Born Fighting

by James Webb

  They have become spoilers because in their view America’s political elites, both Republican and Democrat, have grown together into an almost indiscernible “hybrid royalty” that offers them little to choose from in terms of how the nation is actually being governed. Grand, useless speeches are made on issues such as flag-burning, homosexual marriage, and abortion, but little is said or done about such vital matters as the near-nationwide breakdown of public education, the mind-boggling rate of incarceration in America’s prison systems, or the blatant, government-sponsored reverse discrimination inherent in what are now called diversity programs. And while minor but emotionally charged issues are used to inflame their passions and get their vote, the other wielders of cultural power such as Hollywood, academia, and major media relentlessly chip away at the core principles that have defined the traditions and history of their people. For if the Scots-Irish culture and its Jacksonian derivative have provided the building blocks for America’s working classes, no other group has been so denigrated, attacked, and even feared by America’s ever more interconnected ruling elites.

  For nearly two thousand years, in one form or another, this culture’s unbending individualism—and its ingrained hatred of aristocracy—has been in conflict with a variety of authoritarian power structures, and it remains so in today’s America. The culture in its embryonic form stood fast against the Roman and Norman nation-builders who created a structured and eventually feudal England. The unique emphasis on individual rights and responsibilities that sprang from Calvinism and the Scottish Kirk caused it to resist the throne and finally brought down a king. The fierceness of its refusal to accommodate the Anglican theocrats in Ulster created the radical politics of nonconformism, and this attitude was carried into the Appalachian Mountains. Its people refused to bend a knee to New York and Boston either before, during, or after the Civil War, standing firm against outside forces that would try to tell them how to live and what to believe. And even today, an individual and an issue at a time, it refuses to accept the politics of group privilege that have been foisted on America by its paternalistic, Ivy League–centered, media-connected, politically correct power centers.

  America’s ruling classes have carried a visceral dislike of this culture from the earliest days of the colonial experience, when the first Scots-Irish parcels from Ulster—turned away from the Puritan settlements in Massachusetts—headed for the hills of New Hampshire. Those who plotted their towns so carefully and wished to form a society based on order, reason, and compliance felt little more than disgust for the chaotic, often sensual rebelliousness of a people who refused to be controlled from above. The Quakers who ran early Pennsylvania found them frightening and lawless. The Cavalier aristocrats of Virginia saw them as useful, if only they would remain far away in the mountains and not disrupt the quasi-royal system that had evolved along the coast. The occupiers during Reconstruction found them, frankly, impossible. Modern military commanders, plant foremen, union bosses, and government commissars of political correctness all learn and relearn the same lesson every day—that this is a people who respond to good leadership but will never allow themselves to be dominated or controlled if an edict from above violates their beliefs.

  The ethnic makeup of America’s ruling class has changed over the generations, just as the ethnic composition of what Mead calls the Jacksonians has been leavened by assimilation. The methods of enforcing dominance from above have also undergone many alterations, from sword and spear and royal prerogative to the ability to manipulate power structures through a network of elite academic institutions, media suasion, and judicial activism. But the basic issues that drive the controversy have remained remarkably consistent. On the one hand, there has always been a form of power that believes it holds the answers to society’s problems and wishes to impose those answers from above, its members being the arbiters of what is right and wrong, proper or antisocial. And on the other are the people who are sure of who they are, loyal to strong leaders who affirm their basic beliefs, and who reserve their greatest dislike for those who would abuse governmental systems in order to create special favors for anyone who does not deserve them.

  Andrew Jackson’s admonishment from long ago still rings true to these people. “Equality of talents, of education or of wealth can not be produced by human institutions. . . . Every man is equally entitled to protection by law; but when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of our society—the farmers, mechanics and laborers—who have neither the time nor the means of securing favors to themselves, have the right to complain of the injustice of their Government.”

  The most visible fault line between the people of this culture and those who so adamantly shape modern America’s intellectual and political agenda began during the turmoil of the civil rights movement and continues today in a variety of related issues. Just as slavery needed to end, so did the practice of legal segregation. But as with the aftermath of slavery, the real question became, What should happen after the end of segregation, and who should decide, and on what grounds? Arthur Schlesinger pointed out that during the period before the Civil War, the Yankee industrialists shied away from speaking of issues of class while debating slavery in order to avoid the “explosive possibilities” of class warfare if their arguments were then applied to labor problems in the North.46 For slightly different reasons, so also did the radical activists who were using much of the civil rights movement as a step toward larger political goals.

