Born Frothing: a review essay of James Webb's Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America

Born Fighting is an example of what happens when a writer (without a proper grasp of history or the historical method) exploits Scotland and its people for his own political ends. I read the basic assumptions of Born Fighting as follows:

• there is a certain ethnic group in America that is called the "Scots-Irish"
• they are a pugnacious people by nature
• their traits are due to Celtic genes and to two thousands years of Scottish history
• they have been victims of Anglo-Saxon exploitation in Scotland, Ireland, and America
• they were the primary ethnic group of the American South, and since the time of Andrew Jackson, have been the most powerful influence on the United States
• and finally, America needs them and must make special allowances for them.

There are major flaws in all of these assumptions. There are so many problems with the book that it is hard to know where to start to untangle Webb's web of deceit.

First there are factual errors: he refers to a "British Parliament" in the seventeenth century, despite the Scottish and English parliaments being separate and distinct until 1707; he assumes that the Episcopal and Anglican Churches were the same thing in a British context, just because they are in an American context; he claims William Wallace as a commoner, even if his family were knights to a feudal lord, and Wallace himself fought on behalf of John Balliol, who he recognised as king; and so on. But the factual errors are probably less troubling than the framework of interpretation - or more accurately, personal projection - he uses in his discussion of Scottish history.

In fact, Webb ignores quite a lot of historical facts because they would inconvenience him and his goal: "proving" that the Scotch-Irish (which is the traditional, and still perfectly accepted way to refer to them) have a unique genetic qualification to be America's rank and file military machine, and that they need to band together to save the United States from the "liberal traitors" and to save themselves as a distinct ethnicity.

Webb is pretty open about his enemies; his "persecution" as a Vietnam veteran during the anti-establishment 1960s seems to form the very raison d'etre for this long rant. Imagining himself and his people to be victimised by liberals and the "activist Left," he is constantly denouncing the sinister conspiracies of political correctness, Hollywood, Ivy League intellectuals, and the "elite" (which one might otherwise assume to include government officials such as himself) of robbing the Scotch-Irish of their deserved place in American society. Webb repeatedly bewails how manipulating academics (who he condemns, almost by definition, as "Yankees") and the popular media have equated Confederate soldiers with Hitler's Nazis, and white Southerners with trailer-park trash and backwoods rednecks.

Yet, despite his denunciations of stereotypes applied to his own people, he does not hesitate himself to tar all Northerners, war protestors, and intellectuals with the same broad brush. Nor, for all of his conspiracy theories about Hollywood, does he mind exploiting the iconography of the film Braveheart - despite its major historical and social flaws - to create ethnic myths about Scotland which are utterly false by any sober analysis. It is a challenge to take a book seriously that states, "These were Braveheart's people" (p. 126 - does he realize that the appellation "Braveheart" didn't exist before the film?). Stereotypes and prejudice are the very meat and potatoes of this book, in the same mud-slinging tradition of the recent Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign in the 2004 U.S. Presidential election.

Webb's book is riddled with errors and inconsistencies. Although he is probably not aware of most of these, he seems to have an intentional, non-rational strategy to define the Scotch-Irish in an ambiguous way. By claiming for them a number of contradictory traits, they can be whoever he wants them to be. They are both religious and "sensual," both violent and loving, both clannish and individualistic. The problem is, any group of people can be defined with such vague generalisations; they are, in fact, human universals, and no one people can claim a monopoly on them. Most rural people (and probably most urban ones for that matter) describe themselves as stubborn, nonconformist, non-materialistic, inventive, adaptable, and self-reliant.

Race and racism lie just below the surface of this book, which should sound alarm bells for anyone sensitive either to the problems of race relations in America, or to the undermining of the myths of race by solid scholarship since World War II. Words like "blood" and "bloodline" appear so often one wonders if one is reading a passage from Mein Kampf: "That is the story of my people, not for a generation or for ten generations, but for forever" (p. 4), or "Nonconformity as well as a mistrust of central power was now in their blood" (p. 129).

The evil-doers in Webb's portrayal of Scottish history are not only the English (who, naturally, become "Yankees" later on), but the "hybrid-royal blood caste." "Having themselves been altered in their blood and traditions by intermarriage with Normans and English royalty, the high families of Scotland now embraced further schemes" (p. 43). The Scotch-Irish left for America, he explains, because "they no longer belonged in Ireland's increasingly toxic ethnic mix." If impure blood causes all social ills, does that mean that we need a little ethnic cleansing to put society on the right track again in the present?

