---

By Dale Short
Commentary
January 6, 2002

    "There is nothing new under the sun."

   "The more things change, the more they stay the same."

   "Everything old is new again."

   Whether we glean them from the Book of Ecclesiastes or from cabaret songs, comforting adages such as these contain a large kernel of truth.

   But for me, the comfort level of "history repeats itself" took a major plummet recently, when I read a book that several of my friends had been urging on me for years. The volume is Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America, and it's written by David Hackett Fischer, an esteemed historian with more academic credentials than you can shake a bookmark at.

   As you might guess from its title and its heft (some 900 pages, including voluminous footnotes and maps which non-scholars like myself can easily skip over), Albion's Seed is definitely not a beach book. Nevertheless, it smacked head-on into my consciousness as few page-turners ever have. (The term "Albion," by the way, is an old poetic reference to the ancestral homeland of the British Isles.)

   In a nutshell, Fischer's basic premise is that America's early settlement came in four main waves of immigrants from the vicinity of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales-immigrants who, despite being relatively close neighbors geographically in their home countries, brought with them a mind-boggling intensity of regional peculiarities that extended to nearly every aspect of both their private and public lives.

   Or as Fischer boils it down, in his introduction:

   "They spoke distinctive English dialects and built their houses in diverse ways. They had different ideas of family, marriage and gender; different practices of child-naming and child-raising; different attitudes toward sex, age and death; different rituals of worship and magic; different forms of work and play; different customs of food and dress; different traditions of education and literacy; different modes of settlement and
association. They also had profoundly different ideas of community, order, power, and freedom which derived from British folk-traditions."

   America as "melting pot," indeed. Except-and here's the kicker-these profoundly differing regional traditions didn't melt. At least, not much. Though their outer trappings have changed, these traditional chasms of regional division are not only alive and thriving, they've been so unconsciously assimilated by the other 80 percent of Americans whose ancestors didn't come from the UK that the old differences are continually reborn.

   Fischer, again: "Regional cultures have continued to dominate national politics since 1789...and they still control attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, in which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations."

   No ivory-tower guy, the author provides example after specific example of these variations from region to region, ranging from sports to funeral customs to the exact layout and construction of chicken pens and hog lots across America.

   Impressive, you might say. But what does any of this have to do with the price of eggs in Alabama, in the Year of Our Lord 2002?

   Think two words: State Constitution. Or more accurately, our effective lack of one, a century after a scandalously fraudulent constitutional convention that amounted to economic and class genocide against blacks and low-income whites alike. (My own ancestors, most of whom were subsistence farmers, could no more have afforded the 1901 Constitution's poll tax than they could have flown to the moon.)

   For that constitution's authors (incidentally nicknamed "The Big Mules"), government in Alabama was clearly a circular process: the state was meant to be run by the people who were running the state. Case closed.

   The question is, why have we voters allowed it to remain so, until this day? I've come to the conclusion that it's in our blood...or, if you prefer a more modern terminology, it's genetically determined.

   This is where the perspective furnished by Fischer's Albion's Seed is especially useful, I think.

   My own ancestral lineage-and that of a great many Alabamians-comes under the geographical category of "backcountry." During the height of the immigration, we Scots-Irish were referred to in press accounts as "the scum of two nations." In short, no bluebloods, we. And we take a great deal of pride in this fact.

   Interestingly, two of the main personality traits shared by this group are (1) stubbornness, and (2) a suspicion, often bordering on paranoia, of change and of "outsiders"-which, in practice, includes just about everybody except ourselves.

   Understand that neither of these qualities is inherently bad. In fact, they're the ideal personality profile required of people who choose to leave, because of poverty or famine, their homeland and family for a nightmarish ocean voyage (at one point, the mortality rate of their transatlantic journey almost equaled that of the slave trade) toward a new life in the forbidding wilderness of a foreign land.

   Nor were these folks necessarily blind to their own traits. Fischer tells of a backcountry colonial gentleman who wrote in his devotional journal, "Lord, grant that I may always be right, for thou knowest I am hard to turn." I plead guilty. These are my kinfolk, for sure.

   Far more troublesome, I think, is our tendency toward insularity and suspicion. While it's hard for those in power to manipulate somebody who's just plain stubborn, the early "Big Mules" of colonial life learned quickly how to play on our insecurities for their own purposes-including their unconscionable race-baiting up through the Civil Rights Era, a tactic intended to keep both poor whites and poor blacks "in their place." Namely, divided, and thus less likely to cause trouble in the workplace and at the ballot box.

   Other than the race issue, the most tried-and-true red flags that the powerful have traditionally raised, against any new undertaking to which they're opposed, are religion and money.

   That said, I'm discouraged-but not surprised-that the most vocal early opposition to a new Alabama Constitution is coming from the religious right.

   Take John Eidsmoe, a Montgomery author and law professor who's published numerous books and articles on religion in government. In an Internet forum, he gives some reasons we should be wary of tampering with the 1901 Constitution: (1) Nefarious unnamed forces might change the Constitution's preamble, which currently invokes "the favor and guidance of Almighty God"; (2) Higher taxes might be forced upon us ("I sense that the citizens as a whole are less enthusiastic about new taxes than are the editorial writers," Eidsmoe comments); and (3) the Alabama Constitution's "right to bear arms" clause is somehow stronger (he explains why, but the reasoning escapes me) than the U.S. Constitution's-thus, opponents of a new state constitution
should "use this to alert groups like the National Rifle Association, Gun Owners of America, and various sportsmen's groups to this danger," he suggests.

   In other words, a new state constitution would clearly be anti-God, pro-tax, and anti-gun. And yet, not a word of this perverse document has even been written. But then, such scare tactics have been working for more than a century. So why change horses, now?

   And if you didn't pick up on the subtle anti-outsider theme in his choice of the words "editorial writers," Eidsmoe appeals more directly to our xenophobia in another of his commentaries:

   "We have no idea who would attend such a convention, how the delegates would be selected, who would lead it, by what rules they would proceed, what well-financed special interests would control them, or what kind of constitution they would devise."

   Personally, I found this line of reasoning so troubling that I decided to find out more about where Eidsmoe is coming from, ideologically. I almost wish I hadn't.

   In his book God and Caesar: Biblical Faith and Political Action, the author argues that America has strayed from the solid principles of its founders. Not exactly a new idea. But what are those principles, in Eidsmoe's view? Biblical law. And the Protestant version of it, at that. He writes that the Founding Fathers certainly "did not want a pure, direct democracy in which the majority can do as it pleases."

   The first time I came across that line, it sent a chill down my spine. Repeated readings have had the same effect. I don't believe that any of us, regardless of ancestry, can ever completely overcome the quirks and traits that are literally bred into our blood and bones. But I do have faith that we can come to recognize old lies that have worn thin from long use in subordinating our citizens' personal interests to those of the powerful. And I believe it can happen now, on the issue of a desperately needed new constitution for our state.

   In the interest of open disclosure, I have a political agenda of my own: one that, coincidentally, also comes under the topic of heritage and kin. I have a granddaughter so new she's not even walking yet, but who deserves a better education and a better future than we can provide her through the perpetually under-funded and patched-up schools and colleges that are among the many legacies of a corrupt constitution.

   And a democracy wouldn't be bad to have around, either.

————————————————————————————

Dale Short is a journalist, novelist, and teacher who lives in Birmingham. His newest book, A Writer's Tool Kit, is available online at www.writerstoolkit.com. He can be reached by e-mail: DShort@bham.rr.com.

Return to: Editorial Index