Where do our personal values and norms originate? We are socialized into our society by others and our values are part of this socialization process. Our values are influenced by those with whom we interact! Begin by reading the article Up in Arms ( Up in Arms.pdf)
by Colin Woodard.
- Describe each of the 11 American Nations identified by Woodard. This should include identification of the important values for each nation.
- For each nation, how have the Nation’s values shaped their current attitudes and norms on gun violence, stand-your-ground laws and capital punishment?
- How does this add to your understanding of the importance of culture in influencing our behavior and attitudes
Up in Arms
THE BATTLE LINES OF TODAY’S DEBATES OVER GUN CONTROL, STAND-YOURGROUND LAWS, AND OTHER VIOLENCE-RELATED ISSUES WERE DRAWN
CENTURIES AGO BY AMERICA’S EARLY SETTLERS
BY COLIN WOODARD, A91
ILLUSTRATION BY BRIAN STAUFFER
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 seventeenthcentury 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 topdown 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 1960s, 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 northeastern 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 the exception
of New Hampshire, where the penalty is rarely imposed (the last execution took place in 1939).
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.
Retrieved – 2.6.19; http://news.tufts.edu/magazine/fall2013/features/up-in-arms.html