American North
OD has spent the last several months exhaustively researching the shared racial history of the South and the Caribbean.
While that research project will continue until it culminates next year in my book Shattering The Golden Circle, I want to open up a new line of inquiry into the North’s racial history which is a subject of much confusion on the internet.
In Federalist Propaganda #2, John Jay famously argued:
“With equal pleasure I have as often taken notice that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people — a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.
This country and this people seem to have been made for each other, and it appears as if it was the design of Providence, that an inheritance so proper and convenient for a band of brethren, united to each other by the strongest ties, should never be split into a number of unsocial, jealous, and alien sovereignties.”
These two paragraphs in The Federalist Papers were more wishful thinking than a reality. The only thing that the 13 victorious colonies really shared in the American Revolution was hostility to Britain and a commitment to the triumphant republican cause.
The Southern colonies shared a common language with England and the British West Indies. They shared a common religion – until after the Revolution, the established Anglican Church – with England and the British West Indies, but not with Massachusetts, Connecticut, or Pennsylvania.
By 1787, the “Deep South” had emerged as a distinct cultural region from its beachhead in Charleston. It dominated South Carolina, Georgia, and southeastern North Carolina. These new states were race-based slave societies with economies based on export-oriented plantation agriculture (rice, indigo, long staple cotton) like the sugar islands in the British West Indies.
The Deep South was “very similar in manners and customs,” racial demographics, settlement patterns, and economic interests to the British West Indies, not Congregationalist New England or Quaker Pennsylvania, but the long simmering feud between Britain and France (one theater of which was French retaliation in the American Revolution), British geopolitical priorities, and British naval superiority had succeeded in dividing the islands from the Southern mainland colonies.
With regards to race, the North has always had very different manners, customs, and ideas about this subject and should be analyzed as if it were a foreign country, so it is appropriate to begin our inquiry into the North’s racial traditions with the single most poignant illustration of the Mason-Dixon line as an unrecognized international border: the sectional nature of the repeal of anti-miscegenation laws in the United States.
If you look at the map of the repeal of anti-miscegenation laws in the United States, the first thing that jumps out at you is that the South is dominated by red and that the West is dominated by yellow. Every anti-miscegenation law in the Jim Crow South (with the exception of Maryland, which repealed its anti-miscegenation law in 1967 in anticipation of the pending Supreme Court decision) was struck down by the Loving vs. Virginia decision in 1967.
In the Jim Crow West (the West had a milder form of segregation, which is why Arizona is covered under the Voting Rights Act), all the anti-miscegenation laws (with the notable exceptions of Kansas, New Mexico, and Washington) were repealed in the aftermath of the Second World War from 1948 to 1967.
The Midwest and Northeast stick out like sore thumbs in this picture. For starters, there is the yellow deviation of Indiana, which had an anti-miscegenation law that outlawed intermarriage with blacks, which was only repealed in 1965. For some reason, Indiana was more like Kentucky or West Virginia in the demise of its anti-miscegenation law, and it still votes like Kentucky and West Virginia to this day.
The next thing that strikes you about the Northeast and Midwest is the gray states: Minnesota, Wisconsin, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Vermont, and New Hampshire, in their entire history, these states never passed anti-miscegenation laws, so there were none to repeal.
The green states are the most interesting states on this map: Pennsylvania (1780), Massachusetts (1843), Washington (1868), New Mexico (1866), Kansas (1859), Illinois (1874), Iowa (1851), Michigan (1883), Maine (1883), Rhode Island (1881), and Ohio (1887), which are states that had anti-miscegenation laws, but which voluntarily repealed them between 1780 and 1887.
In OD’s Indictment, I asserted that the years 1750 to 1850 were crucial to understanding the racial and cultural demise of the West: there was a moral, religious, and ideological sea change in worldview during this period that in set in motion a series of catastrophes that would follow.
