> The fourth wave included those people cleared from the Scottish Highlands.
> Hunting with guns was part of their legacy.
Michael Pugliese:
> >...What has been overlooked, however, is the influence of American
regional
> culture -- not only on
> attitudes toward the war in Kosovo but on the domestic politics of foreign
> policy throughout American
> history.
This is from Frederick Jackson Turner (b. 1861), he of the famous "frontier thesis," in his book _The United States, 1830 - 1850: The Nation and its Sections_ (1935). Jackson was a member of the history faculty at the University of Wisconsin from 1889 to 1910, moving then to Harvard where he remained until his retirement in 1924. He exercised his influence mainly through his essays, including "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," and his teaching. The work from which this is excerpted was intended as his summation/magnum opus, but was unfinished at his death in 1932. It was published from his manuscript and notes by his friends and disciples. This masterwork, btw, appears to be out of print except for a very expensive edition, but there was a Norton paperback (1965) from which the following is quoted (pp. 19-20 )
Jacob Conrad
------------------
Prior to 1830 the larger part of the interior of the union had been colonized from the back country of the South Atlantic section. It was not the tidewater planter who furnished the mass of these settlers, but the nonslaveholding upcountry farmer of the Piedmont region. In an earlier generation, these uplands had been settled by a combined stream of Scotch-Irish and Germans from Pennsylvania...
The ideas and leaders of this interior-valley society were profoundly to influence the political issues of the nation...
Composed of various stocks, the special element of Andrew Jackson's people was the Scotch-Irish–the contentious Calvinistic advocates of liberty... The Scotch-Irish had been accustomed to the life of cattle-raisers and fighters... The backwoods families made their ten- or twenty-acre clearing in the surrounding forest with the woodsman's tool, the American ax. They developed an individualism and with it a certain narrowness of view, and emphasized the doctrine of equality...
Along with individualism, self-reliance and equality, went antagonism to the restraints of government. His own gun defended him. Population was sparse and there was no multitude of jostling interests, such as accompanied dense settlement and required a complicated system of government. There were no intricate business relations to need the intervention of the law. Society itself seemed to have dissolved into its individual atoms...
It was not only a society in which the love of equality was prominent: it was also a competitive society. To its socialist critics it has seemed not so much a democracy as a society whose members were "expectant capitalists." And this, indeed, is a part of its character. It was based upon the idea of the fair chance for all men, not on the conception of leveling... But, while this is true, it must also be remembered that the simplicity of life in this region and these years, together with the vast extent of unoccupied land and unexploited resources, made it easy for this upcountry democracy to conceive of equality and competitive individualism as consistent elements of democracy. Just in proportion as competition increased, new fields for activity opened and artificial inequalities were checked. The self-made man was the ideal of this society.
As a part of these same conditions, men readily took the law into their own hands. A crime was more a personal affront to the victim than an outrage upon the law of the land. Substantial justice secured in the most direct way was its aim. It had little patience with fine-drawn legal or constitutional distinctions, or even scruples of method...