Born Fighting

by James Webb

  And that was just the army. The Marine Corps opened up its huge base at Camp Lejeune in 1941 originally as the training ground for the 1st Marine Division, which soon thereafter deployed to Guadalcanal. It also vastly expanded its recruit training facilities in Parris Island, South Carolina, where more than 200,000 recruits were trained during World War II. Naval bases dotted the Southern coastline from Norfolk, Virginia, to New Orleans, with Charleston, South Carolina, one of its main hubs. Naval aviation expanded from a small school at Pensacola, Florida, to additional training facilities in the vicinity of Jacksonville, Florida, and Corpus Christi, Texas. Army Air Corps bases—the precursors to today’s air force bases—seemed ubiquitous, as pilot training tried to catch up with wartime needs as well as an industrial production rate that eventually reached 8,000 to 10,000 planes a month.

  The impact of this phenomenon was cultural as well as economic and had extensive long-term implications. During World War II, millions of non-Southerners of all ethnic backgrounds, most of them citizen-soldiers who had been conscripted (two-thirds of those who served in that war were drafted), were personally exposed to the twin realities of the South. On the one hand, they were often confronted by an honor-bound but frequently backward white culture that was willing to defend its way of life against all outsiders. On the other, the glaring racial humiliations of segregation were visible for all to see. In many eyes, white poverty was attributed to cultural inferiority rather than the generations of Yankee colonialism that had produced it, while the racial inequities they observed would leave a lasting impression, fueling nationwide support for the desegregation and civil rights efforts that began shortly after the end of World War II. And although President Harry Truman may not have had such karma in mind when he announced the policy in 1948, it is interesting to note that the military was the first institution in the country to formally renounce all policies of segregation.

  But that would come later.

  For those inside the region, mobilization for World War II meant, first and foremost, real cash-paying jobs. My grandmother thought God himself was shining down on her when she found work in an ammunition factory in North Little Rock, making artillery rounds. She and the other backcountry laborers would board a bus at two-thirty in the morning so they could travel the forty miles along narrow roads to the factory in time to begin work, and then the bus would drop them off back in Kensett after dark. My Aunt Ima Jean’s husband, Paul, had once left a small family farm to make cars in Detroit, but he got homesick and returned. Then he found work in a sawmill where the principal contracts for decades to come went to making such military items as army cots. In the 1950s, Uncle Paul would lose half of one hand in a sawmill accident, causing him to remain at home for nearly a year as he regrew the muscles of what remained so that he could again report for work at the mill. My Aunt Zara left the cotton fields, and Arkansas, with a boyfriend who had found work as a fireman in Monahans, Texas, just outside the newly opened Pyote Air Base, where Army Air Corps bomber pilots—including, eventually, my father—were being trained. And my Uncle Ercil left a hog farm in Kentucky to enter the wartime army.

  But my grandmother, like so many others, had heard that there was better work in California. Finally she saved enough money for two one-way bus tickets to Los Angeles, taking her youngest daughter, then nine, while sending my mother, then sixteen, to Texas to live with my aunt. One can only imagine the determination that propelled this nearly two-thousand-mile journey with a small child across Crkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona,Ÿand finally CaliÊornia, to a place where she knew no one and where there wereIonly rumors about q job. She was a five-foou tall, Popeye-muscled, forty-nine-year-old widow with literally no money who had come to Arkansas from Tenúessee as a small child and had ne~er left, other than for a brief sti~t near the coal mines of southern Illinois. In her later years she would still recall vividly her arrival at the Los Angeles bus station in the middle of the night, and the kind man who noted her awestricken confusion and helped her and her daughter find a place to sleep.

  With her physical strength and her size—or more properly, her lack of it—Frankie Doyle Hodges soon found her way to the Douglas Aircraft Company, where they hired her to work as a riveter along the tight crawlspaces inside the noses of bomber aircraft. And so within a few weeks of taking a one-way bus out of Arkansas, Granny Hodges was living in Santa Monica and working as Rosie the Riveter. And I doubt there were very many other women on the assembly line who could match the tiny woman’s cotton-chopping biceps, which were still nearly as large as my own when she was seventy-one and I was a nineteen-year-old athlete who had been fighting “under the lights” as a boxer for five years.

  But as she had in Illinois, Granny got homesick for her extended family in Arkansas. Back in Texas, my Aunt Zara received a letter saying that Granny was again saving her money, this time to go home. Zara, also known as Dot, was the most fiercely ambitious of my mother’s siblings. She had been doing her own California dreaming, and as a woman in her early twenties with two children who was getting ready to strike out on her own, that meant keeping Granny in Santa Monica. Dot was also worried because my mother, who was not yet eighteen, had begun dating my father, a twenty-five-year-old pilot with questionable motivations who like all flyboys would soon depart Pyote Airfield for destinations unknown. So she decided to solve two problems at once. She bought my mother a one-way bus ticket to California, reasoning that my mother would reduce Granny’s homesickness (and increase the collective price of those one-way bus tickets back to Arkansas) while my father would soon be reassigned from Texas and thus be out of my mother’s life.

