America Right or Wrong

by Lieven, Anatol;

  When the Okies arrived in California, they found themselves treated by the existing white Californian population (itself originally very largely from the Midwest) as an inferior and despised underclass, almost like the Mexicans, and this treatment lasted into the 1960s—with inevitable results for Okie alienation, antielitism, and of course racial hatred of the Mexicans. This Southern and Midwestern background of “Anglo” Southern California explains in part the flavor of religious and political conservatism in that region, and its differences from Northern California, with its far more mixed white population.65

  A brilliantly evocative picture of this process of defeat in one section of the agricultural frontier, the Texas Hill Country (Edwards Plateau), is to be found in Robert Caro’s monumental biography of Lyndon B. Johnson, who came from that country. Caro describes the deceptively fertile soil of the Hill Country as “a trap baited with grass and water,” which, having attracted the settlers, doomed their descendants to generations of poverty and a continual, grinding struggle against drought and erosion.66

  In the late 1880s, a decade or so after the trap began to close on the inhabitants of the Hill Country, a defeat by drought more sudden and on a much larger scale struck the new settlers of the high plains of the Dakotas, Nebraska, Colorado, and western Kansas. Hundreds of thousands of people had to abandon their dream of an honorable life of farming for wage slavery in the factories of the cities. Those who remained fell deeper and deeper into debt to the hated banks.67 This pattern was repeated in a less dramatic way across large parts of the rural Midwest in the last decades of the twentieth century.68

  This defeat (repeated in a fresh drought after 1910) produced one of the great heartland revolts against the East Coast elites in American history, the Populist movement led by William Jennings Bryan. His defeat as the Democratic candidate by the Republicans (backed by a combination of East Coast financial–industrial interests and the big city populations) in the presidential elections of 1896 was mourned by Vachel Lindsay in the poem quoted at the head of this chapter.69 Just as the Democrat Al Smith was defeated in 1828 in large part because of his Catholicism, which led to the defection of many Protestant heartland and southern supporters, so Bryan lost in part because his intense evangelical Protestant culture, and barely veiled dislike of the cities and the Catholic immigrants, alienated the Democrats’ big city voters, especially the Irish.

  In fact, Bryan picked up and reunited a good deal of the Protestant nativist tradition of the “American Party” or Know-Nothings, which had collapsed when their northern and southern wings split in the run-up to the Civil War. In the interval, however, the number of immigrants—and especially Catholic immigrants—in America had increased greatly, increasing the difficulties of this approach.

  The 1880s and 1890s were years in which while farmers in the Midwest suffered badly, overall, not just the American economy, but American agricultural production grew enormously. In the same way, the incomes of many ordinary Americans from the 1970s to 2008 stagnated and fell, even while the overall American economy grew greatly. My point is therefore not to suggest that the American tradition of national and individual success is somehow imaginary. It is only to point out that this tradition also contains within it innumerable personal and collective defeats, and that these too have had their place in shaping the American national psyche.

  For every family that moved West and made good, there was another “decent, feckless family that had left a century of failed farms, male suicides, and infant graves across the land from Ohio to the Coast, pushing always unprofitably westward.”70 Furthermore—though this is something that cannot be established statistically—the sting of defeat has probably been more bitter in a country where success really did depend to a much greater extent than elsewhere on character and determination, not just on the frontier, but in the cities as well. Failure in America has thus been attended by both shame and Protestant-flavored guilt, for “to fail is to acknowledge some deep flaw in the self, for responsibility cannot lie with a society whose promise of happiness and possibility is its reason for being.”71

  In the still hierarchically influenced societies of Europe, no small German farmer needed to feel bad about not being a Prince von Hohenlohe or a Count Preysing. A new Texan settler who remained a small farmer—or was forced off the land altogether to become an urban proletarian—while Charlie Goodnight created in less than a generation a ranch larger than some European countries would naturally have a different feeling about himself, and seek all the harder, perhaps, to soothe this feeling by a conviction that, all the same, he was part of God’s chosen elite—culturally, religiously, and nationally.

  The White South

  The South has often been treated both by foreign analysts and by Americans themselves as if it were a culturally quite separate part of the United States, without influence on that country’s wider national identity. And the South does indeed have a very special historical and cultural character—but one that cannot be somehow cut out from America’s wider political culture and American nationalism: “No small part of the reactionary nationalism of the twentieth century United States can be directly attributed to the South’s pronounced conservatism and its comparative isolation from contact with foreigners and foreign ideas.”72

  The white South occupies a very considerable portion of the United States, and a very much bigger portion of what I have called the “American Nationalist Party,” or Republicans.73 According to the 2010 census, the 11 former Confederate states made up 31.53 percent of the U.S. population, with the Greater South (including Oklahoma, Missouri, Kentucky, and West Virginia) making up 36.69 percent. Only 19.79 percent of the Old South and 18.13 percent of the Greater South was black, and 17.6 percent and 15.75 percent, respectively, was Latino.

