Gatlinburg Nation

I was standing outside Gatlinburg’s Salt and Pepper Shaker Museum the weekend before Election Day when I first got wind of the Selzer poll. Tucked away in Winery Square at the mouth of the mountain tourist town, the attraction boasts 20,000 sets of shakers from all over the world. And I was willing to wager those reposting said news with such messianic fervor had no interest in visiting here. 

Of course, nothing felt right about lauded Iowa pollster J. Ann Selzer’s prediction that Kamala Harris had overtaken Donald Trump by three points in a heartland state that had remained decisively red for the better part of the last decade. But such off-base projections felt even more bizarre in this environment. Cars with Trump bumper stickers filled the parking lot. An employee with a clear Eastern European accent sold tickets at the counter next to a sign that offered discounts for purchases made with Bitcoin.

Like the rest of the country, I’ll find out how Selzer came to her conclusions as she defends herself against the lawsuit Trump filed after his decisive election victory. But my winnowing away the hours in the Smoky Mountain city revealed a version of America entirely absent from the Oprahfied elitism of the Kamala voting class and the white rural rage studies that have attempted to manage depictions of the deplorables among us since J.D Vance first broke onto the New York Times bestseller in the calmer days of summer 2016.

Those of us who grew up in East Tennessee live everyday in the literal shadow of the Smokies. But even the denizens of the surrounding urban enclaves—Knoxville or the Tri Cities—are unable to escape the outsize impact Sevier County has on our cultural imagination and economic reality. An area with less than 100,000 residents, the often indistinguishable trifecta of Sevierville, Pigeon Forge, and Gatlinburg draws 13 million visitors per year while generating $2.2 billion for the local economy. 

Yet, nestled between the state’s flagship university to the west and the artsy utopia of Asheville, North Carolina, to the east, it serves as little more than a lucrative pockmark on the way to progress for East Tennessee’s self-professed creative class of academics, media professionals, and local urban politicos. Casual talk in the days before semester’s end at the University of Tennessee would invariably circle back to the area as a form of redneckified Antipodean camp that hinges on the exploitation of the working class. Why would anyone in the rarefied Appalachian atmosphere ever deign to visit the area when Asheville was right around the bend with its indie booksellers, and record stores, and vegan restaurants with names like The Laughing Seed unless it was an anthropological jaunt steeped in irony? 

But the truth for us hillbillies who somehow passed our way into that cosmopolitan company is that Gatlinburg and the surrounding areas are much more grounded in America’s realities than the worlds of research institution Assistant Professorships or Bitter Southerner t-shirts with astronomical profit margins. In fact, its entire existence rests on its ability to push back on forces with far greater resources that threaten to undermine its identity. 

Since the still-influential Ogles family settled in the area in 1795, Gatlinburg has strived to maintain a close-knit local culture founded on folk art and regional sensibility. Though reliant on the logging economy in its early days, the area quickly defined itself as a destination for local craft thanks largely to the Pi Beta Phi Women’s Fraternity, which founded trade schools in 1910 that celebrated and preserved local artisan traditions. When the Great Smoky Mountains National Park encroached on the region in 1934 through a campaign of displacement and disruption often elided in discussions of the county’s development, its lifelong residents leaned further into the folk art dynamic. 

Like the rise of the National Park system before it, LBJ’s establishment of the Appalachian Regional Commission during the War on Poverty days brought infrastructure investment. Yet it also ushered in the era of hillbilly poverty porn that still serves as the foundation for Trump voter discourse. Ever resilient, the good folks of Sevier County leaned into this aesthetic, taking control of such depictions on the way to further enriching the local economy. As Graham Hoppe, author of Gone Dollywood: Dolly Parton’s Mountain Dream, writes, the result was that savvy locals subverted national tourism into the authentic local tradition: “Nothing about the hillbilly image is necessarily true–except that, of course, it seems to sell really well.”

Such sly civility achieved through superficially embracing national stereotypes served as a form of inoculation. Unfortunately, like the once-booming Appalachian mining towns surrounding it, the county must now contend with national and international corporations that want to tap into the region’s uniqueness through a fortified wall of Paula Deen and Guy Fieri partnerships that finds seemingly authentic expressions of identity like local institution Hillbilly Golf as a holding of a company based in Chicago. 

Regardless, Sevier County's fierce localism cannot be quelled. During the Great Recession, it absolutely flourished thanks to the Tennessee General Assembly legalizing commercial distilling in forty-one counties, including Sevier. The result was an abrupt transformation of the local economy that extended the region’s tradition to the renegade craft that defined hillbilly culture. Ole Smoky Moonshine became the area’s first spirits purveyor in 2010 and expanded to multiple locations in the area. Other highly vaunted distilling institutions like Tennessee Legend and Sugarlands followed. That the curbing of government overreach led to such a boom is not lost on those familiar with the local lore. 

