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"Real" America
Let me second Belle Waring's last point about The Washington Post's series "Young and Gay in Real America" (one two) -- nothing pisses me off more than the implication that some parts of the country are more "really" America than others (though the forthcoming four part feature "Young and Straight in Fake America" about my misspent youth in the Village is sure to be a knockout) -- we're none of us masquerading pseudoamericans here. Indeed, it's bizarre that the Northeastern part of the country -- the part that was settled first, the part that led the Revolution, the part that led the nation to victory in the Civil War -- has somehow acquired a reputation as less authentically American than a lot of Johnny-come-lately squarish ersatz states and a big swathe of the southeast that decided one time to launch a violent, treasonous effort to maintain the institution of chattel slavery and turn North America into a British sphere of influence.
September 27, 2004 | Permalink
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» The Saint Louis Hegelians and the Metaphysically Essential Center of the United States of America from The Fly Bottle
Matt is whining about the implication that the Northeast isn't "real" America. I can't imagine why he's so defensive about it. He so wrong that he should just quietly let it go. The core of real America is, of course,... [Read More]
Tracked on Sep 27, 2004 2:34:48 PM
» Real America, Real World from The Cardinal Collective
Matthew Yglesias and Belle Waring make the same reasonable point about a Washington Post article about "Being Gay in the Real America". Oklahoma is neither more nor less "real America" than Greenwich Village. This is the same point as the... [Read More]
Tracked on Sep 28, 2004 3:44:12 AM
» Real America, Real World from The Cardinal Collective
Matthew Yglesias and Belle Waring make the same reasonable point about a Washington Post article about "Being Gay in the Real America". Oklahoma is neither more nor less "real America" than Greenwich Village. This is the same point as the... [Read More]
Tracked on Sep 28, 2004 3:56:26 AM
» Swingin' in Real America from Three Guys
While Yglesias and Waldman do a good job of not playing tit-for-tat with the Republicans' un-American regionalism, I think a lot of Dems see the South as... [Read More]
Tracked on Oct 31, 2004 3:28:15 PM
Comments
You'd think "real America" would get targeted by terrorists more often.
Posted by: digamma | Sep 27, 2004 10:09:09 AM
Right on, Matt. This happens on a smaller scale, too. Many people are under the impression that you can't know anything about the world unless you are from their home town. For some reason the media has decided that Alabama or Kansas is the country's home town.
Posted by: Mark Golden | Sep 27, 2004 10:16:22 AM
Indeed, it's bizarre that the Northeastern part of the country -- the part that was settled first, the part that led the Revolution, the part that led the nation to victory in the Civil War.
It's also the part that burned "witches." So perhaps that's why some attribute or compare the current perceived "values" of "red staters" to "real" America.
Posted by: SoCalJustice | Sep 27, 2004 10:21:06 AM
I resent what you say about squarish states. North Dakota is among the top five or ten best states for high literacy, low crime, low unemployment, and long life expectancy. And you can buy a livable house there for $3,000 or less.
North Dakota also leads the nation in outmigration. I would call that a pretty stunning revealed prference.
Posted by: Zizka | Sep 27, 2004 10:22:40 AM
P.S. I'm not going to read the article, but Billings Montana has a substantial gay community. You heard it here first.
Posted by: Zizka | Sep 27, 2004 10:24:01 AM
Matt: now why do you have to ruin a perfectly good storyline?
It also strikes me that those down home southern values our media promotes are generally exemplified by *white* southerners. Odd how these things work out. Let's hear a little more about collard greens.
Posted by: John Isbell | Sep 27, 2004 10:27:23 AM
The Post's treatment is more even-handed, but the Times in particular is really terrible at this sort of coverage. The entire world outside the New York metro area is covered as if it were a different planet inhabited by some other species. As a displaced Southerner I find it really grating.
Is that figure really $3,000 ? You sure you didn't mean $30,000, which is still absurdly low?
Posted by: niq | Sep 27, 2004 10:28:03 AM
I don't think you're giving serious enough treatment to an interesting subject.
I think what the Post means by "Real America" is "the majority of America that people in the east and west coast bubbles tend to ignore most of the time." Clearly they're not any more "real" than you or I, but they're important. If anything, I think the headline writer/author is trying to point out that often we don't think they're real. In other words, we often think of them as Bush-voting, God-fearing, gun-toting redneck robots, and not living, breathing, educated Americans.
Of course, the darker meaining of "real America," (which I hope was not the intention) could be a reference to high immigration levels in the Northeast cities and on the west coast. Go to Iowa, and you'll be hard-pressed to find non-natives. In NYC, you'll be hard-pressed to avoid us.
Some minor points against your silly northeast bias:
1) Virginia was settled before Massachusetts or New York. Florida was settled by the Spanish even earlier. The entire Southeast was explored decades before the pilgrims got lost and wound up in Plymouth.
2) New York City was wildly opposed to fighting the civil war and seriously considered seceding in 1863.
3) Not really a minor point, and perhaps not worth getting into, but the South didn't secede to preserve chattel slavery (nor did the North invade to eliminate it). The South seceded because of the superior, dominating attitude of northerners that this post is representative of, that wanted to trample states rights as it was then understood. After the war, the meaning of "states rights" has been completely redefined (absolutely for the better, mind you), but at the time what the North wanted to do was entirely outside the bounds of political norms. Saying the North sacrificed millions of its soldiers to rid the nation of slavery is an abominable case of looking at history through rose-colored glasses.
Posted by: right | Sep 27, 2004 10:28:44 AM
"[E]ach national variant of fascism draws its legitimacy, as we shall see, not from some universal scripture but from what it considers the most authentic elements of its own community identity. Religion, for example, would certainly play a much larger role in an authentic fascism in the United States than in the first European fascisms, which were pagan for contingent historical reasons." Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism emphasis added, via David Neiwert
If "exceptionalism", religious fundamentalism(and Millenialism), and sexual repression ( for examples) are characteristics more common in Americans than in Europeans than it might be said that there is an "American Character" or "Real America" defined as the marginal differences from other Western societies. Just as there are charcteristics of Japanese Western society that define it as Japanese.
That these may have at one time existed in the Northeast (Cotton Mather & Scarlet Letter) and may still be there in isolated minorities does not negate the fact that whatever might be meant as "American" is not more evident in OK and Alabama.
Other countries like freedom and religious tolerance. But very few have a half-dozen 24 hour evangelical cable stations.
Posted by: bob mcmanus | Sep 27, 2004 10:34:30 AM
You mean latte-sipping, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading freakshows are "real Americans?" What fun is that. I may as well go back to 7-11 coffee, USA Today, and a pickup truck.
Posted by: C.J.Colucci | Sep 27, 2004 10:43:01 AM
"The South seceded because of the superior, dominating attitude of northerners that this post is representative of, that wanted to trample states rights as it was then understood."
The South wanted to keep their slaves, pure and simple. Read the various articles of secession for Christ's sake.
"New York City was wildly opposed to fighting the civil war and seriously considered seceding in 1863."
You're attacking the north for not respecting states rights, but, at the same time, its a bad thing that the Democratic party at the time really didn't want war but, nevertheless, wanted to preserve the union?
