Born Fighting (2 page)

2

The Radical Individualists
                              

THE SCOTS
-
IRISH
(sometimes also called the Scotch-Irish) are all around you, even though you probably don’t know it. They are a force that shapes our culture, more in the abstract power of emotion than through the argumentative force of law. In their insistent individualism they are not likely to put an ethnic label on themselves when they debate societal issues. Some of them don’t even know their ethnic label, and some who do know don’t particularly care. They don’t go for group-identity politics any more than they like to join a union. Two hundred years ago the mountains built a fierce and uncomplaining self-reliance into an already hardened people. To them, joining a group and putting themselves at the mercy of someone else’s collectivist judgment makes about as much sense as letting the government take their guns. And nobody is going to get their guns.

But this is who they are, and where they came from.

Their bloodline was stained by centuries of continuous warfare along the border between England and Scotland, and then in the bitter settlements of England’s Ulster Plantation in Northern Ireland. Their religion was a harsh and demanding Calvinism that sowed the seeds of America’s Bible Belt, its on-your-feet independence instead of on-your-knees rituality offending English Anglicans and Irish Catholics alike. On occasion they sold themselves as indentured servants in order to escape Ulster’s harshness, although unsurprisingly, they quickly became known in America as disagreeable and in-your-face when in that role.

Mostly they came in families and even large groups of families, and thus retained their cultural identity long after leaving Ireland. They came to America on small boats that took months to cross the Atlantic, as many as 30 percent of their passengers dying on a typical voyage. They settled not in the plantations along the Southern coast or in the bustling towns of New England, but in the raw and unforgiving mountain wilderness, some spilling out from settlements in New Hampshire, but the overwhelming majority populating an area along the Appalachians that stretched from Pennsylvania to Georgia and Alabama. It was not unusual to find that their first task beyond building a cabin was to defend themselves against the bloodcurdling attacks of Indian war parties.

They fought the Indians and then they fought the British, comprising 40 percent of the Revolutionary War army. They were the great pioneers—Daniel Boone, Lewis and Clark, and Davy Crockett among them—blazing the westward trails into Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee, and beyond, where other Scots-Irishmen like Kit Carson picked up the slack. They reshaped American politics, taking hegemony away from the aristocratic English-Americans and creating the populist movement. In this role they gave us at least a dozen presidents, beginning with the incomparable Andrew Jackson and including Chester Arthur, Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt (through his mother), Woodrow Wilson, Ronald Reagan (again through his mother), and, most recently, Bill Clinton. It is even said that the patrician George W. Bush has a Kentucky-born, Scots-Irish ancestor.

They formed the bulk of the Confederate Army and a good part of the Union Army as well, and even in later wars provided many of the greatest generals and soldiers our nation has ever seen. Stonewall Jackson comes to mind, as do Sam Houston, Nathan Bedford Forrest, Ulysses S. Grant, George S. Patton, and a slew of army chiefs of staff and Marine Corps commandants. Not to mention Sgt. Alvin York, the most remembered hero of World War I, Audie Murphy, the most decorated soldier of World War II, and David Hackworth, America’s most decorated veteran from Korea and Vietnam. Indeed, they have fed dedicated soldiers to this nation far beyond their numbers in every war—for instance, the heavily Scots-Irish people of West Virginia ranked first, second, or third in military casualty rates in every U.S. war of the twentieth century. As one comparison, West Virginia’s casualty rate was twice that of New York’s and Connecticut’s in Vietnam, and more than two and a half times the rate experienced by those two states in Korea.
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The intense competitiveness that makes them good soldiers also has produced a legion of memorable athletes, business leaders, and even such completely American pastimes as NASCAR racing, which evolved from the exploits of the daring moonshine runners of the Appalachian Mountains during the days of Prohibition.

