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American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2011

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Part 4-EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 4: “Culture Wars: 1878 to 2010”

Part 4, Chapter 22 Summary: “Founding the Far West”

The Far West was the last area in the US to be colonized, as it is inhospitable to Western forms of agriculture. It receives little rainfall, and some of the region is at high elevations. In addition, many of the region’s rivers are too shallow for navigation. The extreme nature of its conditions made it impossible for groups such as the Yankees, Midlanders, and Appalachians to settle. Most of the settlers came instead through a connection to the nation’s industrial corporations. Unique in North America, the Far West is not defined by a regional culture but by external institutions. Its environment required the intervention of inventions such as hard rock mines, barbed wire, hydroelectric dams, railroads, and telegraphs. Therefore, the Far West is a colony of the continent’s older nations and the federal government.

The first settlers in the region were the Yankee Mormons of Utah, who followed a utopian movement with roots in Vermont and upstate New York’s burned-over district. Mormons were almost entirely from Yankeedom, explaining why Utah had the highest percentage of English Americans of any state in 2000. While different in several ways from Yankees, the Mormons share their emphasis on communitarianism, good works, morality, assimilation of others, and utopianism. Their irrigation projects made agriculture possible in their settlements. The other early settlers, gold prospectors arriving during the Gold Rush of 1849, were, in contrast, Appalachians who were hedonistic and individualistic. 

Railroad companies drove further immigration with a massive public relations campaign that fraudulently promised good agricultural conditions. In the 1860s, rainfall was much greater in the region because of a meteorological fluke, but people at the time were convinced that plowing turned the brown prairies green. In 1886, this fantasy ended with an arctic freeze followed by years of drought. Farmers and cattlemen left in droves, and the Great Depression’s Dust Bowl only worsened conditions. 

People survived in this region only through massive federal projects, such as those that involved dams and irrigation. External corporations controlled the region; for example, Anaconda Copper ran Montana, buying off judges and controlling elections. The company controlled the state’s newspapers and employed three-quarters of all wage earners. Much of the land not claimed by corporations or lived on by Indigenous Americans was reserved by the federal government and leased to the same corporate interests that controlled the rest of the region.

People in the region allied themselves with the Deep South because they resented government control; however, this has only served to strengthen corporate control of the Far West. Populist sentiment has run high in the region, whose people have drafted state constitutions that promote workers’ rights. The cultural revolutions of the 1960s drove a wedge between the Far West and Yankeedom, New Netherland, and the Left Coast. Today, people in the region want the government to continue to pay for projects such as irrigation but to refrain from regulating the region. The region’s politicians are closely connected to corporate interests while opposing the federal government. This opposition to federal control is the glue that has kept this region together.

Part 4, Chapter 23 Summary: “Immigration and Identity”

Woodard writes that immigration did not displace the regional cultures already present in the US. While some immigrant groups, such as the Irish in Boston or Italians in New York, gained power over a region, they did not change its essential dominant culture. 

While 36 million people immigrated to the US from 1830 to 1924, foreign-born people made up about 10% of the population at any one time. In addition, immigrants tended to go to New Netherland, Yankeedom, the Midlands, and the Left Coast (and to cities such as New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and San Francisco), while virtually none came to the Tidewater, Deep South, Appalachia, or El Norte. Relatively few went to the Far West, but they nevertheless made up a significant portion of the population in that region. Immigrants avoided areas such as the Tidewater and Deep South because they were fleeing aristocracies and wanted to avoid returning to them. Appalachia did not have cities and jobs, and El Norte identified any outsider as an “Anglo” and was too remote for most immigrants. On the other hand, regions such as New Netherland and the Midlands had been multiethnic from their beginnings and were places where it was considered normal for outsiders to settle. New York drew a majority of Irish immigrants by 1850, attracted a quarter of all Italian immigrants to the US, and was 25% Jewish in 1910. When people speak about America as multicultural, they are really referring to New Netherland and the Midlands. In the Left Coast and Far West, immigrant groups arrived at a time when everything was new, so they shaped the regions, while they also still faced resistance and violence.