Posted by: heh | Sep 27, 2004 10:44:12 AM
Speaking from that "big swath of the southeast" (which did indeed secede to preserve chattel slavery, btw--where do these fantasists come from?), it's always seemed to me that the South is not "real America" either, in the media's mind. When the evening news talks to Southerners, we're representative of "the South," that quaint region. The "real Americans" appear to dwell in Ohio and Iowa, for the most part, and possibly eastern Kansas.
As a parallel to that "geographic center of the U.S.", someone needs to give us a map showing the Metaphysically Essential Center of the U.S. Then, when Peter Jennings wants to know what "real Americans" think, ABC can just send a reporter there and ask them. In fact, we could abolish this whole election nonsense and just hold a straw poll in the designated suburb.
Posted by: Anderson | Sep 27, 2004 10:44:30 AM
As a Virginian by migration, it is true that settlers established colonies in Virginia (and actually North Carolina even earlier) before Massachusetts. It's also true that almost everybody in these colonies died, and therefore the first enduring, permanent settlement was in Massachusetts.
Posted by: Barbara | Sep 27, 2004 10:50:58 AM
A couple of things about this:
1.) My home of Boston (and also New York and DC and other communist cities where welfare queens supposedly live off the hard work of real America) is made up of predominantly blue-collar, working-class people. Sure, we have more elitist eggheads than most places, but they are certainly not the entire population.
2.) Most of the people (i.e., right-wing bloggers) who claim to reside in "real" America are most likely middle-to-upper-class yuppies who live in the suburbs, or worse, planned gated communities. Let's face it: not many farmers in Iowa have the time to sit at their laptops and write "Indeed" after every Jeff Jarvis post.
3.) Liberals/Progressives DO need to overcome their class predjudices (as Mr. Sawicky constantly reminds us). On WFNX's "1-in-10" last night (a local radio show dealing with "gay"-themed issues), one of the hosts derided Bush supporters as frequent Wal-Mart shoppers. This only reinforces the image of city-dwellers as latte-sipping snobs. Bad, bad, bad.
Posted by: Brad Reed | Sep 27, 2004 10:51:17 AM
In response to the comment by "right", I think it's important to point out that the single most important "state right" that the south fought to preserve was the right to own other human beings as property.
The debate over that "right" had dominated national politics from the beginning - from the vile Three-Fifths Comprimise in the constitution, to the Missouri Compromise, to the Compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Act, to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, to the Civil War itself, slave-owning states did whatever they could, including trampling on the "rights" of other states, to ensure the continuation of their privilege.
The south left the union when Lincoln, of the anti-slavery Republican Party, won the presidency. Lincoln might have been fighting to preserve the union, but the south was certainly fighting to preserve chattel slavery.
Posted by: Blogtheist | Sep 27, 2004 10:52:42 AM
And there are so many layers of irony here that you couldn't peel 'em with a knife. I come from the part of the South that supported the Union cause in that 'ol War, mainly becaouse chattel slavery was uncommon in the Southern Mountains, and whose people were stigmatized as hillybillies or worse. The result of this sort of marginalization is, unfortunately, Zell Miller.
And the whole deal with this 'real American' crap is marginalization of someone.
Posted by: Mr. Bill | Sep 27, 2004 10:56:32 AM
Matthew, just ignore the trolls who are trying to defend the Southern traitors. The fact that the South committed treason against the United States is less important than the fact that it is still so popular in the South to hang the flag of Treason (ie the Confederate Flag) in an official governmental role. These traitor sympathizers shouldn't be trusted to ever work for the government let alone run the government.
Posted by: Dan the Man | Sep 27, 2004 10:59:50 AM
Man, I checked into comments just to agree wholeheartedly with Matt's original statement -- the Northeast is just as real as any other part of the country. And I say that as a transplanted midwesterner (Ohio and Wisconsin) now living in Massachusetts.
But comments have gotten pretty far afield -- origins of the Civil War, whether New England or Virginia came first -- and it's pretty hard for a high school history teacher to stay out of the fray.
About an hour ago, I was talking to my sophomores about the Fugitive Slave Act and the Compromise of 1850. Just where in God's holy Earth do the southerners come off as the defenders of states' rights? I mean, here you got the federal government coming into northern states who have sovereignly determined that runaway slaves can freely transit their territories and telling them that those laws have no standing and that citizens who obey those state laws are subject to arrest and fines by federal agents.
Certainly from the Compromise of 1850 on, the southerners are blatantly and nakedly using the power of the federal government to impose slavery on the north. The epitome of it is the Dred Scott decision.
(BTW, Virginia was viable, despite the ongoing high death rate, by about 1611. I believe that was before the founding of Plymouth...)
Posted by: litho | Sep 27, 2004 11:05:55 AM
Living Dolls:The Making of a Child Beauty Queen
Great documentary, a revelation to me when I watched it on HBO. About the Little Junior Miss or whatever scene, 6 yr-old girls in adult sexy dresses with full makeup and hair. A very Red-State activity, would be my guess, and yet all the coaches and personal stylists were gay males.
Completely accepted within that context.
Points: Flyover country (and I live there) is more complex than metropolitan America would guess.
2) Red-state America (which is not completely geographical) despite its complexity remains a steaming swamp of permanently diseased instincts.
Posted by: bob mcmanus | Sep 27, 2004 11:09:20 AM
From what I have seen in my cobbled-together year and a half living on the road in this country, one part of America is no longer significantly different than any other part, outside of topography. Most places have a Wal-Mart and a corporate strip. Most places have liberals and conservatives. Most places would consider themselves part of America, from Caribou, ME to Manhattan to Birmingham to Columbus to Walsenburg, CO to Yachats, OR to San Diego.
Posted by: Oliver | Sep 27, 2004 11:10:55 AM
The North fought the Civil War to preserve the Union. like it or not, you're stuck with us Southrons. Assertion of cultural superiority will only make the polarization worse. Some dumbasses use the Comfederate battle jack to show racism, and some just to say, 'I'm from here." Battles over symbols are a substitute for avoiding the real issues of economic and racial division.
There are many Souths, as many as Southerners. Avoid making it harder for beleagured Southern Progressives by asserting some sort of regional superiority, and marginalizing all persons of any region. I mean, I've been to South Boston....
(should have been 'hillbillies' in previous post.)
Posted by: Mr. Bill | Sep 27, 2004 11:13:38 AM
The first member of my family to reach this continent got here in the 1640s and is buried in the Old North Church graveyard (he was expleed from Harvard for drunkeness!!). I have ancestors who were at Bunker Hill and Antietam.
My nice hi-tech, higher ed suburb is very Demoratic. The folks who run it are the ones who coach Little League, are active in their church, organize charities, and like that.
In other words, it's just like a suburb of Atlanta, except it's Democrats instead of Republicans.
I'm tired of being demonized for no cause. If it looks like Kerry's going to lose come Halloween, I hope he goes down as follows.
"Gay marriage? I'm proud to come from a state where constitutional liberty was upheld over religious bigotry!
Posted by: JMG | Sep 27, 2004 11:16:12 AM
Right,
New England had a semi-permanent population of thousands of European fishermen decades before any serious attempts at colonization were made, and perhaps even before the voyages of Columbus - Mark Kurlansky's epic little book Cod fingers the Basques as the true "discoverers" of America.
