Born Fighting (31 page)

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 equanimity 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 culture, 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.

No sooner had World War II ended than the Cold War began, and the country was forced to confront an aggressive, competing system of government in a variety of dangerous crisis points around the world. From 1950 to 1953, a war in Korea consumed the country’s emotional and intellectual energies as well as the blood and sacrifice of its citizens. A few years later, in 1957, the Soviet Union was the first to enter the space age, the launch of Sputnik bringing with it all the military dangers inherent in intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons thousands of miles away. And America found itself both bewildered and unprepared.

After Sputnik was launched, my father, then an air force major, brought our family tradition of pioneering into a new generation. Still lacking a college education, he was nonetheless chosen by the air force to become part of one of the most urgent missions in the nation’s history: to build a missile system capable of protecting the country against the very real Soviet threat. On short notice our family of six traveled from Alabama to the isolated wilderness of California’s central coast, where an old, eighty-five-thousand-acre National Guard training base named Camp Cook was being transformed into Vandenberg Air Force Base.

In the space of one year the military population at Vandenberg expanded from nearly zero to twelve thousand people. At the beginning, the base had no family housing. We lived for a while crammed into a five-dollar-a-night motel room in Pismo Beach, my father driving more than fifty miles each way every day along narrow, two-lane mountain roads to and from the base, leaving before dawn and coming back well after dark. Later we rented a small home in Santa Maria, cutting his commute in half but seeing him just as seldom, and finally we moved into a base housing project that had been scratched into the rough, vine-covered hillsides of Vandenberg. Having spent the fifth grade in England, the sixth in Texas, and the seventh in Alabama, I went to three different schools in the eighth grade alone, the third school a converted World War II hospital complex on the base. The old, yellow, wooden buildings sagged with age and disrepair. Chalkboards and desks had been erected in the low-ceilinged, dimly lit wards. The original hospital had been built above ground, with crawlspaces under it for ventilation. Snakes, jackrabbits, and skunks often found their way below the creaking floors of the classrooms. Rather than purchasing dead frogs pickled in formaldehyde to dissect in science class, my partner and I would simply crawl underneath the building and catch a few toads.

It was chaos in the classrooms, kids from military towns and bases across the nation thrown suddenly into this remote, old hospital complex with its long interconnecting hallways and its odd, haunting memories of wounded soldiers who had once suffered in rows of beds where now we sat in lines of desks. Most of us, including me, were unwilling and unruly students, jarred from normality, frequently disruptive, and always cynical. Fights broke out routinely, on the playgrounds and even in the classrooms. It was not unusual for firecrackers to be thrown across the classroom when a teacher turned toward the freestanding blackboard. The shortstop on my Babe Ruth League baseball team left us in midseason, heading off to jail. Two years later my second baseman on that team was shot while trying to rob a store. We were accused by a few teachers of being “military trash,” which, one surmised, must have been somewhere below white trash, because some among us were black and others were brown. But we laughed that off—what kind of teacher would settle for a job in this isolated, intellectually barren region, anyway?

Vandenberg at its beginnings had all the chaos of an isolated frontier town; a raw but accessible wilderness where I spent much of my time hiking and camping, a social structure that saw air force enlisted men dating high school girls, and a lack of contact with the more sophisticated world. More important, it was serious work that our fathers were doing far away along the fringes of the sea, where they had built block houses and launchpads and were testing scientific concepts that no one in history had ever before put into play. Our fathers were not scientists, although civilian scientists and engineers frequently worked alongside them. But they were doers, fixers, mechanical geniuses, risk-takers, and, more than we even understood, they were on an urgent mission involving national survival, with little time to lose.

For two years I rarely saw my father except on holidays and on Sundays, even though we were living in the same house. He was gone before I got up. He was usually still gone when I went to bed. He took no leave and had no vacations. Now and then we would be sitting in our hospital ward of a classroom and the ground would shake and the sky would roar and we would rush outside, hundreds of kids emptying out of the buildings within a blink so that we could stand in the school yards and look westward toward the sea where the latest attempt to launch a missile would fill our eyes. The Thor missiles particularly were the world’s greatest firecrackers. More often than not during those first years they went off course and had to be destroyed. Some blew up on the launch pads, some just above them. Sometimes they went sideways instead of following their planned trajectory out into the sea. One of them ended up soaring ever higher, never rolling into its turn toward the sea, and finally exploding just outside the farm town of Santa Maria, where large pieces of metal showered the strawberry fields. We would cheer even when they blew up, for if nothing else we knew that we were watching an attempt to make history somewhere out there in the block houses next to the sea.

Despite Vandenberg’s remoteness, we knew viscerally of its importance. In 1959, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev made a train journey from Los Angeles to San Francisco during a visit to the United States. The rail route passed through the outer fringes of Vandenberg, near the sea. As the train left the little village of Surf and entered the base’s property, Khrushchev famously folded his arms and turned his back on the facility, staring out into the Pacific Ocean until his railroad car was again on civilian soil.

