Black Rednecks & White Liberals Read online

  The cultural values and social patterns prevalent among Southern whites included an aversion to work,16 proneness to violence,17 neglect of education,18 sexual promiscuity,19, improvidence, 20 drunkenness,21 lack of entrepreneurship,22 reckless searches for excitement,23 lively music and dance,24 and a style of religious oratory marked by strident rhetoric, unbridled emotions, and flamboyant imagery.25 This oratorical style carried over into the political oratory of the region in both the Jim Crow era and the civil rights era, and has continued on into our own times among black politicians, preachers, and activists.Touchy pride, vanity, and boastful self-dramatization were also part of this redneck culture26 among people from regions of Britain “where the civilization was the least developed.”27 “They boast and lack self-restraint,” Olmsted said, after observing their descendants in the American antebellum South.28

  While Professor Grady McWhiney’s Cracker Culture is perhaps the most thorough historical study of the values and behavioral patterns of white Southerners, many other scholarly studies have turned up very similar patterns, even when they differed in some ways as to the causes. Professor David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed, for example, challenges the Celtic connection thesis put forth by Professor McWhiney, but shows many of the same cultural patterns among the same people, both in Britain and in the American South. Popular writings of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have likewise described similar behavior, including the Indianapolis resident’s comments on white Southern migrants to that city, which sound so much like what many have said about ghetto blacks.

  None of this is meant to claim that these patterns have remained rigidly unchanged over the centuries or that there are literally no differences between whites and blacks in any aspects of this subculture. However, what is remarkable is how pervasive and how close the similarities have been.

  Pride and Violence

  Centuries before “black pride” became a fashionable phrase, there was cracker pride—and it was very much the same kind of pride. It was not pride in any particular achievement or set of behavioral standards or moral principles adhered to. It was instead a touchiness about anything that might be even remotely construed as a personal slight, much less an insult, combined with a willingness to erupt into violence over it. New Englanders were baffled about this kind of pride among crackers. Observing such people, the Yankees “could not understand what they had to feel proud about.”29 However, this kind of pride is perhaps best illustrated by an episode reported in Professor McWhiney’s Cracker Culture: When an Englishman, tired of waiting for a Southerner to start working on a house he had contracted to build, hired another man to do the job, the enraged Southerner, who considered himself dishonored, vowed:“to-morrow morn, I will come with men, and twenty rifles, and I will have your life, or you shall have mine.”30

  In the vernacular of our later times, he had been “dissed”—and he was not going to stand for it, regardless of the consequences for himself or others.The history of the antebellum South is full of episodes showing the same pattern, whether expressed in the highly formalized duels of the aristocracy or in the no-holds-barred style of fighting called “rough and tumble” among the common folk, a style that included biting off ears and gouging out eyes. It was not simply that particular isolated individuals did such things; social approval was given to these practices, as illustrated by this episode in the antebellum South:A crowd gathered and arranged itself in an impromptu ring.The contestants were asked if they wished to “fight fair” or “rough and tumble.” When they chose “rough and tumble,” a roar of approval rose from the multitude.

  This particular fight ended with the loser’s nose bitten off, his ears torn off, and both his eyes gouged out, after which the “victor, himself maimed and bleeding, was ‘chaired round the grounds,’ to the cheers of the crowd.”This “rough and tumble” style of fighting was also popular in the southern highlands of Scotland, where grabbing an opponent’s testicles and attempting to castrate him by hand was also an accepted practice.31 Scottish highlanders were, in centuries past, part of the “Celtic fringe” or “north Britons,” outside the orbit of English culture, not only as it existed in England but also in the Scottish lowlands.

