Colin Woodard (44 page)

 

The rise of Adolf Hitler put the Dixie bloc in a potentially awkward position. The Nazis had praised the Deep South's caste system, which they used as a model for their own race laws. Nazi publications approved of lynching as a natural response to the threat of racial mixing. (“It is a hundred times better” for Southern whites, one pro-Nazi intellectual wrote, “if exaggerated racial hatred leads to a hundred lynchings per year than if each year 50,000 mulatto children are born.”) But white opinion makers in the Dixie bloc generally did not reciprocate the admiration. Instead they attacked the Nazis for their suppression of Jews while carefully avoiding discussion of the Nazis' vicious propaganda against blacks, the forced sterilization of mixed-race children, and Hitler's calls to exterminate the “Negroid race.” The uncomfortable parallels between the two racist regimes were regularly pointed out by African American publications across the federation but got virtually no airing within Dixie's white caste. Dixie-bloc representatives lambasted the Germans and supported every important legislative act in preparation for war, from approving the draft to expanding the Navy. From 1933 onward this bloc's congressmen gave stronger support to military preparedness than any other part of the federation, even as they opposed Roosevelt's domestic policies. The public was behind them. In a national poll conducted two months before Pearl Harbor, 88 percent of Southerners said war was justified to defeat Nazi Germany, compared to 70 percent of the residents of Northeast states and 64 percent of “Midwesterners.” During the conflict, the bloc had ninety military volunteers for every one hundred draftees, compared to an average of fifty for the federation as a whole. “They had better start selective service,” (Appalachian) Alabama representative Luther Patrick joked, “to keep our boys from filling up the army.”
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During the 1930s the federation was divided on the necessity of preparing for war. New Netherland congressmen were hawkish on military preparations, perhaps because so many of their constituents had emigrated from countries endangered by Hitler. Their Left Coast, Far West, and El Norte colleagues followed suit, especially as the federal government began situating war industries and military bases in the region. Midlanders generally opposed these measures, in part due to the German Americans' reluctance to go to war with their former countrymen. Opinion in Yankeedom was deeply divided, with the New England core more inclined to prepare for war than the Great Lakes and Yankee Midwest.
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After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the nations banded together to a degree never seen before or since. Borderlanders fought for the traditional Scots-Irish reason: to avenge an attack by defeating their enemies on the field of battle. The Tidewater and Deep Southern elite—still very much in charge of their nations—wished to uphold U.S. “national” honor and to defend their Anglo-Norman brethren across the sea. Pacifist Midlanders backed the war as a struggle against military despotism, while Yankees, New Netherlanders, and Left Coasters emphasized the antiauthoritarian aspect of the struggle. Residents of El Norte and the Far West embraced a war that showered their long-neglected regions with federal largesse.
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Indeed, Hitler and Emperor Hirohito did more for the development of the Far West and El Norte than any other agent in those regions' histories. Long exploited as internal colonies, both nations were suddenly given an industrial base to help the Allies win the war. The two nations got shipyards and naval bases (in San Diego and Long Beach), aircraft plants (Los Angeles, San Pedro, and Wichita) and integrated steel mills (in Utah and interior California). There were nuclear weapons labs (Los Alamos) and test sites (White Sands) in New Mexico. Landing strips and modern airports were built throughout the area, reducing its remoteness and creating the first challenge to the transportation monopolies that had kept the Far West in a state of thralldom. The number of military facilities and defense plants in these two nations continued to grow during the Cold War in radical disproportion to their population; today they are dependent on the military-industrial complex, which influences both nations' political priorities.
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In addition to these effects, El Norte experienced a profound agricultural labor shortage during the war as farm and railroad laborers migrated to better-paying jobs at the new military plants. The solution: a wartime guest worker program by which 250,000 Mexican citizens were allowed into El Norte, setting the foundation for a far larger and less organized postwar program that would tip the balance of power back to
norteños
a few decades later.
