A Nation of Regions
An article at the Washington Monthly by Colin Woodard distills his new book, American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, down to two to three dozen paragraphs. He outlines the historical conditions that created enduring, distinct, and in some cases conflicting political cultures for these regions. Furthermore, these distinctions are reflected “in linguists’ dialect maps, cultural anthropologist’s maps of the spread of material culture, cultural geographer’s maps of religious regions, and the famous blue county/red county maps of nearly every hotly contested presidential election of the past two centuries.” Based on this foundation, he proceeds to offer an explanation for the varying regional appeal of the Tea Party, and it’s ultimate doom:
“In short, the Tea Party and the Deep South may do the country serious harm, but they will not take it over. They may hobble the workings of Congress, inject flat-earth thinking into Senate debates, or even capture the presidency next year. But their policy program will never win the hearts and minds of a clear majority of Americans, and it carries the seeds of its own destruction.”
Woodard moves on to offer a suggestion or two as to how progressives can use this keen insight to secure a governing majority at some point in the future. There’s some to like here — the regional analysis, while not as sophisticated or empirically supported as an academic work in political geography would produce, resonates prima facie. (Note, I’ve not read the book itself; it’s possible that it’s chock-a-block with sophisticated empirical support for the thesis). Also, the no-brainer suggestion for progressives is to go after “El Norte” and the Latino vote is something I think most of us can agree on.
However, I have a couple critiques of varying efficacy for the central thesis. First, it is temporally deterministic in that it presumes a region’s political culture is established by the behaviors and attitudes of the first immigrants to that region, and then is immutable. This might be true for some regions to varying degrees, but historically the political culture of a region is dynamic, subject to both internal and external patterns of immigration. Second, and this is more of an epistemological critique that most readers here likely will not agree with, is the use of the C word. Culture. As in the political / ideological motivations, attitudes, behaviors, and decisions of those within these regions are determined by those original immigrants to these regions.
A consideration of my home region, The Left Coast (I was born in San Jose, grew up in Seattle), calls this into question. I’d suggest that the political culture of this region has changed considerably in the past half century: as recently as the 1960 Presidential election, Richard Nixon received all the electoral votes on the west coast.
What this piece has done for me however is to consider empirically testing the core thesis — that a handful of ideological positions vary predictably with these regions — using individual level data. Or, alternatively, simply skimming the political geography literature to see if something similar has already been done (which is quite likely).
h/t Jeff Frane.
He lost me at “The Midlands”. Also, he fails to notice that Delaware is essentially Swedish.
Yes, “The Midlands” is ridiculous. The idea that Baltimore has more in common with Des Moines than it does with Philadelphia seems hard to sustain.
By which I mean to say, the idea that Philadelphia has more in common with Des Moines than it does with New York or Baltimore. Stupid tiny map.
And I’m similar dubious of the idea that Pittsburgh is more like Dallas than it is like Cleveland or Buffalo.
Philadelphia, maybe not. But the rest of Pennsylvania? There’s going to be an inherent problem mapping any large city into the rest of a geographic area. Been to Atlanta and then gone to the red dirt farms? Not really the same thing, although a lot of Atlanta you could plug right into Athens.
I think you’re missing the forest for the trees here. Is New Orleans like the rest of the Deep South? No. Is South Indiana like North Indiana? No. Those are all captured by this map, and hundreds of other distinctions that make TOTAL SENSE TO ME, having grown up an army brat in dozens of states. Some small details might be wrong, but this looks largely right to me.
Within each state, the distinctions usually make sense (although the meanderings of the Midlands don’t really make sense at any point. But it doesn’t take much insight to note that Louisiana is different from the rest of the South, or that the northern parts of the Great Lakes States are different from the southern parts.
The problem is the way those micro-insights are synthesized in a macro-way. “New France,” for example, is ridiculous. Quebec is French-speaking, heavily urban, and has a European-style social welfare network. Louisiana has a very limited and backwards French-speaking population that has been shrinking for 100 years or so, a U.S. south style minimalist government, and an enormous African-American population. Besides the French language, it’s hard to see any serious commonalties.
And while of course urban areas and rural areas will have different profiles even in the same region, I don’t think that really saves this conception. The problem is that some of these regions are just really weird. Is Chicago different from Peoria? Sure. Is it really more like Manchester, New Hampshire, than it is like Peoria? I am doubtful. And there are, I suspect, just as many proposed commonalties THAT MAKE NO SENSE TO ME as there are distinctions THAT MAKE TOTAL SENSE TO YOU.
I prefer the Pop-Soda-Coke map for dividing up NY and PA. Also seems helpful for IN, KY, VA and FL.
Perhaps you would like Garreau’s “The Nine Nations of North America” better. The Foundry includes Milwaukee, Chicago, MI, OH, PA, MD, NJ and NY. Metro NYC is an outlier and the book is 30 years old.
