
And this is a famous picture from about 1900
from an American Family Magazine showing the Church
of the Brethren people washing the saint's feet.
This is a very curious costume that the smallest Mennonite group
in Lancaster County wears.   They're called the new Mennonites.
They were new in 1810 or 12 when they were founded
and they have a very distinctive bonnet and all elements
of the costume have to be the same color.
I think that's rather interesting.
They also were known as the Herrites, H-E-R-R-I-T-E-S,
This is the Mennonite martyr book.   They did produce some literature
and it's called the Bloody Theater [German] or Mirror of the Martyrs,
and this was published in Holland Dutch in 1660 and 1685,
two editions, and the Mennonites wanted it in Pennsylvania
in the 1740's because they saw the war clouds in Europe
and they thought perhaps they would be subject to persecution over here
as they were so much in Europe.
And so they took the project to the Ephrata Cloister,
and Peter Miller the, one of the founders, one of the leaders
of the Cloister translated this from the Holland Dutch
into very good High German and it was published.
It was the largest book published
in the Colonial period on any American press.
It was published at Ephrata in Lancaster County
by the Cloister Brethren 1748 and 49.
It's a very beautiful title page.   Now let's look at the Amish a bit.
The Amish have their own peculiar costume and they all,
these girls are wearing aprons.
These may be work aprons but when they g- go
to meeting they wear a show apron of course or an apron,
a dress apron I would say over their dress.
This is a group of Amish men.
The Amish have services -- the old order, they meet in farmhouses.
They never were allowed to build meetinghouses in Europe
and so they continued that practice in Pennsylvania.
They meet every, every other Sunday and this is what the men do
between the services when they have a service.
They, after they eat the meals-- the men are always served first --
it's a patriarchal system, unfortunately,
and the children are last, and so forth.
And this shows the men outside,
out front of the house during the, between the services.
And note that everything is whitewashed.
Whitewash was a great blessing in early Pennsylvania.
They even, they whitewashed the trees out in the yards.
This is the most unusual Amish costume in America.
It's a group from the Big Valley, or Kishacoquillas Valley,
up in Mifflin County near Lewisburg, Pennsylvania --
no, Lewistown, Pennsylvania
and strangely enough they are called the Nebraska Amish.
They have moved to Nebraska and then moved back.
And they still wear the flat hat of the 18th century.
If you know anything about 18th century prints,
you know that the women wore a flat hat sometimes having it flat
on their head, and sometimes - as this woman did-
putting it, tying it under the chin.   It was succeeded by the bonnet.
In the 1790's a Quaker woman brought the new fashionable Plain bonnet
to Pennsylvania, Martha Routh, and this was copied
by the Mennonites and the Amish later on.
The Amish have the oldest hymnal in the United States, in the world.
It's called the Ausbund, the binding up of chapbooks.
And the earliest edition was 1564.
It was not originally Amish because the Amish didn't develop
until the 1690's and this was the Mennonite hymnal
which all the Mennonites used in Pennsylvania until 1803 and 1804
when then decided they wanted American hymnals and published them.
But the Amish inherited this and they still sing 12 or 14 hymns
from it, and they sing
like Gregorian chanting, a very curious way.
And the Library of Congress published a record on red vinyl
at one time of the Amish singing and it's still, I believe, available.
The Amish also do some other things which the Mennonites do not do.
They still allow dancing at weddings, and this is a picture of,
that I value very highly.
It's a wedding dance in Canton Berne, Switzerland
and if you know anything about the Amish, they have all Swiss names
and all but one or two come from Canton Berne, Switzerland.
This is not an Amish man but he certainly could be an Amish man
with a beard and a brown coat, a plain coat.
But the young people are dancing, they're celebrating the wedding
and this is what the Amish do even today.
They have a wedding dance or wedding dances.
The Amish also do something very interesting.
When the youngest son-- they have big families --
when the youngest son gets married, he inherits the farm and this comes
from the laws of Canton Berne, Switzerland.
And the laws of Canton Berne, Switzerland said when that happens
in a family you have to build a house for the parents.
And so here is an example of a house which in 1852 was given
to the youngest son and the parents moved
to this little house to the right.   And this by the way is a,
an ancestral house of mine, Gingrich Farm.
And I only mention my Gingrich connection to close friends.