  The highlanders lagged far behind the lowlanders in education and economic progress, as well as in the speaking of the English language, for Gaelic was still widely spoken by highlanders in the nineteenth century, not only in Scotland itself but also in North Carolina and in Australia, where immigrants from the Scottish highlands were unable to communicate with English-speaking people, including lowland Scots who had also immigrated. In the Hebrides Islands off Scotland, Gaelic had still not completely died out in the middle of the twentieth century.32

  What is important in the pride and violence patterns among rednecks and crackers was not that particular people did particular things at particular times and places. Nor is it necessary to attempt to quantify such behavior. What is crucial is that violence growing out of such pride had social approval. As Professor McWhiney pointed out:Men often killed and went free in the South just as in earlier times they had in Ireland and Scotland.As one observer in the South noted, enemies would meet, exchange insults, and one would shoot the other down, professing that he had acted in self-defense because he believed the victim was armed. When such a story was told in court,“in a community where it is not a strange thing for men to carry about their persons deadly weapons, [each member of the jury] feels that he would have done the same thing under similar circumstances so that in condemning him they would but condemn themselves.”33

  “The actions of southern courts often amazed outsiders,” Professor McWhiney said. But what may be even more revealing of widespread attitudes were the cases that never even went to trial.As another study of white Southerners put it:To many rural southerners, rather than a set of legal statutes, justice remained a matter of societal norms allowing for respect of property rights, individual honor, and a maximum of personal independence. Any violation of this pattern amounted to a breach of justice requiring a specific response from the injured party. Upon learning that a youthful neighbor had approached his wife in an overly friendly manner, Robert Leard of Tangipahoa, Louisiana, promptly tracked the young man down and killed him. Under the piney-woods code of justice, anything less would have invited shame and ridicule upon the Leard family.34

  “Intensity of personal pride” was connected by Olmsted with the “fiend-like street fights of the South.”35 He mentioned an episode of public murder with impunity:A gentleman of veracity, now living in the South, told me that among his friends he had once numbered two young men, who were themselves intimate friends, till one of them, taking offence at some foolish words uttered by the other, challenges him.A large crowd assembled to see the duel, which took place on a piece of prairie ground.The combatants came armed with rifles, and at the first interchange of shots, the challenged man fell disabled by a ball in the thigh.The other, throwing down his rifle, walked toward him, and kneeling by his side, drew a bowie knife, and deliberately butchered him. The crowd of bystanders not only permitted this, but the execrable assassin still lives in the community, has since married, and, as far as my informant could judge, his social position has been rather advanced then otherwise, from thus dealing with his enemy.36

  Again, what is important here is not the isolated incident itself but the set of social attitudes which allowed such incidents to take place publicly with impunity, the killer knowing in advance that what he was doing had community approval. Moreover, such attitudes went back for centuries, on both sides of the Atlantic, at least among the particular people concerned.

  During the era when dueling became a pattern among upper-class Americans—between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War—it was particularly prevalent in the South.As a social history of the United States noted:“Of Southern statesmen who rose to prominence after 1790, hardly one can be mentioned who was not involved in a duel.”37 Editors of Southern newspapers became invol
ved in duels so often that cartoonists depicted them with a pen in one hand and a dueling pistol in the other.38 Most duels arose not over substantive issues but over words considered insulting. 39 At lower social levels, Southern feuds such as that between the Hatfields and the McCoys—which began in a dispute over a pig and ultimately claimed more than 20 lives40—became legendary.

  It has been estimated that, while at least three-quarters of the settlers in colonial New England originated in the lowland southeastern half of Britain, a similarly large proportion of the population of the South originated in the Scottish highlands, Ireland, Wales, or the northern and western uplands of England.41 Those arriving from Ireland in colonial times would have been from Ulster County, where Scots and Englishmen settled, since substantial immigration of the indigenous Irish did not begin until near the middle of the nineteenth century. Radically different cultures could develop and persist during this era before transportation and communication developed to the point of promoting widespread interactions among people in different regions.