And then there's Maine (= Massachusetts until 1820) which shows signs in its archaeological record of possible Viking exploration and settlement along its coast.
Unless Virginia was a Carthaginian colony or settled by Odysseus on his final voyage, you folks are going to have to dig deep to beat either of those.
I'll leave the "states rights" mantra of yours alone, except to ask you this question: if the right of the States at issue had been anything other than slavery, do you think that the South would have had been able to engineer the secession of half the existing Union?
Everyone Else,
The problem with "real America" is that it thinks it's the only America. Somehow I'm able to envision a country that includes blue liberal coastal cities, red conservative flyover country, and all sorts of shades of purple in between that nevertheless remains "American" wherever you go. I happen to like it that way, too. It would never occur to me to think of a person from Crawford, Texas as not being part of "real America", and yet there is apparently a whole demographic out there that feels such antipathy towards me.
Besides, anyone who thinks that New England is a liberal bastion should drive for an hour in any direction from downtown Boston...
Posted by: oodja | Sep 27, 2004 11:16:18 AM
It's also the part that burned "witches." So perhaps that's why some attribute or compare the current perceived "values" of "red staters" to "real" America.
Were you taking yourself seriously when you wrote this, or were you just looking for a snappy comeback? Let me lay it out on the line-- You, SoCalJusice, are full of crap. I, for one, have yet to hear people from the "heartland" claim that the northeast is corrupt because of the Salem witch trials. You were just trying to come up with a senseless attack rather than address this bizarre bigoted perception some people have about being "real americans."
That always reminds me of this quote from Suck.com:
[Some people's sense of] "importance" is that they're born and raised AMERICANS, from America's HEARTLAND - as if hailing from Missouri is some sort of an accomplishment, to hold over the head of someone who made the "mistake" of being born in a sh*thole like Cambodia.
Posted by: Constantine | Sep 27, 2004 11:21:42 AM
"right" writes: ...the South didn't secede to preserve chattel slavery...
That's a lie that Southerners have been telling themselves since Reconstruction. Slavery was the most important issue in the country in the mid-1800s, and the Republican Party was founded by those who would rollback slavery (the first Presidential candidate, Fremont. Of course, Abraham Lincoln originally wanted to gradually phase out slavery in the US, but it was clear that ending slavery was his ultimate goal, and the South knew it. That was the only reason for secession. Everything else was rationalization.
... (nor did the North invade to eliminate
it).
That's true---the North invaded to preserve the union.
Posted by: Daryl McCullough | Sep 27, 2004 11:22:41 AM
My parents grew up in small towns in southern Illinois. They call it "God's country". I think (hope, anyway) they were somewhat joking, but I got a strong impression that my relatives saw Chicago as that Sodom and Gomorrah to the north, not really part of Illinois.
Posted by: ...now I try to be amused | Sep 27, 2004 11:24:43 AM
Funny comment thread. I'm not American, but unReal-American MY has always been Canuck friendly, so here goes
the South didn't secede to preserve chattel slavery
Yes, it did.
Gay marriage? I'm proud to come from a state where constitutional liberty was upheld over religious bigotry!
I'm glad at that as well, but it is funny that the state founded by puritans is now known for its lack of religious bigotry. The South is not the only part of the USA with an unclean history.
And if the South's defence, it is the only part of the country to come up with an authentically American cuisine (cornbread, collard greens), and an authentically American musical tradition (Rock'n Roll, Blues). Of course, it was black Americans who created both of those.
African-Americans -- the only real Americans?
Posted by: Ikram | Sep 27, 2004 11:27:26 AM
This has always bugged me too--I had a post along similar lines a while back and several commenters suggested what (probably naively) hadn't occured to me--that the "real" America seems to be the segment of the country that's still the whitest. It's hard to think of any other justification--the trend of the last century was growing urbanization, so most of the population now lives in metropolitan areas, not putatively more authentic exurbs and rural areas.
Posted by: Julian Sanchez | Sep 27, 2004 11:41:30 AM
Ikram writes: ...but it is funny that the state founded by puritans is now known for its lack of religious bigotry...
Actually, the history of the puritans in New England is pretty interesting. The Puritans gradually mellowed and merged with the Congregationalists (which eventually became the mainstream Protestant denomination, the Church of Christ), and a schism within the Congregationalists gave rise to the very most tolerant Christian group, the Unitarians.
Posted by: Daryl McCullough | Sep 27, 2004 11:41:31 AM
I'm waiting for someone to call for the return of the New England colonial caliphate.
Posted by: Jeff | Sep 27, 2004 11:41:50 AM
Yeah, it really is $3000. Of course, the house isn't in Fargo, Minot, or any of N.D.'s other major metropolitan areas. There are a lot of abandoned houses in small towns there.
Like JMG, I'm a Yankee the way a lot of Southrons are Rebs. I frequently hear it said that "The South" will never, ever vote for a Northern liberal candidate, and since I'm a Northern liberal I take it personal.
They don't me, I don't like them. Is there a problem with that?
Posted by: Zizka | Sep 27, 2004 11:42:04 AM
Julian's got it. It's the "whiteness." Note that on those occasions when the South gets to be part of "real America," it's the white south.
Posted by: Atrios | Sep 27, 2004 11:46:43 AM
Exactly. Who is really being targeted by the terrorists here?? New York and Washington were the targets of 9/11. Los Angeles and Seattle are targets of attacks that were thwarted. It's people living in the Northeast who are really being affected by the war on terror. Hurricanes and home-grown terrorists like Tim McVeigh pose more danger to the south and midwest.
I'm also tired of the idea that mid-America and the south are somehow more authentically American. Boston was the cradle of the Revolution! The treasonous south were allied with Britain against their own brothers in the name of slavery.
It's amazing that some people actually are still arguing over the causes of the Civil War. There should be no question about who was right and who was wrong in that conflict. The south was backwards in 1865, and it was still backwards in 1965.
Posted by: Tim | Sep 27, 2004 11:49:34 AM
Look, I really don't want to be in this argument but I must clarify.
CLEARLY, slavery is a horrible and terrible thing, and all of mankind is better off now that it's gone,
CLEARLY, the Confederacy was generally pro-slavery and the Union was generally anti-slavery, and we can all conclude with great certainty that the Union was in the moral right.
But this characterization - "a big swathe of the southeast that decided one time to launch a violent, treasonous effort to maintain the institution of chattel slavery and turn North America into a British sphere of influence," is just a brazenly untrue slander on the South.
First of all, they did not launch a violent effort, they merely said we're leaving the Union. The North attacked (hence, the favored, but far too simplistic, name for the war in South Carolina: The War of Northern Aggression) and then we had a violent war.
Secondly, saying the South started an "effort" to maintain slavery is equivalent to saying the North fought the war to destroy slavery, which is untrue. As several posters have noted, Lincoln fought the war to preserve the union, and didn't even free the slaves in the states he controlled when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
Anyway, the real problem here is not the historical details (which can be, and have been, debated endlessly) but the attitude. Historically, the North had slaves just as the South did. They did away with them in the decades before the Civil War because it was easy; the Northern trade- and manufacturing-based economies did not require them. Everyone knew slavery was a terrible thing so they eliminated it. In the South it was not so simple; even those who hated the institution had to realize that the entire Southern economy was completely dependent on it. It should be clear to everyone that the primary reason the South wouldn't abolish slavery was their economic dependency, not some sort of racial hatred. Yet even now, the North looks at the South as some sort of morally inferior step-brother, because they were so unfortunate to have a slavery-based economy. (And I feel, though I can't prove, that almost all of the Southern racism and anti-Northern feeling--including the Confederate flag thing--is a by-product of this Northern attitude.)