Other strangers knew of us as well.

One summer day as we were playing baseball on a field next to our housing project, we heard that a group of protesters was on its way to Vandenberg, presumably from San Francisco far to the north, in order to march against the Bomb. Stuck as we were in this remote outpost that had no recreational outlets save a base gym, an old movie theater, and a one-room “teen club,” the thought of a group of outsiders traveling to the base in order to protest its activities seemed preposterous. Several friends and I made our way to the main gate, where the base commander had augmented the normal air police contingent with a fire truck. Dozens of military kids gathered at the edge of the base perimeter, looking querulously through the chain-link fence.

The protesters were standing in the ice plants and sagebrush on the other side of the dusty, lonely highway, a scraggly, rather confused group of no more than a hundred people holding “Ban the Bomb” signs and gathering their courage to try to enter the base. Suddenly—almost resignedly—they began walking across the highway. When they neared the gate, the fire hoses opened up, washing them back to the other side. Their mission somehow accomplished, they took a few pictures, mostly of themselves, and then walked slowly away, as wet and beaten as whipped puppies.

We laughed and cheered, more at their oddity than at their cause, which from the confines of our lives seemed too ludicrous even to be taken seriously. How could they not comprehend the seriousness of Russia’s missile advantage? And who would even notice that they had come? But less than ten years later, after I returned from a hard year of combat in Vietnam, those protesters and their soul mates would own the streets. Seeing me in my Marine Corps uniform, it was they who would laugh. And it was I who would feel odd.

The missile program at Vandenberg succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations, and over time Vandenberg itself eventually became a stable and thriving community. My father flourished as well, finally working in an area with so many unknowns that his natural intelligence trumped the sophisticated education of many around him. He “wrote the book” on the complicated process of bringing together the many pieces of civilian and military hardware and technology into the actual assemblage of workable Atlas missiles on their launching pads. He was promoted early to lieutenant colonel and assigned to the Strategic Air Command’s headquarters at Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska. Predictably for us, this meant three new homes and two new schools in the next two years.

When the Cuban missile crisis erupted in October 1962, the nation was fortunate that the officers and airmen at Vandenberg had done their work, for if the United States had not developed a strong deterrent program of its own, Soviet missiles would have remained in Cuba, only ninety miles away from our shores. If this had happened, certainly the politics not only of the Cold War but also of the Americas themselves would have evolved far more dangerously. As that crisis unfolded, my father spent an entire week without sleep other than catnapping on military aircraft as he shuttled endlessly between Vandenberg and Offutt, coordinating the air force’s preparedness to launch missiles at a moment’s notice should the president so decide. Finally he passed out at a conference table at SAC headquarters and had to be hospitalized.

For this and other such work my father was again promoted early, this time to colonel with only two years as a lieutenant colonel, which was almost unheard-of, even for better-educated and more urbane academy graduates. Just after I graduated from high school, he was chosen to command the only composite missile squadron in the military, taking a unit responsible for launching Thor, Atlas, and Scout Junior missiles from a success rate of 11 percent to a perfect record of thirteen successful launches in a row. One of his tasks was shooting Atlas missiles into the Johnston Atoll while a version of Nike antiaircraft missiles attempted to intercept them from facilities on the island of Kwajalein—the first, embryonic efforts at an antimissile defense program.

In addition to all this, the old man was steadily sneaking up on his life’s great dream—a college degree. He had been the first to study beyond the eighth grade; the first to finish high school; and for twenty-six years, whenever the chance had presented itself, he had been accumulating college credits. A night school class at some isolated military post; a correspondence course; a military school that might qualify for credit by one college or another; even the electrician’s course he had taken after high school; all were piled together year after year until he crossed the magic threshold. Once assigned to Offutt Air Force Base, he spent three nights a week at the University of Omaha in addition to carrying his sensitive and demanding workload at SAC headquarters. Fats Domino released a song during that time called “Three Nights a Week You’re Gone,” and we joked that it was written especially for him.

Finally, in the winter of my senior year of high school, James Henry Webb, Sr., bagged his diploma. It was, shall we say, a Great Santini Moment. My father was never given to subtlety or understatement. As my granny used to put it, and not in a complimentary way, “Your daddy likes it loud.”

I watched him from where I sat in the front row of the expandable bleacher seats at the University of Omaha’s men’s gymnasium, trying to comprehend the depth of his pride. His chin was lifted; he was high on adrenaline. His prematurely gray hair looked almost fluorescent as he walked toward the podium in the midst of a long line of men and women half his age. The presenter put the cherished paper in his hand. And then he broke out of line and walked across the gymnasium floor, drawing immediate attention in front of perhaps a thousand people. He looked like he’d just won the Super Bowl, or maybe the heavyweight championship. And his burning eyes were on me.