AMERICA'S DOVISH NORTH AND HAWKISH SOUTH

The war in Kosovo opened more fissures in the American public and the U.S. foreign policy elite than any U.S. military intervention since the Vietnam War. Many have remarked that viewpoints about the war transcended the ideological categories of left and right, producing unusual alliances of conservatives and liberals among both supporters and opponents of the NATO campaign against Serbia. What has been overlooked, however, is the influence of American regional culture -- not only on attitudes toward the war in Kosovo but on the domestic politics of foreign policy throughout American history.

That so little attention has been paid to regional influences on U.S. foreign policy is surprising. After all, the polarization of American domestic politics along regional lines is one of the most obvious and striking phenomena of our time. The disproportionately southern congressional leadership reflects the new southern base of the Republican Party. Both liberal Democrats and moderate Republicans find their strongest support in the states of New England and the northern tier. The superimposition of regional cultural loyalties atop partisan ideologies accounts for much of the increase in partisan rancor in the United States. To name only one example, the impeachment of President Clinton revealed a stark division between this southern president's political enemies, who are overwhelmingly southern, and his predominantly northern defenders.

While the sectional division in domestic politics has become familiar, the impact of the divisions between America's regions on its diplomacy is a neglected subject. When the influence of sectionalism on U.S. foreign policy is discussed at all, it is usually in the context of trade disputes, which pit the northeastern-midwestern manufacturing belt against the high-tech industries and commodity exporters of the South and West. But regional influences on U.S. foreign policy go far beyond conflicts of economic interest. Regional differences in the United States based in culture and values -- particularly the enduring differences between anti-interventionists in the North and pro-interventionists in the South -- have shaped debates over American foreign policy in every generation and will continue to do so.

REGIONALISM AND AMERICA'S EARLY WARS

Regions in the United States are notoriously difficult to define. The best guide, perhaps, is provided by speech regions. Most linguists identify four regional dialects of American English: northern, midland, highland southern, and coastal southern. The Greater New England or northern speech region, according to the historian David Hackett Fischer, includes "New England, upstate New York, northern Ohio and Indiana, much of Michigan and Wisconsin, the northern plains, and the Pacific Northwest, together with islands of urban speech at Denver, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco." Since the late 1700s, this area has been the heartland of opposition to foreign wars and the U.S. military establishment. Pro-war, pro-military attitudes have been strongest in the areas identified with coastal southern speech (the Tidewater South) and, to a lesser degree, in the Highland South, from West Virginia through Tennessee to Texas.

The pattern of Greater New England's opposition to wars and the opposite tendency of the South, especially the Tidewater South, to be strongly interventionist first manifested itself in the earliest years of the Union. During the War of 1812, the hawks tended to be southerners like Henry Clay of Kentucky and John C. Calhoun of South Carolina. Congress' vote on the war followed sectional lines, not partisan lines. In the House of Representatives, the northern-and-mid-Atlantic-dominated Federalist Party voted unanimously against the war; the southerners who controlled the Democratic-Republican Party solidly backed it.

This pattern reemerged in subsequent conflicts. Southerners generally favored the western expansion of the United States; northerners disproportionately opposed it. In the 1830s the most extreme American pacifists broke away from the American Peace Society to form a new organization that forswore the use of force even in self-defense. Its name tells the story: the New England Non-Resistance League.

Another example of the extreme antimilitarism of New Englanders is provided by Charles Sumner, the powerful Massachusetts senator who chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee between 1861 and 1871. Sumner's first major public speech was an 1845 Fourth of July oration in Boston in which he horrified the veterans in the audience by blaming war on arms manufacturers, calling West Point "a seminary of idleness and vice," and describing soldiers as "wild beasts" who rejoice "in blood." His speech culminated in the declaration, "In our age there can be no peace that is not honorable; there can be no war that is not dishonorable." True to his pacifist principles, Sumner refused to fight back when he was caned on the floor of the House in 1856 by South Carolina Representative Preston S. Brooks, in retaliation for Sumner's verbal assault on Brooks' cousin, South Carolina Senator Andrew P. Butler.

For New Englanders like Sumner, the Mexican War was a national disgrace. Boston, the capital of the antiwar movement during the War of 1812, was also the center of opposition to the Mexican War. The Boston-based American Peace Society charged the U.S. government with aggression against a "poor, feeble, distracted country." Both the Democrats and their opponents, the Whigs, were divided along regional lines. In February 1847, just before the U.S. victory at Buena Vista, Thomas Corwin, a Whig senator from Ohio, encouraged the Mexican enemy to welcome American soldiers "to hospitable graves." The Boston Brahmin Henry David Thoreau refused to pay taxes, claiming that to do so would make him an accomplice in an unjust war. Jailed, he wrote his classic essay Civil Disobedience, which inspired later generations of (mostly northern) antiwar activists in the United States.

