Colin Woodard (41 page)

The struggle for women's suffrage was conceived and fought by reformers in Yankeedom and the two nations with the deepest attachment to liberty of conscience: New Netherland and the Midlands. The historic initial meeting of women's rights advocates was held in Yankee Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. It was followed two years later by the first National Women's Rights Convention, staged in Worcester, Massachusetts, and backed by a broad pantheon of male Yankee luminaries, from newspaperman Horace Mann and abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison to the writer Wendell Phillips and Unitarian philosopher William Henry Channing; it was no coincidence that every one of its next ten conventions was held in one of the three aforementioned nations. When the Nineteenth Amendment finally passed in 1919, state legislators representing these nations and the Left Coast quickly ratified it; those in the Dixie bloc did not. The women who led the long struggle were also from the three northeastern nations, including Susan B. Anthony (daughter of Massachusetts Quakers), Lucy Stone (Massachusetts-born, Oberlin-educated), Elizabeth Cady Stanton (descended from early Dutch settlers and born, raised, and educated in Yankee upstate New York), and Carrie Chapman Catt (born in Yankee Ripon, Wisconsin, educated in Midland Ames, Iowa).
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While the Dixie bloc fought to keep things as they were or return them to the way they used to be, Yankeedom and especially New Netherland and the Left Coast were becoming increasingly tolerant of unusual social experiments and countercultural movements. Appropriately enough, it was the old New Netherland hamlet of Groenwijck—its erratic country roads absorbed into the expanding city and renamed “Greenwich Village”—that became the federation's first and foremost bohemian district. From approximately 1910 to 1960, this enclave was a magnet for cultural revolutionaries of all sorts: anarchist philosophers, free-verse poets, Cubist painters, feminists, gays, Freudian thinkers, hard-drinking writers, free-love playwrights, and idiosyncratic musicians. Flaunting poverty and eccentricity, they shocked the middle classes, perplexed their Midland and Deep Southern parents, and, in the words of historian Ross Wetzsteon, created “a cult of carefree irresponsibility . . . in the service of transcendental ideas.” From that single square mile tucked inside the tolerant cocoon of New Netherland would spring much of what the religious conservatives of the Dixie bloc would later mobilize against: the gay rights movement, modern art, the beatniks and their hippie successors, left-wing intellectualism, and the antiwar movement. Like seventeenth-century Amsterdam, New Netherland provided a sanctuary for heretics and freethinkers from more rigid nations, consolidating its position as the continent's cultural capital. While bohemia would start moving to the Left Coast in the 1950s, it got its start in a Dutchfounded village.
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In the three northeastern nations, the desire to improve the world frequently took precedence over religious belief itself, especially if the church was standing in the way of progress. Ironically the Puritan mission to purify the world through good works had sown the seeds of its own undoing: over the course of 250 years many descendants of the New England divines came to believe the world couldn't achieve purity if an established church was suppressing dissent, because faith had no meaning if it was coerced. Much of the Yankee elite turned to Unitarianism, an offshoot of the New England church that embraced scientific inquiry and the pursuit of social justice. Under Unitarian president Charles Eliot, Harvard was secularized in the 1870s, while the Yankee-run American Secular Union fought to ban religion from public schools. Midlanders and New Netherlanders—whose societies were founded on religious and cultural pluralism—tended to support such efforts, knowing that if church and state were fused, dissenters would face discrimination. The mainline Public Protestant denominations based in these regions accommodated scientific discoveries about the age and formation of the Earth and the evolution of life by adopting an allegorical rather than a literal interpretation of Scripture. Still, in the early twentieth century, it was not at all uncommon in these nations for educated people to argue that churches should wither away altogether to make way for the triumph of scientific reason. It was a position that would prevail by the end of the century—but in northern Europe, not North America. Within the U.S. federation, strong secularists were destined for defeat by a Private Protestant counterattack of impressive strength, power, and longevity.
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Opposition to modernism, liberal theology, and inconvenient scientific discoveries occurred in pockets across the continent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but only in the Dixie bloc did it represent the dominant cultural position, backed by governments and defended from criticism by state power. In the cultural wars that have followed, the three southern nations have been the stronghold of biblical inerrancy; the elimination of barriers between church and state; teaching children religious rather than scientific explanations for the origins and nature of the universe; maintaining legal, political, and social restraints against homosexuality, civil rights, and interracial dating; and of preventing the secularization of society.

