Colin Woodard by American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America

VIKING
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    First published in 2011 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
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Copyright © Colin Woodard, 2011 All rights reserved
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    Maps drawn by Sean Wilkinson, Sean Wilkinson Design
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    LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Woodard, Colin,—————.
American nations : a history of the eleven rival regional cultures of North America /
Colin Woodard.
p. cm.
Includes index.
    ISBN : 978-1-101-54445-7
    E98.F39W66 2011
    970.004’97—dc22 2011015196
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For my father,
    James Strohn Woodard,
who taught me to read and write

THE AMERICAN NATIONS TODAY

Introduction
    O n a hot late-August day in 2010, television personality Glenn Beck held a rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on the forty-seventh anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Mr. Beck stood where Rev. King had stood and addressed the white, mostly middle-aged crowd encircling the National Mall’s Reflecting Pool. “We are a nation, quite honestly, that is in about as good a shape as I am, and this is not very good,” he joked. “We are dividing ourselves,” he said, “but our values and our principles can unite us. We must discover them again.”
    It’s a theme heard again and again in times of crisis: Americans have become divided on account of having strayed from the core principles on which their country was founded—a “firm reliance on divine providence” and “the idea that man can rule himself,” in Mr. Beck’s analysis—and must return to those shared values if unity is to be restored. When society was turned upside down by mass immigration at the turn of both the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries, intellectuals counseled that America was in danger of losing the “Anglo-Protestant” culture and associated “American creed” that had supposedly kept the nation unified. In the aftermath of the tumultuous 1960s, conservatives like Irving Kristol denounced liberal intellectuals, philanthropists, and social workers for abandoning America’s traditional capitalist values in favor of utopian social engineering; the liberals fervently defended these projects as promoting shared national