How did American English become standardized?

Someone asked me about General American (GA) dialect, sometimes called Standard American. This person specifically asked, “In the 30’s to 60, there was the transatlantic accent, but I was wondering when general american became the norm for tv / movies?”

General American is a variant of American Midland dialect. It’s considered to have its most representative form in a small area of the far western Lower Midwest, mostly but not entirely west of the upper Mississippi River: central-to-southern Iowa, northern Missouri, eastern Nebraska, and northwestern Illinois. Major mainstream media figures such as Ronald Reagan and Walter Cronkite came from this part of the country, Illinois and Missouri respectively.

The archetype of GA in broadcasting was Edward Murrow who was born in North Carolina but early on moved to the rhotic region of the Pacific Northwest, specifically Washington state. According to Thomas Paul Bonfiglio (Race and the Rise of Standard American, pp. 173-4), Murrow’s “nightly radio audience was estimated to be 15,000,000 listeners” and widely considered “the foremost American correspondent of that era.” Murrow’s career took off during WWII when America’s image of greatness finally took form (with the help of the destruction of Europe), and the voice that came to be identified with this new great America was that of GA-speaking Edward Murrow. He helped train and inspire an entire generation of broadcasters that followed him. Bonfiglio then states that,

Those who were hired and trained by Murrow in turn hired and trained Walter Cronkite, Mike Wallace, Harry REasoner, Roger Mudd, Dan Rather, and Chet Hunley (230). Walter Cronkite, who was often characterized as the most trusted man in America, characterized himself as a “direct descendent of the Murrow tradition”

There are variants of GA found across the Midwest, in the Far West, and along the West Coast. Many people working in radio, television, and movies speak GA—whether or not it was the dialect they spoke growing up. GA became standard because of a number of reasons, besides those already mentioned.

Let me begin with a discussion of the Midwest.

The Midwest for a long time has been the median and mean of the population in the United States. Between great soil and plentiful water for agriculture and industry, it attracted most of the immigrant population since the 1800s. Even most people heading further west passed through this region. For this reason, the early railroads were built heavily in the Midwest. Chicago, in particular, was in the past the hub of America. The ‘Midwest’ symbolically is quite broad, imaginatively encompassing almost the entirety of the American interior.

The Midwest was increasingly where large audiences could be reached, an important factor in early broadcasting. Another important factor was that the area of GA is most equidistant from all other areas of the country, and so the dialect is the most familiar to most Americans—i.e., it sounds neutral, as if without accent.

Some have gone so far as to argue that GA is inherently more of a ‘neutral‘ accent in that it is easier to speak or sing for most people; and if that were the case, it could have helped it have spread more easily. Interestingly, GA is in some ways closer to early British English than is contemporary British English, as rhotic pronunciation of ‘r’ sounds used to be the norm for British English and still is for GA. Rhotic English, in the United States, is also what distinguishes (Mid-)Western dialect from Eastern and Southern dialect.

By the way, Reagan worked in Midwestern broadcast radio before he became a Hollywood actor. Strangely, quite a few cowboy actors came from or near the area of GA dialect, such as John Wayne from southern Iowa (his father having been from Illinois and his mother from Nebraska). Wayne has a way of speaking that is hard to pinpoint regionally, other than it sounding vaguely ‘Western’, definitely not Eastern or Southern.

GA took longer to take hold in entertainment media, as regional dialects remained popular in many television shows. In 1934, there was the first “syndicated programming, including The Lone Ranger and Amos ‘n’ Andy” (Radio in the United States). It was news broadcasters that helped make GA the norm for the country, although even this took a while (Bonfiglio, p. 58): “Even in the late thirties, the idea of a standard American English had not yet been located in a specific region, and a sort of linguistic relativism in the field of pronunciation prevailed.” Besides those named above, there were others such Clifton Garrick Utley (along with his mother and father who also worked for NBC) and Vincent Pelletier or, even over in Ohio, someone like Lowell Jackson Thomas. Midwestern broadcasters like this only gained wider national audiences starting in the 1940s, and so they helped to define the emerging perception of a Standard American or General American dialect. The world war era helped fuel the seeking of a national identity and hence a national way of speaking. It helped that Western broadcasters like Edward Murrow similarly spoke rhotic GA.

Plus, the Midwest developed the only thriving regional public radio, partly because of the large number of land grant colleges. It’s not that public radio initially was all that important nationally. But it had great influence in the region. And it probably had some later influence on the eventual establishment of National Public Radio.

Still, early broadcasters do sound different than today. Even Cronkite in the beginning of his career had a more clipped style. This had less to do with regional dialect and maybe more to do with the medium itself at the time—as dthrasher explained: “I’d guess that the “50’s accent” you hear had much to do with the technology of AM and shortwave radio. Precise diction and a somewhat clipped style for words and phrases helped to overcome the crackle and hiss of static in radio reception.” He also points out “that many movie and television stars of that era got their start in theater,” a less casual way of speaking, but I’m not sure how much influence that would have had on the field of broadcasting.

What exactly changed, besides technology, in the mid-20th century? Bonfiglio emphasizes that there was a growing desire for standardization in the 1940s. An obvious reason for this was the rise of the public school movement as part of the response to the perceived threat of ethnic immigrants who weren’t assimilating fast enough for many WASPs. As Bonfiglio writes (p. 59):

In 1944, the New York State Department of Education formed a committee to decide on standards of pronunciation to be taught in public schools (C. K. Thomas 1945). The committee was comprised of over a dozen national language experts, who decided that the pupils should all become acquainted with the three types of American pronunciation: “Eastern, Southern and General American.”

So, it wasn’t (Mid-)Westerners declaring themselves as speaking General American. Apparently, even those outside of the (Mid-)West acknowledged that there was this broadly American dialect that was neither Eastern nor Southern. But why did this matter?

The South obviously wouldn’t become the standard because it is the region that started and lost the Civil War. Besides, the South didn’t have a large concentrated population as did the North, a major reason for their having been overwhelmed by the Union army. That still leaves the upper East Coast region, as it did initially dominate early entertainment media. The mid-Atlantic consisted of a massive population, from the 1800s into the early 1900s. The problem was that this massive population was also massively diverse, with a large influx of Southern and Eastern Europeans, including many non-Protestants (Jews, Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox).

This led many to look to the (Mid-)West for a ‘real’ American identity, probably related to the growing popularity of movie Westerns and all that they mythologized in the public mind. Americans early on came to symbolize their aspirational identity with the West, the Midwest being the first American West. A state like Iowa, west of the upper Mississippi River, was a clear demarcation point for where dialect was most distinct from the East and South, a place where there were few Jews and blacks.

The rhotic dialect was quite broadly distributed in the Western United States, even being heard from a Texan like Dan Rather, though it is true his mother and her family came from Indiana—it does make me wonder what dialect he spoke as a child and young adult. It should be noted that Texas received a fair amount of German immigrants, many having passed through the Midwest before settling in Texas. Then there are other broadcasters such as Tom Brokaw from South Dakota and Peter Jennings from Canada, both areas of rhotic accent among other shared linguistic characteristics. Standard Canadian English is closely related to Standard American English and, indeed, there was much early immigration between Canada and (Mid-)Western United States.

Following the Civil War and into the 20th century, the population was simultaneously growing in the Midwest and West Coast. This represented the future of the country, not just major agricultural regions but the emergence of major industries and new centers of media.

The first movie shot in Hollywood happened in 1910. That was a silent movie and hence accent wasn’t yet an issue. It would be a couple of decades before films with sound became common. I was reading that it was WWI that disrupted the film production in other countries. With California becoming an emerging center, the studio system and star system having developed there.

The numbers moving westward increased vastly following the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. Many of those who ended up in California came from the Midwest, the area of the greatest population and the origin of what has come to be called Standard American English.

The far Middle West accent had already established itself as important. The earliest radio broadcasters that reached the largest numbers of listeners often came from the Midwest or otherwise similarly speaking regions. When so many Midwesterners moved to California, they brought their accent with them. Midwestern broadcasters like Ronald Reagan sometimes became movie stars. Consider also the stereotypical California surfer dude made famous through Hollywood movies. Many of the movie stars and movie extras were of German and Scandinavian ancestry, which had been concentrated in the Midwest. Beach movies came to replace Westerns, but I’m not sure how that might have played into changing attitudes about General American.

The boom of the defense industry and population in California after WWII made it a more important center of culture and media. California even became the center of a religious movement that would take the country by a storm, the new mega-churches that reached massive television audiences. One of these California preachers was Robert H. Schuller who was born and raised in Iowa.

I suppose it took decades for the new accent to become more common mainstream media. By the 1990s, Standard American English definitely had won out as the new dominant accent for the country. It was becoming more common in the 1980s tv, such as with Roseanne which began in 1988. New York City is still a major media center, but it is mostly now known for print media. Even so, there remains a media nostalgia in making movies about New York City, whether or not they are still made there.

The transition to GA dominance wasn’t an accident. There were demographic reasons that made it more probable. But it must be noted that many intentionally promoted it. The Midwest represented a tradition that simultaneously included immigrant diversity and assimilation. This tradition at times was promoted quite forcefully, such as by Klansmen of the Second Klan who hated non-WASP ethnic-Americans (i.e., hyphenated Americans). Mainstream media corporations as gatekeepers were quite self-conscious in their establishing English standardization. The media companies, as stated by Bonfiglio, went so far as to hire professionals from the early speech correction field to teach their broadcasters to speak this at the time newly emerging mainstream standard of American English.

The person who posed the question to me about General American, followed up with this comment: “Even Rosanne doesn’t sound all GA to me. And John Goodman sounds southernish. Was just wondering. I notice some say that after 60s black and white tv it became standard. But I really don’t see that to be the case at all.”

The Roseanne cast had a diverse group of actors. Roseanne Barr was born in Utah, but when she was still young she moved to Colorado which is partly in the Midlands dialect region—her accent is a mix. Several of the other people on the show were born in the Midwest, specifically three from Illinois and one from Michigan. A few were from California and probably spoke more GA, although it’s been a long time since I’ve watched the show.

John Goodman was born in St. Louis, Missouri—what many would consider as culturally part of the Midwest, although there is a Southern influence in Missouri. I’ve even heard a Southern accent in southeast Iowa, from someone who lived just across the Mississipi River. Western Illinois and northern Missouri are part of the specific subset of Midlands dialect (i.e., pure GA) that has become so well known in the mainstream media.

My mother grew up in the Midlands region, central Indiana to be precise. Even she had a Southern-like accent when she was younger, the Hoosier accent that is akin to what is heard in the Upper (Mountain) South. She lost it early on in and now speaks GA. As a speech pathologist, it was part of her job to teach students to speak GA.

I spent many formative years right in the heart of the heart of General American. Even after spending years in the South, it didn’t take long to start speaking GA once I was back in Iowa. It drove my mother wild when I picked up some Southern dialect and she would correct my language, as is her habit. Maybe she was happy when I returned to speaking solid Midwestern dialect.

About early television shows, one to consider is Happy Days. It was set in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. One of the actors was from Wisconsin. Some others were from Minnesota, Oklahoma, illinois, and California. There were a few New Yorkers in that cast as well.

Oddly, one of its spin off shows, Laverne & Shirley, was also supposedly set in the same Milwaukee location. But it’s cast was overwhelmingly from New York. Another spin off from Happy Days was Mork & Mindy, which was supposed to be set in Boulder, Colorado. The two main actors were from Illinois and Michigan, Robin Williams being from Chicago. Of the rest of the cast, two were from Ohio, two from Texas, and one from New York.

From my childhood and young adulthood, there were popular shows like The Wonder Years. The main actor and the actress playing his mother were both from Illinois. By the time that show was on, it probably didn’t matter where actors/actresses came from. Most of them were learning to speak GA. It was probably in California, not the Midwest, where most people in entertainment media learned to speak GA. A Southerner like Stephen Colbert is a good example of someone losing a distinctly regional accent in order to speak GA, although he probably didn’t need to go to California.

If I had to guess, GA came to dominate news reporting and Hollywood movies before it came to dominate tv shows. I’m not sure why that might be. If that is the case, your guess would be as good as mine. One guess might be that tv shows never drew as large of audiences and so General American was less important. New reporting once it became national, on the other hand, demanded an accent that was understandable to the most people. Hollywood movies likewise had larger and more diverse audiences.

According to one theory, General American simply happens to be the accent most Americans can understand the most easily and clearly. Bonfiglio, however, considers that to be an ethnocentric and racist rationalization for the dominance of the (Mid-)Western equivalent of the Aryan race, that perceived superior mix of Anglo-Saxon British and Northern European ancestries. Maybe so or maybe not.

About my mother’s career as a speech pathologist teaching ‘proper’ GA English, my interlocutor then asked the following set of questions, “Just wondering, what era was this? I just find it odd when I watch so much 80s tv and movies, GA isn’t used. What did she teach them for? And was the GA that she taught the one that you mention today? was the accent even remotely similar to what we consider GA today?”

Having been born in the 1940s, my mother started work in the late 1960s and continued until the 2000s. So, she grew up and worked in the precise period of GA dialect fully taking over.

I talked to my mother. We discussed the changes in her own speech.

She doesn’t clearly remember having a Southern-sounding accent or rather a Hoosier accent, but it clearly can be heard on an old audio of her from back in the late 1960s, in the time of her life when she had recently finished college and had begun her career as a speech pathologist.

I asked her if her professors spoke GA. She said that they probably did. She does remember when she was younger that she pronounced in the same way the words ‘pool’, ‘pull’, and ‘pole’. And, when she was in college, a professor corrected her for saying ‘bof’ in place of ‘both’. My mother still will occasionally fall into Hoosier dialect by saying ‘feesh’ for ‘fish’ and ‘cooshion’ for ‘cushion’, the latter example happens commonly in her everyday speaking.

For the most part, my mom speaks GA these days. There is no hint of a Hoosier accent. And, around strangers, she is probably more careful in not using those Hoosier pronunciations. But, even as late as the early 1980s, some people in northern Illinois told my mother that she had what to them sounded like a slight Southern accent. For the time we lived in Illinois and Iowa, we were in the area of GA which probably helped my mom lose what little she had of her childhood dialect.