Posted by: right | Sep 27, 2004 11:56:56 AM
Litho, the real reason why the Pilgrims' story won out as the story of America, of course, is that it highlights the positive reasons for New World settlement (freedom from religious authoritarianism) as opposed to the more mercantile reasons that prompted the settlement of Jamestown, which was not really intended to be a permanent settlement in the same way. The Pilgrims were also more independent of the English crown.
What Atrios and Julian say is true. Every time someone says that "the South" is overwhelmingly Republican, you'd think that African Americans just don't exist. Of course, the same cannot be said for North Dakota, where there really aren't many darker skinned people -- in fact there aren't many people at all, just over 600,000.
Posted by: Barbara | Sep 27, 2004 12:01:25 PM
It's also the part that burned "witches." So perhaps that's why some attribute or compare the current perceived "values" of "red staters" to "real" America.
Okay, point made. Now get back to watching your John Hagee videos on how to protect your child from the witchcraft brainwashing in Harry Potter.
Posted by: BFDiehl | Sep 27, 2004 12:08:23 PM
right writes:
Secondly, saying the South started an "effort" to maintain slavery is equivalent to saying the North fought the war to destroy slavery, which is untrue.
No, those are not equivalent, since the first statement is true, and the second statement is false.
But really, even if Lincoln didn't start out to end slavery, that became the objective that stirred the hearts and minds of Northerners:
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.
Posted by: Daryl McCullough | Sep 27, 2004 12:10:44 PM
Can't anyone read anything anymore without taking offense? Without reading horrific agendas behind everything?
It's "Real America" PROBABLY because it hews most closely to where we came from. What large pockets of the country have left behind or grown out of, but you can read the article and easily see this same story playing out in similarly in probably over 60% of the geographic area of the US.
It's the same as "Real Football" being defense and running. Harkins back to our roots, but it's not as if it's morally superior to the west coast offense.
No comments about the source article, either -- which was pretty good, I thought. Nice slice of life.
And we're arguing about the title?
Oh, and thank GOD race got injected into the argument. Can't have a good argument without race getting thrown around.
Posted by: Jim | Sep 27, 2004 12:14:57 PM
A new addition to the roster of BOP News, Jessie, discusses Europeans confusion over this years US Pres election.
"But the cowboy is an image and meme that is rooted deep in the American psyche. And it’s one that Americans understand, and (even us liberals) in some sense, respect. Bush taps into a language of sheer power, that “going it alone”-if-we-have-to sense that plays to Americans’ sense of independence, freedom, and self-reliance—or, to put it bluntly, our sense of our selves, especially as opposed to the European culture we left behind."
I like to dispute this "cowboy" mythology, because it actually goes back much farther to Revolutionary Times, Daniel Boone, and the first wave of non-English migration moving west out of the colonies etc.
But of course the key is the myth of the frontier and the idea of the frontiersman. Now maybe New Yorkers carry some version of that myth that translates to trips uptown or something, but I doubt it. And there may some sagas about Londoners settling Wales, but I don't remember them. I do know that the myth still animates a lot of Texans....just a little more West, more land, more "freedom". We are moving to the exurbs and beyond.
Walmart is interestingly not irrelevant. Where the individualists used to be marginalized on the outskirts of a small town, now they are frontiersman visiting the trading post.
Posted by: bob mcmanus | Sep 27, 2004 12:26:42 PM
Jim,
The notion that "real" implies a connection to historical roots is an interesting one. Do "real" Russians hew more closely to Communism or the absolute monarchy of the Czars? Do "real" Germans hearken back more to Hitler or the Kaisers? Do "real" South Africans long for Apartheid or British colonial rule? Don't people change? Don't countries, which consist solely of people, change as well? Or does Britain still consist of Normans ruling over Saxons, and no one told me?
What does it mean to "hew closely" to our origins - our political origins? Our ethnic origins? Our religious origins? Considering the vast differences that existed not only between the states themselves at the time of the founding, but also between regions within the states, or with the political thinking of the founding fathers, to name a handful of such pluralities, the phrase leaves me a little confused.
The notion that there are such things as "authentic" nations and "inauthentic" nations is meaningless beyond what it tells us about the person who holds the notion.
Posted by: Blogtheist | Sep 27, 2004 12:32:09 PM
BTW, Virginia was viable, despite the ongoing high death rate, by about 1611. I believe that was before the founding of Plymouth...
I've read accounts that push Virginia's viability (if what you mean by that is self-sustaining population growth) all the way out to the 1680s. At any rate, there were hardly any female settlers in Virginia before the 1620's, so 1611 can't be correct. Virginia's population didn't pass the 5,000 mark until 1644 (the year of a major conflict between the English and the Indidans). Massachusetts by this date had a population exceeding 30,000 (I'm quoting from memory here, having recently done some research on the very subject of population growth in early colonial America). So, Massachusetts is home to the first self-sustaining British colony in terms of natural population increase, but Virginia can trace permanent settlement by Europeans back further by 13 years (to 1607), and Florida, of course, well before that.
Posted by: P.B. Almeida | Sep 27, 2004 12:41:52 PM
I came from the "Real America," a moderate-sized city in central New York. I don't say it was the Real America because I came from there, I call it that because corporate America used it as a proxy for more extensive polling and product testing, and I have to think they know what they're doing.
My family once received blank, pale cardboard tubes containing blank, pale, cardboard-tasting and suspiciously uniform variants of the potato chip. We ate the chips and filled out forms.
I've always felt the need to apologize for my small role in setting Pringles loose upon the world, but haven't had the proper venue for it. This is my best chance. I'm sorry.
Posted by: C.J.Colucci | Sep 27, 2004 12:49:13 PM
Constantine, I was joking, but I very much enjoyed your crazed overreaction.
Posted by: SoCalJustice | Sep 27, 2004 12:50:47 PM
Democrats are for the minorities, everybody knows it.
Posted by: underbelly of truth | Sep 27, 2004 12:51:09 PM
Ikram: You sound like you've read your Albert Murray or W.J. Cash, which is something a lot of jackasses commenting here about race and the South ought to do.
Posted by: Joey | Sep 27, 2004 12:51:50 PM
It's also the part that burned "witches." So perhaps that's why some attribute or compare the current perceived "values" of "red staters" to "real" America.
OK. I'm going to put the red staters claim to be the real America down to jealousy that they were settled to late to get to do any witch-burning themselves.
Besides, anyone who thinks that New England is a liberal bastion should drive for an hour in any direction from downtown Boston...
Can we make everyone who believes that the Civil War was over state's rights and not slavery go to downtown Boston and drive east for an hour?
My parents grew up in small towns in southern Illinois. They call it "God's country".
