Its no longer clear to me what we celebrate on July 4 or why. Some of the people I am expected to embrace on this occasion strike me as numbering among the most odious hypocrites despots and slanderers on the planet. What of our national bond is left?
A few days ago an article posted by Pat Buchanan both encapsulated my own swirling sentiments and also gave me something new to ponder. The passage that stirred me up most ran as follows:
Many liberals not only do not trust the South some detest it. And many seem to think it deserves to be treated differently than the more progressive precincts of the nation.
Consider Wednesdays offering by Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson. The South he writes is the home of so-called right-to-work laws" and hostility to the union shop undergirded by the virulent racism of the white Southern establishment" a place where a right-wing antipathy toward workers rights" is pandemic.
The South is the the heartland of cheap-labor America.... When it wants to slum business still goes to the South." Then there are those reactionary white Republican state governments."
Were a conservative to use the term black" as a slur the way Meyerson spits out the word white" he would be finished at the Post. Meyersons summation:
If the federal government wants to build a fence that keeps the United States safe from the danger of lower wages and poverty and their attendant illsand the all-round fruitcakery of the right-wing white Southit should build that fence from Norfolk to Dallas. There is nothing wrong with a fence as long as you put it in the right place."
Harold looks forward to the day that a surging Latino population forces epochal political change" on a detestable white South. (1)
As another Fourth of July makes me question what nature of union remains to celebrate and why I should celebrate it with the likes of Mr. Meyerson (whose type is common in both parties among the ruling class) I can find fewer answers than ever. My reading of Thomas DiLorenzos Unmasking Lincoln recently has brought to the light of full consciousness a feeling I have had about such people as Mr. Meyerson all my life. DiLorenzo calls them Yankees"as do those among whom I was raised; yet he explains them as they were never explained to me underscoring that he himself though born in Pennsylvania isnt one of the tribe:
The morally superior" New England Yankees announced repeatedly that they did not believe black people were capable of citizenship and tried to force them out of their communities. The American Colonization Society which raised funds to deport blacks to Liberia and other foreign lands was very active in New England. By 1861 some twelve thousand free blacks from New England had been deported to Liberia where most of them perished. To New Englanders abolitionism" did not necessarily mean freedom it meant abolishing" the presence of black people from their midst. They were Gods chosen people and no inferior beings" were acceptable to them. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said approvingly the abolitionist wishes to abolish slavery but because he wishes to abolish the black man." That would supposedly restore New England to an idealized original state as an orderly homogeneous white society. A free New England would be a white New England." In other words they apparently hoped to create a superior master race.(2)
Lincoln himself of course was one of this lot in spirit though no pilgrim blueblood. The Emancipation Proclamation declared slaves to be free throughout the South in a strategic bid to demoralize the enemy: it wasted not a word on those states still loyal to Lincolns precious unionsuch as Kentucky Missouri and Marylandthat held slavery to be legal. Where Abe couldnt in fact free any slaves he freed them all; where he might have taken the initiative in freeing them all he touched not the chains of one. He was a two-faced Yankee hypocrite intent only upon securing power over the maximum number of his fellow citizensby any means possible up to and including invasion and shelling of civilian targets (i.e. terrorism)so as to promote the progressive" vision of those industrialists who bankrolled him. I despise the mans memory as my grandmother did and I find it more difficult than ever to celebrate a holiday on which this first great murderer of the Constitution is prominently honored.
I have so far failed to retrieve the exact citation from Leon OBroins biography of Richard Robert OMadden the Irish abolitionist and diplomat who spoke upat great risk to his careerfor the slave crew of the Amistad. (In any case the book is written in Irish.) I clearly remember the passage however where OMadden and a black friend were returning from Sunday Mass on the streets of New York in the mid-1830s. A mob quickly formed. OMadden feared for his friends life. He hadnt realized that white men dont go to black churches in New York and that blacks dont walk with whites in public.(3)
About four years ago now I recall that a Yankee" Shakespearean submitted a very fine analysis of Measure for Measure to my online literary journal. I learned much from the piece and was pleased to publish it. I label this man with the y" word not because of where he happened to be from (all of us can find something to be ashamed of and proud of in our place of origin) but because of what ensued. Flattered by my admiration he proceeded to send me a more tongue-in-cheek piece about a post-graduate experience dimly connected to his Shakespearean studies at some South Carolinian university. I like to believe that my sense of humor is as flexible as the next persons; but to hear this writer tell it all that Southerners do is get stinking drunk and eat pork rinds. There was a nudge nudge" quality to the whole vignette as if to say Well you know what theyre likeWE know what theyre like." I dont remember what particular political issue may be thanked for parting our ways permanently; but I do most distinctly recall that until I finally raised one too many protests at his statist/paternalist/neocon rants this worthy was constantly letting me know when he would next fly through Dallas on his busy schedule so that we might meet and have a drink". All of his proposed rendezvous had an alcoholic savor to them… and this was the same nave pilgrim who had suggested that Southern moonshine had once corrupted him!
