The Scotch-Irish were also marked by their descendance from a premodern clan tradition where personal and collective honor, pride, and vengeance were important. Hence the fairly high incidence of casual violence and family feuds in the South, particularly in its Appalachian mountain communities, which remained largely untouched by urban development for many years after the Civil War, until the Second World War and even after. Folkways, music, religion, and language displayed certain sixteenth- and seventeenth-century characteristics into contemporary times.*
This Southern legacy has contributed to the global reputation of the United States for a popular culture of violence unknown anywhere in Western Europe, usually associated primarily with the frontier experience. The push westward toward a receding frontier, the conquest of the aboriginal American population and their displacement by European settlers who considered Indian land “unoccupied,” open to appropriation and the installation of “civilization,” was for nearly a century identified as the crucial historical influence on the development of the American nation and American democracy, a thesis first set out by Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893—although in the politically corrected twenty-first century it has lost some of the self-congratulatory luster it originally possessed.
The initial North American experience superficially resembled that of the Spanish conquest and occupation of South and Central America, except that nowhere in North America were there (surviving?) indigenous civilizations of the sophistication of those encountered by the Spanish. By and large, the North American settlers (except in Quebec) lacked the Spanish and Portuguese religious motivation, to save the souls of the pagan Indians (as well as to find Eldorado).
The North Americans’ was a violent and brief conquest of the West . The Union Pacific Railroad was chartered by Congress in 1862 to build the eastern part of the transcontinental railroad, and construction began in 1865 on a line from Council Bluffs, Iowa, on the Missouri River, to Ogden, Utah. That opened the free-range West to land-grant occupation and settlement, cattle drives and cattle wars, Billy the Kid, the dime novel, Owen Wister, Zane Gray—and, ultimately, John Wayne. Thirty years later the “Old West” was over, except in the newly invented movies. The last known “wild” Indian was captured in California early in the twentieth century and was taken in hand by university researchers. Nonetheless, the experience of “the conquest of the West” dominated the American imagination for many years, and it persists today. My own great-uncle slept with a Colt .45 “Peacemaker” revolver under his pillow in the 1930s, in a town that had ceased to be the frontier sixty years earlier. My grandfather (born in 1862) carved for me as a child a bow and arrows as he had been taught by a “tame” Indian. Today, in an American society that is more violent than the Old West, the popular demand to possess and bear individual weapons continues to be politically irresistible—more than ever, it appears, since the 2008 presidential election.
The South was violent for another reason. It was a slave-holding society, where plantation discipline was maintained by the threat or practice of violence, and poor whites in Southern communities struggled to maintain a status superior to that of slaves, even though their material conditions of life were sometimes inferior to those of the slaves on a prosperous plantation. After Emancipation, the living condition of the “red-neck” (a reference to sunburn) white farmer “share-cropping” for a more prosperous farmer or landowner was usually no better than that of the black who shared that miserable condition.
Vigilante “law” and lynching were supported in places where organized law enforcement was weak or absent. Vigilante groups, usually composed of the respectable, originally mostly found their victims among white criminals or supposed law-breakers, since slaves were valuable property and were expected to be controlled by their owners. Lynching as an instrument of racist oppression of free blacks was a post-Emancipation phenomenon in the so-called “Jim Crow” period at the end of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth (often in supposed crimes of sexual connotation). The practice spread to Northern cities with large immigrant and migrant black populations.* The last lynchings were in the 1950s, but there were murders of (usually white) civil rights activists in the South in the 1960s.
It has been argued that an American national deformity results from its people never having known tragedy. But that is to ignore the tragedy of slave life in North America between 1619, when the first slaves were landed in North America (from the British Bahamas), and Emancipation, and the additional century of racial oppression of black Americans that followed Emancipation. The music of black America was from the start the music of suffering and tragedy, and even when comic was sardonic and bitter. Jim Crow persecution and widespread disenfranchisement of blacks after Emancipation, effectively nullifying it in most of the Old South, found an eventual amelioration in President Harry Truman’s courageous and deeply important desegregation of the American military services in 1948.* It took another twenty years to arrive at the civil rights legislation of Lyndon Johnson, and forty years more before the election of Barack Obama.
Tragedy was a related reality in the experience of the white population of the morally compromised slaveholding South, and after 1865 the conquered white South, whose literature in the generations that followed what it called the War Between the States was deeply marked by defeat and even more by the continuing reality and legacy of its complicity in slavery and Jim Crow in all their human ramifications. William Faulkner was the great chronicler of this period. It could be felt in the former Confederate states as late as the 1960s, when the changes in American economic and industrial geography that had begun during the Second World War, and its accompanying labor mobility, plus the influence of national radio broadcasting and above all of television, were accomplishing a national fusion of popular culture and attitudes that by now has all but extinguished the authenticity of regional cultures in the United States, although not of regional differences.