Have to laugh. My husband once got out of a ticket in Framingham when the statie (Massachusetts State Trooper) gave his license a once over and snarled, "You're from Somerville, I see." "God's country" he replied with a smile. The statie cracked up and gave him a warning.
And then there's Maine (= Massachusetts until 1820) which shows signs in its archaeological record of possible Viking exploration and settlement along its coast.
A great book about this is Farley Mowat's Farfarers. Never really realized before that the ivory of medieval Europe was largely walrus tusks from Greenland and then Canada, rather than elephants from Africa. He also theorizes that if you did DNA testing on the assumed-to-be Eskimo/Innuit residents of Newfoundland, you would find some Viking ancestry.
Posted by: Contrary Mary | Sep 27, 2004 12:53:53 PM
south was certainly fighting to preserve chattel slavery.
Not merely to preserve it, but to extend into territories that didn't want it. "States' rights" was bullshit then and bullshit now.
Posted by: Donny | Sep 27, 2004 12:56:13 PM
Happy to see, as usual, that we original Americans - in states squarish, oblong and jagged - are left untouched in this debate about the "real" America and "real" Americans.
Irrelevant as we may seem to almost everyone - except a few politicians in states like South Dakota or Arizona whose careers can depend on our votes - much of the "real America" is deeply mired today in the same myths of divine destiny and ethic, religious and cultural superiority that yesterday put my ancestors into graves and their residue onto the rez.
While the "inferior" foe is no longer us "hostiles," the attitudes, even among many in the East and West Coast "bubbles," haven't changed all that much.
Posted by: Meteor Blades | Sep 27, 2004 1:08:36 PM
As a point of interest, the first comment in a Post "Discussion" of the article was about the "real America" thing. Hull responded, not very convincingly:
"The title "real America" was subject to lots of debate by editors. We didn't mean to condescend. We meant to suggest the large swath of land and opinions beyond the metropolitan areas. Politicians are forever using the term "real" to demonstrate goodness or pureness. There are many ways to read "Real." "
Posted by: Ken C. | Sep 27, 2004 1:13:25 PM
Can we make everyone who believes that the Civil War was over state's rights and not slavery go to downtown Boston and drive east for an hour?
This is pretty funny, seeing as I was actually born 45 minutes southeast of Boston! Good ol' Walpole, Mass. (Not sure what this was supposed to mean, though.)
Posted by: right | Sep 27, 2004 1:13:46 PM
whoops, never mind, I get it. Walpole is southWEST of Boston, and I am not, in fact, a fish.
Posted by: right | Sep 27, 2004 1:16:20 PM
Blogtheist,
By "hews more closely," I mean just that it's most representative of what broad-spectrum America was, irrespective of the wider range of experience that we have today in wider swaths of the country. Smallish communities, somewhat isolated and insular, focused on family and community and peer pressure and lord knows what else. Exceptions abound, but that's how it started everywhere in the US (at least insofar as European history here).
I think characterizing it as "Real America" is less of an objective observation by whoever tagged the story, and more of a nod to roots much of the country has left behind, but still holds sway in a tremendous proportion of our nation.
It's like people telling you "If you want to see the REAL France, you need to go outside of Paris!" It's not that Paris sucks, or that locals in the French countryside are more "real", it's just that you get a more complete version of the French "self-story" outside of Paris. Probably because it's less influenced by external forces, so it's closer to its roots.
I can't say for sure on other countries, but I suspect each of them have idealized notions of what real Germans or real Russians are. I suspect they have little to do with recent events like Nazism, etc., and more to do with their "creation myth."
Our creation myth was of small, self-sufficient parties bravely making their own way in the wilderness, escaping the rotten Old World (or moving West or whatever). Any current instance of America that approaches that is, rightly or wrongly, going to be named "real."
Posted by: Jim | Sep 27, 2004 1:23:33 PM
Let me leap into the controversy over whether Virginia or Massachussetts was settled by Europeans first by pointing to the founding of Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1607. Permanent European settlement in the area dates back to the 1590's
Posted by: rea | Sep 27, 2004 1:25:57 PM
Ah, the old, "I was just joking defense." I swear I've heard that one, before.
Posted by: Constantine | Sep 27, 2004 1:28:14 PM
I have long ago accepted the fact that nobody in the rest of the country (including the northeast) will ever think that Californians are "real Americans." I guess they'd be even more dubious if more people knew that California is in fact a fantasy land constructed on a backlot somewhere in Iowa -- though recently the post-production work has been done outsourced to the Phillipines.
Posted by: janet | Sep 27, 2004 1:31:11 PM
Let me leap into the controversy over whether Virginia or Massachussetts was settled by Europeans first by pointing to the founding of Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1607. Permanent European settlement in the area dates back to the 1590's
You're still 30 years younger than St. Augustine, Florida, the oldest continuous European settlement in the United States. And I'm pretty sure there are no Viking forts still inhabited up in Maine.
Posted by: right | Sep 27, 2004 1:31:53 PM
hear hear, MB. Hmm. So this is what discussions of Canadian Identity must sound like to the uninitiated...
Posted by: Wrye | Sep 27, 2004 1:44:11 PM
This discussion, I guess, is all about cultural visibility. When I said settlement, of course, I meant English settlement, just as the roots of "real" America are usually considered to consist of small, closely knit frontier communities, not large-ish farms that depended on slave labor.
For what it's worth regarding settlement dates, in Quebec, they consider the first "settlement" to coincide with the arrival of "civilians," that is, not traders and not soldiers. They were nuns and they arrived in 1639, nonetheless, they were the beginning of a permanent civilian population.
Posted by: Barbara | Sep 27, 2004 1:47:45 PM
There I go again. A permanent European civilian population, of course. There were lots of non-European civilians already there.
Posted by: Barbara | Sep 27, 2004 1:49:44 PM
Constantine:
I don't believe I need to "defend" myself against you.
I don't give a rip what you think.
It was a joke.
Posted by: SoCalJustice | Sep 27, 2004 2:04:29 PM
i'm not going to comment on the inane topic of who's a 'Real American,' except to remind pop culture freaks of Rick Derringer's song of the same name, that Hulk Hogan used to walk into the 'rasslin' ring to...
on a more constructive note, I'll add my own immigrant story: I immigrated from my home of 30 years in Minnesota to NYC in 2000, and here's my own cultural observation:
people who live in gated communities, (or dead-end gravel roads for that matter), who spend much of their lives insulated/isolated by their 'own kind' end up fearing anybody who is the least bit different than them, which includes skin color, religion, sexual orientation, etc.
the cure? make everybody ride the subway for a while...on the subway, everybody's equal, and stuck riding in a car with hundreds of strangers of all stripe, and forced to get along by sheer necessity!
as they say everywhere, 'that'll learn ya!';>
Posted by: DWitt | Sep 27, 2004 2:10:47 PM
Well, can't let this go by. If we are talking about real Americans and earliest settlements still inhabited, then let's talk Pueblo Peoples. Both the Hopi people in Arizona and the Zuni people of New Mexico have competing claims to the oldest, continuously inhabited settlements in the US, going back to approx 1200 AD.
Posted by: AzRez | Sep 27, 2004 2:15:24 PM
Constantine, and in my (what I thought was) obvious sarcasm, I was ripping the idea of the "red states" as "real America" as a silly notion anyway - the same as the thrust of this thread.
