Where are your people buried? The impossibility of 'Heritage American'; such do not exist
Notes preliminary to a discussion of the Celtic heritage of the Southern nation
So where y’all coming from? Once that was the standard sorta neighborly-type inquiry that in the old days you’d lob at the Mom/Dad/2.5 kiddos in the adjacent booth at HoJo’s while waiting for the gal to bring over your plate of delicious fried clam strips. Maybe that explains the American passion for “legible clothing” that while advertising the usual brands – Hard Rock Café, Rainforest Café, some Disney horseshit – also indicate place: a landscape. Shitty ones, to be sure: New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Orlando or whatever. But place implies – or should, or maybe once did – people: the sluggish, inefficient and sloppy “becoming” of a group of individuals into . . . into themselves.
But good news: we’ve progressed. That’s-not-who-we-are, as the People Department Ladies presiding over the last squalid days of this wretched empire are always ready, willing and able to remind you. It’s highly insensitive, it’s a macroaggression, it’s nothing less than blood and soil Nazism. Imagine, if you will, the impact on the self-esteem of a graduate of the University of Bangalore, whose pathway to the American Dream began with an H1-B at a Circle-K in outside Memphis, through his entire extended family – the whole fucking village, most likely – is enjoying the Blessings of Liberty, and they’re American Waying-it up like motherfuckers over in Sugarland. The local GOP will assure you that they’re natural conservatives, family values and all. Like Vivek Ramaswamy and his MD mom. Right?
And the mere thought that any of the selfy-happy New Americans above and his are any less American than the dowagers of the Daughters of the American Revolution – why, that’s unacceptable, my good man. Just as Professor E. Dudley Baltzell, chronicler of the self-appointed and proclaimed “American WASP Aristocracy” spawned (like he himself) of Philadelphia Quaker and New England Congregationalist. Ol’ Dud also wrote books about Tennis, or some WASPy sport. Here is a pic of ol’ Dud, scion of Yankee aristocracy. He’s sort of the platonic ideal of the Man in the Brooks Brothers Suit:[1]
Why do I invoke Professor Dud? Well, Ol’ Dud Served His County in World War II: he was in the Pacific Theater as a “naval aviator” like the first Bush and something called “air combat intelligence officer.” Knowing what I do of the American military, I’m confidence that latter function comprised “fetching coffee for the Officer of the Deck.” Anyway, Dud took home a valuable lesson from World War II, which can be described as a plank in the Boomer Truth Regime: “War was the great equalizer, the melting pot. You couldn’t share the hardships, the dangers and boredom with people of all races and backgrounds and then turn around and exclude them from the opportunities to which they were entitled.”
Well, Dud, ain’t that fucking profound. It’s a fair enough observation, to be sure. But what the fuck with this “exclude,” “entitled.” “Equalize,” “melting pot.” Yeah, we see where you’re going with that. Key tenets of the Boomer Truth Regime, the Principles of Americanism, Universal Truths in which we all sure as shit better partake, else it’s a drone up your ass. And we have fallen so short of those noble ideals, is Duddy’s lament; we just ain’t we who are, dagnabit; it is the task of our Generation, who smote that unpleasant Hitler fellow, to bring Society into conformance. Others may detect a whiff of the old European noblesse oblige — here, stupid peasant, this is how you hold the plow — but please allow me to assure you that the wretched, cowardly, treasonous WASP class (to the extend it exists) is completely free of such sentiment unless there is a tax writeoff. As documented here, my estucheon is forever stained by the presence of New Englanders. One wretch from this branch heartlessly thrust an old woman out of his home; a family historian rationalized it thusly:
Are you for real? The old dame pitched into the iron dark of New England winter and you say it’s okay as it saves the dickhead a few coppers? Well, it’s obvious that profit motive was the lodestone for the New England Mind back even in the early years, no matter how Duddy tarts it up as Humanitarianism. Dud’s just an early adopter of bullshit postwar Americanism: Uncle Sam’s here to repair all the damage done to the world and the rest of you sons of bitches best get on board. Kick and scream all you want, but into the Melting Pot you go; at the point of the bayonet if needed, but in you go. Be sure to thank your Uncle and leave a tip.