Christian fundamentalism appeared in North America in reaction to the liberal theologies that were becoming dominant in the northern nations. It took its name from
The Fundamentals
, a twelve-volume attack on liberal theology, evolution, atheism, socialism, Mormons, Catholics, Christian Scientists, and Jehovah's Witnesses written by Appalachian Baptist preacher A. C. Dixon. Fundamentalism's early organizers gathered around the World Christian Fundamentals Association, founded by another Baptist preacher, William Bell Riley, who was born in Appalachian Indiana, raised in Boone County, Kentucky, and exposed to Yankee heresy while the pastor of a Minnesota church. Inspired also by William Jennings Bryan—a Scots-Irish presidential candidate from the (very Appalachian) Egypt District of Illinois—fundamentalist-minded Private Protestants went to war against science and its corrosive theory of evolution.
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During the 1920s, anti-evolutionary activists afflicted the entire federation, but they found lasting success only in Appalachia and the Deep South. Legislators in Florida, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas passed laws making it illegal to teach evolution in schools. North Carolina's governor ordered the removal of all textbooks which “in any way intimate an origin of the human race other than that contained in the Bible.” Authorities in Louisiana and Texas (states controlled by Deep Southerners and Borderlanders) redacted all references to evolution from school texts. Dozens of Appalachian and Deep Southern university professors were dismissed for criticizing such measures, and many others refused to take a public position for fear of persecution. Newspapers supported the attack on science. “The professors at the state university may believe they are descended from apes and baboons,” Breathitt County, Kentucky's
Jackson News
editorialized, “but let it be known that the good people of Breathitt are pure Anglo-Saxon.” “Don't disappoint the people of Mississippi, Governor,” the Jackson
Clarion-Ledger
pleaded as the executive contemplated a veto of an anti-evolution bill. “Don't do something that may shake the faith of young people in the first book of the Bible.” Political candidates often put the suppression of evolution at the center of their campaigns, while a revived KKK bristled against Darwin's theory because it contradicted biblical arguments that God had created blacks as servile and inferior beings. Southern Baptists joined the crusade en masse. The movement reached its high-water mark at the infamous 1925 Scopes Trial, where Tennessee officials prosecuted a high school biology teacher for teaching evolution. The Tennessee Supreme Court found him guilty, but critical national media attention undermined fundamentalism's respectability.
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Thereafter, the Public Protestant majorities in Yankeedom, New Netherland, and the Midlands assumed the fire-and-brimstone crowd was ruined, their irrational beliefs exposed as superstition, their authoritarian tactics as violations of American values. But the fundamentalists spent the thirties and forties organizing themselves, building Bible fellowships, Christian colleges, and a network of gospel radio stations. Unnoticed by North America's opinion elite, their numbers grew through the 1950s, while membership in mainline Protestant churches declined. Secularism was in retreat as well, its champions fighting only to keep the state, not the people, free from religion. Behind the veneer of a prosperous and content postwar United States, a full-scale cultural war was quietly brewing. In the 1960s it would finally explode.
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CHAPTER 25

A
fter simmering for the better part of a century, North America's cultural Cold War broke into open conflict in the late 1950s and the 1960s.

Each coalition underwent an internal civil war in this period: in the Dixie bloc, African Americans rose up against segregation and the caste system, while the four nations of the Northern alliance faced a youth-led cultural uprising. Both of these destabilizing events started as homegrown phenomena led by disaffected people from within each bloc but soon drew intervention from outside their respective regions. In the first uprising—the civil rights movement—the northern nations' assistance proved decisive, as it marshaled federal power and troops to force whites in Tidewater, Appalachia, and especially the Deep South to dismantle their cherished racial caste system. In the second “uprising”—the sixties cultural revolution—Dixie-based political leaders intervened in the Northern alliance–based cultural shift by opposing the young revolutionaries from the Left Coast, New Netherland, and Yankeedom, whose agenda was diametrically opposed to everything the Deep South and Tidewater stood for. Weakened by revolution at home, Dixie bloc leaders were unable to stop the youth movement in the short term, but they have since spearheaded efforts to roll back much of what the rebellion accomplished. The interbloc resentments stemming from these twin uprisings widened the divide between the nations, poisoning efforts to find common ground and mutually acceptable solutions in early twenty-first-century America.

