by James Webb
At Georgetown Law, the overwhelming preponderance of students and faculty came heavily from America’s better universities and were clearly among the dissenters. Years of intellectual conditioning had taught them that the government was corrupt, that the capitalist system was rapacious, that the military was incompetent and even invidious, and that the WASP culture that had largely built America had done so at the expense of other ethnic and racial groups. To many of them the Vietnam War was largely an extension of a racist, colonialist, capitalist system that had its origins in the evils of slavery and the genocide of Native Americans during the nation’s westward expansion. And by implication, in their eyes the ones who had agreed to serve in Vietnam were either criminal or stupid.
By August 1972 one could understand the nation’s war weariness, although a Harris Poll taken that very month indicated strong support for continued bombing of North Vietnam (55 percent to 32 percent) and for mining North Vietnamese harbors (64 percent to 22 percent), and, by a margin of 74 percent to 11 percent, it showed an overwhelming agreement that “it is important that South Vietnam not fall into the control of the communists.”8 What one could not easily comprehend was the unthinking viciousness of so many among those who had not gone when they spoke of the government and of those who had stepped forward to serve. These were not America’s downtrodden sitting in the classrooms of Georgetown Law. Radicalism was an elitist, largely intellectual phenomenon, and America’s best and brightest were at the height of their disaffection with their own society.
The mood at the law center was outrageously out of step with the rest of America and yet filled with an unbending, adamant certainty. In a straw poll just before the 1972 election, Richard Nixon received eight votes out of more than a thousand students who voted and was endorsed by no one on the faculty, yet despite the turmoil of Watergate he would receive two-thirds of the votes in the actual election. Nixon was routinely compared to Hitler. Words like “fascist” and “pig” echoed through debates about the war. A few students wore the Viet Cong flag on their jackets in the same manner that others wore college or pro team logos. Professors began discussions with little jokes about “contradictions in terms, such as military intelligence,” or humorous analogies such as “military justice is to justice as military music is to music.” In criminal law class, the concept of consent in rape was introduced with an example of an American soldier in Vietnam walking into a village, carrying his weapon, and choosing a random female victim who acquiesced in sexual intercourse. “You know how our guys are in Vietnam,” the professor winked. “She sees the gun. Did she consent?”
Sometimes it became more personal. Our final exam in criminal law, worth 100 percent of one’s grade, began with a supposedly humorous fact pattern about a platoon sergeant named “Jack Webb” who lost two of his fellow soldiers dead while leading a combat patrol in Vietnam. “Sergeant Webb” then decided to smuggle jade that he had bought on the black market in Bangkok by stuffing the gems inside his soldiers’ wounds before escorting their remains home for their funerals. And the question: To what extent did the Fourth Amendment allow customs officials to search inside the holes of the dead bodies in order to find the jade? To state the obvious, after all the broken bodies and the nights spent in the rain and the blood-filled operations and the dead friends whose lives to me were sacrosanct, this personalized approach to the constitutional issue of search and seizure did not exactly strike me as funny. I could not bring myself to reread the question, and it was a difficult challenge to finish the rest of the exam.
Nor was this simply an insensitive, unthinking act. I had recently won the law school’s first-year legal writing competition with an article about a young black Marine who had been wrongly convicted of a war crime in Vietnam. Six years later I would clear Sam Green’s name, although by then I was doing it for his mother, as Green had taken his own life halfway through the process. My professor, only three years older than I and clearly on the other side of the cultural divide, knew of my Marine Corps background and how strongly I felt about those who had fought in Vietnam. The same professor who had defined consent in rape with a wink toward “how our guys are in Vietnam” was now dropping a big one on my lap.
Not wishing to cheapen the memory of the friends and fellow Marines I had lost in combat by protesting my grade, I instead wrote a letter to the dean of the law school pointing out that the professor knew of my background, used not only an odious Vietnam analogy but also my name, and thus at a minimum lacked the judgment to teach at such a prestigious school. If such a fact pattern had been written after World War II, the professor would have been drawn and quartered, probably by the students themselves. At Georgetown Law he was given tenure.
Debates about the shape and direction of American society were similarly skewed. The very legitimacy of so-called WASP America was under relentless attack, both for the supposedly authoritarian society that the WASPs had created and for the unfair advantages that its members allegedly held. Affirmative action programs were in their infancy, and ethnocentric retreat was replacing old notions of America’s melting pot, defining the very nature of government benefits to an age group. In this convenient, pseudo-Marxist scenario, anyone who was not a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant had grounds for complaint about his or her people’s collective “struggle.” And anyone who was a WASP was by default a privileged, less-than-deserving whipping post. As one Ivy League graduate said in my presence, “You don’t need the W because they’re all white, and you don’t need the P because they’re all Protestant. That leaves you with nothing but an ASS.”
