Trump has awakened US’s founding Scots Irish pit bull

ON READING the “Second Opinion” from the New York Times in the Cape Times (August 21), I was taken by the last sentence which referred to President (Donald) Trump’s fateful news conference following the recent Charlottesville incident.

Referring to Trump it said: “He chose to summon not America’s better angels but its demons.”

While it is easy to label the Robert E Lee supporters as Nazis, the actual situation is more complex and highlights resurgent and dangerous cultural divisions within American society.

The “Scots Irish” or “Ulster Scots” are descriptions given to a cultural group whose role in the foundation of modern America is often overlooked.

Originally from Lowland Scotland, they migrated to Ireland’s Ulster province during the early 1600s before moving on the New World’s 13 colonies in the 1700s, where they became an effective barrier between the coastal settlements and the Indian tribes.

They should not be confused with the mass Irish migration which started with the potato famine in the mid1800s.

The Scots Irish were Calvinist, tough, clannish and extremely self-reliant. Settling initially in Pennsylvania, the more than 200 000 migrants spread down the Appalachian Mountains into the Carolinas, Georgia and Alabama and are often referred to as “hillbillies” or “rednecks.”

While several origins of these pejorative terms have been suggested, followers of King Billy (the Protestant King William III) and the red scarves of the anti-Episcopalian Scots Covenanters are strong contenders.

After driving back the native Indians, their contribution to the American revolution was so great that one Hessian officer, fighting for the British forces, made it clear that it was not an American, but a Scots Irish Presbyterian revolution. A number perished later in a reckless Thermopylaetype stand at the Alamo, facing the Mexican forces of General Santa Anna. One can imagine their final shouts of “No surrender”.

An early hero was President Andrew Jackson who defeated the British at New Orleans in 1812. Nicknamed “Old Hickory”, Jackson was shunned by the political elite in Washington who saw him as uncultured outsider. Possibly one of America’s most successful presidents, Jackson’s followers went on to found the Democratic party.

Trump, also an outsider, has superficial similarities to Jackson and much of his support comes almost subliminally from the Scots Irish community.

During the American civil war, the Scots Irish fought on both sides. Epitomised by “Stonewall Jackson”, General Lee saw them as his best troops, “with the drive of the Irish to capture a position and the stubbornness of the Scots to retain it”.

While the Confederate flag’s blue St Andrew’s Scottish cross symbolises their importance to the Southern cause, Union General and later President Ulysses S Grant, was another, whose bloody campaigns eventually ground the Confederate forces to defeat at Appomattox.

Ever since, the Scots Irish have been renowned in America for their almost instinctual fighting skills. It was their distrust of central government that drove the Second Amendment. Never easy neighbours, the Scots Irish reserved the right to obey only those laws that they considered just.

Senator Jim Webb’s book Born Fighting, illustrates how this aggressiveness is still present. The militant liberal left, whose rise to influence only started in the 1950s, sees them as demons, whose fundamentalism and white supremacy can have no place in modern America.

The Scots Irish, unsurprisingly, see themselves as angels, not of the loving, helpful and sensitive type, but rather as the warlike ones whose dripping swords dispatched Egypt’s first born on the eve of the Exodus.

For some time, this Scots Irish “pit bull” slept fitfully in front of the fire. But the fire has now cooled and there is a young whippersnapper on the carpet that insists on chewing his tail. Unless its owner gains an understanding of his innate characteristics, puts some wood on the fire and restrains the newcomer, it will not be long before fur really flies in the American living room.