  In colonial America, the people of the English borderlands and of the “Celtic fringe” were seen by contemporaries as culturally quite distinct, and were socially unwelcome. Mob action prevented a shipload of Ulster Scots from landing in Boston in 171942 and the Quaker leaders of eastern Pennsylvania encouraged Ulster Scots to settle out in western Pennsylvania,43 where they acted as a buffer to the Indians, as well as being a constant source of friction and conflict with the Indians. It was not just in the North that crackers and rednecks were considered to be undesirables. Southern plantation owners with poor whites living on adjoining land would often offer to buy their land for more than it was worth, in order to be rid of such neighbors.44

  Because there were no racial differences to form separate statistical categories for these north Britons and for other whites who settled in the South or in particular enclaves elsewhere, indirect indicators must serve as proxies for these cultural differences. Names are among these indicators. Edward, for example, was a popular name in Virginia and in Wessex, England, from which many Virginians had emigrated, but the first forty classes of undergraduates at Harvard College contained only one man named Edward. It would be nearly two centuries before Harvard enrolled anyone named Patrick, even though that was a common name in western Pennsylvania, where the Ulster Scots settled.45 This says something not only about the social and geographic differences of the times, but also about how regionalized the naming patterns were then, in contrast to the fact that no one today finds it particularly strange when an Asian American has such non-Asian first names as Kevin or Michelle.

  Even where there was no conflict or hostility involved, Southerners often showed a reckless disregard for human life, including their own. For example, the racing of steamboats that happened to encounter each other on the rivers of the South often ended with exploding boilers, especially when the excited competition led to the tying down of safety valves, in order to build up more pressure to generate more speed.46 An impromptu race between steamboats that encountered each other on the Mississippi illustrates the pattern:On board one boat “was an old lady, who, having bought a winter stock of bacon, pork, &c., was returning to her home on the banks of the Mississippi. Fun lovers on board both boats insisted upon a race; cheers and drawn pistols obliged the captains to cooperate. As the boats struggled to outdistance each other, excited passengers demanded more speed. Despite every effort, the boats raced evenly until the old lady directed her slaves to throw all her casks of bacon into the boilers. Her boat then moved ahead of the other vessel, which suddenly exploded: “clouds of splinters and human limbs darken[ed] the sky.” On the undamaged boat passengers shouted their victory. But above their cheers could “be heard the shrill voice of the old lady, crying, ‘I did it, I did it—it’s all my bacon!’ ”47

  On the Mississippi and other “western” rivers of the United States as it existed in the early nineteenth century, it has been estimated that 30 percent of all the steamboats were lost in accidents. Part of this may have been due to deficiencies in the early steamboats themselves but much of it was due to the recklessness with which they were operated on Southern rivers.The comments of a fireman on a Mississippi steamboat of that era may suggest why a river voyage was considered more dangerous than crossing the Atlantic—at a time when sinkings in the Atlantic were by no means rare:

  “Talk about Northern steamers,” the fireman of a Mississippi steamboat sneered to an eastern traveler in 1844,“it don’t need no spunk to navigate them waters.You haint bust a biler in five years. But I tell you, stranger, it takes a man to ride one of these half alligator boats, head on a snag, high pressures, valve soldered down, 600 souls on board & in danger of going to the devil.”48

  This was not mere idle talk.Among the steamboat explosions in the South, one on the Mississippi in 1838 killed well over a hundred people, and another near Baton Rouge in 1859 killed more than half of the 400 people on board and badly injured more than half the survivors.49 Southerners were just as reckless on land, whether in escapades undertaken for the excitement of the moment or in the many fights and deaths resulting from some insult or slight among people “touchy about their honor and dignity.” 50 Again, all of this went back to a way of life in the turbulent regions of Britain from which white Southerners came.51 Nor is it hard to recognize in these attitudes clear parallels to the behavior and attitudes of ghetto gangs today, who kill over a look or a word, or any action that can be construed as “dissing” them.

