Born Fighting (30 page)

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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.

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.