My (Nonexistent) Redneck Bar Mitzvah

James Webb's 2005 non-fiction bestseller Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America has captured the fancy of your intrepid blogger, oldstyleliberal. I mentioned it in my last post, Long Live the Scots-Irish!, and I hailed its author as a good vice presidential choice for Barack Obama in Jim Webb for Veep!.

Now I want to get personal. Something Webb talks about toward the end of his book hits me where I live.

That something is what he refers jocularly to as the Redneck Bar Mitzvah. It has long been the custom among America's Scots-Irish for the boys to undergo an initiation. Jewish boys get bar mitzvah'd at age 13. Scots-Irish boys get their first rifle somewhat earlier, get taught to hunt and survive in the wilderness, master some form of physical or athletic challenge, even if it's mechanical like drag racing or virtual like video gaming, then go into the military. It's a process much longer than a formal initiation in a temple would take, but it is what allows a Scots-Irish boy to take his rightful place as a man within the group Webb calls the "Celtic kinship."

I missed my Redneck Bar Mitzvah. As a result, I turned out to be way too "sissified."

Though I am of (mostly) Scots-Irish background, my window of opportunity — from ages 11 to 13, roughly — opened and shut without my father doing what was necessary to take me across the crucial threshold to manhood.

I started out as something of a boy's boy, wanting to go into the military, wanting to go to the Naval Academy. Dad was a chief of police and wore a uniform (occasionally) and carried a gun (also occasionally). He had come up through the ranks, taking time out during WWII to serve as an officer in the Coast Guard, a part of the U.S. Navy in the Pacific theater during wartime. He was an expert marksman and liked to go on hunting trips with his buddies. I idolized the man my father was.

But I was also an incipient sissy. I sucked my thumb until I was 12, wet the bed until I was 16. When I got my first BB gun, my mother laid down the law that I couldn't actually shoot it unless Dad was present to supervise.

And that was exactly the problem: Dad wasn't present all that much.

I don't remember exactly what year the trouble started; it may have been in 1956 or '57, when I (an only child) was 9 or 10. My father had been promoted from captain to chief of the then-tiny United States Park Police in Washington, D.C., in 1954, when I was 7. He had beaten out two lieutenants, former buddies of his, who as the years went by became increasingly convinced he had gotten the promotion because he was Protestant and they were Catholic.

The Catholics on the force turned against him. One of them had a brother, not on the force, that began a harassment campaign that centered on dialing our home phone at 3 A.M. in the morning and letting it ring until Mom or Dad picked up ... by which time sleep was ruined.

So there developed an ongoing civil war on the U.S.P.P., and my father's head was being called for on a platter in some quarters of the Department of the Interior' National Park Service, which had authority over the force. My father was innocent of having obtained his promotion through prejudice, or treating Catholics on the force unfairly. But that didn't matter. He was pilloried repeatedly in the Washington papers for years on end. When John F. Kennedy became our first Catholic president in 1961, the handwriting was on the wall for his career.

(By the way, I write this as one who has converted as an adult to the Roman Catholic faith. Obviously, I bear no ill will toward Catholics, either today or "back in the day" when I was growing up — and, I can say with certainty, neither did my father, who was nominally Protestant but never much of a churchgoer.)

Between, say, 1957 and 1960, I went through my "years of trouble" when I needed but wasn't getting the strong fatherly initiation James Webb calls the Redneck Bar Mitzvah. It was during these same years that my father was fighting an internecine civil war while trying to administrate a police force. He was also unfortunately sick during a long stretch of this period with gall bladder problems that required two or three surgeries before he finally got well.

So he didn't have a lot of time for me. Not a lot of father-son bonding went on during these turbulent years.

When I was 11 and in sixth grade, my best friend Jip, a Thai boy, moved away. He had been my prime connection into the group of boys we played with and went to school with. I found it hard to forge my own bonds with the boys after that, and it got worse in seventh and eighth grades, by now in junior high school, when a couple of the boys began to bully me. I didn't know how to fight back. My father spoke of getting me some martial arts training, but it never happened.