Born Fighting is the latest of several recent and popular books that claim that the South was intrinsically Celtic while the North was overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon (pp. 134, 208, 220-1, 232-3, 241). The American Civil War, we would be led to believe by the inevitable chain of logic, was nothing more than the playing out of the centuries-old antagonisms between Celts and Saxons.

This claim has many fatal flaws. First there is the fact that Celts are not defined by "race" (i.e., genetic inheritance) but by language and culture, and real Celts were a scarce commodity in the ante-bellum South. Second, before, during and after the Civil War, Southerners were adamant about their identity as Anglo-Saxons: in fact, it was not uncommon for them to justify the repression of African slaves by recounting that it was necessary for Roman and English civilisations to subjugate the rebellious Celts in the name of progress. Thirdly, there is the inconvenient fact that Celts (especially Scottish and Irish Gaels) were quite numerous in the North, whether by direct migration or by way of the porous Canadian border. Finally, if it were the case that the South had certain "uncouth" characteristics because of Celtic or Scottish blood, why don't we see the same patterns in Canada, where there were also early settlements of even larger, and more purely Celtic, populations?

Social patterns generally emerge because of the political, social and geographical circumstances in which people operate. When people are scattered over harsh terrain where navigation and communication are difficult, and civic institutions (legal system, justice system, police forces, etc.) are unable to assert their authority, then kin-based institutions assume greater importance and functionality in society. Such peripheries are less likely to receive adequate attention and investment from a remote, centralised government. In the modern era these regions have often suffered from the underdevelopment of industrial economies and are therefore most likely to export their populations for low wage service jobs, and, in particular, military recruitment.

But such an analysis is beyond Webb, who sees only the playing out of ancient traditions in Appalachia: "This 'Celtic tie of kinship' has survived in some form through the ages, even in America. An offshoot of this ancient concept defines the unusually strong feelings about military service held by so many Americans of Scottish and Irish descent ..." (p. 38). Is it not also the case for Native Americans and African-Americans that poverty and lack of educational opportunities make military service one of the few viable options they have to choose from? This is simple economics and sociology, not DNA.

Webb perseveres with the notion that England was thoroughly transformed by feudalisation, but that the Scottish people rejected it and "concerned themselves more with personal ties than with the ownership of a specific piece of land" (p. 81). This ignores a huge body of scholarship that shows that feudalism did penetrate Scottish society in significant ways, even if it accommodated itself to local conditions; but this was true of feudalism everywhere, including England. Webb insists on portraying Scotland as a "bottom-up," tribal society, in order that he might contrast it with "top-down," feudal England. It is hard to sustain such a simplistic picture, especially given the legacy of David I of Scotland, who, upon gaining the throne in 1124 introduced coinage, burghs and a top-down system of military and economic obligations into Scottish political and social life. While these innovations took time to work their way uniformly through Scotland, they were certainly part of the fabric of the lives of the people Webb discusses; it is hard to imagine how, for example, the Scottish Kirk (which he praises unconditionally) and its set of concomitant principles could have taken hold in a truly tribal society.

It was not long ago that the Scotch-Irish denied being tainted by Celtic blood. Webb finds it convenient to play the Celtic card, making such bold declarations as, "Mountain culture was Celtic culture" (p. 168). Although he implies that Scotland was a single nation, with a homogenous population and cultural experience, his narrative almost completely neglects the Scottish Highlanders. This is surprising: if all of his generalisations about "Celtic" traits in the Scotch-Irish held water, they would be even more accurate about the Highlanders, being a truly Celtic people known for their military traditions. Yet, probably because they would illuminate the glaring defects in his thesis, they are ignored.

As he posits that the Scotch-Irish are defined by their genes and millenia of experience in Scotland, he cannot fathom that they have ever changed. He forces all Scots to act and look the same as his family in Appalachia, due to their Celtic blood. They must therefore be stereotyped as an inward-looking people distrustful of outsiders: "Paradoxically, the Scots-Irish are also a culture of isolation, hard luck, and infinite stubbornness that has always shunned formal education and mistrusted - even hated - any form of aristocracy" (p. 12). Like other people, Scots, and especially Presbyterians, have always had a great respect for learning and education. This point is stressed so much in Scottish protestant literature that it is hard to believe that he missed it.

