Colin Woodard (45 page)

Since the end of Reconstruction no one nation has had any hope of dominating the others independently. Instead, each has sought to form alliances with like-minded partners.

The most durable and lasting coalition has been that forged between Yankeedom and the Left Coast in the 1840s, one we've seen in action in both the culture wars and foreign policy. With its crusading utopian agenda, Yankeedom has usually set the tone: a quest for betterment of the “common good,” seen as best achieved through the creation of a frugal, competent, and effective government supported by a strong tax base and able to ensure the availability and prudent management of shared assets. The Left Coast's views are nearly identical, though it added environmental quality to the shared agenda during the twentieth century and tempered the Yankees' messianic certainties with the products of its frequent technological experiments, from Monterey-style housing in the mid-nineteenth century to the iPod in the early twenty-first. The world, Left Coasters insisted, can be easily and frequently reinvented.

Between 1877 and 1897 these two nations dominated the federal government with the tacit assistance of their Civil War allies in the Midlands and their colonial minions in the Far West. Together their congressional representatives pushed through policies designed to enrich and empower their societies while weakening their archenemies in the Deep South and Tidewater. First they built a wall of tariffs around the federation, protecting their manufacturing sectors from European competition. The tariffs collected at U.S. Customs Houses accounted for nearly 60 percent of all federal revenue by 1890—far more money, in fact, than the federal government actually needed. Much of this surplus was then pumped back to the citizens of Yankeedom, the Midlands, and the Far West in the form of generous new Civil War pensions, payable in arrears to veterans, their widows, or their children. In the early 1890s these pension payments accounted for more than 37 percent of all federal expenditures, almost double the military budget at the time. Since only Union soldiers qualified for pensions, nearly all of this wealth poured into the northern nations, including the Left Coast and the Far West, which were home to many Union veterans. At the same time, Yankees made a lastditch attempt to thwart the resurgence of the Deep Southern and Tidewater oligarchs by protecting black and poor white voters. Their tool was the 1890 Force Bill, a piece of legislation introduced by Yankee Brahmin senator Henry Cabot Lodge that allowed federal review and military intervention in disputed federal elections. All save three congressmen from Yankeedom, the Far West, and the Left Coast supported the bill. Although it also received the endorsement of a fair number of Midland and Appalachian congressmen, the Force Bill was ultimately defeated by Dixie and its occasional ally, New Netherland.
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The populous, powerful city-state of New Netherland played the superpower blocs off one another until the turn of the century. A nation built on global commerce, it found itself aligned with Dixie's cotton lords in opposition to protective tariffs. Flooded with immigrants, New Netherland was home to only a tiny percentage of Union veterans in the 1880s and so had also opposed the Yankees' pension scheme. Its corrupt political machine, known as Tammany Hall, felt threatened by the Force Bill and mobilized against it on Capitol Hill. Throughout the nineteenth century New Netherland was by no means a reliable member of the Northern alliance.
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In the twentieth century, New Netherland found common ground with Yankeedom in its need, as an enormously complex urban center, for effective government and expensive public infrastructure. This was the nation with the fewest qualms about taxation and large-scale public institutions—indeed, New York City could hardly exist without them. New Netherland's bewilderingly diverse population may not have been particularly concerned about the plight of Deep Southern blacks, but it was repelled by Dixie's emphasis on white
Protestant
supremacy, social conformity, and the suppression of dissent. And while New Netherland has never been the most democratically governed of places—again, witness Tammany Hall—it has always valued cultural diversity, freedom of conscience, and freedom of expression. Long the most socially liberal nation on the continent—very much a live-and-let-live place—New Netherland had little choice but to cast its lot with the Yankees and against the zealotry of the Deep South.