I also asked my mother about her career as a speech pathologist. She said that early on she thought little about dialect, either in her own speaking or that of students. She did work for a few years in the Deep South before I was born, when my dad was stationed at a military base. She would have corrected both black and white Southern children without any thought about it. Compared to Deep Southern dialect, I’m sure my mother even when young sounded Midwestern, an approximation of the rhotic GA dialect.

It was the late 1980s when our family moved to the South Carolina. My mother said that is the first time she was told to not correct the dialect of black students. She still did tell her black students the different ways to pronounce sounds and words and she modeled GA, but she couldn’t technically teach them proper English. At that time, she also wasn’t allowed to work with kids who had English as a second language, for there were separate ESL teachers. Yet, back in the early 1980s, she worked with some Hispanic students in order to teach them proper English.

Until South Carolina, she says she never considered dialect in terms of her speech work. It seems that the language professions were rather informal until later in her career. She spent the longest part of her career in South Carolina where she worked for two decades. Her field had become extremely professionalized at that point and all the language fields were territorial about the students they worked with and the type of language issues they specialized in.

So, my mother’s own way of speaking English changed over her career as the way she taught language changed. By the end of her career, she says even a speech pathologist from the South and working in the South with Southern students would have taught GA, at least to white students and probably informally to black students as well. She said that speech pathologists ended up teaching code switching, in that they taught kids that there were multiple ways of speaking words. She pointed out that many older blacks she worked with, including a principal, didn’t code switch—that makes sense, as they probably were never taught to do so.

My mother’s career wasn’t directly involved in dialect and accent. She was a speech pathologist which means she largely focused on teaching articulation. She never thought of it as teaching kids GA, even if that was the end result.

That field is interesting. When my mother started, it was called speech correction. Then early in her career it was called speech therapy. But now it is speech-language pathology. The change of name correlated to changes in what was being taught in the field.

I don’t know if General American itself changed over time. It’s interesting to note that many of the earliest speech centers and speech corrections/therapy schools in the US were in the Midwest, where many of the pioneers (e.g., Charles Van Riper) in the field came from—such as Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa. Right here in the town I live in, Iowa City, was one of the most influential programs and one of the main professors in that program was born in Iowa City, Dean Williams. As my mother audited one of Williams’ classes, she got to know him and he worked with my brother’s stuttering. Interestingly, Williams himself came in contact with the field because of his own childhood stuttering, when Wendell Johnson helped him. My mother heard Williams say that, while he was in the military during WWII, Johnson sent him speech journals as reading material which inspired him to enter the field when he returned after the war.

So, it appears at least some of the speech fields in the US developed in or near the area of General American dialect. Maybe that is because of the large non-English immigrant populations that settled in the Midwest. German-Americans were the largest demographic in the early 20th century and, accordingly, to mainstream WASP culture this was one of the greatest threats. Even in a college town like Iowa City, the Czechs felt compelled to start their own Catholic church because they couldn’t understand the priest at the German Catholic church. Assimilation was slow to take hold within ethnic immigrant communities. Language standardization and speech correction became a priority for the purveyors of the dominant culture.

Let me point out one thing in relation to my mother. She went to Purdue. The head of her department was Max David Steer, having been in that position from 1963 to 1970, the exact years my mother spent at Purdue. He was a New Yorker, but he got his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa here in Iowa City. Like Williams, he probably also learned under Johnson. The field was small at that time and all of these figures would have known each other.

Here is an amusing side note.

My mother began her education when the field was in transition. Speech corrections/therapy had only been a field distinct from psychology since after WWII, although the program at Purdue started the same year my mother started school, 1963. When she got her masters degree, 1969-70, they had just begun teaching transformational linguistic theory. She says it was highly theoretical and way over her head. Guess who was one of the major influences on this development: the worldwide infamous left-winger, Noam Chomsky. So, my mother learned a bit about Chomskyan linguistic theory back in the day.

By the way, listening to Chomsky speak, it definitely is more or less GA. He grew up in Pennsylvania. It was Pennsylvanian culture that some argue was the greatest influence on Midwestern culture. This is because so many early immigrants entered the United States through Pennsylvania and from there settled in the Midwest. But there is a definite accent that can be found among many Pennsylvanian natives. It’s possible that Chomsky picked up the GA dialect later in life. Anyway, he personifies the neutral/objective-sounding intellectuality of GA in its most standardized mainstream form—so straightforward and unimposing, at least in the way Chomsky speaks it.

I get the sense that, going back far enough, few overtly worried about standardized English. It was simply considered proper English, at least by the mid-20th century. I have no idea when it first became considered proper English in the US. If I had to hazard a guess, the world war era probably helped to establish and spread General American since so many soldiers would have come from the (Mid-)West, the greatest proportion of population in the country—larger than the Southern, Mid-Atlantic, and Northeastern populations combined. It might be similar to how a distinct Southern accent didn’t exist until the Civil War when Southern soldiers fought together and came to share a common identity. Edward Murrow, of course, played a role as the manly voice of WWII describing firsthand accounts of fighting and bombings to the American public back at home.

Whether or not it deserves this prominent position, I suspect General American dialect is here to stay. To most people of this country and around the world, this dialect represents American society. It has become not just dominant here but in most places where English is spoken.

GA has even come to be promoted in the non-entertainment media of the British Broadcasting Company (BBC), specifically for news shows directed at the non-British, as the BBC reaches an international audience. Hollywood has, of course, spread GA English to other countries. So have video games, as the largest consumers of this product are Americans, which creates a bias in the entire industry. More English-speakers in the world have a GA dialect than any other dialect.

General American has become the unofficial standard of English almost everywhere. It is the English dialect that most people can easily understand and not recognize as being a dialect.

The Root and Rot of the Tree of Liberty

As the Heartland, what is in the heart of America? What was planted here? What has grown? What has come to fruition?

The Midwest is Middle America. Without a middle, there is no whole. The periphery, America’s coasts and borders, receives all the attention like the sweet juicy flesh surrounding the seed, but it is the seed that is the purpose of the fruit. Out of the seed grows what was in the seed to grow. The seed grows upward where the fruit is to be had, but the roots surrounding what was the seed holds it all in place. The center, like the roots, must hold for if it doesn’t nothing will remain to be held; a weakly rooted tree will topple. The center is what is at the core, the middle that defines the whole, the circumference measured outward from that point of reference, that point of stability.

In America, the middle has always been the Midlands and the former Middle Colonies, the Mid-Atlantic States and the Midwest that extends into the interior. It is the cultural middling point where cultures meet, clash, merge, and even out. It is the linguistic middle of Standard American English. It is the median and mean center of the United States population.

Right now, the Emerald Ash Borer is slowly making its way across the Midwest. A couple of years ago it finally made it to Iowa and all the Ash trees I see in this Iowa town may soon be gone. The Norse World Tree Yggdrasil is considered to have been an Ash tree, out of which the first man was formed and the sugary sap from which was made the Mead of Inspiration. The Ash tree has long been rooted in Western society. It is a hardwood tree and so has been highly prized, including for use in shipbuilding. Consider how many immigrants came to America afloat upon ships built out of Ash wood. Yet now we are watching possibly a mass extinction of Ash trees, not just a single variety of Ash trees but all Ash trees.

How does the Emerald Ash Borer kill a tree? It does so by cutting off the flow of nutrients from roots to the crown. Where did this pest come from? It is an invasive species from Eastern Russia and Asia.

It is thought that the Emerald Ash Borer was brought to America along with a shipment of parts. This is one of those inevitable unintended results of globalization. The entire United States is itself an unintended result of globalization. The Atlantic colonies were part of the first major era of globalization. Many of the earliest colonies, especially Virginia and New Netherland, were simply intended as capitalist investments and not to develop into full-fledged societies, much less an independent united country. One of the earliest unintended consequences back then was slavery. Another unintended consequence was multiculturalism.

Many Americans today worry about the consequences of mass immigration, even though multiple waves of mass immigration have occurred every century since the colonies were founded. America is mass migration. It is the heart and soul of this crazy experiment.

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
(New Colossus by Emma Lazarus, inscribed on a plaque at the feet of the Statue of Liberty)

In these words is the only moral justification to be found for our having become an empire or what in doublespeak is these days called a global superpower. Call it what you will, but the US acts like an empire: colonial territories such as Hawaii and Philippines; regularly starting wars of aggression along with regularly invading and occupying countries; military bases in countries all over the world and naval presence in international waters all over the world; et cetera. The US is the greatest empire the world has ever seen.

(See the following: Manifesting America by Mark Rifkin, The Dominion of War by Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton, A Turn to Empire by Jennifer Pitts, and Among the Powers of the Earth by Eliga H. Gould)

I’m personally not in favor of my country being an empire (I say ‘my’ with some reservation for a subject doesn’t possess but is possessed by an empire, yet I must take some responsibility for it as I’m a direct beneficiary of its power). Nonetheless, if the metaphorical ‘we’ are going to be imperialists, we at least ought to stick to our moral justifications for doing so. We are an immigrant nation. This is our role in the world. Other countries accept us as big brother because every country has immigrants and descendants living in America. This is seen as everyone’s country. This is why the citizens of other countries mourned with US citizens after the 9/11 attack, and indeed the people who died in that attack were of diverse nationalities and citizenship. Without this moral justification for our empire-building, we are simply yet another big bully. Too many Americans want the benefits of being an empire with none of the responsibilities.

Multiculturalism is the tap root of the Tree of Liberty, whether for good or ill. In the 18th century, South Carolina had a African majority and Pennsylvania had a German majority. Further back in the 17th century, New Netherland had a Dutch majority, New Sweden a Swedish majority, the Spanish territories such as Florida with a Spanish majority and the French territories with a French majority. Even after being taken over by the British, New Netherland/New York still had a large Dutch population. Also, today much of the former Spanish territories that became the United States have continuously maintained a hispanic majority. Of course, the Native American territories had their native majority and once were the majority of the entire continent. These are the roots of the United States. This region of North America has never had a majority population that was of English descent.

One of the conflicts colonists had with the British government was over the rights of Englishmen. I wonder if the reason the British government was so uncertain about the colonies was the fact that there were so many colonists who weren’t Englishmen. I could understand as the ethnocentric ruling elite of an empire that they were wary of equally offering the rights of Englishmen to people who weren’t Englishmen. Those are the kinds of problems that come from empire-building. Nonetheless, the ruling elite in the colonies were also mostly Englishmen. So, they took quite seriously their supposed rights as Englishmen and took offense at their being denied.

Still, I wonder if it ever occurred to the mostly English-descended founding fathers, as they convened congress in Philadelphia, that they were surrounded by fellow colonists who weren’t Englishmen. Even back then, Pennsylvania was the Keystone. The Middle Colonies in general were what held together British Power on this side of the pond. This is why, during the French and Indian War, the British government spent so much money and effort defending the Middle Colonies. It is maybe understandable that those up in New England didn’t appreciate why they were paying higher taxes for the defense of the colonies when their region was never the focal point of that defense. Those New Englanders couldn’t appreciate that the defense of the Middle Colonies was the defense of all the colonies. They also couldn’t appreciate what it felt like to be in the Middle Colonies which had been the target of foreign empires.

Those in the Middle Colonies fully appreciated this which is why they were so reluctant to revolt. Plus, the Middle Colonies were filled with non-Englishmen who had no history with the British government and monarchy, no history of the English Civil War and Glorious Revolution. Even the Englishmen of the Middle Colonies who did have such history nonetheless had a very different view of it. I speak of the Quakers who had in some ways been given the greatest freedom for self-governance. The Monarchy was at times a better friend to the Quakers than their fellow colonial elites ever had been. There was well-founded fears of despotic power arising after the defeat of the British military, and quite prescient considering what this country has become.

It is interesting how this colonial region of multiculturalism was also the region with some of the strongest advocates for British loyalty and political moderation. It was the keystone not just for political and military reasons but also for cultural reasons. The Quakers as well believed in the rights of Englishmen. However, the Quakers were different in their understanding of English constitutionalism. They saw their rights directly rooted in the British constitution. They believed in popular sovereignty and that reform must be sought through the constitutional process. Englishmen didn’t lack a constitution and so didn’t need to create one. They simply needed to improve the very constitution that had given them the rights of Englishmen in the first place. (It is sadly ironic that this is precisely what is now claimed of the US constitution that violently replaced the British constitution. Americans prize their constitution and speak of the democratic process of creating amendments. Yet the US constitution was created by a process no more democratic than the process that created the British constitution.)

The Middle Colonies were the swing colonies for the issue of revolution just as today the Midwestern states are the swing states for presidential elections. It is partly because this has always been where the mass of the population has been centered. The reason it is centered here is because the Mid-Atlantic is where most immigrants arrived and the Midwest is where most immigrants settled. This wasn’t accidental but quite intentional. They were multicultural havens right from the start. To the North and to the South, the other colonial governments were more wary about letting just anyone to settle in their area or even merely to dock their ship full of immigrant strangers. In the Middle Colonies, especially Pennsylvania, a more tolerant attitude prevailed. This is the source of the Midwestern moderate sensibility.

During the revolutionary era, John Dickinson of Pennsylvania and Delaware embodied this the most clearly. He was born of parents of multi-generational Quaker descent. He married a woman of multi-generational Quaker descent. He lived among Quakers and associated with Quakers. However, he came to believe in wars of defense which the Quakers didn’t support and so he wasn’t a Quaker. This single point aside, his worldview was thoroughly Quaker. But even in this point of disagreement, his taking a moderate support of war only in cases of defense was very fitting for the Quaker attitude of moderation. Dickinson was in this way semi-pacifist. He believed violence should be avoided at all costs when possible. His understanding of defense was very narrow and strict.

Dickinson was a principled man. Oddly, as a reform-minded moderate, he was a key player in helping to make the revolution possible. He was the most popular pamphleteer until Thomas Paine (the latter also having had Quaker values instilled in him by his father). Without what Dickinson helped start and what Paine helped finish, the American Revolution may never have gotten very far, quite likely not succeeding at all. These Quaker-descended righteous men (with, at least in the case of Paine, Quaker-taught plain speech) knew how to articulate a collective vision of freedom that unified what was otherwise just a bunch of disparate gripes about government. Many have misunderstand Paine as a mere revolutionary. Paine also sought moderation in his own way, but he sought a moderation of power that would benefit the commoner rather the established elite. To the established elite, this didn’t seem moderate at all. For example, Paine was a deist which he saw as a middleground position where the divine was envisioned as a moderating force between morally unrooted radical atheism/secularism and authoritarian theocratic tendencies such as established churches. Both Dickinson and Paine sought moderation while remaining principled. Neither changed with the times, but the world around them shifted over their lifetimes. They found themselves criticized and forgotten by those less moderate and less principled.

