In America, these attitudes are also closely related to regional interests and prejudices; the hostility of the “honester South and West,” as Thomas Jefferson phrased it, toward the decadent, exploitative, and above all commercial East.37 In our own time, some of these sentiments have found expression through the term “the heartland.” Geographically this means the states of the Midwest and the high plains, from Ohio to the Rockies. However, as its name indeed suggests, in political rhetoric it often carries with it the suggestion that this territory is also the home of true, core American people and values, of which nationalism is one of the most important.38
Jacksonian language pitting these regions against the East Coast elites continued in the Democratic Party for more than a century: in the 1948 elections (drawing also on bitter Confederate memories), Harry Truman declared in North Carolina that the Republican Party and business elites “treat the South and West as colonies to be exploited commercially and held down politically.”39 Over the past 40 years this attitude has been taken over by the Republican Party. For obvious reasons to do with the economic interests of their own leadership, the Republicans have taken a somewhat different group of Jacksonian hate objects—Washington bureaucrats and liberal intellectuals rather than bankers—but the appeal to regionalist hatred of metropolitan elites remains the same. These hate objects were indeed always somewhat flexible and protean. Thus Thomas Jefferson has been seen as in many ways a precursor of Jacksonianism, in his thoroughly racist version of an egalitarian white society and herrenvolk democracy based on the “healthy” producerist farmers and artisans. However, Jefferson—Virginia aristocrat, former ambassador to France, and admirer of the French Revolution—was also himself attacked by his enemies both as a frenchified Jacobin revolutionary atheist and as a frenchified, decadent, parasitic intellectual aristocrat.40 During the campaign for the Republican nomination in 2012, a TV advertisement by supporters of Newt Gingrich, entitled “The French Connection,” attacked his wealthy, “moderate” opponent Mitt Romney as an East Coast elitist who would say anything to win, “and just like John Kerry [Democratic presidential candidate in 2004] he speaks French too.”41
Indeed, the association of France not only with atheism and decadence, but also with East Coast elitism dates back to American reactions against the French Revolution. Notable among these was the first “Great Fear” of independent America, the hysteria surrounding the passage of the Alien and Sedition Act of 1798, directed against supposed French revolutionary plotters in the United States.42 Hostility toward European decadence, when contrasted with American purity and honesty, found its way into the American education system at an early date through one of its fathers, Noah Webster.43 The attacks on France in the context of the war with Iraq therefore had a long pedigree, and even some of the language about French decadence, atheism, and elitism has remained much the same (in the words of one right-wing nationalist attack on France after 9/11, “most Americans find it difficult to take the French critique seriously, coming as it does from men who carry handbags.”)44
In his classic work on the populist tradition in America, Michael Kazin characterized Jacksonian ideology as one of American populism’s most important and enduring elements. Jacksonian beliefs and rhetoric were rooted in a particular moral frame, the elements of which were drawn from a mixture of Scots-Irish Calvinism and the frontier experience. This morality championed the honest producers against “the consumers, the rich, the proud, the privileged” and American “aristocrats” corrupted by European atheism and decadence. It advocated equal access to wealth—above all, Indian lands—for all white Americans, but certainly not economic egalitarianism, and it celebrated “toughness, maleness, and whiteness” in defense of family, race, and nation.45 In the later 1960s and 1970s, the Republican Party revived the Jacksonian alliance of Southern whites and Northern “ethnics” (in Jackson’s own time and after, Irish Catholics) in hostility toward blacks.46
It was on the strength of this appeal that Jackson won election to the presidency in 1828. His election has been taken as symbolizing, in myth and to some extent in reality, America’s transition from the oligarchical rule of the founding elites to mass democracy; a transition closely related to the emergence of new forms of evangelical Protestant popular religion, which radically downgraded the position of the old elite-dominated churches and which had strong anti-intellectual and antimodern biases. This democracy categorically excluded Indians, blacks, and women.47
As Jackson’s own mixture of Southern and frontier origins indicates, the American frontier and the American South might be treated almost as one cultural complex in terms of their cultural impact on American nationalism. Gunnar Myrdal, in 1944, described the South as a “stubbornly lagging American frontier society.”48 Jackson himself was a product both of the Indian frontier and the upper South, as these existed from his birth in 1767 to the deportation of the southern Indians in the 1820s to 1830s. What we have been taught by Hollywood to think of as the classic frontier, in the West, was largely settled by Southerners with Southern Cultural traits.
The mingling of the Southern and western traditions is at its most obvious in Texas, the home state of George W. Bush, and the source of much of his political culture and attitudes. Texas has been described as “a southern state masquerading as a western state.”49 It was one of the Confederate states, and its eastern section, close to the border with Louisiana, has a strongly Southern flavor, with a large black population and a plantation tradition of agriculture. Central and western Texas, however, was still Indian territory at the time of the Civil War.
