America Right or Wrong

by Lieven, Anatol;

  As the North, or the remaining United States, became more and more ethnically mixed due to immigration, so the “purity” of the Southern ethnic tradition would have been asserted against Northern “mongrelization.” Indeed, this purity–mongrelization opposition was already widely used in Southern rhetoric during the Civil War. It was shared by the Southerner Woodrow Wilson, and was continued in rabid form by Southern anti-Semitic nativists like Governor Tom Watson of Georgia.90 In these circumstances, the South would have lost its remaining liberals to the North, but would have attracted in turn conservative Northern whites appalled by the transformation of America by immigration, like the novelist Owen Wister or the painter Frederic Remington, with his ferocious talk of “Jews, Injuns, Chinamen, Italians, Huns—the rubbish of the Earth I hate.”91

  But as recent scholars of American historical demography have stressed, the Scots-Irish ethnic tradition was neither constructed nor invented, but very ancient, perpetuating until well into the twentieth century “folkways” that long predated the modern age, and in some cases even Christianity. Moreover, the violent circumstances in which the Scots-Irish found themselves on the American frontier in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries replicated in many regards those they had left behind, both in the savage wars against the Gaelic Irish and in the much older tradition of feuding along the English–Scottish border, and among Scottish and northern English clans.92 This was a tradition of which the Scots-Irish themselves in the nineteenth century were well aware. Andrew Jackson reportedly “required his wards to read the history of the Scottish chieftains whom he deeply admired and made the models for his own acts.”93

  The figure of Sir Walter Scott is a fascinating one in this regard. The craze for his historical novels and poems in the Antebellum South has been generally seen—and mocked—as part of the attempt of the Southern plantation-owning class to invent a British aristocratic and “Cavalier” tradition for themselves. For the Scots-Irish frontiersmen, however, his role was rather different: to “reimagine” in suitably sanitized form their own historical tradition, and thereby also to romanticize their actual lives on the southern frontier, which, as noted, reproduced in many ways those of their wild ancestors.

  If the white South had gained its independence, Scott might be studied today from some of the same angles as those nineteenth-century nationalist poets and novelists who helped “imagine their nations” by weaving genuine but fragmented stories and legends into nationalist myths—like Elias Lonnnrot in Finland, or Andrejs Pumpurs in Latvia. Or as a nineteenth-century Estonian nationalist declared, “let us give the people the epic and the history, and everything is done!” That Sir Walter himself, of course, had no idea that he was performing this role in the American South only indicates the extremely tortuous cultural paths by which nations come into being.94

  A Vignette of the Deep South

  In 1979 I spent several months at a college in the small town of Troy in southern Alabama (on an English Speaking Union scholarship named for soon-to-retire Governor George C. Wallace). Not only was society rigidly divided between blacks and whites, but the absolutely overwhelming majority of locally born whites I met were of mixed Anglo-Saxon and Scots-Irish descent, and Southern Baptist by religion. A survey of 1982 shows religious adherents in Pike County, where Troy is located, as 67.5 percent Southern Baptist and 15.7 percent United Methodist. No other church reached 5 percent of the total. Eighteen years later, the figures for the Southern Baptists and Methodists were almost identical, with fundamentalist believers in the Assembly of God and Church of Christ growing to 3.8 percent and 4.9 percent, respectively.95

  The public spirit of the place was strongly marked by this religion. Thus the county was “dry” (not completely, but to the extent that alcohol could not be advertised or drunk in public, and bars were highly restricted). Neither this, nor the fact that we were mostly under 21 years of age seemed to have the slightest effect on the drinking habits of my peers. The great majority of white students were self-described “rednecks,” and proud of it. They were very far indeed from the centers of American wealth, power, culture, and influence. They knew this, and their response differed from prickly pride to bitter resentment.

  They possessed a very strong sense of ethnoreligious community and local tradition. Although very few were of wealthy or aristocratic descent, very many were able to trace their ancestry back beyond the creation of Alabama, to settlers who had originally moved from Tennessee, Georgia, or the Carolinas. Surprisingly, some were even proud of the possession of Cherokee or Creek ancestry, since this constituted proof of ancient establishment—whereas black ancestry, though perhaps sometimes present, was emphatically not talked about. Despite state relief programs, a large part of the rural population, white as well as black, was also still appallingly poor by the standards of the “developed” world, with extremely high levels of illiteracy.

  Except for time spent in military service, a quite astonishing number had never been outside Alabama, except for visits to Pensacola and the beaches of the Florida panhandle, and still more had never traveled outside the South. Given the greater distances in the United States, Troy’s isolation was in some ways comparable to that of small European towns before the coming of the railroads.

  People were extremely kind and hospitable to the individual visitor (at least from Britain, a land that seemed to enjoy an almost mystical prestige both as an ally in war and as their own ancestral land of origin), but many were deeply suspicious of outsiders in general, and deeply ignorant of America beyond the Lower South. The world beyond America’s shores was a kind of magic shadow play, full of heroes and demons, but without real substance. “Demons” in some cases is a literal rendering of how they saw America’s enemies, for millenarian views of history were also present, though less at the college than among the surrounding population.

