Interesting, I thought. But wait. Wasn't this exactly the setup that led to the sinkhole disaster in the first place? Texas Brine was insured by New York—based Liberty Insurance Company. Liberty was bonded, but it refused to pay and sued Texas Brine. Other companies insuring Texas Brine did the same, and it counter-sued them all. You had the courts, the laws, the jails, and bonding, and you had both an ecological and a legal mess. Besides, didn't rich companies hire many lawyers to come up against victims with one? I asked. "No," Mike countered. "It's rich oil companies up against rich insurance companies." Even so, don't you need another—federal—counterweight?
I thought back to Lee Sherman's life at PPG, to the rubberized horse, to the industrial explosion that made the young Janice Areno think the world was ending, to the Arenos' deceased relatives, dead animals, and missing frogs in Bayou d'Inde, to the events leading up to the seafood advisory. I thought of life before the EPA, and all this in a state that had so much natural magnificence to protect. Donny McCorquodale was right that some accidents were bound to happen, I thought. But without a national vision based on the common good, none of us could leave a natural heritage to our children, or, as the General said, be "free." A free market didn't make us a free people, I thought. But I had slipped way over to my side of the empathy wall again.
Mike agreed with a smidgen of this—a skeleton crew at the EPA, maybe. But the EPA was grabbing authority and tax money to take on a Active mission, he felt—lessening the impact of global warming. This was just another excuse to expand, like governments do. As a whole, the federal government was eroding beloved communities such as those he loved. And if the federal government was anything like the Louisiana state government—which he thought it was—it wasn't worth believing in or paying taxes to. The "federal government" filled a mental space in Mike's mind—and the minds of all those on the right I came to know—associated with a financial sinkhole.
In fact, after the 2009 government bailout of failing banks, companies, and home owners, the federal government seemed to side with yet more line cutters. Now debtors, too, were cutting ahead of people and the federal government was inviting them to do so. This was a strange new expression of social conflict, undeclared, appearing on a new stage, with various groups undefined by class per se—blacks, immigrants, refugees—mixed in. And by proxy, the federal government was the enemy.
And on the personal side there was one more thing—the federal government wasn't on the side of men being manly. Liberals were certainly on the wrong side of that one. It wasn't easy being a man. It was an era of numerous subtle challenges to masculinity, it seemed. These days a woman didn't need a man for financial support, for procreation, even for the status of being married. And now with talk of transgender people, what, really, was a man? It was unsettling, wrong. At the core, to be a man you had to be willing to lose your life in battle, willing to use your strength to protect the weak. Who today was remembering all that? Marriage was truly between a man and a woman, Mike felt. Clarity about one's identity was a good thing, and the military had offered that clarity, he felt, even as it offered gifted men of modest backgrounds a pathway to honor. Meanwhile, the nearly all-male areas of life—the police, the fire department, parts of the U.S. military, and the oil rigs—needed defending against this cultural erosion of manhood. The federal government, the EPA, stood up for the biological environment, but it was allowing—and it seemed at times it was causing—a cultural erosion. What seemed to my Tea Party friends to be dangerously polluted, unclean, and harmful was American culture. And against that pollution, the Tea Party stood firm.
Mike was a fighter but not a Cowboy, a man of religion but not a Worshipper, and a Team Loyalist but critical, in one big way, of his team. The team he wanted would dismantle much of the federal government that he blamed for many wrongs in America. He still saw the solution to many problems as non-governmental. But in his hour of need, faced with the Bayou Corne Sinkhole, he had called on the EPA to check the level of methane gas in his neighborhood. While Mike thought we needed policemen to protect the streets, he wasn't so sure about the EPA protecting the waterways. It could get too bossy. It could get too big.
At night after the evacuation of most of the Bayou Corne Sinkhole victims, he said, "I go out to look at the stars, and all the houses are dark." In the year before Mike moved, a scattering of other residents had also stayed on in their destroyed homes. One was a neighbor and dear friend, Bandy, whose wife was facing her third bout with breast cancer. She was suffering from radiation treatments, and Randy felt it unwise to move her.
One evening Mike looked across Crawfish Stew Street and saw Randy standing on his lawn alone. He was smoking a cigarette, spirals of smoke drifting upward into the empty night. "He'd lost his house to the sinkhole. His wife was ill. Their dog was dying. But I sensed he was feeling bad about something new," Mike said. "So I walked across the street over to him. He's just gotten word that his son had pancreatic cancer."
Mike put his hand on Randy's shoulder, and the two men wept together for a long time.
PART FOUR
Going National
14
The Fires of History:
The 1860s and the 1960s
Stepping back in time, three streams of influence seemed present in the feelings of my Tea Party friends in Louisiana, one often spoken of and two, rarely. For one thing, the Tea Party movement is one in a long line of periodic heightened expressions "of a popular impulse endemic in American political culture," as the historian Richard Hofstadter has noted. Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, movements rose up against secularism, modernity, racial integration, and a culture of experts. But none before the Tea Party have so forcefully taken up the twin causes of reversing progressive reform and dismantling the federal government—a movement in response to the deep story. So within the long line of such movements, why this one? To answer that, we must look to two pivotal moments in history, I believe. One is the era of the 1860s, which has special meaning for the South. The second is the era of the 1960s, which resonates for the right wing across the nation.