Western frontier culture was molded by the previous experience of the Southern frontier in the Appalachians and the Southern forests. On the other hand, the frontier tradition as a whole also had aspects that had nothing to do with the South. The northeastern states also had an Indian frontier from their foundation in the early seventeenth century to the expulsion of the French and then the British 150 years later. The frontier also generally lacked the other defining factor in the South, namely a black population and (before 1865) an institution of black slavery to be defended. The need to defend slavery and black subordination produced a Southern tradition of conformism—enforced democratically and spontaneously, but with ruthless determination—which has not been as characteristic of the West.50 Closely connected with this is the fact that the West is also far more religiously diverse than the South.
One of the most important legacies of the frontier for American nationalism was a history of exceptionally ferocious warfare, often amounting to genocide, in which both sides committed appalling atrocities. This has bred in sections of the American tradition both a capacity for ruthlessness and a taste for absolute and unqualified victory of the kind that was, in the end, won over all the indigenous adversaries of white America. A second feature was constant expansionism, often pushed for by the frontier white populations against the wishes of administrations in Washington. As Newt Gingrich said of Andrew Jackson during the South Carolina primary campaign: “Andrew Jackson had a pretty clear-cut idea about America’s enemies: kill them.”51 This might seem an empty piece of rhetoric, except for the fact that he was speaking of his desire to launch a raid into Pakistan to kill the Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar, even at the price of a complete end to Pakistani cooperation against terrorism.
In the South especially, this expansionist spirit was directed not just toward the Indian and Mexican lands, but also toward European colonial possessions in the Caribbean. In the twentieth century, as T. R. Fehrenbach has written, it carried over into support for far wider agendas:
Since 1900, Texas had increasingly fused back with the nation in foreign policy, especially when foreign policy was basically imperial—whatever name was put upon it. Texans instinctively supported anything that seemed to support American power and prestige. Both the domination of the banana republics and the destruction of Imperial Germany were parts of the same policy, blended of self-interest, self-def
ense, and an arrogant form of goodwill…Those who had in some sense carried the American flag West did not metamorphose overnight when they had no more worlds to conquer on their shores.52
Moreover, as far as the American mainland itself was concerned, this expansion was completely successful—in part because it very cannily stopped short of annexing regions with large, Catholic, Spanish-speaking populations that could be neither exterminated, swamped, nor assimilated.
In contrast, the record of successful settlement on the part of other white nations has been a mixed one. In parts of the world where the indigenous peoples were similar to those of the Americas (and had been decimated by Eurasian diseases before the settlers even arrived), white settlement was successful and seems quite likely to prove long-lasting. Everywhere else, in the long run the white settlers have been either kicked out again, as in Algeria, Zimbabwe, and Soviet Central Asia, or subordinated to the indigenous population, as in South Africa and Kazakhstan. In America, the record of settlement has been one of unqualified victory through ruthless violence—with all the effects that this is bound to have on a nation’s psyche.
The bestial atrocities to which Indian tribes like the Comanche and Kiowa subjected their prisoners also did much to shape long-term attitudes toward aliens in Texas and elsewhere:
Survivors of Indian raids were unable to rationalize a brotherhood of man that included American Indians…The dominant view of the Amerindians among the English became one of inhuman savages who were unpredictable and dangerous predators. Since the whole frontier population—not a protecting line of soldiers—became involved in endemic Indian wars, the entire population was predictably brutalized. Suffering terrible wrongs themselves, the frontier people inflicted terrible wrongs on the Amerindians.53
The Scots-Irish in particular had already experienced one savage frontier war with genocidal overtones. Their ancestors (together with some English Puritans and French Huguenots) had initially settled in Ireland as part of the Elizabethan and Jacobean clearances of the native Irish population of Ulster, and the Cromwellian and Williamite settlements of the rest of the island, and had mixed with protestantized elements of the Irish population.54
From their original settlements in central Pennsylvania, the Scots-Irish eventually settled much of the old frontier of Virginia and the Carolinas (where Jackson was born), before moving on to Tennessee, the lower South, Texas, and the Southwest. Indeed, the Southern historian Grady McWhiney has gone so far as to attribute most of the cultural difference between the South and the rest of the United States to their Gaelic cultural heritage.55 Discriminated against by the Anglo-Irish Episcopalian elites on the grounds both of class and religion, they brought with them to America a legacy of dislike of educated elites, whether English or Yankee (Northeasterners of overwhelmingly English origin).56
This tradition in America remains closely akin to the Ulster Protestant community, from which it stemmed, in its conflation of religion and nationalism, and (until recently) its bitter hatred of Catholicism. Now that the Boer tradition of South Africa has surrendered to the black majority, the Ulster Protestant Loyalists are today the only people anywhere else in the developed world whose culture and ideology resembles that of American evangelical Christianity.57
The Old Testament gave these settlers in Ireland, America, and South Africa both a language and a theological framework to describe and justify their dispossession of the native inhabitants of the land. The biblical tones of Jackson’s addresses to the Cherokees and Creeks demanding their removal across the Mississippi were prefigured 150 years earlier in Cromwell’s addresses to Irish Catholics demanding their removal “to Hell or Connaught.”58 As chapter 6 explores, this tradition creates a natural affinity with the harsher aspects of Israeli attitudes toward the Palestinians.
