American Nations

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.²

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.)

As blacks challenged the caste system, many in the Dixie bloc pledged “massive resistance.” The extreme steps they took to defend their “way of life” laid bare the inhuman, despotic nature of the region’s cherished practices. Arkansas governor Orval Faubus called out bayonet-bearing National Guardsmen to prevent nine black students from starting class at Little Rock’s Central High School, an act that forced President Dwight D. Eisenhower to deploy the 101st Airborne Division and federalize the entire Arkansas Guard. As school integration proceeded across the Deep South, angry white mobs jeered, taunted, and threatened not only frightened black schoolchildren but also white children and parents who continued to use the nominally integrated public schools. Communities across the Dixie bloc responded by shutting down their entire public school systems, slashing property taxes, and helping set up whites-only private academies in their place. Prince Edward County, Virginia (in Tidewater), went without public schools for years—depriving blacks and poor whites of any education whatsoever—until the Supreme Court ruled that this, too, was unconstitutional. When the pastor of a white Methodist church in Jackson, Mississippi, tried to admit black worshippers, his own deacons formed a “color guard” to turn any away at the door. Klansmen murdered civil rights workers of both races, while city authorities turned fire hoses, attack dogs, and mounted horsemen on peaceful marchers. But faced with a choice between integrated schools or no schools at all, between ending Jim Crow and accepting mob rule, between dropping some aspects of Southern “heritage” and being forced to take troubling measures to defend it, large numbers of whites in the region chose to accept at least token changes.³

But the levels of acceptance were uneven across the Dixie bloc, particularly after President Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act into law. The legislation, which denied federal funds to segregated schools and forced most businesses to integrate, had been opposed by virtually every member of Congress from the Deep South, Tidewater, or Appalachia—even in states that had remained in the Union during the Civil War (West Virginia senator and former Klansman Robert Byrd led the three-month filibuster against it). In the aftermath, journalists from across the federation reported that integration went smoothest in Appalachia and Tidewater, and encountered the greatest resistance in the rural Deep South, especially in Mississippi, Alabama, and southwestern Georgia. Thereafter, the most fiery defenders of segregation on the national stage were Deep Southerners: Georgia governor Lester Maddox (who had declared himself enslaved by the changes), South Carolina governor and senator Strom Thurmond (an arch-segregationist candidate for president who, at age twenty-two, had fathered a child with his family’s sixteen-year-old black maid), and Alabama governor and four-time presidential candidate George Wallace (who had tossed a “gauntlet before the feet of tyranny” to pledge “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”). Right into the twenty-first century, Deep Southerners clashed over the display of the Confederate flag and, by extension, the meaning of their heritage. Not surprisingly, the sharpest conflict on this issue has taken place in South Carolina, whose political leaders insist on flying it over the state capitol.⁴

While it forced key social changes, the Second Reconstruction did not alter the Dixie bloc’s Private Protestant values. Many whites in Appalachia, Tidewater, and the Deep South became further entrenched in a Southern evangelical worldview that resisted social reform or the lifting of cultural taboos, and increasingly sought to break down the walls between church and state so as to impose their values and moral code on everyone else. This counterattack was quiet at first, as Southern evangelicals and fundamentalists concentrated on building the institutional machinery necessary to take on their northern opponents on the national stage. Many of the private academies whites set up to avoid attending school with blacks were transformed into Christian academies providing “faith-based” education, with an emphasis on conservative values, creationism, and obedience to authority. (The financial burdens these schools place on less-affluent whites prompted evangelical leaders to embrace taxpayer support of these institutions via “school vouchers.”) Dixie preachers took particular advantage of television, creating powerful media empires such as Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, and Jerry Falwell’s PTL Club. They built a network of fundamentalist universities like Robertson’s Regent University (which seeks to train “God’s representatives on the face of the Earth” until the Second Coming), Falwell’s Liberty University (which teaches that dinosaur fossils are 4,000 years old), and Bob Jones University (which didn’t admit black students until 1971 and banned interracial dating and marriage until 2000). By the early 1990s, Dixie-bloc religious figures were ready to do battle against the secular, sexually liberated, science-based, “big government” ethos the northern nations had foisted on the federation.⁵

Combining the utopia-seeking moral impulses of secularized Puritanism, the intellectual freedom of New Netherland, and the tolerant pacifism of the Midlands, the social movement sought to remake and improve the world by breaking down the very sorts of traditional institutions and social taboos Dixie whites were fighting to protect. The Port Huron Statement, a 1962 manifesto considered the founding document of this “youth movement,” was an amalgam of core Yankee and Midlander values. It called for universal disarmament, an end to the “permanent war economy,” and the cultivation of each person’s “infinitely precious and . . . unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom, and love”—statements that William Penn’s early settlers would undoubtedly have endorsed. It demanded an end to “power rooted in possession, privilege, or circumstance” and the establishment of a “participatory democracy” with decisions “carried on by public groupings”—talking points that could have been drafted by the early Puritans. The public sector was seen as a force for good, so long as citizens reclaimed it from the tyranny of corporate and military power. This movement was far removed from the values of the Deep South and Tidewater, and the gap would only grow after the Vietnam War and the 1968 assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy radicalized its adherents.⁶