With New Netherland on board, the Yankee-led Northern alliance achieved its current three-nation form. Together it has consistently promoted a coherent agenda for more than a century, regardless of which political party was dominant in the region. From the “conservative” administration of Republican Teddy Roosevelt to the “liberal” one of Democrat Barack Obama, these three nations have favored the maintenance of a strong central government, federal checks on corporate power, and the conservation of environmental resources.

 

During the first half of the twentieth century, the Republican Party was still the “party of the north,” and it dominated the federal government until the coming of the Great Depression. Except for Woodrow Wilson's presidency, northern Republicans occupied the White House continuously from 1897 to 1932, and only lost it to Wilson by splitting their vote in a three-way race. Of the six presidents in this period, three were Yankees (McKinley, Taft, and Coolidge), one was a New Netherland plutocrat of Dutch origin (Teddy Roosevelt), and two were Midlanders (Midland Ohioan Warren Harding and German/Canadian Quaker Herbert Hoover). Although they presided over an era of laissez-faire capitalism, all of them save Hoover supported civil rights for African Americans and all (except Coolidge) an expanded reach for the federal government and checks on corporate and plutocratic power. They weren't averse to cutting taxes, but generally did not do so in ways that skewed the benefits to the wealthy.

Teddy Roosevelt broke up the great corporate trusts, intervened in a major strike to secure a solution beneficial to miners, and founded the National Park Service, national wildlife refuges, and the U.S. Forest Service; he also championed the federal regulation and inspection of meat, food, and pharmaceuticals, and made the first Jewish cabinet appointment in U.S. history. Taft, the Yale-educated child of Massachusetts Puritans, furthered Roosevelt's antitrust investigations and backed constitutional amendments instituting the federal income tax and the direct popular election of U.S. senators. Harding did reduce income taxes for corporations and the wealthy but also sought to make government more effective through the creation of the Office of Management and Budget and the General Accounting Office; he also founded what is now the Veterans Administration. Coolidge, famous for his refusal to regulate banks and corporations as president, did so out of a desire to avoid a bloating of the federal government; as governor of Massachusetts, he had promoted labor, wage, and workplace safety protections and the inclusion of labor representatives on corporate boards. As president, Coolidge cut taxes, but in a way unfavorable to the rich. Hoover expanded the national park and veterans' hospital systems, founded the federal Department of Education and the Department of Justice's antitrust division, and fought (unsuccessfully) for low-income tax cuts and universal pensions for senior citizens.
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These most conservative of Northern alliance presidents would all probably be considered big-government liberals by the standards of early-twenty-first-century Dixie-bloc political leaders. So, too, would the Northern alliance–led Republican Party of the 1950s. In Eisenhower's first term, the GOP controlled the White House and both branches of Congress but created the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Eisenhower later sent federal troops to Arkansas to enforce civil rights rulings and, in his farewell address, warned of the threat to democracy posed by the emerging “military-industrial complex.”
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The three Northern alliance nations have supported the same presidential candidates in nearly every presidential election from 1988 to 2008, always opting for the more progressive choices: Obama over John McCain, John Kerry and Al Gore over George W. Bush, and Michael Dukakis over George H. W. Bush. (The more liberal New Netherland broke with its allies to reject conservatives Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, the only nation to definitively do so.) All supported LBJ over Barry Goldwater in 1964 and the ever-popular Eisenhower over Midlander Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s. While some candidacies failed to generate a clear voter consensus within one or more of these nations,
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only once in the postwar period have they firmly endorsed rival candidates: when New Netherland chose George McGovern over Richard Nixon in 1972.