Back in November, I fled back home for a number of reasons. I was in the early stages of preparation for the Southern Oasis Film Festival that I direct in Sevierville every April. I also wanted to escape another homebound pre-election weekend doom scrolling while trying to bliss out to anything but cable news. My desire to prevent such a fate was so strong that I agreed to listen to a two-hour “it’s not a timeshare” presentation at the Gatlinburg Holiday Inn Resort in exchange for a free weekend stay.

Surrounded by visitors from Illinois, Michigan, and Florida in a basement shrine to the history of the Holiday Inn, I learned Gatlinburg was a top-tier destination in the company’s portfolio–on par with Orlando and the Grand Canyon. Like those around me, I was caught in the 21st century crossfire of the American Dream–affluent enough for a handful of weekend jaunts with a credit score up to snuff to get into this room, but still on the wrong side of the gate of the culture class A-List and its aspirants who’d spent the better part of the year telling me voting the correct way was a moral imperative.

I spent most of my weekend making idle apolitical chit chat with tourists who called swing states home. A Catholic family with a son on the spectrum praised Gatlinburg as an escape from the spiraling cost of living in suburban Michigan while lamenting not having the means to just up and move full time. Visitors from Georgia at the Ripley’s Aquarium waiting for the sting ray show marvelled at how the attraction rivaled Atlanta’s offerings. Such characters may remain utterly absent from legacy media think pieces and Sundance-anointed indies about how the other half live. But, for better or worse, they made their presence known at the ballot box. 

Tellingly, one of Gatlinburg’s newest shops is The Silent Majority Store—a boutique that stocks a host of “Back the Blue” and “Faith and Freedom” paraphernalia that I found ultimately served as quite the canary in the coalmine at about 2:30 a.m. on November 6th. It’s adjacent to a Trump Superstore, a company with three locations in Sevier County (including an outlet) and a bustling shop just outside of Knoxville at the busiest stretch of Interstate in the nation. 

While outsiders can cry foul at the Confederate paraphernalia and popularity of the Fascist in Chief within its limits, Sevier County has no interest in sanitizing its history. If as the late cultural theorist Fredric Jameson contends, Las Vegas is the epitome of the postmodern city thanks to its pastiche of international tourist symbols from the Pyramids to the Statue of Liberty unbound from history, Sevier County imbues its own pastiche with the full spectrum of history, unafraid to repress its past while attracting a melting pot of demographics. 

However, for those who live in this milieu year round, Sevier County is no MAGA paradise. Kelli O’Connor, one of the masterminds of local conservative grassroots group Empowered Sevier, was drawn to the county after living most of her life in and around Knoxville, but saw her unabashed love of the area tarnished in the wake of the pandemic.

“I have no connections to politicians. I'm a homemaker. I was looking for an organization to get to be a part of,” she said. “The local GOP never got back to me. I reached out to them for six months and they really weren't doing anything locally at all. No meetings or anything. They didn't even have a Facebook page. And so I thought, ‘I guess I'll start something.’” 

Like Williamson County’s Moms for Liberty and parents groups in Loudoun County, Virginia, Empower Sevier pushed back against COVID restrictions and the local school board that took root despite the area’s ruby red status. O’Connor’s main concern has been what she sees as the area’s collegial local culture preventing difficult conversations.

“A lot of these people, they work together. They go to church together. Everybody knows everybody. And unfortunately, I think they vote a lot of times based on that. They're like, ‘Well, I go to church with them.’ And I'm like, ‘Well, that's great that they go to church, but would they really be a good politician?’”

Larry Linton, a Republican Navy vet who ran twice ran for a state house seat since he moved to the area in 2017 and lost to the incumbent, shared similar concerns about what he sees as attempts to preserve the way things were with the very real challenges of the area’s international appeal and need for infrastructure: “Home prices are out of the world high,” he said. “We need all those tourism-based employees: servers, amusement park people, and all that. But their income does not keep up with the rising prices in the county. It's not planned very well.”

As I wandered through a labyrinth of glass cases that told the story of America, salt shaker by salt shaker, I wanted to linger. Here were the promo sets families procured from the backs of cereal boxes on their way to stocking their kitchen as they ascended to the middle class. The hillbilly caricatures made to hold seasonings that Appalachian families proudly displayed regardless of their creator’s intent still elicited much excitement from the visiting families. There’s a reason that no such museum exists anywhere else than Gatlinburg. It’s a place that unabashedly celebrates the minutiae of life while pushing back against whatever force threatens to co-opt its identity. Whatever state the country finds itself in during my next trip back, I’m confident that Gatlinburg will be just fine.