Colin Woodard (43 page)

Although comprising nearly half the territory of the contiguous United States, the Dixie bloc was conspicuously absent from the green movement until well after the sixties pushed it into world consciousness. Political leaders in El Norte and the Far West often shared Dixie's skepticism about the need to protect natural resources. When, in 2009, the U.S. House narrowly passed a bill to cap and trade carbon emissions to address global warming, the measure received near-unanimous support in New Netherland, the Left Coast, and Yankeedom, including that of every congressman in New England; the Far West offered near-unanimous bipartisan opposition, joined by the overwhelming majority of Appalachian and Deep Southern lawmakers; Tidewater and the Midlands were divided.
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Opposition to the 1972 Equal Rights Amendment was also regional, with all state governments controlled by Deep Southerners declining to ratify it, and those dominated by Appalachia opposing or rescinding ratification (with the exception of West Virginia). States dominated by Yankees, Midlanders, and Left Coasters all ratified the amendment, with the exception of Illinois (where majorities ratified it but never by the three-fifths majority required by the state's constitution). Tidewater no longer dominated any single state, but the one state in which the culture remained strongest, Virginia, also opposed ratification. (The Far West was split.)

In 2010 opinion on gay marriage also fell along predictable national lines. Legislatures have passed laws permitting same-sex marriages in the three northern New England states. State courts have mandated same-sex marriages in three others: Yankee Connecticut and both Yankee/Midland Iowa and tri-national California. (Residents of the Far West and El Norte sections of California rebelled, overturning the court decision via a 2008 ballot measure, despite the opposition of voters in nearly every Left Coast county.) By contrast, every single Dixie bloc–controlled state had passed laws or constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage. On another issue,
USA Today
reported in 2006 that every state controlled by the Deep South could be expected to ban or greatly restrict abortion services if
Roe v. Wade
were to be overturned; every New England state, plus those comprising New Netherland and the Left Coast, were expected to protect women's access.
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The following chapter will examine the issues of militarism and national defense, but in regard to corporate behavior, the two blocs were also divided. The northern sixties rebels regarded big business as an oppressive force that despoiled the Earth and dehumanized the individual. By contrast, the nations of the Dixie bloc have continued to promulgate policies that ensure they remain low-wage resource colonies controlled by a one-party political system dedicated to serving the interests of a wealthy elite. To keep wages low, all Dixie-bloc states passed laws making it difficult to organize unions—which their politicians sold as protecting the “right to work”—or to increase the minimum wage. Taxes are kept too low to adequately support public schools and other services. Urban planning and land-use zoning—commonplace among the four Northern allies—are shunned as a hindrance to business, even in major cities like Houston, which had hundreds of miles of unpaved, unlit streets as recently as the 1980s. From the gas fields of Louisiana to the industrial hog farms of North Carolina, environmental and workplace safety rules are notoriously lax.

These divergent approaches to economic development, tax policy, and social spending have only increased tensions between the cultural blocs. In the aftermath of the civil rights and sixties movements, the Dixie bloc has lured away most of the Yankee and Midland manufacturing sector by offering foreign and domestic corporations substantially lower wages, taxes, and regulations in a deunionized environment. The continent's Yankee automotive industry was all but destroyed in the 1990s and 2000s in favor of foreign-owned factories in the Deep South and Greater Appalachia, just like the textile and forest products industries before it. Some observers fear that the “neo-Confederates” will force the other nations to follow their lead, turning the entire federation into a giant “low-wage export platform” for advanced, highly educated industrial societies in Western Europe and northeast Asia. Meanwhile, innovation and research has become increasingly concentrated in knowledge clusters, most of which lie in the nations that have emphasized education and rationalism. Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon all formed around Left Coast cities, just as the first “Silicon Valley” formed around Boston's Route 128, also known as the Yankee Highway.
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But the culture wars haven't been confined to domestic issues. Indeed, they have often raged strongest over issues of war and peace, humanitarian interventions, and the federation's proper role on the world stage.