As a result, I found out that I could by sheer will power make myself sick every school-day morning, so I wouldn't have to go to school. That went on for several months, until my parents consulted a pediatrician/child psychologist named Dr. Knop.

I don't know whether Dr. Knop believed in the Redneck Bar Mitzvah, but she had something like it in mind when she told my father he had to start being more of a father to me.

Pursuant to that advice, he decided to teach me to shoot a gun. But instead of doing it himself — he just didn't have the time — he had one of the cops on the force, Cpl. Papuga, a great guy and a super marksman, give me lessons every Saturday at the U.S.P.P. pistol range. I learned to shoot, but I developed no emotional attachment to it, as I would have if Dad were doing the teaching.

Later, there were horseback riding lessons. This time I was farmed out to the owner of a stable where the U.S.P.P. boarded some of its horses. Again, it wasn't the same as if Dad were doing the honors.

One day Dad and Cpl. Papuga took me groundhog hunting. For whatever reason, I was not eligible to do any shooting. Between the two of them, only Dad had a single shot at a groundhog ... and he missed. Then I got carsick on the way home. That day was not exactly my Redneck Bar Mitzvah, I can tell you.

I could go on, but you get the point. There are junctures in the life of every boy, of every person, where certain seemingly atavistic things have to happen. If they don't, it's as if life has pushed his head far down into deep water, and he has to kick one's way back up slowly, desperately, belatedly to the surface of normality. He eventually does surface, but meanwhile he is irretrievably behind in his developmental curve.

That's what happened to me, oldstyleliberal. As a result, my inclinations toward masculine stuff like going into the military simply evaporated. When I later entered as a freshman at Georgetown University in 1965, I was soon alerted to the fact that there was a war heating up in Vietnam, and I might one day have to fight in it. Little wonder that that war didn't appeal to "sissified" me. I was against it on moral grounds, but deep down I think I opposed it mainly because I knew that either (a) I wouldn't be able to hack it as a soldier, or (b) I would, but only by virtue of the belated initiation into manhood the military experience would represent.

People tend to resist belated initiations they have already compensated for having missed out on.

I'm not going to give you chapter and verse here and now, but I can now see that my having missed my Redneck Bar Mitzvah and become "sissified" has shaped my life ever since, both the good and the bad aspects of it. I am undoubtedly more prone to go along with, say, the feminist movement because of this omission in my developmental process ... and that I count as a blessing. On the other hand, I realize I simply do not have the ability to distinguish between a necessary war and an unnecessary one. It's one thing to be a "normal" man and yet decide one is against all war. That's an honorable choice. It's another thing entirely to be against all wars out of a reflexive "sissified" outlook that came about because one's father was too busy fighting alligators in his career path to see to one's Redneck Bar Mitzvah.


Postscript: My father and I remained close, if at daggers drawn much of the time, after I graduated college and went out on my own. Psychologists would say my attitude toward him was "ambivalent." But we both loved Mom and managed to patch up our differences rather than tear apart our little three-person family. In 1985 Mom died, and I kept on visiting Dad regularly — he was having his daily needs seen to by a wonderful young couple who lived in the living quarters Mom and Dad had built in the basement of their new home, in 1976, just for that purpose.

On the last Christmas visit before he died in mid-1988, he went to bed early one evening, as was his wont, while I usually hitched a La-Z-Boy recliner around to watch some TV before my own bedtime. On this particular evening, he came out of the bedroom and into the living room unexpectedly. He was, I'll never forget, wearing his navy blue bathrobe, the one he got when he was in the Coast Guard in WWII and still wore.

I suspect that his short-term memory loss due to the dementia he suffered from, at age 83, had led to his forgetting that I was in the house, and he came out to the living room to see why the TV was on. This is the moment I'll cherish forever: he saw me, his son, unexpectedly there, and his face lit up.