It has been said of America’s Evangelical Protestants that “instead of creating a Christian America as was their initial intention, … [they] have effectively Americanized Christianity.” Their belief is a fundamentalist, interdenominational or multidenominational Pentecostal Christianity that is an American invention (or amalgamation), far from its roots in dissenting Anglicanism, Calvinism, the influences of Moravian piety, and the theology of Jacobus Arminius. David Hempton wrote in the Times Literary Supplement in 2007 that the movement has “at once condemned, appropriated and consumed popular culture [which helps to explain] the paradox that has befuddled secularization theorists for years of how modern America has become more religious and more secular at the same time.”7
While the movement is properly called an American version of Christianity, it has failed to convert the American majority to its version of Christianity. The overall average of Sunday churchgoers in the United States may be higher than in Western Europe, but urban, educated, professional, and academic America, including the government policy class, is no less secular than its counterparts abroad—although politicians of Protestant origin usually find it expedient to acknowledge religion’s conventions and declare themselves “saved.” Evangelicals faithfully attend church, but so do Catholic Latinos, the most rapidly growing demographic group in the United States.
The international political significance of the rise of the American Evangelicals lies in its adherents’ passionate conviction that the United States is God’s chosen instrument in his salvation plan, and their identification of their religious expectations with the events of contemporary history, looking for signs that predicted redemptive events are at hand. A great many are convinced that the great Middle Eastern ally of the United States, Israel, is crucial to the fulfillment of the divine plan, having carried out that return of the Jews to Jerusalem described as indispensable to the fulfillment of the predicted Last Days and the end of time, when “saved” Christians and those Jews who have chosen conversion will welcome the final apocalyptic batt
les with the Evil One and the arrival of the Christian redeemer.
The Evangelicals have made a special and not unsuccessful effort to win military converts. The moral tension between Christian commitment and a career commitment to the employment of state violence is surely eased if one believes this participates in events of divine significance. Since early in the development of the American all-volunteer professional military service, Evangelical clergymen have figured disproportionately among the candidates for appointment to the military chaplains’ corps. While military regulations are rigorous in defining permitted religious activity and proselytism, there have been scandals in this connection, the most notorious being that at the Air Force Academy in Colorado (which trains secondary-school graduates to become career officers). Nonbelievers, Catholics, and Jewish and mainstream Protestant cadets have complained of academic or professional discrimination and aggressive proselytism tacitly encouraged by senior officers who are themselves committed Evangelicals, prompting official investigations.
Certain officers prominent in the Pentagon during the George W. Bush administration publicly identified the war in Iraq as a divine commission to the United States. Mr. Bush’s own avowed Evangelical commitment has provoked questions in some quarters about his motives in his official decisions. In spring 2009 a friend of the retired president of the French Republic, Jacques Chirac, confided to a journalist friend preparing a book on Chirac’s presidency that in 2003, just before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Mr. Chirac was twice telephoned by President Bush, urging France to join the invasion because the world had arrived at the era prefigured by Gog and Magog, signifying the arrival of a great war in which all God’s enemies would be destroyed and the Last Days of Divine Judgement arrive. Mr. Bush seemed convinced that his war on Iraq was this prophesied war, and tried to so convince Chirac. The French president was sufficiently disturbed by Bush’s state of mind to consult a theologian at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland for his opinion. The theologian told him that Gog is a mysterious figure from the land of Magog, of controversial Biblical significance, mentioned in the book of Genesis and again in Ezekiel and Revelation, taken by some to represent the nations of the world who are enemies of Israel at the end-time. The French president decided to keep the nature of these telephone conversations to himself so long as he (and, as it happened, Mr. Bush) remained in office.*
* The independence movement in the Latin American colonies did not begin until two decades later, and there are those who argue that, with respect to the overlordship of the United States, it has yet to be completed. Canada did not become a united nation in spirit until the Battle of Vimy Ridge in April 1917, when the four separate divisions of the Canadian Expeditionary Force for the first time fought as a Canadian army.
* In 2007 there was a proposal (unsuccessful) in Congress for legislation rewriting the history of the period to affirm evangelical Protestant religious inspiration for the Constitution.
* Kazin also quotes Tolstoy’s note, written during the Crimean War: “A conversation about Divinity and Faith has suggested to me a great, stupendous idea, to the realization of which I feel capable of devoting my life. That idea is the founding of a new religion corresponding to the present stage of mankind: the religion of Christ but purged of dogmas and absolutism—a practical religion, not promising future bliss but giving bliss on earth.” Emerson anticipated him.
* This writer was a soldier in a largely Southern infantry unit of the U.S. Army in 1951–1952, where Elizabethan turns of phrase were not uncommon in the ordinary usage of white soldiers from rural Appalachia, such as speaking of “frolic” to mean celebration while on weekend passes, or the use of “yon” to indicate direction. Southern country music has old sources in Scottish and English folk music. By now it has become commercialized mainstream music, although recognizable for what it was and where it began.
* In the 1920s and 1930s there was a notable rise of Ku Klux Klan activity in the Midwest, in this case anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant as well as racial.