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In the 1960s the Dixie bloc was the most hawkish region on the war in Southeast Asia, providing firm support for (Appalachian Texan) President Johnson's escalation of the conflict. Of some thirty-odd Dixie senators, only two consistently opposed the war, and both were from Appalachia. One, Arkansas's J. William Fulbright, was a committed racist who saw parallels between the federal efforts to reshape Vietnam (by propping up the Saigon regime) and the American South (by supporting civil rights activists) and vigorously fought against both. The other was an anomaly: the “patron saint of Texas liberals,” Ralph Yarborough, who ultimately was ousted for his antiwar and pro–civil rights views. Only a handful of Dixie congressmen supported a landmark 1970 Senate measure that would have stopped military interventions in Cambodia, ensuring the measure's failure. “Words are fruitless, diplomatic notes are useless,” South Carolina representative L. Mendel Rivers said of Vietnam. “There can be only one answer from America: retaliation, retaliation, retaliation, retaliation! They say, quit the bombing, I say, Bomb!” When radical antiwar activists proposed assassinating prowar senators, all the men on their hit list were Deep Southerners. Of the two dozen most significant antiwar events of the period, only one took place in the Dixie bloc: the killing of protesting black students at Jackson State University by white policemen in 1970. Throughout the conflict, most of the dissenting minority in Dixie were Borderlanders who questioned the purpose of intervening in another country's civil war. “If we must fight, let us fight in defense of our homeland and our own hemisphere,” Kentucky senator Tim Lee Carter said. “Our sons' lives are too precious to lose on foreign soil. If they must die, let it be in defense of America.”
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Opposition to the war centered in Yankeedom, New Netherland, and the Left Coast, generally on the grounds that it was an unjust imperial intervention. The antiwar movement started on these nations' campuses, with the first marches on military facilities originating from Berkeley and the first Vietnam “teach-in” held at the University of Michigan in 1965. The first mass demonstration took place in New York City in 1967 with 300,000 participants, while that fall's 400,000-person March on the Pentagon was dominated by students from New York and Boston, with substantial representation from campuses in the Yankee Midwest. Vietnam Veterans Against the War was founded by six returned soldiers in New York City and concentrated its activities in the northeast. The Kent State shootings occurred in Ohio's Yankee-founded Western Reserve, part of a wave of strikes that started at Oberlin (Yankeedom) and Princeton (New Netherland) minutes after President Nixon announced U.S. forces were invading Cambodia; of the hundreds of universities that eventually joined the strike, the vast majority were located in these three nations. They also provided the core of antiwar sentiment in Washington, with the 1970 measure to end operations in Cambodia receiving overwhelming support from their congressional delegations.
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The Midlands neither forcefully challenged nor endorsed the controversial conflict, and even its students were ambivalent. At the March on the Pentagon, witnesses noted that students from the Philadelphia and Baltimore areas were noticeably scarce, despite their close proximity to Washington, D.C. True to regional traditions, those Midlanders who did take an active stance against the war often did so on pacifist grounds, with the Philadelphia-based American Friends Service Committee mobilized to discourage violent confrontations at antiwar rallies and to provide relief to both North and South Vietnamese civilians. One Baltimore Quaker, Norman Morrison, killed himself by self-immolation outside Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's office in solidarity with Vietnamese monks who'd done the same in front of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon.
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Far Western political representatives generally supported the war, with most rejecting congressional efforts to stop military operations in Cambodia. The region produced several prominent hawks, including Barry Goldwater (of central Arizona) and Wyoming senator Gale McGee. El Norte representatives were stalemated, with even Hispanic congressmen at odds over Cambodia and other war-related issues. Antiwar protests were relatively rare in both nations, with the exception of student uprisings in Los Angeles and a chain of demonstrations led by the Chicano Moratorium, a
norteño
-led coalition. The protestors repeatedly emphasized that Chicano youths should be fighting not for Vietnam but rather “for social justice right here in the United States.” As it was an essentially nationalistic movement, its participants generally did not seek to join forces with non-Hispanic opponents of the war but rather with Puerto Ricans and other Spanish-speaking people within the federation.