  First, the class issue was a difficult card to play. The socialists and economic Marxists had failed to excite a following in the United States, or for that matter to find a willing proletariat, even during the darkest days of the Depression. Many activists who had pressed for economic Marxism had then joined what some political commentators call the cultural Marxists, with a large segment of the activist Left now claiming that society was flawed along the lines of ineradicable conditions such as race, sex, and sexual preference rather than lack of opportunity and poverty per se. For them to spotlight the dirt-poor legacy of a substantial percentage of white Southerners would be to deny this faction of the antisegregationist movement its principal rallying point, the very hate-object of their cause. For if the supposedly evil, tobacco-chewing Southern redneck in his pickup truck with the Confederate flag on the bumper represented not a fringe but a plurality that had suffered in economic terms just as deeply as the black, a whole new dynamic would be necessary. And it also would illuminate by implication the frequently well-off circumstances of many liberal activists who were making the case.

  If the legal aspects of segregation were cut and dried, the social and economic elements were anything but. Poverty and hardship have never traveled completely along racial lines, even in the South, and particularly in Southern urban areas, where a black professional class had thrived for decades before the civil rights movement even began. Indeed, when former white segregationists Lester Maddox and Strom Thurmond and Atlanta’s first black mayor, Maynard Jackson, all died within a few days of each other in June 2003, The Economist magazine was careful to point out in an article that, of the three, “Mr. Jackson had the most privileged background. His father, a Baptist minister, came from an influential family in Dallas; his mother from another in Atlanta; both parents had been university educated.” Thurmond, hardly poor, was the son of a judge. But Maddox, the son of a steelworker, had finished high school through a correspondence course.47

  One does not need to defend the conduct of those who opposed racial integration in order to understand it, and one does not need to condemn the actions of those who pushed for integration in order to call into question some of their long-term motives. After a hundred years this issue was balled up in a Gordian knot that was almost impossible to untie. One could never question the motives, or even the tactics, of Martin Luther King, Jr., whose e
quanimity was Lincolnesque in its breadth of vision. But others, white and black alike, were bent on using the issue to foment a larger revolution.

  As one example, the Students for a Democratic Society, better known as the SDS, would become the vanguard of the Vietnam antiwar movement, and its members were the instigators of deliberately provocative violence at many antiwar rallies. But it was originally formed in 1962, before there ever was a Vietnam War, with a goal of bringing revolutionary changes to America principally through the issue of race. Indeed, the first agenda item mentioned in its formative Port Huron Statement was “the permeating and victimizing fact of human degradation, symbolized by the Southern struggle against racial bigotry,” and many of its members first worked on the racial issue in cities such as Newark and in the South. That its key leadership would later gain notoriety as principal antiwar organizers—including Tom Hayden, who with former wife Jane Fonda ran the Indochina Peace Coalition, and several members of the Chicago Seven, who organized the riots that shut down that city during the 1968 Democratic Party Convention—demonstrates the sweep of their intended goals.

  By working so hard to convert an issue of social justice designed to eradicate demeaning laws of exclusion into a full-blown war against the entire value system of a region, these radical activists terribly misread that region’s basic culture and turned many of the very people who might have worked for racial justice into their most virulent enemies. To provoke and blame disadvantaged whites for the plight of disadvantaged blacks was either naive or politically manipulative. And to expect that the disadvantaged whites would happily assist in revamping the entire social and economic order without attention being paid to their own situation was absurd. In the largest terms of solving the problems of the region, the racial issue could have been presented as only a first step—one capable of summoning the deepest of emotions, but a step nonetheless along a road that would bring fairness on a far larger scale.

  Without such reassurance, the fight over ending legal racial segregation ended up demonizing people who had shared the same social and economic dilemma as the blacks themselves. In reality, once the “Whites Only” water fountains and bathrooms and restaurants went away, there was very little left to distinguish the past several generations of history between a substantial percentage of whites and blacks alike. The demagoguery of many of the South’s white political leaders, perhaps borne of the recognition and even fear of that very reality, did not help. But the end result of this approach was more than ironic. For if the scions of the plantation aristocracy had kept poor whites in line for generations by convincing them of their status just above the former slaves, now the liberals and the cultural Marxists were coalescing blacks and unthinking Northerners around the notion that the barriers to black economic advancement had somehow for generations come at the hands of the equally neglected less-advantaged whites.

  Or to put it another way, if these were the people who took something away from black America, where did they hide it—inside their corn-shuck mattresses?

  As the civil rights movement progressed, and even as it was memorialized, the Southern redneck became the enemy, the veritable poster child of liberal hatred and disgust, even today celebrated in film after film, book after book, speech after speech (along with his literary godson, the skinhead), as the emblem of everything that had kept the black man down. No matter that the country club whites had always held the keys to the Big House, or that many of them had done well at the expense of disadvantaged whites and blacks alike. No matter that the biggest race riots took place outside the South, in that Promised Land where blacks were still being held down by policies, many of them unwritten, which precluded them from assimilating into the American mainstream. Harlem and Bedford Stuyvesant erupted in 1964. Malcolm X was killed in New York a year later. The Watts section of Los Angeles blew up in 1965, in large-scale violence that left 34 dead and more than 1,000 injured. Chicago rioted in 1966, as did Cleveland. Newark and Detroit followed in 1967. Many of these same cities as well as others saw renewed rioting in 1968.