In general, the South was as enthusiastic about the Mexican War as the North was hostile. Many leading southern military officers, including Robert E. Lee, became members of the "Aztec Club," an organization of veterans of the Mexican War. To some degree, this was because the U.S. military has almost always been dominated by southerners. As Samuel P. Huntington, a Harvard political scientist, has noted, "The South gave military professionalism its only significant support in the pre -- Civil War years. A 'Southern military tradition' existed in a way in which there was never a New England, Middle Western, or Rocky Mountain military tradition." Huntington points out that in the U.S. Army of 1837, 3 of the 4 active generals, 6 of the 13 colonels of the line, and 10 of the 22 highest-ranking officers were not only from the South but from one state: Virginia.

The pattern of southern support for foreign wars was broken during the Spanish-American War when -- for the only time in U.S. history, with the possible exception of the Kosovo war -- intervention abroad was the project of northeastern elites. As the historian Richard Franklin Bensel notes, "imperialism rationalized the interests of the northern industrial core, their agrarian allies, and the Republican party" -- at the time a northeastern-midwestern coalition. Meanwhile, many former Confederates opposed the war out of bitterness toward the federal government. But antiwar sentiment did not end there. Even though the Spanish-American War was a northern enterprise, it was opposed vehemently from within the North. David Hackett Fischer writes, "Anti-imperialism was a regional movement, centered in New England." Once again Boston became the center of the antiwar movement.

AMERICAN SECTIONALISM AND THE WORLD WARS

After the outbreak of World War I, congressional voting on "preparedness" legislation between 1915 and 1917 revealed the by-now-familiar pattern. The anti-interventionists were concentrated in Greater New England, with a few allies among populists in the Highland South. The myth of conservative isolationism to the contrary, most of the World War I-era isolationists held left-of-center views: Progressive Republican followers of Wisconsin Senator Robert La Follette and southern and western populists of the William Jennings Bryan school. In the Senate, the most consistent opponents of pre-paredness and intervention in World War I were all from the western section of Greater New England: George W. Norris (R-Nebr.), Asle J. Gronna (R-N.D.), Harry Lane (D-Ore.), and La Follette himself. In the House, as in the Senate, all but one of the representatives who never voted to put the nation on a war footing or intervene were from the same region. Remarkably, four of the seven most consistent opponents of U.S. involvement in World War I came from the same state in Greater New England: Wisconsin.

The South, on the other hand, was overwhelmingly in favor of U.S. participation in this European war, as it had been in favor of U.S. involvement in the Napoleonic Wars in 1798 and again in 1812. Two-thirds of the southern members of the Senate and four-fifths of the southern members of the House voted in favor of every one of Woodrow Wilson's wartime policies. The exceptions tended to be found in the Highland South. Among the Highland southern allies of the Yankee isolationists in the years preceding World War I was a populist Democratic senator, Thomas P. Gore of Oklahoma -- the grandfather of novelist Gore Vidal and an ancestor of the late Tennessee Senator Albert Gore, Sr., and his son, Vice President Al Gore. His "Gore Resolution" prohibited travel by U.S. citizens on armed merchant vessels.

Between World War I and World War II, the leaders of isolationism in Congress were William E. Borah (R-Idaho), Hiram Johnson (R-Calif.), George Norris (R-Nebr.), and Robert La Follette, Sr. (R-Wis.). Although often described as "midwestern conservative isolationists," they were all actually Greater New England progressives, usually to the left of center in domestic policy. Another of their number, North Dakota Senator Gerald P. Nye, became an important progressive anti-interventionist. In 1934 -- 35, Nye chaired a Senate committee investigating allegations that the munitions industry and international finance had drawn the United States into the Great War. According to the historian Thomas N. Guinsberg, Nye, along with Arthur Vandenberg (R-Mich.) and a Missouri Democrat, Bennett Champ Clark, then staged "a most effective preemptive attack that took the leadership of foreign policy away from the White House." They passed neutrality laws similar to those of the years preceding World War I -- and also similar to legislation passed by the northern-dominated Democrats in Congress during their later attacks on presidential foreign policy prerogatives in the 1970s and 1980s.

As war with Hitler appeared imminent, the American political elite was divided along regional lines, rather than partisan or ideological ones. Southern Democrats like Senators Harry Byrd and Carter Glass of Virginia supported F.D.R.'s military policy even though they bitterly opposed the New Deal. As war with the Axis approached, Representative Luther Patrick of Alabama joked that "they had to start selective service to keep our boys from filling up the army" as volunteers. The isolationist America First Committee succeeded least in the South.