I read that book recently.
I submit that the the east coast of “the Foundry” – NYC, Philly, Washington – has gone on such a different trajectory from the interior portion around the Great Lakes that it has essentially split off, and merged with New England to create an “Acela” region.
Wow, that book. My dad had that and I used to occasionally skim through it as a kid. As jfL says, the Foundry is problematic in its own way.
On the whole, I think all of these efforts are bound to be a bit oversimplified and have problems. “The Midlands” on this particular map seem especially problematic, though.
Thanks all for your interest in the American Nations thesis and the interesting commentary.
I’d urge everyone to judge the overall thesis based on the book-length treatment, rather than the summary overview in this (and other)articles which, by necessity, skip over detail and nuance. There’s also an accurate, high-resolution two-page map from which to discern which cities are in which “nations.” (The cover art was created for Viking by a third party, with some artistic license.)
For example: Baltimore, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh are all in the Midlands (and so, yes, they have as much or more in common with one another than with Dallas or Des Moines.)
Further, the Midlands is not just a dumping ground for places that “don’t fit.” For some detailed scholarship on the region, try David Hackett Fisher’s Albion’s Seed (on origins), or Paul Kleppner’s work on political/cultural divisions in the 19th century midwest (for westward settlement flows.) (References in the book.)
Garreu’s Nine Nations is mentioned in the book’s introduction. We share the view that the underlying cultural fissures don’t match state boundaries, but the books are very different in methodology, research questions, and conclusions.
Thanks again for your interest.
OTOH, I’m completely down with central and downstate Illinois being part of Greater Appalachia. Yeeeeeee-haw!
Southern Illinois is fairly Appalachian in character, but central Illinois (Springfield, Peoria, Bloomington/Normal, Champaign/Urbana, Decatur) is not all that culturally distinct from northern Illinois.
I live in CU. Outside the downstate cities, and to a certain extent inside them, I see a lot of difference between us and Chicagoland culturally.
Do you think that difference is greater than the difference between Chicago and New England?
This is what I was driving at. The culture in Peoria is more similar to that of Chicago than it is to (for example) Lexington, Kentucky.
It’s more accurate to say that Southern Illinois is more of the Ohio Valley than it is of the prairie. I’d divide the atate into Chicagoland, the prairie, and Little Egypt (Illinois south of Springfield), although even that tends to look over the little pockets of liberalism in the state university towns, which are fairly evenly spread over the state (at least down to Carbondale, anyway).
Good article, but I was wondering how much Woodard draws from Albion’s Seed, which I haven’t read in it’s entirety since I have the attention span of a coked out squirrel.
There is a Midlands dialect zone between Yankee and Southerner, but his Midlands is too cramped and doesn’t match it, not to speak of the gerrymandering.
Seems like a lot of Albion’s Seed. The Quaker Midlands there seemed to be a catchall, and it was the route through which the 19th c. immigrants came, leaving the South and Yankee areas less affected.
Er, why does South Florida not exist on the map? Did it not fit in with one of his categories, so he just left it out?
Yes.
South Florida is properly considered a part of a region including the islands to its south.
He couldn’t come up with a nifty tag that captured the essence of mixing Cubans, Haitians, British expats, Canadian snowbirds, and NYC Jews in the same place.
As the book explains, I had to draw a line somewhere, and the rationale I used was to exclude regional cultures primary located outside of the present U.S./Canada. South Florida is part of a wider Spanish Caribbean cultural region I did not explore; Hawaii is part of Polynesia; Newfoundland is either its own nation or an extension of an Anglo-Irish one.
@LKS: If I’d wanted too, I’m sure I could have come up with a nifty tag.
If you had drawn the line around the north and west edge of Dade County, I’d almost agree with you. But you didn’t, which means you don’t know jack shit about south Florida.
I think we’re seeing the effects of migration on a place’s identity.
As retirees from the northeast have migrated to central Florida, the line has moved south, closer to Miami, but not too long ago, it would have made perfect sense for it to be up near Tampa.
Well maybe he doesn’t. How relevant is that really, though? It’s a portion of the country he explicitly excluded from his analysis. You don’t have to be so aggressively mean about it.
Actually, that over-the-top aggression perfectly characterizes the culture of south FL that I know.
Redo the Midlands and it makes sense but isn’t terribly original.
I think that’s the point – that these demarcations can be seen in several different contexts: linguistic, economic, etc. I don’t know how much I buy his argument about the Tea Party, though.
“A consideration of my home region, The Left Coast (I was born in San Jose, grew up in Seattle), calls this into question. I’d suggest that the political culture of this region has changed considerably in the past half century: as recently as the 1960 Presidential election, Richard Nixon received all the electoral votes on the west coast.”