  No matter, actually, that except in his fierce resistance, both to forces from the outside and to a misreading of his own history, the redressing of wrongs to African-Americans was not a Southern redneck phenomenon at all. It was an American phenomenon, for which the Southern redneck has been held up as the whipping boy.

  Why was he singled out? Partly because the Southern redneck was such an easy target, with his intrinsic stubbornness, his capacity for violence, and his curious social ways. And partly because something else was going on, something deeper and more fundamental to the social and political makeup of the country: a feeling that the culture so dramatically symbolized by the Southern redneck was the greatest inhibitor of the plans of the activist Left and the cultural Marxists for a new kind of society altogether.

  From the perspective of the activist Left, Jacksonian populists are the greatest obstacles to what might be called the collectivist taming of America, symbolized by the edicts of political correctness. And for the last fifty years the Left has been doing everything in its power to sue them, legislate against their interests, mock them in the media, isolate them as idiosyncratic, and publicly humiliate their traditions in order to make them, at best, irrelevant to America’s future growth.

  In the classic film Cool Hand Luke, the warden of the Arkansas work camp was fond of saying over and over to the irascible, unbreakable title character, “Luke, we got to get your mind right. Is your mind right, Luke?” But the warden never got Luke’s mind right. He put Luke into solitary confinement inside what was called The Box. He made him work all night, digging a hole and filling it up and then digging it again, until Luke was crying for mercy. He put him in chains, and then in double chains, to keep him from running away. But Luke kept running, and kept resisting, because he would rather die than have the warden make his mind right.

  Luke was nothing more than an unpretentious wild man, a good old, unreconstructed, unreeducatable redneck. And whatever these societal manipulators may want to do with their lawsuits and their movies and their constant mockeries, they must understand that they are dealing with a whole lot of Lukes, millions of them, who are only now beginning to comprehend the depth of cynicism and unfairness that has attended so many national policies over the past generation, to their disadvantage.

  Change the fabric of their culture? It hasn’t happened yet, not in two thousand years. And it won’t happen now.

  PART SEVEN

  Reflections:

  The Unbreakable Circle

  Again and again I come across the assertion that a society cannot grow and thrive without a culturally superior stratum which generates the impulse toward excellence and greatness. . . . The happenings in this country refute this assertion. . . . [T]here is evidence on every hand that the vigor and health of a society are determined by the quality of the common people rather than that of the cultural elite.

  —ERIC HOFFER,

  Working and Thinking on the Waterfront (1958)

  1

  Glad Soldiers,

  Accidental Scholars

  WORLD WAR II and its aftermath were heady days for those of Scots-Irish descent, elevating this culture with its unique mix of individualism, self-reliance, kinship, and courage from its regional dominance of the Southern backcountry to a subtle but powerful position of national prominence. In international affairs, every element of the Scots-Irish ethos was vital to the strength of the American military while at the same time its values were naturally opposed to the Soviet Union’s repressive, expansionist form of communism. Domestically, Scots-Irish folkways had become deeply embedded into the nation’s blue-collar communities in every region except the Northeast. And at the individual level, people whose families had for so many generations lived in utter poverty were for the first time reaping the benefits of the American dream on a meaningful scale.

  During this same period, the intense philosophical debates that opposed the values of this cul
ture, and the radical political movement that was part and parcel of those deliberations, were being nurtured in geographic, intellectual, and academic venues where the Scots-Irish themselves seldom ventured. Quite often, the grist of the arguments for revolutionary change was the product of social and political experiences in a Europe that the Scots-Irish had long ago left behind. But the intellectual and social forces that were growing in the universities and cultural enclaves of “progressive” America were little more than distant noise to the Scots-Irish, who were fighting an entirely different political and economic monster. Some of them were climbing out of more than seven decades of poverty and colonialism in the South. Others were packing scant belongings and setting out on their rough journeys north or west.

  When war ultimately came to America in 1941, their cause was simple, and true to their long history: to defeat their country’s enemies on the battlefield. In the war’s aftermath, the occupation and rebuilding of Japan and Germany seemed to them a ratification of their own version of democracy. That the Soviet Union immediately pursued an expansionist agenda once the war was over, even as its ugly repression of its own people continued apace, only convinced them further. And the postwar economic boom in America, which brought many of them jobs and cars and decent houses in suburban neighborhoods, was icing on the cake. America was the land of the free, the hope of the world, and they had helped make it so.