Joe Klein Explains How the History of Four Centuries Ago is Still Shaped


Culture is shapeless; is not immutable. Somehow, frontier grandchildren accepted the polio vaccine in the 1950s. Somehow, the Puritan state of Massachusetts was opposed to Prohibition – it was ruled by a generation of Irish Catholic politicians (but “Happy Hour” was banned in 1983 during a series of drunken car crashes). Of the Scots-Irish, Fischer writes: The southern highlands were “intensely resistant to change and suspicious of ‘foreigners’. … at the beginning of the 20th century, they would become intensely negrophobic and antisemitic.”

But how to prove such a claim? The only way is through meticulous accumulation of details. Over nearly a thousand pages, Fischer describes 22 different behavioral patterns, or “folk traditions,” for each of the four cultures, from dressing to cooking, marriage to child-rearing, governance and criminal justice. These result in four different definitions of freedom. Freedom, he writes, has “never been a single idea, but a series of different and even contrasting traditions in creative tension with one another.”

Here’s the crux of the book: Puritan, Cavalier, Quaker, and Scots-Irish concepts of freedom were radically different, but each provided a basic type of American idea. Puritans practiced “an orderly freedom” by the state’s dispensing of liberties: Fishing licenses allowed freedom to fish. It was a concept that would have seemed ludicrous in the mountainous region of the South and could have predicted our current struggle for gun control. The Puritan order also envisioned two of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms: The state provided “freedom from want” and “freedom from fear”—that is, freedom provided by government regulations.

The Scots-Irish were the opposite: their conception of “natural freedom” was deeply libertarian. You moved to the country to do what you wanted – within the values ​​of border culture, of course. “Natural freedom was not a mutual idea. Fischer did not recognize the right to dissent or disagreement,” he writes. Scots-Irish leaders were charismatic—Andrew Jackson was the prime example—and their religion was evangelical, an aristocratic governor of South Carolina sniffed at for “illiterate sentimentality.” Honor was valor, a physical trait (among Puritans and Quakers, honor was spiritual). The American military tradition and disproportionate number of soldiers arose from descendants of Scots-Irish warriors in the Appalachian highlands.

Virginia’s definition of freedom was complex, contradictory, and remains problematic. It was hierarchical, the freedom to be unequal. “I am an aristocrat,” said John Randolph of Roanoke. “I love freedom; I hate equality.” Freedom was defined by what it is not. It wasn’t slavery. It was freedom to enslave. It was a freedom given to the plantation masters to indulge, gamble, and debauchery. Fischer, quoting Samuel Johnson, “How come we hear the loudest cries for freedom among black drivers?” Still, it was Virginia aristocrats Thomas Jefferson and James Madison who drafted our founding papers. Over time, this plutocratic libertarianism found natural allies, though strange friends, in the highly egalitarian Scots-Irish hill country people. Neither wanted to be “ruled” by a strong central government. Look at the Covid maps: The regional alliance continues to this day.



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