The Moravians were also a sectarian group but they're kind
of in-between the Plain groups and the church groups.
They had more churchliness than some of the Plain groups and this is one
of the buildings at historic Bethlehem,
and the there's a southern place
where the Moravians have their archives is Salem,
Old Salem in North Carolina now part of the city of Winston Salem.
But I don't like to mention Winston, because of the cigarette business.
This is a Moravian woman, Elizabeth Bohler, the wife of Peter Bohler
who came to Pennsylvania and he's very important in the history
of religion because he was on the ship that went
to Georgia taking Moravians there in 1736 when John Wesley was aboard.
And John Wesley was a great founder of the Methodist church which,
and by 1840 was the largest Protestant church
in the United States and still is extremely important.
And John Wesley talked with Peter Bohler on shipboard
and he decided to learn German.
He went to Hernhuth to study the Moravians
and he was influence by them.
He almost joined the Moravians in the 1740's but he decided to stay
in the Church of England, the Anglican Church
and he founded the Methodist group within the Anglican fold.
I was interested in costume,
the fact that the Plain groups wear a white cap which in peasant culture
in Europe was a symbol of the married woman.
The children did not always wear the cap, and I found one time
when I was sailing up and down the Rhine or the Moselle --
I forget which -- I saw these two women with white caps on
and here they are deaconesses in the Protestant Church of Germany.
And this was a 19th century movement and it was an attempt to give women
who want to devote their lives full-time to the church
by not marrying, a way of doing this in the Protestant world,
such as nuns do in the Catholic world.
And they, there are deaconess costumes that I worked
on at the time that are extremely interesting
because of their similarity to the Pennsylvania's Plain costumes.
These are Pennsylvania Plain people and they were members
of a group called the United Christian Church
which was a very small group in Lancaster and Lebanon Counties.
And they were singers of my bush meeting songs.
I did a book called Pennsylvania Spirituals and they came
to our festival one time and sang for us.
And here they are posing for me holding my book.
I was very moved.
Now you have to hold onto your chairs
because the next slide is somewhat shocking.
It shows why there are Plain Quakers and Plain Mennonites,
why they wanted to get away from costume.
[laughing] And there she is, the Duchess of Kent in 1618 and the,
there was as class system in England
until the 20th century I guess, or 21st.
And people like this had the money, they ruled the estates,
they ruled the peasants and they dressed like this.
And the Puritans got tired of it and in the 17th century George Fox
and the Quakers got tired of it and they dressed plain.
They had the testimony of simplicity.
So goodbye Duchess of Kent.   The, this is a picture that I like.
It's by a Russian artist around 1811 of a tavern dance
and I don't know whether is the, the fiddler,
I think the fiddler is a black man-- I mentioned that --
and here the Conestoga Wagon,
a product of the Pennsylvania Dutch culture is
out standing outside the door, and the wagoners are dancing
with the local girls and so forth.
Dancing was extremely important in Pennsylvania.
There were tavern dances and [German] dances and so forth.
The Lutherans and Reformed also had style even in their tombstones
and this is a very interesting tombstone with a kind
of baroque scroll up at the top.
They were aware of the artistic trends in Europe and they,
this even affected their tombstones.
The Mennonites and Amish do not do this,
they have very plain tombstones
without any decoration, or without very much.
This is one of my favorite Lutheran and Reform tombstones.
It's a, the tombstone of a maiden lady as we used to say--
Maria Fisher [assumed spelling].
It's in the Oley Valley Cemetery and it shows the the shield down below,
the pillars, the neoclassical pillars and of course the symbol
of muted mourning, the Weeping Willow which took
over on tombstone art about the 1850's.
But this is an extremely beautiful stone and there are thousands
of these waiting to be studied
in the cemeteries of eastern Pennsylvania.
This is the crudest of the, and the oldest of Penns-
Pennsylvania German tombstone.
It's at the St. Gabriel's Church of Douglassville and it's dated 1719
and it has the skull and crossbones and the hour glass
which is turned sideways suggesting that the life is over.
The Pennsylvania Dutch didn't begin quilting in Europe.
It's an English and Welsh habit in America
but they certainly became master quilters, and this is a,
simply a picture to introduce that subject.
The Amish quilts, the Amish are not a creative culture.
