United States: two nations
Manuel E. Yepe
IN the mid-19th century, the Republican Party, representing
the interests of nascent industrial capital in the North, won
the military battle against the Southern Democratic Party,
representing and defending the slave plantation and slavery
itself.
However, the Southern institutions – including its religious
system which justified slavery and defined whites as superior
beings – did not disappear. The defeat suffered by the South
profoundly affected its society which, from that point,
perceived the North as alien, secularizing and foreign: an enemy
that had to be fought. The Civil War which ended for the North
in 1865, was only just beginning for the South.
The above is an appreciation by Nelson P. Valdés, a Cuban
academic resident in the United States for 40 years, in an email
interview.
According to this expert on U.S. history, Valdés who, until
his recent retirement, was a professor at the University of New
Mexico, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln by a Southerner in
1865 signified the first questioning of Northern power. And the
same situation has continued up until today.
Since then the South has perceived itself as discriminated
against by the power of the North. As family farms gradually
disappeared (replaced by agribusinesses) those displaced
ranchers opposed to the new capitalism – which, by paying low
wages to Mexicans, made it impossible for the farmers to prosper
– aligned themselves with the Southerners.
A Southern nationalism developed against the North. If one
thinks of the United States as one single nation, this is not
perceptible. But, in real terms, the country is made up of two
nations with distinct dynamics, Professor Valdés emphasizes.
Those in the South were free traders because plantation
owners in the South were dependent on cotton exports to Europe.
Those of the North, who were industrializing, were
protectionists, influenced by an ideology of self-employed work
directed at depending on the labor of farmers in rural areas,
with slaves or without them.
In the South, which extends geographically along the eastern
coast to Virginia and reaches the doors of Washington, the
plantation system dominated.
However, the military defeat of the South was not the defeat
of the institutions of the South, nor of its ideology. The North
became industrialized and over time (in this period) came to
depend on finance, the banks and mortgages – given that
industries disappeared with their export to the Third World. On
the other hand, the South continued being agricultural until
1920, when large-scale oil drilling began in Texas, Louisiana
and Alabama. So, it was in the South that, little by little, the
powerful oil cartel developed.
In the South, where whites were in the majority poor but saw
themselves as superior to the slaves, the Ku Klux Klan emerged
in 1865. Its function was to de facto maintain what was
prohibited by law. The prohibition on the black vote remained
and only after another Northern intervention with federal troops
100 years later were the civil rights of African Americans
legalized.
The nationalist and conservative ideology was founded in the
South within a tradition of identifying with the past. After
all, the founding fathers acknowledged slavery and did not
question it! The original constitution permitted slavery.
The religious aspect should not be overlooked. The ideology
of revenge has a basis within the religion of the Southern
Baptists. God chooses one group in particular and, for the
Southerners, they are the chosen people – as against the
Northerners. The expansion of the country before and after the
Civil War was led by Southerners. And the same thing happened in
the border states with Canada – where it merged with a Lutheran
tradition from Northern Europe with its own racist attitudes.
Many Southerners also went to Alaska. The state of Utah is
populated by Mormons, whose racist theology has a Southern basis
originating in the right-wing tradition of Arizona.
Ethnic and African-American groups have been influenced by
this ideology via the gospel of prosperity and security that
this movement has emphasized since the 19th century.
According to the Southern optic, President Barack Obama
represents Northern interests. He is a Northerner (from
Chicago), an African American and allied to the world of finance
– the three elements that unite the Southern right against the
North.
Nelson P. Valdés believes that the points of view of these
two poles of U.S. policies on relations with Cuba should be
perceived on the basis of the fact that Southerners are
conservative and, for that reason, opposed, to the point of
hatred, to progressive political ideas. For their part, the
Democrats of the North are not interested in wasting political
capital on the Cuba issue. This translates into it being a
non-issue in the framework of this national situation.
Moreover, "Cubans in government have not understood that
there are two nations in the United States, with two foreign
policies."
When there is talk in the United States of blue and red
states, above all in an election period, this is a reference to
two nations. And for Professor Valdés, the one that is growing
is the South.
http://www.granma.cu/ingles/international-i/29julio-30eeuu.html