While inspired by the civil rights struggle, the cultural revolution of the 1960s barely touched the Dixie bloc. Its major events, leaders, and lasting results were confined almost entirely to the four northern nations: Yankeedom, New Netherland, the Midlands, and the Left Coast. The hippie movement emerged from the Beats’ old lairs in the San Francisco Bay Area and in Manhattan. The youth movement’s principal organization, Students for a Democratic Society, was founded in Yankee Michigan and had its strongest following at campuses in Yankeedom (Harvard, Cornell, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Oberlin, Binghamton), the Left Coast (Berkeley, Stanford, Reed), New Netherland (Columbia, City University of New York), and the Midlands (Swarthmore, Antioch, Earlham). The Free Speech Movement (1964) and the Summer of Love (1967) were both centered in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Woodstock Festival (1969) and the Kent State massacre (1970) both occurred in Yankeedom. The Stonewall Riots (1969)—a watershed event in the gay rights movement—took place in Greenwich Village, while San Francisco’s Castro district emerged as the western capital of gay culture. Later, more radical groups also sprang from these same nations, like the Black Panthers (founded in Oakland) and all three collectives of the Weather Underground. Earth Day, which launched the modern environmental movement, was conceived by a Wisconsin senator, promoted in a speech in Seattle, and spearheaded by students at the University of Pennsylvania.⁷

Since the United States’ incorporation of much of El Norte, norteños had been treated as second-class citizens, especially in south Texas and southern California, where most “Anglos” were from the Deep South or Greater Appalachia. Local governments and school boards were run entirely by Anglos, even in areas with a 60-to-90-percent Hispanic population. Crystal City—a 95 percent norteño town in south Texas—was typical: right up to the early 1960s the Anglo minority owned virtually all the land and businesses and ran the town council and school board, ensuring even that norteño teens remained a minority on the cheerleading squad. But in the 1960s, young norteños began to assert their rights, organizing voter registration drives and citizens’ movements. In Crystal City they shocked the Anglo minority by quietly mobilizing voters to take over the city council (1963) and brazenly seizing control of a majority of school board seats (1969), enabling them to appoint a norteño superintendent and plenty of teachers and cheerleaders. In San Antonio, norteño activists worked with Roman Catholic priests to mobilize voters to seize control of the city council in 1975. Yuma, Arizona, native César Chávez organized agricultural laborers and boycotts to improve labor conditions on farms in southern California and Texas. In Los Angeles, the militant Brown Berets arranged student walkouts, protests against police brutality, and even a short-lived occupation of Santa Catalina Island, which they proclaimed for Mexico. After the 1960s, norteños were no longer powerless residents of El Norte; from local school boards to representation in the U.S. Senate to the New Mexico governor’s mansion, they had begun running the region again.⁸

The Québécois’ “Quiet Revolution” of the 1960s was something of a misnomer. After a century of dominance by Anglo-Canadians and the Catholic hierarchy, the people of Québec elected a liberal reformer, Jean Lesage, to lead the province in 1960. Over the coming decade Lesage and his allies transformed Québec’s institutions along the lines of postwar metropolitan France, secularizing public education, founding a strong social welfare state, unionizing the public workforce, and nationalizing energy utilities into a powerful state conglomerate, Hydro-Québec. The people of New France, Lesage’s Liberal Party proclaimed, would now be Maîtres chez nous—“Masters in Our Own Home.” Pierre Vallières, founder of the radical terrorist group Front de libération du Québec (or FLQ), wrote a manifesto called White Niggers in America, which compared the Québécois liberation struggle to that of the blacks of the southern United States. But the FLQ did not embrace Reverend King’s nonviolent tactics. In 1969–70 they bombed the Montréal Stock Exchange (injuring twenty-seven) and the home of Montréal’s mayor, and kidnapped and murdered the province’s vice premier, prompting Ottawa to declare martial law in a successful bid to round up its ringleaders. Thereafter, voters put the separatist Parti Québécois into power, which immediately recognized aboriginal rights to self-determination, instituted French as the only state language in the province, and initiated unsuccessful referenda on independence in 1980 and 1995; the latter measure was defeated by only 0.4 percent of the vote. Today, the Québécois are definitely masters in their own home. The question for the future is whether they will accept keeping their home within the Canadian federation at all.⁹

The culture wars of the 1990s and 2000s were in essence a resumption of the sixties-era struggle, with a majority of people in the four northern nations generally supporting social change and an overwhelming majority of those in the Dixie bloc defending the traditional order. (Opinion in El Norte and the Far West varied, based on the issue at hand.) Northern alliance campaigns for civil liberties, sexual freedom, women’s rights, gay rights, and environmental protection all became divisive sectional issues, just as Dixie’s promotion of creationism, school prayer, abstinence-only sex education, abortion bans, and state’s rights did.