At the same time, many northerners, both Democrats and Progressive Republicans like La Follette, endorsed the New Deal while opposing F.D.R.'s military measures in exactly the same way many northern Democrats and liberal Republicans later supported the civil rights and welfare programs of Harry S Truman and Lyndon B. Johnson while opposing their anti-Soviet foreign policies. The New Dealer Rexford Tugwell pointed out that the West (that is, Greater New England) supported F.D.R.'s progressivism at home but not his interventionist foreign policy, while the South supported interventionism abroad but not a progressive domestic policy. In August 1941, just months before Pearl Harbor, interventionist southern Democrats provided the votes to save the extension of the draft law from defeat. In the fall came the vote on amending the Neutrality Act. Seven southern states cast all their votes to revise "neutrality" to let the United States aid Britain in its struggle with Hitler. Four Greater New England states -- Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Idaho -- cast all their votes against the measure. By providing Roosevelt with a narrow margin of victory on preparedness measures, southern interventionist representatives played a key role in defeating Nazi Germany.

AMERICA'S REGIONAL COLD WAR SPLIT

The pattern of northern isolationism and southern interventionism continued into the Cold War. Ohio Senator Robert A. Taft voted against both the Marshall Plan and NATO. The legacy of Greater New England isolationism also explains the curious fact that William Langer, a progressive Republican senator from North Dakota, opposed the Senate's censure of Wisconsin's Joseph McCarthy -- and the fact that McCarthy was admired by Robert La Follette's son Philip. McCarthy's hatred and suspicion of U.S. national security agencies resonated with many left-of-center progressive isolationists in Wisconsin and surrounding states. Indeed, it is no accident that the same region produced both McCarthy, determined to expose alleged communist subversion of American national security agencies in the 1950s, and Idaho Senator Frank Church, determined to expose the immorality of the CIA in the 1970s. Both McCarthy and Church must be understood in the context of two centuries of Greater New England opposition to standing armies and the national-security state. Nor is it an accident that it was McCarthy of Wisconsin's attack on the Virginia-bred General George C. Marshall and the largely southern U.S. Army that finally led to the demagogue's downfall at the hands of the southern-dominated U.S. Congress. Significantly, the most influential school of anti -- Cold War thought in the academy and press was the "Wisconsin School."

The regional continuities in American foreign policy during the Cold War are clear despite the political realignment of 1964 -- 94, in which the two parties exchanged their constituencies. As the right-wing Goldwater movement, based in the South and the West, became more powerful in the GOP, growing numbers of progressive and liberal Republicans from New England and Yankee states like Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, the Dakotas, and Oregon joined the Democratic Party. At the same time, blacks deserted the party of Lincoln and joined their traditional northern Protestant and Jewish white allies in the Democratic coalition. Meanwhile, white southerners and, more slowly, northern white Catholics moved into the Republican Party. By the early 1970s, the Greater New England Protestant-black-Jewish alliance had captured the national Democratic Party. Following the congressional election of 1974, conservative and moderate southern Democratic committee chairmen were purged by mostly northern left-liberal reformers. (In 1956, two-thirds of the Democrats chairing House committees had been southerners.)

The reason for the collapse of Cold War liberalism in the Democratic Party was not Vietnam but the transformation of the party's base. Even if there had been no Vietnam War, the Democratic Party probably would have become more isolationist in the 1960s and 1970s as its demographic base moved northward. Many of the antiwar activists and politicians came from backgrounds or regions formerly associated with Republican progressivism and anti-interventionism. Lyndon Johnson, a product of the old southern-northern Catholic New Deal coalition, found himself presiding over a party increasingly identified with antimilitary northern Protestants and Jews. Lady Bird Johnson marveled in 1967 at the way that the Republicans supported the Cold War while the Democrats were abandoning it: "Lyndon and I watched Senator John Tower for the Republicans and Senator Joe Clark for the Democrats on television -- the Today show -- talking about Vietnam. What a twist of fate it is to see the administration -- indeed, us -- being explained, backed, yes, even defended by John Tower, while that red-hot Democrat Joe Clark slashes at the administration's policy with rancor and emotion." What escaped the First Lady's attention was the fact that the difference was less partisan than regional: Tower was from Texas, Clark from Pennsylvania. (Senator George Aiken, famous for saying that the United States should declare victory and get out of Vietnam, was from Vermont.)