The contemporary turn to the right in America has occurred mainly in the South, which is what drew me there. You don't have to be Southern to be Tea Party, of course, but the white South has been a center of it. What interests me about Southern history is the series of emotional grooves, as we might call them, carved into the minds and hearts of the people I came to know through the lives of their ancestors—many of whom were white farmers of small farms. It isn't the origin of certain ideas in history that I am curious about, as much as the way the past fixes patterns of class identification in our minds that we impose on the present. What might people be asked to want to feel? To believe they should feel? To actually feel? In broad, sketching strokes, what might be the impact of stories from grandparents, teachers, and history books on the ideas of those I've come to know?
The 1860s
The South had become "a section apart," in C. Vann Woodward's words, because of the plantation system. This system deeply affected well-to-do white planters and black slaves, of course. But it also left a deep imprint on another large group we often forget—poor white sharecroppers, small farmers, and tenant farmers, some of whom were the ancestors of those I came to know in Louisiana. In his classic The Mind of the South, W.J. Cash says that the plantation system "threw up walls [which]... enclosed the white man, walls he did not see.' The poor white did not see himself "locked into a marginal life" but as "a potential planter or mill baron himself."
Within those walls, the cultural imagination focused intently on two groups—the dominant and dominated, very rich and very poor, free and bound, envied and pitied, with very little in between. Rich planters sipped foreign wine under crystal chandeliers, seated on European chairs, in white-pillared mansions. They saw themselves not as wicked oppressors but as generous benefactors, and poor whites took them as such. At the other extreme, poor whites saw the terrifying misery of the traumatized
, short-lived slave. This set in their minds a picture of the best and worst fates in life. Compared to life in New England farming villages, there was much more wealth to envy above, and far more misery to gasp at below. Such a system suggested its own metaphoric line waiting for the American Dream—one with little room for the lucky ahead, and much room for the forgotten behind.
Between this top and bottom, Cash describes poor whites as living in unpainted houses with "sagging rail fences... and crazy barns which yet bulged with corn." However, as the plantation system grew, it became harder and harder to cope. Planters bought up the most desirable fertile plains, pressing poorer farmers onto the barren uplands. If poor white farmers tried to move to better land, they found that the planters had "seized the best lands there" even "beyond the Mississippi" in "Arkansas and Texas armed with plentiful capital and solid battalions of slaves." Poor whites were driven back "to the red hills and the sand lands and the pine barrens and the swamps—to all the marginal lands of the South." To plant cotton and sugarcane, plantation owners destroyed forests, which deprived "the farmer's table of the old abundant variety," reducing his diet to "cornpone and the flesh of razorback hogs." Since the planters relied on slave labor, and since they bought most of their hay, corn, beef, and wood from the North or Midwest, poor whites became surplus labor, left to live on what they themselves could produce. Marginalized and without demand for their labor, poor whites bore up under rude epithets—crackers, white trash, po buckra.
Transposing ancestral history onto our modern-day deep story, nineteenth-century poor whites stood very far back in line for the American Dream. There was no ethnic or gender parade of people "cutting in." The very idea of redistribution was anathema to the plantation system. And there was little by way of a government-supported public commons, the South being far poorer than the North in public libraries, parks, schools, universities.
Then came the Civil War, and the North devastated the South. Cities were burned, fields laid waste—some by the Confederate troops as they retreated. After the Civil War, the North replaced Southern state governments with its own hand-picked governors. The profit-seeking carpetbaggers came, it seemed to those I interviewed, as agents of the dominating North. Exploiters from the North, an angry, traumatized black population at home, and moral condemnation from all—this was the scene some described to me. When the 1960s began sending Freedom Riders and civil rights activists, pressing for new federal laws to dismantle Jim Crow, there they came again, it seemed, the moralizing North.
And again, Obamacare, global warming, gun control, abortion rights—did these issues, too, fall into the emotional grooves of history? Does it feel like another strike from the North, from Washington, that has put the brown pelican ahead of the Tea Partier waiting in line? I wondered. When I talked to Cappy Brantley in Longville about the 2016 presidential election, he commented with a gentle smile, "Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders—they're from the North."
A Different Costume
"From Baton Rouge to New Orleans, the great sugarcane plantations border both sides of the river all the way... standing so close together, for long distances," Mark Twain wrote in Life on the Mississippi, "that the broad river lying between the two rows, becomes a sort of spacious street." Along the seventy-mile strip, some four hundred graceful mansions, with two- or three-story white Grecian pillars, oak-canopied walkways, manicured gardens and ponds, are the ancient castles of America. They were built with profits from cotton.
The new cotton is oil, but the plantation culture continues. Indeed, a number of the white-pillared mansions of the great plantations have now been bought by oil and petrochemical companies. Dow Chemical bought four plantations—including the Australia Plantation and the Abner Jackson Plantation, and on the latter the company hosts conferences in its Big House. "We've always been a plantation state," Oliver Houck, a Tulane University law professor, observes. "What oil and gas did is replace the agricultural with an oil 'plantation culture.'" Like cotton, oil is a single commodity requiring huge investment and has, like cotton and sugar, come to dominate the economy.