 

The civil rights movement has been called the “Second Reconstruction” because of the dramatic effect it had on Southern culture and because of the role of the Yankee- and Midlands-directed federal government in forcing change. Like the first Reconstruction, this remarkably pacifistic uprising
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by Deep Southern African Americans permanently altered certain aspects of Deep South and Tidewater culture, but it prompted white retrenchment on other issues in these nations and Greater Appalachia.

In 1955 the three nations of the Dixie bloc were still authoritarian states whose citizens—white and black—were required to uphold a rigid, all-pervasive apartheid system. Across the bloc adult blacks were required to refer to even teenage whites as “Mister,” “Miss,” or “Missus,” while whites were forbidden to address blacks of any age with these titles, using “boy,” “Auntie,” or “Uncle” instead. Blacks and whites were prohibited from dining, dating, worshipping, playing baseball, or attending school together. The caste system required that blacks and whites use separate drinking fountains, rest rooms, waiting rooms, and building entrances; that factories maintain separate production lines, with blacks unable to be promoted into “white” positions regardless of experience, merit, or seniority; and that theaters, lunch counters, restaurants, railroad companies, and public bus systems maintain separate seating by race. In Mississippi it was illegal to print, publish, or distribute “suggestions in favor of social equality or of intermarriage between whites and Negroes,” with perpetrators subject to up to six months in prison. Klansmen and other vigilante groups tortured and executed blacks who violated these rules, often with the public approval of elected officials, newspaper editors, preachers, and the region's leading families. White violators faced legal penalties and, worse, the social ostracism that resulted from having one's family branded “nigger lovers.” Dixie's white religious leaders, with few exceptions, either bestowed divine endorsement on this system or kept silent.
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African Americans in the Deep South led the movement, challenging apartheid policies across the region: the discrimination on Montgomery, Alabama's, public buses (1955–56); the ban on black students at Little Rock Central High School (1957), in Orleans Parish, Louisiana, elementary schools (1960), and at the universities of Georgia (1961) and Mississippi (1962); the denial of voting rights in Mississippi (1962); the segregation of businesses and suppression of the right of assembly in Birmingham, Alabama (1963); and, perhaps most poignantly, the bloody voting-rights protests in Selma, Alabama (1965). The majority of the movement's most famous figures were Deep Southerners, including the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. (from Atlanta), John Lewis (southern Alabama), James Meredith (central Mississippi), and Rosa Parks (Tuskegee, Alabama). They were backed by civil rights activists, white and black, from New Netherland (Robert Moses, slain activists Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner) and Yankeedom (Malcolm X). President John F. Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy—icons of Yankeedom—provided crucial support from the White House and a blueprint for the Appalachian Texan Lyndon B. Johnson to follow after the president's assassination.

Across the Dixie bloc white Southerners initially reacted to the movement with disbelief, having been conditioned to think that “our Negroes” were “happy” to be oppressed, patronized, and deprived of basic human and civil rights. Clearly their beloved blacks were being manipulated by what Deep Southern politicians called “outside agitators”—Yankees and New Netherlanders—who were often also believed to be communists. Consistent with the Deep Southern and Tidewater conception of
libertas
, white resisters rallied around the notion that the uprising was about taking away white people's “freedoms,” including the freedom to oppress others. When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregation was unconstitutional, Deep Southern legislators set up state antisubversion agencies charged with investigating and destroying efforts to “overthrow our form of government” and armed with wiretapping and subpoena powers. (Mississippi's State Sovereignty Commission declared one civil rights group—the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—to be subverting “Mississippi's way of life” simply for engaging in the entirely legal act of helping to register black voters.)