Yankeedom had a well-deserved reputation for intolerance toward outsiders, but by the mid-19th century, its farms, mines, and factories began to attract immigrants, many of whom were not English or Protestant. Yankees focused on helping newcomers conform to American ways and on educating them. Many Yankee-controlled states made education compulsory to compel newcomers to assimilate. These types of programs were also adapted in New Netherland and the Midlands but not in the Deep South, the Tidewater, and Appalachia. The idea of the “melting pot,” in which immigrants come to conform to American ways, is really a Yankee idea. Immigrants were expected to adopt the Yankee paradigm of a Protestant work ethic, commitment to a common good, and dislike of authoritarianism. 

While political scientists debate whether what makes people American is commitment to an Anglo-Protestant creed and individualism or a commitment to multiculturalism, Woodard believes that these ideas are only characteristic of some regions. For example, Appalachians and the Far West celebrate individualism while community-minded New England does not. Multiculturalism is valued in New Netherland and the Midlands but not elsewhere, and Protestant culture is not dominant in El Norte. 

Failing to realize that the US has no one dominant culture, conservatives are fretting about the wave of Mexican immigration now occurring. However, Woodard notes that as most Mexican immigrants have settled in El Norte, their immigration is not changing the region as much as returning it to its roots.

Part 4, Chapter 24 Summary: “Gods and Missions”

After the Civil War, the US settled into a kind of cold war with the Deep South and Tidewater, resentful of the US Army’s occupation of the South after the war, forming a solid Dixie bloc that opposed Yankeedom, New Netherland, and the Left Coast. Yankees, Midlanders, and New Netherlanders streamed into the South after the war to refashion it along Yankee lines. However, their efforts failed to remake the South, and they stirred up resentment, which also brought Appalachians into the Dixie bloc. 

The South organized its resistance to the North through its churches, whose denominations encouraged people to be “Private Protestants” rather than “Public Protestants.” Rather than concentrating on public works, they focused on saving individual souls and on obedience and order. The poverty and hierarchy of the South had to be preserved at all costs in the face of Yankee challenges. Promoting what historians have called the mythology of the “Lost Cause,” churches spread the idea that God had tested the South during the Civil War to sanctify its people. In the Deep South and Tidewater, poor white people were not empowered, as the elite tried to maintain the rigid hierarchy. In Appalachia, white people, made even poorer by the war, found themselves in direct competition with freed Black Americans, increasing the vitriol of anti-Black sentiment and giving rise to the KKK (founded in Tennessee). Though slavery had been abolished, a rigid caste system remained under the control of a single-party political system that resisted change.

In Yankeedom, however, there had always been a focus on trying to perfect the world. As Puritans believed one’s fate had already been sealed at birth, Yankees focused on trying to better the world around them. While Southern Baptists viewed problems such as alcohol addiction as personal failings, Yankees and other northerners saw it as a social ill. Public Protestants in the North tried to use the federal government to create social change, while Private Protestants directed their efforts to individual salvation. 

After the failure of Reconstruction, Yankees turned their efforts to helping Appalachia, which remained abjectly poor, and then to the causes of temperance, children’s welfare, and women’s rights. These movements were concentrated in New Netherland and Yankeedom. One region of New Netherland—Greenwich Village—became the center of bohemianism. From it would spring gay rights, modern art, and hippies. These countercultural ideas spread to the Left Coast. Over time, the former Puritan region turned to Unitarianism, a religion that stresses social justice and scientific inquiry.

