Joe Klein Explains How the History of Four Centuries Ago Still Shapes American Culture ... - 0 views
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Culture history american ethnic immigrants UK Scots-Irish Puritan Quaker Cavalier politics
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“Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America,” David Hackett Fischer’s classic history of British migration to colonial America, which was published in 1989 and explained these phenomena with a clarity that seems even more stunning today. The divide between maskers and anti-maskers, vaxxers and anti-vaxxers is as old as Plymouth Rock. It is deeper than politics; it is cultural.
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The Appalachian hill country and much of the Deep South were settled by a wild caste of emigrants from the borderlands of Scotland and England. They brought their clannish, violent, independent culture, which had evolved over seven centuries of border warfare.
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The spirit of the Scots-Irish borderlanders could also be seen in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol; their ancestors staged the Whiskey Rebellion against the U.S. Constitution.
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In New England, it was quite the opposite. “Order was an obsession” for the Puritan founders. Everything was regulated.
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Cotton Mather defined an “honorable” person as one who was “studious, humble, patient, reserved and mortified.” These habits have lingered, too.
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“Albion’s Seed” makes the brazen case that the tangled roots of America’s restless and contentious spirit can be found in the interplay of the distinctive societies and value systems brought by the British emigrations — the Puritans from East Anglia to New England; the Cavaliers (and their indentured servants) from Sussex and Wessex to Virginia; the Quakers from north-central England to the Delaware River valley; and the Scots-Irish from the borderlands to the Southern hill country.
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The values of the Virginia Cavaliers caused the unusual brutality of the American system of Black enslavement.)
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Fischer writes of the Scots-Irish: The people of the Southern hill country region “were intensely resistant to change and suspicious of ‘foreigners.’ … In the early 20th century, they would become intensely negrophobic and antisemitic.”
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But how does one prove such an assertion? The only way is through the meticulous accumulation of detail. Over nearly a thousand pages, Fischer describes 22 different patterns of behavior or “folkways” for each of the four cultures — from dress and cooking, to marriage and child-rearing, to governance and criminal justice
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These culminate in four distinctive definitions of liberty. Freedom, he writes, “has never been a single idea, but a set of different and even contrary traditions in creative tension with each other.”
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Here is the nub of the book: The Puritan, Cavalier, Quaker and Scots-Irish notions of liberty were radically different, but each provided an essential strain of the American idea
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The Puritans practiced an “ordered freedom” with the state parceling out liberties: Fishing licenses allowed the freedom to fish
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The Scots-Irish were the opposite: Their sense of “natural freedom” was deeply libertarian. You moved to the backcountry so that you could do what you wanted
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“Natural liberty was not a reciprocal idea. It did not recognize the right of dissent or disagreement,
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Scots-Irish leaders were charismatic — Andrew Jackson was the paragon — and their religion was evangelical,
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The Virginia definition of freedom was complex, contradictory — and remains problematic. It was hierarchical, the freedom to be unequal. “I am an aristocrat,” John Randolph of Roanoke said. “I love liberty; I hate equality.”
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Freedom was defined by what it wasn’t. It wasn’t slavery. It was the freedom to enslave. It was a freedom, granted to the plantation masters, to indulge themselves, gamble and debauch.
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Over time, this plutocratic libertarianism found natural allies, if strange bedfellows, in the fiercely egalitarian Scots-Irish hill country folk. Neither wanted to be “ruled” by a strong central government. Look at the Covid maps: The regional alliance remains to this day.
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The Quakers seem an afterthought, but their migration was larger in size than that of the Puritans or Cavaliers. And their version of liberty seems most amenable today. It was “reciprocal freedom,” based on the golden rule.
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American cuisine mirrored the cultures — the Puritans baked (as in beans and pies), the Cavaliers roasted (as in barbecue), the Quakers boiled (as in cream cheese) and the Scots-Irish fried and mashed (as in pancakes and grits)
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The Scots-Irish spoke a dialect that predated current British English, and that, because of their notion of freedom, included “an actual antipathy to fixed schemes of grammar and orthography and punctuation.”
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Culture is a sticky thing. “To change a culture in any fundamental way,” Fischer writes, “one must transform many things at once.”
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Child-rearing was wildly different in the four colonial systems, for example. And, in turn, that affected education, which affected criminal justice and traditions of governance.