Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a Cultural History)

Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a Cultural History) | David Hackett Fischer | A mind-expanding read

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Albion's Seed: Fou...

	Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a Cultural History) David Hackett Fischer Oxford University Press, USA, 1989 - 972 pages average customer review:based on 86 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Five stars are not enough

A Rosetta stone: fits the definition of genius, in that it makes the obscure obvious. Writing Albion's Seed must have been a serious strain, which shows in a few places. Yet the book is a masterpiece. Another reviewer wrote, it's like reading Darwin's Origin of Species or Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel. It's gratifying to see so many positive reviews of Albion's Seed on Amazon, because it is a non-PC history that some people might take offense at. The book deftly steers around the shrill excess of multicultural history. It also represents a serious and largely successful attack on the 20th-century revisionist-materialist theories of history that have done so much damage to American historiography and the teaching of history. On a theoretical level, these are Fischer's real target, and he takes them down beautifully. His explanation of the rise of slavery in the tidewater Chesapeake should be drilled into every history graduate student, since there's so much nonsense that's been written on the subject. (The tidewater South was the Royalist-cavalier utopia of the disinherited younger sons. The South created slavery, not vice-versa, and its creation was a conscious, deliberate act, not a result of imaginary "blind economic forces.") Although Fischer is not a conservative, the book's message is the essential conservative truth: culture is (usually) more important than politics, custom more important than law, and society more important than government.

Unless you understand Fischer's larger point about pluralism and competing notions of freedom and the public good, you won't understand America. If you think it's irrelevant today, just overlay a national map of the "four culture" derivatives with the "red-blue" electoral maps the media incessantly chatters about, with zero understanding. Fischer's gift for making vividly concrete what would otherwise be deadly abstractions serves the reader especially well here. The Puritan conception (the origin of modern liberalism) is ordered freedom, with everyone smothered in lots of rules. (After the twisting of the Puritan legacy by the likes of Mencken and Arthur Miller, Fischer's corrective presentation of what they were about is alone worth the price of the book.) The Quaker conception is libertarian: reciprocal, mutual forebearance. And so on.

Another sign of genius: the implications of the book, which could easily serve as a basis for decades of graduate theses. Many Fischer does not mention or only mentions in passing. One is the role of non-Anglo minorities operating within the four-cultures template, the most important being black Americans. Mixed Anglo and African by ancestry, they are nonetheless completely American in culture and religion. Forced by slavery and racism to operate at the margins of society, they absorbed and re-created for themselves the two Southern cultures of tidewater and upland. Liberated from slavery by the two middle class Northern cultures of Puritan and Quaker, they nevertheless remain culturally more like white Southerners than anyone else. Read Kevin Phillips' very interesting The Cousins' Wars: The Triumph of Anglo-America for more about this.

Another is the existence of smaller "niche" cultures that Fischer barely mentions, the most important being the niche centered around New Amsterdam/New York. This area was already a polyglot standout in colonial times, dominated by a mix of Dutch Calvinists, French Huguenots, and Anglos. The later emergence of New York as a non-Anglo immigrant mecca cannot be understood apart from its earlier colonial history. Then there are the two colonial Catholic niches of Louisiana and Maryland, more relaxed versions of Southern tidewater culture.

The most recognized footprint left by Albion's Seed is Fischer's superb exposition of the borders culture, often misunderstood and confused with the culture of poor whites of the Southern lowlands. He does a superb job of explaining it as a result of the insecurity and anarchy of northern Britain and Ireland in early modern times. (This culture includes, but is not limited to, the Scots-Irish Presbyterians, the fiercest border type. Other types include the Anglo-Scottish and Anglo-Irish.) In such cultures, a man's measure is not what he owns, but how well he can fight. A leader's measure is his charisma and the protection he provides to his followers, both blood relatives and adoptees. Honor and shame are everything. See, e.g., Rob Roy. Since there was no effective government, each man, or more precisely, each clan, was its own law. Contrary to a common misconception, this has nothing to do with slavery - a silly idea, since few border people in America owned slaves. Their relations with the Indians are more interesting, since many Indian peoples were similar - warlike, insecure, taciturn, and stoic - women subordinated and doing all the work, while the men did the fighting and lacked a strong work ethic. The type of leader produced by this culture - the classic examples are Andrew Jackson and James Polk - is populist, but only in the sense that his followers acclaim him, not vice versa.

The White House is currently inhabited by a cartoon version of this very culture. The dried-out, eldest son of wealthy Connecticut Yankees re-invents his sorry ass as a populist border chieftan - pathetic. If Andrew Jackson or Lyndon Johnson were alive today, they'd be spinning in their graves :) Another interesting study would be how the borders culture moved into conflict with the Southern tidewater culture in the 19th century, mainly because of slavery (see: Cold Mountain), but then into alliance in the twentieth, because of a common opposition to growing government, albeit for different reasons.