The divisions within the Republican Party over Vietnam also followed geographic fault lines familiar from earlier American wars. Northern Republicans tended to be more dovish than southern Democrats. At a 1965 Republican governors' conference, the only two governors who refused to sign a pro-war resolution were from the Greater New England anti-interventionist belt: George Romney of Michigan and Mark Hatfield of Oregon. In spring 1967, three Republican senators from Greater New England -- Jacob Javits of New York, Charles Percy of Illinois, and Margaret Chase Smith of Maine -- met to promote a more dovish line for the GOP. The drift of Greater New England Republicans into the Democratic fold was symbolized by the conversion of Senator Floyd Haskell of Colorado, an antiwar Republican.

The contrast between northern anti-interventionism and southern interventionism can be illustrated by a comparison of Idaho Senator Frank Church and Representative Mendel Rivers of South Carolina, who chaired the House Armed Services Committee from 1965 to 1970. Church, a harsh critic of U.S. Cold War policy and national security agencies like the CIA, was photographed in 1966 holding up a picture of his hero and predecessor in the Senate from Idaho: William Borah, the Republican interwar isolationist. Rivers, reflecting the tradition of nineteenth-century South Carolina "fire-eaters," summed up his attitude toward Vietnam thus: "Words are fruitless, diplomatic notes are useless. There can be only one answer for America: retaliation, retaliation, retaliation, retaliation! They say, Quit the bombing. I say, Bomb!"

Northern congressional Democrats in the 1970s, turning against the interventionist heritage of the disproportionately southern and Catholic Cold War liberals, revived techniques used by the isolationist northern Republicans of the 1930s, like banning U.S. military aid to factions in countries like Angola and Nicaragua and attempting to strip the presidency of foreign policy powers. The leader of the movement in favor of a War Powers Act was a Democratic representative from historically anti-interventionist Wisconsin, Clement J. Zablocki.

The domestic divisions over U.S. foreign policy in the 1980s, Peter Trubowitz writes, "were also sectional, not ideological. . . . While Cold War internationalism continued to strike a responsive chord in the South, it had lost much of its appeal in the Northeast." (Indeed, the Cold War never had much appeal in the Northeast, except in regions with large numbers of anticommunist Catholics). According to Trubowitz, "Most of the so-called doves were liberal Democrats and Republicans" from the Northeast, whereas the "hawks were a group made up of conservative Democrats from the South and Republicans from the West."

The Greater New England anti-interventionist bloc coalesced once more in the 1980s behind the nuclear-freeze movement, which won the endorsement of 446 New England town meetings. The sponsors of the first congressional resolution backing the nuclear freeze came from Massachusetts (Senator Edward Kennedy and Representative Edward J. Markey) and Oregon (Senator Mark Hatfield). Three out of four voters in Massachusetts supported the nuclear freeze; Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Ashland, Oregon, among other cities in the isolationist belt, declared themselves "nuclear-free zones."

Meanwhile, white southern Democrats rallied behind President Reagan's militant Cold War policy. In 1980, southern whites who favored higher defense spending were 52 percent Democratic and 34 percent Republican; by 1984, they were 49 percent Republican and 38 percent Democratic. Almost 80 percent of southern whites who voted for Reagan believed that defense spending should be increased beyond Reagan's buildup -- itself the largest peacetime buildup in U.S. history.

By the 1990s, the Tidewater South was the most solidly Republican region, and Greater New England was the bastion of the Democrats. Enough southerners left the Democratic Party after 1960 to give the Republicans a majority in both houses of Congress by 1994 and a near lock on the White House from 1968 to 1992. The regional polarization of the two parties was reflected in the congressional vote authorizing President Bush to wage war on Iraq. Most Democrats voted against the measure, and most of the dissenting Democrats whose alliance with the Republican minority let the declaration of war pass were southerners.

At first glance, the pattern of partisan attitudes toward Kosovo appears not to fit the familiar pattern. Many southern conservatives opposed the NATO campaign against Serbia, while many northern liberals supported it. On close examination, however, the North-South split is still faintly discernible through the superimposed palimpsest of party loyalties.

On April 28, the House of Representatives voted on several proposed endorsements of the war. The votes were mostly partisan; the Republican majority that had impeached President Clinton voted against his Balkan policy, while most Democrats rallied behind their party's leader. Such partisan loyalty was made easier, no doubt, by the fact that the NATO campaign did not seem to the public like a major war (indeed, no American soldiers were killed in combat). Even so, the deviations from the partisan norm were instructive. Representatives from Greater New England states like Wisconsin, Minnesota, Washington, Oregon, Illinois, and Ohio were over-represented among the Democrats who broke with their party to vote against Clinton's bombing campaign. The only Texan Democrat who did so was Lloyd Doggett, who represents liberal Austin, a major college town. Just as significant was the regional identity of the Republicans who voted to formally authorize the Balkan war. Approximately half of these were from southern or south-western states. Virginia alone provided a fifth of the Republicans who broke with their party to back the bombing. Even more significant, another resolution in which Congress, on behalf of the U.S. government, would have formally declared war on Yugoslavia was supported by only two members of the House, one from Texas (Joe Barton, a Republican) and one from Mississippi (Gene Taylor, a Democrat). However distorted by the Clinton-era politics of scandal, the old regional pattern still holds.