So what follows is something of an extended footnote on Dud’s little cri de couer. A midrash, if you will, on how nastily exclusionary and un-melting-potted it was back in the day.
“Where y’all from” once meant “where are your people buried?” Buried, in turn, implies place, a postage-stamp of sod or swamp or forest, a landscape secured by name, by generations, by labor and blood and memory. That, as we know, is unacceptable for a polity predicated the free flow of capital and labor. “Local attachment,” much less “familial,” interferes with Free to Choose. Anyone remember Kevin Williamson, the National Review hack who sneered at his kinfolk in East Texas because they refused to move from where their people were buried to some urban shithole where they’d learn to code? Well, that’s Americanism for you. If it is not an integer that can be entered into a spreadsheet and milked for another few basis points of margin, it’s it’s worthless. And, increasingly, Americans and Europeans will happily confess that place of birth was nothing more than a cosmic accident, not a demand on loyalty and oligation. Indeed, the American system from the end of World War II on is also predicated on a hostile rejection of the past and a contempt for Tradition (unless it’s monetizable).
I wrote about the American attitude here; Tradition is the province of Ghost Dancers and thus disposable. Now back to “where are they buried.” My map, like that of most Southerners, displays landings in Virginia, the Carolinas and Philadelphia; migrations through the frontiers of the Upper South and westward, with clusters in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and East Texas. And, after Lincoln pronounced Let There Be (the) Light (of equality) (Jon Meacham) by “refounding America” (Garry Wills), the Texas panhandle, where there were fewer U.S. troops and Union Leaguers. They rest in cemeteries in country churches, or family cemeteries on the grounds of old plantations.
I’ve another map, too: the towns in which the men enlisted for service in the Confederate armies. The names of the regiments are named, too: 16th Georgia, 40th Georgia; 8th Alabama, 33rd Alabama; 10th Mississippi 17th Mississippi; 5th Louisiana; Crescent City Guards; 5th Texas; 10th Texas; Waul’s Texas Legion (among others). The routes of the armies through Virginia, Tennessee and Mississippi. Where they stood against the first American effort at “regime change” and where they fell against the Americans: Malvern Hill, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Richmond. Perryville, Murfreesboro, Chickamauga, Adairsville, Franklin. Champion Hill, Vicksburg.
Those were things we knew back then. And not just obsessed autists like myself: almost everybody because it was bad form and fucking white trash if you could not name at least one ancestor who followed Marse Robert or sweated in the Vicksburg trenches or cut Sherman’s rabble to shreds on Missionary Ridge. At least that was the case where I grew up: a small town, pop. 3573, in the rural South, somewhere north of the Black Belt but south of the Cumberland (and Cumerlands), a region where a spur of the Appalachians reaches into a river valley amid an arc of the longleaf and loblolly piney-woods that stretch from Georgia through East Texas. My high school generally graduated eighty or ninety per annum. Here are some representative names from a high school yearbook, the class that graduated before mine:
Abney, Ambrose, Anglin, Armstrong, Bowlin, Bickford, Boggs, Cameron, Carter, Chestnut, Daly, Davis, Davies, Dollins, Farley, Floyd, Gabbard, Gentry, Greathouse, Griffin, Hazelwood, Jones, Lloyd, McCollum, McIntosh, McQuerry, Montgomery, Neeley, Osborne, Pennington, Percival, Seals, Skidmore.
Anything strike you about this little bill of lading from the fabled “before” times? This antediluvian nightmare of oppression, bigotry, racism, insensitivity, fascist patriarchs forcing women to wear funny Handsmaids’ Tale hoods, racist bigots, bigoted racist Klansman goose-stepping in 6/8 time garbed in Molly Hatchett and AC/DC concert Ts? Poke around Substack and you will discover an absurdity of so-called nostalgia for this diverseless nightmare: no Internet, smart phones or social media, just kids doing shit (once chores were done) unsupervised until the declining sun gilds the green fields in antique gold and twilight rises from the land itself, fireflies twinkling as the gentle night descended. Sure, it looks like Norman Rockwell figures in landscape by Constable. But take heart! For the sun indeed sets over all those drearily un-diverse, anti-vibrant and boring white-bread mayonnaise cracker towns and their racist mouth-breathing residents.