My point is to show the power of this vision of moderation. Like Quaker pacifism and tolerance, it need not be a position of weakness for it holds the potential of immense strength, both strength of conviction and strength of influence. Not all moderates are neutral and passive. The greatest wisdom of moderation, however, is easily forgotten even by moderates. When moderation loses its moral center, it merely becomes a defense of the status quo. The center is what holds, but what is being maintained and for what purpose?

The proponents of moderateness are what hold this diverse country together. An empire wouldn’t be possible without them. That is the rub. Modern empire-building has necessitated this kind of conservative-minded liberalism, the latter thus becoming complicit with the former. Why not give Hawaii back to the Hawaiians, the Philippines back to the Filipinos, former Northern Mexico back to the Mexicans, and at least some of the former Indian territories back to the Native Americans? Why did we as a country expend so much blood in keeping the country together during the Civil War? Why do we want to be a great power on the earth? Why not just be free and independent communities that govern themselves as they see fit?

I love the Midwest for its moderation. I truly believe the Midlands has helped keep this country together, for whatever that is worth (I often do think there is worth in this, certainly Dickinson and Paine did). Still, the dark side of this bothers me. I see it in a status quo mentality. The attitude of tolerance only goes so far and often is only advocated when it is convenient and easy, when no sacrifices are required. This is the rot in the Tree of Liberty.

Thomas Jefferson is famous for having said, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure.” Jefferson proved to be less consistently principled than the likes of Dickinson and Paine, but still his words resonate as I don’t doubt that he believed them when he wrote them. What has often been on my mind lately is how the American Revolution was ideologically and politically lost by the principled reformers like Dickinson and the principled revolutionaries like Paine. Accordingly, it could be said that the American Revolution went too far and not far enough. Those who took the reigns of power were the very ones least interested in any liberty besides their own. It is strange how radical a moderate like Dickinson can sound compared to what came to pass.

I’ve never been sure about revolution, specifically violent revolution. It is hard to say that Canada is worse off for embracing slow reform instead of bloody insurrection. Canada has a more multicultural society than even the US. Plus, Canada has fewer of the problems found in the US: high poverty, high wealth inequality, low social mobility, etc. The American Revolution seems to have created a very divided country and made the Civil War inevitable. The British, instead, offered freedom to many slaves right after the revolution and many of them settled in free communities in Canada. I sometimes wonder if Canada is offering a better American Dream than America.

Is there something worth saving by moderation in America? Can we regain the moderate vision of John Dickinson? Or can we finally follow to completion the freedom-loving vision of Paine? If we are so incapable of worthwhile non-violent reform, what makes some people think that yet again more violence will solve our problems? How many more revolutions and civil wars do we need? What is this deformed tree of ‘liberty’ that has grown out of conflict? Should we hope to water it once again or just let it die from its own rot? What would we plant in its place? Or are there other seeds already planted that don’t need blood to grow?

“From that moment on, I was no longer a liberal, a believer in the self-correcting character of American democracy. I was a radical, believing that something fundamental was wrong in this country–not just the existence of poverty amidst great wealth, not just the horrible treatment of black people, but something rotten at the root. The situation required not just a new president or new laws, but an uprooting of the old order, the introduction of a new kind of society–cooperative, peaceful, egalitarian.”
~ Howard Zinn, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

Midlands Mestizo: Pluralism and Social Democracy

I’ve been struggling to get my thoughts in order about race, ethnicity, culture and nation. These can sometimes refer to the same thing, but there are many interpretive lenses and many related ideas and issues.

—

Colin Woodard argues that nations as ethnic cultures aren’t necessarily identical with states.

Some nations have states and some are stateless, existing within larger states that include or cross over multiple nations. Some states are based on a historically identifiable traditional ethnic culture, but during the imperial and colonial age (i.e., modern history) that became an increasingly uncertain claim. America certainly isn’t like the traditional notion of an ethnic nation-state in the way many perceive European countries, but then again one could argue that not even (most?) European countries consist of single ethnic nations.

Spain, for example, includes the separate ethnic nation of the Basque, a ethnic demographic that crosses state boundaries into France. The Basque are separate from other Spanish and French people, separate culturally, linguistically and genetically. The Basque who some suggest are Celtic have been fighting off invaders maybe since before the Roman Empire came around. There is no particular reason why the Basque should care about Spanish or French nationalism and other non-Basque ethnocentric concerns. Also, why should the Basque identify any more with the European history of Roman and German invaders to their land than they do with the Mediterranean history of African and Arab invaders?

The Basque aren’t Europeans. They are Celts and I’m sure they are proud of being so. Their ancestors were among the first humans to arrive in Europe. It’s the same reason the Celtic Scottish and Irish have fought so much with the English. It is a fight for the continued existence of their people. If there is any ethnic purity left in Europe, it is to be found with these clannish native people who live in tiny ethnic islands.

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Pretty much all of Europe is a confusion of separate and intertwining ethnic groups, and even the ethnic islands haven’t survived unscathed and unchanged.

Certainly, there is no singular European people in any objective sense. Europe as seen on maps is just as arbitrary as most state boundaries. Europe only arose as an identity largely because of Roman aspirations and the later imperial aspirations of others who were likewise inspired. England and Scotland exist as separate places simply because that is as far as the Romans advanced. The same goes for France and Germany. Borders typically are the detritus of failed or waning imperialism, memories of a bygone era made to seem permanently real in the present because people (temporarily) get tired of fighting over it.

Europeans, like Americans, are neither separately distinct nor united. Rather, they are somewhere in between, a constant flux of borders and identities. Europe is just another creole society and there is nothing to be ashamed in that.

Border people can often be a particularly mixed lot. Border people survive not just by resisting but also by accommodating and syncretizing (which is why, for example, Celtic people of today are Christians rather than having remained Pagans). I have ancestors from both endpoints of Roman expansionism, on the continent and in Britain. This is why the topic has come to my attention. I hadn’t previously realized how important are border people. It is border people who prove how malleable and permeable are the concepts of borders.

A border is a meeting point and hence a mixing and joining place… or so they have been for the hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution, prehistorical and historical, prior to the rise of modern nation-states. The highly militarized borders of today are a recent invention. Such borders are unnatural, thus requiring massive amounts of wealth, technology and manpower to enforce on human reality and on the physical landscape. The toll is costly, both in terms of taxes and human misery. Such costs of maintaining borders has always been a main contributing factor in the demise of all those with imperial aspirations. It just ends up costing too much and is in the end unsustainable.

Spain and Portugal is another border region and the Basque another border people. Border people often survive and fight back by residing in mountainous or swampy areas, the  former for the Basque. The Iberian Peninsula was a place of ethnic struggle that took the form of wars between governments and religions. Most interesting were the Moors who were one of the greatest influences on the European Renaissance and hence all European culture thereafter. This is the point where Europe met Africa and back in the day Africa had some powerful, wealthy and quite advanced kingdoms.

—

As a side note, the original slave trade in Europe was targeted against the Eastern Europeans, i.e., Slavs; and it was justified because white skin was associated with social and intellectual inferiority (interestingly, even many Europeans today still look down upon Eastern Europeans, although they no longer see their pasty white skin as the reason). This Mediterranean slave trade of Europeans continued into the beginning centuries of the Atlantic slave trade of Africans. To give context, in 1602 John Smith, who later became the most famous leader of Jamestown (a later center of American slavery), was himself captured and sold as a slave to a Turk.

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Through millennia of war, slavery and trade, the people of the Iberian Peninsula are what one might fairly call a creole society.

This could be said of countries like England as well with its mix of Celtic people, several Germanic ethnicities, the Scandinavian Vikings, the Romans (who brought with them a diversity of ethnicities in their armies and among their slaves, including Africans), and the Normans (who were Romanized Germans). The other Mediterranean people like the Iberian people have never been very good at maintaining ethnic purity with all that long-distance seafaring that regularly brought foreigners right to their doorstep. If even the British so far away from continental Europe couldn’t keep themselves ethnically pure, the Southern Europeans were truly out of luck in that department.

It’s not as if the United States invented racial mixing, the dreaded miscegenation, nor even the notion of multiculturalism. Humans have been mixing it up for millennia. This is why almost the entire homo sapiens population of the earth includes the genetics of other hominid species; it was near the Mediterranean in the Levant that homo sapiens probably first bumped uglies with the Neanderthals (Jesus, if you want some good ol’ fashioned racial purity, ya better stay away from the Mediterranean Sea, that cauldron of sin and temptation; well, ya better stay away from all large bodies of water, go to the interior and go as far North as possible or at least hide out in the mountains for even swamps can be drained). We humans will hump anything that moves and sometimes things that don’t move, although only the former tends to lead to viable offspring. This is why ethnicity is such a nebulous concept and race can seem almost meaningless at times.

Nonetheless, good multiculturalist liberal that I am, I don’t want to see the end of ethnic differences, issues of racial purity aside. At the same time, I’m not a big fan of the worst traits of clannishness such as violence, nepotism, cronyism, etc. Clannishness is the polar opposite of a social democracy. You can try to have a clannish nation-state, but it will inevitably lead to a brutally oppressive society. I love and find fascinating the diversity of ethnicities, but I want to live in a world that brings out the best in ethnic cultures, not the worst. Plus, I would add that not all cultures are ethnic cultures. A multicultural culture is a culture too and a worthy one at that.

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The social and political divides in America and the Americas have their origins in the ethnic divides of Old World. The divide isn’t between whites and non-whites but between those of European descent.

There are the divides in Britain. The anti-monarchist Puritans from East Anglia who settled New England were of a more Anglo-Saxon descent and the pro-monarchist Cavaliers from Wessex who came to dominate Virginia were of Norman descent. These two separate ethnicities in England fought a civil war there and in America their descendents fought another civil war. Talk about a lack of assimilation. The clannish Scots-Irish, Scottish and Irish were also never big on assimilation; and for good reason as they found no more love here in America than they did back in Britain. In the American North, they were involved in Civil War draft riots. In the American South, they supported secession as a way of creating their own new clannish nation. Either way, not the material out of which patriotic Americans are easily made. It took centuries of weakening their clannishness before they began to lose some of their xenophobic ethnocentrism, but they still haven’t fully assimilated to the American Way and continue to pine for their Lost Cause of anti-American secession or else some romanticized ideal of their traditional culture. Give us a few more centuries and we’ll finally make good Americans out of those clannish Southerners (or not, heck if I know).

An additional European divide is less geographic, but I’ll add it here amidst these grander divides. The original European people have been swamped by the later immigrations and conquerings. These earlier people are less defined by the nation-state identities. I’ve mentioned the Basque who cross the boundary between Spain and France. More interestingly, the Irish originate from the Basque (by the way, it sounds like that although culturally similar to Celtics the Irish/Basque people aren’t genetically the same as the Celtics). The Irish are a mysterious group when considering genetics and the Black Irish, but there seems to be no absolute conclusions as of yet. Anyway, their unique origins would explain the conflict these two peoples have had with the populations that surround them. These are particularly clannish people who have attempted to maintain local self-governance and ethnic identity in the face of those who wish to impose upon them from the outside (i.e., the great empires of Spain, France and England). These clannish people declared a forceful ‘no’ to assimilation. The Basque republican independence even helped to inspire early American political thinking (see here).

Another European divide of the more starkly geographic variety is that between Northern and Southern Europe which is based on the boundary of the Roman Empire. The Roman culture has its connection to Britain with the Cavaliers who were of Norman descent and so the American South can partly be seen as the long-lasting influence of the Roman Empire which could be seen in the South’s imperialist aspirations leading up to the Civil War, imperial aspirations that spread all the way through Mexico, down into Central America and to Caribbean islands such as Cuba (Southerners dreamed big, ya gotta give them that). The American North, on the other hand, was populated by people (including Germans and Scandinavians) who were less influenced by the Roman Empire and by the Mediterranean cultures in general.

Yet another divide existed within Southern Europe. The other great power in this region were the Moors. For many centuries, they ruled Portugal, Spain, and Andorra along with parts of France and Italy. Hispania was the name the Romans gave to the Iberian Peninsula where the Moors later had their most power and influence and this is the etymological origin of Spain. The origin of the Hispanics of the Americas originates from this region of Hispanic Europe. Genetic testing even shows how different this population is from the rest of Europe.

—

The Southern Europe angle is so fascinating because it partly mirrors the early development of Southern North America.

The Iberian Peninsula extends south toward Africa like Mexico in relation to the black-populated Central and South America. There are the mixed-race/ethnicity Hispanics with their open range cowboy culture brought from Spain and the Romanized Germanic Norman Cavaliers with their feudalist-like slave society (ignoring the uncertainty of how many of the Cavaliers actually descended from Norman aristocracy; certainly there were plenty of actual titled British nobility among them, whatever their ancestry). One could think of the Gulf of Mexico as the American version of the Mediterranean Sea, both areas of vast multiculturalism and creole societies and both areas of conflict-ridden ethnic rivalries. And one could think of South America with its large African-descended population as the twin of Africa, both places ravaged by centuries of colonial exploitation and imperial oppression, not to mention the Atlantic slave trade.

The multiculturalism of the US isn’t a failure of having lost our supposed European traditional values. If there is a failure, it is because we mimicked the long (and often conflicted, war torn even) multicultural history of Europe. The US is the seeming inevitable extension of how Europe has been evolving over the past thousand years or so. You reap what you sow or rather what your forefathers sowed.

—

I want to further follow the Hispanic issue into American history, but I think the best way to do that is by considering the Quakers.

My favorite descendant of Quakers was Thomas Paine. His father was a Quaker and his mother was an Anglican, but it was his father who was the main influence in guiding his education and ensuring he had instilled him the Quaker values of plain speech and practical knowledge. Interestingly, Paine grew up in East Anglia, the original hotbed of the Puritans. It was also an area that had experienced a lot of the enclosure movement.

