I wonder if I partially provoked this post by Thomas Fleming: http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/?p=578 Probably I did not, since Fleming probably has never heard of me and certainly has no reason to have had previous respect for my opinions. Furthermore, I never mentioned Bryan (nor would I have been so foolish as to do so, since I would have suspected, although I admit I did not know for sure, that he was of Butternut descent). There must have been a similar conversation going on somewhere else on the Internet.

Nonetheless, if anyone did think from my post that I “hate the South,” however, nothing could be further from the truth.

I don’t know the data for WWII offhand, but I know 70% nationally opposed entry into WWI in 1917. That means that most folks in just about every region didn’t want to join the war. It was a more popular move in those places where Anglophilia was strongest and commercial ties were greatest, and I don’t think it is a stretch to assume that this was the Northeast.

On behalf of Northeasterners and mid-Atlantic folks, I should stress that there were many people, including my ancestors and relatives, in New England and New Jersey who opposed foreign wars from 1812 through WWI and on. Wilson is the one who made my Democratic ancestors switch parties in disgust, and they were from New Jersey, so I don’t mean to lay warmongering at the door of everyone from that region, either.

It would be interesting to look at rudimentary public opinion data (if any such exists) from World War I and World War II. In Congress for World War I, just as with the Iraq War, most members jumped on the war bandwagon and the war received the great majority of votes from all regions. Ordinary folk were on a different page, of course, but I don’t know the regional breakdown. For World War II, I have in mind the story of the Southerner in mid-1941 who supposedly told a visiting journalist “I think we will have to enter the war. Do you think the Yankees will come along with us when we do?” Of course, that is probably an apocryphal tale, and again, I wonder what story early opinion polls would tell.

Actually, opposition to entry into WWI was strong in the South, just as it was strong almost everywhere. Opposition to entry into WWII was strong in the South. Also, I am not saying that Southerners or Scots-Irish people are reflexively or more naturally “antiwar” than others. I’m not trying to pretend that there have never been Southerners who wanted wars and some who started wars, nor am I trying to say that they are the “children of light.” I celebrate the Midwesterners who have opposed unnecessary wars down through the decades. This is an argument about which region dominates our politics and the substance of our policies, and very clearly the region that still holds disproportionate sway over all this, as it has done for well over a century, is the Northeast. People from this region have driven our policies to such a large extent because they are the ones who have been in power for most of this time, and they have directed those policies in ways that serve their interests and attachments. Wilson may be from Virginia, but the people who embraced Wilsonian ideas at the time (and, for the most part, ever since) certainly were not. The picture was more complicated during the Cold War, but overwhelmingly the people who favoured involvement in foreign wars early on were from the East. Usually, it was not just Southerners, but the vast majority of the country that was against what the Easterners wanted to do, but the latter nonetheless got their way.

Also, if the South is so dominant today, isn’t it strange that we have had only one non-transplant Southerner in the White House in the last 28 years and before that only two in the last 40?

Leaving out the complicated issue of the Civil War, the only major war in U.S. history where opposition was strong in the South was the Phillipine War (a separate war from the Spanish-American War, which was generally popular in the South). Southerners were unqestionably the driving force behind the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the “filibustering” movements of the 1850s. The Civil War changed the dynamic and made Southerners more suspicious of foreign expansionism, which was reflected in their opposition to Grant’s failed annexation of Santo Domingo, McKinley’s successful annexation of Hawaii, and the Philippine War.

Except for his years as an undergraduate at Princeton (always the most Southern-friendly of the major Northeastern colleges), Wilson lived in the South continuously until he was thirty (twenty-six if we consider Maryland Mid-Atlantic instead of Southern). The dominant influences in his Cabinet and advisers were mostly Southern (notably House, McAdoo, Burleson, Daniels, Glass, and Page). Attempts to classify him as a non-Southener just won’t wash. Most Southerners in Congress voted for the war (as did most Congressmen from other regions, it should be said). Again in World War II, very few of the leading opponents of intervention in Congress were Southerners; most were Midwesterners and Westerners.

The most anti-war region of the United States in the twentieth century has unquestionably been the Upper Midwest, where the dominant cultural influences have been Yankee, German, and Scandanavian.

Both Northeastern liberals like Hirsh and Southern (or Southern-friendly) paleoconservatives like you enjoy dividing the nation into children of light and children of darkness (merely disagreeing on which region is which), but the facts are otherwise. All regions of the country have bellicose at certain times and pacific at other times.

