Some remember being “Irish”, others simply do not know their ancestry. Webb writes, “In their insistent individualism they are not likely to put an ethnic label on themselves when they debate societal issues. Some of them don’t even know their ethnic label, and some who do don’t particularly care.”
“They came with nothing,” Webb says, “and for a complicated set of reasons, many of them still have nothing.” Today by their ethnic-slurred names, rednecks and hillbillies, are how they are known. They are described as; he explains “…trailer park trash. Racists. Cannon fodder. My ancestors. My people. Me…”
“The contributions of this culture are too great to be forgotten.” Webb points out. “And in a society obsessed with multicultural jealousies, those who cannot articulate their ethnic origins are doomed to a form of social and political isolation.
During the American Revolution some scholars estimate that, of the Continental troops fighting for independence, between twenty-five and forty percent were of Scots-Irish heritage. Webb agrees with the latter figure. He also points out that their descendants have made up the bulk of American fighting forces since that time.
“Poor but Proud – and Stubborn as Hell” is the heading of chapter three. During the Great Depression the Scots-Irish were in the bulk of those affected. Family farms lost; lives changed. U.S. Route 66 became known as the Hillbilly Highway as the dispossessed, disposed people of the mid-west and south searched for new jobs, new homes and new lives. Webb says, “These were people who measured others not by titles or possessions but by personal honor, dignity, and the unwillingness to fight for their beliefs. Most were unenvious of wealth, unafraid of the wielders of authority, unconscious of class and also unwilling to consider themselves ethnically aloof – in most cases, their own ethnicity is less important than their individuality. And more than any other culture, this is the one that new immigrant groups have traditionally gravitated toward in order to call themselves American.”
This group, according to Webb, controls more power than it realizes. The Scots Irish and those who have assimilated into their culture have, “shaped the emotional fabric of the nation.” They are the Red State people, those who won and work in the South and heartland of our country.
Born Fighting is a great read with an excellent insight into a culture that is misunderstood by much of America. It is published by Broadway Books
We recommend it – highly.– but not Webb's politics.- Editor
How the Scots Irish Shaped America
By James Webb
o say “Scots Irish” is to say the word "American". In nearly two thousand years of history this ethnic group has a constant history of war. Pushed from homeland to homeland, the group who began their nomadic trek in the borderlands of what is now known as Scotland and England have been instrumental in securing the freedom of those who typically hold them to a second-class role in society. They became the will and brawn that grew and defended a nation.
Former Secretary of the Navy and author James Webb describes his people as hardheaded and fiercely independent. The Scots Irish rarely retreat in personal confrontation or in battle. From the beginnings in Scotland, he says, “…they refused to recognize leadership beyond their local tribes and thus would not become a nation. And they had a permeating discontent that caused the more determined of them to keep pushing, every generation, a little farther into the wild unknown.
These were the people who fought along side Robert the Bruce at Bannockburn and helped win Scottish independence. “The bitter fights during these middle centuries caused many areas that were ethnically and historically Scottish to end up on the English side of the border.” Ethnically, the northern English have roots as firmly planted in the culture as to those north of the border.
“The wildest, most contentious people on all the earth,” Web says, “trapped in a sea-bound bottleneck, [in Scotland] their emotions spattering out into poetry and music and brawls….” Today they call themselves, “Irish and Scottish… or Catholic and Protestant, anything that might make another reason for a good fight.”
Webb follows the migration and politics that forced and enticed the Lowland Scots and English from their borderland homes. Moving en-mass to Northern Ireland they started a fight in the region that has lasted four hundred years.
Hated and warred upon by Irish and English alike they again moved with their kiss-my-butt independence to pre-revolutionary America. They took the land in the hills and hinterlands where others hesitated to settle. They were the citizen-military buffer between “savages” and the elites of the coastal plain. In their action they tended to lose their ethnic identity in the woods and hollows of the frontier, preferring to call themselves “Americans.”
Along the way a few have risen from the largely self-inflicted poverty of independent mindedness to become leaders of renown: Daniel Boone, Andrew Jackson, JEB Stuart, Woodrow Wilson, Ulysses Grant, George Patton, Johnny Cash and Ronald Reagan to mention a few. Even George W. Bush is said to have this DNA line in his ancestry.