They've borrowed almost everything that they practice in their culture
from the, the larger Lutheran and Reform church cultures.
But in quilting the Amish who stayed at home and didn't often get
out into into the public like the Amish men,
created something very distinctive -- the Amish quilt.
And they used dissident colors like purples and greens together.
This isn't exactly the one that I was hoping to show you
but this is an Amish quilt with a, a purple border
and they created something extremely important in the Amish quilt.
And when I was in Zurich a few years ago, many,
I've been there many times,
but one time I saw an art gallery full of Amish quilts.
And they are so popular now in the world of antiques
that the Amish have hired some of the Hmong refugees
from Southeast Asia to make them to sell.
Food, of course, is another angle
where there is a united culture among the Plain groups
and the church groups.
This is a rather famous book called Sauerkraut Yankees.
This is what the, the soldiers were called in Virginia
and North Carolina where the union army got south in the Civil War--
those Sauerkraut Yankees.
Scrapple is a Pennsylvania Dutch gift whether you like it or not.
[laughter] It's the, it was really pon haus.
I was once very greatly surprised and delighted,
I was at the University of Minster Rhineland in Westphalia studying
and I went to a restaurant for lunch and they had pon haus
on the menu and I ordered it.
It was almost black because they still put blood in it
which the Pennsylvanians gave up, and it was a half inch thick
and it was served on a piece of toast.
We had, I had never eaten it like that
but I I welcomed seeing the word pon haus which I've known all my life.
But scrapple is the English word and I think William Woys Weaver,
the most important food historian of the Pennsylvania Dutch,
says that scrapple came to America via Germantown because they were,
they were North Germans, North Rhinelanders
and they don't even know it in the Palatinate
where perhaps the majority of the Pennsylvania Dutch people came from.
Also rye whiskey is the Pennsylvania form of whiskey
and this is Old Overholt.
It was made by a Mennonite named Abraham Overholt
from Lancaster County who moved west near Pittsburgh
and the Mennonites today are all temperance people and they would
like to forget Abraham and his rye whiskey and re-write history,
but they're not able to do that.
Also Pennsylvania, despite the fact that we have more farmers' markets
with fresh foods than any other state,
according to the US Department of Commerce,
we also make a lot of junk food.   And this is my favorite one.
I don't eat it, but I love the title, Nibble with Gibble's.
[laughing] The hex signs are now being called barn stars and perhaps
that is a better term because they really had nothing to do
with hexeroi or witchcraft when they were put on the
on the barns in Pennsylvania.
The symbols, the geometrical symbols were important
in the culture in Europe.   They put them on houses and they,
but the Pennsylvania Dutch used these symbols on Fraktur,
on tombstones, everywhere.
And finally someone had the brilliant idea
of taking a carpenter's compass and making them very large
on the forebay, the public side of a barn.
They are beautiful and they have been studied --
in fact I wrote a book on hex signs --
but I'm using the term "barn stars" now.
The furniture that the Pennsylvania Dutch made was distinctive
and this is the famous Huber schrank.
A schrank is a wardrobe.
It shouldn't be called a kas which is the, the Holland Dutch word.
Antique dealers often make that mistake.
This should be called a schrank, S-C-H-R-A-N-K and it's dated 1779
for Georg Huber, George Hoover, of Lancaster County
and it's a perfect magnificent piece.
It has the whirling swastikas, which were common symbols.
Had nothing to do with Hitler's stiff-legged swastika at all.
It was used on Fraktur and tombstones and so forth.
It has the the the cross and the crown, the penalty of life
and the reward of life and so forth.   A lot of symbolism here.
It's in the Philadelphia Museum of Art and I must say
that at Winterthur, at the Winterthur Museum
at the present time there is the finest exa- finest exhibit
on Pennsylvania furniture, not only the Pennsylvania Dutch furniture
but the Quaker and other furniture, of the 18th
and early 19th centuries.
And they've published a magnificent book by Wendy Cooper
and Lisa Minardi which you should be aware of.
These are some people that I photographed
at the Kutztown Festival.
I was one of the three academic founders of this with Dr. Shoemaker
and Dr. Frey in 1950 and it,
in 10 years it became the largest festival in the United States.
And it was a folklife festival from the very beginning.
We tried to put on display elements of the Pennsylvania Dutch culture
which you can't put on display in a museum.
