A review of American Nations by comparison with Albion’s Seed
2017-08-07
In a class my friend took in college, he had to think
of five labels to describe himself. When my friend gave his labels, his
professor asked why he didn’t include “American” as one of them. Intrigued by
this exercise, I too, found that “American” was not really a way in which I
thought of myself (though my views have evolved on this topic since I started
working with many colleagues not from the U.S.). I thought about it off and on
for a few years, trying to understand why it didn’t feel right.
Albion’s Seed, historian David Hackett Fischer’s 1989 treatise on four Anglo
migrations to the New World in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which
he asserts determined much of American culture over the next several centuries,
gave me an answer. Fischer identifies four “folkways”, patterns of culture
associated with specific populations that settled in the present day U.S.: those
of the Puritans settling in Massachusetts, Cavaliers in the Tidewater region,
Quakers settling in the Delaware Valley, and Borderlanders settling in the
Appalachian backcountry. Many of the attributes being “American” connotes to me:
love of guns, hate of government, strong suspicion of elites and academics,
originated from the Borderlanders, who emigrated via Ireland from the violent
border between England and Scotland to the New World.
On the other hand, Puritan folkways: high regard for education, “improving the
time” through hard work, even institutions of local administration: town
meetings and selectmen, resonated much more strongly with me (my hometown is
mentioned in a footnote).
America has never been a homogenous culture, Albion’s Seed shows, rather, an
uneasy compromise between several. Despite Albion’s Seed’s extremely thorough
treatment of early Anglo-American cultures, Fischer treads lightly on the
several centuries since, though his final hundred pages do include a case study
of the presidency through the lens of his four folkways.
Anxious for more, I turned to a newer book. Colin Woodard’s American Nations,
published in 2011, incorporates seven new ethnoregional nations—Woodard’s
equivalent of Fischer’s folkways—with the original four rebranded respectively
as “Yankee”, “Tidewater”, “Midlands”, and “Greater Appalachia”. American
Nations focuses more on the evolution of the cultures and updates Albion’s
Seed for the twenty-first century.
Or it attempts to. While both Albion’s Seed and American Nations discuss
ethnoregional cultures in North America, the similarities end there. American
Nations is not at all like Albion’s Seed: not in style, not in substance, and
not in attitude. Fischer’s work is intellectually stimulating and fun to read,
due to his thorough research and incisive prose. Woodard’s work could not be
farther from this; it is intellectually dishonest and upsetting to read: polemic
demagoguery in a cultural history’s clothing.