New at Reason

Julian Sanchez | July 21, 2005

Charles Oliver sets off in search of the individualist spirit of the Scots-Irish.

Comments

|7.21.05 @ 10:53AM|#

"The spirit of the people who tarred and feathered tax collectors during the Whiskey Rebellion lives on in the man cooking meth in his kitchen"

Oh for the love of...

|7.21.05 @ 11:09AM|#

I agree Joe, that's not a very good analogy. The Whiskey Rebellion happened mainly because farmers distant from the markey couldn't afford to pay the shipping costs on bulk grain, so they turned their crops into a more profitable form. The tax screwed them over finacially, it had nothing to do with banning receational stimulants.

On another note, the book "Albion's Seed" has a very interesting section on the Scots-Irish/Borderers.

keith|7.21.05 @ 11:17AM|#

Joe:

My feelings exactly.

And some of us Scots-Irish from the hills of Kentucky still hate Southern politicians. And most other politicans, now that I think about it.

|7.21.05 @ 11:36AM|#

Madogvelkor,

"Albion's Seed" is reductionist non-sense.

|7.21.05 @ 11:38AM|#

joe,

Its a pretty easy task to cast back and cherry pick historical facts to justify current policies, trends, etc. I see this done all the time with the history of Athens and Sparta.

|7.21.05 @ 11:38AM|#

I have to say, there was something mildly interesting in the middle of that piece, but that is probably the worst conclusion of an article ever to show up in Reason.

|7.21.05 @ 11:47AM|#

Hakluyt, I'd be interested to know why you dislike "Albion's Seed". It seems to be a very accurate and well written book, for the time period it covers.

|7.21.05 @ 11:52AM|#

Hakluyt, I'd be interested to know why you dislike "Albion's Seed".

Now you've done it. ;-)

I love the smell of Gunnels in the morning. Smells like...lecturing.

|7.21.05 @ 12:23PM|#

Madogvelkor,

You'd have to take some classes on the colonial period, etc. and read a few hundred books on the matter. :) Reductionist, essentialist, culturally rigid analysis, conveniently ignores contradictory evidence, etc. are the sorts of ways that I describe it. Of course given the sort of thesis he has come up with its not surprising that these sorts of criticism apply.

|7.21.05 @ 1:18PM|#

I think the main reason FDR is fondly remembered throughout this region is the TVA and the rural electrification it brought. I'm surprised this wasn't mentioned.

With regard to the Hope Scholarship program, of course people complain if the benefits are threatened or their out-of-pocket expenses might go up, that's human nature. Duh. And part of it, too, is the feeling that, at least with this one program, the people paying the greatest burden of taxes (or buying the lottery tickets) in Georgia are the ones actually getting the benefits, unlike so many other government programs. The demand is more in line with 'we paid for it; it's ours.'

|7.21.05 @ 1:27PM|#

From Mencken's obituary of Creationist, populist, and all-around demagogue William Jennings Bryan:

The city proletariat, transiently flustered by him in 1896, quickly penetrated his buncombe and would have no more of him; the gallery jeered at him at every Democratic National Convention for twenty-five years. But out where the grass grows high, and the horned cattle dream away the lazy day, and men still fear the powers and principles of the air--out there between the corn-rows he held his old puissance to the end. There was no need of beaters to drive his game. The news that he was coming was enough. For miles the flivver dust would choke the roads. And when he rose at the end of the day to discharge his Message there would be such a breathless attention, such a rapt and enchanted ecstasy, such a sweet rustle of amens as the world has not known since Johannan fell to Herod's headsman.

There was something peculiarly fitting in the fact that his last days were spent in a one-horse Tennessee village, and that death found him there. The man felt at home in such scenes. He liked people who sweated freely, and were not debauched by the refinements of the toilet. Making his progress up and down the Main Street of little Dayton, surrounded by gaping primates from the upland valleys of the Cumberland Range, his coat laid aside, his bare arms and hairy chest shining damply, his bald head sprinkled with dust--so accoutred and on display he was obviously happy. He liked getting up early in the morning, to the tune of cocks crowing on the dunghill. He liked the heavy, greasy victuals of the farmhouse kitchen. He liked country lawyers, country pastors, all country people. I believe that this liking was sincere--perhaps the only sincere thing in the man. His nose showed no uneasiness when a hillman in faded overalls and hickory shirt accosted him on the street, and besought him for light upon some mystery of Holy Writ. The simian gabble of a country town was not gabble to him, but wisdom of an occult and superior sort. In the presence of city folks he was palpably uneasy. Their clothes, I suspect, annoyed him, and he was suspicious of their too delicate manners. He knew all the while that they were laughing at him--if not at his baroque theology, then at least at his alpaca pantaloons. But the yokels never laughed at him. To them he was not the huntsman but the prophet, and toward the end, as he gradually forsook mundane politics for purely ghostly concerns, they began to elevate him in their hierarchy. When he died he was the peer of Abraham.... His place in the Tennessee hagiocracy is secure. If the village barber saved any of his hair, then it is curing gall-stones down there today.

|7.21.05 @ 1:31PM|#

Hmm...looks like I put the end italics bracket a paragraph ahead.

|7.21.05 @ 2:03PM|#

What of those individualists in Murphy Village, SC?