  This was therefore a society as different from the common image both of American prosperity and the American “melting pot” as could be imagined. This picture was, and to a considerable extent still is, mirrored in small towns across the Deep South, and certain parts of Texas and the West, reflecting what Oran Smith has called the continuing “incredible homogeneity among White Southerners.”96 Blacks had been accepted into the university, and were not subject to overt discrimination, but were still in a thoroughly subordinate position, with little local influence.97

  Over the past 60 years, the tremendous economic changes initiated by World War II have changed the South greatly. The shift of industries from the Rust Belt of the Northeast and Midwest have transformed parts of the South into some of the most industrialized areas in America, and this transformation has been widely publicized by boosters from the region and beyond.98 Economic development has sucked in new immigrants, including not only Latinos, but also South Asians, so that for the first time since the expulsion of the Indians, Southern society is not simply split along black–white lines.

  However, a glance at the political, religious, and ideological map of the white South reveals a society that has not changed nearly as much as figures for economic change would suggest. Although both the Latino and South Asian minorities have grown enormously, in 2000 the Southern Focus Poll still found that 65 percent of Southerners declared themselves Protestant, and more than half the population of Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia belonged to one denomination, Southern Baptist. Six of 10 southerners still say that they prefer the biblical account of creation to evolutionary theory (a figure, of course, including Southern blacks).99

  The region has continued to elect a range of politicians of strikingly conservative, religious, and nationalist caste. Older representatives of this culture, like Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, have retired, but only to be followed by figures like James Inhofe, Jim DeMint, and Roy Blunt, who perpetuate their tradition. These are indeed “lively dinosaurs,” as one observer put it. They are not fading remnants of a dead tradition and a lost cause.

  One reason for this continuity may be t
hat in one respect the South has become, if anything, more homogeneous over the past century. Before the Civil War, blacks were a majority in two Southern states (South Carolina and Louisiana) and very close to a majority in two more (Alabama and Mississippi). By the 1960s, black emigration to the North, pulled by Northern jobs and pushed by Southern white oppression and harassment, had radically reduced these figures—a change that helps explain why the achievement of civil rights for blacks under federal pressure, savagely resisted though it was by many whites, did not lead to the Balkan-style eruption of white mass violence of which Southern racists and conservatives had so often warned. According to the census of 1880, blacks made up 41 percent of the population of the Old South. By the 1960s, this had fallen by more than half.100

  For a century and a half, however, the desire to preserve first slavery and then absolute black separation and subordination had contributed enormously to the closing of the Southern mind, with consequences for America as a whole that have lasted to the present. They led to a situation both before the Civil War and in the mid-twentieth century in which the social system of the South was “on the defensive against most of the Western world” and white Southerners saw “outside aggression” against the South everywhere.101 The effects of this long experience of embittered defensiveness continue to this day.

  Racial solidarity gave poor whites pride in belonging to the superior, ruling race, and helped deflect resentment against the wealthy plantation owners. Cultural, racial, political, and economic defensiveness reached the point where the South became the pioneer in the modern world of the mass public burning of “dangerous books” from the abolitionist North. “In place of its old eagerness for new ideas and its outgoing communicativeness the South developed a suspicious inhospitality toward the new and the foreign, a tendency to withdraw from what it felt to be a critical world.”102

  Southern Defeat and Reconciliation

  The defense of slavery and its effects on culture, in combination with the other specific features of Southern culture noted above, led the South into its attempt at independent nationhood in 1861, and to crushing defeat. The losses suffered by the South during the Civil War were fully comparable with those of European nations during the great wars of the twentieth century. Some 260,000 Confederate soldiers—more than one-fifth of the entire white adult male population—were killed in action or died of disease (some 350,000 Union soldiers died, but from a much larger population).

  Hundreds of thousands of civilians, white and black, also died of disease brought on by malnutrition. Several of the South’s largest cities were destroyed, along with numerous smaller towns, and extensive tracts of the countryside were deliberately stripped bare by the strategies of Sherman, Sheridan, and other Northern generals. The real value of all property dropped by one-third, the number of horses by 29 percent, and pigs by 35 percent. The South’s cotton production did not recover its prewar levels until 1879, 14 years after the war ended.103 Moreover—as in so many neocolonial monoculture economies around the world—the Southern economy as a whole was depressed by a drop in the price of cotton that lasted for several decades, just as the same thing was happening to wheat farmers of the Great Plains.