The enclosures were designed to end the commons. Both Quakers and Puritans put great value on the commons. The Quakers were concentrated in the North Midlands which had a long history of Viking and Norse settlements (but I noticed that Quakers also had some concentration in an area of Wales where the American Midlands socialist Robert Owen came from). The Vikings, as I recall, gave them a proto-feminism and the Norse gave them a proto-democracy. The commons wasn’t just a place for people to graze their animals and gather wood. The commons was also where the common folk met to debate and vote on issues, most often about their community. Americans were carrying on this tradition in the North during the Revolutionary Era and it continues to this day.

Paine was coming of age when the full effect of enclosures were being felt. When he visited London, he saw the masses of land dispossessed who had been forced into the cities. The commons had allowed for Lockean land rights and hence subsistence living. The enclosures left people homeless and starving. So, before coming to the colonies, Paine saw the first labor unions forming and the first working class protests.

I bring this up because the same conservatives who wrongly argue about the tragedy of the commons also argue about tighter border control. The conservative mind loves boundaries and wants everything enclosed and controlled, typically by the perceived moral elite (and failing that, the political and plutocratic elite, same difference right?). The fear was that if the common people were democratically allowed to govern themselves and control their own lives they would mess everything up and destroy all that is good about society.

Quakers for their time were quite liberal which in their case meant they had great faith in the common people (and, from the common people’s perspective, an unwillingness to govern others). This is the basis of the pluralistic Midlands that combined pansy liberal values such as feminism and pacifism with more hardcore liberal values of left-libertarianism and direct democracy. The love of democracy, especially social democracy, is what eventually allied the Midlands with Yankeedom, but Midlands never fully got on board with the Puritan-originated melting pot assimilationist program.

Pluralism is an odd way to do borders. The Quakers neither sought to enforce borders nor to destroy them. They simply left them up to communities. So, in the Midlands, you will find ethnic enclaves and islands while also finding varying degrees of mixed up populations. It was the ideal of freedom of association (or not if one so desired).

—

The Midlands became so important to American identity, the Heartland, because of the way it moderated the extremes and lessened the distance between differences.

The Quakers weren’t against assimilation, just against oppressively enforced assimilation. In the end, the Quaker Midlands (with some major help from New Netherlands/New York) have been more successful at assimilating ethnic immigrants into American society than either the oppressively enforced assimilation of New England or the oppressively enforced assimilation of the Deep South. The Midlands inspires ethnic immigrants to assimilate themselves by making clear to them that they aren’t the enemy and that they have a place in American society. Build enough public institutions like public schools and most people, the clannish aside, will assimilate themselves in a generation or two, sometimes several generations.

The Midwest is the Midlands which was settled by the Quakers who were middle class immigrants from the English Midlands. Hamlin Garland referred to the Midwest as the Middle Border. That captures the essence of some truth. Between Yankees and Southerners, Midlands is part of the region of the original Middle Colonies (along with the former New Netherlands colony). It was the border territory between settlements and frontier, eventually extending by way of immigration and settlement patterns down into upper Texas and up into lower Canada (the only cultural region that connects South and North). This is the Middle West, between the East Coast and the West Coast, the flyover country one passes over going from one place to another. It is the middle of America, including the geographic center of the contiguous United States along with the median and mean center of the United States population.

The Middle Colonies and the Midwest is so symbolically important in American history for many reasons. It was a meeting point of empires with the Penn’s Quaker colony with its largely German immigrants, the Dutch colony of New Netherlands with a diverse population, the New Sweden colony that later was incorporated into New Netherlands, and the Native American allied French Empire extending along the edge of the Middle colonies. It was also where most new immigrants arrived and settled or else passed through on their way westward. It is where some of the most centrally located multicultural big cities: New York City, Philadelphia, and Chicago (all three in the top 5 most populous cities in the US).

This middle region of the US is where cultures mixed. It has maybe the most ethnic enclaves and ethnic islands in the entire country. The only other region that competes is that of the Northern border region of the Spanish Empire, the region where met Hispanics, Native Americans, French, Africans, and all the mix of people going west and south from the British colonies.

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Spain and the Spanish Empire played a similar role of a meeting ground of peoples and cultures.

As I’ve pointed out, even before they sought to colonize the Americas and import African slaves, the Spanish people back in Europe were already mixing it up. Beyond the Basque, there are numerous native ethnic groups with their own non-Spanish languages. Even the Roma are considered a native people in Spain where they live as an autonomous community in Andalusia. Spain has a multicultural tradition that has existed for a long time and continues to this day:

“As of 2010, there were over 6 million foreign-born residents in Spain, corresponding to 14% of the total population. Of these, 4.1 million (8.9% of the total population) were born outside the European Union and 2.3 million (5.1%) were born in another EU Member State.^[1]

“Because of its location in the Iberian Peninsula, the territory comprising modern Spain has always been at the crossroads of human migration, having harboured many waves of historical immigration. The Spanish Empire, one of the first global empires and one of the largest in the world, spanned all inhabited continents and throughout the years people from these lands emigrated to Spain in varying numbers.”

I wonder if this history as a geographic crossroads helped Spain become such a major empire controlling so many different ethnic groups and mixed populations. As a people, I’d assume they had a fair amount of familiarity with dealing with diversity along with the related issues of inter-ethnic conflict, pluralistic tolerance and national assimilation.

Their way of dealing with it, however, doesn’t seem to be exactly like how the English dealt with it in their similar history of diversity. I’m not overly familiar with the Spanish Empire, but I have been reading more about Hispanic culture here in the Americas. Among the Hispanic population, there is the idea of mestizo which as a general concept is less about the crossbreeding of supposed separate races than it is about the cultural culmination where ethnicities meet. In discussing this in Mestizo Democracy: The Politics of Crossing Borders, John Francis Burke pointed out a false dichotomy that typically polarizes debate (Kindle Locations 180-184):

“As was the case with the individual v. community dichotomy, assimilationism v. separatism presumes there are only two possibilities-a universal, uniform community identity or particular intense cultural identities. Behind this presumption lies the notion of cultural identity as a possession to be preserved and not as a fluid relationship in which a culture is both affected by constant new influences and, reciprocally, affects or shapes those influences. Just as the intersubjective basis of human relations dissovles the wall between the individual and the community, so the logic of distinguishing a universal generic community from particular dense cultures disintegrates once we acknowledge that cultures continually interpenetrate and transform one another and that any articulation of a universal political community is connected to this vibrant interchange among its particular cultural groups.

Burke then concludes the chapter with the following (Kindle Locations 282-286):

“A just unity-in-diversity thus entails the pursuit of the following two questions. What are the conditions under which diverse cultural groups can even begin to dialogue? How can marginalized groups gain genuine access-without emasculating their respective cultures in the process-to the political, social, and economic decision-making structures that in large part affect their destinies? Given the import of such questions, a mestizo democracy is hardly a saccharine celebration of multiculturalism. Rather it is a politics of “crossing borders” that considers how cultures can realize their respective distinctiveness in interaction with other cultures while simultaneously engendering a just, substantive political community in which the dignity of `others’ is not marginalized.”

As is made clear, Burke isn’t just talking about the relationship between Americans and Mexican immigrants. It’s also about Hispanics who have been here since before the Texas Revolution and the Mexican-American War. It’s even more generally about every ethnic group, including those of European ancestry and those who are first generation immigrants from all over.

The problem with Borg-style assimilation is that even most white Americans of colonial era ancestry don’t want to be told that they will be assimilated and that resistance is futile. I dare you to go to some small rural Southern community and tell the people there that in order to be real Americans they have to fully assimilate to the standard culture, lifestyle and way of speaking as shown on US mass media. I double-dog dare you!

This is why I speak of pluralism, whether done in the style of mestizo or the middle colonies. I’m fond of the Midlands style because it is an example of unity-in-diversity that exists at the heart of the American identity. This pluralism isn’t a foreign concept. It is America itself, if anything is America at all.

—

Even we white people are more genetically mixed up (not just among European ethnicities) than we’d like to admit, but it isn’t the end of the world. We’ve survived as a country this long and so far our diversity has been our strength. What does race even mean in the land of the American mutt?

I was noticing an article about Vanessa Williams who in American society is considered African-American (for example, a big deal was made at the time that she was the first African-American to be crowned Miss America). In the article, it describes the results of genetic testing she had done. Her results were: “23% from Ghana, 17% from the British Isles, 15% from Cameroon, 12% Finnish, 11% Southern European, 7% Togo, 6% Benin, 5% Senegal and 4% Portuguese.” She is almost evenly split between European and African genetics, but she does look like what people in America think of as black with darker skin and thick dark hair. Nonetheless, it would be about as correct to call her a European-American. If you were to compare her to a full-blooded African, she would look quite European indeed.

Are our arguments about race really about percentages? So, if a black person or Hispanic person can prove they have more than 50% European genetics, we’ll let them into the white club? If so, there are a lot of people perceived as non-white who should be considered white. However, if having a drop (or even quite a few drops) of non-European blood means a person isn’t white, we’ll have to kick a bunch of Americans out of the white club.

If it isn’t about race but some judgment of an ethnic culture as inferior, then why do we continue to allow rural Southern Scots-Irish to be a part of the American experiment. Objectively speaking, they are dragging us all down. They’ve resisted assimilation, just as white Americans accuse minorities. They are violent, just as white Americans accuse minorities. They have massive social problems, just as white Americans accuse minorities. So, why are so many white Americans, specifically conservatives, reluctant to fairly bring the same accusations against another so-called white American group?

I’d argue that even Hispanics are more assimilable than the Scots-Irish have proven to be. The Scots-Irish at least received the benefit of the doubt and we tried to assimilate them. Few white Americans ever gave the Hispanics such benefit of the doubt extending over the centuries. How can Hispanics prove they are American enough when the bar keeps getting raised for them according to the typical racist double standard? Besides, it was we white Americans who invaded their land first and annexed it with Hispanics already living there. Why are we white Americans complaining about people remaining on their people’s land after we’ve taken it?

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Let me continue my thought by quoting from an HBD article:

Law Alone?
by Audacious Epigone

“The paradox presented here for many like myself is that the places inspiring the warmest feelings and that I would like most to live in are the places that tend to put the least effort into maintaining what they have. It’s tragic. It doesn’t strike me as overly cynical to presume that this is almost inevitable, as though liberalism doesn’t know when or where to stop and just keeps cruising along the progressive highway past the promised land and over the cliff. [ . . . ]

What of birthright citizenship? Our own 14th amendment has been read by the courts in such a way that if one is able to spawn somewhere in the country, through hook, crook or otherwise, then said spawn is, jus soli, a child of the land he was born on.”

To my mind, this is the voice of someone who just doesn’t get it, not to say that I don’t sympathize with the complaint (yes, the evolving multicultural world has lots of problems).

I would argue that the reason those countries inspire the warmest feelings is because they are open societies (i.e., liberal democracies). Take the liberal away by making them closed societies and what makes them great in the first place would be almost instantly destroyed. This is all the more true for the US which was closer to being an ethnic nation-state prior to the European invasion and it’s been going in the opposite direction ever since.

I have one ancestor (of European descent) who was born in Kentucky before the American Revolution. This was at a time when the British had a treaty that forbade settlers from living there. So, not only were some of my white ancestors illegal immigrants, but they had an anchor baby as well.

My ancestors were far from unusual. It was because of all those law-breaking immigrants, especially the Scots-Irish, that the British (and later the US government) struggled to maintain order and maintain the border. Those early Scots-Irish make the worst Mexican undocumented workers of today look like angels. If not for those trouble-making rebellious clannish ethnics, it is a lot less likely that many of the wars and revolutions would have happened here. We might now be as peaceful and moderate as Canada without those violent, crime-ridden Scots-Irish constantly forcing the hand of authority. I’ve entertained the idea that a significant part of the Civil War was a clannishly ethnic refusal to assimilate, specifically as the South lost political influence and the Northern Melting/Stew Pot American Dream became predominant. Even so, these centuries later we Americans finally assimilated the Scots-Irish, more or less. In doing so, we broke their clannish spirit by making them Americans and they are nearly respectable at this point. If we can assimilate the Scots-Irish, we can assimilate anyone.

I’m picking on the Scots-Irish just to make a point, but I have nothing against them any more than I have against any other ethnicity. Every immigrant group has its strengths and weaknesses. The strength of America is precisely because we have a diversity of strengths and hence don’t share the same weaknesses. Besides, it’s kind of pointless talking about Scots-Irish or Hispanic or whatever. Most Americans have a little bit of many ethnicities in them.

If we white Americans WASPs don’t like multiculturalism, then we should give back to the Dutch, Swedish, French, Spanish and Native Americans their respective colonies and territories. Otherwise, shut up and be a good American mutt, whether a mutt in terms of genetics or cultures. Or else don’t and instead be a clannish regionalist (or even isolationists like the Amish), yet another good ol’ American tradition. I suppose we have space for all types here in America.

Live and let live, like good Quaker Friends.

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Here are some posts that have got me thinking lately, the first four being from hbd chick and involving my discussions with her in the comments section:

http://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2012/01/18/the-happiest-healthiest-community-in-the-u-s/

http://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2013/07/12/american-nations/

http://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2013/07/12/clannish-or-not/

http://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2012/09/23/civicness-in-spain-by-region/

http://www.craigwilly.info/2013/07/07/emmanuel-todds-linvention-de-leurope-a-critical-summary/

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Additional thought the day after writing this:

I’m a Midlander and so I’m biased. I declare this without apology. I’m proud that the Quaker pluralist vision has become so dominant in America and that the pluralist American Dream has become so widely influential in the world. I’m a proud American, dammit!

I like this American experiment that has been going on for centuries now. Why stop it now because the world is changing? America has always been about change, for good or ill. We’ve been dealt this hand and I say let us play it to its conclusion. It’s an experiment, after all. What fun is an experiment if you end it before you find out how it turns out?

Otherwise, I have no strong opinion about ethnocentric nation-states. I don’t care if other countries want to try that experiment. More power to them. I love experiments of all kinds. Let us have a contest. They with their ethnocentric experiment and we with our pluralistic experiment.

I’d point out that all the great empires were multiculturalists in their own way. I’m not a big fan of empires in and of themselves, but I suspect it is too late for the US to be anything other than an empire at this point. Our forefathers made their choices and we (and the coming generations) are forced to face the consequences. Maybe we can be a new kind of empire. The US has definitely stepped up its game from previous attempts at imperialism.