– During the French Revolution, slavery was abolished and all the blacks in the French Empire were made into French citizens with equal rights before reaction set in under Napoleon who restored the racial status quo of the ancien régime. This would change under the Second Republic in 1848 when slavery was abolished again and the blacks in the French Caribbean were again made into French citizens.
– In Great Britain, racialism was weakened during the early nineteenth century by the negative influence of evangelical Christianity to the point where during the debate over the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies not one MP expressed any doubt that the free negro lacked the capacity to maintain the economy and preserve civilization.
So how do we explain the gray states and the green states in the Northeast and Midwest? Why were the anti-miscegenation laws repealed so much earlier there? Why not in the South or the West? In the nineteenth century, not in the “1960s,” as many WNs commonly assume?
If you want to understand why the Northern states would repeal their anti-miscegenation laws in the nineteenth century, it helps to get a feel for racial and cultural attitudes in contemporary Great Britain, which was considered the ideal model by Yankees and was the fashionable trendsetter (in among other things, the nexus between abolitionism and evangelical Christianity) in the North.
In the early nineteenth century, the North was the Anglophile region of the United States, whereas the South was the Anglophobic region. In the South, Britain was looked upon as a menace that was trying to block America’s westward expansion into Texas and as the world headquarters of abolitionism which posed a mortal threat to the South’s social and economic system.
Interestingly enough, Southern Anglophobia and British anti-slavery did not prevent the two countries from engaging in the mutually profitable cotton trade. The British were committed to “free labor” and “free trade” and these two doctrines were also at odds with each other in the British West Indies where the success of the “free labor” project was sacrificed in 1846 for “free trade” with Spanish Cuba.
With this in mind, we can start to explain the green states in the North: in Pennsylvania (1780), the anti-miscegenation law was repealed early due to the Quaker influence, the most stalwart egalitarian sect/notorious group of heretics in the British Empire, which pioneered anti-slavery and anti-racism in Britain and America.
In Massachusetts (1843), the demise of the anti-miscegenation law was a direct consequence of the rise of abolitionism there, which was the American citadel of anti-slavery, evangelical Christianity, and the reform movement. If this strikes you as being eerily reminiscent of the Clapham Saints and the influence of Wilberforce, Clarkson, & Co. in Britain, it is hardly a coincidence.
In Kansas, we notice that an anti-miscegenation law was passed in 1855, but was repealed in 1859. This is strange until you realize that “Bleeding Kansas” was a battleground at the time between Southern expansionists and ideologically motivated New Englanders who moved to Kansas and rejected the pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution.
In Iowa, an anti-miscegenation law that had been passed in 1839 was repealed in 1851. Like Kansas, the repeal of the anti-miscegenation law in Iowa is another example of New England Saints moving to sparsely populated Western territories and outvoting the Cracker Nation which was expanding out of the Upper South into the Lower Midwest states like Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana.
If you have ever wondered why Iowa has a split personality, it is because Eastern Iowa is culturally part of Yankeedom whereas Western and Central Iowa is part of the Midlands, which is the heterogeneous Germanic borderland between Yankee and Cracker territory in the Heartland. In much the same way, Southern Missouri is part of Dixie.
The repeal of the anti-miscegenation laws in the rest of the North after the War Between the States in Illinois (1874), Michigan (1883), Maine (1883), Ohio (1887), and Rhode Island (1881) was part of a larger trend toward integration in the post-“Civil War” era and was intimately tied to the Union Cause and the deification of Abraham Lincoln who glorified equality in the Gettysburg Address.
During Radical Reconstruction (1867-1876), the anti-miscegenation laws in the South were temporarily repealed by the negro-carpetbagger-scalawag triumvirate in states like Mississippi and Louisiana, but were reimposed by native Southerners as each state went through the Redemption process and the White Man’s Revolution.
After 1877, Northern enthusiasm for Reconstruction waned and the last gasp of “civil rights” was the Federal Elections Bill of 1890 which Henry Cabot Lodge attempted to impose on the South to save the Southern Republican Party. A long period of sectional détente between the North and South followed, roughly from 1896 to 1945, in which the children and grandchildren of the “Civil War” generation rebuilt the country and wisely tried to forget the likes of Thaddeus Stevens and move past the blunders that had ripped the country apart in the 1860s.
