Born Fighting
How the Scots-Irish Shaped America
y James Webb
Broadway, 369 pp., $25.95
C. VANN WOODWARD, the distinguished historian of the American South, once spoke of the regional differences among his graduate students at Yale. The southerners, he said, wanted to tell stories about their region, while the Yankees wanted to advance some thesis or other. Appropriately for someone who grew up all over (in a military family), James Webb does both. In fact, Born Fighting is really almost two separate books.
The first book, the storytelling one, is a memoir and family history, and it's a corker. The son of a self-made Air Force officer, Webb went to Annapolis, then as a Marine infantry officer to Vietnam, where he was wounded twice and received the Navy Cross for valor. In 1972 he left the Marines and enrolled in law school at Georgetown, where at the time a warrior was, to say the least, not understood. (The experience obviously still rankles.) While a student, he wrote a book on U.S. strategy in the Pacific, and began a legal campaign to clear a fellow Marine wrongly convicted on charges of war crimes--a campaign that eventually succeeded, but only three years after the man's suicide. In 1978, he published Fields of Fire, a highly praised novel of the Vietnam war, and the first of his six bestsellers. He served in the Reagan administration as assistant secretary of defense and secretary of the Navy, resigned to protest cuts in naval strength, and has lately turned his hand to journalism, business consulting, and screenwriting/producing.
Webb comes from a long line of fighters, both in and out of uniform. His people have been fighting their nations' enemies, their own, and occasionally each other for hundreds of years, and some of their stories are as compelling as Webb's own. This is good reading.
Why are these people so scrappy? Well, Webb has a theory about that, and that's the second book.
Webb's ancestors were for the most part Scots-Irish (more commonly, if less correctly, "Scotch-Irish"), part of the great wave of 18th-century immigrants from Ulster to Pennsylvania, who then moved south down the Shenandoah Valley to settle the southern backcountry, moving on from there to Texas, Missouri (where Webb was born), and points north and west. Webb believes that the Scots-Irish have a distinctive culture that includes aggressive response to insult, attack, and attempted intimidation: "Physical courage fueled this culture, and an adamant independence marked its daily life. Success itself was usually defined in personal reputation rather than worldly goods."
Moreover, as his subtitle ("How the Scots-Irish Shaped America") indicates, he believes this culture's "legacy is broad, in many ways defining the attitudes and values of the military, of working-class America, and even of the particularly populist form of American democracy itself," in fact that it "has become the definition of 'American' that others gravitate toward when they wish to drop their hyphens and join the cultural mainstream."
If I find this argument appealing, it's possibly because the Scots-Irish are my people, too. I grew up less than 10 miles from Moccasin Gap, Virginia, where Webb begins his book searching for his great-great-grandparents' graves, and given how things were in the early years of Virginia's "Fighting Ninth" congressional district, we're probably cousins--although most of my ancestors were Unionists and Republicans and most of his Rebels and Democrats.
Webb sees this culture as "bred deeply into every heart," "passing with the blood," even "in the Scots-Irish DNA" (although I think he's speaking figuratively). He argues that it has been shaped and reinforced by the group's experience, and a potted (and occasionally padded) history of Scotland, Ulster, and 18th-and 19th-century America amply illustrates his point that the Scots-Irish have a long record of invasion, oppression, and resistance. Again and again, they have found--or put--themselves in the position of, well, insurgents. This history of incessant conflict, together with the Scottish clan structure, the Protestant Reformation, and rural isolation, has "ingrained" certain attitudes and values in the Scots-Irish, and the other groups they have influenced and absorbed:
The culture in its embryonic form stood fast against the Roman and Norman nation-builders who created a structured and eventually feudal England. The unique emphasis on individual rights and responsibilities that sprang from Calvinism and the Scottish Kirk caused it to resist the throne and finally brought down a king. The fierceness of its refusal to accommodate the Anglican theocrats in Ulster created the radical politics of nonconformism, and this attitude was carried into the Appalachian Mountains. Its people refused to bend a knee to New York and Boston either before, during, or after the Civil War, standing firm against outside forces that would try to tell them how to live and what to believe. And even today . . . it refuses to accept the politics of group privilege that have been foisted on America by its paternalistic, Ivy League-centered, media-connected, politically correct power centers.
I think he's on to something here. During the conflict over the Mississippi state flag, I was struck when a reporter for the Irish Times found the whole controversy eerily reminiscent of Ulster, where they also "do battle over the right to flaunt symbols of division in the name of irreconcilable versions of history."
But Webb's argument was presented more succinctly in a Wall Street Journal piece he wrote just before the 2004 elections ("Secret GOP Weapon: The Scots-Irish Vote"), and it has been presented more thoroughly and systematically by David Hackett Fischer in Albion's Seed (which Webb cites often), and Grady McWhiney in Cracker Culture (which, oddly, he doesn't cite at all, although he did take a chapter title, "Attack and Die," from another of McWhiney's books on the South's "Celtic" heritage). Anyone seriously interested in Webb's thesis would do well to read Fischer and McWhiney, as well as a fascinating and underappreciated book called Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South by Richard E. Nisbett and Dov Cohen. One should also read the extensive literature critical of these books, because this is a highly controversial field of scholarship, although you wouldn't know that from Webb's presentation.