I feel a bit parochial in my defense of the Midlands. I’m not a clannish regionalist, but neither am I a devil-may-care universalist of the mainstream liberal variety. I like my region, partly because it doesn’t hold itself above all the other regions.I like the very idea of regions along with the uniqueness and diversity that goes along with them Why does arguing for the merits of one thing seem inevitably to make one appear as disparaging all else? That is the opposite of what I’m trying to do with my vision of the Mestizo Midlands.

So, I mean not criticism of the ethnocentric among us, in the larger world or even here in the good ol’ US of A.

Part of me is with Paine (and some other founding fathers) in feeling like a citizen of the world. To be an American is to be something greater and more inclusive than a mere citizen of a nation-state. America is the only country in the world that includes large numbers of people from nearly every country and ethnicity in the world, excepting a few isolated tribal people maybe.

I should mention that this post has nothing directly to do with the larger perspective of HBD proponents, beyond the brief mention of HBD with one quote, most especially not directly about the views of hbd chick, although discussions with her motivated some of my thinking. The HBD view of culture is slightly different than how I’m using it here. I’m not really talking a whole lot about such things as family patterns or even the more intricate details of geography and its impact.

I tend to come from a view that sees culture as an unknown factor. We don’t know where it comes from for its origins are in the mists of prehistory, but we can speak of what maintains culture in the present (and speculate about the known history).

I’m a namby-pamby liberal in my love of vague concepts like ‘culture’. I see human nature and human society as an amorphous set of factors. We can speak of concrete correlates to culture, but they aren’t culture. The closest metaphor is the difference between hardware and software, however extremely imperfect that metaphor is.

Let me put it like this. In hunting, you want to capture the prey your after. So, you follow the signs such as animal poop. But, as Pat McManus wrote, “Well, you can’t eat sign.”

My Inheritance, North and South

Inheritance is an odd thing.

We take on so much from others and from the world around us. Most of the time we aren’t even aware of it. We are just who we are. We think of ourselves as indidviduals with lives built up from choices we’ve made, but ultimately we are just a conglomeration of factors that came together in a unique way, none of the factors being what we can take credit for. We may have some choice in the arrangement, not necessarily much else.

I’ve thought about this in many ways. As I’ve aged, I’ve become increasingly aware of how much I’m a product of my environment, a result of the past. This life I was given certainly wasn’t of my own choosing, even if not to claim being a mere victim of circumstance. It’s more of an experience of being humbled by how immense and complex is the world. All of society (countries, ethnicities, communities, religions, families, etc) has been built up over centuries and millennia, shaped by the hands of forgotten generations of people.

The most obvious inheritance is that of genetics. Through genetics or other pathways, I’ve inherited all kinds of personality traits, cognitive patterns and behavioral tendencies. I’ve also inherited much from the culture around me, from being a part of Western civilization and specifically from being a descendant of immigrants from Northern Europe and the British Isles, from being a citizen of the United States which is a country that arose directly out of Enlightenment thinking, from having been brought up in the New Thought Christian Unity Church which itself came out of the Evangelical tradition during the Populist Era, from being born into Generation X as the Cold War was coming to an end, from being raised a Midwesterner right dab in the middle of the origin of Standard American English, from having spent many years of my formative youth and young adulthood in the South, etc.

There is, of course, an endless list of things I could add. It’s hard to imagine who I’d be if I changed even a single one of those factors.

Let me share more specific examples.

I have my mom’s scatterbrained mind with a certain kind of mental focus that has the potential for being nearly obsessive-compulsive. I have my dad’s intellectual curiosity and emotional sensitivity, of which he inherited from his parents; and apparently somewhat skipping a generation I manifest his mother’s spiritual sensibility and predisposition of laziness/efficiency along with shyness and a need for privacy/personal space, although my social awkwardness also seems to come from my mom. I have a large helping of depression and moodiness from both sides of my family. Sadly, I have a bit of an unforgiving nature and occasional interpersonal bluntness which goes along with the depression and moodiness of my mom’s family.

As for physcial attributes: I definitely have the features of my mom’s family, mostly seeming Germanic: large bones, big feet, long toes and fingers, thick hair, hazel eyes, bump on the ridge of my nose, and receding chin. But when younger I had features from my dad’s family (Steele) which seem more English such as straight, blonde hair, although oddly when really young I had eyes slanting in the way common with Asians.

For whatever reason, my mom’s genetics seem to be overall more pronounced in me. I do feel more of a connection with my mom’s family, partly just because I saw them more often growing up. I must admit that I have mixed feelings about the Clouse family on my mom’s side. Her dad was definitely a patriarch and acted that way (her mother playing the submissive wife). He was an alcoholic which was probably his way of self-medicating depression. I can understand the self-medication part and I understand the addictive aspect of alcoholism, although alcohol has never been my preferred addiction.

I was particularly thinking about the Clouse tendency toward grudges that go on for years. I know I have some of this capacity as well and I’m not proud of it. It’s very sad the kind of impact it has had on my mom’s family. Her brothers and her dad were always fueding and sometimes refusing to speak to one another.

My mom’s dad didn’t even know the name of his grandparents and I suspect the reason for it wasn’t a happy incident. Interestingly, a lady on ancestry.com contacted me who is related on my mom’s side through two separate lines, Clouse and Edwards, which makes her both a third and fourth cousin of my mom on each of those lines. My maternal grandfather’s (Charles Eugene Clouse) grandfather was Charles E. Clouse who married Lucy Hawk. This person from ancestry.com is descended from James Clouse who was the uncle of Charles E. Clouse and who married Lula Hawk, Lucy’s sister.

(For anyone interested: The Clouse lineage descends from James Wesley Clouse of Kentucky and the Hawk lineage descends from Sampson Hawk of New Jersey. I figured both family lines were of German origin, but there are family rumors of Hawks having Indian blood and there is a photograph supposedly of Lula Hawk that could be interpreted as showing some Native American features. As for the Edwards lineage, this lady from ancestry.com and I share the same converging three lines. One descends from Hiram Edwards of Connerley Switch, Indiana whose father may have been from or at some time living in Kentucky. The other two descend through Thursie Mae Edwards of Indiana whose father was David B. Edwards of North Carolina and grandfather was Young Edwards of North Carolina and, on her mother’s side, whose grandmother’s mother was Susan Edwards of North Carolina, possibly descending from another David Edwards of North Carolina. Hiram Edwards’ son, Charles Lester Edwards, married Thursie Mae Edwards. The three Edwards lines then converged in their daughter, Inez Rosemary Edwards, who married Willie Clouse, the son of Charles E. Clouse. They also had another daughter, Jessie Ann Edwards, who is the person who is the ancestor of the ancestry.com lady. Thus, the Clouse and Edwards lines came together in at least two separate marriages just as did the Clouse and Hawk lines.)

This lady and I began corresponding about these links. I mentioned to her about my grandfather Clouse not knowing the names of his own grandparents and I told her about the Clouse inclination toward grudges. Her dad is a Clouse and she mentioned that her part of the Clouse family had the same inclination, her father not talking to his sister for years and not going to his sister’s funeral.

So, separate parts of the same family, unknown to one another in recent generations, manifested the same character trait. I’m sure at least some of it is genetics, but I doubt all of it is. I was wondering if it could be partly cultural. My mom’s family spent many generations in Hoosier Southern Indiana and before that many generations in Appalachia Kentucky. Their inclination toward grudges could be explained by the Southern culture of honor.

My mom’s dad was a very giving person, but it was the type of giving that established a hierarchical and paternalistic relationship for he would never accept charity from anyone else. He expected gratitude and deference for his gifts, maybe even a sense of indebtedness. He wanted to be respected and worked hard to escape the poverty of his working class family. As such, he wanted to be treated with respect and not be challenged. To have his authority, position or opinion challenged couldn’t just be forgiven and forgotten.

Maybe there is some predisposition of this in me, but it doesn’t manifest in this exact same way. I do have a mental checklist where I keep tabs on what people do and don’t do, say and don’t say; I can’t help it for such details of behavior just stick in my memory. And when someone crosses some particular line, I can be one of the most unforgiving people in the world. The difference maybe is that I didn’t grow up in that Southern/Appalachian honor culture and so my grudge-keeping tends to be more mild and suppressed.

It is the Southern/Appalachian culture with which I’ve tried to come to terms. It goes beyond my extended family. I too am partly a Southerner. Despite my self-idenifying as a Midwesterner and chosing Iowa as my home, I must admit that the South shaped me as well and probably in ways I’m unaware of. From 8th grade to graduation, I lived in South Carolina and went to desegregated public schools. I didn’t even know that regional differences existed prior to that time and it was a shock to my system when I first moved there, but after a while it became normal to me. I spent many years in the South following that time while in college in South Carolina and while working in the buckle of the Bible Belt in North Carolina.

So, my experience of the South is very personal. My best friend was a redneck and I dated a girl who came from a hillbilly lineage (I don’t use those terms in a disparaging way). I even learned to talk Southern. I used to fall into a Southern dialect without even trying, especially when talking to my redneck friend. To this day, I can unintentionally speak in that dialect for brief moments.

I am and I am not a Southerner. There is both much that I like and much that I dislike about the South.

It’s because of my personal experience, both North and South, that I’ve come to self-consciously identify as a Midwesterner. The South is part of me, but I know that I’m not fully a part of the South. I don’t know it in the way someone knows it who was born and raised there, who lived there for their entire life.

Plus, I never experienced the full reality of what the Deep South once was. I arrived on the scene long after the Civil Rights movement. In high school, I knew kids who dated across the race line and it didn’t seem like a big deal. But hints of the Old South were still around such as my best friend’s mom referring to blacks as “niggers”. I was living in Columbia, South Carolina which is much more cosmopolitan. And in North Carolina, I lived near Asheville which is fairly liberal and alternative, especially for that area.

However, I know the Carolina region of the South better than I know the Mississippi Delta over to the Southern Border. My dad’s mom was born in Texas, lived in Oklahoma until her early teens, and went to high school in Mississipi. She then went back to Oklahoma for college and after that taught for some years in Mississippi and Georgia.

She died when I was so young that I hardly remember her and I’ve never visited any of those places she lived in prior to her moving to Indiana. So, the culture of that area isn’t familiar to me and didn’t influence me in any direct way.

Even as a Northerner, I know the Carolina region of the South better than the entire Northeast. My dad’s dad grew up in New England. But I’ve never visited there either. The closest I’ve come to New England is living in Iowa City which is a New England style college town (i.e., a small town dominated by a single college and surrounded by rural farmland).

My inheritance from my dad’s family feels rather skimpy on the cultural front. Identifying as a Midwesterner, one would think I’m culturally more similar to my Grandmother’s Oklahoma and my Grandfather’s New England… and maybe I am in some gneral ways, but those states aren’t part of my most personal sense of America. I don’t culturally identify as a Southerner in any broad sense and yet the South is intimately connected to who I am, even though I sometimes use it as a contrast to clarify my Midwestern sensibility.

I have lived in Iowa longer than anywhere else. Iowa is unique as part of the Lower Midwest. It is the only Lower Midwest state that isn’t on the borderlands of Appalachia and the only Lower Midwest state to be West of the Mississippi. Just follow the river south and there is the Mississippi Delta (much cultural diffusion went up and down the Mississippi river, in particular the 1927 flood in the Mississipi Delta sent many blacks to the North). Also, Iowa is the Lower Midwest state that is the most influenced by the Yankiedom of the Upper Midwest. The culture of Iowa is massively different than that of South Carolina. The only way to feel culturally further away from South Carolina would be to move to the West Coast.

Generation after generation, my mom’s family slowly drifted westward and northward. Finally, with my brothers and I, our family fully escaped the remnants of Southern culture that pioneers had carried with them into parts of the Midwest such as Indiana. I blissfully was ignorant of the South up to the beginning of my teens, but then my parents brought the family all the way down to the Deep South.

Moving to the South made me self-conscious about regional cultures from a fairly young age. Still, I didn’t begin to feel the depth of the differences until I got a summer job at a YMCA camp in North Carolina. As it was a YMCA, I was surrounded by Christians which in and of itself didn’t bother me. However, as it was in the Bible Belt, I was surrounded by Fundamentalists which made understand how far was the religious right or at least how far right were some of those part of the religious right. The religious right was a worldview that was outside my zone of familiarity. Living in the South, I heard the fire-and-brimstone preaching on the radio, but I had no direct contact with it. The girl I dated there was from a Fundamentalist family. Talking to her family gave me my first experience of a culture that seemingly had little respect for or interest in intellectuality and the broader world of knowledge.

After spending three consecutive summers at that YMCA camp, I permanently moved back to Iowa. In the following years, I was still visiting my parents and the contrast of the two worlds slowly formed into a distinct sense of difference about these cultures. Maybe I was becoming more influenced by the political moderateness of the Midwest and maybe I was becoming more influenced by the liberalism of Iowa City. At the same time, it seemed even more clear that my parents were becoming more stridently conservative the longer they lived in South Carolina. My parents were losing their Midwestern moderateness, although never coming close to the radicalism of God n’ Guns Fundamentalism.

Now, my parents have also moved back to Iowa City. I see them regularly which hasn’t been the case since the mid 1990s. We’ve been coming to terms with our differences which at times has been challenging, but other similarities have made it less difficult. This process, along with recent genealogical research, has forced me to also come to terms with these differences within myself.

How do I grasp all these influences? How do I contain within myself such diversity? What exactly have I inherited?

Patchwork Nation: Evangelical Epicenters & Tractor Country

I was perusing a book I’ve had for a while, Our Patchwork Nation by Dante Chinni and James Gimpel.

I don’t think I’ve written about it before, but it is an interesting book that fits in with much I have written about. The following passage comes from the last chapter on culture, and in reading about it I was reminded of some previous thoughts about Midwestern culture. It took me well into my adulthood before I could grasp this Midwestern sense of community-mindedness.

Unfortunately, the authors don’t go as deeply into the origins of this cultural difference. They don’t consider, for example, the larger history of ethnic immigrations (in this context, the Scots-Irish culture of Appalachia and the Northern European culture of the Midlands). Nonetheless, the data and analysis they offer is compelling.