  This means that white Southerners make up more than one-fifth of the total U.S. population; not a dominant portion, but certainly a potentially very powerful one. In terms of political power, the position of the South (and the often allied West) is strengthened by the American federal system, which gives disproportionate weight to states with small, mainly traditional white populations.74 Since the 1970s, only a handful of Southern states have ever voted Democrat in presidential elections.

  As Michael Lind, Kevin Phillips, Peter Applebome, and others have pointed out, over the past two decades the “southernization” of the Republican Party has given these traditions a very considerable new importance in the politics of America as a whole, and consequently in U.S. international behavior.75 The Tea Parties draw support from all over the United States, but their attitudes display strongly marked Southern trends—in particular, their belief in the power of the states over that of the federal government. And, of course, Barack Obama’s identity—a black Yankee intellectual from Abraham Lincoln’s state of Illinois—makes him almost a composite hate figure for many white Southerners.

  Among the effects of this “southernization” has been a harsher form of nationalism. The growing Southern-style religiosity of the Republicans has also had its effect, both in alienating the United States from “atheist” Europe and in increasing commitment to Israel. This transformation of the Republicans has contributed greatly to the increasing polarization of Americans along party lines. As indicated in the Introduction, it also reflects strongly contrasting attitudes to religion, morality, culture, economics, and nationalism.

  This division was symbolized in 2003 by the public condemnation of the Democrats for moral decadence and lack of patriotism by their last senior conservative Southern representative, Senator Zell Miller of Georgia. Or as Thomas Schaller put it in 2003, “trying to recapture the South is a futile, counterproductive exercise because the South is no longer the swing region. It has swung: Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy” of 1968 has reached full fruition.”76 This picture may change, however, as an influx not only of Latinos, but of blacks from northern cities reduces white dominance. Thus in 2008 Obama carried North Carolina thanks in part to a much h
igher than usual black turnout.

  The white South has not, of course, regained the political dominance enjoyed by Virginia’s aristocracy from the 1780s to the 1820s, but it has recovered and indeed exceeded the power exercised by the white South’s representatives from the end of post–Civil War Reconstruction in the late 1870s to civil rights and the collapse of the South’s allegiance to the Democratic Party in the mid-1960s.

  A key reason for Southern power is the way in which the South has been able to exercise disproportionate political influence through its grip on one of the two major parties. From 1877 to the 1960s (albeit with diminishing strength from the 1940s), the white South was solidly Democratic, thanks to bitter hostility toward the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln. However, during all that period, lingering prejudices related to the Civil War, and unease about the South’s racial record, meant that no Southerner from the 11 Confederate states could aspire to the presidency (unless, like Woodrow Wilson, he had moved north in his youth).77

  Because a majority of the white South switched its allegiance to the Republicans in the 1960s and 1970s in reaction against Democratic advancement of civil rights and multiculturalism, its role has become a good deal more activist. The critical importance of this section to Republican hopes has been demonstrated in a series of presidential elections—most notably in 2000, when Al Gore’s failure to win a single southern state (despite coming from Tennessee himself) helped doom his presidential hopes.78

  The region’s importance to hard-line conservative influence in the Republican Party is indicated by the fact that in a survey of senators and congressmen compiled by the National Journal in 2004, of the 16 senators dubbed “most conservative” by that journal (one-third of the Republican total), 10 came from the Greater South; of 21 senators dubbed “centrist,” only 5 were from the South.79

  If only because southern blacks now have the vote and use it to vote solidly Democrat, the South today is not as overwhelmingly Republican as it was once Democrat. In recent years, the end of discrimination and the economic rise of the South (compared to the “Rust Belt” cities of the Midwest and Northeast) has led to blacks returning to the South. If this process continues, then it will seriously undermine the white conservative political grip on the South.

  As of 2012, however, Southern whites form the most solidly and reliably major Republican voting bloc in the country, which naturally gives them immense influence over that party. The political power and longevity of the Southern conservatives in Congress has been unintentionally increased by the redrawing of congressional districts intended to create solidly black areas and therefore strengthen black representation, the result of which has also created more solidly white districts. From the late 1970s, and more importantly since the “Republican Revolution” led by the Georgian Newt Gingrich in 1994, and the formation of the Texan-led Bush administration in 2001, this influence has been used to advance programs with their roots in white southern culture.

  As noted by Applebome, Mead, and others, this process has been greatly facilitated by the fact that important parts of that culture have, in recent decades, spread far beyond their original homelands: this is true, for example, of southern evangelical Protestant religion, the cult of personal weaponry, country and western music, and stock car racing (which apparently originated among Appalachian mountain bootleggers of moonshine whisky). The South has also long been the home of a particularly intense form of American nationalism, strongly flavored by respect for the military and military values, and part of a wider culture that believes in traditional values of religion, family, manhood, and honor.80

  The South in this sense was never coterminous with the 11 states that in 1861 seceded from the Union and for four years formed the Confederate States of America. The Greater South extends beyond the borders of the former Confederacy and even the Mason-Dixon Line (dividing slave from free states before 1861) to cover large parts of the Midwest and the West. According to some cultural geographers, the northern cultural border of the Greater South lies roughly along Route 40, which runs from east to west across the middle of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. In the West, the Greater South includes Oklahoma and other states largely settled from the Old South.81 George C. Wallace appealed to Southerners “from Baltimore to Oklahoma City to St. Louis.”

