THE BATTLE LINES OF TODAY’S DEBATES OVER GUN CONTROL,
STAND-YOUR-GROUND LAWS, AND OTHER VIOLENCE-RELATED ISSUES WERE DRAWN
CENTURIES AGO BY AMERICA’S EARLY SETTLERS
BY COLIN WOODARD, A91
Last December, when Adam Lanza stormed into the Sandy Hook Elementary
School in Newtown, Connecticut, with a rifle and killed twenty children
and six adult staff members, the United States found itself immersed in
debates about gun control. Another flash point occurred this July, when
George Zimmerman, who saw himself as a guardian of his community, was
exonerated in the killing of an unarmed black teenager, Trayvon Martin,
in Florida. That time, talk turned to stand-your-ground laws and the
proper use of deadly force. The gun debate was refreshed in September by
the shooting deaths of twelve people at the Washington Navy Yard,
apparently at the hands of an IT contractor who was mentally ill.
Such episodes remind Americans that our country as a whole is marked
by staggering levels of deadly violence. Our death rate from assault is
many times higher than that of highly urbanized countries like the
Netherlands or Germany, sparsely populated nations with plenty of
forests and game hunters like Canada, Sweden, Finland, or New Zealand,
and large, populous ones like the United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan.
State-sponsored violence, too—in the form of capital punishment—sets our
country apart. Last year we executed more than ten times as many
prisoners as other advanced industrialized nations combined—not
surprising given that Japan is the only other such country that allows
the practice. Our violent streak has become almost a part of our
national identity.
What’s less well appreciated is how much the incidence of violence,
like so many salient issues in American life, varies by region. Beyond a
vague awareness that supporters of violent retaliation and easy access
to guns are concentrated in the states of the former Confederacy and, to
a lesser extent, the western interior, most people cannot tell you much
about regional differences on such matters. Our conventional way of
defining regions—dividing the country along state boundaries into a
Northeast, Midwest, Southeast, Southwest, and Northwest—masks the
cultural lines along which attitudes toward violence fall. These lines
don’t respect state boundaries. To understand violence or practically
any other divisive issue, you need to understand historical settlement
patterns and the lasting cultural fissures they established.
The original North American colonies were settled by people from
distinct regions of the British Isles—and from France, the Netherlands,
and Spain—each with its own religious, political, and ethnographic
traits. For generations, these Euro-American cultures developed in
isolation from one another, consolidating their cherished religious and
political principles and fundamental values, and expanding across the
eastern half of the continent in nearly exclusive settlement bands.
Throughout the colonial period and the Early Republic, they saw
themselves as competitors—for land, capital, and other settlers—and even
as enemies, taking opposing sides in the American Revolution, the War
of 1812, and the Civil War.
There’s never been an America, but rather several Americas—each a
distinct nation. There are eleven nations today. Each looks at violence,
as well as everything else, in its own way.
The precise delineation of the eleven nations—which I have explored at length in my latest book,
American Nations—is
original to me, but I’m certainly not the first person to observe that
such national divisions exist. Kevin Phillips, a Republican Party
campaign strategist, recognized the boundaries and values of several of
these nations in 1969 and used them to correctly prophesy two decades of
American political development in his politico cult classic
The Emerging Republican Majority. Joel Garreau, a
Washington Post editor, argued that our continent was divided into rival power blocs in
The Nine Nations of North America,
though his ahistorical approach undermined the identification of the
nations. The Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David Hackett Fischer
detailed the origins and early evolution of four of these nations in his
magisterial
Albion’s Seed and later added New France. Russell Shorto described the salient characteristics of New Netherland in
The Island at the Center of the World. And the list goes on.
The borders of my eleven American nations are reflected in many
different types of maps—including maps showing the distribution of
linguistic dialects, the spread of cultural artifacts, the prevalence of
different religious denominations, and the county-by-county breakdown
of voting in virtually every hotly contested presidential race in our
history. Our continent’s famed mobility has been reinforcing, not
dissolving, regional differences, as people increasingly sort themselves
into like-minded communities, a phenomenon analyzed by Bill Bishop and
Robert Cushing in
The Big Sort (2008).
Even waves of immigrants
did not fundamentally alter these nations, because the children and
grandchildren of immigrants assimilated into whichever culture
surrounded them.
