When he gets the answers to his questions he will be discouraged. In the first place, a good many writers who are said to use folklore, do not, unless one counts an occasional superstition or tale. Robert Frost, for instance, writes about rural life in New England, but he does not include any significant amount of folklore in his poems. This has not, however, prevented publishers from labeling him a ``folk poet,'' simply because he is a rural one. In the second place, a large number of writers, making a more direct claim than Frost to being ``folk writers'' of one sort or another, clearly make no distinctions between genuine and bogus material. Stephen Vincent Benet's John Brown's Body comes immediately to mind in this connection, as does John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Carl Sandburg's The People, Yes. The last two writers introduce strong political bias into their works, and not unlike the union leaders that we will discuss soon, see folklore as a reservoir of protest by a downtrodden and publically silenced mass. Folklore, as used by such writers, really reflects images engraved into it by the very person using it. The folk are simply not homogeneous with respect to nation or political attitude. In fact, there is much evidence to indicate they don't care a bit about anything beyond their particular regional, ethnic and occupational limits. Nevertheless, with a reading public that longs for ``the good old days'' and with an awareness of our expanding international interests, it is easy for the Benets to obtain a magnified position in literature by use of all sorts of Americana, real or fake, and it is easy for the Steinbecks and Sandburgs to support their messages of reform by reading messages of reform into the minds of the folk.