Webb - Born fighting: how the Scots-Irish shaped America

Contents

PART ONE:
RULERS AND REDNECKS

PART TWO:
THE MAKING OF A PEOPLE
AND A NATION

PART THREE:
THE ULSTER SCOTS

PART FOUR:
THE SPIRIT OF A REVOLUTION

PART FIVE:
RISE AND FALL: THE HEART OF THE SOUTH

PART SIX:
RECONSTRUCTION. DIASPORA. REEDUCATION?

PART SEVEN:
REFLECTIONS: THE UNBREAKABLE CIRCLE

To those who went before us.
And to those we will someday leave behind.

Acknowledgments

THIS BOOK IS the product of decades of research and thought. Over those years many people encouraged me to write it. Many others gave me valuable emotional support during the difficult months it took to do so. But I would especially like to thank Oleg Jankovic and Nick Gardiner for their time and insights as the manuscript progressed, and my editor, Charlie Conrad, who believed in the value of the book from its inception, and resolutely steered me to its final conclusions without diluting its emotional and intellectual content. No writer can ask for more.

Foreword

IN AN ERA of ghostwritten memoirs and short-lived screeds, writing on difficult, substantive issues for a commercial audience can be tricky business. Those of us who have chosen this somewhat incongruous career path tend to view ourselves, rightly or wrongly, as artisans, and in rare moments even as sages. With each book we chase the elusive moonbeam that might bring us into the company of those literary lions fortunate enough to have their works still being considered long after their caskets have been lowered into their graves. At the same time, we are conscious that each book unavoidably reflects our own imperfections, and that these blemishes can be illuminated and even magnified in our writings. The books we write march alongside us, year by year as we move through the celebrations and defeats that mark our lives. If we have written directly or even tangentially about social policy, our books speak to our judgment and intellectual breadth at one particular moment, as well as to the events that were then dominating our consciousness. And yet in our books that moment survives, vulnerable to rebuttal in different social and national circumstances as the years wear on, forever frozen on the pages we have written.

Conscious of this, I came carefully to the writing of Born Fighting. For many years I believed that the story of the Scots-Irish migrations from Scotland to Northern Ireland and then to America would become my crowning literary achievement, in a sweeping epic of a novel. As my writing career moved forward I put it off again and again, wishing to make sure that my intellectual and emotional maturity, and my skills as a writer, would be equal to the sense of obligation I have always felt about its content. I started several novels on the subject, each time giving up with the realization that the facts overwhelmed the characters. Simply put, the journey was so powerful and so riddled with contradictions that I could not render it properly in one work of fiction. At the same time, a formal academic history seemed out of the question. I am not a professional historian, nor did I wish to write a book that the average reader would find dry and inaccessible.

I wanted this book to be right and I wanted it to be readby those who are the product of this cultural migration, by those who have forgotten or ignored it, and by those who wish to understand how populist-style American democracy was created and still thrives. And so after many years of thought I decided on the present format, which is a mix of cultural history, social comment and family narratives. The many thousands of letters I have received since Born Fighting was published in October 2004, and the political commentary that the book has inspired, convince me that the three decades I spent in research and reflection were well worth the journey.

It would serve little purpose to recount the observations already in the body of this book in order to introduce new readers to its central themes. To state it a bit differently, in the context of recent American politics this is the story of the core culture around which Red State America has gathered and thrived. Its tendency toward egalitarian traditions, mistrust of central authority, frequent combativeness, and an odd indifference to wealth make the Scots-Irish a uniquely values-based culture, whose historical journey has been marked by fiercely held loyalties to leaders who will not betray their ideals. And its migration from Northern Ireland directly to the wilderness of the Appalachian Mountains, bypassing even the rudiments of colonial civilization, accentuated a strong sense of individualism and self-reliance, while also bringing a cultural regression in terms of education and social refinements.

Great lines from country musican art form created and dominated by the Scots-Irishare continuing testimony to the pervasiveness of these themes:

I can be had, but I cant be bought

Take this job and shove it, I aint working here no more

Well put a boot in their ass, that's the American way

You can stand me up at the gates of hell but I wont back down

You cant stomp us out and you cant make us run, cause were them old boys raised on shotguns

And so on. And, so, ever, on again

Today the Scots-Irish and the people they have so strongly influenced are the greatest arbiters of American politics, providing the swing votes that cause the nation to move, periodically, between the Democratic and Republican parties. They were the original Jacksonians (indeed, Andrew Jackson defined them to America), and were among the strongest of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Democrats. Decades later they formed the core of the Reagan Democrats, and with that pendulum swing went the votes of the South over to the Republicans. Karl Rove understood them completely even if he did not overtly identify them ethnically, fashioning many of the emotional and values-based issues that consolidated the power of George W. Bush.

As the twentieth century moved forward toward the twenty-first, the impact of this culture grew, particularly in the military as well as in rural and blue-collar America. But the modern Democratic Partyand indeed most of Americas elites and its newer immigrant populationslost its consciousness that the Scots-Irish even exist as a cultural group at all. Obsessed with a political strategy that targeted ethnic minorities, dominated by leaders who had no firsthand experience with this group, and generalizing the loss of white support in Red State America to simple racism, the Democrats lost the backing of their key historical core group, those farmers, laborers, and mechanics to whom Andrew Jackson had dedicated his political career and around whom American populist democracy had been formed. At the same time, Americas elites persisted in racial and ethnic policies that ignored a fundamental truth. Indeed, in this age of political correctness it can even be uncomfortable to utter this truth, but it is at the heart of Americas current ethnic dilemma: white ethnic groups in America are so varied that it is impossible to lump them together in the formation of policies affecting minorities without creating even greater disparities among white cultural groups themselves.

These realities were clear from the outset, if one had the cultural eyes with which to see them. And for me, the genesis for Born Fighting