I don't see why you're so hot and bothered by it.
you write: "You were just trying to come up with a senseless attack rather than address this bizarre bigoted perception some people have about being "real americans.""
No, I was trying to point out that the perception of "real Americans" in the MSM/Elite Media is often of people having backwards or unenlightened positions, and using an extreme (hence, obviously sarcastic) example, to add to the picture of Matt's version of Northeastern America (read: the part that was settled first, the part that led the Revolution, the part that led the nation to victory in the Civil War) - by trying to say that's only part of the "Northeastern" narrative.
At any rate, I guess I do feel the need to defend myself against your attack.
But again, whatever, it was clearly sarcasm.
Posted by: SoCalJustice | Sep 27, 2004 2:15:40 PM
Hey, no witches were burned in the Plymouth Colony. Not in Rhode Island either, I don't think, which is the true progenitor of "unreal" America -- ie, a founding principle being tolerance of difference.
Posted by: CharleyCarp | Sep 27, 2004 2:17:41 PM
I notice that when slurs against the South pop up there tends to be a blind eye turned towards Yankee Clippers whose wealth came from the rum-sugar-slave trade. New York City gained ascendance when the Southern economy was ruined.
Not to mention the Federal government was financed by a tax on the cotton trade until the Southerners seceded, leading the New York Times to bemoan the state of the federal treasury in 1861.
Perhaps we can just say different times and different morals led to different actions?
Lincoln didn't start the Civil War to end slavery, but by the end, that's what his letters suggest the war was about, as it was for thousands of Union soldiers. Southerners for their part, based on their letters, fought for their freedom, not for the less than 2% of the population who resided on plantations.
I would have thought hundreds of thousands of dead Americans in that war would put this behind us.
It is of course foolish to call Poplar Bluff, Real America, and Boston, fake America. But it is also foolish to claim that New Yorkers are the world's greatest baseball fans when St Louisans are clearly more committed.
Regional differences are the spice of life, not a poison on our national soul. This post, however, is snobbishness. And Lileks today has your measure.
Posted by: Jim Durbin | Sep 27, 2004 2:32:38 PM
Discussing the South is like discussing Roe v. Wade. There's no point, because every adult has made up their mind on the subject. However, I am moved to write by the shocking misinformation someone posted about greens, aka collards. It is not a specifically African-American dish, like chitlins. It is, or used to be, a standard part of middle-class white diet in rural areas. I'm not sure about the provenance of the technique. Frying is certainly from West Africa. But there's only one way to cook greens. The problem is the stringy texture and foul taste of the raw vegetable. They have to be cooked for hours to make them edible. This stinks up the house, so it was best done outdoors in a large, open iron pot over a wood fire, which adds to the taste Still stinky, but barely tolerable at the population density of a small town. To restore some taste, the greens are cooked with a big hunk of fatback, a practice which renders large tracts of land unkosher for decades. After this production, the flavor still isn't right unless it's doused with vinegar soaked in peppers. The resulting mixture of tastes is like nothing else in the universe. I have seen grownup, unsentimental men go into Proust madelaine trances and raptures at tasting the stuff if they haven't had any since childhood.
If any part of Colonial America is the "real America", it would be the Middle Atlantic colonies, based on patterns of settlement and land use, and related patterns of social institutions. Virginia made an indispensable contribution, because of the Enlightenment ideas in the Declaration and Bill of Rights. Although Puritanism was long dead in New England, Adams and other Federalists thought the Alien and Sedition Laws were a good idea, and this is way against the grain of a modern concept of individual rights. Adams's family are certainly more attractive people than Jefferson and the other Randolphs, and most of us would feel more comfortable with him. But Jefferson insisted on having the life-style of English gentry, and we take that for granted. His narcissism, our basic rights.
There is perhaps a distinction between tobacco-growing Eighteenth Century Virginia and the later South that seceded. I once had a member in very good standing of the Winston-Salem Junior League inform me that my relative Jefferson wasn't "really" a Southerner, because he was "too liberal", so it's a distinction that some people still feel. The tobacco economy declined from the 1750's and collapsed around 1830. Meanwhile, the cotton gin had been invented. Some of the Virginians had an aristocratic outspokenness about the evil of slavery, despite their dependence on it. Richard Henry Lee said it was wrong, but he had to sell his slaves to support his family. Jefferson freed his slaves in hiw will (but died bankrupt, so his creditors seized the slaves). John Randolph of Roanoke, patron saint of libertarians, freed his in his will as well. The Williamsburg lawyer St. George Tucker, who married a Randolph cousin of Jefferson, wrote a survey of the institution of slavery and the related case law around 1790. He thought it should be abolished, and sketched a concrete plan for phasing it out. It didn't get far, but it suggests that Virginians of the period could freely discuss the issue and call for abolition.
Posted by: Roger Bigod | Sep 27, 2004 2:41:40 PM
"Real America", IMO is a diverse America. And, BTW, New Amsterdam was the first diverse settlement.
"For most of its life, New Amsterdam had fewer than 1,000 residents, but its influence would far outstrip its size. This was the first and most important multicultural base in colonial America. While Boston and, later, Philadelphia, developed along distinctly English lines, New Amsterdam was pluralistic from the beginning. In 1643, when barely 500 people called it home, director Willem Kieft told a visiting Jesuit priest that 18 languages were spoken. In fact, according to some estimates this “Dutch” city was never more than 50 percent Dutch in its population. The other major groups included Germans, English, Africans, Scandinavians, French, and Jewish. From this tiny mix of peoples would come the structure of New York City."
Posted by: sofia | Sep 27, 2004 2:48:18 PM
Bravo Matthew,
As a guy who has lived his whole life in Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Hampshire, it frustrates me to no end that Presidential candidates from New England are now expected to run away from their region and hide their heritage. Candidates from everywhere else are allowed, and even expected, to display regional pride. But not those from New England.
Wouldn't it be nice to hear John Kerry say something like this: "People often tell me that I should downplay my New England roots, and that most Americans are now so bigoted toward my region that reminding them of where I am from is a political mistake. Well, I have now travelled all over our great country, and grown to admire and appreciate the contributions that each different region of America has made to our common heritage. But I am very, very proud to be from New England.
New England is the region that launched the American revolution, lead the nation in the abolition of slavery, and has educated many of our Presidents. It has a proud tradition of enlightened liberality and commitment to democratic principles of self-government. It's people value hard work and self-reliance, as well as tolerance, respect for individual differences and an openness to new ideas. It is my home."
I think a display of regional pride and rootedness like this might actually help Kerry project a sense of authenticity among voters, and help him connect with them on a personal level, rather than appearing as a sort of regionally neutral policy wonk. Americans tend to respect someone who is grounded and proud of his roots, and has some degree of regional charm, even if they don't always see eye-to-eye with the people who have those roots.
Posted by: Dan Kervick | Sep 27, 2004 2:55:53 PM
Ah, but timing is everything, Sofia. The Dutch at the time of colonization were a thriving mercantile, risk taking (recall the tulip craze?) people. It is due to the early Dutch influence that today the biggest stock exchanges and banking/investment firms are in New York. Those dour early Bostonians at Mass Bay Colony (my ancestors included) would never have allowed such public speculative activities. They felt time was better spent hunting down forbidden May Pole dances.