Because backward. How backward? The biggest event of my teen years was when McDonald’s opened an outlet by the interstate. Immediately it became the town’s most prestigious employer. Varsity and junior-varsity cheerleaders competed for the coveted cash register and drive-by booth positions. On Fridays the thing to do was cruise the parking lot, sometimes with a six-pack from the bootlegger a county over, sometimes with a bag of bright green sinsemilla – the mad scientists of the Ag department at the state university up the road had whipped up some strains that were rough on the throat but would melt your brain. The son of my father’s best friend had a patch on a ridge above his farm and he was always happy to share.
And, worst of all! Observe the absence of diversity signaled by those surnames. Germans are the largest ethnicity in the U.S., we’re told, but the sole representative of the Master Race back in my ‘ton were the sons of my dad’s best friend, who was an actual Nazi. No, not really, but he was German, his family from Rhine-Westphalia so close enough. His dad ran a brewery in South America, so they missed the war. His son (the one with the weed) bore the unironically Wagnerian name of Otto Wolfgang. There was one black family at my high school. Only one? Because we’d chased the others out with lynchings and cross-burnings? Right, Dudley? No, but we did elect the daughter (a year ahead of me) class president; one son was a member of my friends’ group; his younger brother joined the Marines. I don’t recall our lynching them, not even once. There was an Italian family with a son who played briefly for the Montgomery Biscuits. A Lithuanian family with an ethereally beautiful daughter; she and I philosophized with the assistance of the above-referenced sinsemilla now and again. One year two brothers from Wisconsin enrolled. One played the trumpet; the other used to lug around John Coltrane and Miles Davis vinyl and discourse loudly on their superiority to Zeppelin and Skynyrd. One day in art class I dropped Coltrane’s Living Space on the record player. Whatcha think, man? I asked him with faux eagerness. Turn that atonal shit off, he screeched. Fucking redneck jam, put on some real music!
That damaged his credibility somewhat. This was, though, the early eighties, so during the reign of the High King of Boomerstan Ronaldus Magnus, former California governor Reagan, of course, was informed by the libertarian musings of Milton Friedman and supported by the likes of New York congressman Jack Kemp, who was big on the “magic dirt” theory. Public TV was already pushing the Spanish-language shows; something called Via Allegre came on right after Sesame Street and most of us had no idea why. Was it then that National Review began hosannaing Hispanics for their “natural conservatism,” all the “family values” crap? Or was that during one of the Bushes? I don’t recall precisely; and it may have been a period of transition from Professor Dud’s “melting pot” to the “great mosaic” of all cultures being awesome-o but the local one: all landmarks on the highway to ethnicity-as-an-assault-weapon levelled at, well, us. This was the American Story:
The Mayflower was Cruelly Oppressed by the British Crown, so fled to the New World where it made friends with Squanto and became a City on the Hill, Conceieved in Liberty, the First of its Kind, and Where You And Me Are Free to Be You and Me:
Anyone remember Free to Be You and Me? Marlo Thomas? My friend Phil’s parents divorced, and the counselor prescribed the vinyl as something of a balm in Gilead, as it were (the self-esteem movement had yet to reach our town, so we couldn’t make out the point of it all, other than it was weird). Marlo was married to Phil Donahue. Who remembers Phil Donohue? What the hell happened to him?
Anyway, Hating us for our Freedoms, the English Crown dialed up the Cruel Oppression. Paul Revere galloped to Concord and warned Crispus Attucks, who rang the Liberty Bell (that’s how it got the crack) and rallied the Minutemen at the Old North Church where the Patriots! then defeated Cornwallis at Valley Forge with the help of Lafayette by throwing Tea into the Harbor. The French were so amazed at the power of Revolution! That they were inspired to do one of their own (no mention of M Guilliton’s charming mechanism, needless to say).
