Thursday Open Comments

This book was written by the controversial former Senator from Virginia and Secretary of the Navy, James H. Webb, of Virginia.  I was reminded of this book when reading last weekend an opinion piece (behind the paywall) by Gary Andersen in Military Times titled, Why Our Generals Can’t Think, describing an Atlantic magazine column (sorry, also behind the paywall) by Franklin Foer about Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal in which not one single American flag officer ever objected to using Kabul airport instead of the much more secure and safe US military-managed Bagram air base.  Stupid is as stupid does.

I bought this book when it was released in 2004 and read it without stopping.  It changed and deepened my understanding of American history in ways no history book had ever done before.  If you want to truly understand not only the spirit and soul of native America, but grasp the heart and soul of its deep sense of survival then buy this book and read it and maybe read it again as I have done.

More than 27 million Americans today can trace their lineage to the Scots, whose bloodline was stained by centuries of continuous warfare along the border between England and Scotland, and later in the bitter settlements of England’s Ulster Plantation in Northern Ireland. Between 250,000 and 400,000 Scots-Irish migrated to America in the eighteenth century, traveling in groups of families and bringing with them not only long experience as rebels and outcasts but also unparalleled skills as frontiersmen and guerrilla fighters. Their cultural identity reflected acute individualism, dislike of aristocracy and a military tradition, and, over time, the Scots-Irish defined the attitudes and values of the military, of working class America, and even of the peculiarly populist form of American democracy itself.

and,

Born Fighting shows that the Scots-Irish were 40 percent of the Revolutionary War army; they included the pioneers Daniel Boone, Lewis and Clark, Davy Crockett, and Sam Houston; they were the writers Edgar Allan Poe and Mark Twain; and they have given America numerous great military leaders, including Stonewall Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, Audie Murphy, and George S. Patton, as well as most of the soldiers of the Confederacy (only 5 percent of whom owned slaves, and who fought against what they viewed as an invading army). It illustrates how the Scots-Irish redefined American politics, creating the populist movement and giving the country a dozen presidents, including Andrew Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton. And it explores how the Scots-Irish culture of isolation, hard luck, stubbornness, and mistrust of the nation’s elite formed and still dominates blue-collar America, the military services, the Bible Belt, and country music.

Buy the book and read it.