Before I describe the nations, I should underscore that my
observations refer to the dominant culture, not the individual
inhabitants, of each region. In every town, city, and state you’ll
likely find a full range of political opinions and social preferences.
Even in the reddest of red counties and bluest of blue ones, twenty to
forty percent of voters cast ballots for the “wrong” team. It isn’t that
residents of one or another nation all think the same, but rather that
they are all embedded within a cultural framework of deep-seated
preferences and attitudes—each of which a person may like or hate, but
has to deal with nonetheless. Because of slavery, the African American
experience has been different from that of other settlers and
immigrants, but it too has varied by nation, as black people confronted
the dominant cultural and institutional norms of each.
The nations are constituted as follows:
YANKEEDOM. Founded on the shores of Massachusetts
Bay by radical Calvinists as a new Zion, Yankeedom has, since the
outset, put great emphasis on perfecting earthly civilization through
social engineering, denial of self for the common good, and assimilation
of outsiders. It has prized education, intellectual achievement,
communal empowerment, and broad citizen participation in politics and
government, the latter seen as the public’s shield against the
machinations of grasping aristocrats and other would-be tyrants. Since
the early Puritans, it has been more comfortable with government
regulation and public-sector social projects than many of the other
nations, who regard the Yankee utopian streak with trepidation.
NEW NETHERLAND. Established by the Dutch at a time
when the Netherlands was the most sophisticated society in the Western
world, New Netherland has always been a global commercial
culture—materialistic, with a profound tolerance for ethnic and
religious diversity and an unflinching commitment to the freedom of
inquiry and conscience. Like seventeenth-century Amsterdam, it emerged
as a center of publishing, trade, and finance, a magnet for immigrants,
and a refuge for those persecuted by other regional cultures, from
Sephardim in the seventeenth century to gays, feminists, and bohemians
in the early twentieth. Unconcerned with great moral questions, it
nonetheless has found itself in alliance with Yankeedom to defend public
institutions and reject evangelical prescriptions for individual
behavior.
THE MIDLANDS. America’s great swing region was
founded by English Quakers, who believed in humans’ inherent goodness
and welcomed people of many nations and creeds to their utopian colonies
like Pennsylvania on the shores of Delaware Bay. Pluralistic and
organized around the middle class, the Midlands spawned the culture of
Middle America and the Heartland, where ethnic and ideological purity
have never been a priority, government has been seen as an unwelcome
intrusion, and political opinion has been moderate. An ethnic mosaic
from the start—it had a German, rather than British, majority at the
time of the Revolution—it shares the Yankee belief that society should
be organized to benefit ordinary people, though it rejects top-down
government intervention.
TIDEWATER. Built by the younger sons of southern
English gentry in the Chesapeake country and neighboring sections of
Delaware and North Carolina, Tidewater was meant to reproduce the
semifeudal society of the countryside they’d left behind. Standing in
for the peasantry were indentured servants and, later, slaves. Tidewater
places a high value on respect for authority and tradition, and very
little on equality or public participation in politics. It was the most
powerful of the American nations in the eighteenth century, but today it
is in decline, partly because it was cut off from westward expansion by
its boisterous Appalachian neighbors and, more recently, because it has
been eaten away by the expanding federal halos around D.C. and Norfolk.
GREATER APPALACHIA. Founded in the early eighteenth
century by wave upon wave of settlers from the war-ravaged borderlands
of Northern Ireland, northern England, and the Scottish lowlands,
Appalachia has been lampooned by writers and screenwriters as the home
of hillbillies and rednecks. It transplanted a culture formed in a state
of near constant danger and upheaval, characterized by a warrior ethic
and a commitment to personal sovereignty and individual liberty.
Intensely suspicious of lowland aristocrats and Yankee social engineers
alike, Greater Appalachia has shifted alliances depending on who
appeared to be the greatest threat to their freedom. It was with the
Union in the Civil War. Since Reconstruction, and especially since the
upheavals of the 1960's, it has joined with Deep South to counter federal
overrides of local preference.
DEEP SOUTH. Established by English slave lords from
Barbados, Deep South was meant as a West Indies–style slave society.