The War Between the States was addressed in a few brisk paragraphs: there was a sinister “Slave Power” (a term created by the more hysterical abolitionists of Boston) which would not allow the United States to be Free to Be et cetera until the humble Railsplitter from Illinois who educated himself by reading the Scripture and Coke on Blackwood (or Blackwood on Coke?) by firelight and mirablu dictu! discovered the secret equality messages hidden in the Constitution and thus the “Union” was “saved.” Or “defended.” Depends where you look. The Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn features a sort of triumphal arch dedicated to the “defenders ot the Union.”
Oh? Do tell. Defended from who/what? Anyway, said arch features bas-reliefs of the Railsplitter and bestie Humble Man from Galena, Illinois. Buried in Grant’s Tomb, this Saviour of the Last, Best Hope et cetera is presented as an exemplar of the New Nation Conceived in Liberty. That’s because Grant, a slob and far less talented than his fluffers would have you believe, showed up to accept the surrender of General Robert E Lee in the equivalent of sweats and flats from Wal-Mart:
And then, only then, could the Free to Be You and Me Nation release its energies and become the Beacon of Liberty for those Huddled Masses Yearning to Breathe Free, the veritable Lamp Beside the Golden Door. Our textbooks featured sepia photos of Ellis Island and the queues “Italians, Jews, Poles and Slavs” on the verge of becoming Americans. We were assigned to write a three-page essay about the contributions of one such group to the Greatness of America.
It wasn’t done back then, but these days, the Yoof are encouraged to describe how the New Americans signed up for Mr Lincoln’s War. Like these:
U.S.-born or not, they were fighting for the survival of the country they called home.”
“Fighting for survival” of the poor Republic, eh? Bullshit. These Huddled Masses were no more than mercenaries who in exchange for “citizenship” plundered, burning, looting, killing and conquest of the country that we, the Southern people, call home.
Like this guy: General John B. Turchin. I am an ardent Russophile, but here I make an exception.
Born Ivan Vasilevich Turchaninov and a one-time colonel of military intelligence in the Imperial Russian Army. The Guards, no less: the ones that so impressed Bonaparte. He had a yearning to Be All He Could Be so immigrated to the Golden Shore in 1853, farmed on Long Island, worked for the railroad in Chicago and signed on for Abe’s crusade in 1861. He was placed in command of the 19h Illinois Regiment: “At Camp Long, he drilled the troops to the limit, to make the Regiment as effective as possible for service. He was finally successful in making the Nineteenth Illinois one of the finest drilled regiments in the Western armies.”
That’s Wikipedia. Another New American success story, right? What Wikipedia fails to mention is the Sack of Athens. It happened in Alabama; Turchin was by then a brigadier general, commanding the Eighth Brigade of the U.S. Third Division under General Ormsby Mitchell. The Eighth Brigade was composed of the 19th and 24th Illinois, 18th Ohio and the 37th Indiana.
It was April of 1862. Following Shiloh, the Americans pushed into north Alabama. Turchin’s brigade was posted near the railroad junction of Athens, which ironically enough had been Unionist in sentiment. In May of that year, Colonel J.S. Scott of the first Louisiana Cavalry, with 60 Confeerate troopers, routed the 18thOhio. Mitchell ordered Turchin to retake the town:
"I shut my eyes for two hours." The angry and tired soldiers required no further clarification, and they proceeded to sack the town. Shop windows were shattered, and in short order jewelry stores, druggists, and dry goods stores were relieved of their wares. With enthusiasm the troops then turned to the private homes of Athens. Bureau drawers were pulled to the floor and trunks were pried open with bayonets and rifled in the quest for valuables. Some men feverishly pocketed silver utensils, gold watches, and jewelry. Others simply sought the tobacco, sugar, or molasses that would improve their rations. Most — even officers — seemed to have delighted in insulting the men and women of the town. Although physical violence was kept to a minimum, troops firing their guns into one home unknowingly caused a pregnant women to suffer a miscarriage, resulting in both the mother's and fetus's death. "Indecent and beastly propositions" were made to many of the women, and at least one "servant girl" was raped. When night came, the soldiers appropriated private homes and completed their despoilment by chopping roasts on pianos and cutting bacon on rugs before retiring. "Men who had been sleeping in th mud," one veteran recalled, "laid fine broadcloth on the ground that night and slept on it."
