One of America's biggest root problems: Scots-Irish culture

[politicat]

87. But that's terrible cultural history. It doesn't work.

Point this is missing: Each wave of immigration to North America was separatist as hell and badly behaved in multiple ways that continue to influence contemporary culture. New England Puritans were insular schmucks who wanted the ability to isolate their children from anything they didn't like. (Where do we see this now? Homeschooling fundies? Separatists? How did that streak get here?) New Amsterdam was willing to lie, cheat and steal from anybody to make a buck. (Hi, Wjal Straet!) Midlanders took the best and worst of all sets of neighbors -- slavery, religious intolerance, and profit motive. Norteño culture made all of the East Coast settlements look like massive advances in human rights, in that Norteño priests tended to pretend to let their conquered Native Americans go once they were sufficiently assimilated, but really never did, and infected them with several dozen diseases, and destroyed major cultural and infrastructural markers, like pueblo cities and canals. (Everyone brought good things, too, but this is about blame, so bad only for now.)

The Deep South and Tidewater south was primarily English Midlanders and Home Counties subsequent sons, plus their retinues, so Deep South/Tidewater does have a history and social structure of covert/overt feudalism plus poorly translated noblesse oblige, plus a deep bench class structure rather than broad and shallow. They tended to arrive as individuals with (perhaps a bride and) servants in tow, not as a complete extended family. The "gentlemen" tended to respect each others' boundaries, extending the concept of libertas to one another, but nobody else. Thus,
1) large plots of estate land with minimal investment in mercantile, manufacturing, transportation or educational infrastructure (because the damn villages were always where trouble started at home, so let's not have those)
2) the development of the American plantation structure (plantation originally meant something like farm estate, not Gone With the Wind or Barbados) and
3) indentured servitude followed by slavery when the supply of indentured servants got expensive and short.

The Deep South and Tidewater 'gentlemen' were primarily dispossessed Cavaliers who arrived in the mid-17th to early 18th centuries -- those displaced by the English Civil War, or their sons, or those who survived Cromwell, but failed to make nice at the Restoration (collaboration is such an unpleasant word...) or those who just didn't manage to survive with fortunes intact enough to provide for subsequent children. (Note that New England Puritan and Dissenter Protestant migrations stopped when Cromwell came to power -- why leave when your party is in power?)

The Borderlander Northern English, Scots and Scots-Irish were primarily late comers (1750s through end of Napoleonic Wars) who arrived after the coastal land was taken. They tended to push west almost immediately upon arrival (thus West Virginia, Western New York, the Ohio River Valley, then the middle Midwest (Southern Indiana and Illinois, Kentucky) then eventually Missouri, Arkansas and eastern Kansas are considered Borderlander territory, as well as the middle of Canada -- look at a distribution of Campbells, MacKenzies and McCoys west of Quebec.). They tended to emigrate as full families or clans, often pooling resources to secure a single ship for the clan/family use, or sending scouts to lay claims, then sending for everyone else. The northern English/low Scots vernacular for the word commonly translated as freedom is much closer to the northern Germanic/Norse freiheit than the Latin/Greek libertas.

Those two words matter, because how one learns to interpret freedom as a child will affect how one behaves politically for life. Libertas -- liberty -- is the philosophy that social equality and participation is a privilege to be earnedor bestowed rather than a birthright. ("With liberty and justice for all" is a nonsense phrase in libertas philosophy, but "liberty of the seas" or the liberty of the House of Commons, which existed at the discretion of a higher power (the monarch), makes sense.) It is not an egalitarian philosophy, and much more resembles the English House of Lords or the Roman Senate than say, the Norse alething (or the eastern English guild and town councils that descended from the Danelander invaders and evolved into Yankee town meetings). Libertas is primarily inherited, but may be earned through service or exemplary merit; it is not given away lightly.

Freiheit is the old Germanic (and thus Norse, Dane and Saxon) concept of birthright freedom, that all people are born equal, and earn privilege rather than rights through effort. The descent of libertas shows in Jim Crow laws, in that they placed additional burdens for suffrage, and in separate but equal, in that they defined and codified a class society. The descent of freiheit shows in the Midlands (Quaker egalitarianism), in New Amsterdam (the Dutch had perfected freiheit by the time they kicked out the Spanish in the 17th century, mostly due to the forced cooperation of living on marshland and having to deal with levees to keep the ocean out of the polders), in New England (since East Anglia settled New England, and Suffolk, Norfolk and Essex were first heavily invaded by the Danes, then were never as Normanized as the Home counties in the center of the English south), then in the Upper Midwest (which was mostly Yankees tired of New England winters and soil) and Cascadia (more Yankees.)