  Aunt Dot was partially successful. Once my mother arrived in California, Granny calmed down. But after my mother left Texas, my father had heated up. Within a few months Dot had made it to California, although my father had by then sent my mother enough money to return to Texas and marry him. And she did, two months after turning eighteen.

  My father’s family reflected the same fascination with making the jump to the California dreamland, although their starting point was Missouri rather than Arkansas. His two older brothers, Tommy and Charlie, had left school after the eighth grade and were determined that my father and his younger brother, Art, would be the first in the family to finish high school. For the rest of his life he felt an indebtedness to his older brothers that impelled his desire to succeed, remembering their financial help and moral suasion that had kept him in high school. Nor did he stop there. It was one of my life’s greatest inspirations to watch my father as he struggled through twenty-six years of night school, all the while carrying a military career filled with overseas deployments and taking care of a family that included four children, until he received a college degree from the University of Omaha during my own senior year of high school.

  When the war began, my father was working as an electrician in St. Joseph, Missouri’s largest department store, alongside my Uncle Tommy. But the war scattered all of them quickly. My father enlisted the day after Pearl Harbor was attacked and went into the army air corps. His younger brother, Art, went into the army, which after examining his test scores sent him immediately for further schooling, where he became what was then called a “junior engineer.” Tommy and Charlie headed for California, followed soon by my grandmother, with Tommy spending the war at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard. And by the end of the war, all of them were living permanently in California except for my father, who returned briefly to Missouri, then re-upped in the air force and spent the next twenty-three years on the road.

  These sorts of migrations were hardly unusual; in fact, they were emblematic. In this small microcosm, one begins to understand the flavor of a massive population movement of a scale and scope that approaches the more well-remembered influx to the East Coast from Europe in the late 1890s and early 1900s. Because this migration was internal and because the strongly individualistic people involved had tossed away any overt ethnic identification after generations of
assimilation as Americans, historians and political commentators frequently overlook both its scale and its relatively homogeneous nature. And in contrast to the original Scots-Irish migrations into the Appalachian Mountains and beyond, these were not organized family movements, by groups that knew each other, into unpopulated areas in order to begin whole new communities and infuse them with their traditions. These descendants of the original Scots-Irish migrations were now, like most other cultures, immigrants rather than settlers. For most of them, the South or the Border South was their native soil. And even among others who were migrating from the Midwest and Southwest, the Appalachian Mountain communities were the “old sod,” the common cultural starting place that had shaped values and habits brought from their ancestors’ earlier European migration and then coalesced into a truly American persona.

  This emigration played itself out most intensely across the South and Border South as a restless people headed into the industrial areas of the North-Central region and into the distant Mecca of California. The roads into the industrial hubs of Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan from the Carolinas, Kentucky, southwest Virginia, West Virginia, and even Arkansas became known as Hillbilly Highways. A motto among the young in the Appalachian hamlets became “Write and read, and Route 23,” for the newly built federal highway that cut right through the heart of that region, from northern Georgia to eastern Kentucky, and took them directly to Toledo and Detroit. Hundreds of thousands of other migrants from the South and Midwest poured into California along Route 66, John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath highway. Referred to pejoratively by more established Californians as Okies and Arkies, they fueled the military-oriented factories of Southern California and made the farmlands from Barstow to Bakersfield a hillbilly enclave. As one example among many, country singing great Merle Haggard, whose parents had just made the trek from Oklahoma, was born in 1937 while his family was living in an abandoned railroad car in Bakersfield.

  The scale of this massive out-migration caused the population of many of the Southern and Border States to flat-line during periods of the 1930s and 1940s. Indeed, Arkansas and West Virginia actually lost population between 1940 and 1970 at a time when the overall population of the United States increased by 53 percent, from 132 million to 203 million people. Even today West Virginia still remains well below its 1950 level of 2 million residents.42

  Importantly, among those of Scots-Irish descent, this migration was different from those that had occurred earlier, for it was bringing a strong percentage of people who had been burned by generations of ill education and poverty. Famed World War II general George Smith Patton, Jr.’s family journey illustrates the success that many earlier Scots-Irish emigrants from the mountain South found on the West Coast. Patton’s grandfather George had been killed as a Confederate soldier at the Battle of Winchester in May 1862 (where my own ancestor William John Jewell fought as a member of Stonewall Jackson’s brigade) while commanding the 22nd Virginia Regiment in the Shenandoah Valley. His grandfather’s brother Walter had also died in that war while commanding a regiment under Maj. Gen. George E. Pickett at Gettysburg. Shortly after the Civil War, Patton’s family moved to California, where his father, a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute, ran a ranch. His mother, Ruth Wilson Patton, was the daughter of native Tennesseean Benjamin Davis Wilson, a well-known Indian fighter who had settled in California in 1841 and was known for having started the citrus industry there. Wilson was also the first mayor of Los Angeles, served three terms as a California state senator, and made the first trek up Mount Wilson, which was named in his honor after his death.43

  There would be no mountains named after the later Okies and Arkies, but their collective contribution was in other ways far greater. Poor they may have been, and uneducated as well, but this infusion of migrants whose American experience had been shaped by the power of the interlocking Scots-Irish communities west of the Appalachian Mountains brought with it a force that would in many ways shape the attitudes of working-class America. In the factories and steel mills of the industrial heartland, and in the shipyards and defense industries along the West Coast, these migrants quickly infected the children of more recent European immigrations with the attitudes that had been nurtured in the Scottish Kirk and then hardened on the American frontier. In a phrase, that attitude might be called, “Take this job and shove it.”