They created and still dominate country music, which along with jazz and soul is a truly American musical form. Indeed, it would be fruitless to single out country music legends from this culture, because to name a dozen would be to leave another hundred out. Country music is at the heart of the Scots-Irish culture. It percolated for more than a century in the remote and distant mountains until WSM radio took it national in the 1930s through the Grand Ole Opry. In the hollows through those isolated earlier years the dulcimer found its plaintive notes, the traditionally exquisite violin turned into such a hot fiddle that some warned it came from the devil, and the
banjar
, a native African instrument made with a gourd, evolved into the hillbilly banjo.

And they gave us so many brilliant writers—Mark Twain the lion among them, Horace Greeley, Edgar Allan Poe and Margaret Mitchell not far behind, and Larry McMurtry a good honorable mention—that their style of folklore became one of the truest American art forms. Not to mention a horde of thespians, including Tallulah Bankhead, Ava Gardner, Andie MacDowell, the legendary Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne, Robert Redford, and George C. Scott, who hailed from Wise County, Virginia, just a few miles down the road from Big Moccasin Gap. A thousand years ago, English monasteries searched out Scots, Welsh, or Irish monks to be their scribes, calling their native artistic talent “the Celtic curve.” And in the American South it has always been said that one cannot shoot an arrow up into the air without having it land on a soldier, a musician, or a writer.

Paradoxically, the Scots-Irish are also a culture of isolation, hard luck, and infinite stubbornness that has always shunned formal education and mistrusted—even hated—any form of aristocracy. In this sense they have given us the truest American of all, the man the elites secretly love to hate (except in Hollywood, where he is openly reviled to the point of caricature), the unreconstructed redneck. Blamed for slavery even though only a minute percentage actually owned slaves, they suffered for generations after the Civil War due to the twin calamities of Reconstruction and the ever-increasing seclusion of the Appalachian and Allegheny Mountains.

Enduring poverty at a rate that far exceeded the rest of the country, over the last century they scattered far and wide, following (most famously) the Hillbilly Highway up to the North-Central factory belt and the
Grapes of Wrath
roads into California, often taking their poverty with them. Conditioned by a thousand years of conflict, those who stayed behind resisted the Northern-dominated structure of the civil rights movement as an invasion from the outside just as vociferously as they had viewed the Civil War in such terms. The reformers who worked to help end segregation failed to understand the vital historical distinctions among white cultures in the South, forcing a fight with a naturally populist people who might otherwise have worked with them, at least on some points, if they had taken a different approach.

The Scots-Irish did not merely come to America, they became America, particularly in the South and the Ohio Valley, where their culture overwhelmed the English and German ethnic groups and defined the mores of those regions. And the irony is that modern America has forgotten who they were (and are) so completely that it is rare to find anyone who can even recognize their ethnic makeup or identify their amazing journey and their singular contributions. It is no exaggeration to say that despite its obsession with race and ethnicity, today’s America has a hole in its understanding of its own origins. Not a small hole, as for instance the need to rediscover and recount some long-ago incident in an isolated backwater, but a huge, gaping vacuum that affects virtually every major debate where ethnicity plays a role.

This lack of cultural awareness applies to many people of Scots-Irish heritage as well.

The story of the Scots-Irish has been lost in the common understanding for a variety of reasons. First, due to their individuality and the timing of their migration—roughly the first seventy years of the 1700s—the Scots-Irish never really desired to define themselves by their ethnic identity. In their rush to become Americans, the “hyphens” didn’t matter, except in the telling of family histories in the front-porch chronicles that persisted into my own generation. Indeed, although they were the dominant culture of these regions, they were not ethnically exclusive and often intermarried with those who accepted the mores of their communities. A good example of how this phenomenon has affected self-identification is that fully 38 percent of the city of Middlesborough, Kentucky (in the heart of Scots-Irish America), listed their ethnicity on the 2000 census simply as “native American,” compared to 7 percent nationwide. America’s “ethnocentric retreat” of the last few decades caught this culture unaware and by surprise.