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“In the Evangelical Epicenters it’s not just that there are many adherents; it’s that they come mostly from one particular faith tradition. Nearly half of the people who live in these places are members of some kind of Evangelical Protestant church, all of which share the key belief that faith and salvation are highly personal experiences.

“That affects the local culture. Congregations here tend to be communities unto themselves, concerned foremost with the care of their own members. One pastor in our representative Epicenter of Nixa told us that his church doesn’t have as much to give the greater community because there is so much need within his own congregation. That attitude is clearly shared by others: Nixa is full of churches and congregations, but they don’t tend to organize into larger interfaith groups. That more personal understanding of God and religion may also have something to do with those places’ attitude toward governing, which tends to put individual rights first.

“Tractor Country, which looks a lot like the Evangelical Epicenters in terms of its vote, has a very different religious makeup. These small communities are a mix of different Christian sects. The percentage of evangelicals here is a fraction of what it is in the Epicenters, even though Tractor Country has roughly the same number of religious adherents. These communities are mostly mainline Protestant, with a significant population of Catholics, as well. In general, these mainline churches are more open to ecumenical dialogue. They also tend have greater top-down organization than the evangelical denominations that predominate the Epicenters. It’s easier to coordinate churches that have built-in power structures: It involves talking to fewer people.

“Working together is an important part of life in agricultural Tractor Country. In our representative community of Sioux Center, people take an active interest in their neighbors’ lives, helping out when they need to. In Sioux Center, a town of 6,500 people, many of whom are members of one or another offshoot of the Dutch Reformed Church, money is raised with relative ease and bond issues are passed to build things for the larger community. Here the community comes before the congregation.”

Appalachia Meets Midlands: My Kentucky & Indiana Family History

I spent this past week with my parents in Southern Indiana doing genealogy research on my mom’s side of the family. We were staying at Spring Mill State Park and doing some research in nearby Mitchell at the courthouse and the historical museum. Most of my time was spent in Lawrence County, although some of the cemeteries we visited were in Orange County as well.

This was the second genealogical trip I took with my parents. The last visit to Southern Indiana was just a year ago. I knew very little about my family at that time and now I know a lot. I find it fascinating, but I realize talking about family history is not dissimilar to telling someone about your dreams. Most people aren’t interested.

Anyway, let me explain why it fascinates me. I’ve been reading a lot of history in recent years. Most of it has been focused on the colonial and revolutionary eras of North America, but I’ve been studying all the history that led up to that and the larger context of events. On a smaller scale, I’m curious about my mom side of the family that is a mix of early immigrants who were mostly poor ethnic types (Germans, Scottish, Scots-Irish, etc). They weren’t English. They weren’t landed aristocracy. They were the desperate poor (mostly farmers, distillers, and laborers) who sought freedom and opportunity on the frontier as the frontier moved into Kentucky and then into Indiana.

Of course, someone of Native American ancestry or even of French ancestry would describe this very differently. My forefathers and foremothers took possession of land that was formerly occupied. And Indiana where my parents come from was the location of the last great battle where Native Americans tried to hold their ground. It’s a sad history all around, sad and fascinating.

My exploration of family history has been an exploration of my feelings about what it means to be an American. I’ve always identified as a Midwesterner which to me feels like ‘normal’, simply what America means. It’s the freaking Heartland. However, when I moved to South Carolina in 8th grade, I was sometimes jokingly referred to as a Yankee. I had no concept of what a Yankee was at that time. Even now living back in the Midwest for many years, I don’t think of myself as a Yankee. I’m a Midwesterner from the lower Midwest. This is the Midlands, the extension of the Quaker colony in Pennsylvania. This isn’t Yankiedom of Puritan origins.

Many of the lower Midwestern states are split between Midlands and Appalachia, the two regions immigrants traveled to at great risk in order to escape the competing powers of Yankiedom and the Deep South. My mom’s maiden name is Clouse which is Germanic and most German immigrants found Midlands to be the most hospitable, but the Clouses on my mom’s side instead first came to Kentucky and then moved to Southern Indiana (Sarah Sally Walters who married William Jr. Fain, the grandfather of William Edward Clouse who was the second generation born in Kentucky, and Sarah Sally Walters was born in Kentucky in 1801; in that family line, the Clouses, Walters, Fains, Hawks, Stogsdills, Randalls, Waddles, Ashy’s, Welchs, and Hansfords were all in Kentucky in the early 1800s and some going back to the 1700; also, some of them were already in Southern Indiana before the War of 1812). My mom’s family has largely adopted the Scots-Irish culture and mentality of Appalachia. Both of my parents, however, grew up in Northern Indiana where Midlands culture is strong. I only knew of the Scots-Irish aspects of my mom’s family from visiting them since I was a child.

My time spent in South Carolina and North Carolina has given me some understanding of Scots-Irish culture. In SC, my high school best friend was a typical Scots-Irish redneck. In NC, a summer girlfriend was from a typical Scots-Irish fundamentalist hillbilly family, actually living in a trailer on a lonely country road nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains. My SC friend had Goff as his last name. I noticed that in early Kentucky records that there were many Goffs there. For what it is worth, the Scots-Irish are part of my family history and also part of my personal experience. I could judge that culture for all of its problems, but I do have a fondness for it that became most clear to me while living in NC. Besides, Appalachia is beautiful country, ticks aside.

In some ways, that culture is the complete opposite of Midlands culture and hence opposite of my Midwestern identity. On the other hand, there has been much mixing between the two cultures and they have shared the distinction of being the main battlegrounds of the American soul. I was thinking about this recently in terms of a radio show such as Coast to Coast AM which used to be hosted by Art Bell. You can hear all kinds of views on that show. Both my uncle Bob (my mom’s brother) and I have listened to it since the 1990s, yet we otherwise have little in common. He is a fundamentalist of Appalachian culture and I’m an agnostic of Midlands culture, but an interest in conspiracy theories and aliens creates a common ground. Coast to Coast AM is a show about alternative culture. The Midlands and Appalachia have always been regions of alternative culture. It is in these places that alternative religious and political communities often settled. That is what I loved about NC, the hidden pockets of odd alternative culture.

Visiting Southern Indiana brings all of this into focus. It is where my family shifted from Appalachia into the Midlands, always following where land and work could be found, generation after generation restlessly moving on in a drift Westward. All of my mom’s lines of family converged in Lawrence County (and the counties right around it, specifically Orange County and Dubois County). The Clouses and Hawks came separately and soon married, two of those marriages ending up in the Mitchell area right around or in Spring Mill back when it was still an operational mill, an infant of one of those marriages buried in the Hamer cemetery there (the Hamers being one of the rich families that moved into the area). At that time, Southern Indiana was attractive to alternative communities and many intellectuals, New Harmony being the most famous example (radical intellectuals from New Harmony would visit the pub at Spring Mill where some of my family lived and worked). It was this radical tradition of Southern Indiana that helped form the mind of Abraham Lincoln, specifically Lincoln’s being influenced by the alternative religion and politics (socialism, feminism, abolitionism, spiritualism, etc) being promoted by people such as the Owens family of New Harmony.

This was the frontier, but not the frontier as you learned about in school. People came to frontier communities for all kinds of reasons. My family would have lived amidst great cultural, ethnic, religious and political diversity.

My mom’s paternal grandfather, Willie Clouse, was born at Spring Mill. The family was still poor and at that time they were squatters. The water mill slowly died because of engine-driven mills made them obsolete. Willie married Inez Rosemary Edwards.

On that other side of the family, two lines of Edwards married and there was also another line of Edwards a few generations back from that point. Inez’s maternal great grandmother was a Toliver who lived more than a century after having come to Mitchel as a young child as part of one of the first families to settle there. She was interviewed a few years before her death and she still remembered her childhood.

It was interesting to read about that era. The Edwards and Tolivers (along with the Way and Evans families), unlike the Clouses and Hawks, went straight from North Carolina to Indiana (some of the family on both sides — Henry Sr Waddle, Elizabeth Morris, William Fain jr, Elizabeth Whicker, Catherine Cox, and Benjamin Hansford — came from Virginia instead, although some of these families were moving back and forth between North Carolina and Virginia, and a few lines came from elsewhere — Sampson Hawk from New Jersey and one line, the Cox family as I recall, can be followed back to South Carolina; my mom’s maternal side of the family is similar, but there are several lines that in the early-to-mid 1800s went straight from the ship docks to Kentucky and Indiana).

All of this research has made history more tangible to me. Spring Mill, the home of my family that is of my mom’s maiden name, is now a preserved historical site. It’s strange to visit my great grandfather’s birth place as a visitor to a park; my mom also visited it as a child and had her grandfather point out the building he claimed to be born in. History gets turned into a theme park. The mill has been fixed back up and they grind corn as a demonstration. They even have an old lady working on a loom and a blacksmith doing his thing. To be truly accurate they’d need people to represent my family as distillers and squatters.

After a few generations of industrial growth, Southern Indiana has returned to its origin in poverty. The difference is that early pioneers had land and many opportunities to better themselves, but the poor people there now are simply getting by or trying to. Southern Indiana once was a place that attracted intellectuals and industry. People like the Owens family sought to create a better world. Later on, many famous socialists and labor organizers came out of Indiana. The tide, however, has turned. No one seems to remember Indiana for the hopes and dreams people living there had for generations. You can’t understand the conservatism and fundamentalism of places like Southern Indiana without understanding this history.

Indiana makes for a useful case history. It is a place where the effects of the past are still visible. It is a place that has been in between, split between Midlands and Appalachia. It is one of the main states where the Midwest first took form as a separate culture from the East Coast states.

Like the ancestors of both my mother’s and father’s families, my parents moved on from Indiana, although their movement no longer coincided with a Westward movement. As a kid, I was forced to move around; but as an adult, I’ve chosen to stay put here in the same Midwestern town I grew to love as a child. Most of my mom’s family, unlike her, chose also to stay in the area in which they grew up in. In this age of globalization, a sense of place is taking on new meaning in context of community and family. For the average person, there no longer is a better life to be sought elsewhere. There is no new frontier land to be settled.

 

Deep South, Traditional Conservatism, & Future Possibilities

I have a bunch of thoughts rolling around in my head: the cultures of early American immigrations and colonies, the different types of liberalisms especially the differences between contemporary American liberalism and classical liberalism, the defense by liberals of traditional conservatism against fiscal conservatives, and maybe a few other things besides. I’ll begin with the issue of colonies and go from there.

I’m presently reading American Nations by Colin Woodard and was having a discussion about it. I find it quite fascinating, although it probably would only interest someone to the degree that they have had personal experience in different regions of the US.

I was reading about the Deep South and my little mind was blown. I spent many years living in and/or visiting the South Carlina cities of Columbia and Charleston, the latter being the originating point of the Deep South colony, but during my years there I was mostly oblivious to the history of the Deep South. That region has experienced massive change over the centuries and, whatever problems it may still have, it is far away from where it began.

Among the colonies, the Deep South was unique in a number of ways. It is the only colony that began explicitly as a slave society. It is also the only colony that was started by people from another colony, Barbados, upon which it was modeled. At the time, Barbados was well known for being the most violently and horrifically oppressive slave colony in the entire English-speaking world. The Barbados colonists were immensely rich, but they didn’t have any more land to be developed. So, the sons of the Barbados elite sought lands on other islands as well as coming to America. It was because they had so much wealth that they could be so brutal. It didn’t matter that their slaves had such short lives under these conditions because more could be bought with the massive profits made.

The Deep South was the wealthiest and most heavily populated colony in America. They had so much money that they even bought most of their goods from Britain and so the Deep South colony had little need for industry. Many of the plantation owners sent their children to boarding schools in England. Also, many of them lived in England themselves rather than living on their plantations. Deep South was the only colony to have major political representation in England which allowed them to keep taxation low within their own colony.

I’m not even sure how to describe this kind of society. It was as anti-liberal as is possible for a society to be while still being functional. It was a capitalist nightmare where everything operated according to property. The ruling minority at the top owned everything and everyone. All legal rights were based on property rights. I suppose it was some kind of proto-fascism, but typically fascism is seen as a response to socialism and this was long before socialism was formulated.

Deep South was similar to the Tidewater colony in that it was based on plantations using indentured servants and slaves, but it was urban where Tidewater was more rural. Deep South plantation owners built a major city and spent much of their time and money visiting it. Plus, Deep South plantation owners lacked the paternalism of the Tidwater where the plantation owners were expected to care for the needs of those working for them. Tidewater plantation owners lived on their plantations and so lived closely with their indentured servants and slaves. Tidewater was a very kinship-oriented society and so those living on a plantation were a part of the daily experience of family life. Deep South didn’t have this same intimate way of running their plantations.

Deep South was similar to the New Netherlands colony (what would become New York City) in that it was a society undemocratically centered around capitalism. New Netherlands for some time was managed by a corporation. So, both had elements of proto-fascism. One difference is New Netherlands wasn’t founded as a slave society, although it was New Netherlands that first introduced slavery to America. Another difference is that New Netherlands was a more multicultural, egalitarian society. If any colony could make a claim to bringing classical liberalism to America, it would be New Netherlands. They believed in the more modern capitalist dream of working hard in order to better one’s station in life. Unlike Deep South, many of the wealthy in New Netherlands weren’t born into wealth. Even African slaves could become freemen and operate their own farms and businesses. New Netherlands was one of the most tolerant of the colonies and Deep South was one of the least tolerant.

And Deep South was similar to the Yankiedom colony in that it was politically centralized and expansionist. It was Yankiedom and Tidewater that had the longest history of conflict that tied them both back to the conflicts in England, but it was Yankiedom and Deep South that were two most major forces in their competing visions. Yankiedom was focused on an educated middle class whereas Deep South was focused on inherited power and wealth. Yankiedom was built on democratic ideals that were inspired by the Reformation (such as mandatory public education to ensure everyone could read the Bible and have a personal relationship with God) whereas Deep South was built on republican ideals that were inspired by the slave oligarchies of the ancient world. Despite their differences, both would use military force to ensure their expansion and both could be less than welcoming to those perceived as outside of their social in-group.

