Choice Review of The Cult of Individualism

Choice, a publication of the American Library Association, publishes 'postcard reviews' for use by academic libraries. The point is to give a quick overview of the book, an idea of the appropriate audience, and a sense of whether the book can be useful to any particular library. I write reviews for Choice and love doing so, even with its limitations in size and purpose. The word limit, for example, prevents grandstanding by a reviewer and forces her or him to aim for a succinct description. Taking to heart the old saw, best expressed by Mark Twain as “I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead,” reviewers are

expected to put time and care into these pieces, not just dash them off.

What I like best, however, is that Choice surprises me each time a book arrives. Each has related to my areas of experience and expertise, certainly, but none has been a book I would likely pick up on my own. I don't have to accept any assignment--if a book is just too awful, I can simply ask to be excused--but I have never had to do so. In each case, I have learned something; in one case, I ended up using the book as a source in a book of my own.

The latest issue of Choice contains its review of that book, The Cult of Individualism: A History of an Enduring American Myth. It is by an emeritus professor of history at Brooklyn College named Robert Muccigrosso and, for me, it creates a model of what a Choice review should be, a model I hope my own reviews live up to.

Muccigrosso begins by referring to Rodney Dangerfield's "I can't get no respect" as an apt description of my subject, the Scots-Irish "Borderers." He writes:

Despised and derided both in the Old World and the New, these mostly poor and uneducated uprooted Protestants brought with them their anger, a serious distrust of authority, and an abiding sense of the strength of individual endeavor.

That's it, as it should be, in a nutshell. Muccigrosso ends with this:

This book provides a sensible plea to include the Borderer experience more fully into the national heritage for the benefit of all. 

If that ever happens--and happens in small part because of my book--I will be extremely happy.

Review of The Cult of Individualism: Partisans Beware

Chip Etier has posted a review of The Cult of Individualism: A History of an Enduring American Myth. He focuses on one of the underlying reasons I wrote the book and, in an off way, explains the "lapse" that Dave Tabler, in his own review, notes--that I do not really consider the southern "Cavalier" culture, favoring, instead, a look almost exclusively at the "Borderer" culture and what has become its contemporary antithesis, the secular-humanist culture that has arisen from the Quaker and Puritan cultures (these designations come from David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America). In a comment for Tabler's review, I excuse myself by saying that the Cavalier culture was effectively destroyed by the Civil War... which is true, for the most part, but is not the whole of it.

Though many people still do hold a romantic view of Cavalier culture (look at the continuing popularity of Gone With the Wind), its impact today is mainly confined to nostalgia. The destruction of the economic base of that culture, slavery, coupled with the devastation of the war itself, led to a withering of the Cavaliers and an incorporation of their descendants (and their myths) into the resilient Borderers who, after centuries of surviving wars on the Scottish/English border, were hardly fazed (culturally) by more of the same in North America.

Etier writes:

Barlow offers readers an unbiased examination of the root causes of America’s retreat from reason, understanding, and acceptance in dealing with our political adversaries. Too many people have, for too long, taken the easy way out and cast inflammatory remarks across the aisle and turned a cold shoulder towards the opposition. Who is the opposition?

Barlow takes a new look at identifying the contestants. Rather than the more commonly considered North-South divide, he looks at what he considers a neglected force, East-West.

In many ways, we still look at the United States through the fractured (and imperfectly repaired) lens of the Civil War. And we see that war rather simplistically as solely over slavery, that economic engine of the South. But the war was about much more, and many of its other seeds can be found in the distrust toward Quakers and Puritans (and, yes, even Cavaliers) that the Borderers felt from their mass arrival in the seven decades before the Revolution. They weren't welcomed in the colonies. Even during the Revolution, which they supported, they felt themselves relegated to a secondary role, their voices counting for little in the Continental Congress. After that war, many of them felt that exploitation continued; no longer was it coming from the British Crown but from the monied East.

Tabler is right: I should have spent more time dealing with the Cavalier culture. That, however, would have reduced attention to my main, underlying point, that our contemporary political divides stem from a cultural division long ignored, though quite real, a division that goes back to life of the border in Britain and that came to North America through Ulster Plantation in Northern Ireland.