I don’t think the West Coast has changed as much as the Republican party has changed. I remember reading about Republicans in the 50′s and 60′s. Chief Justice Warren? California Republican. In the 50′s. I think he’d be squarely in the radical, too crazy to get on TV branch of the Democratic party right now, amirite?
Oregon? My home state. Gawd luv em, but those were some amazingly progressive repubs they pumped out. I think they’re called “socialists” now – war loving socialists, but socialists nonetheless.
Reasonable minds can differ of course, but I think the slight change in culture on the West Coast is dramatically outweighed by the massive change in the Republican party.
People often forget (or rather, they just don’t care) how conservative most of California really is. Outside of the Bay Area and Los Angeles, most of California is solid red (and yes, I am aware that most people in California live in the Bay Area or LA Metropolitan Area). It is not the socialist paradise many people think it is.
Much of eastern and southeastern California–meaning Inyo, Kern, and San Bernadino counties–strike me as being much more politically, culturally, and even economically attuned to the conservative Mountain West than the West Coast. They seem hardly distinguishable from Utah, Wyoming, rural Nevada.
There’s a pretty active pipeline of migration back and forth between Kern County and Oklahoma; San Bernardino seems to have a lot of folks who also call Arizona home. California’s a land of immigrants; some immigrate from the other 49 states.
Obama won Fresno, Riverside and San Bernadino counties. These counties are all centered upon a city that is larger than SLC and they also contain many more Mexicans. The Riverside-San Bernadino MSA is 4x larger than the SLC MSA and each county is at least 45% Hispanic.
Obama won the coastal counties of of SLO, Ventura and San Diego but was under 55%. And of course Orange voted for the Republican.
I don’t think it’s the Republican party that has changed as much as the political context behind both parties has changed with time. There’s no doubt in 1960 that JFK was to the left of Nixon, yet the west coast went Nixon. When Nixon was elected in 1968, the left were despondent. Of course, today, Obama is to the right of Nixon, but it’s 40 years later. Even in 1968, both Oregon and California went for Nixon (yet the latter wouldn’t even elect him Governor in 1962). Only Washington on the so called “left coast” went for HHH.
Or to put it another way — both parties have moved well to the right.
Looks almost like an updated Nine Nations of North America.
How about Nine Nations of North America meets Albion’s Seed meets Kevin Philips’ The Emerging Republican Majority? That was my impression, at any rate.
I’m a believer in the idea that there are historical cultural differences among regions in the U.S. that can override economics in determining voting preferences. Can anyone doubt that the Philadelphia area feels different than the Boston area, North Jersey feels different than South Jersey, and Pittsburgh feels different than Detroit?
I guess I’d argue that Woodard’s Midlands is all of the leftover stuff that he couldn’t assign anywhere else, plus a corridor through OH, IN, IL, and the Dakotas to connect the various bits. For whatever reason, SE PA/South Jersey pronunciation became the RP of the U.S., but the unique Quaker/PA German culture didn’t transport too well. To me it seems the Midwestern part of what Woodard identifies as the Midlands is the heartland of Grain Country, which includes most of Iowa and parts of Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Minnesota. Drive west on a U.S. highway sometime and you’ll understand. There’s a point in those states where you say to yourself, “now I’m in the West”. And the Canadian parts of Woodard’s Midlands I would call the Canadian Heartland, which is to say the people who identify themselves as “not Americans” because of the American invasion. I mean really, what on earth can make Philadelphia, Des Moines, and the Toronto/Sarnia/Windsor area similar to each other?
There are two insane strips in the Midlands, one connecting Canada and Nebraska through the Dakotas, and one connecting Iowa to Pennsylvania. Supposedly if you travelled across the Dakotas there’d be a 50 mile stretch where you were neither in the West nor on the expanded Yankee area.
Supposedly MN, WS, and ND are Yankee, but that area has a lower proportion of people of English descent than anywhere but NYC, Hawaii, and parts of the American SW.
Neither of the Dakota’s are particularly consistent. For instance, South DAkota divides more or less at the Missouri. To the west you have large ranches, low population density and extremely right wing politics; to the east, small farms, much greater population density and and a mix of right wing (from the rural areas) and centrist (from the cities) politics. When SD had two representatives, the second district started about 50 miles from the eastern border, encompassing about 80-90% of the state’s area.
So SD is really two, two two states in one. I am less familiar with ND, but certainly the terrain and population issues are similar.
Sure, but the problem is that this author divided the Dakotas three ways, not two. The East-West divide is well known and even has an official longitude of division.