While opposition to scientific inquiry and modernity occurred in pockets across the US, that opposition was part of the dominant culture in the Dixie bloc, backed by local governments. Religious fundamentalism developed in Dixie as a reaction to modernity. Opposition to the theory of evolution was strongest in the Deep South and Appalachia and supported by the KKK, which felt that evolution put Black and white people on equal footing. Behind the scenes, opposition to secularism mounted and exploded in the culture wars of the 1960s.

Part 4, Chapter 25 Summary: “Culture Clash”

In the 1960s, the culture wars exploded. First, African Americans rebelled against the caste hierarchy of the South, aided by the federal government. The youth rebellion that broke out in different regions was opposed by the Dixie bloc, who could not stop the rebellion in the short term but who have since tried to roll back all its achievements, sparking a nationwide culture war.

The civil rights movement, led by pacifist African Americans, sought to dismantle the rigid apartheid system of the Dixie bloc. It was led by African Americans from the Deep South such as Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, with the assistance of people from Yankeedom (Malcolm X and the Kennedys) and New Netherland (Robert Moses and others). 

Resistance to the civil rights movement revolved around the old Tidewater idea of “libertas,” meaning that maintaining the current social order was necessary to protect white “freedoms,” including the right to deprive others of their freedoms. White resistance took the form of the governor of Arkansas calling out the state’s National Guard to prevent nine African American students from entering a white high school in Little Rock until President Eisenhower mobilized federal troops and nationalized the Arkansas National Guard. In some parts of the South, such as Prince Edward County, Virginia, white people closed the schools rather than integrate them. After President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, resistance varied by region. Appalachians and people in the Tidewater adopted integration most quickly, while parts of the Deep South resisted it most fiercely. White Southerners increasingly turned to an evangelical worldview, bolstered by evangelical media empires, that resisted social reform and erased the boundaries between church and state. 

At the same time, Yankeedom, New Netherland, and the Left Coast contended with a large-scale youth rebellion that combined the utopianism of Yankeedom, the intellectual freedom of New Netherland, and the tolerant pacifism of the Midlands. The movement was confined to these areas and barely touched the Dixie bloc. 

At the same time, there was a movement for cultural emancipation in El Norte and New France. The Anglos had long disenfranchised the Norteños, and in the 1960s, the Norteños began to reassert control of their region, which they accomplished. In New France, the Québécois launched a “Quiet Revolution” led by liberal Jean Lesage that established a strong social welfare state and that saw the rise of separatist Parti Québécois. French became the only official language in Québec, and the Québécois considered breaking away from the Canadian confederation.

The culture wars of the 1990s and 2000s were a continuation of these social upheavals. The Northern bloc supported environmentalism, gay rights, women’s rights, and civil rights, while the Dixie bloc supported school prayer, creationism, abortion bans, and state rights. The environmental movement sprang from the creation of the Sierra Club in San Francisco and was supported by Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt (both from New York) and others. The Dixie bloc, the Far West, and El Norte have been skeptical about the need to protect environmental resources. Opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment came from the Deep South, while states controlled by Yankeedom, the Midlands, and the Left Coast supported it. Support for gay rights fell along similar lines. While the Northern states regard large corporations as entities that destroy the environment and curb the rights of individuals, the Deep South maintains laws that preserve low wages, make it difficult for unions to organize, and keep taxes too low to support schools. Corporations have largely fled to the Dixie bloc, while the Left Coast and the Boston area remain the centers of technological innovation and education.

Part 4, Chapter 26 Summary: “War, Empire, and the Military”

Opinions about America’s foreign wars and its use of power abroad have also split along regional lines, with the Dixie bloc supporting war since the 1830s and the Northern bloc opposing it. Though nearly every region supported the Spanish-American War of 1898, when it came time to decide what to do with the conquered territories of Guam, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Hawaii, Yankees were opposed to the subjugation of foreign territories, which they saw as a violation of the right to self-government. The Anti-Imperialist League was located in Boston and led by Yankees. The Deep South, on the other hand, supported the use of American power abroad but was suspicious of the use of federal power and worried that the lands conquered by the US would be filled with unassimilable people. 

