Review of American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America by Colin Woodard
Too sharply drawn perhaps, but essential
Extreme polarization has jolted many of us out of a complacency we scarcely knew we indulged. After a lifetime as a political junky, I am beginning to seriously wonder how well I understand the United States – I had assumed so much and ignored much more. Woodard’s book is a regional history of the United States, as 11 separate “nations” or more accurately, “cultures”. Its ambition is to trace the roots of our political behavior to present as determined by our demographic composition and the circumstances of our origins; in this it partially, if brilliantly, succeeds. Unfortunately, the author takes his approach too far – I don’t believe it can explain as much as he thinks it does. Nonetheless, his perspective is so fundamentally useful in framing recent US political developments that it is a must read.
He defines the 11 nations, whose characteristics are determined by the conditions of their establishment – who moved into them, when, and why.
First, there was the “tidewater” in the Virginia and Maryland areas, educated planters who settled in order to conquer the land, much like the Spanish. It was a catastrophic failure until they discovered tobacco, creating a number of quick fortunes and pseudo-aristocratic oligarchies; starting with indentured servitude, according to which liberty was earned and then granted rather than a right, before moving on to slaves. Second, there were the Puritans who emigrated to New England in order to live a purer life – a relative freedom so long as settlers conformed to local religious norms. This grew into “Yankeedom” with a reformist impulse, a faith in change, and a lack of aristocratic presumptions of power inheritance. Unlike the tidewater colonies, which was blocked geographically and by other groups, Yankeedom was able to spread its culture westward. Third, there was a tolerant Dutch culture limited to the New York area, with an interest in trade and a somewhat libertarian notion of freedom. These were the 17th century cultures.
Later, poorer settlers came to the south. Greater Appalachia, the fourth region, was founded as a relatively autarkic area, mostly by less educated Scots and Englishmen; they valued their freedom from authority of any kind. They spread west in a rather lawless manner. Fifth, there was the deep south, which modelled itself on the slave state in Barbados, a brutal regime whose planter elite ruled large estates that predominantly grew cotton; their lower-class residents tended to bow to authority and accept their condition, particularly as they could look down on the other races. The cotton estates were labor-intensive with an extremely high fatality rate among workers. This would become the Bible Belt. Sixth, there were the midlands colonies, founded by the Penns and others; they were tolerant and moderate, wishing to pursue their economic future with minimum interference from the state.
The remaining cultures – the far west, New France, Spanish El Norte, and the left coast – were essentially variations on earlier cultures, either as described above or by their own historical origins. Finally, in Canada, there was a “First Nation” that was heavily Indian.
As Woodard demonstrates, these colonies represented separate cultures with differing interests and values, most of whom were skeptical of central authorities. Power-elite elements within them united in common interest in order to achieve independence, but were by no stretch of the imagination a coherent nation in formation; many pockets of loyalists persisted, particularly in what became Canada. Thus, the notion of “original intent” is a contemporary fiction, Woodard argues: there were many intents. Once independent from the British Empire, a national system worked in the early years as states pursued their development in the manner in which they chose, held together by a vague and flexible Constitution. The cultures could co-exist, if for no other reason than lack of intimate contact.
Division arose when the early cultures – Yankees, Midland, Deep South, Appalachia – pushed to the west, ending their easy co-existence through isolation. The Southern ones were attempting to extend slavery, hence to preserve their economic privileges and power arrangements. Eventually, a reformist coalition from the northeast opposed them, which provoked the Deep South and Greater Appalachia to secede, along with Virginia but not Maryland. While Woodard does not offer a narrative of the Civil War, this is an extremely interesting analysis of why the actors did what they did: southerners bowed to their elites’ vision of preserving their societies (as based on slavery and race division), northerners wanted both to preserve the union and free the slaves, to create a new society. After 1865, this conflict transformed itself into the cultural wars, which we are playing out today.
This perspective explains a great deal about our political development. Much of the north believes in government, visionary progress, and indeed, ideals of inclusion and free enterprise. Wide-ranging debate and inquiry are integral to the process of governing. On the other hand, the south opposes all this, tends to think with less nuance, and heavily relies on elite authorities to guide their beliefs, as we see with fundamentalist sects. Woodard argues that this explains our electoral blocs, that is, ideologies bound within our original cultures.
What tips the electoral balance? Swing states in a more pragmatic middle, according to Woodard. If you want to understand why Senator Joe Manchin (of Appalachian West Virginia) votes the way he does – against progressives in his own party from the northeast – this book offers a clear and, I think, convincing explanation. Woodard’s message is that progressives should listen to Manchin because he unambiguously speaks for a huge swing vote block, one crucial to their hold on power. I agree with this, even if I don’t particularly like it.