Over time it became clear that, at bottom, this vitriol was not really about the war or even about simple political disagreement. It was instead a larger battle between the cultural forces that were supposedly behind the creation of a mercantile, racist American society and thus had brought us into war, and a collective group of opposing forces that wished to diminish their power while a new America was being created from the ashes of their past glories. History, as the poet T. S. Eliot once wrote, has many cunning passages, and certainly is not as clear-cut as the activists were trying to make it. But the WASPs, forever on the defensive, were losing big-time. And in this academic stratosphere where the attitudes of future policy-makers were being formed, the Scots-Irish culture, like the Vietnam veteran, was largely invisible.
To be of Scots-Irish heritage as this debate raged on was to lose twice, for in these arguments the culture’s historical journey was both unknown and irrelevant. First, since the dominant forces in American society were by assumption the WASP hierarchy, to be white, Protestant, and of British heritage immediately lumped one in with the New England Brahmin elites. In this perverted logic, those who had been the clearest victims of Yankee colonialism were now grouped together with the beneficiaries. All WASPs were considered to be the same in this environment, as if they had landed together on the same ship at Plymouth Rock and the smart ones had gone to Boston while the dumbest had somehow made their way to West Virginia.
And second, it was impossible to argue the distinctions among the cultures that had originally settled the South and Border South. To be of Southern descent brought with it an immediate presumption of invidious discrimination and cruelty dating back to the slave system and the unequal, segregated society that followed it. Through a false reading of history that focused only on the disadvantages that had accrued to blacks, the white cultures whose ancestors had gained the least benefit from the elitist social structure of the Old South were being grouped together with the veneer that had formed the aristocracy. The occasional Southerners who had studied alongside these students and professors at the better universities typically reinforced this premise, either through their own privileged origins, or by ducking the debate, or by becoming self-hating stereotypes who deflected criticism by denouncing the culture that had spawned them.
These debates and the presumptions that fed them were based on an enormous, palpable falsity fed by the reality that few w
ho were advancing such ideas had ever experienced the intricacies of the cultures in America’s heartland with any degree of intimacy. These bright but inexperienced intellectuals had never seen with their own eyes the culture that they were ignoring, and instead were forming hard opinions based on unrealities that were as mythical as the shadows on the wall of Plato’s Cave. But it was almost impossible to argue against their presumptions. To speak of one’s family journey was dismissed as anecdotal if not unrepresentative of a culture’s true journey. And for all the minute details that went into socioeconomic data based on race, there was no available data that would show the vast distinctions among white Americans. And yet it was intuitively obvious to the casual observer, as our professors liked to say in other matters, that the statistical straw man of “white America” being used to determine minority inclusiveness was nothing more than an imaginary facade. Indeed, white America is so variegated that it is an ethnic fairy tale.
In 1974, toward the end of my second year at Georgetown Law, the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center (NORC) published a landmark study, dividing American whites into seventeen ethnic and religious backgrounds and scoring them by educational attainment and family income.9 Contrary to prevailing mythology, the vaunted White Anglo-Saxon Protestants were even then not at the top. The highest WASP group—the Episcopalians—ranked sixth in family income, behind American Jews, then Irish, Italian, German, and Polish Catholics. Other white Protestants, principally the descendants of those who had settled the Midwest and the South, constituted the bottom eight groups, and ten of the bottom twelve. Educational attainment and income levels did not vary geographically, as for instance among white Baptists (who scored the lowest overall) living in Arkansas or California, a further indication that these differences were culturally rather than geographically based.
Family income in the NORC study varied by almost $5,000 dollars, from the Jewish high of $13,340 to the Baptist low of $8,693. By comparison, in the 1970 census the variance in family income between whites taken as a whole and blacks was only $3,600. In addition, white Baptists averaged only 10.7 years of education, which was almost four years less than American Jews and at the same level of black Americans in 1970. This meant that, even prior to the major affirmative action programs, there was a greater variation within “white America” than there was between white America and black America. And in terms of education and income, the whites at the bottom were in approximately the same situation as blacks.
The past thirty years of affirmative action and the more expansive concept of diversity quotas have not altered this reality; instead, they have exacerbated it. In the technological age, with the shrinking of the industrial base, the decrease in quality of public education, and the tendency of those who “have” to protect their own and utilize greater assets to prepare them for the future, the divergence in both expectation and reward among our citizens has grown rather than disappeared. In this context, the untold story of the programs designed to bring racial diversity into the American mainstream is that diversity among white cultures has been ignored, with the result that less-advantaged whites have often paid far beyond their percentage of the white population when quotas have been put into place for the benefit of minorities.
Recent data from the NORC’s General Social Survey on white American adults born after World War II indicates that the vast distinctions in educational attainment among whites has not abated. Social Survey data for the years 1980–2000 shows that white Baptists, who are heavily descended from the Scots-Irish culture, as well as “Irish Protestants,” who are almost exclusively from that culture, rank well below other white ethnic groups, and also well below the combined national average when all racial and ethnic groups are taken together. This data shows that only 18.4 percent of white Baptists born after World War II and 21.8 percent of Irish Protestants have obtained a college degree, compared to a national average 30.1 percent that includes all races, a Jewish average of 73.3 percent, and an average among those of Chinese and Indian descent of 61.9 percent.
