With such a culture and region of storied past, academic folklife studies emerged worldwide in the wake of post-WWII modern lifestyle, created when natural fibers were replaced by new synthetic materials and mass produced commercial foods changed man’s traditional way of living. Folk cultures like Pennsylvania’s Amish and Old Order Mennonites had already surmised that some man-made innovations were to be avoided and were cautious of allowing social and material change in their religious orders.
During the modern age of the 1950s when nations embraced the scientific atomic age, people fearing to be considered backward ridiculed old fashion living practices, and even some folklorists announced folkways to be extinct among their people. However, national attention became drawn to the persistent folkways of our state’s horse and buggy Dutch and proved just the opposite. As the mass media informed the public about contemporary Pennsylvania Dutch cooking and age old ethnic folk practices, it was apparent that the bilingual Pennsylvania Dutch were still practicing their folklife within the confines of modern society.
Sociologically speaking, the newer folklife studies movement in the 1950s was a broader and more sophisticated approach to researching human behavior, striving to understand and record the depth of a nation’s cultural complexity; thereby, it became the goal of earnest folklife researchers like Dr. Alfred L. Shoemaker, Dr. Don Yoder and J. William Frey, as opposed to the classical folklorists of the past.
The Americanism, PENNSYLVANIA DUTCH, has always indicated a broader group of immigrants who came to America in the pre-American Revolutionary period from Europe’s Rhine Valley, and should be preferred by all serious scholars over the term Pennsylvania German or German-American, the latter of which are not Americanisms. For those misinformed, Pennsylvania Dutch is the original term used by English Colonists, and refers to the Rhenish German Civilization of native Palatines and includes not just Germans but French Huguenots, Swiss Amish and Mennonites, Holland Dutch Mennonites and Moravians who collectively shared the German language together, and in large numbers came to America seeking farms in Pennsylvania, and almost outnumbered William Penn’s English immigrants, as a matter of fact.
This early American cultural melting pot, mainly in southeastern Pennsylvania, was made up of naturalized Rhineland citizens who swore allegiance to the United States but assimilated with English laws and standards. But with everyday work habits and living customs, they followed in their native Rhineland fashion, and continued this unique German dialect in America rather than formal High German, and soon became known as “Pennsylvania Dutch.” Dr. Alfred L. Shoemaker, founder of the Folklife Movement, preferred the native American term, Pennsylvania Dutch rather than the misnomer, Pennsylvania German.
An ethnologist, Shoemaker believed that the older term, Pennsylvania Dutch, was more precise in describing these people with pre-Revolutionary Rhineland roots rather than these latter terms, which were not as accurate, especially given the fact most of the Amish and Mennonites were not German, but Swiss. Only because of varying editorial policies in America, the American Folklife Institute has used both terms.
Richard L.T. Orth is assistant director of the American Folklife Institute in Kutztown.