I inserted a brief little apologetic for the South in my journal a few months after publishing the Yankee burlesque and I included an old photo retrieved from my grandfathers album. Ive reproduced that photo in this post. The year must be about 1900: the place is a farm outside of Clemson. As you can see the little black children and the little white children are clearly playmates. Huddling together to squeeze into the frame they obviously arent afraid of rubbing against each other. The Yankee presumption that such scenes as this could not possibly exist when and where the picture proves they did is the basis (or part of it) for the Yankee loathing of people like me: white male and of Southern extraction. That presumption insofar as it is made to blanket an entire people rather than describe only a certain stratum of Southern white society is a lie. Like the myth of Lincoln its a damned lie. Yes there were lynchings in the Southin Mississippi especially; and there were also race riots in places like Detroit and acts of voter disenfranchisement in many major northeastern cities directed at the Irish and Eastern Europeans for decades after the Civil War.
But the Yankee remains superiorhe doesnt do such things and will not permit them to be recorded in our collective history books. The progressive heir to his Puritan forebears he doesnt have to justify his actions: they are his and hence inspired by God. It has been said that the Southern cracker" has to feel himself superior to a black because if you aint better than a n----r you aint better than no one." Is this not the same function that all Southerners fulfill for the Yankee? If he is ever tempted toward self-doubt he may always find a Southerner and recover his sense of rightful privilege.
In Ken Burns documentary Baseball I recall a Yankee professor in tweeds sneering that Georgian Ty Cobb was an embarrassment to the game. This sniffing condemnation came at the end of a lopsided account of Cobbs fight with an armless invalid in the bleachers who had reportedly flung the n" word at him. (The man actually had no fingers due to an industrial accident: he disguised this handicap by wearing gloves.) Even if the incident took place largely as reported why did the professorand Burnshave no vitriol for the Northern spectator who released the slur or for the Northern teammates who told Cobb that if he did not punch the guy they would lose all respect for him? Why is racism always a one-way street never traveled by the Yankee and walked only by those he has selected for social and political excommunication?
A final word about racism in the South. The incomparable C. Vann Woodward reproduces in perhaps his greatest book the struggles of one T. McCants Stewart a black journalist working for a Northern newspaper during 1885 as he traveled South on a mission (or a crusade) to write home about the horrors of bigotry:
On leaving Washington D.C. he reported to his paper I put a chip on my shoulder and inwardly dared any man to knock it off." He found a seat in a car which became so crowded that several white passengers had to sit on their baggage. I fairly foamed at the mouth" he wrote imagining the conductor would order me into the seat occupied by a colored lady so as to make room for a white passenger." Nothing of the sort happened however nor was there any unpleasantness when Stewart complained of a request from a white Virginian that he shift his baggage so that the white man could sit beside him. At a stop twenty-one miles below Petersburg he entered a station dining room bold as a lion" he wrote took a seat at a table with white people and was courteously served. The whites at the table appeared not to notice my presence" he reported. Thus far I had found traveling more pleasant... than in some parts of new England. Aboard a steamboat in North Carolina he complained of a colored waiter who seated him at a separate table though in the same dining room with whites. At Wilmington however he suffered from no discrimination in dining arrangements. His treatment in Virginia and North Carolina he declared contrasted strongly with much that I have experienced in dining rooms in the north." Another contrast that impressed him was the ease and frequency with which white people entered into conversation with him for no other purpose than to pass the time of day. I think the whites of the south" he observed are really less afraid to have contact with colored people than the whites of the north."(4)
Stewart had his preconceptions and they were not groundless; but he was also an honest man and he realized that the assumptions he had been fed were careless and over-broad. In other words he was not a Yankee.
If my many hints that the y" word is almost a synonym for progressive" have been too subtle then I will come out into the open now. Ive had my filla lifetimes fillof people who really arent any smarter or better educated than I telling meor broadcasting over my head to their elite audience I should saythat they know whats best that they dont need to justify this knowledge and that the right" sort of person needs no explanation of their preemptive superiority. It turns out that such insufferable Gods chosen" arrogance has been on display since the first wobbly days of our now moribund republic. The progressives have wanted an oligarchya theocracya faux democracy of nodding puppets at one-party electionssince the Mayflower dropped anchor. At last theyre having their way.
Mr. Meyerson tell me where you would like to build your damned wall and Ill show up to raise it from the other side. Only… I notice that like Mr. Lincoln you have no intention of restricting the reach of your dictates from that side where you would never sully your shoe soles. What then is the purpose of your wall since you shall continue trying to micro-manage the lives of the exiles even after its rearing? Is it just that every emperor needs a great wall?
Of the Mexico which Mr. Meyerson proposes to settle all along the walls southern boundary I have much to write once my blood pressure falls a few ticks.
Notes
(1) Patrick J. Buchanan Does the South Belong in the Union?" Townhall.com. 28 June 2013.
(2) Lincoln Unmasked (New York: Three Rivers Press 2006) 40-41.
(3) Leon Broin An Maidneach (Baile tha Cliath: Sirsal agus Dill 1971).
(4) From early in the second chapter of C. Vann Woodward The Strange Career of Jim Crow (first published in 1955; this citation from a e-bookno page number available).