WAR AND AMERICAN REGIONAL CULTURE

The historical record, then, could not be clearer. There is a centuries-old anti-interventionist, antimilitary culture in the United States, centered in New England and the regions of the Great Lakes, the Midwest, the Upper Plains, and the Pacific Northwest settled by New Englanders. In the twentieth century, as European Catholic immigrants diluted the influence of Yankee Protestant stock in New England itself, the epicenter of this political culture shifted westward to the Middle West and Far West. For generations, the isolationists of Greater New England have battled the pro-military interventionists of the Tidewater South. The populists of the Highland South have often been divided over foreign policy, as they were divided in their loyalties during the Civil War and the American Revolution. The pedigree of Yankee isolationism runs from the New England Federalists through the northern Whigs and northern Democrats who opposed the Mexican War to the New England anti-imperialists of the later nineteenth century, the liberal Republican anti-interventionists of the first half of the twentieth century, and the anti -- Cold War northern liberal Democrats of the second half. Today's pro-military, interventionist Republicans, for their part, are the political heirs of the pro-military, interventionist Roosevelt and Wilson Democrats, as well as of the expansionist Democrats of the early nineteenth century and their predecessors, the Jeffersonian Republicans who favored the War of 1812.

What accounts for this remarkably persistent pattern of North-South disagreement about the necessity and legitimacy of U.S. military intervention abroad? Traditional accounts of U.S. interventionism and isolationism have explained them in terms of the ties between immigrant groups and Old World countries. This explanation does help account for the opposition of German Americans and anti-British Irish Americans to U.S. intervention in both world wars. But political scientists like Samuel Lubell who attribute interwar American isolationism chiefly to the influence of German and Irish American voters are mistaken. Isolationist sentiment from 1914 to 1941 was strong in many northern states with negligible German and Irish populations.

Quasi-Marxist economic determinist explanations are no more convincing. In Defining the National Interest, Trubowitz attributes the persisting sectional divisions between the hawkish South and the dovish North to different regional economies. Given the South's enthusiasm for other American wars, it is not necessary to explain southern hostility to Hitler and his allies, as Trubowitz does, in terms of a southern strategy of defending overseas markets for cotton exports. The "agrarian" explanation of Greater New England isolationism is no more convincing. The historian Paul Michael Rogin speculates that the opposition of North Dakota Senators Quentin Burdick and George McGovern to the Vietnam War "owes something to the radical agrarian heritage." But agrarianism cannot explain both the anti-interventionism of the North and the interventionism of the South.

The real reason for the persistence of sectionalism in U.S. foreign policy can be found in the "ethnoregional" theory of American politics, which has been developed by David Hackett Fischer, Daniel J. Elazar, D. W. Meinig, Kevin Phillips, and others. This theory holds that, in the United States, powerful ethnic and regional subcultures are more important and enduring than political parties or ideologies. The meaning of "Democrat" and "Republican" differs from generation to generation; regional subcultures like those of New England and the Tidewater South change far more slowly.

The greatest insight of ethnoregional theorists is that immigrants in the United States do not assimilate into a uniform American national culture but assimilate into one of a small number of preexisting regional cultures. The historian Wilbur Zelinsky defined a "Doctrine of Effective First Settlement," which holds that "whenever an empty territory undergoes settlement, or an earlier population is dislodged by invaders, the specific characteristics of the first group able to affect a viable, self-perpetuating society are of crucial significance for the later social and cultural geography of the area, no matter how tiny the initial band of settlers may have been." According to Zelinsky, "in terms of lasting impact, the activities of a few hundred, or even a few score, initial colonizers can mean much more for the cultural geography of a place than the contributions of tens of thousands of new immigrants a few generations later."

Historians disagree about how many such enduring regional cultures there are in the United States. But most scholars agree on at least three: a "Yankee" culture that spread westward overland from New England, a "Quaker" culture originating in Pennsylvania, and a "Cavalier" culture originating in the coastal South. Most, but not all, include a fourth regional culture, that of the Scots-Irish Highland