The Confederacy was never really a Nation even though they aspired to be one. Nationhood, in the formal sense, is less an issue than the state of mind of the people. I came to Virginia to work in a University, Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) in 1973. My experiences here have made wonder if the conquest of the South ever has been a success in terms of the way the people here think about themselves.
I ran across this article today: 8 disturbing trends that reveal the South’s battered psyche and it brought back thoughts and observations that have intrigued me for all this time. Regional differences are everywhere. Living and working at SUNY at Buffalo and Harvard made me conscious of how my Chicago upbringing was different than theirs.
There is more to it than that. Read on below and I'll explain what I mean.
My first encounter with the South was arriving by train in Norfolk, VA in 1954 at the end of my Freshman year in college. I was boarding ship for my NROTC training cruise. I experienced segregation of a kind and racism in Chicago. It was ugly there. Still, seeing the overt signs of it in Norfolk blew my mind. It was a different world. That was just a snapshot.
My next encounter was after graduation and being commissioned as an officer in the USMC. I went to Marine Corps Schools in Quantico, VA for my officer's Basic School for nine months. I was a fundamentalist ex-Catholic then. My first wife and I became members of Triangle Baptist Church and joined the choir. The choir was quite good and we got to travel to other churches in the region to perform. Usually these were all day affairs with home cooked food served throughout the day.
I was the usual American male and married my wife before she finished her education at the University of Chicago and dragged her along with me as I pursued my career. It turned out that Quantico needed a teacher for their two room school house and she was hired with just two years of college.
From Quantico I was sent to a number of Marine Corps Schools at Camp Lejeune, NC. We saw another version of Southern life there. Again there was a teaching job for my wife to apply for. She now had a year's experience and out qualified the other applicants by far. She did not get the job. They hired a local person with a High School education.
In 1969 I left a post as acting Chairman of Biophysics at SUNY Buffalo to teach at a predominantly African American college, Philander Smith College, in Little Rock Arkansas. After a year there I was hired at Harvard and then in 1970 I went to a position at Meharry Medical College in Nashville TN.
Then in 1973 I moved to Richmond VA to teach and do research at the Medical College at VCU. In 1998 , in anticipation of retirement, my third wife and I moved to Mathews VA were we now reside.
So my background as a "carpetbagger" is pretty well founded. My personality and my politics, which became radical during the 1960s, set me apart from the folks in the South. I am critical of attitudes and behavior that comes across as anti-intellectual and often as just plain "backwards" for lack of a better term.
Being the analytical person I am I had to make sense out of these behaviors so foreign and, often, repugnant to me. I did some reading and saw a pattern that I came to call "the conquered nation syndrome". The link above describes some of what I am talking about pretty well.
There is more. The Universities, especially the better known ones, seemed to be staffed more by "conquerors" rather than locals. The belief structure was manipulated to keep class and racial divisions more intense than in the North where the more subtle ways of manipulating people were more prevalent.
The poverty of so many was accepted as part of being a part of their "special" culture. When the Democrats were overtly racist the racial divisions kept the party alive in the South. When that ended they became first Republican and then Tea Party and we now see so many as a new "American Taliban".
I could go on, but from where I sit the shooting war ended a long time ago, but the cultural part never did.