The parallel between cotton and oil has its limits, of course. Cotton barons did not promise prosperity to poor farmers or slaves, as the oil industry has done to modern-day Louisianans. On the positive side, oil offers to restore lost honor. For if the plantation system brought shame to the South in the eyes of the nation, oil has brought pride. The hosannas of the Louisiana Chemical Association are expressed in the language of investment, profit, and jobs. But the new plantation seems to offer more—the Big House without the slave quarters.
Meanwhile, just as yeomen farmers were pressed back to make way for the sugar and cotton plantations, so too has oil partly crowded out the seafood industry and tourism, as Paul Templet noted. That also happened to a talkative man whom I discovered on one summer visit, a man sweating in his woolen Confederate cap and uniform as he worked as a period actor at the restored Oak Alley Plantation. This was the grandest of the majestic mansions along River Road, now a popular tourist attraction. He was stationed in a small tent behind the Big House. Displayed was a Civil War-era rifle, and on a hanger a Confederate uniform, cap, and knapsack. A friendly, blond man in his forties, he was paid to talk about the details of his make-believe life as a Confederate soldier of the 1860s, and he was doing a convincing job.
At the moment, there were no others in his tent. He invited me to sit down with him at a small table and talk. He set aside his prepared script to tell me, "Oil is the new cotton. I was born eight miles from here. My wife and I raise racehorses on an eight-acre farm. An oil company applied for permission to set up a tank farm half a football field away from our house" (an enormous storage facility that holds up to forty-six million barrels of crude oil). "And we couldn't stop it. No one could. We can't sell our house, either, because the value of it sank because now we're next to a tank farm."
Then the man looked around casually, as if to check if he could be overheard. "I'm here in my costume to represent a Confederate trooper. Confederates tried to get out from under the control of the federal government—to secede. But you can't secede from oil. And you can't secede from a mentality. You have to think your way into and out of that mentality. But they should get me in a different costume to talk about that."
Echoes from the 1960s and 1970s
A century later, another legacy was to fuel the right, not just in the South but across the nation. The 1960s and 1970s set off a series of social movements, which, to some degree, shuffled the order of those "waiting in line" and laid down a simmering fire of resentment which was to flame up years later as the Tea Party. During this era a long parade of the underprivileged came forward to talk of their mistreatment—blacks who had fled a Jim Crow South, underpaid Latino field workers, Japanese internment camp victims, ill-treated Native Americans, immigrants from all over. Then came the women's movement. Overburdened at home, restricted to clerical or teaching jobs in the workplace, unsafe from harassment, women renewed their claim to a place in line for the American Dream. Then gays and lesbians spoke out against their oppression. Environmentalists argued the cause of forest animals without forests. The endangered brown pelican, flapping its long, oily wings, had now taken its place in line.
As the 1960s transitioned to the 1970s, a movement focused on the social and legal system shifted into a movement focused on personal identity. Now to gain public sympathy it was enough to be Native American, or a woman, or gay. The patience, of many on both left and right was tried. All these social movements left one group standing in line: the older, white male, especially if such a man worked in a field that didn't particularly help the planet. He was—or was soon becoming—a minority too.
If the civil rights movement and the women's movement had pointed the finger of blame at the entitled white male, maybe it was time for people to see white men as victims too, to be heard, honored, and put—or left— ahead in line. But this provided its members with a troubling contradiction: how do yo
u join the identity politics parade and also bring it to a halt?
Perhaps the defining moment of the 1960s occurred in the South, which had remained the most conservative area of the country and the least prepared for the enormous changes that began in June of 1964: Freedom Summer. A thousand students, many from elite universities, traveled to Mississippi to register voters, teach black history, and help in what ways they could. (My husband, Adam, and I were among them.) Sixty civil rights workers were trained in voter registration in Plaquemine, Louisiana. Even though most black voter applicants were turned away, over a thousand got registered for the first time in their lives. Black students famously tried to integrate lunch counters, restaurants, hotels, housing, schools, and universities.
Especially for blacks, this was dangerous work. In the summer of 1964, three voter registration drive workers, one black and two white—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in Philadelphia, Mississippi. This led to a national outcry and to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. There were 1,062 arrests; 37 churches were burned or bombed, and the homes or businesses of 30 blacks were also bombed or burned. This was also the year the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation to the Democratic National Convention challenged the all-white regular delegation.
Where did this leave white, blue-collar Southern men, the most visible resisters to civil rights? In the shocked eyes of the nation, they lost moral standing. Many older males I spoke with were children or teenagers in the 1960s. Whatever their family's view or their own, however much sympathy they may have personally felt for blacks at the time, the public narrative was that the North had to come to the South, as it had with soldiers in the 1860s and during Reconstruction in the 1870s, to tell Southern whites to change their way of life. History was on the side of the civil rights movement. The nation honored its leaders. Southern whites bore the mark of shame, again, even though, as one man told me, "We didn't do those bad things."
Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right Page 22