And that's the problem with this second book of his. Webb draws extensively from W.J. Cash's 1941 classic The Mind of the South (which he describes as "perennially well-regarded"--not exactly so, but I don't want to turn this into even more of a bibliographical essay). Like Cash, Webb paints with broad, bold strokes, and one can only admire the sweep and dash of his treatment. But, also like Cash, he has a way of treating as fact what is actually conjecture and hypothesis. Like his Scots ancestors, Webb wades fearlessly into battles--in this case, historiographical ones, some of them recent (like the importance of the "Celtic" heritage), others (like the causes of the Civil War) that have been raging for decades. I pretty much agree with him on most points, but then, as a Scots-Irishman myself, I would. A good many serious historians do not, and by no means all of them are prisoners of political correctness--a phrase which should probably be retired, although Webb is fond of it.
Also, predictably for an academic, I have an overpowering urge to pick nits that are individually trivial, but that add up to make me uneasy. Just three examples: Webb's observation that Andrew Jackson's crushing defeat of the British at New Orleans forced them "once and for all to abandon dreams of regaining their hold on American interests" may be, at least, overstatement. As every schoolboy once knew, that victory took place after the signing of the treaty that ended the War of 1812.
To say that John Calvin is "the founder of the modern Christian evangelical movement," and that Scots-Irish culture still has an "emphasis on Calvinist theology," simply ignores the culture war in the antebellum southern uplands between Calvinists and Arminians (the "free will" ancestors of modern evangelicalism), a war the evangelicals won.
Finally, as a measure of the unimportance of slavery to southern yeomen, Webb mentions, twice, that only 5 percent of antebellum white Southerners owned slaves. This is technically correct, but a more meaningful figure is that between a quarter and a third of white southern households owned slaves (and a much higher percentage in the cotton states).
In short, Webb has an interesting and important argument, although it's not as novel as he apparently believes, and he doesn't really make the best possible case for it. Even if he's right, it raises as many questions as it answers. Why, for example, do contemporary Scotland and Ireland (Ulster, perhaps, aside) no longer display some of these "Celtic" traits? And how is it that so many other southerners and Americans--in particular, those who trace their ancestry to West Africa--happen to have many of the same values? These questions are not unanswerable in Webb's terms, but they do suggest that the story is more complicated than the simple passing-in-the-blood version that we get here.
It's also not entirely clear what Webb wants us to do. Plainly, he wants to alert politicians and the media to the presence, grievances, and influence of this largely neglected and ignored American ethnic group, and who could object to that? (Well, Charles Krauthammer, for one. When Howard Dean said that he wanted the votes of "guys with Confederate flags in their pick-ups," Krauthammer accused him of going after the "white trash vote" of "rebel-yelling racist rednecks." Webb observed at the time that Krauthammer "has never complained about this ethnic group when it has marched off to fight the wars he wishes upon us.")
But apparently, Webb also wants to raise the consciousness of Scots-Irish Americans themselves. If you had asked them, Webb's ancestors would have said they were "Americans" or "Southerners" or (usually) both, but almost certainly not "Scots-Irish." As Webb describes it:
In their insistent individualism [the Scots-Irish] are not likely to put an ethnic label on themselves. . . . Some of them don't even know their ethnic label, and some who do don't particularly care. They don't go for group identity politics any more than they like to join a union. Two hundred years ago the mountains built a fierce and uncomplaining people. To them, joining a group and putting themselves at the mercy of someone else's collective judgment makes about as much sense as letting the government take their guns. And nobody is going to get their guns.
In other words, when it comes to identity politics, it looks as if many of us Scots-Irish just don't get it. How else to account for the fact that, as Webb reports, 38 percent of the population of Middlesborough, Kentucky, told the 2000 Census that their ethnicity is "native American"?
Personally, I'm glad that there is no Scots-Irish Anti-Defamation League. Certainly, we Scots-Irish have been defamed ever since the English-American Virginia aristocrat William Byrd visited North Carolina in 1733 and wrote scornfully about the inhabitants of "Lubberland," and Webb points out the irony of lumping the Scots-Irish with "WASPs," their historic adversaries: "In this perverted logic, those who had been the clearest victims of Yankee colonialism were now grouped together with the beneficiaries. All WASPs were considered to be the same in this environment, as if they had landed together on the same ship at Plymouth Rock and the smart ones had gone to Boston while the dumbest had somehow made their way to West Virginia."
But not only have most Scots-Irish resolutely refused to see themselves as victims, some have even made contemptuous jokes about those who do. The southern comedian Brother Dave Gardner's proposal for a National Association for the Advancement of White Trash is just a starter.
Webb believes that "the final question in this age of diversity and political correctness is whether [Scots-Irish Americans] can learn to play the modern game of group politics." He tells the story of Phyllis Deal of Clintwood, Virginia, who was asked by a Washington Post reporter if her traditional Appalachian foodstuffs were being marketed through local food cooperatives. "No," she answered. "There's a traditional resistance to cooperatives in our area. We're just not very cooperative."
Webb comments: "Dear Mrs. Deal: I admire your independent spirit. But it's time to get more cooperative." I like attitude, too. But I'm not sure I want to see her change.
John Shelton Reed is Kenan Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of North Carolina and author, most recently, of Minding the South.