Larry A|7.21.05 @ 2:08PM|#

I think the main reason FDR is fondly remembered throughout this region is the TVA and the rural electrification it brought.

That or folks have him confused with Teddy.

keith|7.21.05 @ 2:20PM|#

The popular characterization of the South and of Southerners as a bunch of fat, whiny louts with a fistful of lottery tickets, Wal-Mart receipts, and welfare checks, may apply in many cases. But if you want to talk about the South as it relates to old-timey Scots-Irish traditions, there are still pockets of cranky, isolated communities scattered throughout the mountains. They don't get written about much, because they don't like to talk to anyone and most people don't know they're there anyway.

Even as a fellow Kentuckian, the fact that I grew up less than hour from the city of Louisville made me a suspect and pariah.

Trotting out the name of a great grandfather who happened to take some shots at Pinkerton thugs during the 1920/21 Coal Mine Wars and having a grandfather who fought in Paton's army are about the only thing that kept me from being run out of town.

|7.21.05 @ 2:39PM|#

In my AP, yes AP, history class when I was in high school, I had a test question as follows:

"The Scotch-Irish were____________________."

It was a mutiple choice and the actual answer was "a troublesome lot."

Can you believe it? Talk about a serious lack of objectivity. I argued with the teacher about how ludicrous a blanket statement like that was, but he wouldn't budge. No wonder most of his class didn't pass the AP exam (although, ha ha, I did).

|7.21.05 @ 4:23PM|#

I come from the Scotch-Irish. My last name even sounds like "Celtic".
And yet most people assume that I am jewish. Let's face it, most americans are mutts by the third generation.

|7.21.05 @ 4:27PM|#

C'mon, Jode, if the other three choices were objectively innaccurate, that's a perfectly good question. Maybe a little prejudiced.

|7.21.05 @ 4:44PM|#

Most of the "Scotch-Irish" were mutts before they even got to America, the borderers especially. A mix of Scotish, Nordic, English, Saxon, and Irish.

|7.21.05 @ 5:16PM|#

True Madogvelkor, but that does even less to explain why I look like a shorter version of that guy from The Hebrew Hammer.

|7.21.05 @ 6:51PM|#

joe,

How's this for an alternative question:

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was _________.

a. a famous African-American abolitionist.
b. the English commander at the Battle of Waterloo.
c. one of Thomas Edison's inventions.
d. an incompetent, power-hungry diletant who became the worst US president of the 20th century.

|7.21.05 @ 7:02PM|#

crimethink,
Worse than Jimmy carter? He's history's greatest monster!

|7.21.05 @ 8:47PM|#

Mo,

Don't get me started on that rabbit-molester*! But he learned it from watching Frankie!


* intending the original meaning of molest, of course

|7.21.05 @ 9:27PM|#

Funny you never hear the Tom Tancredos of this country railing against the large numbers of Irish who are here illegally.

(Not a joke: go out to Eastern Long Island and throw a stick [shillelagh?]; you'll hit about a dozen of them...)

|7.21.05 @ 9:29PM|#

Joe--Didn't go down like that. Choices were very broad like "farmers" "craftsmen" or "fishermen" or some crap like that. Shitty question overall. This was the same teacher who once wrote on my essay that I wrote well but then crossed the word "well" out and replaced it with "good". Aah, American publice education.

|7.21.05 @ 9:31PM|#

Meant public. Should've gone back to typing class.

|7.21.05 @ 9:55PM|#

So a major migration from a specific geographic region over a short time followed by major political upheaval doesn't lend itself to the type of doen in Albion's Seed? What about the African-American slave trade, to be doen in the the volume? Shouldn't we use these types of analysis, settlement patterns, social relationships etc, to analyze African-American impact on US society? What other tools do we have?


You'd have to take some classes on the colonial period, etc. and read a few hundred books on the matter. :) Reductionist, essentialist, culturally rigid analysis, conveniently ignores contradictory evidence, etc. are the sorts of ways that I describe it. Of course given the sort of thesis he has come up with its not surprising that these sorts of criticism apply.

Comment by: Hakluyt at July 21, 2005 12:23 PM

|7.22.05 @ 9:41AM|#

Then you're right, Jode, that just sucks.

|7.25.05 @ 12:33PM|#

Mike:

What does doen mean? My brain's typo-correcting function can't grok that one.

Illegal/undocumented/"free people go wherever they damned well please" - type immigration from Ireland was big in the 70s and 80s, but once the Republic adopted its "Celtic Tiger" policies that flow has actually started to reverse. Of course, there may be some localized variation.

FDR doesn't rate as Our Worst President. Woodrow Wilson wins that by a mile. At least Roosevelt II had an actual attack on U.S. territory as a causus belli in 1941. Most everything in domestic policy we libertarians hate about Franklin were there in embryo with Wilson, from debasing the currency to enacting conscription, with the added sins of introducing official segregation into federal employment, jailing one's political opponents, wartime alcohol prohibition that morphed into a constitutional amendment, and the income tax. At least FDR let a man have a beer.

Kevin
Overwhelmingly non-Scots Irish, though Dad's folks may have a Jock in the woodpile.