Take the environmental movement, for instance. The entire history of the movement prior to Earth Day took place in the four Public Protestant nations, where the spiritual emphasis was on bettering this world rather than preparing for the next. The Sierra Club, the continent’s first grass-roots environmental group, was founded in San Francisco in 1892 with substantial support from faculty at Stanford and Berkeley. George Bird Grinnell, a Yale-educated New Yorker, fought the mass slaughter of birds by recreational shooters through the foundation of the New York–based Audubon Society (1905). Another New Yorker, President Theodore Roosevelt, pioneered federal government involvement in environmental protection, founding the national forest, park, and wildlife refuge systems. Roosevelt’s Yankee cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, created the National Wildlife Federation in 1936. Aldo Leopold, the father of the science of wildlife management and founder of the Wilderness Society, was the Yale-educated son of German immigrants to the Midland Midwest and spent most of his career in Yankee Wisconsin. Environmental writer Rachel Carson (The Sea Around Us [1951], Silent Spring [1962]) was a Pennsylvania Midlander who analyzed ecosystems in Yankee Maine. Two of the prominent environmental groups that emerged from the sixties—the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Defense Fund—were based in New Netherland. Greenpeace took shape in the Left Coast city of Vancouver, the militant Sea Shepherd Conservation Society in coastal Washington State, and the Friends of the Earth in San Francisco, under the auspices of Berkeley native David Brower (who also founded the Earth Island Institute and the League of Conservation Voters). The father of the Appalachian Trail, Benton MacKaye, wasn’t from Appalachia at all but was rather a Harvard-trained native of Connecticut whose grandparents had been prominent Yankee abolitionists.¹⁰

Although comprising nearly half the territory of the contiguous United States, the Dixie bloc was conspicuously absent from the green movement until well after the sixties pushed it into world consciousness. Political leaders in El Norte and the Far West often shared Dixie’s skepticism about the need to protect natural resources. When, in 2009, the U.S. House narrowly passed a bill to cap and trade carbon emissions to address global warming, the measure received near-unanimous support in New Netherland, the Left Coast, and Yankeedom, including that of every congressman in New England; the Far West offered near-unanimous bipartisan opposition, joined by the overwhelming majority of Appalachian and Deep Southern lawmakers; Tidewater and the Midlands were divided.¹¹

Opposition to the 1972 Equal Rights Amendment was also regional, with all state governments controlled by Deep Southerners declining to ratify it, and those dominated by Appalachia opposing or rescinding ratification (with the exception of West Virginia). States dominated by Yankees, Midlanders, and Left Coasters all ratified the amendment, with the exception of Illinois (where majorities ratified it but never by the three-fifths majority required by the state’s constitution). Tidewater no longer dominated any single state, but the one state in which the culture remained strongest, Virginia, also opposed ratification. (The Far West was split.)

In 2010 opinion on gay marriage also fell along predictable national lines. Legislatures have passed laws permitting same-sex marriages in the three northern New England states. State courts have mandated same-sex marriages in three others: Yankee Connecticut and both Yankee/Midland Iowa and tri-national California. (Residents of the Far West and El Norte sections of California rebelled, overturning the court decision via a 2008 ballot measure, despite the opposition of voters in nearly every Left Coast county.) By contrast, every single Dixie bloc–controlled state had passed laws or constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage. On another issue, USA Today reported in 2006 that every state controlled by the Deep South could be expected to ban or greatly restrict abortion services if Roe v. Wade were to be overturned; every New England state, plus those comprising New Netherland and the Left Coast, were expected to protect women’s access.¹²

The following chapter will examine the issues of militarism and national defense, but in regard to corporate behavior, the two blocs were also divided. The northern sixties rebels regarded big business as an oppressive force that despoiled the Earth and dehumanized the individual. By contrast, the nations of the Dixie bloc have continued to promulgate policies that ensure they remain low-wage resource colonies controlled by a one-party political system dedicated to serving the interests of a wealthy elite. To keep wages low, all Dixie-bloc states passed laws making it difficult to organize unions—which their politicians sold as protecting the “right to work”—or to increase the minimum wage. Taxes are kept too low to adequately support public schools and other services. Urban planning and land-use zoning—commonplace among the four Northern allies—are shunned as a hindrance to business, even in major cities like Houston, which had hundreds of miles of unpaved, unlit streets as recently as the 1980s. From the gas fields of Louisiana to the industrial hog farms of North Carolina, environmental and workplace safety rules are notoriously lax.

These divergent approaches to economic development, tax policy, and social spending have only increased tensions between the cultural blocs. In the aftermath of the civil rights and sixties movements, the Dixie bloc has lured away most of the Yankee and Midland manufacturing sector by offering foreign and domestic corporations substantially lower wages, taxes, and regulations in a deunionized environment. The continent’s Yankee automotive industry was all but destroyed in the 1990s and 2000s in favor of foreign-owned factories in the Deep South and Greater Appalachia, just like the textile and forest products industries before it. Some observers fear that the “neo-Confederates” will force the other nations to follow their lead, turning the entire federation into a giant “low-wage export platform” for advanced, highly educated industrial societies in Western Europe and northeast Asia. Meanwhile, innovation and research has become increasingly concentrated in knowledge clusters, most of which lie in the nations that have emphasized education and rationalism. Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon all formed around Left Coast cities, just as the first “Silicon Valley” formed around Boston’s Route 128, also known as the Yankee Highway.¹³