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Before it became that fabled “City upon a Hill,” America was in the eyes of sixteenth-century adventurers a foul, weedy wilderness—a “sinke hole” suited to ill-bred commoners.
Instead, we have the Pilgrims (a people who are celebrated at Thanksgiving, a holiday that did not exist until the Civil War), who came ashore at Plymouth Rock (a place only designated as such in the late eighteenth century).
At the opening of the century of settlement, English philosopher Francis Bacon noted in 1605 that wives were for “generation, fruit, and comfort.” To compare a woman’s body to arable land that produced fruit made perfect sense to his readers.
North Carolina’s physical terrain was crucial in shaping the character of its people. Along the boundary between Virginia and Carolina was a large and forbidding wetland known as the Dismal Swamp.
Unique among the American settlements, Georgia was not motivated by a desire for profit. Receiving its charter in 1732, the southernmost colony was the last to be established prior to the American Revolution. Its purpose was twofold: to carve out a middle ground between the extremes of wealth that took hold in the Carolinas, and to serve as a barrier against the Spanish in Florida. As such, it became the site of an unusual experiment.
Jefferson’s proposal to lift up the bottom ranks, granting men without any land of their own fifty acres and the vote, was dropped from the final version of the constitution.12
Jackson’s aggressive style, his frequent resorting to duels and street fights, his angry acts of personal and political retaliation seemed to fit what one Frenchman with Jacksonian sympathies described as the westerner’s “rude instinct of masculine liberty.”
The cracker’s survivalist ethos invariably trumped legal niceties or polite decorum.
Like the cracker fighter who might bite, kick, and lash out indiscriminately, and hide a weapon under his coat, Jackson was seen as thoroughly ruthless—the antithesis of that studied republican gentility meant to define a sober statesman.52
For Helper, economies dependent on one source of wealth created extreme class conditions. California mining was worshipped in the same way that cotton and slavery had become the false deities of the South.
“Homo genus without the sapien.”
This was the world of W. E. B. Du Bois. This was also the world of Theodore Roosevelt. The two men agreed on very little—and obviously not on evolutionary theory or the science of eugenics, to which Roosevelt was a complete convert. Certainly Du Bois found no comfort in the president’s militarism or his glorification of the white settler’s savagery in the Old West. But they were in total agreement on one thing: the menace of redneck politics.
Roosevelt also ruffled the feathers of the proud white women of the South when he had dared to class Jefferson Davis (the Confederate president) with Benedict Arnold.
The poor are not dull or slow-witted, he insists; they have merely internalized a kind of “anesthesia,” which numbs them against the “shame and insult of discomforts, insecurities, and inferiorities.”
“Hillbilly Demosthenes.”
Lyndon Johnson was aware of every detail as he went about fashioning his public image. The hat he wore was not a ten-gallon cowboy, but a modified five-gallon version with a narrower brim. This was LBJ: a modified, modernized southerner.
A certain ambiguity remained. Redneck, cracker, and hillbilly were simultaneously presented as an ethnic identity, a racial epithet, and a workingman’s badge of honor.
When you turn an election into a three-ring circus, there’s always a chance that the dancing bear will win.
