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In May 1951, Mennonite churchman Grant Stoltzfus profiled the rising renown of Lancaster County's sectarian groups for readers of the Lancaster-based Pennsylvania Dutchman. In his "Memorandum to Persons Interested in Disseminating Information about Mennonites and Amish and Their Way of Life," Stoltzfus described how, in recent years, the Lancaster Chamber of Commerce had been inundated with requests for information about the county's Mennonite and Amish residents. Even more significant-and, to Stoltzfus, more unsettlingwas the commerce in information that transpired outside the chamber's walls. Stoltzfus characterized what he saw being sold in Lancaster's bus station as "cheap, tawdry literature on the Amish and Mennonites," and he complained that similar materials were available throughout southeastern Pennsylvania. Stoltzfus concluded his memo with a rhetorical question and a call to action: "Can we blame these businesses for handling [this literature] until we take some positive steps to provide something better?" Scholarly works have their place, wrote Stoltzfus, but the hour's most pressing need was the production of "some good popular pamphlets on Mennonite and Amish life."1
Stoltzfus issued his call to action in the Pennsylvania Dutchman, the bimonthly publication of the recently established Pennsylvania Dutch Folklore Center.2 But unlike many whose words graced the pages of the Dutchman, Stoltzfus was more than an ethnically conscious descendant of Pennsylvania German immigrants. Stoltzfus was a Mennonite, a rising leader in this religious group that historically, theologically, and geographically stood adjacent to the Old Order Amish.3 While his call for "some good popular pamphlets" on the Mennonites and the Amish sanctioned the nascent agenda of the Pennsylvania Dutch Folklore Center, it likewise mapped a course for Stoltzfus's Mennonite colleagues who, until this juncture, had rarely considered the Amish culture mart worth their while. With the exceptions of Joseph W. Yoder's Rosanna of the Amish (1940) and its sequel, Rosanna's Boys (1948), Mennonite representations of the Amish prior to 1950 could hardly be characterized as marketable, let alone popular.4 But in the decades following Stoltzfus's memorandum-that is, in concert with the rising popular renown of the Amish in post-World War II AmericaMennonites devoted increasing time and energy to the process of representing their "cousins" to a culture-consuming American public.5
This article analyzes Mennonite representations of the Amish during the third quarter of the...