IN MY SHOES: From Yellow Dog Dem To Repub In One Generation
By Big Old Boot
Are you familiar with Mark Twain's "Begum of Bengal" speech about a "frivolous little self-important captain of a coasting-sloop in the dried-apple & kitchen-furniture trade" who loved to hail "every vessel that came in sight, just to hear himself talk & air his small grandeurs"? One day he "squeaked a hail: "Ship ahoy! what ship is that & whence & whither?" to a majestic Indiaman and received this answer: "The Begum of Bengal, 123 days out from Canton - homeward bound! What ship is that?" Humbled, the sloop captain responded (Hal Holbrook does this really well): "Only the Mary Ann -14 hours out from Boston, bound for Kittery Point with … with nothing to speak of!"
Well, that’s me. Only child of working class parents. Started college because ... well, yeah, because. Left after a year because I wanted to get on with the really important stuff in my life. I was nineteen when I married my wife, but that wasn’t my fault. I didn’t meet her any earlier. We migrated to Alaska shortly before I turned twenty. We worked hard, we raised six children, I finished college at the age of 44, for the pure fun of it. I retired at 51. I can now read, write, visit national parks, and spoil my grandkids.
I’ve been told I could have been more, but, honestly, I’m not sure there was anything more I wanted to be that was worth the effort it would have taken. I remember praying (when I was still religious, in my early teens) that G-d would grant me to live long enough to see and hold a child of my own. That would have been enough. I’ve had a lot more than that.
So here I am writing this bio for The Stiletto, so I can sound off about politics. But first, I need to explain how I came to believe what I believe. That takes a little longer, but if I’m going to write stuff for The Stiletto Blog with any regularity, it ought to be said.
I’m sure I confused the Census Bureau because under the “race” category, I checked “Other” and wrote in “American.” That’s all they will ever get from me. I have a very German family name, but according to my father’s research, the first of my ancestors bearing that name arrived in Philadelphia three hundred years ago. At that time, “Germany” only meant a vague part of Europe where people spoke German, and my immigrant ancestor was naturalized a British subject. It’s been eleven generations since then, during which my family assimilated bloodlines from all of Europe as well as Asia, Africa, and at least two of the tribes of North America.
I had an ancestor who served on Washington’s staff, and I have letters in my possession from ancestors who served the Union in the Civil War. My maternal grandparents came from the Western Ukraine (now Belarus) and settled in West Virginia. My people were small farmers, blacksmiths, coal miners, steel mill workers, bartenders, barbers, hillbillies, rednecks - and a moonshiner or two. We eat a lot of fried chicken and mashed potatoes. My mother’s family has boasted a professor of mathematics, but so far as I know my Dad was the first in his family to complete high school, and I was the first to complete college, if 20 years late.
It always amused my late-mother-in-law (who was from Georgia) that every time I would visit, my accent would change within half a day. It wouldn’t match hers, exactly, but would return to the West Virginia hills, to speech patterns I picked up from my mother. Not quite Southern dialect, but close enough for a Northerner. I still sound like a hillbilly, at least part of the time.
But I was born and raised a city boy, in Denver. The migration from the country was a generation prior to mine. I can’t grow a decent flower garden, much less farm. I don’t hunt. I’m a lousy fisherman. The closest I get to "country" is listening to Johnny Cash or Tennessee Ernie Ford - one of the first songs my kids learned was “Sixteen Tons.”
My parents were Yellow Dog Democrats. That is, as the saying goes, they would sooner vote for a yellow dog than a Republican. Most everyone I knew was a Democrat, too. When I was 11 years old, my friend Al and I scooped up a few hundred free Johnson-Humphrey buttons and peddled them door to door for a penny a piece, earning enough to go to the movies.
There was only one Republican family in my working class neighborhood - probably a third to half Spanish-speaking - that I knew of. Mama pretty much opposed the Vietnam War from the beginning, and I remember getting a spanking because I picked up the “N word" from a movie. In high school, I did work for Robert Kennedy, and in college I was a precinct co-chair for Gene McCarthy’s second campaign for president. I cast my first presidential vote for George McGovern, but I already didn’t like him much. We were all liberals, in the classical sense, and I could already tell he was something else.
The wedge issue for me was abortion. I could not, and still cannot, understand how killing children could be justified from the viewpoint of social justice. In 1976, my wife and I worked for Ellen McCormack, the pro-life housewife who ran for the Democratic nomination for President. That year, I also ran for the legislature as a Democrat. One of my campaign flyers identified me as a “low-cholesterol Democrat (no peanuts).” I had decided to vote for Gerald Ford for President. I enthusiastically backed Ronald Reagan four years later. In 1982 I was the Democratic nominee for a state house seat, and realized afterward that I was the only Democrat I had voted for, and I was actually registered as a Republican (you can do that in Alaska) because I had attended the Republican state convention two years earlier.
At the age of 87, my mother voted for her first Republican for President. As a matter of fact, she voted a straight Republican ticket in 2008, because she would not vote for anyone who had endorsed Barack Obama. “I know a snake-oil salesman when I see one,” she said.
The funny thing is, I didn’t change. Not much, anyway. The only way in which I have sensibly become more “conservative” is on economic policy, because I have discovered the bankruptcy of socialism. Mostly, I came to realize that “liberals” - in the sense the label is now used - had different meanings for words than I did. Words like "freedom" and "justice."
Like my accent, I suppose, I am still philosophically in the West Virginia hollows. Worldview, to me, does not stretch from liberal to conservative, but from individualist to communalist. Many, perhaps most, self-styled conservatives are communalists, but almost all self-styled liberals are communalists. I’m an individualist. For the foreseeable future, that means my lot is cast with conservatives. My car is plastered with pro-life, pro-Second Amendment bumper stickers (and a Palin one) and my American flag flies every day, as it has since 9/11 and will until the war is won (which could be forever…).
And I’m here with my shoulder-length hair like some refugee from Woodstock. Only the Mary Ann. Go figure.
Editorial Note: Big Old Boot is one of the writers that The Stiletto has invited to contribute to The Stiletto Blog. The Stiletto will be introducing other writers to as they come on board. If you have a conservative/libertarian slant on the events of the day and would like to share your thoughts with the readers of this blog, please contact The Stiletto at: the stiletto@thestiletto.info.
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