Want to Understand the Tea Party? Look to How They See Themselves

This map comes from the U.S.Census Bureau (and thanks, Rodger Cunningham, for alerting me to it). It is based on self-reporting on the 2000 census. What is fascinating to me is the number of people who identified themselves simply as "American." Their location covers almost all of Appalachia and, I suspect, if you took out "African American," would dominate the entire old Confederacy (except for Texas and the south of Florida).

These are primarily people of European ancestry who see themselves as simply "American," with no ties to other nations or other cultures. They do not descend from post-Civil War immigration; ties to any "old country" were broken long ago, probably even before the age of steam. Many of them are associated with the Borderer culture that rose between Scotland and England and that was hardened on Ulster Plantation in the 17th century, either by descent or incorporation--and all of them see themselves as being the "real" Americans who created the United States.

They do not feel that they have been treated well by the federal government, of late. In fact, they may never have felt themselves treated well (they were the rebels of the War of the Regulation in the 1760s and the Whiskey Rebellion thirty years later--not to mention, many were the stalwarts of the Confederate States of America, though few would have been counted among the rich slave owners). In The Cult of Individualism: A History of an Enduring American Myth, I quote Albert Votaw, writing in Harper's about them in 1958, at a time when a number of them had moved north to work in the factories of Illinois, Ohio and Michigan:

These farmers, miners, and mechanics from the mountains and meadows of the mid-South--with their fecund wives and numerous children--are, in a sense, the prototype of what the "superior" American should be, white Protestants of early American, Anglo-Saxon stock; but on the streets of Chicago they seem to be the American dream gone berserk. This may be the reason why their neighbors often find them more obnoxious than the Negros or the early foreign immigrants whose obvious differences from the American stereotype made them easy to despise. Clannish, proud, disorderly, untamed to urban ways, these country cousins confound all notions of racial, religious, and cultural purity. (quoted in Cult 193)

Faced with attitudes like this (and it was--and is--commonplace), is there any wonder that the Borderers have turned the tables, rejecting anyone but themselves as the "real" Americans? I think not.

To them, America has never consisted of a federation of states but was forged by the white people who escaped the financial and social tyranny of the East Coast and, as they moved West, created a new culture and new land. From their first arrival in the 18th century, they were the people of the backcountry--which in those days included almost all but the coastal parts (and the areas along the major rivers) of Pennsylvania, Virginia and the Carolinas. They weren't welcome in Philadelphia (the biggest number of them coming to America through the Delaware Valley) or in any of the established cities or towns, so they quickly moved West. Though their "base" remains in the Appalachian Mountains, they were among the first moving farther west throughout the 19th century, often establishing the communities that were soon further populated by newer immigrants.

Their descendants today are proud of this heritage, but have seen themselves demeaned by the powerful intellectual and financial elites of the East for generations--their very value as Americans denigrated while newer immigrants--and African Americans--get (in their eyes) the fruit of their own hard labor through government largess--largess made possible through their own taxes (or so they believe). America is being stolen from them, they imagine. Congressman Pete Sessions' declaration to President Obama, "I cannot stand to even look at you," is nothing more, in fact, than a declaration of the frustrations so many Borderer descendants feel in face of a President who, through his very appearance, brags (it seems to them) of the theft of America from its "real" inheritors.

These are not simply racists, the contemporary Tea Party, and to call them that continues to process of denigration that has now gone on for three centuries. Their attitudes are much more complex and do, at times, come from real grievances--and not just the imagined ones we know so well. In the East, for example, it is commonplace to speak of "white privilege." But "white privilege" is not something many of the Borderers have ever experienced. Yes, many of them were better off than the African Americans in their communities, but not much more so. Just look at images from James Agee's and Walker Evans' Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; many Appalachian counties did not see indoor plumbing until the 1950s or later. Yes, Borderers could blend into the dominant white culture of the East (and many did--my family among them) and gain "white privilege," but for many others life was (and is) one of deprivation and desperation.

We're going through a time, right now, of real cultural divide and hatred. It is showing up in our politics, making our government more and more unworkable. The tendency is, from our nice perches in New York City, Washington, San Francisco, Minneapolis... wherever... to see the Tea Party as the "Other," as the vicious and horrible. That's not going to solve anything.

Remember, the Tea Party sees us, the 'secular-liberals,' African Americans, Latinos, Jews, and everyone else who has not joined with them, as the "Other," as the vicious and horrible.

Which side is right? Neither.