  This region forms the heartland of evangelical Protestant religious belief, or the so-called Bible Belt, and the picture of America as a deeply religious country is to a considerable extent derived from the Greater South.82 This was a region that until fairly recently lacked many large cities, and in consequence did not undergo the massive immigration that poured into the cities of the North and East from the mid-nineteenth century on. In many areas, and especially of course in the countryside and small towns, its white population therefore remained homogeneous.

  W. J. Cash declared that the white South “is not quite a nation within a nation, but it is the next thing to it.”83 That was in 1941, but decades later John Shelton Reed could still speak of Southern whites constituting a form of ethnicity and possessing a form of ethnic consciousness.84 And it is worth remembering in this context that if a couple of battles in the Civil War had gone the other way—by no means a historical impossibility—the South would in fact have become an independent nation, with its own (white) national consciousness.

  Because the white South’s bid for nationhood was crushed in war, and the region’s particular nationalism was later reincorporated into that of the United States as a whole, the development of Southern identity before 1865 has never been properly addressed by students of nationalism. This is a pity, for in many ways it provides a fascinating case study and adds interesting nuances to the debate between the “primordial” and “constructivist” approaches to the explanation of nationalism’s origins.

  On the one hand, the Southern “national identity” was clearly a “constructed” one. It was constructed moreover in response to a particular threat, that to the South’s “peculiar institution,” slavery. Moreover, though Southern whites genuinely hated and feared the blacks, slavery was an issue that affected above all the Southern slave-owning elites. The Antebellum South can well be seen therefore as a good example of the model of elitist construction of modern nationalism argued for by Eric Hobsbawm and other left-wing scholars of the “constructivist” tradition in nationalism.

  Of course, issues other than slavery were also involved in the North–South split before 1861. Nonetheless, take slavery, and Northern antislavery, out of the equation, and there is no real reason to think that the Southern elites would have devoted such intense effort to the construction of a separate identity, nor that the Southern states would have gone so far as to fight for independence through four years of catastrophic warfare.

  But the South is also an example of the fact that while national identities can be “constructed,” they cannot—pace Hobsbawm—be “invented.” They have to be put together, or “imagined” out certain previously existing elements, and if these elements are not old and strong, then the resulting nationalism will be a weak one for which few are willing to sacrifice and die. This is one key reason why the invented nationalisms of postcolonial Africa, based on completely artificial colonial territories, have usually proved so weak, while many old tribal and religious loyalties have proved so strong.85

  The antebellum white Southern “protonational” identity was based on three main foundations. The first, obviously, was a herrenvolk determination to keep the blacks in a subordinate and helpless position—what Cash called the “Doric” tradition of the South, after ancient Sparta and its ferocious suppression of the Helot population. The second, closely linked to the first, was a desire to preserve the South’s agrarian economy, and with it the domination of the plantation-owning class. This in turn generated intellectual and cultural defenders who self-consciously looked to European traditions of aristocratic conservatism, very different indeed from the kind of liberal pseudoconservatism prevalent elsewhere in the United
States.

  As in Europe, rather than explicitly defending aristocratic rule, this tradition instead attacked the soullessness, atomization, and exploitation of Northern capitalism, and contrasted this with real or invented Southern values of continuity of tradition and rootedness in the soil.86 (Or in the words of T. R. Fehrenbach about twentieth-century Texans, “the great majority knew where their grandparents lay buried.”87) This kind of critique of Western capitalism has of course been very characteristic not only of declining agrarian and aristocratic social orders, but of nationalist movements from wholly or partially “defeated” societies throughout modern history, from German ideas of Teutonic community (gemeinschaft) against the soulless, exploitative French and British “society” (gesellschaft) to the nineteenth-century Slavophils in Russia and a host of “third world” writers in our own time.88 Thus, already by 1825 there had been created among the South Carolinian gentry “just that atmosphere of pride, poverty and resentment which in the 20th century has favored the growth of Arab and African nationalism.”89

  This tendency in the Southern identity overlapped with one that has been obscured both by defeat in 1865 and by the fact that in the Civil War Americans of Anglo-Saxon and Scots-Irish descent fought on both sides, as did evangelical Protestants. This is the specifically ethnic element in the white Southern tradition. In my view, if the white South had prevailed in the Civil War and established itself as an independent nation, the assertion of an ethnic identity based on a composite of the Anglo-Saxon and Scots-Irish strains and fundamentalist Protestantism would have emerged as the central public face of white Southern nationalism.