It is also hard to understand how Webb can hope to maintain the assertion that Scots had an antipathy for elites and aristocracy when so much of Scottish history relates to their adherence to their native nobility, despite the losses such loyalty caused. Yet he claims, "The Scottish people did not care much for the larger world, and they especially did not care much for elites" (p. 42). This is, of course, Webb talking for himself and those Scotch-Irish in America who were excluded due to their circumstances from the institutions of dominance. As a matter of fact, the Scottish people were outward looking and did care a great deal about the larger world: they were very conscious of being members of Christendom, sent saints and scholars out to foreign lands, chose on their own initiative to imitate many dominant European fashions, went to great lengths to harmonise their native traditions with those of the Classical world, and so on. It would be as easy to produce a list of examples of how important elites were in Scottish society, and how much ordinary Scots deferred to them. But as Webb seems to know little of Scottish history, such details have gone undetected by him.

Webb is obsessed with violence and war, so much so that he has skipped over all of the facts that would detract from his goal to make all Scots born fighters. "Violence in defense of one's honor had always been the moniker of this culture ..." (p. 244). What was the universal philosophy of the Scotch-Irish? "If any man, no matter how highly born, should strike or offend them, it was their credo to strike back twice as hard" (p. 89). Such bloody behavior would have been hard to tolerate in any small, familiar, kin-based society. This also ignores the fact that the Gaels of Ireland and Scotland have the oldest recorded law system in Western Europe, one quite astonishing for its depth and breadth. The effective governance of the Lords of the Isles enabled the Hebrides and Western Highlands to enjoy a period of relative peace for nearly two centuries, a period remembered long after as a Golden Age. Violence is possible in all societies, but Gaelic tradition does not support the assertion that all Scots were overly concerned with personal (as opposed to kin) honor or that violence was always the primary solution to personal problems.

Like many other traits, Webb attributes bellicosity to Celtic genes, claiming that the Troubles of the North of Ireland are simply due to inborn intransigence (p. 39). If this were true, then the people of southwestern Scotland, and of the Republic of Ireland, ought to be engrossed in constant feuding and bitter rancor. Yet, this is not the case. Clearly it is the political situation, the fact that Northern Ireland is a contested territory with unresolved claims between two ethnic groups and nation-states, that creates the conditions that allow violence to thrive.

Webb is nearly as obsessed with individualism as he is with warfare: "From these pulpits, decade after decade, strong men preached about the power of the individual ..." (p. 156) and "Thus continued the odd but effective paradox of this particular culture that was on the one hand a warrior aristocracy while on the other hand adamantly individualistic and strangely unconscious of class" (p. 160). Certainly the most heralded cultural feature of the Scotch-Irish was their adherence to Presbyterianism, and the intentional creation of churches by immigrant communities says much against the thesis of hyper-individualism. As my friend Peter Gilmore, engaged at Carnegie Mellon University in research on Ulster Scots and the cultural milieu they created in southwestern Pennsylvania, has relayed to me, "Their sense of ethnic identity largely consisted of their understanding that as collectives of varying sizes and responsibilities (congregations, presbyteries, synods) they had a communal obligation to the deity with whom they had entered into a series of covenants." Neither does having one's personal life publicly exposed to the censure of church elders support Webb's depiction of defiant and insubordinate pioneers.

Unfortunately, Webb makes the error of taking history personally, and trying to make the personal historical. He too often "proves" his hypotheses by repeating anecdotes about his family or people he has met on his travels. While these may be amusing sketches, they are not the data of the historical method.

Webb comes across as an apologist for the legacy of racism in the South. Just as the Scotch-Irish are cleared of any wrong-doing against the native Irish ("they brought with them a greater antipathy toward the English hierarchy than they ever could have felt toward the ordinary Irish," p. 109), they are never themselves to blame for the problems of slavery and racism in the South. Of course, there is a seed of truth in this: the Scotch-Irish did not invent slavery or racism, nor did they reap as much of the economic benefits from slavery as the large plantation owners. But the efforts to ameliorate America's lingering aftermath of race-based slavery will not make any progress by playing "He started it."

Racism is not just an economic institution: it is a social and cultural order. Webb alleges that conditions for poor whites in the South were just as wretched as that of blacks (pp. 214, 239, 270, 292), but the well-being and self-realisation of a social group is not determined purely by their economic status. If poor whites were just as victimised by the "pseudo-aristocracy" of slave-owning elites, why didn't they make common cause with the enslaved blacks to overthrow the profiteers? There is a great deal of work demonstrating that white privilege and the "race dividend" is of social and psychological, not to mention economic, advantage to all whites, which is precisely why poor whites mobilised en masse against civil rights.

