The fighting Scots-Irish: they shaped America, but did they make it more free?

• Author: Oliver, Charles
• Position: Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America - Book Review

Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America, by James Webb, New York: Broadway Books, 369 pages, $14.95

Long dismissed as rednecks, crackers, and hillbillies, the Scots-Irish--also known as Scotch-Irish, Ulster Scots, or Borderers, because they hailed from Northern Ireland and the border counties of Scotland and England--have provided a disproportionate share of America's political leaders, military brass, writers, and musicians. As an ethnic group, James Webb argues in Born Fighting, they "did not merely come to America, they became America, particularly in the south and the Ohio Valley, where their culture overwhelmed the English and German ethnic groups and defined the mores of those regions."

For Webb, a descendant of Scots-Irish immigrants who has written novels, fought with highly decorated distinction in Vietnam, and served as secretary of the navy and assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan, the political culture of the Scots-Irish is defined by hyperpatriotism, a devotion to strong leaders, and individualist self-reliance. "It has shaped the emotional fabric of the nation, defined America's unique form of populist democracy, created a distinctly American musical style, and through the power of its insistence on personal honor and adamant individualism has become the definition of 'American' that others gravitate toward when they wish to drop their hyphens and join the cultural mainstream,' he writes.

But the Scots-Irish impact on American politics is more problematic than Webb would have us believe. The populist politics they pioneered doesn't necessarily produce the sort of values that sustain liberty. Indeed, the democratic impulse toward comfort and safety often undercuts self-reliance and individualism. Webb's book, though well-written and often insightful, is more an exercise in ethnic self-mythologizing than an evenhanded attempt to judge the impact of the Scots-Irish and their culture on America.

How did this culture evolve? Webb tries to place the Scots-Irish within a larger framework of the Celtic tradition. But there's quite a bit of dispute among historians about just how Celtic the Scots-Irish actually were. David Hackett Fischer, for instance, insists in Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America that the term Celtic is "very much mistaken as a rounded description of their ethnic origins." Fischer notes the Scottish border area saw a mixing of Celtic tribes with Angles, Saxons, Danes, and Normans, a fact reflected in some of the common...