OK, I didn’t read your comment as saying that, but it is saturday morning.
and really MN, WS and ND (also eastern SD) are Scandinavian and German much more than English. It’s lutefisk and brats, not spotted dick and mushy peas
As a U.S. historian, I am extremely skeptical of these kind of books. They are overly deterministic and often cherry pick the cultural norms that best fit the thesis. This kind of analysis completely ignores internal migration. The Appalachian region does make a certain amount of sense, but what about the widespread Appalachian migration to the Great Lakes region? Can Latino migration outside of “El Norte” fundamentally change the culture of other regions? As Dave points out, the west coast has changed dramatically since 1960, particularly California, once one of America’s most conservative states.
It’s not that there aren’t regional differences. As a historian of the U.S. West primarily, I would argue the West is different in important ways than the rest of the nation. But those differences change over time and the West (or the South for that matter) has become significantly less important over time.
In the end, I just think the explanatory power of this kind of book is pretty limited.
This is also how I often view books like these; they seem a bit deterministic and overly reductionist. Which is not to dismiss the argument out of hand, just that I think there are significant exceptions to these kinds of arguments.
As an anthropologist, I agree that the US has many regional cultures and that those cultural differences impact significantly on politics, but the patterns are much more complicated than indicated here. It is also the case that, while the founding populations have an impact in establishing regional cultures, they can easily be swamped by later immigrants. Indeed, NYC owes less to the 17th century Dutch founders than to the waves of immigrants in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is also culturally distinct from upstate NY, as many other urban areas are from the more rural areas. Just as in your case of migration from Appalachia to the Midwest, much of central California is culturally similar to eastern Oklahoma, western Arkansas, southern Missouri, and east Texas owing to Dust Bowl migrations.
Remember the Russian who, several yrs. ago, predicted the division of these United Snakes into six different regional entities, each under the control/influence of Asian, European or Latin American areas or gov’ts.? Can’t remember the divisions, & of course he was pretty much full of shit, but it might be interesting to compare.
I also remember a full-page article in the Sunday L.A. Times Opinion section (When there was an Opinion section.) sometime in the ’80s (Or early ’90s; it’s all a blur.) that divided the U.S. into five culturally/politically/whatever distinct regions. I assume there was some actual research, if not a book or at least a paper behind the article, & it would be interesting to compare it to these nine regions. IIRC, its regions followed state lines, but I’ve no idea if it’s Internet-available, or what the search terms might be.
As for South Florida, the author probably considers it to be “La Sur,” because, as we all know, Miami is the capital of the Caribbean as well as the gateway to South America. I.e., the foreskin of America, ready to be cut from the rest of the continent at any moment.
Be careful wishing a briss upon South Florida!
“I also remember a full-page article in the Sunday L.A. Times Opinion section (When there was an Opinion section.) sometime in the ’80s…”
You may be thinking of Garreau’s THE NINE NATIONS OF NORTH AMERICA (1991) mentioned upthread. I know that’s what I immediately thought about upon reading the post.
…
OK, fine, the limited regional appeal of the Tea Party and inherent cultural differences will keep them from expanding to a full blown majority movement.
So the (currently a political minority) progressive movement should be able to expand it’s influence by trying to win the hearts and minds of people in some of the other regions because while local political/cultural norms can have a long timespan, they’re not “immutable”. Fair enough, even though they’ve been unable to do this for the past 100 years.
And the Tea Party would not be able to do this expansion via focused targetting? Do only progressives migrate out from their regions and expand their influence in other regions by mass action?
Right. This country has already gone fabsolutely ucking crazy from conservative influence in the last 30 years. So how do we figure that immensely pervasive political culture is going to stand still while we remake it in our own image?
I grew up in a small town in rural western NY state and went to Michigan State University in East Lansing. My father’s family was from eastern Massachusetts, and I used to spend my summers in Marblehead with my grandparents. Anyone who attempts to lump these three locations together in one political, cultural or linguistic group is simply making shit up.
the tea party sowed the seeds of its own soon-to-be extinction when it attracted primarily retirement or near-retirement aged white people, as its primary “membership”. this isn’t the demographic you want, if you plan on being around for more than a few years. they tend to have a shorter actuarial life expectancy than say, oh, 25 year-olds. the tea party will snuff itself out (as will rush limbaugh’s and glenn beck’s audiences), simply from aging and death.
I am very much associated with the Tea Party and the last I checked, at 45, not quite yet elderly …LOL. I have many friends the same and younger. I would think perhaps that the same is in order for progressives given their propensity for abortion. I should think it more difficult to spread the ideology when there are very few offspring to be inculcated with said ideology and carry it on.
Anyone who classifies the Deep South as a monolith without taking into account the urban/suburban/rural split (let alone the difference between the Northern halves of AL and GA and the Black Belt of Southern MS, AL, GA, and Tidewater SC)has not paid attention to Southern history and needs to have their conclusions reviewed carefully.
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