  Other groups, particularly recently arrived Jewish activists with a long history in legal theory, brought to the American working class the concepts of collective bargaining, unionization, and the use of the strike as a tool to settle worker grievances. Still others, notably the more recent Irish immigrants with their Jesuit-inspired rebelliousness, brought a good measure of fierce resistance. But the Scots-Irish culture—itself so intensely individualistic that few of its members cared for the unionization process or even collective bargaining—brought a simple, sometimes combative directness when dealing with authority, together with an unbending demand for personal respect and a complete lack of fear.

  Many thinking Americans had worried that the wave of European immigration from 1890 to 1910 would change the nation’s basic character. As Walter Russell Mead pointed out in his well-regarded essay on Jacksonian American (after mentioning the Scots-Irish as the originators of what he terms “Jacksonian populism”), “The great cities of the United States were increasingly filled with Catholics, members of the Orthodox churches and Jews—all professing in one way or another communitarian social values very much at odds with the individualism of the traditional Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Celtic culture.” But something different happened, at least among America’s working classes: the stubbornness of bottom-up won out over the intimidation and manipulation of top-down. Those from the South and Border South and states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania that had long Scots-Irish traditions began to mix among the workers in their factories, neighborhoods, and local bars, and even began to intermarry with them. Also, one can never underestimate the impact on those who were exposed to the power of this culture while serving in America’s most quintessentially Scots-Irish institution, the military. By 1975 there were more than 30 million living veterans in the United States, and the overwhelming majority had served in the more recent eras of World War II, Korea, or Vietnam.

  As Mead observes, “In what is still a largely unheralded triumph of the melting pot, Northern immigrants gradually assimilated the values of Jacksonian individualism. Each generation of new Americans was less ‘social’ and more individualistic than the preceding one. . . . The appeal of [the Jacksonian code of honor, self-reliance, equality, individualism, and courage] is one of the reasons that Jacksonian values have spread to so many people outside the original ethnic and social nexus in which Jacksonian America was formed.”44

  Mead goes even further, claiming that Andrew Jackson’s “political movement—or, more accurately, the community of political feeling that he wielded into an instrument of power—remains in many ways the most important in American politics . . . Jacksonian populism today has moved beyond its original ethnic and geographical limits. Like country music, another product of Jacksonian culture, Jacksonian politics and folk feeling has become a basic element in American consciousness that can be found from one end of the country to the other.”45

  This observation is correct, at least as it applies to America’s vast populist base. Just as the Scots-Irish family networks infused much of the South and the Ohio Valley with their cultural traditions, so also has this powerfully individualistic culture embraced large groups of new Americans, particularly among those of the working classes. Andrew Jackson’s core group of “farmers, mechanics and laborers” still thrives in America today and still lives by his code. These are people who measure others not by titles or possessions but by personal honor, dignity, and the willingness to fight for their beliefs. Most are unenvious of wealth, unafraid of the wielders of authority, unconscious of class, and also unwilling to consider themselves ethnically aloof—in most cases, their
own ethnicity is less important than their individuality. And more than any other culture, this is the one that new immigrant groups have traditionally gravitated toward in order to call themselves American.

  But except for the accessibility given them during Ronald Reagan’s presidency—an influence that was often diluted by establishment Republicans—over the past fifty years this movement has rarely seen its issues seriously defended by national leaders. And except for the hard-core Christian Right, which has aligned itself with the Republicans, it represents a large, independent swing vote—whose key concerns are seldom passionately represented by either side in any election—rather than a force that affirmatively shapes the national agenda.

  Other than with their support of Reagan—perhaps the most Jacksonian president since Jackson himself—the power of this group’s voting patterns has been in their role as electoral spoilers. These are the blue-collar workers and Southerners who swung away from the antiwar Democrats and voted for either George Wallace or Richard Nixon in 1968 (Wallace carried five Southern states), and Nixon in 1972. They were the enthusiastic Reagan Democrats who still will argue passionately about the Gipper’s greatness and who in the South finally began supporting Republican candidates. They reluctantly pulled the lever for George Bush in 1988, but many could not do it again for Bush in 1992 or for Bob Dole in 1996, opting instead to sit it out or to vote for Ross Perot. And they are the “red state” individualists who went for George W. Bush in 2000 rather than aligning themselves with the “blue state” voters representing the “new” Democratic Party of political correctness who went for Al Gore. Indeed, the argument can be made that Gore’s position on gun control cost him the election, not in Florida but in the Scots-Irish redoubts of Tennessee and West Virginia, both of which through history and logic should have been slam-dunk electoral votes in his favor.