Born Fighting Read Free

experienced by those two states in Korea. 1
    The intense competitiveness that makes them good soldiers also has produced a legion of memorable athletes, business leaders, and even such completely American pastimes as NASCAR racing, which evolved from the exploits of the daring moonshine runners of the Appalachian Mountains during the days of Prohibition.
    They created and still dominate country music, which along with jazz and soul is a truly American musical form. Indeed, it would be fruitless to single out country music legends from this culture, because to name a dozen would be to leave another hundred out. Country music is at the heart of the Scots-Irish culture. It percolated for more than a century in the remote and distant mountains until WSM radio took it national in the 1930s through the Grand Ole Opry. In the hollows through those isolated earlier years the dulcimer found its plaintive notes, the traditionally exquisite violin turned into such a hot fiddle that some warned it came from the devil, and the
banjar
, a native African instrument made with a gourd, evolved into the hillbilly banjo.
    And they gave us so many brilliant writers—Mark Twain the lion among them, Horace Greeley, Edgar Allan Poe and Margaret Mitchell not far behind, and Larry McMurtry a good honorable mention—that their style of folklore became one of the truest American art forms. Not to mention a horde of thespians, including Tallulah Bankhead, Ava Gardner, Andie MacDowell, the legendary Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne, Robert Redford, and George C. Scott, who hailed from Wise County, Virginia, just a few miles down the road from Big Moccasin Gap. A thousand years ago, English monasteries searched out Scots, Welsh, or Irish monks to be their scribes, calling their native artistic talent “the Celtic curve.” And in the American South it has always been said that one cannot shoot an arrow up into the air without having it land on a soldier, a musician, or a writer.
    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. In this sense they have given us the truest American of all, the man the elites secretly love to hate (except in Hollywood, where he is openly reviled to the point of caricature), the unreconstructed redneck. Blamed for slavery even though only a minute percentage actually owned slaves, they suffered for generations after the Civil War due to the twin calamities of Reconstruction and the ever-increasing seclusion of the Appalachian and Allegheny Mountains.
    Enduring poverty at a rate that far exceeded the rest of the country, over the last century they scattered far and wide, following (most famously) the Hillbilly Highway up to the North-Central factory belt and the
Grapes of Wrath
roads into California, often taking their poverty with them. Conditioned by a thousand years of conflict, those who stayed behind resisted the Northern-dominated structure of the civil rights movement as an invasion from the outside just as vociferously as they had viewed the Civil War in such terms. The reformers who worked to help end segregation failed to understand the vital historical distinctions among white cultures in the South, forcing a fight with a naturally populist people who might otherwise have worked with them, at least on some points, if they had taken a different approach.
    The Scots-Irish did not merely come to America, they became America, particularly in the South and the Ohio Valley, where their culture overwhelmed the English and German ethnic groups and defined the mores of those regions. And the irony is that modern America has forgotten who they were (and are) so completely that it is rare to find anyone who can even recognize their ethnic makeup or identify their amazing journey and their singular contributions. It is no exaggeration to say that despite its obsession with race and