CHAPTER 26

A
s on cultural issues, the two “superpower” national blocs have traditionally disagreed on the United States' proper role in the world, how it should behave toward other states and federations, and whether internal dissent should be tolerated when “national” honor or security is at stake. Once again, opinion has split along ethnonational grounds, with the three nations of the Dixie bloc steadfastly supporting virtually every war since the 1830s, regardless of its purpose and opponents, while championing the use of force to expand and maintain the United States' power and suppressing dissenting opinions. Opposition to foreign wars—to the extent it has existed—has been concentrated in the four nations of the Northern alliance, although Appalachia is often skeptical of distant imperial undertakings, at least until the fighting starts. As on other issues, the Far West and El Norte are swing nations on foreign policy.

Consider the case of the Spanish-American War of 1898, in which the United States achieved a quick and resounding victory, crushing Spanish forces and seizing control of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. Initially every nation supported this “splendid little war,” which ostensibly was fought to help Cubans achieve independence and to avenge the destruction of the USS
Maine
in Havana, allegedly by Spanish agents. At the time, the federal government was still controlled by the Northern alliance, with Western Reserve–born Yankee William McKinley occupying the Oval Office. But with honor at stake, Dixie residents signed up for federal military duty in large numbers, seeing an opportunity to prove their loyalty to the federation. Several Confederate veterans served as senior generals, one of whom, Major General Joseph Wheeler, reportedly got sufficiently agitated during the fighting in Cuba to yell out, “We've got the damn Yankees on the run!”