Unfortunately, the legislative follies of that era were never completely expunged from either the U.S. Constitution or the statutes of the Northern states. In the North, the negro remained a voter and a citizen with equal “civil rights,” and after 47 percent of the negro population moved to the Northern and Western states in the “Great Migration” in the twentieth century, the growth of negro political power in the North along with America’s new role as the “leader of the free world” after the Second World War revived the long dormant issue of “civil rights.”
It is a much more complicated story than simply “the Jews repealed our anti-miscegenation laws.”
“Why did they voluntarily repeal them before 1887? Why did they overwhelmingly vote for the Civil Rights Act of 1964?”
The point is that one does not follow from the other. The South voted in the majority for JFK in 1960, who then forced school integration. It was LBJ who took moribund civil rights legislation and brought it to fruition. It wasn’t Massachusetts or Michigan that forced civil rights legislation upon the South, even if they revoked racial intermarriage a century earlier. Conflating the two periods is pettifogging the issue. It was Johnson, a son of the South, whether for political expendiency or idealism, who put the presidential signature to the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. LBJ was relentless in his demonization of his Southern brethren.
The Black vote flipped to Kennedy in 1960. Southern states have black voters who flipped from Republican to Democratic that year.
Kennedy privately sprang MLK from a Southern jail. MLK instructed blacks to flip that year.
Blacks were aprox. 30% of the Alabama population in 1960. Kennedy took 56% of the Alabama vote.
There was no sense of whiteness in the North or the South. In the South whiteness was equivalent of ethnicity (founding Anglo-Saxon people). In the North groups identified as ethnicities; Irish, Italian, French Canadian etc. There was no sentimental pro-white bond, otherwise the 1924 immigration restriction, a defence of an American founding people of NW European origin, would not pass. The issue of whether the South was more pro-white than the North means little, in this framework.
http://www.vdare.com/articles/madison-grant-preserving-buffaloes-redwoods-and-founding-stock-americans
I live in New England and from what I can tell, they are up to their eyeballs in diversity, but the diversity mostly lives separate from them. The whites up here love equality, gay marriage, democrats, etc. A shame really.
I can only speak from my own history, and that of my wife, and her studies of ‘Blacks in MN.’
One- there WERE NO blacks of any great numbers in MN, so they could not make INFORMED DECISIONS about the differences between Whites and Negroes, when the state entered the union in 1858. In the early 1900’s, even after Dred Scott, the WBTS, and Reconstruction, there were no more than 20 blacks in all of MN, at the turn of the century (1900), until after WWI. The numbers remained low even after WWII. Until….
Two- the same HHHumphrey, who co-authored the Immigration Reform Bill of 1965, also (as Governor) opened MN. up to the Blacks of (believe it or not) Gary, In. – to our ‘free welfare’ state; it was these scum who, in the late 1960’s swarmed into MN, centering around the area known as Camden/West Broadway.
My mother saw the writing on the wall, and moved us ‘WEST’ to the environs of Plymouth (that yankee bastion- arrrgh) -MN, that is- right about the time the first waves were ‘enriching’ MPLS schools. And it’s been downhill ever since. Lutheran Social(ist) Service has now brought in Hmong, and Somalis, and we now have gangs of BOTH in our area. How lovely- NOT.
The fact that MN had NO knowledge of the Negroes’ and their acultural predilections, was the proximate cause that Dred Scott could actually be CONSIDERED A WHITE MAN once he crossed over into our territory- rather than be considered as the slave he always will be, and it was this ‘technicality,’ that caused the Supreme Court to even CONSIDER the case, that won the battle, but ‘lost the war.’
