Born Fighting Read online

  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.”2

  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.”3 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 w
ays 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.4 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.5 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.6

  Once removed from Ireland, the common Celtic origins of these two groups brought many similarities, especially in their military traditions, their affinity for politics, and their literary prowess. But the timing, geography, and cohesion of these respective migrations resulted in starkly different experiences in America. The first, Protestant wave centered on the Appalachian and Allegheny Mountains. The other, principally Irish Catholic migrations flowed mostly into Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, with a secondary outflow to Chicago. They were not only urban in their first instance, but also competitive with other large ethnic migrations such as those from Italy, Greece, and Eastern Europe. They were also up against a truly dominant WASP establishment that quickly became identified as an adversary to be overcome as well as a benchmark against which to measure their success. However, in contrast to the Scots-Irish, these migrations benefited from having landed smack in the middle of America’s rich and thriving Northeast corridor. Although they met early resistance from the entrenched elites, the availability of quality schooling and the ability to organize themselves politically allowed many Irish Catholics to assume positions of power and influence very quickly, including in the worlds of publishing, mass media, and academia.

  Another division between these two cultures pops up from time to time from the perspective of some Irish Catholic Americans. The unresolved issues between Protestant and Catholic factions in Northern Ireland are closer in their experience than they are to the Scots-Irish, and this remembered bitterness at times affects their views of Americans of Irish Protestant descent. To a few Irish Catholics, the Scots-Irish remains a people apart who should still be battled or at best kept at a distance. If you are Protestant, the logic goes, you have no claim to being truly Irish. This viewpoint amounts to an unfair judgment even as it relates to Irish history itself, as many of Ireland’s greatest figures have been Protestant and, in the parlance, “Anglo-Irish.” Nationalist leaders Theobald Wolfe Tone and Charles Stewart Parnell come to mind, as do legendary writers Jonathan Swift, William Butler Yeats, and George Bernard Shaw. Musician Van Morrison is also an Irish Protestant of Scottish descent. And the highest-ranking native-born Irishman in the Civil War, the legendary Confederate general Patrick Cleburne, was a Protestant who had once served in the British army.

  There is another reason that the Scots-Irish story has been lost to common identification. In the age of political correctness and ultraethnic sensitivities, it has become delicate, to say the least, to celebrate many of this culture’s hard-won accomplishments when teaching American history in today’s public schools.

  The Scots-Irish settled the Ulster Plantation in Northern Ireland at the urging of the English, a position that is anathema to some Irish Catholics, who look at this migration as having sown the seeds of the current Troubles in Ireland. No matter that Presbyterians and Catholics suffered many of the same legal and political difficulties at the hands of the Anglican hierarchy.

  They came to America and took the land that no one else wanted, a difficult movement to sell in today’s politically correct environment, since in many eyes they took it from the Indians.

  Their legacy is stained because they became the dominant culture in the South, whose economic system was based on slavery. No matter that the English aristocrats of Tidewater were slavery’s originators and principal beneficiaries, or that the typical Scots-Irish yeoman had no slaves and actually suffered economic detriment from the practice.

  They suffered 70 percent killed or wounded in the Civil War and were still standing proud in the ranks at Appomattox when General Lee surrendered—but in today’s politically correct environment this means that they were the “racist” soldiers of the Nazilike Confederacy.

  They are a culture founded on guns, which considers the Second Amendment sacrosanct, while literary and academic America considers such views not only archaic but also threatening. And yet it is not hyperbole to say that Al Gore lost the 2000 election by going against them on this issue, causing Tennessee and West Virginia to vote for George W. Bush.

  And they are the very heartbeat of fundamentalist Christianity, which itself is largely derived from the harsh demands of Scottish Calvinism. As such, they have produced their share of fire-and-brimstone spiritual leaders, whose conservative views on social issues continually offend liberal opinion-makers.

  Because “sophisticated” America tends to avert its eyes from the bellicose and often warlike nature of their journey, it also is inclined to ignore or misunderstand this culture, even though the Scots-Irish continue to hold enormous social and political sway. Other than the occasional student that they are usually able to tame through the educational process of their high-end universities, or the Southern politician that they can indoctrinate and mold into their version of a respectable presidential candidate, America’s elites have had very little contact with this culture. As with African-Americans fifty years ago, they rest comfortably with the false notion that the “redneck world” does not comprise a social or political force outside of the narrow and often invented social issues that are necessary to get its vote. The elites do not have to deal with people from this culture on a daily basis in their classrooms or their neighborhoods or at work. They do not see them in their clubs or go to the same parties. They do not need their goodwill in order to advance professionally. But they ignore them at their peril. Because in this culture’s heart beats the soul of working-class America.

  These are loyal Americans, sometimes to the point of mawkishness. They show up for our wars. Indeed, we cannot go to war without them. They haul our goods. They grow our food. They sweat in our factories. And if they turn against you, you are going to be in a fight.

  Historian Walter Russell Mead, who won the 2002 Lionel Gelber Prize for outstanding writing on international affairs, illuminated the validity of these last points in an essay examining what he termed “the Jacksonian Tradition” in American foreign policy.7 Defining a movement that came out of the Scots-Irish settlements and later migrations and was personified by President Andrew Jackson, Mead cont
rasted the Jacksonians with other foreign policy cultures such as the Wilsonians, Hamiltonians, and Jeffersonians. The Jacksonians, he indicated, are “instinctively democratic and populist.” They believe “that the government should do everything in its power to promote the well-being—political, moral, economic—of the folk community. Any means are permissible . . . so long as they do not violate the moral feelings or infringe on the freedoms that Jacksonians believe are essential in their daily lives.”8

  Mead asserts that this political movement takes its views from the Scots-Irish definitions of personal honor, equality, and individualism,9 and then makes two vitally significant observations. The first is that despite this reality, the Jacksonians are virtually invisible to America’s elites. “Jacksonianism is less an intellectual or political movement than an expression of the social, cultural and religious values of a large portion of the American public. And it is doubly obscure because it happens to be rooted in one of the portions of the public least represented in the media and the professoriat.”10

  The second is that the tenets of Jacksonianism have expanded beyond the Scots-Irish to become the dominant political code of America’s working class, including the more recent immigrant communities in the North. “American Catholics, once among the world’s most orthodox, remained Catholic in religious allegiance but were increasingly individualistic in terms of psychology and behavior. . . . Urban immigrants may have softened some of the rough edges of Jacksonian America, but the descendants of the great wave of European immigration sound more like Andrew Jackson from decade to decade.”11