And you can talk to craftsmen, for instance,
who are working at their benches.
You can talk to the cooks who are making the Dutch food.
And these were three women whom I got to know
at the festival dressed in Dutch costume.
The sun bonnets are quite accurate.
Every woman wore a sun bonnet when she went out to work in the garden.
They didn't have the cult of tanning that we have today,
even though it's dangerous.
And the woman in the middle had a kind of Victorian bent
with her little cap, hat and so forth.
Anyway the, most of the folk festivals before Kutztown were music
festi- music and dance festivals where you had a stage
and an audience and performance.
They were performance venues and we tried to put the Dutch culture
on display, as I said, for a week at a time
and it's still going after 61 years.   It's just amazing.
There's another very important person,
Mabel Schneider from near Reading.
She worked 50 weeks of the year in a shirt factory at Reading
and she took two weeks vacation and always took one week to stand
out in the hot sun and make soap,
to demonstrate how the Pennsylvania Dutch farm wives made soap
out of lye and ashes.
And her sun bonnet is very interesting.
She gave me one as a museum piece; really it is.
It's called a "bobedagle hood" [assumed spelling]
in Pennsylvania Dutch, the word
"bobedagle" [assumed spelling] means cardboard because the strips
that stiffen the brim of the hat of the cap,
of the bonnet, are made of cardboard.
You take them out when you wash the fabric.
So she made this, of course, and made one for me.
I don't wear it, [laughs] but she gave it to me.
Mabel Schneider -- I I honor her.   Note the modern glasses too.
I think they go very well with the [laughing]
with the old fashioned dress and the sun bonnet.
This is Clarence Cope.
He represented the church of the Brethren Tradition.
He was a descendent of Christopher Sower, the printer,
and he had only a high school education.
He knew High German, he had studied Holland Dutch.
He could read The Martyr Book in Holland Dutch
and he knew Pennsylvania Dutch perfectly.
He had an almost photographic memory for the songs that were sung
in the Brethren Church and Mennonite Church when he was growing up
and he became a Plain Brethren person;
he grew a beard but not a mustache.
The mustache is a no-no for the Plain groups
because it was a military symbol in the 17th century.
Soldiers had them.   But he wore a beard.
And Clarence Cope has written a great deal.
He's no longer living unfortunately,
but he represents the self-taught scholar that you have
in the Plain groups--
in the Mennonite and even in the Amish groups--
where they can't go to college and get a full education,
they yet devote themselves to scholarship in a very wonderful way.
And he certainly did.   Clarence Cope.
And this is Professor Schnitzel.
He was a baggy pants comedian who published records.
He came to the festival every year and he would begin his spiel
by saying, "I'm so glad to see so many of yous here today even
from foreign countries like New Jersey."
[laughing] And everyone of course would laugh at that.
He was a gift- gifted Dutchified English speaker and that's one
of the languages that the Pennsylvania Dutch have--
Dutchified English.
[laughing] This is another woman that came, I never got her name,
but she's eating a piece of shoo-fly pie and she liked to dress
up in kind of semi-Victorian or Edwardian style
and swish around at the festivals.
Pennsylvania because of the, the Pennsylvania Dutch culture
because the crafts lived into the 20th century has become I think the
center and motivation for the modern American craft movement,
the do-it-yourself movement.
This is a, a dear friend of mine no longer living, Ollie Strauser;
Strauser the basket-maker, and this shows him using the materials to,
that he made his wonderful baskets from.
So he kept the basket-making practice alive
into the 20th century.
This is another old friend of mine, Milton Hill, who was a wagon maker.
You have to make wheels and that's the main thing
but he could make a whole wagon.
And this of course was a very detailed,
rural craft because brought from Europe.
When we think that these ancestors who came over on the crowded ships
in the 18th century, what they brought in their minds and hearts
and also in the gifts of their hands.
This is one of the, the hand gifts, the craft gifts
of the Pennsylvania Dutch.   And now I have four more slides.
I hope you can sit through them.
I want to prove now that I am Pennsylvania Dutch --
as if I have to.
This is the church in the Higgins Valley or Lykens Valley
in Pennsylvania north of Harrisburg.
It was built in 1874 and every brick--
it's a Lutheran and Reform Union Church, they had one church
and alternate services -- and every brick of,
that makes up that church was made on my grandfather Yoder's farm.