The nations in the Dixie bloc were also the most supportive of American involvement in World War I and the suppression of dissent and pacifism. Appalachian Virginian Woodrow Wilson assured the South that the war would not lead to an assault on the Southern caste system, as he segregated military camps and purged the government of Black administrators. At the same time, many Borderlanders joined the Marine Corps, which had many military tactics that came from Scots-Irish tradition. Opposition to the war came from Yankeedom and the Left Coast.

World War II put the Dixie bloc in a bind, as it refused to admit that its own racial policies were the model for the Nazis but supported the war before Pearl Harbor more than other regions did. New Netherlanders were eager to prepare for war, perhaps because so many of them came from countries endangered by the Nazis, and the Left Coast, Far West, and El Norte followed, in part because there were so many military bases and plants in the regions. Midlanders were opposed to preparing for war, in part because so many of them were from Germany, while New Englanders were divided. Once the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, however, the regions banded together to support the war. Borderlanders fought to continue the Scots-Irish tradition, while the Tidewater and Deep South fought to defend American honor. Midlanders saw the war as a fight against tyranny, while New Netherlanders, Yankees, and Left Coasters focused on the anti-authoritarian nature of the fight. El Norte and the Far West embraced the fight, as military spending enriched their long-ignored regions. Their regions got shipyards, naval bases, aircraft plants, and nuclear weapons labs (such as the one at Los Alamos in New Mexico). El Norte had a labor shortage during the war and began a guest worker program that would spark the massive Mexican migration northward in later years.

The Deep South was the most hawkish in supporting the Vietnam War, led by Appalachian Texas President Lyndon Johnson. Opposition to the war was centered in Yankeedom, New Netherland, and the Left Coast, particularly on college campuses (including Kent State, in the Yankee-founded area of Ohio). The Midlands were ambivalent about the war, though those Midlanders who opposed the war did so on pacifist grounds (such as the American Friends Service Committee in Philadelphia). The Far West was generally supportive of the war. 

In 2000, the Dixie bloc gained control of the White House (under George W. Bush), the Senate, and the House of Representatives. Their direction, which was even stronger after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, 2001, was to establish the US as a superpower through preemptive wars and the sidelining of international organizations. Bush’s war in Iraq was supported by the Dixie bloc, and ambivalence in the Tidewater and Appalachia only developed after the war had settled into a protracted occupation. For the past 200 years, Yankees have taken an anti-imperialist stance and battled for control with the hawks of the Deep South and Tidewater. Appalachia, while supplying many soldiers, is often divided.

Part 4, Chapter 27 Summary: “The Struggle for Power I: The Blue Nations”

As no one region can control the federal government, nations have formed alliances with other nations. The most durable alliance is that between Yankeedom and the Left Coast, which started in the 1840s. Both crusade for a better society through well-managed government, though the Left Coast also added an environmental campaign. From 1877 to 1897, this coalition controlled the federal government, imposing high tariffs on European imports that were used to fund pensions for Union veterans (all of whom lived in the North). The Yankees tried to thwart the power of the Tidewater and Deep South with the 1890 Force Bill, which allowed federal intervention in disputed elections. The Dixie bloc and New Netherland eventually defeated this bill.

New Netherland was able to play the other powers off each other. It often allied with the cotton barons of the South in opposition to high tariffs, and it opposed tariffs and pensions, as it had fewer Union veterans (as New York was a city of immigrants). Tammany Hall, its corrupt local government, fought the Force Bill. In the 20th century, New Netherland joined with Yankeedom due to the need to build a complex urban infrastructure and because its immigrant population was repulsed by Dixie’s emphasis on white Protestant supremacy and the quashing of dissent. 