Wanting to cover up the fact that he had forgotten I was visiting, he said, "Son, I just wanted to tell you how glad I am to have you here with me now." But I realized it was also the truth, and the peculiar situation had simply jolted it out of him.

I said, "Dad, I am very glad to be here with you." I was too surprised to say or do much more than that in response. We Scots-Irish men don't do a lot of hugging. I was too far across the room to go to him without it seeming forced, anyway.

But that was fine with him. He smiled, said "Good night, son," and went back to his bedroom.

After I went home from that visit I never saw Dad alive again. But at the very end of his life we two had managed to reconcile all our silly differences of a lifetime in that perhaps thirty seconds of a brief, unexpected encounter, and we both knew it.

Long Live the Scots-Irish!

In Jim Webb for Veep! I extolled the (hoped-for) sensibility of Barack Obama tapping this man to be his vice-presidential running mate:


The man is James Webb, recently elected senator from Virginia, a Democrat who takes a backseat to no one in his support of our fighting men and women in uniform — which is not the same thing as support for President Bush's ill-conceived war in Iraq, mind you.

Webb served with distinction in Vietnam and, at that time a Republican, became President Ronald Reagan's Secretary of the Navy. He has since switched to the Democratic Party because he feels "it is now the Republican Party that most glaringly does not understand the true nature of military service."

As any reader of Webb's 2005 non-fiction bestseller Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America will tell you, Webb comes by his love for the military's fighting spirit honestly: it's in his Scots-Irish DNA. In his book, Webb traces the centuries-long journey of his people from the Scotland of William Wallace, proudly remembered as "Braveheart," to the Ulster Plantation of 17th-century Northern Ireland, site of the famed siege of Derry and the Battle of the Boyne, to the backcountry mountains of Appalachia during the formative centuries of American culture.

Scots-Irish Americans were the primary fighters of the Revolutionary War and of the Civil War. These hardscrabble Calvinist Presbyterians from Scotland by way of Ulster — who in America often became Baptists and Methodists — are the unsung backbone of our basic notion of what it means to be an American, as they have spread far and wide from their original Appalachian hill country and taken their instinctive indomitability with them wherever they have roamed.


oldstyleliberal, your intrepid blogger, figures he is anywhere from one-half to three-quarters Scots-Irish. His last name is Stewart, and his lineal Stewart forebear is known to have emigrated from Ulster to the United States at about the time of the War of 1812 ... well after the main tide of Ulstermen arrived here during the fifty years or so prior to the American Revolution. My Stewart progenitor's brother (or was it a cousin?) emigrated with him; he was named Alexander Turney Stewart and founded the first department store, A.T. Stewart's, later to become Wanamaker's.

Other names in my family tree include Berry, Henry, Armstrong, Robinson, and Stephens on my mother's side, and Warnes, Davis, Campbell, and Thompson on my father's side. Of these, the only name I know for sure didn't arrive here on a boat from Northern Ireland is Warnes; the Warneses came to America direct from England. Some of the other names may or may not be Scots-Irish. I have some detailed genealogical information on my line of Berrys, for instance, but it seems to stop at the water's edge and leave in doubt where the original Berrys came from, pre-America.

My people in general seem to have spent a lot of time in Scots-Irish haunts in Virginia, Kentucky, Illinois, and Missouri. Some of those places are, of course, in the Appalachians, while others are mentioned by Webb as places that received an outpouring of the original Scots-Irish Americans, ever known (even before they were American) to have congenital wanderlust. Way back in the mists of prehistory, the Scots-Irish were descended from the nomadic ancestors of the Scottish people, the Celts.


The Celts pretty much had all of northern Europe to themselves when the Roman Empire conquered them ... anyone remember Caesar's Gallic Wars? The Gauls who held France in the Bronze and Iron Ages were Celts, related to the Celtic tribes whose territory included modern England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and Cornwall. Even the Germanic "barbarians" before whose onslaught Rome eventually fell may have been Celts once. The Celts were everywhere, for two reasons. One, they loved to fight and conquer. Two, they hated to stay put in any one place.