By the way, I should clarify what is included within the Deep South. It started in South Carolina from which it expanded South and West mostly going through states along the Southern coast and ending its expansion in Eastern Texas. It came to occupy Georgia, for example, even though Georgia was colonized as a utopian society very different from the Deep South colony. So, even within the Deep South, there are pockets or mixings of other cultures. The Deep South is almost entirely bordered by Appalachia on its Northern side. Many people conflate Deep South and Appalachia for they both share a number of states, including South Carolina, and they both have influenced each other greatly. I suspect that it is the anti-authoritarian Appalachian culture that has been a moderating force on the formerly authoritarian Deep South culture, and I’m sure the formerly utopian Georgia culture probably had its impact as well.

Still, no matter what changes have occured, Deep South still emphasizes the view that property rights are prioritized above all else. This property rights focus is a major point of agreement Deep South has with Appalachia. There is this idea of ownership as the basis of liberty. It was the Deep South (and maybe Tidewater as well) that promoted the idea that only land owners should have the right to vote. This cultural heritage is what has formed the basis of what is now known as fiscal conservatism. It was the GOP’s Southern Strategy that brought fiscal conservatism to dominance in national politics.

I was discussing the problems and dangers of fiscal conservatism in a recent post. Events in the local city government have made me aware of how much influence fiscal conservatism has had on the nation. Even in this Yankee-style liberal college town in the moderate Midlands, the local government has turned to fiscal conservatism as the preferred solution for economic problems. Even radically progressive states like Wisconsin which is in a stronghold of Yankiedom, fiscal conservative rhetoric helped to elect some of the most radically right-wing politicians seen in a long time. In the endless struggle between the superpowers of Yankiedom and Deep South, it does at times feel like the latter has won the war of who will dominate public debate and hence determine America’s future.

My point, as a Midlander, isn’t necessarily to take sides in this war between Yankiedom and Deep South. The former doesn’t represent my sense of liberalism and the latter doesn’t represent any normal notion of traditional conservatism. In the past, traditional conservatives fought against capitalism and classical liberalism. It’s hard to find many vocal traditional conservatives left in the so-called conservative movement, especially not in the GOP itself. The demographic most strong in their traditional conservatism would be minorities who vote for the Democratic Party. The two party system isn’t split between conservatism and liberalism. Rather, it is split between neoconservatives on one side and traditional conservatives on the other, between classical liberals on one side and neoliberals on the other. Conservatives have stopped defending traditional conservatism for the most part and liberals have come to akwardly defend it.

As a Midlander, I realize the culture of the region I live in isn’t the most influential, even though some think of it as being the most ‘American’ since it is the Heartland, after all. If traditional conservatism as a viable and established culture still exists anywhere in the US, it likely would be found in small pockets in the Midlands Midwest, especially in the small Catholic farming towns in states like Iowa. The great conflict I see right now in this country is between fiscal conservatism and traditional conservatism. It is during hard economic times that Americans remember the importance of traditional conservatism (family, religion, community, regionalism, ‘sense of place’, government regulations, public welfare, etc). Maybe at this point such traditional conservatism has become nothing more than a romanticized reminiscence of and projection onto a distant past. America has never had much of a culture of traditional conservatism and probably never will, but I think it is good for Americans to think what it might mean for society facing so much change. One thing to keep in mind is that socialism is closer than capitalism to the original meaning of traditional conservatism. So, to contemplate traditional conservatism is to be forced to confront the failures and problems with capitalism.

In terms of demographics, I think minorities have the strongest connection to traditional conservatism because of two reasons, both related to the Hispanic population. First, Hispanics are some of the most strongly Catholic of Americans. Catholicism is one of the oldest Christian traditions left in the world and so it still is rooted in ancient traditions (unlike Protestantism, Anabaptism, Mormonism, New Thought, etc). Second, Spaniards were some of the first to colonize North America. Their arrival here precedes the Enlightenment by many centuries. Also, the El Norte colony/nation (in the Northern parts of Mexico, along the Southern border of the US, up along Southern California coasts, and into the Southwest) is one of the few places where European culture mixed with native culture.

Interestingly, El Norte is known for having a history of seeking democratic reform. As the Hispanic demographic is the fastest growing in America, it makes me wonder what this will mean for national politics in the future. Combined with that, I could see a further impact of blacks returning to the South in large numbers after spending generations in Midlands and Yankiedom where they incorporated that culture. I portend major culture clashes in the coming decades.

I’m not sure I have any clear conclusions to add. I was just trying to bring together that jumble of thoughts. I feel like there is such a confusion of issues going on that it may be impossible to disentangle what it all means and where it all is heading. In pointing out the problems of the early Deep South, I don’t mean to praise Yankiedom as the better alternative culture. I do think we could use more of the Yankee emphasis on education. However, I’d gladly point out the hypocrisy of Puritan egalitarianism at the heart of the Yankee vision of society. I’m personally fond of the Midlands, but I don’t know that the Midlands has much to offer that would be acceptable to the powers that be. I don’t even know if the growing minority population will lead to any positive change, but almost any change would feel better than the status quo at this point. I don’t know what potential is left in American society. My hope is that understanding the past might help break us free from the sense of cultural hegemony that can blind us from other perspectives.

Midwest vs Coasts: history, culture & politics

Often in reading about politics, my Midwestern worldview can make me feel like I’m working from a slightly different context than mainstream culture. The mainstream media tends to put issues in terms of Northeastern Democrats versus Southern Republicans or else East Coast Establishment versus West Coast Libertarianism/Liberalism. The Midwest is none of these.

I was thinking about this last night when I was reading American Nations by Colin Woodard (which I came across in my recent research that began with an earlier post). Here is one of the passages that made me think about this (Kindle Locations 2962-3053):

“New Englanders headed west across the northern tier of the Northwest Territory, land-hungry settlers from the Midlands were pouring into the central Midwest. The Midlanders—a great many of them German speaking—carried their pluralistic culture into the Heartland, a place long since identified with neighborliness, family-centered progress, practical politics, and a distrust of big government. Spanning the north-central portions of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, the Greater Midlands spread through central and southern Iowa, northern Missouri, eastern Nebraska and Kansas, and even northernmost Texas—an area many times greater than its original hearth on the shores of the Delaware Bay. Its settlements—a collection of mutually tolerant ethnic enclaves—served as a buffer between the intolerant, communitarian morality of Greater Yankeedom and the individualistic hedonism of Greater Appalachia, just as they had earlier on the eastern seaboard. New Englanders and Appalachian people often settled among them, but neither group’s values took hold. The Midland Midwest would develop as a center of moderation and tolerance, where people of many faiths and ethnicities lived side by side, largely minding their own business. Few Midwestern Midlanders were Quakers, but they unconsciously carried aspects of William Penn’s vision to fruition.”

(Note: Here in Eastern Iowa, there are a fair number of Quakers. Offhand, I know of 3 Quaker churches and a Quaker school in the immediate area. Demographic maps show a relatively higher percentage of Quakers in the Midwest, particularly in Ohio, Indiana and Iowa; where I live, Johnson County, is only a county away from one of the concentrated Quaker communities in the US, Keokuk County. However, maybe this only increased after the early immigrants came to the region. I noticed a 1914 book about Quakers in Iowa which notes, “Although the Quakers have not been numerous in Iowa, the influence of their attitude toward life has been considerable in the history of the Commonwealth.” Maybe living near a concentrated population of Quakers biases my perception of the Midwest slightly.)

“Most Midlanders reached the region on the National Road, which guided their settlement to the Mississippi and beyond. Pennsylvania Germans did their best to replicate the towns they’d left behind. New Philadelphia, Ohio, was founded by a congregation of Moravians and soon attracted German-speaking Mennonites. In Ohio, Pennsylvania Dutch dominated a fifty-mile-wide belt of farms south of the Yankee Western Reserve in settlements called Berlin, Hanover, Dresden, Frankfort, Potsdam, Strasburg, or Winesburg. Amish and Dunkers founded Nazareth, Canaan, and Bethlehem. Pennsylvania Dutch barns and United Brethren churches sprang up amid tidy farmhouses and fields of wheat. From the 1830s this familiar cultural environment attracted huge numbers of immigrants directly from Germany who congregated in Cincinnati.1

“In Indiana the Midlander belt of settlement was narrower due to their discomfort with the Appalachian dominance over the territory’s affairs. Indiana’s Borderlanders called themselves Hoosiers, came from the backcountry of Kentucky and western Virginia, and were ambivalent about slavery. But to Yankees and Midlanders they might as well have come from the Deep South. “Avoid settling in those states where negro slavery prevails,” a Philadelphia newspaper advised would-be emigrants to the west. “Your children will be corrupted by their vices and the slave lords will never treat you like Christians or fellow citizens.” To settle in Yankee-dominated Michigan or Wisconsin, meanwhile, meant putting up with the New Englanders’ irritating desire to make everyone into a Yankee. Many Midlanders did ultimately put down roots there (Milwaukee would declare itself the “German capital of America”), but they had to expend time and energy resisting Yankee attempts to close their beer gardens on the Sabbath, to force English-only public schools on their children, and to stamp out their Germanness. In the Midland zone, foreigners, Catholics, and others found a society untroubled by diversity but skeptical of slave labor, warfare, and the cult of the individual.2″

(Note: My mom’s family who were Germans would be included in the above mentioned ‘Hoosiers’. They originally settled in Southern Indiana from Kentucky, but I don’t know how long they were in Kentucky. If they had only stopped in Kentucky on there way to Indiana, they might not have picked up as much of the Appalachian culture. However, living in Southern Indiana, they inevitably picked up some of that culture. In fact, my mom raised in Northern Indiana still to this day speaks with some of the Appalachian dialect that she apparently got from her family. Anyway, from what I know of my family on that side, it would seem they took on a fair amount of the Appalachian culture, beyond just dialect. My ancestors probably would have maintained more of their own German culture had they initially settled in a more Northern or more Western region of the Midlands. Yankee culture tried to enforce assimilation, but the Scots-Irish of Appalachia weren’t known for being friendly to other cultures either.)

“Midlanders settled a swath of the north-central area of Illinois, anchored by the border cities of Chicago and St. Louis. Northern Missouri became a Midland stronghold as well, with St. Louis supporting two German-language daily newspapers by 1845. Bavarian immigrant George Schneider founded the Bavarian Brewery there in 1852, selling it to Eberhard Anheuser and Adolphus Busch a few years later. Continued immigration from Germany enabled Midland civilization to dominate the American Heartland despite competition from aggressive Yankees and Borderlanders. By midcentury, German immigrants were arriving by riverboat in St. Louis and from there fanning out across northern Missouri and the eastern prairies. Railroads followed, carrying immigrants from Europe and the coastal Midlands alike.3

“Germans had many reasons to abandon central Europe, where forty independent German states were squabbling over the great issues raised by the French Revolution: the legitimacy of feudalism, monarchies, and an economic system in which most people lived in dire poverty. Efforts to unify the region into a single state under a representative government failed in 1848, and many Germans looked to escape the military autocracy that followed. Even before the collapse of the so-called ’48 Revolution, liberals had wished for a place where they could build a New Germany, a model for the democratic, egalitarian society they had hoped their own splintered nation could become. “The foundations of a new and free Germany in the great north American republic can be laid by us,” the leader of one German colonization expedition to the American Midwest told his followers in 1833. “We may in at least one of the American territories create a state that is German from its foundations up, in which all those to whom the future here at home may seem . . . intolerable, can find refuge.” This and other expeditions were drawn to northern Missouri by the writings of Prussian-born resident Gottfried Duden, who extolled the region as a ready-made utopia. They were further encouraged by the new German Society of Philadelphia, which sought to found “a New Germany” in the west as “a secure refuge for ourselves, our children, and our descendants.” As the United States headed to the brink of civil war in the late 1850s, two leading German political analysts predicted the union would break into a number of independent states, some “under German rule.” These ideas are probably not what ultimately motivated the hundreds of thousands of ordinary Germans who actually made the move to the American Midlands, but they did provide the means for many of them to get there, in the form of useful information, organized emigration societies, and political assistance. No state would ever come close to being dominated by the German-born—Wisconsin stalled at 16 percent in 1860—but the 1830–1860 exodus from the Fatherland ensured that the diverse and tolerant Midlander civilization would come to dominate the American Heartland.4

“The flow of Quaker migrants was much smaller, but they were drawn to the Midland Midwest for similar reasons. In the early nineteenth century, Friends still sought to separate themselves from the world, and many found it harder and harder to do so on the densely populated eastern seaboard. During the course of the century, a number of Quaker enclaves outside of the Midlands relocated to Ohio and Central Indiana. Disgusted by slavery, century-old Quaker communities abandoned Tidewater and the Deep South. Indiana eclipsed Philadelphia as the center of North American Quakers in the 1850s. To this day, Richmond, Indiana, is second only to the City of Brotherly Love in total Quaker population. Nestled among communities of Germans, Scots-Irish, English Methodists, Moravians, Amish, and others, the Quakers had found a cultural landscape almost identical to that of southeastern Pennsylvania.5

“Like the Yankee Midwest, the Greater Midlands was settled by groups of families who had been neighbors on the eastern seaboard or in Europe. Unlike Yankees, they generally weren’t interested in assimilating people in neighboring communities, let alone in entire states. As in the Delaware Valley, individual towns were often dominated by a particular ethnic group, but counties tended to be pluralistic. Midwestern towns took their gridiron street plans from Pennsylvania precedents. The Germans set the tone, generally buying land with the intent to build lasting family homesteads rather than as speculative investments. They sought a permanent, organic connection to their land, taking unusual care to ensure its long-term productivity through soil and forest conservation measures first perfected on the tiny farm plots of central Europe. Whether arriving from Europe or Pennsylvania, they built their homes from stone whenever possible, as it was more durable than the wood used by the Yankees or Appalachian people.6

“Scholars have observed that the Germans insisted on entering the American melting pot collectively, on their own terms, and bearing ingredients they felt the country was lacking. Germans arriving from Europe usually had a higher standard of education, craftsmanship, and farming knowledge than most of their American neighbors, whom they found grasping and uncultured. “Americans are in their regard for art half-barbarian,” immigrant Gustave Koerner remarked in 1834, “and their taste is not much better than that of the Indian aborigines, who stick metal rings through their noses.” The Germans avoided assimilating, using their language in schools and newspapers and almost exclusively marrying other Germans as late as the 1880s. In a country rushing madly toward the frontier, the Germans distinguished themselves by their emphasis on stable, permanent, rooted communities, where families would work the same piece of land for generations. This rootedness would be perhaps their most lasting contribution to the culture of the Midlands and, by extension, the American Midwest.7″

(Note: The above is what I had in mind when I was writing yesterday my post Radicals & Reformers of Indiana. In that post, I was discussing the revisionist history that claims assimilation was the norm prior to the multiculturalism of 20th century progressivism. In reality, America was in many ways more culturally diverse and less culturally assimilated in the 19th century than it is today.)