* The army obediently desegregated and became the most important vehicle of black male social and professional ascension the United States has ever had, a role that continues. The U.S. Navy and Marine Corps, “gentlemen’s” services, resisted, so long as their officer corps were able to do so. The only desegregation the navy wanted was black labor and construction units plus its old practice of employing black or Filipino stewards in officers’ messes. The Marines stayed all-white, or nearly so, longer, pleading that their supposedly unique fighting qualities depended on an enlisted corps that was a “band of brothers.” The army had always been culturally a Southern institution, meaning that in ordinary life blacks and whites mingled despite segregated institutions, which actually made it easier for the army to accept racial desegregation, even in the ranks.
* Jean-Claude Maurice, Si vous le répétez, je démentirai (Paris: Plon, 2009). The translation of the deliberately provocative title is “If you repeat this, I’ll deny it,” but the book’s information about the Bush calls has been widely published in the French and other press and never has been denied by Mr. Chirac.
IV
From American Isolationism to Utopian Interventionism
The function of national myth is to explain history and a nation’s (and implicitly, the individual’s) role therein. Underlying nearly everything said or written about history—in the West, at least, where the awareness first emerged of it as an intelligible or meaningful progression through time—there is an implicit belief that history has a meaning, and from that belief or assumption, a nation acts. This is true of the foreign policy of modern nations.
A belief in national election and mission was integral to the American identity during the first century and a half of the nation’s history, but its effect was to emphasize the separateness of the American nation from the Europe from which nearly all of its people had come, and to validate a foreign policy that isolated the United States from the affairs of Europe, considered politically turbulent and potentially compromising, or ideologically contaminating.
With Woodrow Wilson, the national myth was turned into a philosophy of international action. The United States became convinced that it could provide a solution to the crisis that gripped Europe. Its national virtues would enable it to become the savior nation the world presumably awaited. The First World War’s carnage and futility destroyed Europe’s confidence in its civilization. The Europeans enthusiastically (to American gratification) welcomed American intervention in that war and Wilson’s Fourteen Point Plan for peace. When Wilson arrived in Paris in 1919 it was to what witnesses described as near-hysterical popular enthusiasm.
With Wilson, a fundamental change had taken place in twentieth-century American thinking about world affairs. From the period of the French Revolution the new United States had mostly been spared the conflicts in European state relations. After the Congress of Vienna, which settled the Napoleonic legacy, these conflicts seemed to Americans a matter of those “jealousies and rivalries of the complicated politics of Europe” that Wilson and others were to condemn as the cause of the Great War.
From the time of the Barbary Pirates until the conversion of the United States to an idealistic imperialism in 1898 (seizing Spain’s empire—for the good of its natives—in what became known in Spain as the Catastrophe), international affairs had not greatly perturbed Americans. Foreign relations all but exclusively concerned disputes connected with commerce or the continental expansion of the United States into territories belonging to or claimed by Britain, Canada, Russia, or Spain. France’s possession of the Louisiana territories, between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains, was settled by Thomas Jefferson’s purchase of them from Napoleon in 1803.
Besides confronting the resistance of the aboriginal peoples of what had become the United States, the citizens of the new nation fought and lost a second war with Britain in 1812 in an effort to expand into Canada (and had the British burn Washington in retaliation),
but settled with the Spaniards in Florida in 1819 after the first Seminole War. After 1823 the British government found it convenient quietly to support the Monroe Doctrine, opposing any European presence or colonization in the Americas (notwithstanding a certain cautious subsequent interest by London in exploiting the existence of the Confederacy, so long as it survived).*
The United States otherwise faced no real threats from overseas, and threw its energies into the pursuit of its original conception of Manifest Destiny: transcontinental territorial expansion (and commerce). It annexed Mexican Texas and California, and all the territories between, by means of a white Texan declaration of independence and a war (1846–1847) in which Mexico was defeated, with Washington subsequently paying fifteen million dollars compensation for New Mexico and California, and assuming claims against the Mexican government.
The Civil War was the republic’s first and last experience of a major war in which it suffered heavy casualties and attacks on civilian society. It was also, for reasons of technological development, the first truly modern war, an industrial and railroad war, at least on the part of the Union. General Ulysses S. Grant’s strategy, exemplified by William Tecumseh Sherman’s “March Through Georgia” (from Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Atlanta and Savannah, and then northward through South Carolina to Goldsboro, North Carolina), destroying with its massive industrial supremacy the Confederacy’s civilian agrarian economy, was to set a precedent for American military practice during the Second World War and the Korean War.
The war against Spain in 1898, however catastrophic for Spain, was for the United States a casual affair in which the nation itself was never seriously engaged elsewhere than in the Philippines, where it had to fight for three years against an independence movement whose leaders had mistakenly believed that the Americans had come to liberate them, and where the United States subsequently fought what would today be called a counterinsurgency war against Muslim “Moro” separatists in Mindanao that lasted until 1916. (That same war has resumed today, with American soldiers as advisers to Filipino troops, and the Moros awarded the new identity of Muslim terrorists.)
The Irony of Manifest Destiny Page 6