He gave the clay, good clay along the Pine Creek where his farm was,
and he gave the congregation the right
to dig the clay and make the brick.
So this, and my father was baptized in that church on the Lutheran side
in 1883, so this is very close to me and I, there used to be nine or 100
or 1000 of these Union Churches, [German] in Pennsylvania
between the Lutherans and Reforms.
It was a grassroots ecumenical movement.
Unfortunately, today they're breaking up the churches
and you have two churches instead of one, and they used to say,
there is a joke that is told that in the 20th century when the Lutherans
and Reform began to fight in these congregations as they sometimes do,
church people, they fought over the heating of the church.
And it was too hot for the Reformed or too cold for them,
and so they decided to have two furnaces,
a Lutheran furnace and a Reform furnace.
[laughing] I hope that joke is true.
But you can quote me on it if you want to.
This picture is very important to me.
It's my great-great grandmother Magdalena Mower [assumed spelling]
and she's dressed for church.
She has her, her silk apron on and a silk shawl.
She has a black cap, not a white cap like the Mennonites.
She was a Lutheran, and her maiden name was Klutz.
And I once made the mistake at a genealogical conference,
we were at lunch after the lectures and we were going around the table
and saying what family we were really working on
and one person said I'm a Balliot, I'm a Wesco, I'm a Helfrey,
and when it came to me and I said and I'm a Klutz, [laughing]
and everyone laughed because I'm obviously not a klutz.
[laughing] Anyway, this picture is a good one.
She was born in 1783 and died in 1876 and I talked to people,
my aunts who knew her as little girls,
this was their great grandmother.
And my grandmother looked just like her.
My grandmother was her granddaughter.
This is the first car that chugged into the town
of Higgins and in the valley.
This was our farm, the yard outside the house, and the,
it was my uncle's car and his wife who's seated at the driver's seat,
although she couldn't drive, she's posing,
was my aunt Luella [assumed spelling],
my father's youngest sister.
And the other occupants of the high back car are my other aunts.
I think the picture is good and it shows the value
of collecting historic photographs like this.
And finally this is my favorite picture of all these.
This is my grandmother, the old woman seated in the rocking chair
with the long black dress.
My Aunt Emma Yoder to the left who, whose memory was so great,
and she taught me so much about the meaning
of the Pennsylvania Dutch culture.
And the other two are my Aunt Ida and Aunt Elvina.
This was taken in 1918.
My oldest cousin, Aunt Ida's son Albert was in the army in France
and so they had the flag up.   So this is my family.
My father owned that farm for 10 years when I was a boy and I grew
up with the Pennsylvania Dutch and, so forth, so I hope you will admit
that I am Pennsylvania Dutch.
I did bring, bring along today Dale Phillips
who is a legitimate Pennsylvania Dutchman, too and I wanted to day
if you just have a minute or two, what a pleasure it is for me
to speak at the American Folklife Center.
As my introducer said, I did help to bring it into being
in 1976 I think it was, and we, it is a going concern
and I gave my collection of religious hymnody,
the camp meeting songs, and my witchcraft
and pow-wowing tapes to them.   Some of them were wire recorders.
I told someone today, I was once mistaken carrying a heavy --
almost too heavy to carry -- wire recorder into a farmhouse.
I was mistaken for a Jehovah's Witness minister.
[laughing] But it didn't take long to assure them that I wasn't.
Anyway, I'm very proud to have been connected with the early years
of the of the center and the great years when people
like Waylon Hand were involved, and he and I did a, the conference
on American Folk Custom here in in some years ago and it's great
to see Alan Jabbour here, my old colleague and friend,
and all of you whom I have known in the past.
So thank you very much.   [ Applause ]
>> Nancy Groce: Would you take a few questions?
>> Don Yoder: Yeah sure.   Sure.
[ Applause ]
>> Nancy Groce: Dr. Yoder has time for a few questions [inaudible].
Oh, question?
>> Male speaker: Dr. Yoder I, some years ago came across a volume
of Ann Hark's stories and I now have two of her volumes
and her cook book with Preston Barba.
. .   >> Don Yoder: Yeah.
>> Speaker continues: and she disappeared without a trace
and I've Googled and Googled and found very little evidence.