Posted by: constancemather | Sep 27, 2004 3:02:45 PM
"Fascism: modern political ideology that seeks to regenerate the social, economic, and cultural life of a country by basing it on a heightened sense of national belonging or ethnic identity" Roger Griffin, Oxford, via David Neiwert's brilliant new series Psuedo-Fascism and the Conservative Movement
Boy, this is a toughie. I suggest we poll both Democrats and Republicans, urbanites and rural residents, Yankees and Dixiecrats, and ask questions like: Is there a real America? Are you part of it? Is the Real America portrayed fairly in the media? Is the history of Real America taught to our children in schools? Do people who say there is no Real America deserve to live in it? I have no idea of course what this poll might reveal.
Since the "Real America" question certainly isn't one of fact, but more of opinion and emotion, the only way to discover the meaning of the term is to interview the people who believe it has meaning, not to listen to those who think it nonsense.
Posted by: bob mcmanus | Sep 27, 2004 3:08:31 PM
Ah, history. Obviously, in the case of the Civil War, the victors didn't always write it. Otherwise, I and others of my generation who grew up in the South - including those of us of color - would not have learned from our textbooks about the War of Northern Aggression.
While less than 2% of the Southern population lived on plantations, James M. McPherson found in his examination of Confederate letters, which he writes about in For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War, that “20 percent of the [Confederate] soldiers avowed explicit proslavery purposes in their letters and diaries.”
Still a minority, of course, but as McPherson writes: Confederate soldiers “took slavery for granted as one of the Southern ‘rights’ and institutions for which they fought, and did not feel compelled to discuss it.”
Moreover, as David Pleger argues quite cogently, 30% of free households in the 11 Confederate states had slaves, according to the 1860 census.
Posted by: Meteor Blades | Sep 27, 2004 3:18:27 PM
Yet even now, the North looks at the South as some sort of morally inferior step-brother, because they were so unfortunate to have a slavery-based economy. (And I feel, though I can't prove, that almost all of the Southern racism and anti-Northern feeling--including the Confederate flag thing--is a by-product of this Northern attitude.)
As an avid collector of irony, I must thank right for this gem.
Posted by: WillieStyle | Sep 27, 2004 3:38:58 PM
"Hey, no witches were burned in the Plymouth Colony"
Quite true--they were hanged instead . . .
Posted by: rea | Sep 27, 2004 3:41:04 PM
Right-
When did we change the argument from first settlement in America to first continuously-inhabited settlement? Even then, are Spaniards still manning the cannons at St. Augustine - just curious! Fact of the matter is that your precious Virginian colonies would have starved to death year after year if not for the abundant protein supplied by pre-settlement fishing outposts along the Maine coast, the center of which was Monhegan Island, which had been operating for decades before any of the more familiar historical attempts at colonization.
There's a great history of the European prehistory of Maine in Colin Woodward's The Lobster Coast, if anyone's interested.
Back to the Civil War - you do have a point, Right, in the morally superior tone often taken by us Northerners in our retelling of the tale. Although there was a significant and vocal portion of people dedicated to the abolition of slavery for moral reasons, the captains of Northern industry abandoned the practice primarily because they realized that paying a free man shit wages and nothing else was much more profitable than financing every aspect of his life, from his importation from another continent through his continued incarceration through adulthood to old age and death. Yay capitalism!
You poor "backward" Southerners never had a chance, did you?
My question is: why can't it be about States' rights and slavery? As I rhetorically asked in an above post, was there any other issue in early 19th Century American politics that could have forced the crisis of States' rights to the brink of secession and Civil War? I doubt it.
Posted by: oodja | Sep 27, 2004 3:56:03 PM
Look at the constellation of things, images, ideas that fall together under the heading "Real America":
- "Small towns"
- "Main street"
- "Small business"
- "Hard work"
Taken as a whole, these things represent the reconciliation of individualism and community. The small business owner in a small town symbolizes modest self-mastery, individualism without alienation nor exploitation of others. (Unlike, say, the CEO of ExxonMobil or GE.)
So supposedly real Real America is the only thing we have to prove that individualism produces morality. Take it away, and you have nothing to refute the charge that individualism is just social darwinism.
Now, Real America must be implicitly white -- this is definitely true. Nostalgia can't survive moral complexity. You can't have nostalgia that includes communal guilt. Reagan's statement, "When I was a boy there was no race problem," remains the classic example of this.
Posted by: jgh | Sep 27, 2004 3:59:21 PM
Each American family has its own "how we became Americans" story. In my family there are several strands, spanning a good bit of the spectrum of European-American origin stories. As a result, my own sense of American-ness is fundamentally about braiding these strands together: rural, small town, and urban; Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic; New England, Midwest, and West Coast; long-time and recent resident; etc.
Posted by: janet | Sep 27, 2004 4:12:53 PM
"primarily because they realized that paying a free man shit wages and nothing else was much more profitable than financing every aspect of his life"
Which goes to the question as to whether the ante-Bellum South was economically dependent on slavery(not, it was a loser) or emotionally and socially attached to slavery, which, in many practical ways was not overcome until the 1970's.
Posted by: bob mcmanus | Sep 27, 2004 4:32:57 PM
Well, I must say that I have found the whole Civil War aspect of this discussion to be highly edifying -- having moved around a lot as a kid, I somehow missed the entirety of 19th-century American history. So I always find these sorts of arguments to be quite interesting.
On an unrelated note, I did find that during my visit to the NMAI this weekend (and its accompanying "First Americans" festival), I was able to remember from 7th-grade NYS history what SCOOM + T stood for (Seneca, Cayuga, Oneida, Onandaga, Mohawk, and Tuscarora). Yay, brain!
Posted by: amy | Sep 27, 2004 4:33:52 PM
Bob,
I think that's probably dead-on. The antebellum South was the last gasp of a traditional (i.e., non-capitalist) economic model that had worked fairly well for the first three centuries of American history but had long since outlived its usefulness, especially after the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade made the care and maintenance of slaves in the U.S. even more expensive.
Posted by: oodja | Sep 27, 2004 4:42:07 PM
Right,
"but at the time what the North wanted to do was entirely outside the bounds of political norms"
What is it the North wanted to do that was entirely outside the bounds of the political norms?
Posted by: WeSaferThemHealthier | Sep 27, 2004 4:57:22 PM
For the record, the Spanish settled in New Mexico in 1598. Like their later-to-arrive-in-the-northeast and more WASPy European brethern, they too obliterated the locals. 400+ years later we're still at it, except that since we've conquered everything here at home, we've moved the operations overseas.
Posted by: poputonian | Sep 27, 2004 4:57:36 PM
For the record, bad as they were, the conquistadores did NOT obliterate the locals in New Mexico, although not for lack of trying. The Pueblo tribes still live on their ancestral lands and maintain - to a great extent, despite pickups and satellite dishes - their ancient communal culture.
Posted by: Meteor Blades | Sep 27, 2004 5:46:10 PM
I doubt right from Walpole is still reading this, but on the off chance he or she is, I'm just kinda struck by that Northern War of Aggression thing they got going down there in South Carolina (!)(of all places!).