The movement for racial equality was not just an imposition of alien, Northern values, as Webb suggests (pp. 242, 293), but a struggle which many Southern blacks had long awaited; they were not just the unthinking minions of meddlesome Northern activists. It is true, as he says, that "white America is so variegated that it is an ethnic fairy tale" (p. 323), but the ethnic origins of white Americans became irrelevant to their access to white privilege, and this is a nuance which Webb misses entirely. His revisionism includes attributing the motivations of the Ku Klux Klan not to white supremacy but to the bitterness of being dominated by the North (p. 263), supporting the rationale for the American war in Vietnam (p. 308), and denying the validity of the principles of affirmative action programmes (pp. 324-5).

By buying into the myths of race, Webb has created a Catch-22 for himself. If the Scotch-Irish are really defined by their genes, and their distinct characteristics are inherited from one generation to another, then why are they a threatened group? He claims, "The Scots-Irish did not merely come to America, they became America ..." (p. 12). If the Scotch-Irish really are the dominant strain of (white) America, as he claims, then how is their survival threatened? Webb bemoans time and again that they must suffer the ridicule of Yankees, which makes one suspect that he is quite insecure.

The book runs amok with counterfactuals. He purports to hear echoes, and see reflections, of the ancient Celts, the Scottish War of Independence, and the Scottish Kirk, in the life of the Scotch-Irish of Appalachia. Such alleged ghosts do not equate with historical evidence demonstrating a direct and causal link between two contexts widely distanced in space and time. They instead may be resemblances which are merely coincidental, or due to similar conditions.

Let me finish with what I see as a couple of serious ironies in Webb's poisoned polemic. Given his agenda, he must deprecate Marxists in no uncertain terms (pp. 291, 295, 319, etc.). In practically the same breath, he laments the sacrifices made by the common man of the South to uphold a system which did not value him or provide economic or educational benefits: "for the nonslaveholding yeoman, his instinctive support of issues that benefited the slaveholding elites would eventually 'bear him outside the orbit of his own true interest [and] would swing him headlong, perhaps against his more sober judgment, into the disaster of the Civil War' " (pp. 212-3). Does that sound like a Marxist argument, or am I imagining things?

The military machine exploits, in particular, the poor and disempowered in its wars, and helps to impose the interests of the elite against the weak. Webb clearly sees this when he casts his sorrowful eye on the South, some 140 years after the conclusion of the Civil War, but he is complicit in the belief that "might is right" when applied to anyone else. He reviews the findings of the 1938 report by the National Emergency Council (pp. 265-8), detailing the reasons for the poverty of the South and the disparity between North and South: the region's rich resources were extracted by corporations (owned and operated by absentee executives) and exported elsewhere; the profits stayed outside the South and did not benefit internal development; the labor force was discouraged from extending beyond low-wage and unskilled work; imports were excessively high; and so on. And all of this happened as an imposition of a Northern military occupation: "the South had become an economic colony of the North."

This scenario sounds uncannily similar to the current American occupation of Iraq, not to mention the critiques offered of how multinational corporations exploit the entire third world. Apparently, it's acceptable for the South to continue to relive its injustices a century and a half after its defeat, but the Scotch-Irish ought to continue their unflinching support for America's use of extreme force against other nations simply because they were "born fighting." The assertions are narcissistic and careless in the extreme.

The Scottish experience is, both in Scotland and abroad, complex and multifaceted. Webb is the most articulate of a number of people who want to invent a simplified (and artificial) version of Scottish identity in order to justify their militaristic, Imperialist, anti-intellectual, and racist goals. Webb expresses all of this in the language of victimisation, "we was wronged," rather than admit to the wrong that might have been done to others.

The idea of blood and race has a certain magnetism for many people, but they are fictions in the eyes of modern scholars. If they are the creed of Mr Webb, he ought to stick to writing novels, rather than exploit these delusions in the writing of history. In Born Fighting he creates and propagates fallacies which are not only irresponsible, but dangerous. They are the kinds of illusions that helped to invent the Nazis and resuscitate the Ku Klux Klan, and ought to be rejected in a modern, pluralistic democracy claiming to value "truth and justice for all."

This book demonstrates how, in the vacuum of intellectual leadership and the lack of an educated public, Scottish identity is appropriated for purposes that contradict the facts of history. While people might be expected to believe what appeals to them or benefits them, they can also reject falsehoods if they are informed to know better. It is deplorable that Webb has chosen to ignore the outstanding scholarship that has been achieved in the last two decades about Scotland in general, and the Scotch-Irish specifically. Scholars such as Kerby Miller and Patrick Griffin would have offered new depths of perspective on the Scotch-Irish unavailable in the few, obsolete texts that Webb chose to consult in his writing. Perhaps this book, and others like it, may provoke Scots to do something constructive in North America to challenge the appropriation of their history for disturbing causes.