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The knowledge that most Americans have of folklore comes through contact with commercial propagandists and a few energetic amateurs and collectors.

The work done by the analysts, the men who really know what folklore is all about, has no more appeal than any other work of a truly scientific sort and reaches a limited, learned audience.

Publishers want books that will sell, recording studios want discs that will not seem strange to ears used to hillbilly and jazz music, grade and high schools want quaint, but moral, material.

The analyst is apt to be too honest to fit in.

As a result, most people don't have more than a vague idea what folklore actually is ; ;

they see it as a potpourri of charming, moral legends and patriotic anecdotes, with a superstition or remedy thrown in here and there.

And so well is such ignorance preserved by the amateur and the money-maker that even at the college level most of the hundred-odd folklore courses given in the United States survive on sentiment and nationalism alone.