Fischer only touches on the later co-evolution and hybridization of these four seed cultures. He does discuss Lincoln at some length as a hybrid of Puritan and Quaker, and Reagan as a hybrid of border-Irish and English. He also touches briefly on the later branching of the borders culture into two streams, the rugged individualism of the Far West and the cattle-ranching culture of the Southwest, under Spanish influence. Then there is the culture of the upper Mid West and the Northwest strongly influenced by seeding from New England and the Quakers. (There is a Scandinavian influence as well, but partly and surprisingly through the Quakers themselves.) The Left Coast would be horrified to discover the Puritans among its spiritual ancestors. But so it is.

To close: Fischer's admiration for the Quakers. After you absorb this culture and its Midlands English dialect, it will be obvious which of the four seed cultures dominates middle class America today: commerce, philanthropy, and forms of local government; attitudes towards literacy, education, and children; relations between the sexes; religious pluralism; and the standard "middle" (mid-Atlantic) American speech. Much that is wrongly attributed to the Puritans is really due to the Quakers and their remarkable leader, William Penn. The Quakers' reciprocal liberty is just an application of the Golden Rule, yet it is sad that what many people want for themselves they often fail to extend to others. The Quaker culture is the one that a modern American could be transported back into with the least disorientation. And yet Penn and his Quakers are given too little attention in American history books, which tend to be consumed with Puritans and Virginians and their quarrel over slavery - Roundheads and Cavaliers again. That's a pity.

NOTE: Go to C-SPAN's BookTV Web site and find the Fischer interview. Worth your three hours.

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A mind-expanding read

I was drawn to read this book by Professor Fischer's recent appearance on C-Span, and was not disappointed. It may be true as other reviewers have noted that he sometimes seems to stretch the facts to fit his theory, but I was amazed at how often as I read I said to myself, "Yes, I knew that, but now I understand why." Fischer's thesis can explain why the Democrats could elect a Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton but not a John Kerry, and how the red and blue states got that way. There is always a danger in stereotyping, of course, but it helps if you know where the stereotypes come from and how much of them are valid--Fischer's book is a great help in knowing ourselves.

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Anthropology - not history

David Hackett Fisher's Albion's Seed is an enlightening and fascinating book.

The reason it had such a powerful impact on me is because I was expecting a history book and it's not - it's an anthropology book. It is a study of nature - human nature as it arose in England and settled in America 400 years ago.

At its core Albion's Seed accepts the conservative belief that what people ARE is more important to history than what people DO. It is surprising to see this book coming from a sociology professor at Brandeis University - a place generally racially hostile to indigenous European peoples such as the English.

Albion's Seed is about the English settlers of America in the 1600s and 1700s. And it contains not a trace of hostility or condescension towards them. In the case of the Quakers of the Delaware Valley it is openly admiring - so much so that Fisher almost loses his academic detachment.

In addition to the Quakers who emigrated from the North Midlands fleeing persecution, it studies the Puritan Congregationalists who settled New England from East England seeking to create a perfect society; the royalist elites from the South of England who left because of population pressure and formed Virginian society; and the war-like, clan-like families from the English/Scottish border fleeing famine and persecution who settled the American backcountries.

Fisher brilliantly and deeply describes the varied folkways of these people and (especially in the case of the English/Scotch border folk) how those ways arose from the history of their homeland. In America they were free from the pressures of England - but they brought their nature and culture with them and carved out unique, successful, and cultured societies in the new world.

This book is deeply researched and thoroughly footnoted. It is both scholarly and easy to read. I highly recommend it to anyone who believes that history changes - but people do not.

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Brilliant with one inexplicable flaw

Turning the "Turner thesis" somewhat on its ear this work is every bit as groundbreaking as it is hyped to be. I have seached and struggled for years to explain regional differences with no satisfaction until now. Four separate and distinct sections of the east were settled at different times by four very distinct British "tribes" which adapted uniquely to their new environments. The meddling materialist yankee, the bland egalitarian Quaker, the dignified cavalier and the untamed rebel are dissected and evaluated from every significant social angle. This is social history at its best.
And why not. Fischer even has the stones to write a book entitled "Historians' Fallacies" which I am presently reading. In it he sets out to set other historians straight on the various wrong routes they have taken. Perhaps it will explain the gaping hole in his Albion's Seed. I specifically refer to the total and complete absence of New England's role in the slave trade, and how it was developed and harnessed as the capital engine for the regions' industrial revolution. I continue to be astounded at the amnesia, blind eye or delusion that plagues even our "best" historians on the institution which, you guessed it, Fischer pretty much blamed on the Virginians.
OK, so nobody is perfect. Realize the book has this one enormous flaw and read it anyway.

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