The frontier also helped perpetuate a belief in private weaponry, which—as orchestrated by the National Rifle Association (NRA)—has become an article of faith for the Republican Party. This belief has always been closely associated with a certain kind of egalitarianism and belief in every man’s right and duty to defend his personal and familial honor—a classic theme of Hollywood versions of the West, but one with a real existence and with real roots in the Southern and frontier traditions.
These traditions in turn derive ultimately from the world of late medieval and early modern England and Scotland, which was extremely violent by contemporary standards. Especially in northern England and Scotland, crimes were very often crimes of “honor,” or forms of the lex talionis (law of retaliation): collective family revenge or self-defense, often on the part of respectable gentry families. “Stuart England was a country in which violence was endemic even when it was not being torn apart by Civil War.”59 Gentry and poor alike displayed the “ferocity, childishness and lack of self-control of the Homeric age.”60 Stuart Scotland and Ireland were a great deal worse. As in the South and West of the United States and in many tribal societies across the world, this concern with honor was often indistinguishable from intense quarrelsomeness. The duel proper lasted in the South for several generations after it had died out in most of the Western world.61
Writing in the 1960s, Warren Leslie described the traditional Texan character as follows:
Frontier days in Texas are not so far in the past…Challenged, [the Texan] fought with his gun or his fists, and he fought the land, too, as he would an enemy. He was a man of action rather than contemplation; he was an individualist, and he took great pride in victory—over the land and over other men. His life was made up of elemental facts, and fundamentalist preaching confirmed his conviction that things were either Black or White…The man who acts, who fights, who resists trespass, who takes no orders from groups or from other men and who will not compromise—he is the frontier man, and he is still around in Dallas, and in Texas.62
This is a tremendously important part of the self-image of George Bush, of Dick Cheney (from Wyoming, another tough frontier state), and indeed of their administration as a whole, and it shaped that administration’s aggressive stance in international affairs—though, of course, unlike their ancestors, its leading members showed no desire to fight themselves. A former senior official of the Bush administration from a state of the upper South once declared in my presence that even if it had been possible after 9/11 to use police and intelligence methods to hunt down and kill or capture Osama bin Laden and his chief lieutenants, wars would still have been necessary, because “a handful of deaths would not have been sufficient compensation for our culture for the losses we suffered on 9/11.”
As John Shelton Reed remarked of Appalachian society in the mid-twentieth century: “It has been found impossible to convict men of murder…provided the jury is convinced that the assailant’s honor was aggrieved and that he gave his adversary notice of his intention to assail him.” In other words, the code of the duel: once again, an essentially premodern cultural tradition continues to exist in the standard-bearer nation of world modernity.
Reed has described this as “lawful violence,” in the sense of violence that is socially sanctioned, is a predictable response to certain actions, and observes codes and limits. It is, in other words, another aspect of community or “folk” law, as opposed to that of the state, and closely related to the right of the community as a whole to administer its communal version of “justice” where the state, for whatever reason, is unwilling or unable to follow the popular will. The resulting tradition of lynching has been associated above all with the bestial terrorization of blacks in the South in the century after the Civil War, but the tradition on the frontier was much older, and had usually been deployed against deviant whites (and Indians, of course).63
This culture of violence has declined greatly in the South and West over the past century, but it remains very high compared to the rest of the United States (except for the inner cities, which were largely peopled from the South), let alone the rest of the developed world, and this has carried over to the outside world.
As W. J. Cash wrote in his great study of 1941, The Mind of the South, Southern violence was not only personal:
The Southerner’s fundamental approach carried over into the realm of public offences as well. What the direct willfulness of his individualism demanded, when confronted by a crime that roused his anger, was immediate satisfaction for itself—catharsis for personal passion in the spectacle of a body dancing on the end of a rope or writhing in the fire—now, within the hour—and not some ponderous abstract justice in an abstract tomorrow. And so, in this world of ineffective social control, the tradition of vigilante action, which normally lives and dies with the frontier, not only survived but grew.64
In one respect, the frontier, like the South, embodies a tradition that is quite at variance with the popular image of a triumphant march westward, and which links the roots of American populist nationalism to radical nationalisms elsewhere in the world. This is a tradition of repeated and sometimes shattering defeats, though on the frontier these were at the hands of nature, provoked by human mismanagement and greed: the defeat of whole populations on the agricultural frontier by soil exhaustion, erosion, and drought.
The most internationally famous episode of this was the “dust bowl” on the lower plains in the 1930s, which led to the westward migration of “Okies” and others described by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath; but this was only part of a much wider and longer pattern. Indeed, many of the Okies moved to the plains from the lower South in the first place, not only because they were drawn by the lure of land taken from the Indians, but also because they were driven: driven first from the fertile lands of the South to the thin soils of the hills by the spread of slave-worked commercial plantations, then driven from the hills by the erosion of that soil due to deforestation and overfarming. When they arrived on the plains, the same pattern would repeat itself.
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