Most books aren’t for everyone, but occasionally a book comes along that one feels everyone should read, because it says something about what it means to be a human, or about our particular moment in time or, as in the case of “American Nations” by Colin Woodard, because it makes sense of this peculiar, patchwork, confusing, contradictory country of ours.
It is, in a sense, a book about American demographics or what lies beneath them. I can see your eyes glazing over as I type that word, but if demographics isn’t destiny precisely, it surely counts. Perhaps psychographics or folkways is a better word, but whatever you call the cultural beliefs, attitudes and traditions we live by, they are incredibly persistent. Centuries after the fact, unbeknownst to most of us, we are where our grandparents and great grandparents came from. We are what they ate, and think what they were taught.
When I began tracing our family history backwards, I was forced to learn some American history to make sense of why our ancestors came here when they did, why they settled where they did, why they moved when they did, what they believed about church and state, why they acted as they did in war and peace.
Some of the books that shed important light on these question were “The Cousin’s War” by Kevin Phillips, “Albion’s Seed” by David Hackett Fischer, and “Born Fighting” by James Webb. “American Nations” builds on them to suggest that there is not one American history, but several. They are behind our attitudes toward government and race, education and labor, marriage and the law, immigration and taxation.
Woodard shows, for example, that liberty meant very different things to an aristocratic Tidewater Virginian, a proselytizing Yankee Puritan or an egalitarian Midland Quaker. They cooperated to win a revolution but envisioned very different countries as their goal. Ever since, American history has been a tug-of-war between competing cultures. We are taught one airbrushed, “E Pluribus Unum” version of history in school, but we see a different reality every day on the news. “American Nations” is a secret decoder ring for America.
Americans from the New Netherlands became New Yorkers, a place that retains the spirit of the 17th century Dutch founders who had a tremendous tolerance for diversity and a tropism for commerce and a willingness to support anything that would advance it and oppose anything that would threaten it. Both the Revolution and the Civil War were likely to be bad for business and New Netherlands was unenthusiastic about both.
Tidewater and the Deep South were born from an aristocratic ideal, the desire to replicate the country gentleman hegemony of England in a new land with slaves in place of serfs. Liberty for all was not a Tory notion, liberty was to be reserved for the well-born and landed, an idea with consequences that still reverberate in our time. Greater Appalachia was populated by Scots-Irish refugees who believed their rights had been trampled by the British in the Scottish lowlands and again in Ireland. They refused to take it a third time and arguably won the Revolution. They have been a warlike, contentious, libertarian subculture ever since. Andrew Jackson was one of theirs. The very different Ben Franklin epitomizes the Midlander.
The Quakers who settled the Midlands believed all men possess a divine light and that finding it was a private, personal endeavor. They welcomed all, did not believe in overly zealous governance and sought an ordered, civilized polity. When mixed with tidy, industrious, rooted German immigrants they produced a culture that spread west and created the quintessential Midwesterner.
Yankeedom was settled by theocratic zealots who thought hierarchies such as that of the Catholic Church and the British Empire were tyrannical impositions on self-determination. Over time the fire of Puritan theology waned, but the taste telling others what to believe, the insistence on education, the impulse to use government to advance social ends remained.
With a few additional ingredients (the Spanish-American influence Woodard calls El Norte and a dollop of New France from north of Maine and from New Orleans), these competing folkways spread west and created the political map we inhabit today. The roots of the Red State/Blue State divide go back three hundred years. The attitudes of Tea Party adherent and Progressive were bred in the bone. One American thinks Donald Trump is a savior, another feels the same about Bernie Sanders. It is no wonder their antipathy is so bitter, they have been at loggerheads since well before the founding. It’s a colonial thing.
“American Nations” shows the melting pot is largely bunk. Yes, we have welcomed and assimilated many strains, but to an astonishing degree the same cultures that created separate colonies at the outset persist. As they spread past the Appalachians they tended to settle the new territory in distinct bands so that, for instance, Yankee attitudes and beliefs can be seen in the Western Reserve strip of northern Ohio they settled, those of the Midlanders in a row of counties across the middle of that state, and the influence of Greater Appalachia owns the southern half. Those with a good ear can hear the difference in the dialects. The election returns in the three bands are quite different, and the houses the people live in and the foods they eat also hark back to their origins.
If you are baffled by our country, its conflicting attitudes and schizophrenic politics, the key is in “American Nations.” If you have crossed the country and found some places hauntingly familiar and sympathetic and others like an alien nation, it is likely because the people from whom you sprang settled the former and not the latter. On every page there is a surprise. Why South Carolina’s flag has a crescent moon on it, why the Far West’s motto is “get out, leave us alone, give us more money.” Rarely have the scales falling from your eyes been so entertaining and instructive. Have I said this before? Everyone should read this book. And if you’ve been paying attention, you can probably deduce that it is my drop of Yankee blood that is telling you to do what I am sure is good for you. And your dollop of Scots-Irish saying, “Are you talking to me?”