Press photo, May 9, 1938, showing Congressman Short, Rep. Dudley White and their wives at a DC barn dance.
Dewey Short was “an avowed Hill-Billy.” Neither he nor renowned folklorist Vance Randolph ever disavowed the term. Unlike the transplanted Kansas folklorist, the educated congressman was an Ozark native. Like politicians from Andrew Jackson on, he exploited his backwoods credentials. The cutline of this press photo, “Chicken and Fixin’s YUM YUM,” notes they were dressed in “approved rustic styles” at a D.C. barn dance. Galena’s famous son alternately postured as an Oxford schooled philosophy professor and a Stone County hillbilly. And he was both.
Born in Galena to a family of 10 children, he served in the infantry in World War I, then graduating from Baker University in 1919 and from Boston University in 1922. Short also attended Harvard University, Heidelberg University, the University of Berlin, and Oxford University. Dewey rose to national prominence as the Representative of Missouri’s 7th congressional district.
In 1942, the St. Louis Star and Times sent a reporter down to Galena to find out, “Just who is Dewey Short, this 44-year-old, one-man hillbilly band from the Ozarks, who has been elected for four straight terms in Congress from the Seventh District in Southwest Missouri?” Encountering Jackson Short, Dewey’s father, the reporter “came to the right place.” Writer Ralph S. O’Leary noted that “the oratorical gifts” for which Dewey Short was noted came from his father, “who talks fluently and decisively.” Dewey’s own speechmaking talents earned him the moniker, “Orator of the Ozarks.”
From James Fork of the White: Transformation of an Ozark River, 352 pages with more than 400 color illustrations. Lens & Pen Press is having a half-price sale for all titles. James Fork is now available on our website at www.dammingtheosage.com for $17.50 (half the original price of $35), postage paid.