Again, there is no regional variance to this lack of education; the percentage of college graduates among those who grew up in the South is little different from those whose families had migrated out of the South to other places. These figures indicate that, similar to the much-discussed experiences of black Americans, whites who migrated from the South with little capital, and after the generations of educational deprivation that followed the Civil War, often brought their cultural disadvantages with them. Whatever comment one might wish to make about this fact as a cultural feature, these members of our society can hardly be called advantaged in a way that justifies legal discrimination against them as interchangeable members of a supposedly monolithic white majority.
Does this lack of educational access matter? Ron K. Unz, a prominent California businessman and political activist, examined the ethnic makeup of Harvard College in the Wall Street Journal not long ago. As he wrote, “Asians comprise between 2% and 3% of the U.S. population, but nearly 20% of Harvard undergraduates. Then, too, between a quarter and a third of Harvard students identify themselves as Jewish.” Unz continues, “Thus it appears that Jews and Asians approximate half of Harvard’s student body, leaving the other half for the remaining 95% of America [and this is without taking into account the 15% minority quota]. . . . Furthermore, even among non-Jewish whites there is almost certainly a severe skew in representation, with Northeastern WASPs being far better represented than other demographic or religious groups such as Baptists or Southerners. . . . This entire ethnic dilemma is present to a greater or lesser degree at most of our other elite educational institutions. . . . And partly because these universities act as a natural springboard to elite careers in law, medicine, finance and technology, many of these commanding heights of American society seem to exhibit a similar skew in demographic composition.”10
And so the answer is that it appears to matter a great deal. It is an odd reality that in cultural terms, the dividing line of race and ethnicity in America is steadily becoming blurred, a friendship and a marriage at a time, while in political terms race and ethnicity continue to define government entitlements and, inevitably, power. And in the age of globalization, when so many of America’s hands-on manufacturing jobs have been exported to cheaper labor pools in Third World countries, it matters even more, for our society is increasingly diverging along the lines suggested by Mr. Unz.
That those of Scots-Irish descent have failed to use such evidence in order to argue against diversity programs that do not distinguish among the widely varying white ethnic groups is as much a comment on their individuality as it is on their political naïveté. To argue about such disparities would require that they act collectively. And to act collectively would require that they alter their historic understanding of what it means to be an American. And thus the final question in this age of diversity and political correctness is whether they can learn to play the modern game of group politics. For if they do, they hold the future direction of America in their collective hands.
This culture has more power than it understands. It has shaped the emotional fabric of the nation, defined America’s unique form of populist democracy, created a distinctively American musical style, and through the power of its insistence on personal honor and adamant individualism has become the definition of “American” that others gravitate toward when they wish to drop their hyphens and join the cultural mainstream. It has produced great military and political leaders, memorable athletes, talented performers, and successful entrepreneurs. It also has the most powerful issue in American politics on its side: simple fairness. Indeed, the Scots-Irish notion of fairness has dominated the most insistent rhetoric about the American democratic system since the days of Andrew Jackson—that the life and access to the future of every human being has equal value, regardless of wealth or social status. And the Scots-Irish people brought this concept to reality through the frequently bloody, brutally confronta
tional process of refusing, over and over again, to be dominated from above for reasons that benefited only the ruling classes.
In the summer of 2003, a folklife festival on the Mall in Washington, DC, had as one of its features the arts, crafts, and music of the Appalachian Mountain region. During that festival, Phyllis Deal of Clintwood, Virginia, a maker of Appalachian foodstuffs, was more definitive than she probably even intended when asked by a Washington Post reporter if her products were being marketed through local food cooperatives. “No,” she answered. “There’s a traditional resistance to cooperatives in our area. We’re not very cooperative.”11
Dear Mrs. Deal: I admire your independent spirit. But it’s time to get more cooperative.
3
Rites of Passage:
The Legacy of Camel Six
You can’t stomp us out and you can’t make us run
Cause we’re them old boys raised on shotguns.
We say grace, we say “ma’am,”
And if you ain’t into that we don’t give a damn.
—HANK WILLIAMS, JR.,
“A Country Boy Can Survive”
DUE LARGELY TO the odd-couple marriage of rebellious political populism and strict religious Calvinism in the Scottish Kirk during the Protestant Reformation, the traditional Scots-Irish culture is a study in wild contrasts. These are an intensely religious people—indeed, they comprise the very heart of the Christian evangelical movement—and yet they are also unapologetically and even devilishly hedonistic. They are probably the most antiauthoritarian culture in America, conditioned from birth to resist any pressure from above, and yet they are known as the most intensely patriotic segment of the country as well. They are naturally rebellious, often impossible to control, and yet their strong military tradition produces generation after generation of perhaps the finest soldiers the world has ever seen. They are filled with wanderlust and are ethnically assimilative, but their love of their own heritage can move them to tears when the bagpipes play, and no matter how far they roam, their passion for family travels with them.