However, federal unity collapsed over the question of the disposition of the occupied territories, which included Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines, and the independent kingdom of Hawaii (seized outright during the war on the pretext that somebody else would if the United States did not). Turn-of-the-century opposition to the creation of an American empire was centered in Yankeedom, though it was inspired by very different concerns. For Yankee critics—by no means a majority opinion even in their nation—the subjugation of foreign territories was a flagrant violation of the principles for which New Englanders had fought the American Revolution, particularly the right to representative self-government. Dissenters organized an anti-imperial movement, all of whose most prominent spokespeople were Yankees, including former president Grover Cleveland (who called annexations “dangerous perversions of our national mission”), Massachusetts senator George F. Hoar (who championed Filipino independence, noting that “love of liberty does not depend on the color of the skin”), and John Adams's great-grandson Charles Francis Adams Jr., who approved of the Filipinos' “very gallant resistance” of the U.S. occupation. The Boston-based Anti-Imperialist League was also dominated by Yankees, who accounted for twenty-eight of their forty-three vice presidents. (Only three resided in the Deep South, and none in the Far West.) When the Philippines insurrection turned violent and the U.S. commander ordered his troops to kill everyone in a province of 250,000 (at least 1,000 and possibly as many as 50,000 Filipinos are believed to have perished), the League exposed and condemned the atrocities. Harvard alumni rallied to stop the college from granting an honorary degree to President McKinley. While there were many Yankee imperialists—Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge was perhaps the best-known of them all—it was the only region that also had a large antiwar movement.
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The Dixie bloc was in favor of the unilateral use of military power to vanquish perceived enemies and increase U.S. prestige, but with Reconstruction still in living memory, they were skeptical of the federal government creating and maintaining an overseas empire of subordinate territories. An empire, the Dixie bloc argued, was acceptable only if the territories that were acquired were racially and geographically “suitable” for eventual absorption into the federation as full-fledged states. Such cases held forth the hope of a partial fulfillment of the Deep South's plans for a “Golden Circle” in the tropics. Dixie-bloc leaders were much less enthusiastic about the annexation of territories with “unassimilatable” populations and the large standing armies and navies that would be required to police and subjugate them. An expanded federal military might one day be turned against the Dixie bloc itself, they reasoned, perhaps turning it, too, into a subordinate colony of the northern nations. Offering statehood to places with large numbers of free “inferior” peoples would put further pressure on the bloc's cherished apartheid system. Thus many Dixie-bloc political leaders rejected the annexation of Hawaii, due to the presence of large numbers of Asians and native Hawaiians on the islands. “How can we endure the shame when a Chinese senator from Hawaii with his pigtail hanging down his neck and with his pagan joss in hand shall rise from his curule chair and in pigeon English proceed to chop logic with [senators] George Frisbie Hoar or Henry Cabot Lodge?” asked Appalachian Missouri senator Champ Clark. Others in Dixie cautiously endorsed the annexation, on the promise that a Deep South–style caste system would be imposed on nonwhites in the islands, ensuring white supremacy. The use of brute military force to crush America's enemies was a good thing, so long as it didn't result in any Yankee-inspired efforts to reengineer, “uplift,” and assimilate inferior peoples.
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The three Dixie nations also emerged as the most enthusiastic supporters of U.S. involvement in World War I and the suppression of dissenters and pacifists. Goaded by the first Southern president since the Civil War—Appalachian Virginian Woodrow Wilson—the southern nations held that God had endorsed the war and that opposition to it was tantamount to treason. Pacifists, Wilson said publicly, were filled with “stupidity,” and opponents of the war should face “a firm hand of stiff repression.” Any congressman who opposed the war, Alabama representative J. Thomas Heflin proclaimed, “deserves the contempt and scorn of every loyal American citizen.” The people of Wisconsin, Senator Thomas Hardwick of Georgia announced, were “false to America [and] the cause of democracy throughout the world” because 100,000 of them had voted for a pacifist candidate in their senate primary. Mississippi's Jackson
Clarion-Ledger
editorialized that antiwar leaders should be “shot or hung,” while the Charleston
News and Courier
was satisfied with “repression, stern and absolute.” When a small Georgia paper criticized Wilson's warmongering, the president shut the paper down with the enthusiastic approval of the rest of the Deep Southern press. Dixie antiwar leaders such as Mississippi senator James Vardaman appealed to the region's racism, arguing (correctly) that the war was giving black soldiers the idea that they deserved equality; even so, Vardaman was turned out of office with the approval of at least one preacher who'd condemned him for hampering “God's war against the devil.” Wilson, for his part, assuaged Dixie fears that his idealistic war for democracy and self-determination in Europe would threaten their own authoritarian caste system. The president oversaw the purging of black administrators at federal agencies and the introduction of racially segregated bathrooms, lavatories, and offices in many government buildings; Wilson also segregated military training camps, forcing the Union's army to adopt Dixie ways. Such moves earned him the loyalty and admiration of Dixie-bloc lawmakers, who later championed his League of Nations plan. When, years after Wilson's death, Midlander senator Gerald Nye criticized his war policies, Texas senator Tom Connally challenged Nye to a fistfight, and Virginia senator Carter Glass became so angry that he wounded himself pounding his desk. The commander in chief, like the Deep Southern and Tidewater oligarchs themselves, was not to be questioned.
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Jim Webb, the historian, Marine Corps veteran, and Virginia senator, has pointed out that during World War I, many Borderlanders enlisted in the Marine Corps, imparting “a strong tradition of Scots-Irish and Southern influence on the culture and leadership style of that elite Corps which continues to this day.” He argues that the Corps's preference for frontal assaults, its “fire team” system of interlocking unit commanders, and the tradition of having leaders who “led from the front” can all be traced to Borderlander precedents dating back to William Wallace of
Braveheart
fame. Many of our most famous officers, Webb points out, had Scots-Irish ancestors, including John J. Pershing, Douglas MacArthur, George Patton, and a host of Marine commandants.
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By contrast, the four leading opponents of intervention in World War I in the U.S. Senate were Yankees or Left Coasters: Harry Lane of Oregon, George W. Norris (a Western Reserve transplant to Nebraska), Asle Gronna (a Minnesotan representing North Dakota), and Robert La Follette of Wisconsin. When the United States entered the war, these four men were joined by three other Wisconsin congressional representatives to form the core of the antiwar caucus on Capitol Hill.
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