P.S. Since when was Clay a Northerner? That is even more dubious than portraying Wilson as one, since Clay never lived in the North at all. (Kentucky is arguably non-Southern after 1861, but no one during Clay’s career knew which states would succeed and which would not.) Since he was a Mexican War skeptic, claiming him as a Southerner would actually support your point. (And his strong support of the War of 1812 was similar to that of John C. Calhoun, then his close ally.)

The problem with some of your historical analysis is that it neglects the Civil War – obviously one war fought for both honor and economic interests that the Scotts-Irish southerners were all for. Of course, this was not a foreign war, so perhaps it shouldn’t count. Except that all opposition or disinterest in foreign wars in the ante-bellum south can be seen as a consequence of the terrible defeat they suffered, and their lack of say in the federal government for a very long time. If we look at war prior to the Civil War, the evidence for their peaceful nature is lacking. The Texan War of Independence and the later Mexican War were both the result of Scotts-Irish aggression, and of course the Indian wars were fought with total commitment by these same peoples. Any opposition to expansionist wars during this time was purely due to the fear that expansionist states would not be slave states, and so lead to their marginalization. Which led to the Kansas-Missouri wars, and of course to the Civil War itself, which was fought far more aggressively and competently by the south, until of course Grant and Sherman took over.

So the militant tradition in the south is very strong, and continues to be exploited and re-directed to serve the ends of others. Even in WWII, it was the Scotts-Irish who were our best fighters, and even many of our best generals, such as Patton.

What I question is whether it’s really fair to say that these peoples have opposed the foreign wars that our elite establishments have gotten us into. I don’t recall much southern opposition to WWII, Korea, Vietnam, or either Iraq war. Or any war in my lifetime, to be sure. I agree with you that they didn’t start these wars, that various elites in our country are responsible for that, but I don’t get any sense that these people have ever mounted any serious opposition. It seems they are all too eager to go off and fight wars if the elites tell them to. Maybe I’m missing something, but I think you are relying on wishful thinking to imagine that Scotts-Irish culture is some kind of fertile ground for anti-war isolationism.

On the other hand, I do sympathize with your notion that these people ought to be anti-war, if they were acting in their own best interests. But this neglects how the culture of honor and warrior ethics is precisely the kind of culture which does NOT act in its own best interests, but is willing to plunge itself into lost causes (see Civil War once again) that often lead to ruin, regardless of all the warning signs. I’m not sure how this can be reversed, but if you have any clues, please let me know. It could save the whole country a lot of trouble.

Maybe you’re drawing on a superior source, but the most exhaustive and respected account of regional cultures in the United States that I know of is still David Hackett Fischer’s _Albion’s Seed_. Fischer writes:

“The war fever of [17]98 marked the beginning of a consistent pattern in American military history. From the quasi-war with France to the Vietnam War, the two southern cultures [i.e. the Southern tidewater region and the so-called Scots-Irish] strongly supported every American war no matter what it was about or who it was against. Southern honor and the warrior ethic combined to create regional war fevers of great intensity in 1798, 1812, 1861, 1898, 1917, 1941, 1950, and 1965.”

You might have a better case that those wars were *conceived* by the “Yankees,” but certainly not that they were “largely…supported and waged” by them.

What we almost did in 1895-96 would be comparable to a British threat to intervene militarily prior to or during the Mexican war on behalf of Santa Anna. Had Cleveland followed through on his threat, we might have tried to attack Quebec again, or perhaps occupy parts of Alberta, but the British Navy would have reduced our port cities to rubble. So, yes, I disapprove of what he was doing.

I would qualify my point about the Venezuela example in an important respect: it was the heavy dependence of American commerce and finance on British lending that ultimately made the war politically undesirable in the U.S., so in this instance the Easterners’ pro-British bias prevented the situation from escalating, but this was not because of their greater sophistication or wisdom. It was because they were economically tied to the British–the same ties that sucked us into WWI twenty years later. That was a rare case where the traditional Democratic Anglophobia and populist dislike of concentrated financial power rallied in support of a belligerent posture towards another nation.

Do you disapprove of Grover Cleveland’s taking us to the brink of war in 1897? The situation and prospects of Cleveland’s Venezuelan (really Canadian) war of 1897 more nearly resembled those of James K. Polk’s Mexican war of 1848 than those of William McKinley’s Spanish war of 1898. The object of Polk’s war were the empty lands of Mexico, of Cleveland’s aborted war, the empty lands of Canada. McKinley by contrast targeted lands already populated by foreigners.

Howard