Having just praised Scott Kleeb as a historian, I now come to trash another, Joshua Micah Marshall of Talking Points Memo. Josh Marshall comes unhinged in surmising Obama’s demise in West Virigina:
During the 18th and 19th centuries, in the middle Atlantic and particularly in the Southern states, there was a long-standing cleavage between the coastal and ‘piedmont’ regions on the one hand and the upcountry areas to the west on the other. It’s really the coastal lowlands and the Appalachian districts. On the other side of the Appalachian mountain range the pattern is flipped, with the Appalachians in the east and the lowlands in the west.
These regions were settled disproportionately by Scots-Irish immigrants who pushed into the hill country to the west in part because that’s where the affordable land was but also because they wanted to get away from the more stratified and inegalitarian society of the east which was built by English settlers and their African slaves. Crucially, slavery never really took root in these areas. And this is why during the Civil War, Unionism (as in support for the federal union and opposition to the treason of secession) ran strong through the Appalachian upcountry, even into Deep South states like Alabama and Mississippi.
As I alluded to earlier, this was the origin of West Virginia, which was originally the westernmost part of Virginia. The anti-slavery, anti-slaveholding upcountry seceded from Virginia to remain in the Union after Virginia seceded from the Union. Each of these regions was fiercely anti-Slavery. And most ended up raising regiments that fought in the Union Army. But they were as anti-slave as they were anti-slavery, both of which they viewed as the lynchpins of the aristocratic and inegalitarian society they loathed. It was a society that was both more violent and more self-reliant.
This is history. But it shapes the region. It’s overwhelmingly white, economically underdeveloped (another legacy of the pre-civil war pattern) and arguably because of that underdevelopment has very low education rates and disproportionately old populations.
For all these reasons, if you’re familiar with the history, it’s really no surprise that Barack Obama would have a very hard time running in this region.
Being a historian myself, I’d like to remind Joshua Micah Marshall that the last Democratic President to win the White House and lose West Virginia was Woodrow Wilson, a historian, in 1916. You would think they would teach this at Princeton. And Jack Kennedy, a Catholic, had no problem winning both West Virginia in the primary and in the general election. In fact, Josh, it might please you to know that it was Jack Kennedy’s victory in the West Virginia primary that secured the nomination for him back in 1960 over Lyndon Johnson.
For the record, the entire South was largely settled by the Scots-Irish. And the crucial attribute is really a religious one, Anglicanism versus Baptist. And today the decendants of the Scots-Irish stretch from coast-to-coast. They include the Volunteers that settled Tennessee and the Ohio Valley, the Grangers that farmed the Prairies, the Sooners that settled Oklahoma, the Oakies that came to California during the Great Depression. Andrew Jackson, Daniel Boone, James Polk and Abraham Lincoln are Scots-Irish.
And you’re wrong about why West Virginia has a disportionately older population. That development is recent and has more to do with the lack of a manufacturing base as the state transitioned from labour-intensive mining industry to one that is more mechanized. The lack of jobs have sent younger Mountaineers in search of employment outside the state.
Furthermore in between your lines of condescending nonsense, you are levelling charges of a veiled racism and that’s frankly disgusting. West Virginians deserve better. And this points to a larger pattern of behaivour among Obama’s supporters. Fail to support Obama and you are ostracized with some sort of social disorder. You are not winning friends and you are hardly doing your candidate any favours. In fact, you are destroying what little chance he has of winning a general election.
Perhaps if you ventured 100 miles from DC, you might discover one of the most beautiful states in the Union and what Clinton country looks like. Unlike your elitist hangouts, this is working class America. Still I’m sure you can get an arugula salad and a latte so don’t worry. And Joshua Micah, don’t give up your day job because as a historian, you would starve.