In the first half of the 20th century, the Republicans were the party of the North. All their leaders, save Hoover, supported civil rights for African Americans, expanded power for the federal government, and restrictions on corporate interests (such as Teddy Roosevelt’s trust-busting). From 1988 to 2008, the three Northern alliance regions have voted for the same candidates for president. During that time, only four men from Northern alliance regions have been President: Republicans Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush and Democrats John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama. All of them tried to better society through the efforts of government, and they expanded civil rights legislation.

After the civil rights movement, the Dixie bloc captured control of the Republican party, or GOP, and Northern alliance members dropped out of the party. By the time of the George W. Bush presidency, the Northern alliance’s Republican congressional delegation was all but finished. Even Republicans representing Northern regions tended to uphold their region’s agenda. By the 2000s, Northern alliance Democrats and Republicans had more in common than their counterparts in the Dixie bloc.

Part 4, Chapter 28 Summary: “The Struggle for Power II: The Red and the Purple”

The Dixie bloc has been less stable than it appears, as the Tidewater and Appalachia were less committed to the apartheid system of the Deep South. When the Deep South, which was committed to maintaining a colonial-style economy under one party, was confronted with the civil rights movement, it rallied poor white people in the Tidewater and Appalachia to its side with racial fearmongering. The Deep South has also been committed to cutting taxes for the rich and eliminating labor and environmental laws. Its greatest problem has been keeping Appalachia in the alliance. Borderlanders have always promoted freedom and egalitarianism. Many Southern populists, from Lyndon Johnson to Ralph Yarborough to Bill Clinton to Cordell Hull, have come from Appalachia. However, Appalachians have been kept in the coalition by appeals to racism and their common religious tradition of Private Protestantism that eschews social reform and rejects secularism. 

In the decades after 1877, when the federal government was in the hands of the Yankee coalition with the Left Coast, the Dixie bloc voted against Yankee tariffs, the force bill, and African American voting rights. In the early 20th century, the bloc won the presidency only once, under Woodrow Wilson. When Democrats JFK and LBJ backed civil rights, the region went Republican. Since the mid-1960s, this region has almost always supported the more conservative presidential candidate, and ultraconservatives over the years have supported curbs on civil rights and bans on union shops. They have also supported lowering taxes on the wealthy and blocking health care and other regulations. This region has taken positions that are shocking to the Northern alliance, such as opposing the creation of the Martin Luther King holiday. 

Starting in the 1990s, the Dixie bloc has had a strong influence on the federal government. In 2000, it helped to elect George W. Bush, one of its own from Texas, who championed the interests of the Dixie bloc, including lowering taxes, promoting deregulation, and imposing his fundamentalist Christian beliefs. By the end of his presidency, income inequality had reached the highest point in the nation’s history—even greater than during the Gilded Age. 

As the Northern alliance and the Dixie bloc have been in stable opposition to each other, shifts in power reflect the movement of the three “swing” nations—the Midlands, El Norte, and the Far West. The recent dominance of Dixie power has been accomplished through an alliance with the Far West and the Midlands and the presidential bids of conservative Anglos from El Norte such as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. 

The Midlands have been leery of both Yankees and the Dixie bloc. They have the Borderlanders’ dislike of authority, the Yankees’ identification with the middle class, the commitment to cultural pluralism of New Netherland, and the Deep South’s dislike of student activism. This region encompasses “battleground states” such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Missouri that decide presidential elections. The agenda of the Far West has been to escape the control of the Northern alliance while maintaining governmental largesse. Since 1968, the Far West has sided with Dixie to protect corporate interests, but the region has a libertarian streak that surfaced in the 2008 election, when Colorado and Utah voted for Obama. 

The future of the balance of power rests with the rapidly growing Hispanic population of El Norte, who have begun to reassert control over the cultural and political life of their region and who are expected to account for a quarter of the nation’s population by 2025. Dixie has not done itself any favors by failing to win the hearts and minds of this population. Dixie’s commitment to white supremacy and the caste system has alienated many Norteños, whose political leaders have voted with Yankeedom in every presidential election since 1988. 