Their fierce, uncivilized ways made it too hard for them to organize to fight off the well-disciplined Roman legions on the European continent, but it was a different story when Rome tried to subjugate the Celts in the far-flung extremities of Great Britain, where Roman supply lines couldn't easily reach. There the guerrilla tactics of the locals had a chance to win, and did win.

The Romans built Hadrian's wall and even another wall farther north to try to mark the top edge of their civilization. The Picts, Scots, and other Celts north of the wall weren't having any of it. They wanted their land back: the areas now known as the southwestern lowlands of Scotland and the border regions of England.

It was these areas that produced the heroes William Wallace, called "Braveheart," and Robert the Bruce, immortalized in song as the "Flower of Scotland," when another conquering civilization, that of the cruel Norman King Edward I of England, tried to force Scots to their knees in the late 13th century.


Starting in about 1610, during the period in England when the throne passed back and forth among Catholic and Protestant rulers and claimants, Northern Ireland's Ulster Plantation, controlled by England, was the target of Protestant colonization from Britain, following the mass exodus of the Catholic Gaelic leaders of that area in 1607. Many of those who arrived (were "planted") in Ulster then were lowland Scots or people from the English border areas who had basically the same culture.

Those people became known later as the Scots-Irish. When in the early 18th century the British throne tried to make these hardscrabble Presbyterians truckle to the Anglo-Irish Protestants who upheld the established Anglican faith in not-yet-independent Ireland, the Scots-Irish began decamping in large numbers to America.

Coming in largely through Pennsylvania, where they were quickly despised by the peace-loving Quaker power elite who had invited them there to act as a warlike buffer against the Indians in the western areas of the colony, they continued their trek southward and wound up in the Piedmont and Appalachian regions of Virginia and North Carolina.

Indian fighters and explorers who could not be content until they pushed further westward into the Ohio Valley and what are now the states of Tennessee and Kentucky — Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone were of Ulster stock — the Scots-Irish who did not move westward were tolerated (barely) by the Tidewater aristocracy of Virginia and the Carolinas, who allowed them to worship in their own Calvinist ways even though it was officially illegal so to do.


Those Scots-Irish Americans then proceeded to get ambushed by history. Many of them lived in states that seceded during the Civil War, and though few of them were rich enough to own slaves, their loyalty to the Confederacy was a foregone conclusion. After all, the North was in the political hands of those who reverently looked back, culturally, religiously, and philosophically, not to Celtic Scotland but to Norman England ... which made all the difference in the world to the people who were now America's Scots-Irish.

These people had always had a bottom-up way of organizing their loyalties. It was their local clan chieftain to whom they owed their sense of duty, no some far-off lord who may or not have cared one whit for their welfare. While England under the Romans and later under the Normans was evolving a top-down democracy with many layers of duty owed and duty received, the Celtic residues in the north kept to the old, bottom-up ways of owing personal, not institutional, fealty.

When the Protestant Reformation hit, the Celts were drawn to a Calvinist/Presbyterian version of Protestantism which was maximally suspicious of any sort of church hierarchy.

When their original homeland, Scotland, was becoming a leading light of Enlightenment philosophy in the 18th century, the Scots-Irish over in Ulster were fighting oppression where they now lived and trekking to the uncouth regions of America where the only reading matter — for those who could read — was the Bible.

When the tides of history turned against the African slavery so notable in their adopted new home, the southland of America, they found they were on the wrong side of history yet again. They fought valiantly and died for the Confederacy as the bastion of, again, their God-given right to liberty and self-determination as a free people.

It was the insult of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period, during which those unspeakable bullies from the North rubbed the Scots-Irish southerners' noses in their own "backwardness," that the Presbyterian-Baptist-Methodist faith of the Scots-Irish hardened into an anti-Darwinist fundamentalism, as a way of saying no thank you, we aren't having any of your "better-educated" ways of doing business in the world. That was the real reason behind the Scopes "Monkey" trial of 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee.