Did you know her?   Do you know whatever became of her?
>> Don Yoder: I knew her yes.   She was a Moravian.
Her father was J. Max Hark who was at Bethlehem and she beg- was one
of the persons who focused the tourists
on the Pennsylvania Dutch culture.
She wrote these books Blue Hills and Shoo-fly Pie and so forth,
and she wrote children's books but she seemed to have taken the idea
of the, the famous room in the Philadelphia Museum of Art,
the House of the Miller at Millbach, she used that and applied it.
She she, her people were Amish -- she has a lot of mistakes --
and she also, it's come out recently that she was never married
and she went around with a chauffeur
to the Dutch country and we- went to farms.
And she must've been very suspect in the Mennonite farms
where they served her supper with her chauffeur.
Anyway, she's, she did a lot for,
especially for Pennsylvania Dutch tourism.
But a person who did much more was Cornelius Weygandt
who is my predecessor at the University of Pennsylvania.
He was in the English department and,
he was in the English department and he wrote a famous book in 1929,
"The Red Hills," all about the Pennsylvania Dutch country.
They are charming essays that he wrote
as a very talented English professor,
and then he wrote "The Blue Hills,"
"The Dutch Country," and other books.
And he helped to create both the antique business, antique interests
in the Pennsylvania Dutch material culture
but also the tourists coming to, to Pennsylvania
to see the Pennsylvania Dutch.   And Lancaster County has become one
of the main tourist areas of the United States.
They say that five or six million tourists come to Lancaster County,
Pennsylvania alone, every year just to see the Amish.
>>Female speaker: What- do you agree with on John J. Stout on his views
of the barn stars and the symbols in Fraktur?
>> Don Yoder: Well the, John Joseph Stout who was a cousin of mine,
not a first cousin but a definite relative whom I knew very well,
was a good scholar.   He was he was excellent in religion.
He was trained in religion.
And he had the idea that, that there was symbolic meaning in,
in a great many of the Fraktur designs
and he had a rather wild system that took it back
to medieval Catholic mysticism to the Age of the Lily and so forth,
and I think much of his extreme symbolism has been toned down.
People did not really buy that and I don't buy it either.
John Joseph Stout.   Yes?
>> Alan Jabbour: You briefly referred to the word plain,
how it had come to be applied to the Pennsylvania Dutch but.
. .   >> Don Yoder: Pla-.
. .
>> Alan Jabbour: Yeah I gathered-- that is to the sect people.
. .   >> Don Yoder: Yes.
>> Alan Jabbour: Do they accept that term, plain?
>> Don Yoder: Yes they they certainly do.
They certainly do.
It comes from the Puritans in England who are
at the background of the Quakers.
The Quakers came out of the Puritan movement in the 17th century
and they used the word plain.
You went Plain, you dressed Plain and so forth.
And the Puritans had, had preceded them in that use.
And the Pennsylvania Dutch use that, but the Amish,
I don't know whether I should mention this,
but the Amish have another word
and that is the opposite of Plain is gay.
And this is the religious word gay, it's not the meaning of "gay"
that we have today that's in the foreground.
But it, this is a Puritan word and the Quakers used it
and the Amish used it at least until very recently.
They say when one of their sons left,
left the Amish world he went gay, he went into the world.
And Dr. Shoemaker and I who were the leaders
of the Pennsylvania Dutch Folk Festival were working on what
to call the Plain Dutch and the church Dutch
and we hit on the term "gay Dutch."
And this was right before the word began to shift
in in its its emphasis into into what it is presently
and some stupid people are using this but some stupid people changed
"gay Dutch" to "fancy Dutch" and that is ridiculous.
[laughing] There's nothing like a fancy Dutchman I'm sure.
[laughing] But the word plain is a very important word
and I think that-- I'm glad you you mentioned that.
Yes?
>>Female speaker: Hi, I have a follow-up question on that.
I wonder if you have any thoughts on, you mentioned the
that it came from the Quakers.
The Quakers by the 20th century had discarded the level
of of the costume and.   . .
>> Don Yoder:Yeah.
>> Female speaker: And sectarianness that the the Plain sects.
. .   >> Don Yoder: Yeah.
>> Female speaker: of the Germans continued.
I wonder if you have any any thoughts
on why they continued to do that even then.