This nation offered a version of classical Republicanism modeled on the
slave states of the ancient world, where democracy was the privilege of
the few and enslavement the natural lot of the many. Its caste systems
smashed by outside intervention, it continues to fight against expanded
federal powers, taxes on capital and the wealthy, and environmental,
labor, and consumer regulations.
EL NORTE. The oldest of the American nations, El
Norte consists of the borderlands of the Spanish American empire, which
were so far from the seats of power in Mexico City and Madrid that they
evolved their own characteristics. Most Americans are aware of El Norte
as a place apart, where Hispanic language, culture, and societal norms
dominate. But few realize that among Mexicans,
norteños have a
reputation for being exceptionally independent, self-sufficient,
adaptable, and focused on work. Long a hotbed of democratic reform and
revolutionary settlement, the region encompasses parts of Mexico that
have tried to secede in order to form independent buffer states between
their mother country and the United States.
THE LEFT COAST. A Chile-shaped nation wedged between
the Pacific Ocean and the Cascade and Coast mountains, the Left Coast
was originally colonized by two groups: New Englanders (merchants,
missionaries, and woodsmen who arrived by sea and dominated the towns)
and Appalachian midwesterners (farmers, prospectors, and fur traders who
generally arrived by wagon and controlled the countryside). Yankee
missionaries tried to make it a “New England on the Pacific,” but were
only partially successful. Left Coast culture is a hybrid of Yankee
utopianism and Appalachian self-expression and exploration—traits
recognizable in its cultural production, from the Summer of Love to the
iPad. The staunchest ally of Yankeedom, it clashes with Far Western
sections in the interior of its home states.
THE FAR WEST. The other “second-generation” nation,
the Far West occupies the one part of the continent shaped more by
environmental factors than ethnographic ones. High, dry, and remote, the
Far West stopped migrating easterners in their tracks, and most of it
could be made habitable only with the deployment of vast industrial
resources: railroads, heavy mining equipment, ore smelters, dams, and
irrigation systems. As a result, settlement was largely directed by
corporations headquartered in distant New York, Boston, Chicago, or San
Francisco, or by the federal government, which controlled much of the
land. The Far West’s people are often resentful of their dependent
status, feeling that they have been exploited as an internal colony for
the benefit of the seaboard nations. Their senators led the fight
against trusts in the mid-twentieth century. Of late, Far Westerners
have focused their anger on the federal government, rather than their
corporate masters.
NEW FRANCE. Occupying the New Orleans area and southeastern Canada, New France blends the folkways of
ancien régime
northern French peasantry with the traditions and values of the
aboriginal people they encountered in northwestern North America. After a
long history of imperial oppression, its people have emerged as
down-to-earth, egalitarian, and consensus driven, among the most liberal
on the continent, with unusually tolerant attitudes toward gays and
people of all races and a ready acceptance of government involvement in
the economy. The New French influence is manifest in Canada, where
multiculturalism and negotiated consensus are treasured.
FIRST NATION. First Nation is populated by native
American groups that generally never gave up their land by treaty and
have largely retained cultural practices and knowledge that allow them
to survive in this hostile region on their own terms. The nation is now
reclaiming its sovereignty, having won considerable autonomy in Alaska
and Nunavut and a self-governing nation state in Greenland that stands
on the threshold of full independence. Its territory is huge—far larger
than the continental United States—but its population is less than
300,000, most of whom live in Canada.
If you understand the United States as a patchwork of separate
nations, each with its own origins and prevailing values, you would
hardly expect attitudes toward violence to be uniformly distributed. You
would instead be prepared to discover that some parts of the country
experience more violence, have a greater tolerance for violent solutions
to conflict, and are more protective of the instruments of violence
than other parts of the country. That is exactly what the data on
violence reveal about the modern United States.
Most scholarly research on violence has collected data at the state
level, rather than the county level (where the boundaries of the eleven
nations are delineated). Still, the trends are clear. The same handful
of nations show up again and again at the top and the bottom of
state-level figures on deadly violence, capital punishment, and
promotion of gun ownership.
Consider assault deaths. Kieran Healy, a Duke University sociologist,
broke down the per capita, age-adjusted deadly assault rate for 2010.