Ummm, where's Fort Sumter? What happened there? And, ummm, just when and how did the Civil War start?
(I pulled this off encarta for those who need the refresher: "On April 11, 1861, General P. G. T. Beauregard, commanding the Confederate troops in Charleston, served Anderson with a demand that he surrender the fort. Anderson refused, but he stated that lack of supplies would compel him to give up the fort by April 15. His reply was so hedged with qualifications that Beauregard considered it unsatisfactory, and, at 4:30 AM on April 12, he ordered his batteries to open fire on the fort." It was the first military action in the Civil War.)
Posted by: litho | Sep 27, 2004 5:50:32 PM
My comment on Virginia and Massachusetts was really about the first viable British colony in North America. If we want to get into First Americans, that's a whole different story. If we want to get into French or Spanish colonies, that also a whole nother different story.
If I remember this stuff correctly, the British colonists at Jamestown arrived with the intent of establishing an agricultural and/or mining colony, something to replicate the Spanish financial successes in the Caribbean and South America. When no immediately viable cash crop was discovered, the colony went through a very difficult period where its physical survival was in extreme doubt. I might have the dates wrong, but I think it was the winter of 1609-1610 that the Virginians called the "starving time," when things got so bad that at least one colonist decided to tide himself over by eating his wife. (He was later hung when his neighbors learned of his innovative interpretation of the obligation to obey in sickness and in health.)
By around 1611, the colony had resolved the immediate question of how to provide themselves with food (partly by growing their own, but also by convincing neighboring Algonkians to share their surpluses with them). Around 1613 John Rolfe had begun his successful experiments with tobacco, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Barbara is totally right that the death rate remained high in Jamestown for decades after, and that the population was not self-sustaining. It did, however, grow fairly rapidly, as the supply of new immigrants continued to outpace the death rate of those undergoing the "seasoning" process (which pretty much meant acquiring antibodies to things like typhus and malaria).
To sum up, Jamestown was a permanent, growing settlement, about a decade before the Pilgrims didn't step on Plymouth Rock. Babies were born there and survived to become adults.
How did America, then, get saddled with Puritan values? Good question, but off the topic for this post.
Posted by: litho | Sep 27, 2004 6:06:06 PM
I'm really sick and tired of the politically-correct attacks on the Puritans for burning witches.
No one even bothers to ask whether the witches were guilty ot not. Many of them were. The trials were careful to establish the guilt of the accused, and many accused witches were acquitted.
And while burning at the stake seems cruel to us, acording to the standards of the time it was relatively merciful.
Posted by: Al | Sep 27, 2004 7:34:45 PM
Cute, Stalker Al.
I propose this solution to Matthew: he gets all the people in in "Fake" America to stop calling flyover land "flyover land", and then I'll get all the people in flyover land to stop calling Real America "Real America". Deal?
Posted by: Al (Real One) | Sep 27, 2004 7:57:25 PM
Hey, no witches were burned in the Plymouth Colony. Not in Rhode Island either
Hey, no witches were burned in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, either. They were hanged.
Posted by: Donny | Sep 27, 2004 8:51:56 PM
It's like people telling you "If you want to see the REAL France, you need to go outside of Paris!" It's not that Paris sucks, or that locals in the French countryside are more "real", it's just that you get a more complete version of the French "self-story" outside of Paris. Probably because it's less influenced by external forces, so it's closer to its roots.
Well, that's a different (though interesting) example. Because Paris is, and always has been, much larger than any provincial cities, the relationship between the capital and the provinces has always been a strange (and strained) one. In fact, much of French history was written in Paris, in spite of the provinces.
Anyway, I'm reminded of the Gene Wilder line in Blazing Saddles: 'These are people who have lived on their land for generations, they have unchanging values, the salt of the earth people: you know, morons.'
In other news, Real Al puts the 'cunt' in Flyover Country.
Posted by: ahem | Sep 27, 2004 10:07:35 PM
Meteor, the Spanish systematically subjugated the Pueblos and violently pounded them into submission. I would recommend Weber's The Spanish Frontier in North America. They may still exist, as do other Native Americans cultures, but it doesn't change what their Spanish conquerors did.
In the name of the most Christian King, Don Philip ... I take and seize tenancy and posession, real and actual, civil and natural, one, two, and three times ... and all the times that by right I can and should ... without limitations. Juan de Onate at El Paso, April 1598
Jesus made him do it. Why does that sound familiar?
Posted by: poputonian | Sep 28, 2004 12:59:04 AM
I agree that the widespread use of the term "flyover land/country" is not helping the East and Left Coasters' cause here. Everyone should be required to road trip across the U.S.A. at least once, if only to appreciate our country's enormity. That we as a people have anything in common should be celebrated as a national miracle.
Posted by: oodja | Sep 28, 2004 11:00:54 AM
There is no "real America." Damn place is layer upon layer of fakeness from sea to shining sea, with the exception only of places like West Texas where there aren't any people at all. It's all teevee's fault, I say.
Also, believe me, I do appreciate America's enormity.
Posted by: W. Kiernan | Sep 28, 2004 6:22:49 PM
There's a different way of thinking about this...
Functionally, Matt, in the two-party aim-for-the middle political system we have, that middle 10-20% of America is the one that makes the political decisions. Often, in my courses, we talk of the 40-20-40 rule re: presidential elections. Only on rare occasions do presidential candidates not achieve 40% of the two-party popular vote...that means the 20% in the middle, the least educated, the least politically aware/savvy, the least politically active, and the least efficacious, are the ones making the decisions, because they're the only persuadable part of the mass politic...ergo, they are to whom the politicians must pander.
Until the US changes to a parliamentary/proportional representation system, that's what you're gonna get. The way the rules are set up, we're going to have a two party system until the cows come home.
Posted by: ProfGoose | Sep 29, 2004 1:13:25 PM
First let me start of by asking how many atars are on the flag of the "real" America? Last time i checked ther were fifty and each on stood for a "real" American Stat. I think that Matt and Waring both make great points but they also make a mistake that has become second nature to so many people today. They a sectionalists, they believe that their part of the country is the best part.
I noticed that one person spoke of ho and hy the south seceeded, and though they mentioned slavery plenty of times they failed to mention the real reason behind the South's Secession. The South seceeded because they truly believed in States' Rights, while the government and parts of the north did not. Obviously someone did not pay as much attention in history class as they thought. I have a confederate Flag that says in huge letters "Heritage not Hate" and I have a shirt with the Confed4erate Flag on it that says "If this shirt offends you, you need a history lesson" and i fully agree with both of those.
I am from the south and i'm not a "white" southerner as someone mentioned, I am Half Cherokee and a little bit of everything else from the orld thrown in. I belive in Southern values, but i spent a good deal of my life in the North and i agree with some of the Northen Values.
I think that the media and the government have played the sectional card up so much, that we are no longer a union we are simply sections. If that is true that is true and e keep living up to it we are simply asking for another Civil War, but this time it will be over who is the best section or over where "Real" America is located. Who Really Cares? We are all American Citizens, if we don't realize that then our soldiers will have nothing to fight for and our children will have nothing to look for. That's my opinion and if you don't like tough, because I still live in the REAL UNITED States of America.
Posted by: kma | Jul 6, 2005 1:43:59 PM
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