In the same period only four men from Northern alliance nations have occupied the White House: Republicans Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush and Democrats John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama.
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True to their origins, all four sought to better society through government programs, expanded civil rights protections, and environmental safeguards. Both Republicans represented their party's moderate wing and soon found themselves at odds with their Dixie-bloc constituents. Ford supported the Equal Rights Amendment and the act that created federally funded special education programs across the country, and appointed John Paul Stevens to the Supreme Court. Facing budget deficits inherited from Reagan, Bush raised taxes on the wealthy and refused to lower the capital gains tax, despite knowing it would make him politically unpopular. He supported the extension of civil rights to disabled people and the reauthorization of the Clean Air Act, and increased federal spending on education, research, and child care. Likewise, John F. Kennedy proposed what later became the 1964 Civil Rights Act, dispatched federal troops and agents to force Dixie governors to allow black students into the Universities of Georgia and Alabama, increased the minimum wage and federal funding for affordable housing and mental health services, and launched a watershed investigation of environmental issues that laid the groundwork for the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. In his first two years in office, Obama supported an overhaul of the federation's health insurance industry, the regulation of the financial services industry, and efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions—all against strong Dixie opposition.
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When Dixie-bloc conservatives captured control of the GOP in the aftermath of the civil rights struggle, Northern alliance Republicans (and Dixie blacks) abandoned the party in large numbers. Between 1956 and 1998 the percentage of New Englanders who cast their votes for Republican candidates fell from 55 percent to 33 percent, and those of New Yorkers (both Yankee and New Netherlander) fell from 54 to 43 percent, while the Yankee Midwest also saw declines that accelerated during the first decade of the twenty-first century. By 2010 the Republicans had lost control of the lower house of every single state legislature in the three Northern alliance nations, all but one of the upper houses, and seven of the thirteen governors' mansions in states dominated by the alliance. In a flip-flop of enormous proportions, the Democrats had become the party of the Northern alliance, and the “party of Lincoln” had become the vehicle of Dixie-bloc whites.
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During the George W. Bush administration, the Northern alliance's Republican congressional delegation was all but eliminated. Vermont senator Jim Jeffords—who'd voted against Reagan and Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy and in support of gay rights and education spending—abandoned the party after his colleagues stripped funding for a program to help disabled children. Senator Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island was defeated by a Democratic challenger in 2006, left the party, and was subsequently elected governor as an independent. In 2008 Minnesota senator Norm Coleman lost his seat to liberal comedian Al Franken, while Far Western Mormon Oregonian senator Gordon Smith was unseated by a Democratic challenger from the Left Coast. By 2009 there were only three Republican U.S. senators left in the entire Northern alliance, and two had an American Conservative Union lifetime rating of less than 50 of 100 points; the only conservative, New Hampshire's Judd Gregg, announced in 2010 that he would not seek reelection. The Republican Party was essentially extinct in the region of its birth.
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Northern alliance congressional representatives have generally upheld their nations' agendas, regardless of party affiliation. In the late 1970s they voted en masse to prohibit Dixie's “right to work” laws (which forbade union shop contracts) and to change laws that exempted small firms from federal workplace safety inspections and effectively prohibited strikes by workers at large construction sites. (The Dixie bloc opposed these efforts, en masse.) In 1980, when there were still plenty of northern Republicans, every Yankee and New Netherland congressional representative save three supported a measure to allocate federal low-income heating assistance based on how cold it actually was in a given consumer's community; Left Coasters in Washington and Oregon were also unanimously in favor. (Only Californians, with their mild climate, opposed the measure.) By contrast, the Deep South was unanimously opposed to the measure and Appalachia nearly so. (Tidewater, with its cooler winter conditions, defected to the Northern position, regardless of party.)
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The divisive 2010 House vote on President Obama's health care overhaul bill illustrates Northern alliance cohesion. Yankee representatives backed the bill 62 to 21, New Netherlanders by 24 to 6, and the Left Coast by a staggering 21 to 2. The results were the same on a vote a few months later to strengthen the financial regulatory system in the aftermath of the near-meltdown of the world banking system. Yankeedom approved the measures by 63 to 19, the Left Coast by 21 to 1, and New Netherland, 26 to 4, despite being the federation's financial capital. Both measures were overwhelmingly opposed by the Dixie-bloc delegation as unwarranted intrusions into the private marketplace.
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