By the time yours truly was born in 1947, his father and mother had moved from the Ozarks of Missouri to the citified East, where they were upwardly mobile former Baptists (Mom) and Methodists (Dad), self-educated beyond their schooling and with modern lifestyles that were anathema to the old folks back home. When Mom and Dad took me to Springfield, Missouri, for a visit with Grandpa and Grandma Berry, they had to secrete themselves in their bedroom for a smoke and a drink of ... Scotch.

But they still delighted in watching southwestern Missouri's own version of Grand Ole Opry, called Ozark Jubilee, on TV. It was televised on a national hookup in Washington. D.C. and around the country. The music it featured was "country" music, just a hop, skip, and a jump from the music of the original Scots-Irish Americans.

Though their respective parents, my grandparents, were teetotalers, they relished a drink of spirits as much as any backwoods moonshiner of Scots-Irish derivation ever did. (Webb mentions over and over how the Scots-Irish were at one and the same time strong for God and religion and yet devoted to liquor, lasciviousness, and a life of the senses. This is something I don't suppose can ever be fully explained ... but I note that it is equally true of the African American descendants of slaves, whose sacred and secular music combined with that of the Scots-Irish to make rock 'n' roll.)

I grew up in a cultural atmosphere that derided everything my Scots-Irish forebears upheld: loyalty to one's local tribe over national aspirations, practicality over intellectuality, peace-loving ways over the love of a good fight, etc. Yet there has always been in me the sort of romantic who weeps at the end of the movie Braveheart and chokes up at a good old country music weeper like Dolly Parton's "Coat of Many Colors."

Perhaps it is the Scots-Irish in me that keeps me a moderate oldstyleliberal and not a partisan of the far left. Perhaps it's why, after reading James Webb's book, I want to shout from the rooftops, "Long live the Scots-Irish!"

"Heed lessons of '72"

Religious studies professor Ira Chernus writes in "Heed lessons of '72," an op-ed piece in today's Baltimore Sun, that the Democratic Party of 2008 must avoid making the same mistake it did in 1972. In that year Democrats nominated the antiwar candidate George McGovern as their presidential standardbearer. Most Americans were by that time against the Vietnam War, but instead of backing McGovern, they reelected Richard Nixon in a landslide.

Republicans tarred McGovern as the candidate of "acid, amnesty, and abortion." LSD, known as "acid," was the drug of choice in the ostentatious counterculture of the day. The political radicals of the era were calling for amnesty for draft resisters. The following year, 1973, would find a liberal Supreme Court upholding a woman's constitutional "right to choose" in Roe v. Wade.

Chernus writes that the main reason McGovern lost was the insistence of insiders in the Democratic Party power structure that the platform McGovern would run on should contain a strong antiwar plank. Meanwhile, Nixon ran on a pledge to wind the war down gradually, while preserving America's "honor" — a code word, Chernus points out, for "keeping the nation's moorings in familiar cultural traditions of the past."

Chernus thinks this year's presidential contest parallels that one. Most voters actually oppose the Iraq War, but there is great danger that the skin color or unusual name and family background of Barack Obama will trigger a victory for war hero John McCain nevertheless, particularly if McCain is handed strong antiwar language in the Democratic platform on which he can embroider code words to draw votes from those who fear too much "change" in America too soon.

This analysis interests your blogger oldstyleliberal greatly, in part because he thinks it's correct, and in part because it reveals something profound about human nature. Most people want peace, preferring it in the abstract to war hands down. What's more, most people think this war is a mistake. Yet such sentiments take a back seat to an inchoate fear that coming out strongly against the war is the sign of a candidate who is more of a "goody goody" than America is ready for.

So people want to keep the "better angels of our nature" on a short leash. The "liberal" politics that promises to fulfill our human longing for peace (or justice, or equality, or unfettered liberty) needs to be restrained, lest America grow flabby and weak. We do not dare be more "goody goody" than our enemies, or they will have us for breakfast.

When push comes to shove, fear trumps our "better angels" every time.