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Following Tradition: Folklore in the Discourse of American Culture. By Simon J. Bronner. (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1998. xvi, 599 pp. $49.95, ISBN 0-87421-239-1.)
The McGuffey Readers: Selections from the 1879 Edition. Ed. by Elliott J. Gorn. (Boston: Bedford, 1998. xviii, 202 pp. Cloth, $35.00, ISBN 0-312-17766-6. Paper, $8.50, ISBN 0-312-- 13398-7.)
In the 1920s, the industrialist Henry Ford soured on the ethos of the modern world that he had helped create and began to pour his energies into history. Not conventional history, to be sure: that, he is famously quoted as concluding, was pure "bunk." Instead, Ford turned to what Simon J. Bronner might call folklore or folklife, or quotidian life as Ford remembered it-a humble farm boy, growing up in the nineteenth century. At Greenfield Village, outside Detroit, Ford assembled examples of indigenous vernacular architecture (including his own boyhood home)-painstakingly disassembled, shipped to the site, and restored to pristine glory. He revived the wholesome square dances of his youth. And, for the use of friends, admirers, and the pupils in the old-fashioned, no-nonsense school at Greenfield Village, he reprinted the 1857 edition of the McGuffey Reader, the book from which he had long ago recited his lessons in a one-room schoolhouse.
Ford used books, buildings, and music to conjure up a dense cultural environment grounded in what he believed to be authentic folk traditions of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century United States. Elliott J. Gorn argues that his excursion into fake-lore gave Ford "a moment of peace" from the industrial society he had midwifed into being. But because it was a museum, Greenfield...