>>Don Yoder: Okay the Quakers yes,
there are very few Plain Quakers today.
There are, there is a a a, there are a few in North Carolina
and a few conservative Quakers who dress Plain in Ohio and so forth,
but the Philadelphia Quakers and the Earlham Quakers and so forth dress
like other Americans just like the Lutherans and Reform.
They're not Plain anymore.
And I think the Quakers in the 20th century when they began to give
up the Plain costume, they realized
that the Plain costume is outward; it's an outward symbol.
It was important at one time to preach equality and simplicity
by wearing a Plain costume, [inaudible],
the women dressing alike, the men dressing alike.
But they were more important in in the world th- their world,
the moral questions of the world, the war, the wars and so forth
and th- they decided to give up the Plain costume
which was only an outward symbol and concentrate on the inward things
which were more important to them.   I think that's that's true.
But the Plain groups, so-called Plain groups, the Amish
and Mennonites, they still feel that it's important
to have this outward symbol of of everyone being alike.
Yeah.
>>Nancy Groce: Could we have one more question?
>>Don Yoder: Yes.
>> Male speaker: I have a question about the Union Churches.
>> Don Yoder:Yes.
>> Male speaker: How did that movement begin?
Was that because the, the Reform and the Lutherans originated
from the same area in in in Europe and so when they went there
that they just maintained that unity?
Is that how that happened?
>> Don Yoder: No it, it's an American thing.
They, these people settled together in valleys
and had a valley community and they founded a church and some
of them were Lutherans, some of them were Reform.
Sometimes a Lutheran man would marry a Reformed woman and so forth.
Most of the people were mixed in that way,
and so they decided to have Union Churches.
There was in the Rhineland, in the 17th century after the elector
of the Palatinate in 1785 became Catholic,
he insisted on having the Reform Church shared by the Catholics.
And so there are some examples of these churches,
a famous one at Otterberg near Kaiserlautern;
beautiful church built by the Cistertians.
It was a Reform Church until 1700 or so
and they the Catholics built a wall separating the,
the choir from the nave and the Catholics took --
they were smaller in number-- they took the the the choir
and the Reform took the nave.
And I had the great joy of seeing that wall come down
and now they worship together.
They have a Catholic service early in the morning
and then they have the Reform service.
[pause] Yes?   Was there a question here before we?
One more?   >>Peter Bartis: Well I was going,
I was going to ask a question Dr. Yoder.
You mentioned that the Pennsylvania Dutch Folk Festival was among the
first to include a different venue besides music.
>>Don Yoder: Yes.
>>Peter Bartis: Was that a result of anything [inaudible] experienced
with European folk museums or, [inaudible]?
>> Don Yoder: No both Dr. Shoemaker and I were aware of what was going
on in Europe and I I, it's simply a matter of we became interested
in broadening, in broadening folklore into folklife and a-
as a way it has had been done in Scandinavia,
Dr. Shoemaker brought the term folklife from Scandinavia,
[foreign word], and that was translated
from [German] the German word, which was a much earlier term and the,
it was true that the, these people were looking
at every aspect of traditional culture.
Three that I became very interested
in that most folklorists didn't deal with: food- food history, costume,
and medicine, folk medicine.
Well some, Wayland Hand, of course, was a master in folk medicine,
but most folklorists had a rather limited view
of what folklore should include.
It was mostly verbal culture and folk songs, folktales, riddles,
folk speech and things like that.
And material culture was out and they had no way of,
they divided everything into genres in my opinion,
and they had no way of treating religion.
They had a genre called superstition and I never could,
could agree with dear Wayland Hand, a wonderful friend of mine,
who continued to use the word superstition.
I think it's a wrong, unscientific word.
So we tried, beginning at Kutztown and, so forth,
to broaden the American concept of folklore into folklife
and that's why I'm so glad that there is an American Folklife Center
at the Library of Congress and there's a folklife program
at the Smithsonian Institution and there are folklife programs
in New Hampshire, that wonderful one that has published the whole series
of documentary books on on folklife materials
and there are folklife offices in some
of the states in the public sector.
So I'm very happy that this is, this is happening.
I think we have to be as broad as possible in looking at the culture
that our ancestors had and how it came down to us.
Yes.   >> Nancy Groce: Thank you very much.
[applause]
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.