The Really Old South, the Phony New South. Our local PBS television station, WNET Newark/New York, broadcast today the last two parts of the four-part series, "Rebels and Redcoats: How Britain Lost America", a British view by English military historian Richard Holmes. This episode speaks to the last time the South was more a boon than bane to the United States. And even, then, its insistence on retaining slavery while claiming to fight for "Liberty" (the name of another series on the Revolutionary War that is also being rebroadcast by WNET) put the success of the Revolution at serious risk.
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The key facts about the American Revolution militarily are (a) that it could not have succeeded without French help — thank you, France — and (b) that the vastness of the Continental Army's homeland and the democratically dispersed nature of power here made recapture of lost colonies extremely difficult. The British found themselves in control of the cities and, like Napoleon in Moscow, thought that that would bring an end to resistance. But, like the Russians three decades later, the Americans had so great a depth of territory that loss of small areas didn't mean much.
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Making things worse for the British, there was no historical nor unified "capital" of "America", which was a group of separate states each of which had its own capital but none of which was particularly important in a predominantly rural society. When the British captured Philadelphia, the ostensible "capital" of the Thirteen States, they found that didn't dishearten the "Rebels". Philadelphia meant nothing to Charlestonians, New Yorkers, or Bostonians.
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Curiously, Napoleon made his quest the ancient capital of Russia, Moscow, not the contemporaneous capital, Saint Petersburg. But it wouldn't have made much difference which city he took. Russia was too big to conquer, as "America" (a geographical term, not a real country at the time) was too big to reconquer without winning "the hearts and minds" of its residents.
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Making things even worse for the British was that England made some crucially foolish mistakes that alienated large portions of the former-colonial population, such as allying with Indians and loosing them upon rural white settlers, to slaughter and scalp, and trying to win over the black population by promising to end slavery. We were to see, 80 years after the British lost at Yorktown, how much blood ending slavery would take.
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Still, the point of this blog entry is that the South has been for almost our entire history (with the POSSIBLE exception of the Revolution), a huge, stinking, dead albatross around our national neck.
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In the later years of the Revolutionary War, after the British took most of the major cities in the North but the war still did not end, they turned their attention to capturing Southern cities, with, however, the same result. The South was far more rural than the North, so the loss of a few important cities was even less important there than in the North, where, in any case, it didn't mean as much as the British had hoped it would. If the Revolution started in the North, it triumphed in the South. Militarily.
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Alas, the South embraced "liberty" only for white men, and long after the establishment of independence, the Union, and a Constitution that entrenched a Bill of Rights for white people, the South fought tooth and nail against equality and freedom for blacks.
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Slavery was abolished, but only at detestable cost in life and treasure; and new institutions that amounted to a new slavery were created during Reconstruction, the South's triumph over the North.
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Southern bigots kept blacks ignorant and uneducated, and made living conditions so unpleasant that hundreds of thousands left the South for the North. Alas, when they arrived there, they did not possess the skills necessary to succeed. Nor was quickly acquiring skills by patient and intense attention to education part of their tradition. Impatient young people could argue, in part rightly, that it didn't matter how much education a black person got; s/he still wouldn't be allowed to rise as high as his or her talents might otherwise permit because of white hostility.
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The consequence of the long denial of quality education to blacks in the South is that instead of moving out of poverty within one generation up North, large proportions of black migrants remained stuck in dehumanizing poverty, a culture that actually derided education and praised stupidity, in ghettoes that were filled with violence and the life-sapping, self-subverting use of drugs.
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Rage at real and imagined slights produced riots and vast criminality that very nearly destroyed American civilization, almost bringing down all of the great cities of the Nation to the lowest level of Southern barbarism. Huge swaths of virtually all our major cities were literally burned to the ground and rendered into "war zones" as catastrophic as 1945 Berlin.
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Fortunately, we have emerged from that terrible time, as Southern blacks (which is to say, the great preponderance of all American blacks) who had resettled in the North and West incorporated key features of the culture of success into the mentality of their children: education, self-discipline, deferred gratification (sacrifice now for success later), and acceptance of the fact that progress is more usually incremental than monumental. American blacks who have taken those values to heart have emerged from poverty to form a huge community of middle-class blacks who are, alas, still coping with an immovable culture of poverty in which getting rich quick, by any means necessary, and displaying the signs of wealth (without perhaps even having the wealth those signs would suggest) are more important than living a life of modest success and happiness rooted in nonmaterialistic values rather than the flash and glamor of the pimp and pusher.
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For several decades, the South has dominated national politics, with extremely harmful results. The most regressive part of the Nation tips the balance between the most progressive and more conservative regions, toward the least-progressive policies. Were it not for the South, the U.S. would be very similar to the progressive nations of Northern Europe.
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The South is the most jingoistic, racist, homophobic, and superstitious region of the Nation, and pretends to speak for "Amurica". All too much of the Nation accepts Southern-identified features of "Americanism" as truly representative of our civilization, when they are wholly at variance with the progressive values we fought our Revolution for.
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Poor whites suffer as much as do poor blacks from the regressive politics entrenched by Southern tie-breaking votes in national politics, and a large proportion of the most desperately poor people, with the worst rates of pay and worst employee benefits, live in the South. How does it profit poor whites to defeat proposals for, to use one example, universal healthcare, when they more than most need exactly that kind of care?
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In recent decades we have been told there is a "New South" that has moved beyond race and embraced a more balanced and nuanced politics. What a pile of crap! Where is this New South? And how did such little progress as the South has experienced come from?
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The Federal Government has poured trillions of dollars into the South, taken from the pockets of taxpayers in other parts of the Union, to try to lift Southerners out of their self-inflicted misery. But Southern "culture" resists self-improvement. Only as outsiders fled cold winters for the Sunbelt, which just happens to be in the South, has what little progress as we see there arrived. Absent migration from the North and Latin America, Miami would be as retrograde and racist as the smallest town in northern Florida.
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Voting rights legislation has changed the complexion of many local governments across the South, but there are still no black Senators nor Governors in the entire region. There was, briefly, ONE 'black' governor, in Virginia, but he wasn't very dark and didn't last long.
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I will believe there is a New South when (a) Southern poor whites realize that they have been played for fools by their 'betters', and change their voting habits to make common cause with progressives to secure really good health insurance for their family, really good wages, and jobs with really good benefits; and (b) when every single monument to the 'heroes' of the Confederacy is torn down, every Southern state flag removes all symbols of the Confederacy, every Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis Highway is renamed.
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I would love to see a real New South. When will it arrive?
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:52 PM