Therefore, the scholar, as he looks at our national folklore of the last 60 years, will be mindful of two facts. 1) Most of the legends that are created to fan the fires of patriotism are essentially propagandistic and are not folk legends at all. 2) The concept that an ``American national folklore'' exists is itself probably another propagandistic legend.

Folklore is individually created art that a homogeneous group of people preserve, vary and recreate through oral transmission. It has come to mean myths, legends, tales, songs, proverbs, riddles, superstitions, rhymes and such literary forms of expression. Related to written literature, and often remaining temporarily frozen in written form, it loses its vitality when transcribed or removed from its oral existence. Though it may exist in either literate or illiterate societies, it assumes a role of true cultural importance only in the latter.

In its propagandistic and commercial haste to discover our folk heritage, the public has remained ignorant of definitions such as this. Enthusiastically, Americans have swept subliterary and bogus materials like Paul Bunyan tales, Abe Lincoln anecdotes and labor union songs up as true products of our American oral tradition. Nor have we remembered that in the melting pot of America the hundreds of isolated and semi isolated ethnic, regional and occupational groups did not fuse into a homogeneous national unit until long after education and industrialization had caused them to cast oral tradition aside as a means of carrying culturally significant material.