Some of the modern stereotypes of the South is that there’s a lot of American flags on pickup trucks, they listen to a lot of country music that extol the virtues of America and military service, and send a lot of their sons and daughters into the service. I don’t know the precise percentages, but as of this article, southerners accounted for 37% of the casualties in the Iraq war:
But where did this overt patriotism come from? The South hated this country so much at one point that they tried to form their own country. Reconstruction created a lot more hatred and I’m sure that the federal government’s efforts to fight Jim Crow didn’t endear southerners to the federal government either.
So when did being the most vocal patriots become a part of southern culture? Is it a very recent phenomenon?
While the Southerners rebelling during the Civil War certainly had no love for the then-current government of the USA (as most Southerners today don’t either for the Obama administration), it should be noted that they revered the founding fathers, to the point that George Washington appeared on the Great Seal of the Confederate States of America. They believed that the federal government had betrayed the ideals of the nation’s founding, and that the South was carrying on the true ideals.
Then and today, I think Southerners are a prime example of “love the country, hate the government.”
The Confederates in 1861 believed that they were just following the example of the founding fathers, who, after all, had rebelled against their own government. It was called “the second American revolution” by Southerners at the time.
There also was the attitude after the war that if their ancestors had broken off from the US, they’d do the opposite.
Southern Patriotism was certainly well-established long before the time I was growing up there in the 1970s. I believe it could be traced back as least as far as WWI, Sergeant York, possibly as far back as the Tennessee Volunteers in 1812.
The concept of patriotism has evolved over the course of American history. Modern-style patriotic displays didn’t exist most of the time because America didn’t have a place in world culture until recently, after WWII. In cultural mythology, admittedly, America was a special place - the land of the free, the place where streets were paved with gold, Horatio Alger-type rise by your bootstraps successes - but it so obviously stood apart from the Old Country that daily displays weren’t necessary. Fourth of July celebrations, though, were extravagant, the biggest display of the year.
The South never hated the country. That’s nonsense. They hated the Northerners who dared to preach to them about slavery. The elite who ran the South considered their conception of the rights of individuals and of the individual power of their states to be the true successor to the beliefs of the Founding Fathers. They also considered themselves to be the only pure Americans, a contrast to the mongrel immigrants who were flooding to the North. (And especially to the “inferior” race they made sure stayed inferior.) References to a separate Southern Civilization abound in the hot talk leading up to the Civil War.
It’s doubtful that the small farmers of the South thought much about this but losing the war and the common connection of suffering through it and the years of deprivation following solidified a feeling that they, the true Americans, had been wronged somehow. A military culture had always existed - The Citadel and Virginia Military Institute were private rivals of West Point and Annapolis - and that intensified so that the South provided a disproportionate share of the national military from then on.
The overt displays of patriotism, chauvinism really, started before WWII with isolationist movements like America First and then morphed, with some of the same people, into an interventionist movement that put America first. It was another way of displaying the cultural differences between the coherent South and the bastardized North (although more East and West Coasts in recent years). Their own patriotism, their own culture, their own music, their own religion, their own exclusions. Obviously these were not as exclusive to the South as they pretended, just as their politics that reflect these patterns is not exclusive. Just magnified.
The South has always been the South, since before the Revolution. Nothing recent about it.
According to the U.S. Census (PDF file) the percentage of the total U.S. population contained in “the South” is…37%! (The South is also the single most populous of the four Census-defined regions.)
Granted, the Census Bureau’s definition of “the South” is somewhat idiosyncratic; soldiers from Maryland or Delaware probably wouldn’t self-identify as having come from “the South”; possibly Kentuckyians, West Virginians, or Oklahomans wouldn’t either. Hell, some Texans might not. If those troops were asked “Is your permanent residency in ‘the South’?” that could skew the results (as opposed to asking the troops “What state is your permenant residency in?” and then matching that up with the Census-defined region, which includes Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Oklahoma, as well as the District of Columbia).
Still…“Forty percent of all sick days in this company are taken on Monday or Friday!!!”
When parts of the Southern economy became intermeshed with the military-industrial complex would be a good starting place. A lot of the poor South also serves in the armed forces and while patriot is component of this, what is not often discussed is the raw, economic need, that is major factor. The armed forces got poor, farm boys and their descendants (since most of the small family farms are gone) out of deadend towns.
The South had strong military traditions long before the birth of the military-industrial complex. And that military tradition dates back to when the South was still frontier, and under chronic threat of attack from (understandably) hostile Indians. Jim Webb seems to think it’s a Scots-Irish cultural thing, but I’m not so sure. English settlers in the South had a fighting tradition before the Scots-Irish arrived in numbers.
The ostentatious patriotism is all tied up with the militarism, and it’s hard to separate the two.
Considering that 5 of the original 13 colonies are considered part of the South, I would say that nationalistic pride in the South has existed prior to the birth of our nation.
One factor not mentioned is the bitterly internecine nature of the American Revolution in the South. The Revolutionary War in the South was in large measure a civil war between American patriots and American loyalists (or tories). Neighbor vs. neighbor. This engendered enormous bitterness between the warring factions, and after the war, the loyalists were essentially driven out. It is not hard to imagine that this set of circumstances left the victors with an intense sense of patriotism.
As noted by previous posters, the South during the Civil War did not see itself as rebelling against American principles, but rather as being the true embodiment and heirs of those principles.