The Yeoman, the Redneck, and the Working Man

Outside of the Soviet Union and China, no country has experienced the sort of economic and cultural revolution-from-above that the Southland experienced between the 1880s and the 1950s. Originally a country dominated by landed gentry and yeoman farmers, interdependent on each other, albeit each somewhat resentful of the other, the South transformed by the middle of the 20th century into a partially-industrialized, partially-deindustrialized suburb of the North. Wilde quipped that America was the only nation in history to have gone from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between; the South certainly seems to bear this out, having gone from a pre-industrial to a post-industrial society in the space of less than 50 years.

The hollow promises of Yankee politicians like Donald Trump to the “forgotten” Americans have had no more ready audience than in the South. At a loss for alternatives and fuelled by distant memories of martial valour, a higher percentage of Southern youths enlist in the Imperial military than any other region. The South also consistently has higher White unemployment than almost anywhere in the rest of America, higher rates of opioid-related deaths, and a greater general sense of despair. We are a people without a purpose, deprived of the opportunity to contribute to American modernity and so in part absolved of its consequences, but likewise deprived of the few good fruits it produced. The Southern working man is so much a potentiality, a different creature than his counterparts in the Northern proletariat and the Western pioneers.

Already in the 1970s, the post-industrial hellscape that has come to define the wasteland of Silent America had begun to reach those few places in the South which were allowed to industrialize during and after the second World War. Places like Atlanta have lately undergone a brief revival, brought to nothing by the recent race riots, but largely Southern cities, as soon as they became metropoloi, began to implode. It is a foreign mode of thought that builds The Metropolis; the decadent Athenian sensibilities of Delos-Washington cannot transform the Lacadaemonian into a cashier-catamite. So they have had to come down here and replace us with their own subdivisions and import pool boys and au pairs to wait on them in the various Imperial Pleasure Colonies they’ve established around the bombed-out shells of our short-lived megacities.

The air, though, is too filled with the Yankee’s cultural smog now to smell the sweetness of our cotton, tobacco, and oats. The Southern working man, though, has not gone away. Here, as in other places, we so often write and opine from positions of luxury that enable us to philosophize about our people, their identity, their history, and their potential. We offer nothing to our Southern manhood if this is all we can produce. The poets and knights of the Old South accounted for a paltry handful of men in their heyday. That corpse is not rotting: it is dust. The real South before us is a people without the two most necessary elements of a healthy people: celestial purpose in supernatural Faith and mundane purpose in productive labor.

We are soon to mark Labor Day, a peculiar holiday to the Yankee Empire from a time when the threat of Leftist utopia loomed much larger in the hearts of the broader population than it does even now in the body politic. Two Yankee-Proletarian groups, the Knights of Labour and the Second Klan, managed to crush efforts on the part of a budding socialist movement to make their High Holy Day a recognized holiday. Labor Day is kept elsewhere on May 1, a pre-Christian holy day turned into a post-Christian holy day. The conceit that the United States would never be overtaken by the forces of the Left is encapsulated in our marking the day on our calendars in September. To be sure, the day never meant much outside of the AFL-CIO and their adjacent circles. It is nice to have a day to mark the end of Autumn and the beginning of Football season, but aside from that not many people think of it other than being happy they don’t have to go into their soul-draining service and office jobs.

The working man across America has joined the ranks of the Southern yeoman, a forgotten population without purpose or drive. Perhaps this is why the American phenomenon of the redneck has spread so far and wide, and why when I drive through the Rust Belt towns in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and the New York, I see rebel flags on front porches of old duplexes. The redneck, though, despite the academic conceit, is not a Southern creature: he is as universal as any displaced element of the Imperial landscape, and he exists everywhere, divorced from his ancestral home as much as we have become. He wears the trappings of the South, though; he is not of the South in his heart (Southern rednecks may be, but they would be so without being rednecks). To be a redneck is merely to be a member of the forgotten class – a yeoman without the land, a worker without a job, a man without a God.

The Southern identity movement has an opportunity to breathe real life back into our people by showing them who they have become and who they can become. The slogans “retake everything” and “secede in your mind” can have powerful meaning when they are given concrete form. The celebration of the Southern yeoman, the Dixian worker, is essential to this, because the working man is the lifeblood of the South – not the airy agrarian, but the hardened farmer, free because he is of the soil, because he coaxes the Earth to bring forth its fruits that he might live from them. His family, his hands, and his church are what make him a man, in all the fulness of that word’s meaning. If we restore these things to him, we can make of him a nation.

Let us work to this end, beginning with reminding workers what role they play in a healthy society; now our local communities have parades and celebrations and cook-outs for men who were murdered by the Empire in service of anti-Southern causes. It does us little good to decry this, no one will hear us. We do not celebrate the Southern yeoman and working man, though, on Labor Day the way we celebrate on Memorial and Veterans Days. We can change that, and from this mustard seed grow the strong trunk of a mighty nation.

Then, and only then, can we speak of a concrete Southern identity. Then, and only then, can we be a people.

-By Matthew Galloway