  It was more than a century before even parts of the Confederate South “caught up” with the rest of America, both in terms of income and development, and in access to political power. Indeed, extensive areas have still not done so. For a century the South was reduced, in reality and still more in the perception of Southerners, to a position of almost colonial dependence on the North and the East Coast, symbolized above all by railway freight rates that discriminated against the South and in favor of the Northeast—a gross injustice that was not rectified until World War II.104

  Moreover, the period of radical reconstruction under military rule in the South, with its establishment of black voting rights and advancement of blacks to political office, was a terrible shock to the white South. The “tragic legend of Reconstruction” was immensely exaggerated and embroidered in subsequent Southern propaganda (most famously in Thomas Dixon’s novel The Clansman and the film Birth of a Nation, which was based on it). Nonetheless, it had a solid basis if not in real black behavior, then certainly in real Southern white fears.105

  Absolute white dominance was reestablished in the 1870s with the help of a campaign of terrorism by the Ku Klux Klan, directed against supporters of the Republican administrations in the South, both black and white. Thereafter, a determination to eliminate any possibility of even limited black political power led to the establishment at a formal level of the “Jim Crow” apartheid laws, which were to rule in the region until the 1960s. Informally these laws were reinforced by the tradition of public lynching, which in the Antebellum South had been used more often to control white criminals (slaves being valuable private property and punishable by their owners).106

  Typically of colonized territories, with a feeling of economic exploitation came bitter resentment of cultural patronization and insults, focused chiefly but not exclusively on criticism of the South’s racial record and habits. This resentment lingers on, though now rather than race, the feeling is of a general sneering at the South by East Coast and California liberals, intellectuals, and not least, film makers. And such sneering has indeed occurred continuously—albeit at varying levels of intensity—since the 1830s, with a new crescendo being reached in the 1960s.

  Specifically, Southern resentments of Northern elites have fed into the wider social and cultural resentments of the “heartland” to create a mixture that is very prominently on display in the Tea Parties. And these resentments are not without cause. East Coast liberal contempt for the heartland and the religious middle class is often crude and ostentatious. The Midwest in general is widely known among the East Coast elites as “the Great Flyover,” something you cross at 30,000 feet as you fly between Boston, New York, or Washington and California. The daughter of a rare surviving elected Democratic official from Idaho once described to me her fury on arriving at an Ivy League university to be asked by fellow students, “Idaho—that’s next to Iowa, right?” sometimes as a put-down, but more often out of genuine ignorance.

  A century and a half earlier, in the run-up to the Civil War, a Northern supporter of Abraham Lincoln had called the South “the poorest, meanest, least productive, and most miserable part of creation, and therefore ought to be continually teased and taunted and reproached and reviled.” The great satirist H. L. Mencken derived much pleasure from slashing at Southern barbarity, ignorance, and fatuity, with fundamentalist religion receiving the sharpest strokes. Even when justified, such approaches are unlikely to create good feelings.107

  During his campaign for the presidency in 1968, George C. Wallace declared in Georgia that “both national parties have been calling us peckerwoods and rednecks for a long time now…and we gonna show them we resent being used as a doormat.” He said that these parties represented “the Eastern moneyed interests that have done everything they could to keep the people of our region of the country ground into the dirt for the past hundred years.”108 Senator Zell Miller’s public attack on the Democrats was motivated in part by what he saw as their elitist Yankee sneering at Southern culture:

  Democrat leaders are as nervous as a long-tailed cat around a rocking chair when they travel south or get out in rural America. They have no idea what to say or how to act. I once saw one try to eat a boiled shrimp without peeling it. Another one gagged loudly on the salty taste of country ham…We’re like the alcoholic uncle that families try to hide in a room up in the attic: after the primaries are over and the general election nears, national Democrats trot out the South and show us off—at arm’s length—as if to say, “Look how tolerant we are; see how caring? Why, we even allow people like this in our party of the big tent. We still love that strange old reprobate uncle.” As soon as the election is over, the old boy is banished to the attic and ignored for another two years.109

  In Troy, acquaintances would com
plain bitterly that every Southern character in a Hollywood movie was likely to be a variant on half a dozen stock and hostile types: the sadistic police chief, the bestial swamp-dwelling “cracker,” the fanatical and/or hypocritical preacher, the corrupt political boss, or—at best—the corny, simple-minded hillbilly and the eccentric aristocratic lady on her decaying Gothic plantation (of course, certain Southern actors have themselves made careers by playing “white trash” parts, and often celebrating their culture and attitudes—notably Robert Mitchum and Burt Reynolds).110

  More recently, the Coen Brothers’ film O Brother Where Art Thou?, though praised for its love of Southern music, was also criticized by Southerners for portraying some of the same old shallow stereotypes. The unforgiving reader is admittedly at liberty to find a certain poetic justice in white Southerners sharing some of the cultural experience of American blacks and Indians at the hands of Hollywood.111

  As has often been pointed out, this collective regional experience of comprehensive defeat and humiliation is unusual in a white American history characterized by continuous national success. In Richard Weaver’s phrase, “the South is the [American] region which history has happened to.” Equally unique is the sense of guilt for past collective crimes of slavery and racism felt by more liberal Southerners, including those like William Faulkner, whose pride in their regional tradition was fundamental to their identity and culture. The psychological and cultural anxiety that this produced is comparable to the position of a Westernized, humane, and patriotic Russian serf-owning noblemen in the nineteenth century.112 As in that case, these profound contradictions and ironies contributed enormously to the richness of the Southern literary tradition after the Civil War.113