Tandy, Jennette Reid

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TANDY, Jennette Reid

Born 27 September 1889, Vevay, Indiana; died 24 August 1968, Dillsboro, Indiana

Daughter of Carroll S. and Jennette Carpenter Tandy

Descended on her father's side from Swiss immigrants, Jennette Reid Tandy was the oldest of six daughters in a locally prominent and well-educated family. Both parents encouraged the girls in reading, needlework, music, and art. The family valued academic achievement, and all of the daughters attended universities or art school. Tandy and her sister Elizabeth earned doctorates. After studying at Wellesley College for two years, Tandy went to the University of Chicago for her Ph.B. (1911), then studied library science at Western Reserve University. During the 1910s she worked as librarian and teacher in Ohio and Indiana. In the 1920s, Tandy studied and taught at Columbia University where she received her M.A. (1920) and her Ph.D. (1925).

At Columbia, Professors William P. Trent and Carl Van Doren guided Tandy and other graduate students to undertake some of the necessary groundwork for establishing American literature, then a just barely respectable subject for academic inquiry, as a legitimate discipline. Always independent and iconoclastic, Tandy more than met the challenge for a pioneering study. Her dissertation, published as Crackerbox Philosophers in American Humor and Satire (1925), goes beyond mainstream American literature to include what she calls the "underbrush of literature," that is, the popular writing of newspapers and almanacs. Her book, one of the landmarks in the study of American humor, has been overshadowed by Constance Rourke's American Humor (1931) but is notable on several counts.

Although Crackerbox Philosophers is a study in American letters, Tandy is mindful of the cultural context out of which literature comes. In assuming a broad definition of literature that includes folk and popular material and in treating literature as an artifact of culture, Tandy, her mentors, and colleagues helped to establish a perspective that eventually gave rise to the American studies and popular culture movements. Tandy's work anticipates Rourke's later recognition that a study of American humor is a study of American character. In her book, Tandy describes and analyzes the provincial character type she calls "crackerbox philosopher." Her study is the earliest full treatment of this unlettered American social critic. The crackerbox philosopher in literature and in life is a variant of the "wise fool" a person deficient in book learning but strong in common sense. In her chapter, "The Development of Southern Humor," Tandy gives the first serious attention to a group of journalistic writers later to be identified as "frontier" or "Old Southwestern" humorists. Since frontier humor is often described as "masculine," it is noteworthy that a woman became one of its earliest scholars.

Serious illness and a long recuperation ended Tandy's career as a scholar. She returned to her native Ohio River Valley and as a therapeutic continuation of her interest in textiles and needlework started weaving tapestries on a small hand loom. Always a willing traveler and always questing after knowledge and new experiences, Tandy studied art and weaving in this country and Europe, most intensely with the Navajos in Arizona. A collector of Native American jewelry and crafts, she incorporated Navajo motifs into some of her tapestries.

When Tandy returned to Vevay, she chose for her studio an early 19th-century building, formerly used as a saloon and tavern, where Daniel Boone is reputed to have stayed overnight. In her weaving, she continued some of the same interests that had occupied her as a literary scholar: local culture and ordinary folk. Many of Tandy's tapestries depict scenes along the Kentucky and Ohio Rivers: shanty boats, tobacco market, and provincial architecture. Her interest in popular culture shows in woven representations of a hamburger stand and pool hall. Some of her portrait tapestries are caricatures. In her depiction of "Mrs. Uppercrust," for instance, Tandy pokes fun at the pretensions of social class in the spirit of a crackerbox philosopher.

Never content with mediocrity, Tandy experimented with technique, floss, and color and became an accomplished artisan. In the 1940s and 1950s, she produced hundreds of tapestries and exhibited them in one-woman shows in art museums in the U.S. and Canada. Life as a New York City intellectual and life as a village weaver seem unconnected, but a common thread runs through Tandy's diverse activities and achievements: in her art and in her scholarship, she focused on Native American culture.