Until both can get off their high horses and start seeing things from the perspectives of their enemies, both will continue to be wrong.

What Is Behind the Shutdown... and Why Is the Tea Party So Unapologetic?

What happens when there are two major cultures in a country, and one feels that, though they represent the real spirit of the country, they are being pretty much ignored by its rulers?

Lots of things can, from protest to revolution. We've just seen a rather unusual one, though completely appropriate (in the eyes of the perpetrators), given the beliefs and situation of those who see themselves shoved to the outside of their own country.

The American right sees a United States dominated by people who, in their eyes, don't even represent the "real" Americans who built this country in the first place. They see a country dominated by immigrants and minorities, by people who don't understand the work that it took to make this country great--people who are simply taking advantage of its greatness.

They see (or imagine they see) others coddled and cut to the front of the line while they work and wait their turn. They think government, to aid these others, has gotten too much into their business and their finances, making them struggle while others relax. They look at laws that many (to their eyes) hide behind, or that favor the non-"Americans" over the true children of this country.

To them, central governments have always been villains. Since the time of the War of the Regulation in the 1760s, they have been struggling against those who want to impose their own law upon them. Though they supported the Revolution and loved General Washington, they hated the taxes that they saw as an unfair imposition on an already overburdened population. They rose up against the federal government in the Whiskey Rebellion of the 1790s--and it was only the presence of their beloved general, now President, that took the wind out of their sails.

Could resentments from so long ago be influencing attitudes to many generations later?

There's a line that can be traced from the Whiskey Rebellion right to Junior Johnson and the birth of NASCAR, not all that long ago.

More tellingly, feelings associated with the Civil War, only a couple of generations more recent than the Whiskey Rebellion, still crop up in association with the Tea Party, so why not those just a little older (and more than a little related)?

But who are they, these Americans so close to being at war with their government?

In The Cult of Individualism: A History of an Enduring American Myth, I identify them as the inheritors of the Borderers, the Scots-Irish immigrants of the 18th century who settled in the backwoods of the time and who were the leaders of the movement westward of the 19th century. The book is a start at telling their story, a start because theirs is a story seldom told today, in a country that celebrates immigrants of the 19th, 20th and even 17th centuries but elides the Borderers almost completely from almost all of its intellectual and media discussions (making it no wonder, by the way, that they hate the media... and most intellectuals).

Here's what my publisher's website says about the book:

American culture is divided—and it always has been.

American individualism: It is the reason for American success, but it also tears the nation apart.
Why do Americans have so much trouble seeing eye to eye today? Is this new? Was there ever an American consensus? The Cult of Individualism: A History of an Enduring American Myth explores the rarely discussed cultural differences leading to today's seemingly intractable political divides.

After an examination of the various meanings of individualism in America, author Aaron Barlow describes the progression and evolution of the concept from the 18th century on, illuminating the wide division in Caucasian American culture that developed between the culture based on the ideals of the English Enlightenment and that of the Scots-Irish "Borderers." The "Borderer" legacy, generally explored only by students of Appalachian culture, remains as pervasive and significant in contemporary American culture and politics as it is, unfortunately, overlooked. It is from the "Borderers" that the Tea Party sprang, along with many of the attitudes of the contemporary American right, making it imperative that this culture be thoroughly explored.

Features: 
• Documents how the concept and execution of "American individualism" is as diverse as America itself. • Explains how the American notion of individualism has roots that extend back to cultural myths that predate the founding of the nation. • Spotlights the role of the "Borderer" culture spearheaded by the Scots-Irish, whose legacy fuels much of America's contemporary cultural and political divides. • Provides eye-opening information for any reader who wishes to know why so many of our 21st-century political debates in America seem hopelessly irreconcilable. 

Sample Topics: 
American Backwoods,American Folkways,Appalachian Culture,Daniel Boone,Horatio Alger,Individualism in America,Movies and Small Towns,Red States vs. Blue States,Scots-Irish in America,Self-Made Myth.

Excerpts can be read here. 

Excerpts from The Cult of Individualism

This link will take you to excerpts from my new book, The Cult of Individualism: A History of an Enduring American Myth. In it, I explore backgrounds that can make the "shutdown" a bit more understandable--historically, at least. Making sense of it in current terms is beyond me.

The book is available in a number of places online, including Amazon.