Second, many of the most literate observers of American culture tend to lump the Scots-Irish in with the largely English-derivative New England Protestant groups and the original English settlers of the vast Virginia colony as “WASPs” (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) under the rubric of “British” ancestry. But these were, and are, distinctly separate and different peoples. In terms of historical background, education, religious formality, and experiences here in America, the people who made up the New England settlements had nothing in common with the Scots-Irish or even with the English who settled in Virginia. Alexis de Tocqueville was instructive on this point in his 1835 classic
Democracy in America
. “The settlers who established themselves in New England,” he pointed out, “all belonged to the more independent classes of their native country. . . . These men possessed, in proportion to their number, a greater mass of intelligence than is to be found in any European nation of our own time. All without exception had received a good education, and many of them were known in Europe for their talents and acquirements.”
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The New England migrations were well planned, carefully structured, and organized from their beginning to create townships and the advantages of urban infrastructure. The townships were platted out with a careful sense of equality, and families were given their own pieces of land. Academic institutions were created early on, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and many of our other great learning institutions. The WASP societies of New England were indeed formidable, dominating America’s intellectual and economic institutions for centuries.

The original English settlements in Virginia were quite the opposite, immediately creating an agrarian economy and a three-tiered class system that often caused members of the lower classes to regress rather than advance as the generations moved forward. Of those English settlements de Tocqueville wrote, “The men sent to Virginia were seekers of gold, adventurers without resources and without character. . . . They were in nowise above the level of the inferior classes in England.”
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Even the later migrations of “Cavalier aristocracy” that eventually made up the famed first families of Virginia had little to do with the WASP cultures of New England—and were not interconnected with the Scots-Irish themselves at all. The Scots-Irish migrations were separate from this three-tiered structure along the Virginia Tidewater, in geographic, religious, and cultural terms.

And thus the Scots-Irish had nothing in common with either the English aristocracy in Virginia or the New England WASP settlements. Nor, for that matter, did the typical English who made their way into the mountains to join them. Some of the English in the mountain communities had come from Ulster with the Scots-Irish. Some came from the border areas between England and Scotland and were, in contrast to the New England English, heavily Celtic in their origins. And others, such as those depicted by de Tocqueville, drifted into the mountains from the ugly, class-based system that characterized lowland Virginia.

These three distinctly separate cultural groups approached almost every important issue differently as the nation took shape, and were affected in dramatically different ways by social and economic policies. Analysts who attempt to analyze American history and political views by combining all those with “British Protestant origins” under one rubric will invariably end up with a false understanding as well as a mass of useless and conflicting data.

Third, there is a tendency in many academic and literary quarters to lump the Scots-Irish in with the Irish themselves. More than 40 million Americans claim Irish descent, exclusive of those Scots-Irish who have self-identified themselves on census reports under other categories such as Scottish or “native American.” Interestingly, more than half of these are of Scots-Irish ancestry. This fact is rarely recognized even by Protestants of Scots-Irish descent, many of whom may be found happily wearing the green and marching in St. Patrick’s Day parades. A considerable number of Scots-Irish immigrant families did carry Irish as well as Scottish blood, just as many of them also carried English blood. My own ancestors included Murphys, Doyles, and Connollys, among others. But at some point they all became Protestant, and the cultural migration as well as the experiences of the Scots-Irish were widely different from their Celtic kin, the Irish Catholics.

Early America experienced three great “Celtic waves” of migration from Ireland. The first, numbering between 250,000 and 400,000, included many Northern English and Scots, but consisted principally of Scots-Irish Presbyterians emptying out of Ulster.
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Although the migration began in the late 1690s, its heaviest years were between 1717 and the American Revolution. The second, spurred on by Ireland’s potato famine in the late 1840s, was most heavily, but not exclusively, Catholic. In its peak years during the 1860s, about 100,000 Irish immigrants were flooding into America every year.
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The third, centering on the two decades that bracketed the beginning of the twentieth century, was in many ways a continuation of the second wave but at about half the immigration rate, with 84 percent of all Irish emigrants from 1876 to 1921 coming to the United States.
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