  Pride had yet another side to it. Among the definitions of a “cracker” in the Oxford dictionary is a “braggart”52—one who “talks trash” in today’s vernacular—a wisecracker. More than mere wisecracks were involved, however. The pattern is one said by Professor McWhiney to go back to descriptions of ancient Celts as “boasters and threateners, and given to bombastic self-dramatisation.” 53 Examples today come readily to mind, not only from ghetto life and gangsta rap, but also from militant black “leaders,” spokesmen or activists.What is painfully ironic is that such attitudes and behavior are projected today as aspects of a distinctive “black identity,” when in fact they are part of a centuries-old pattern among the whites in whose midst generations of blacks lived in the South.

  Any broad-brush discussion of cultural patterns must, of course, not claim that all people—whether white or black—had the same culture, much less to the same degree.There are not only changes over time, there are cross-currents at a given time. Nevertheless, it is useful to see the outlines of a general pattern, even when that pattern erodes over time and at varying rates among different subgroups.

  The violence for which white Southerners became most lastingly notorious was lynching. Like other aspects of the redneck and cracker culture, it has often been attributed to race or slavery. In fact, however, most lynching victims in the antebellum South were white.54 Economic considerations alone would prevent a slaveowner from lynching his own slave or tolerating anyone else’s doing so. It was only after the Civil War that the emancipated blacks became the principal targets of lynching. But, by then, Southern vigilante violence had been a tradition for more than a century in North America55 and even longer back in the regions of Britain from which crackers and rednecks came, where “retributive justice” was often left in private hands.56 Even the burning cross of the Ku Klux Klan has been traced back to “the fiery cross of old Scotland” used by feuding clans.57

  Economic Activity

  Observers of the white population of the antebellum South often commented not only on their poverty but also on their lack of industriousness or entrepreneurship. A contemporary characterized many white Southerners as “too poor to keep slaves and too proud to work.”58 A landmark history of agriculture in the antebellum South described the poor whites this way: They cultivated in a casual and careless fashion small patches of corn or rice, sweet potatoes, cowpeas, and garden products. Women and children did a large part of the work.The men spent their time principall
y in hunting or idleness….The men were inveterate drunkards and sometimes the women joined them in drinking inferior whisky. Licentiousness was prevalent among them…. Among their equals, the men were quarrelsome and inclined to crimes of violence….The poor whites were densely ignorant.59

  Their labors tended to be intermittent—often when they were pressed for money, rather than a steady employment career.60 Frederick Law Olmsted called it “lazy poverty,” with whatever work they did being done in a “thoughtless manner.”61 Summarizing his observations in the antebellum South, Olmsted said:…I know that while men seldom want an abundance of coarse food in the Cotton States, the proportion of the free white men who live as well in any aspect as our working classes in the North, on an average, is small, and that the citizens of the cotton States, as a whole, are poor. They work little, and that little, badly; they earn little; they sell little; they buy little, and they have little—very little—of the common comforts and consolations of civilized life. Their destitution is not material only; it is intellectual and it is moral.62

  When Olmsted found work done efficiently, promptly, and well during his travels through the South—when he found well-run businesses, good libraries, impressive churches, and efficiently functioning institutions in general—he almost invariably found them to be run by Northerners, foreigners, or Jews.63 Nor was he the only visiting observer to reach such conclusions. Another observed that “nearly all of the Old South’s successful storekeepers were either Yankees or Yankee-trained Southerners.” A French visitor said that, when you saw a plantation in better condition than others, you would often discover that it was owned by someone from the North.64 A history of Southern agriculture presented this picture of North Carolina in the early eighteenth century:Many of the inhabitants were rough borderers who lived a crude, half savage existence. Some were herdsmen, dependent mainly on the product of the range and “under the necessity of eating meat without bread.”There were also many thriftless and lazy families who had been attracted to the country by the mild climate and the ease with which a bare livelihood could be obtained by hunting and fishing, raising a little corn, and keeping a few head of swine and possibly a cow or two on the range. On the other hand, there were small farmers, many of Northern or European extraction, living industrious and thrifty lives amidst a rude abundance and considerable diversity of food supplies. They maintained good-sized herds of cattle, swine, and sheep, and the women made butter and cheese.65