Borderlanders had a deep cultural meld with the Norse, who brought both the alething and the clan-raid structure to Northern Great Britain, and thus the Borderlanders brought it with them as an interfamilial working structure when they emigrated. On the other hand, Borderlanders had, by then, had several hundred years of getting screwed by the southern English Norman descendents, and had been pushed off their pre-Norman Invasion lands at least many times. So ceding authority to nobility or even descended nobility who acted like they were still landed and titled was never a really strong part of the borderlander culture. Not so much on the cooperation with the authorities. They had also spent centuries surviving slow and sometimes speedy genocide because they kept the strong clan structure, but had emplaced a hierarchy within the family/clan -- non-combatants deferred to combatants, children to parents and women to men, because while being displaced is not the time for a council meeting. (Thus, expectations of authoritarianism within the clan and especially within the family -- as is often seen in displaced cultures.)

Borderlanders did make excellent mercenaries -- which the French noticed and used from the 12th century until 1603 when James became king of both Scotland and England. After that, Borderlander Scots and northern English continued to serve as hired armies during the Thirty Years' War and the Wars of Spanish Succession, right up until the end of the Napoleonics in 1815. (Quite a lot of Borderlander immigrants to the US and Canada in the 1815-1825 period financed their move through Napoleonic war plunder and prizes.) To this day, a significant percentage of both UK and US armed forces come from Borderlander stock. That's not a genetic issue, but if your family prizes a strong warrior ethic, that tends to get passed down.

The herding is accurate -- when your ancestral line has been displaced about a gazillion times, why bother putting any of your wealth in anything that stays put? Better that it has legs and can be moved to the next safe haven instead of having to burn it to keep it out of enemy hands yet again. But that applies to Borderlanders, not to Tidewater or the Deep South, who definitely expected to keep their stuff just where they left it, and their wealth where they could see it. (My spouse, upon hearing this theory, and himself being an Appalachian Norse-Scot descendent of the Fitzgeralds, sighed, nodded, and said, "so that explains NASCAR and mobile homes. At least I come by it honestly." NASCAR, because putting one's wealth into something with motive power means the ability to make a getaway as needed; mobiles because if weather or decay destroys it or an exterior agent (usually government, but possibly a rival) seizes it, not much wealth is lost, and they're comfortable enough to live in for a while.)

But classing the Deep South, Tidewater and Appalachia as the same culture and specifically responsible -- BS. Point first at the heritage and wealth factors of reflected aristocracy and the flawed concept of limited liberty. It also has almost nothing to do with a genetic inheritance and with cultural place heritage -- having watched second gen Hindi and Iranian kids grow up in Wheeling to be just as Borderlander as my spouse (his high school chums are interesting), it's a case of dominant culture assimilating those in the sphere. I've also watched Anglo-Dutch, Vietnamese, Cambodian and South African children who grew up on the Mexico border assimilate to Norteño culture (example: Korean tacos), and second generation Yankee children turn into Deep Southers. Look at any group of military kids -- their primary culture is not whatever their DNA says, it's Mil Brat. And not everyone in a sphere of influence adopts all or even most of the dominant culture -- but a dominant culture is dominant, and that provides a useful start point for understanding a local power structure. But the point is local -- which can't be said for multiple waves of immigrants coming from vastly different cultural backgrounds over almost three centuries to completely different environmental conditions.

Yes, we are still fighting the remnants of the Protestant Reformation, the English Civil War and the Restoration in our school boards, congressional elections and city councils. Yes, it's a class struggle, primarily between the descended power structures of Norman aristocrats and Romano-Norse-Saxons. The Calvinism doesn't show so much in the Deep and Tidewater South -- those were Establishment religious structures, not Dissenter, and the strongest high status churches in the Tidewater and Deep South are still Episcopalian to High Baptist, not low church. (Duh. See Puritans immigrating to places where they could discriminate and stopping when they got power of their own.) While Borderlanders tended towards Dissenters, they were often mainstream Dissenters of the Lutheran/Arminian flavors (Methodist, Baptist, Anabaptist) not Calvinist (though Presbyterian did have a significant moiety.) They mostly didn't believe in an Elect, a central tenet of Calvinism, because an Elect is too much like an aristocracy, and they'd had enough of that down here, thankyouverymuch. The resurgence of Calvinism (and thus post-modern Evangelicalism) is a late 19th to early 20th century phenomenon that started in the Midwest, where Borderlanders, Westerners and New England descendant Midlanders met and recombined.

Dropping this whole regional divide at the Borderlanders' feet is not so much racist as classist as hell, and deterministic, and that is the major flaw. It's important to not underestimate the power of "but we've always done it this way" whenever considering local power structures, and the US doesn't have a significantly long history of "always", so yes, understanding where the seeds were transplanted from matters. But it's more important to know the history (and get it right), to keep from repeating it.