In the northeastern states—almost entirely dominated by Yankeedom, New
Netherland, and the Midlands—just over 4 people per 100,000 died in
assaults. By contrast, southern states—largely monopolized by Deep
South, Tidewater, and Greater Appalachia—had a rate of more than 7 per
100,000. The three deadliest states—Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama,
where the rate of killings topped 10 per 100,000—were all in Deep South
territory. Meanwhile, the three safest states—New Hampshire, Maine, and
Minnesota, with rates of about 2 killings per 100,000—were all part of
Yankeedom.
Not surprisingly, black Americans have it worse than whites.
Countrywide, according to Healy, blacks die from assaults at the
bewildering rate of about 20 per 100,000, while the rate for whites is
less than 6. But does that mean racial differences might be skewing the
homicide data for nations with larger African-American populations?
Apparently not. A classic 1993 study by the social psychologist Richard
Nisbett, of the University of Michigan, found that homicide rates in
small predominantly white cities were three times higher in the South
than in New England. Nisbett and a colleague, Andrew Reaves, went on to
show that southern rural counties had white homicide rates more than
four times those of counties in New England, Middle Atlantic, and
Midwestern states.
Stand-your-ground laws are another dividing line between American
nations. Such laws waive a citizen’s duty to try and retreat from a
threatening individual before killing the person. Of the twenty-three
states to pass stand-your-ground laws, only one, New Hampshire, is part
of Yankeedom, and only one, Illinois, is in the Midlands. By contrast,
each of the six Deep South–dominated states has passed such a law, and
almost all the other states with similar laws are in the Far West or
Greater Appalachia.
Comparable schisms show up in the gun control debate. In 2011, after
the mass shooting of U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords and eighteen
others in Tucson, the Pew Research Center asked Americans what was more
important, protecting gun ownership or controlling it. The Yankee
states of New England went for gun control by a margin of sixty-one to
thirty-six, while those in the poll’s “southeast central” region—the
Deep South states of Alabama and Mississippi and the Appalachian states
of Tennessee and Kentucky—supported gun rights by exactly the same
margin. Far Western states backed gun rights by a proportion of
fifty-nine to thirty-eight.
Another revealing moment came this past April, in the wake of the
Newtown school massacre, when the U.S. Senate failed to pass a bill to
close loopholes in federal background checks for would-be gun owners. In
the six states dominated by Deep South, the vote was twelve to two
against the measure, and most of the Far West and Appalachia followed
suit. But Yankee New England voted eleven to one in favor, and the
dissenting vote, from Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, was so unpopular in
her home state that it caused an immediate dip in her approval rating.
The pattern for capital punishment laws is equally stark. The states
dominated by Deep South, Greater Appalachia, Tidewater, and the Far West
have had a virtual monopoly on capital punishment. They account for
more than ninety-five percent of the 1,343 executions in the United
States since 1976. In the same period, the twelve states definitively
controlled by Yankeedom and New Netherland—states that account for
almost a quarter of the U.S. population—have executed just one person.
Why is violence—state-sponsored and otherwise—so much more prevalent
in some American nations than in others? It all goes back to who settled
those regions and where they came from. Nisbett, the social
psychologist, noted that regions initially “settled by sober Puritans,
Quakers, and Dutch farmer-artisans”—that is, Yankeedom, the Midlands,
and New Netherland—were organized around a yeoman agricultural economy
that rewarded “quiet, cooperative citizenship, with each individual
being capable of uniting for the common good.” The South—and by this he
meant the nations I call Tidewater and Deep South—was settled by
“swashbuckling Cavaliers of noble or landed gentry status, who took
their values . . . from the knightly, medieval standards of manly honor
and virtue.”
Continuing to treat the South as a single entity, Nisbett argued that
the violent streak in the culture the Cavaliers established was
intensified by the “major subsequent wave of immigration . . . from the
borderlands of Scotland and Ireland.” These immigrants, who populated
what I call Greater Appalachia, came from “an economy based on herding,”
which, as anthropologists have shown, predisposes people to belligerent
stances because the animals on which their wealth depends are so
vulnerable to theft. Drawing on the work of the historian David Hackett
Fisher, Nisbett maintained that “southern” violence stems partly from a
“culture-of-honor tradition,” in which males are raised to create
reputations for ferocity—as a deterrent to rustling—rather than relying
on official legal intervention.