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After the 2000 election, the Dixie bloc established simultaneous control over the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives for the first time in forty-six years. The White House was led by a Deep Southern president (the Houston-raised, Brazos Valley–based George W. Bush), the House by Deep Southern Texans Dick Armey and Tom DeLay, and the Senate by Borderlander Bill Frist, a member of an elite Nashville family whose ancestors had founded Chattanooga, Tennessee.
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The federation's foreign policy took an immediate and radical departure from previous norms, a change in direction that only accelerated after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington the following September. The new plan was to enhance the United States' position as the world's only superpower through military force: a series of preemptive wars against potential rivals; the sidelining of any inconvenient treaties, international organizations, or diplomatic obligations; and a severing of potentially encumbering relationships with traditional allies, save those with Israel. Bush canceled more international treaties in his first year than any other president in U.S. history. He ended negotiations with the Palestinians, insisting they become a full-scale democracy as a prerequisite to Israel's ending its occupation. Representative Armey advocated ethnic cleansing of the West Bank's three million Palestinians, while DeLay asserted the occupied territories “belonged to Israel,” apparently on biblical grounds. But most controversial of the Bush administration's foreign policy decisions was to invade Iraq, a country that had not threatened the United States and whose secular dictatorship was hated by the fanatics who had planned the September 11 attacks.
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The Iraq war provided a litmus test of the nations' commitment to internationalism or, alternately, to the unilateral use of U.S. military power. The results fell into a now recognizable pattern: the Dixie bloc gave Bush's Iraq policies a ringing endorsement. An August 2002 Gallup poll found “Southerners” approved of an invasion by 62 to 34 percent, compared to 47 to 44 percent for “Midwesterners.” Two months later, Dixie congressional representatives voted to authorize the war by a more than four-to-one ratio, far higher than any other region. Only when the war deteriorated into an ugly occupation did Appalachia and Tidewater enthusiasm begin to falter; congressional representatives from these two nations were divided over whether to condemn Bush's 2006 plan to increase the military commitment. Deep Southerners and Far Westerners, meanwhile, strongly opposed any criticism of the president's strategy. On the other side of the argument, the Left Coast congressional delegation was unanimous in its disapproval of the military “surge,” and Yankeedom and El Norte nearly so. As in other wars, opinion in the Midlands and New Netherland was mixed.
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U.S. foreign policy has shown a clear national pattern for the past two centuries. Since 1812, the anti-interventionist, anti-imperial Yankees have squared off against the bellicose, unilateralist hawks in the Deep South and Tidewater. Appalachia, while providing the warriors, is often divided on the wisdom of going to war when there is neither the prospect of territorial aggrandizement nor revenge. The Yankees—idealistic, intellectual, and guided by the Public Protestant mission—have sought foreign policies that would civilize the world and, thus, has often dominated the Foreign Affairs Committees on Capitol Hill. The Dixie-bloc—martial and honor-bound—has generally aimed to dominate the world and has traditionally controlled the federation's Armed Services Committee. “U.S. foreign policy,” Michael Lind has argued, is merely “civil war by other means.”
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CHAPTER 27

T
he nations have been struggling with one another for advantage and influence since they were founded, and from 1790 the biggest prize has been control of federal government institutions: Congress, the White House, the courts, and the military. As the central government has grown in size, scope, and power, so have the nations' efforts to capture and reshape it—and the rest of the continent—in their image. Since 1877 the driving force of American politics hasn't primarily been a class struggle or tension between agrarian and commercial interests, or even between competing partisan ideologies, although each has played a role. Ultimately the determinative political struggle has been a clash between shifting coalitions of ethnoregional nations, one invariably headed by the Deep South, the other by Yankeedom.