The whole time I was reading this delightful book, I was poking holes in Woodard’s arguments. While impressive in its ability to frame how we should conceive of American political possibility, I believe that Woodard’s model is too deterministic. For example, the New Deal Coalition included the south and was indisputably progressive – so long as African Americans were excluded from the government largesse, it provided basic infrastructure development to impoverished regions such as the Texas Hill Country (where LBJ was from), created jobs, and moderately redistributed wealth. It was only later, with the civil rights reforms of the 1960s, that the Coalition broke apart; today, it has evolved into forms of white nationalism and nativism that are new and more fascistic than they were in the past.
That being said, after a few weeks of thinking about it, I see that Woodard has singularly succeeded in changing the way I see the country and its possibilities. I now feel forced to acknowledge that some constituencies will remain unreachable and the Democratic Party is out of touch with a very large part of the country, indeed the lion’s share in geographical terms. Most progressives live in urban areas, cut off from a conservative rural world that we do not respect or understand, with whom we can no longer even speak. We have to change this.
Moreover, Woodard argues that the Constitution is the only thing holding us together. This deeply impressed me: I had felt for years it was obsolete and pathetically dysfunctional, indeed I would have had little regret to throw it out and try again. Now, I am wondering if that should be attempted – perhaps the result will be irreparable, violent fragmentation, even the breakup of the nation. I would not have contemplated this – something so basic – without this book. That alone is worth the price of admission.
Finally, Woodard offers a frighteningly prescient warning. To quote: we “had best respect the fundamental tenets of our unlikely union. It cannot survive if we end the separation of church and state or institute the Baptist equivalent of Sharia law. We won’t hold together if presidents appoint political ideologues to the Justice Department or the Supreme Court…or if party loyalists try to win by trying to stop people from voting rather than winning them over by their ideas. The Union can’t function if national coalitions continue to use the House and Senate to prevent important issues from being debated in the open because members know their positions wouldn’t withstand public scrutiny.” That was written in 2011. It nearly made me weep.
I have recommended this book (and the follow-up, "American Character") to so many people that Colin Woodard should give me a cut of his royalties. I'm a big fan of the "how we got here" kind of books as regards the U.S. political situation, and though none of the books I've read explains everything, this contains an important element that most others don't-the invisible but very real differences in basic cultural worldview in different regions of the U.S. that often form the scaffolding that our political differences are built upon. If I had to boil it down to only two of the eleven, I would say that the struggle between "Yankee" culture and "Borderlander" (or "Scotch-Irish*") culture is the most salient (though because both of my grandfathers were of Puritan Yankee extraction and both of my grandmothers were of Border Scots extraction, perhaps I have too much of a tendency to project my own internal conflicts onto current events-but I don't think so).
People are often incredulous when I try to explain that the Puritans weren't just a bunch of prudes-they were actually the progenitors of the progressive movement, and their concept that we needed to "reform the world in preparation for Christ's return" persists today in the liberal "mainline" versions of Protestantism. Seattle, where I live and where all my grandparents settled in the 1890s, was founded largely by settlers from Yankeedom, many following a route from the area of the Plymouth Colony, westward into New York, and around the Great Lakes, and eventually landing in Seattle, where our original motto was "New York, Alki" ("Alki" being the Chinook trading jargon word meaning, "someday"). As a result of this, we have always been a "Progressive" city, adopting both women's suffrage and Prohibition before the rest of the country, as well as having a pretty remarkable "general strike" in 1919. But Progressivism is not without its problems, as Seattle residents sometimes find when they mistake "liberalism" for "libertarianism". I always tell people, "The GREAT thing about liberals is that we want what's best for you. The BAD thing about liberals is that think we KNOW what's best for you". An example of this is our tax on sugary drinks. Because poorer people tend to drink too many of them, often resulting in diabetes and such, we discourage consumption with a substantial tax- never mind that this might be the only source of joy for a lower income worker. Though I greatly prefer it to the alternative, our city's reputation as a "nanny state" is well-deserved.
Though David Hackett Fischer's "Albion's Seed" is better known, a book that goes into far more detail and nuance than either Fischer's or Woodard's is Kevin Phillip's "The Cousin's Wars". Though Phillips WAS involved in Nixon's "Southern Strategy", to his credit, he did recant. Phillips begins with the "English Civil Wars" (aka "The Wars of the Three Kingdoms"), though he doesn't go into the religious differences too deeply-and they are necessary to REALLY understand what was at stake. I'm more inclined to believe that a culture chooses a religion that fits it more than being formed by a given religion, but whatever the mix of synergy, the seeds of the conflicts between communitarianism and libertarianism, and centralized, "top down" authority and patriarchal, "family up" authority were sown before the first settlers from Britain got here.
*Without going off on too much of a tangent, I think that the whole concept of "Sola Scriptura", which was embraced so thoroughly by Presbyterians, Baptists, and other "dissenters", and the idea that one's "compact" was directly with God (rather than with God as mediated through Church and Monarch) was, for good or ill, an important contributor (or collaborator) with the "independent spirit" associated with Borderlanders and their descendants-the frontiersmen, cowboys, and "rogue cops" that have become our American "icons". It definitely worked better when we lived in an age when we could move on when we could hear our neighbor's axe.