Without sympathy for Turchin and his men was Major General Don Carlos Buell, who labeled the incident an "undisputed atrocity" and ordered a court-martial to examine charges against Turchin and his officers. Brigadier General and future U.S. president James A. Garfield, who was ordered to preside over the trial, initially believed that Turchin's men had "committed the most shameful outrages.”
Turchin was court-martialed an, amazingly, found guilty. It was noted that the 24th Illinois was primarily German. Another immigrant success story! Found guilty of dereliction of duty, Turchin was pardoned by Abe after Mrs Turchin sobbed on the Railsplitter’s breast.
I recently happened across an essay that claimed to define and speak for “Heritage Americans.” It was somewhat dissatisfying. It struck me as something of an AI summary (or a dreadful simulacra of one) in all likelihood “trained” by the wretched textbooks of my youth. Alas, I may not have commented in the most constructive manner; I can’t find the essay now, so perhaps the author blocked me.
“Heritage American” implies the existence of a single, unified “American” culture. Well, there ain’t one – or not one that any sane or decent person would claim. Disney? Porn? Rap? Contemporary country? Credit-default swaps? But “Heritage American” purports to describe a people. And as Pat Buchanan has reminded us, a people is born of language, faith, culture and history – birth, blood and soil, eeek! – and not the bullshit ideological abstractions that the Americans claim as their sole possession. If immigrants like Turchin, and those who took part in the invasion and conquest and plunder of the South are “heritage Americans,” then I return my ticket.
Because we are not and have never been American. The Southern people have always been and remain distinct, peculiar. We are sailed from different shores than the New Englanders. And we sailed at different times. Our people came “unenlightenend” – which is to say, untained by the arrogance of the Enlightenment, and the presumptuous self-righteousness of the Yankee Puritans. We are the only people in North America that constitutes an actual people, folk, kin.
I wrote about English origins here. But there is more: beyond the West of England – itself a liminal space between the Anglo-Saxons and Normans and the old inhabitants of the Isles. The old kingdoms that came to be the shires of Devon and Cornwall, Wales and Scotland, Ulster and Ireland, forever defiant, forever unbowed and the nursery of the finest fighting men the world has ever seen.
“Southern people,” the great historian Frank Owsley wrote in Plain Folk of the Old South, “were a genuine folk long before the Civil War. Even the Southern aristocracy were folkish in their manners and customs and shared to a marked degree in their sense of solidarity.”
And more importantly:
“The closely knit family with its ramified and widening kinship ties was a folk characteristic which the Southerners possessed to a degree second only to the Highland Scots of an earlier time.”
Where are your people buried?
Here, in this land. You are welcome to your abstractions. Our nation was purchased with the one currency that matters: blood. And we paid it defending our land against Americans like John B. Turbin and all those other immigrants fightin for the survival of a land of which they knew nothing and that existed only because of us.
America!
More in parts two and three. I leave you with a monument of our people: a heritage Southerner, if you will, and one of the men that made us.
Border Reiver. Galashiels War Memorial, Scotland.
Enoch Cade/Vicksburg, Mississippi (occupied)
[1] Brooks Brothers, like any number of retailers, went bankrupt during the Coof. I worked on it a bit during my Wall Street days. Brooks make uniforms for the Union Army and was notorious for creating them from rags which dissolved after one decent rainstorm. Lincoln was inaugurated in Brooks, and wore Brooks that night at the theater. It’s emerged from bankruptcy and is run by a gay Chinese guy. Word is it’s doing well.