There’s even a park in a tony – but rapidly ‘darkening’ – SW Metro suburb, (ah, thy days are numbered) where Slave Scott is honored with his name. I go and litter there, every time I have to walk that defaced ground, in memory of the ‘diversity’ blacks bring to a nation, a state, and a city. I figure I am merely doing what they WANT the blacks to do, once they become the dominant race in town- just look at every frickin’ ghetto worldwide. Trash is as trash races do.
John
“Northerners who are working class vote Democratic.”
Brutus
“Yep, all my life I have heard from a SIGNIFICANT percentage of white workers that “the Democrats are for the working man.””
The question was about attitudes to race. What has voting Republican or Democrat got to do with it? Both the Republicans and Democrats are anti-white so that neutralises that issue and if that issue is neutralized then the Republicans are more anti-union so it becomes an easy choice. If the Republicans weren’t anti-white then you’d have a point.
ps, just once could you attempt to refute a fact with an actual source?
You can look at the Kennedy results as a moment of realignment. I don’t think southerners had at that moment any idea of what the Kennedys were up to. We might be in a transition where white northerners from workingclass backgrounds are slowly realizing that they are unrepresented.
What does voting one party or another have to do with anything?
Everything and nothing. The white South was Democratic and populist until the Dems got religion in the mid sixties. They they appear to have become Republican and populist.
Hello again my dear friends; I was showing some of my nonwhite lady friends this site; one African, one Jewish, one Mexican, one Korean. They were all talking about how 313Chris is the most awesome White Supremacist commenter ever; they all want to marry you and have beautiful mixed-race children who will all be raised to learn about how much the Confederacy sucks and how proud we are to be true Yankee Americans who don’t support secessionism. How does that sound? Chris, if Stonelifter and I got into a fight, who would you be rooting for?
so how’s the jewess treatin’ ya? they usually kick alot
John
“Northerners who are working class vote Democratic.”
Brutus
“Yep, all my life I have heard from a SIGNIFICANT percentage of white workers that “the Democrats are for the working man.””
The question was about attitudes to race. What has voting Republican or Democrat got to do with it? Both the Republicans and Democrats are anti-white so that neutralises that issue and if that issue is neutralized then the Republicans are more anti-union so it becomes an easy choice. If the Republicans weren’t anti-white then you’d have a point.
I worked for the Midwest branch office of a Massachusetts company for a while. Sometimes they’d send the mass people over to fill in in the plant for a couple of weeks since they wouldn’t pay Massachusetts wages at the satellite plant and the really good people would move away. Invariably they were guys that liked guns and hunting. They all voted for Ted Kennedy, too.
Of course, I would get upset at this. “Why do you support that walking piece of dogshit?”, I’d ask.
“Well,” they’d say, “We know he’s a piece of shit. He’s a bigger piece of shit than you think. And he doesn’t even walk, he waddles. But, he’s OUR waddling piece of shit. He’s why we have $30 an hour blue collar jobs and you guys get $14 for similar work. He makes it so any big contractor for the DoD or any project with much federal regulation knows if they f*** us or scab out the work he’ll fix their wagon royally. He’ll get the contract so screwed up the job never gets built out, or he’ll get some junior VP busted and jailed for some minor shit. He’s like Darth Vader. We figure it’s because he never got to f*** Marilyn Monroe like his brothers did, but we don’t really care why. We just value our jobs more than we value being able to buy a handgun without some paperwork we’ll probably get approved for anyway. ”
Whether you like unions or not, they are a part-not all, but a part, and a big part-of why we had the prosperity we did. Unions were opposed to immigration, even the repulsive mestizo Cesar Chavez used his UFW to keep farmers from undercutting his stupid indios by bringing in more stupid indios cheaper. Unions wanted tariffs to keep cheap undercutting imports out and manufacturing jobs here. Unions were an essential counterbalance to corporatist power that wants globalism to increase profits at any cost.