More recently, researchers have begun to probe beyond state
boundaries to distinguish among different cultural streams. Robert
Baller of the University of Iowa and two colleagues looked at
late-twentieth-century white male “argument-related” homicide rates,
comparing those in counties that, in 1850, were dominated by Scots-Irish
settlers with those in other parts of the “Old South.” In other words,
they teased out the rates at which white men killed each other in feuds
and compared those for Greater Appalachia with those for Deep South and
Tidewater. The result: Appalachian areas had significantly higher
homicide rates than their lowland neighbors—“findings [that] are
supportive of theoretical claims about the role of herding as the
ecological underpinning of a code of honor.”
Another researcher, Pauline Grosjean, an economist at Australia’s
University of New South Wales, found strong statistical relationships
between the presence of Scots-Irish settlers in the 1790 census and
contemporary homicide rates, but only in “southern” areas “where the
institutional environment was weak”—which is the case in almost the
entirety of Greater Appalachia. She further noted that in areas where
Scots-Irish were dominant, settlers of other ethnic origins—Dutch,
French, and German—were also more violent, suggesting that they had
acculturated to Appalachian norms.
But it’s not just herding that promoted a culture of violence.
Scholars have long recognized that cultures organized around slavery
rely on violence to control, punish, and terrorize—which no doubt helps
explain the erstwhile prevalence of lynching deaths in Deep South and
Tidewater. But it is also significant that both these nations, along
with Greater Appalachia, follow religious traditions that sanction
eye-for-an-eye justice, and adhere to secular codes that emphasize
personal honor and shun governmental authority. As a result, their
members have fewer qualms about rushing to lethal judgments.
The code of Yankeedom could not have been more different. Its
founders promoted self-doubt and self-restraint, and their Unitarian and
Congregational spiritual descendants believed vengeance would not
receive the approval of an all-knowing God. This nation was the center
of the nineteenth-century death penalty reform movement, which began
eliminating capital punishment for burglary, robbery, sodomy, and other
nonlethal crimes. None of the states controlled by Yankeedom or New
Netherland retain the death penalty today.
With such sharp regional differences, the idea that the United States
would ever reach consensus on any issue having to do with violence
seems far-fetched. The cultural gulf between Appalachia and Yankeedom,
Deep South and New Netherland is simply too large. But it’s conceivable
that some new alliance could form to tip the balance.
Among the eleven regional cultures, there are two superpowers,
nations with the identity, mission, and numbers to shape continental
debate: Yankeedom and Deep South. For more than two hundred years,
they’ve fought for control of the federal government and, in a sense,
the nation’s soul. Over the decades, Deep South has become strongly
allied with Greater Appalachia and Tidewater, and more tenuously with
the Far West. Their combined agenda—to slash taxes, regulations, social
services, and federal powers—is opposed by a Yankee-led bloc that
includes New Netherland and the Left Coast.
Other nations, especially
the Midlands and El Norte, often hold the swing vote, whether in a
presidential election or a congressional battle over health care reform.
Those swing nations stand to play a decisive role on violence-related
issues as well.
For now, the country will remain split on how best to make its
citizens safer, with Deep South and its allies bent on deterrence
through armament and the threat of capital punishment, and Yankeedom and
its allies determined to bring peace through constraints such as gun
control. The deadlock will persist until one of these camps modifies its
message and policy platform to draw in the swing nations. Only then can
that camp seize full control over the levers of federal power—the White
House, the House, and a filibuster-proof Senate majority—to force its
will on the opposing nations. Until then, expect continuing frustration
and division.
Colin Woodard, A91, is the author of American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America.
An earlier book, The Republic of Pirates,
is the basis of the forthcoming NBC drama Crossbones.
He is currently state and national affairs writer at the Portland Press Herald
and Maine Sunday Telegram,
where he won a George Polk Award this year for his investigative reporting.
For
the first time since the bulk of votes were tallied in Virginia on
Election Night last Tuesday, the Democratic candidate for Attorney
General, state Sen. Mark Herring appears to now have taken the lead over
Republican state Sen. Mark Obenshain in the razor-thin results of more
than 2.2 million votes cast.