Canada shows what the US would have looked like if the South had successfully left the Union. Canada is composed of Yankee Maritimes, New France, the Midland-settled areas in the center, the Far West, and the liberal Pacific Coast. As in the US, the Yankees, Midlanders, and Left Coast get along, while they have friction with the conservative Far West. These regions have faced off not with the white supremacist Dixie bloc but with New France, which is the “most postmodern nation in North America” (312). This region is noted for its liberal, tolerant attitudes, including toward Indigenous peoples, who are now reclaiming sovereignty over their regions.

Epilogue Summary

Woodard writes that it’s “farfetched” to believe that the political boundaries of North America will remain the same into the future, given the power dynamics among the different regions. Woodard believes, as do many other experts, that the US is a superpower in decline, losing ground to China and experiencing deep divisions among its people.

Mexico is in worse shape, mired in narcotics traffickers, corruption, and regional battles such as the one in Chiapas for independence. Canada is in many ways the most stable of the three North American nations, as its Anglo regions have granted Québec a degree of self-control. 

Woodard runs through many possible scenarios for the US. It’s conceivable that Americans could compromise on their agendas, but he finds that unlikely, as Yankeedom and the Dixie bloc are committed to their ideals. It’s also possible that given a crisis, the union will dissolve and regions will reform into different coalitions. It’s also conceivable that the country will allocate more powers to states rather than the federal government. He believes that if the US is to continue as a nation, it must “respect the fundamental tenets of [its] unlikely union” (318). For example, the US won’t be able to survive with ideologues on the Supreme Court.

Woodard writes about the northern Indigenous peoples who are reclaiming sovereignty in areas such as Nunavut, Canada, and Greenland (which became nearly independent from Denmark following a referendum in 2009). First Nations governments tend to be communalistic, environmentalist, and female-dominated, giving Indigenous peoples a chance to show how they combine pre-modern ways with postmodern life.

Part 4-Epilogue Analysis

In this section, Woodard traces the development of the “culture wars” that have defined US politics since the mid-1960s, arguing that they are actually nothing new but rather the latest manifestation of The Regions at Loggerheads. The growth of the civil rights movement sparked the Dixie bloc alliance, composed of Appalachia, the Deep South, and the Tidewater, which is counterbalanced by an alliance between Yankeedom, New Netherland, and the Left Coast. The other nations are those that determine the shifts of power between the two blocs; Woodard thus contextualizes the “swing states” of modern electoral politics within Yankeedom and the Deep South’s longer battle for control over the nation’s destiny, particularly on matters of race.

In the Epilogue, Woodard writes that the culture wars have had a decidedly destabilizing effect on the US. However, it is worth noting that Woodard does not suggest that regional differences per se are to blame. For instance, in comparing the US to Canada, he notes that the latter has been able to forge a compromise between the Anglo regions on the one hand and New France and the First Nations on the other. Indeed, modern Canadian politics has been marked by The Resurgence of Cultural Minorities demanding greater autonomy, and the country has survived largely by granting it. However, Woodard writes that it’s unlikely that the US will be able to forge this type of compromise due to an all-or-nothing commitment to regional values that, ironically, cuts across regional lines. 

For much of the book, Woodard has relied on the historical record and on others’ opinions. In the Epilogue, he writes with his own voice about the future of the nation to argue that changes are needed in the tenor of the American political debate and in American political practices if the union is to survive. Woodard’s book ends on a gloomy note, as he believes that the US cannot sustain the divisiveness that has characterized its political and cultural life. The US could potentially break into new coalitions, or it could lessen the power of the federal government in favor of greater states’ rights. Whatever its course, Woodard believes that the US cannot exist if it doesn’t respect open debate and the tenets on which it was founded—a project complicated by the fact that, according to Woodard, the country was not truly founded on any unifying set of beliefs but rather on various competing agendas.

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