“The people of the Midland Midwest had political values that distinguished the region from both the Yankee upper Midwest and the Appalachian lower Midwest. Midland areas resisted Yankee cultural imperialism and thus voted against the new Yankee-controlled political vehicle that emerged in the 1850s: the Republican Party. Midlanders did not wish to create a homogeneous nation: Quakers championed religious freedom, at least for Christians; new British immigrants were coming for economic opportunity, not to create an ideal Calvinist republic; Germans were accustomed to living among people of different religions. While these and other groups settling in the Midlands zone may have disliked and disagreed with one another, none sought to rule or assimilate the others beyond the town or neighborhood level. All rejected the Yankee efforts to do so.

(Note: Multiculturalism is and always has been the culture of the Midland Midwest.)

“As a result, throughout the 1850s a majority of Midlanders supported the anti-Yankee Democratic Party, which, at the time, was the party of the Deep South, Tidewater, and immigrants, especially Catholics. Democrats in this era rejected the notion that governments had a moral mission to better society, either through assimilating minorities or eliminating slavery. People—whether Deep Southern slave lords or the impoverished Irish Catholic immigrants of Boston—should be left to go about their business as they wished.

“But at the end of the 1850s this allegiance to the Democrats began to change as tensions built over the extension of slavery to Missouri, Kansas, and other new states and territories. Midland opinion began to splinter along doctrinal lines. Religious groups whose beliefs emphasized the need to redeem the world through good works, moral reforms, or utopian experiments found common ground with the Yankees, first on slavery, and later on efforts to curb alcoholism, blasphemous speech, and antisocial behaviors; this led Dutch Calvinists, German Sectarians, Swedish Lutherans, Northern Methodists, Free Will Baptists, and General Synod German Lutherans to embrace the Republican Party. People whose religious beliefs did not emphasize—or actively discouraged—efforts to make the present world holy stuck with the laissez-faire Democrats: Confessional German Lutherans, Roman Catholics, Southern Baptists, and Southern Methodists. Groups occupying the middle ground on these issues (Anglicans, the Disciples of Christ) were split.8

“The end result was characteristically Midland: a large region of swing voters whose support could make or break nearly every future federal coalition around any given issue. On the eve of the Civil War, slavery would push a narrow majority of Midlanders into the Republican camp. Careful forensic analysis of the 1860 presidential vote by late twentieth-century political scientists has shown that this shift in Midlander opinion—particularly among Germans—tipped Illinois, Ohio, and Indiana into Abraham Lincoln’s column, giving him control of the White House. Defeated on the federal stage by the defection of the Midland Midwest, the Deep South would move to secede almost immediately.9″

My Mom’s family is mostly German-Americans who came through the Appalachian country of Kentucky and finally settled in Indiana (interestingly, Abraham Lincoln’s family also went from Kentucky to Indiana where he spent most of his childhood, the reason given for the move was partly because of the slavery issue, Kentucky being a slave state and Indiana a non-slave state; by the way, Lincoln had a personal and political connection to the utopian socialist New Harmony community that was located near the area where Lincoln’s family and my family lived; also, like Paine who inspired him, Lincoln had family ties to Quakerism and, like Paine, sought to self-educate himself as was encouraged in the Quaker tradition). My mom’s family seems to have a bit more of what people think of as the Scots-Irish culture (not known for tendencies toward socialism and self-education), but I was born in the Midlands of German-American Ohio and raised in the Midlands of various states with Iowa as my home state. Both the Midlands Midwest and Appalachia have cultures that mistrust big government, although for different reasons, the former because of a focus on local communities (local governance and civic mindedness) and the latter because of a focus on individualism and a disinterest in any collective organization beyond kinship.

The Midlands has never easily fit into the categories of Southern aristocratic conservatism or Northeastern paternalistic liberalism. Certainly, the Northeast did add a certain flavor to Midwestern culture, especially with some of the New England type of college towns that can be found as far as Iowa. However, the Midwest had to deal with multiculturalism in a way that many other regions of the country didn’t have to deal with. The closest parallel might be parts of the West Coast which makes sense considering many Midwesterners moved to the West Coast during the Dust Bowl years, thus giving to the West Coast its Standard American English. The Midwest shares with the Northeast and the West Coast a love of multiculturalism, although the Midwest gives a very different spin to it.

Midwesterners are liberal in this sense, but this liberalism isn’t always perceived by the rest of the country. Midwesterners are so laidback and not generally outspoken in politics. Texans and other Southerners may speak of live and let live, but Midwesterners genuinely live this motto to a greater extent. Many Americans outside of the Midwest might find it odd how radicaly left-wing the Midwestern states can be at times. We have high union membership, we have some states with same-sex marriage or same-sex union rights, and we have a history of socialism.

Eugene V. Debs, one of the most influential American socialists, was born and raised in Indiana. We also had many socialists communities starting in the 19th century through the 20th century, including New Harmony in Southern Indiana around the time my family moved into that area and including decades of Sewer Socialist mayors in Milwaukee. Big business and big government oppression led many Midwestern socialists to flee to Canada, but even to this day there are successful socialist communities such as Eastwind which is located in the lower Midwest. Despite the decline of overt socialism, social democracy which is closely allied with socialism continues to reign as the dominant political system of the Midwest. My home of Iowa City is a perfect example of social democracy in action.

The following is another section from the same book (Kindle Locations 3799-3819):

“Despite a long history of abolitionist sentiment, the Midlands had been ambivalent about Southern secession prior to the attack on Sumter. The Quaker/Anabaptist commitment to pacifism trumped moral qualms about slavery. Newspapers and politicians from Midland areas of Pennsylvania advocated allowing the Deep South to secede peacefully. Midland-controlled northern Delaware found itself at odds with the Tidewater-dominated south of the state, with some fearing violence might break out between the sections. Midland southern New Jersey had no intention of joining a slave-trading Gotham city-state, even if northern Jersey did.

“In the 1860 presidential election the Midlands voted overwhelmingly for Lincoln, except for northern Maryland and Delaware, where he did not appear on the ballot. (In those places, Midlanders voted for the moderate Bell instead.) Lincoln easily won most of the Midland Midwest from central Ohio to southern Iowa, tipping Illinois and Indiana into his column. While Midlanders voted with their Yankee neighbors, they had no desire to be governed by them. Faced with the possibility of a national dissolution, most Midland political and opinion leaders hoped to join the Appalachian-controlled states to create a Central Confederacy stretching from New Jersey to Arkansas. The proposed nation would serve as a neutral buffer area between Yankeedom and the Deep South, preventing the antagonists from going to war with each other. John Pendleton Kennedy, a Baltimore publisher and former congressman, championed this “Confederacy of Border States,” which opposed both the Deep South’s program of expansion by conquest and the Yankee plans to preserve the Union by force. It was, he argued, the “natural and appropriate medium through which the settlement of all differences is eventually to be obtained.” Maryland’s governor, Thomas Hicks, saw merit in the proposal, which could preserve the peace in a state split between Midland, Appalachian, and Tidewater sections; he corresponded with governors of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Ohio, and Missouri (all of which had substantial Midland sections) plus New York and Virginia to lay the groundwork for such an alliance should the Union break up.13

“But the Deep South lost all Midland support after Sumter. In Philadelphia, Easton, and West Chester—Pennsylvania communities that had previously been centers of secessionist sympathy—mobs destroyed pro-Southern newspaper offices, drove pro-Southern politicians from their homes, assaulted secessionists in the streets, and forced homes and businesses to display Union flags. In Maryland the Central Confederacy proposal became obsolete overnight; Midland and Appalachian sections rallied to the Union, Tidewater ones to the Southern Confederacy. Their flag attacked, Midland sections of Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri threw in their lot with the Yankees.14″

Isn’t that interesting?

Imagine if a Central Confederacy had formed. If the South had resisted turning to violence, the Midland Midwest (and upper Appalachia) wouldn’t have turned to fight with the Northeast in defense of the Union. Also, if the South hadn’t tried to force its slaveholding aristocracy onto the rest of the country (through undemocratically forcing slavery onto new states and by forcing non-slave states to submit to the power and authority of slave states), most Americans in the rest of the country would have been fine with leaving Southerners alone. It was force, oppression and violence that Midlanders and Borderlanders refused to accept from the South. It was the principle of it that bothered these Americans. If the North had first turned to violence in a similar manner, they very well might have gone to the defense of the South.

This is why it is so important for American presidential campaigns to begin in Iowa, in the Heartland. To win the heart of America usually means to win the entire country or at least to win the popular vote. Republicans try to look good in Iowa despite the fact that Iowa in recent history usually goes to Democrats.

I don’t know if that clarifies what I was stated at the beginning of this post. I’m a Midwesterner in my outlook on life. When I come across discussions about politics, especially when it involves those on the far right or far left, I feel like my own understanding is ignored.

I don’t think it is intentional. It’s simply that most Americans are from different regions than I am from. The most densely populated regions are on or near the coasts (West and East, Northeast and Deep South), and it is these regions where most political extremists are found. If I try to join discussions with such people, I feel like I have to translate my own views into their political terms and their social context. I realize that I understand them better than they understand me. As a member of fly-over territory, I constantly am barraged by the mainstream media that comes from the coasts. Those on the coasts, however, are mostly unaware of Midwestern media and hence unaware of the Midwest in general. Sadly, because of coastal dominance, even average Midwesterners have become increasingly uninformed and misinformed about the history, culture and politics of the Midwest.

In some ways, I think the Midwest is more radical than any other region of the US. It is radical because it is something entirely different, something that challenges the very notion of what this country is, what this country has been and could become. The Midwest is largely the creation of cultures from Northern Europe such as Germany. This Northern European culture still remains in the Midwest. Like Northern Europe, the Midwest has low economic inequality and low rates of social problems. Maybe it is time for average Americans to stop defining themselves according to the worldview of coastal elites.

 * * * *

After writing the above, I realized I had forgotten about one issue that motivated my thinking in this direction. I was reading an interview/discussion and a guest post over at SKEPOET’s blog. In both, the issue of regions came up, although only in terms of comparing countries. In the first one linked, one particular section of the discussion stood out:

Keith418:  [ . . . ] I don’t see a criticism of the managed society developing on the right or on the left. Instead, people pick vaguely defined managerial forces they wish to see prevail, but the structure and core operating beliefs of these experts is seldom acknowledged or challenged. Many people on the left just want more humane and caring management – which is quite a different demand from that of the people themselves being allowed to make the most important decisions that effect their lives. There are those on the paleocon right who evidence a kind of cranky antipathy towards the managerial elites, but these folks still don’t seem truly ready to abandon the technological society these same trained experts have provided for them. The neocon right has always cultivated its own managers and think tanks and has always been quite ready to enjoy what a “big government” made of empowered managers can provided.  For both the left and the right, taking power back from those they have ceded it to will take effort and energy. Who is ready to start that process and what sacrifices will they make to get there? The alternative is just to insist on better management – and not to attack and question the power and role of the managers at all.

He does make a fair point here, but such generalizations can be problematic. Instead of just comparing countries or international cultures, I was wondering if more insight might be gained by a more fine-tuned analysis of the regions within the US (and within other countries). If we don’t look in detail at how we got here, how can we speak of where we are going and where we might end up?

The ideal of a society managed by an elite has tended to be more of a coastal phenomenon. In the Midwest, there is the ideal of managing at the local level of communities where there can be a balance between a “more humane and caring management” and “the people themselves being allowed to make the most important decisions that effect their lives”. The most notable example of this balance is that of the Milwaukee Sewer Socialists.

We ignore this cultural tradition and its future potential at our own peril. Instead of looking outside for rupture from the present system, why not look inward for the native traditions that can erupt naturally as part of the culture? If we want to avoid technocrats, then any revolution must arise naturally rather than being externally foced upon the population.

Skepoet: Would you say that right and left are largely irrelevant positions?

Keith418:  Well, even if I did, what would be gained? Why do people still cling to these terms and think and act as if they were, indeed, still profoundly meaningful? Since the ’60s – I’m thinking of Karl Hess and even before him – many have tried to point out differing, and more determining and accurate kinds of dichotomies. Centralized vs. decentralized approaches, authoritarian vs. individualistic choices, top-down vs. bottom up styles. Why, after all this time, do people keep using “left and right”? What is concealed, what unrevealed truth is carried in these terms that continues to prevent their exhaustion?

Maybe we cling to these terms because what needs to be resolved is at the ground level of culture rather than in the heavenly sphere of ideas. The devil is in the details, not in the abstractions. Likewise, to borrow a phrase from Philip K. Dick, God is in the garbage. The real fight is in the dirt and muck of local culture. That is the only place ideological conflict can be fundamentally resolved. As former neocon Francis Fukuyama came to understand, healthy institutions must arise from within a culture as part of the local traditions and knowledge of communities.

Skepoet: What do you think remains unresolved at the core of the idea of left and right then as the fact that categories do not seem to leave us would indicate?   In my mind, when categories won’t go away despite the existence of more precise semantic categories, there is something unresolved at the core of the idea. Perhaps I am wrong about this, but I suspect you approach this similarly, although it may be for different reasons.

Keith418: Well, what are the origin of the terms? They go back to the days of the French Revolution. What remains unresolved from that point? What questions were asked then that still haven’t been answered – and which our political definition still, somehow, entail? [ . . . ]

To me, these terms represent differing sides on the nature of the dream of shared human life, the great motivating metaphysical dream that floats above us and lives through us as we seek to create a world for ourselves.

Maybe so. I’m not unfamiliar with nor uninterested in such metaphysical perspective. However, for my thinking at the moment, I feel drawn to ground these metaphysical dreams in worldly particulars.

Metaphysical dreams don’t just float. They are more like the mist hovering along the ground drenching the world with its wetness, condensing into water that feeds life and then evaporating once again. Such mist follows closely the geography of hills and hollows, obscuring the world beyond the immediate place we stand even as it gives form to the air we breathe.