Sailer correctly posits the Sailer Strategy-the GOP runs a platform getting a solid 65% of the white vote and ignores all nonwhites, and wins. The GOP refuses this simple and sure method for several reasons, but a big one is that it means winning the votes of a good chunk of the remaining blue collar industrial base in the Northeast and Eastern Midwest, plus the people at Boeing in Seattle (where even the engineers are union.) That means dropping support for scab state laws and generally not portraying unions in a very negative light.
I am not a union member, and I will certainly agree they were and are, to a lesser degree today, responsible for much mischief and waste. So are our CEO cadres, who burn millions of gallons of corporate jet kerosene for irrelevant-to-real-business purposes and buy their wives and mistresses $5000 handbags. That isn’t the point. Those workers are mostly White. They should make a decent living, both because having a White, American labor base is much more productive in the long run and because they are White.
John says:
October 2, 2012 at 3:27 am
You can look at the Kennedy results as a moment of realignment. I don’t think southerners had at that moment any idea of what the Kennedys were up to.
The JFK election was only four years before the Republicanization of the South (and Nixon’s people saw that coming)
.
I lived in Georgia from the mid 50s until the mid 60s. Most intelligent Southerners had smelled the coffee as early as 1948 and while they rightly didn’t trust Nixon in 1960 they certainly detested Kennedy and his whole clan much, much more. It was something like McCain(Nixon)/Obama(Kennedy) but not nearly as clownish. Naturally, the “majority” in the northeast enlisted with the prescribed agenda as easily as they had in 1861.
The strategy is and has been, since the demise of Eleanor’s husband, to nominate a Dem who scares the daylights out of people enough to make them vote for the Rep. See the current campaign. Sometimes it elects the Rep, sometimes the Dem, what’s the diff?
In 1976 the Dems counted on a Nixonian Rep even more distrusted than Dick himself, combined with a Dem homeboy of their own, to win. Leading, naturally, to Jesus in 1980. It’s a goddamned game!
I guess my larger point is that, in spite of all of the psychological barbells Southerners have endured and in spite of their ultimate absorption of propaganda, including Americanism itself, they are generally way ahead of their fellow Americans in instinct and perception of obvious disaster. They don’t always know how to handle it but at least they recognize a problem when they see it.
It might be hard for us to believe but Adlai Stephenson was once so scary a candidate that IKE was not elected once, but twice. Dear old Steppin’ Fetchit that he was.
In the long term, there is nothing at all that can be done to turn the tide of such a classic historical cycle. The American Empire and Age will fold and crumble, as did the Roman, although much more rapidly. Shoot, the ‘Wild West’ was nuthin’.
@Bill Yancey
There’s a lively discussion about Southern culture going on right now, over at VNN. You might want to check it out.
“I am not a union member, and I will certainly agree they were and are, to a lesser degree today, responsible for much mischief and waste. So are our CEO cadres, who burn millions of gallons of corporate jet kerosene for irrelevant-to-real-business purposes and buy their wives and mistresses $5000 handbags. That isn’t the point. Those workers are mostly White. They should make a decent living, both because having a White, American labor base is much more productive in the long run and because they are White.”
Unfortunately it has always been the CEO and banker “cadre”, aka The Grande Bourgeoisie, who have funded and controlled the Republican Party right from its inception. Just look at the current nominee for President.
Now Indiana has people (democrats) like Jocelyn Tandy Adande supporting Indiana HJR3, a consituational amendment banning gay marriage. (WTHR 13 news) Why doesn’t she introduce a new anti-miscegenation law or white supremacy law? It is 2014 and most states are moving forward in formalizing gay marriage, not reverting to the dark ages! ! ! HJR13 is said to be most like Russia’s anti-gay law than any other in the USA.
“The Midwest and Northeast stick out like sore thumbs in this picture. For starters, there is the yellow deviation of Indiana, which had an anti-miscegenation law that outlawed intermarriage with blacks, which was only repealed in 1965. For some reason, Indiana was more like Kentucky or West Virginia in the demise of its anti-miscegenation law, and it still votes like Kentucky and West Virginia to this day.”