Month: August 2013

One thing that bugged me about some of the comments from the Cascadia Calm post was the treatment of some regional personalities as normal, while others abnormal. But, Kim brings up Southern Charm indirectly, so I’ll take a look at Southern Charm.

The idea behind Southern Charm as the polite normal is pretty straight forward. As Kim points out, Southerners (especially Dixie Southerners) introduce themselves, use terms like sir and ma’am, make polite conversation and share stories about their lives, relations and friends.

Now, if someone (without a Southern accent) came up to me and started behaving this way, I’d be just a bit put off. But, that’s me, that’s my region, that’s how we see politeness.

But, let’s get back to Southern Charm and its origins. Or, at least its dark side:

Scott Huler:

Southern hospitality is all it’s chalked up to be: It’s 12-molar,
190-proof distilled essence of welcome, and aren’t you sweet? But at the
restaurant where you can’t leave until they bring you a bill, and they
won’t bring it until they’re good and done with you, it’s about control,
not welcome. It’s a little bit more like Grandma’s insistence on red
velvet cake and seven-layer cake and chocolate cake after Sunday dinner —
but everybody has to make one and bring it, and don’t even think about
getting up from the table until you’ve tried all three, and, meanwhile,
greens turn to glop on the stove and dressing dries out in the oven and
Grandma accidentally lays the potatoes down on the settee, a case of
nerves brought on by the strain of all these guests that she demanded
come over. I have endured this kind of hospitality in the family of my
beloved wife, a native of this state, and I have seen the toll it takes
on host and guest alike. “A tyrannical Southern insistence on
hospitality” is how David Denby described it in a recent New Yorker
review. “Graciousness,” he concluded, “is both armor and a weapon.” 

Denby is far from the first to note that Southern hospitality has its
dark side. Roy Blount Jr. discussed it in his famous essay “The Lowdown
on Southern Hospitality.” “The truth is, irritation is involved in
Southern hospitality,” Blount writes. “Nothing … is sweeter than
mounting irritation prolongedly held close to the bosom.”

Why does the South, in particular, need this sort of personality to survive. It is because, Huler notes, of the way the South developed:

In A History of the South, Francis Butler Simkins and
Charles Pierce Roland say “the cult of Southern hospitality” expressed
“a means of relieving the loneliness of those living far from each
other.” A new friend once pressed hospitality on me on Malta, the island
at the belly button of the Mediterranean. When I suggested I could not
possibly be as welcome a guest as he made me seem, he explained: “We
live on an island. We wait for people like you.” Loneliness powerfully
motivates hospitality. On a more basic level, when it took half a day to
get to the neighbors, you’d better get more than a ladle of water and a
nod from the porch when you rode up.

 Large farms, a largely rural population spread across several states. It is no wonder that the regional personality was focused on being so damn polite. If you weren’t if you lost a few friends, they were likely the only friends you’d have a chance to make in awhile.

And, I’ll just make the leap here to another topic that I think is pretty striking given this conversation. Take a look at the social capital map of the United States:

  

The more we descend towards the South,
the less active does the business of the township or parish become; the
number of magistrates, of functions, and of rights decreases; the
population exercises a less immediate influence on affairs; town
meetings are less frequent, and the subjects of debate less numerous.
The power of the elected magistrate is augmented and that of the elector
diminished, whilst the public spirit of the local communities is less
awakened and less influential.

The map shows you that the De Tocqueville quote carries through to today. The institutions built up by citizens acting in concert with each other simply don’t exist in the same ways that they exist elsewhere (especially New England, the upper Midwest and Cascadia).

If you don’t think about it too hard, it seems strange that the region best known for its social graces rates the lowest in social capital, the actual verifiable ties that bind community’s together.

Unless you thought that social politeness was a cover for actual social ties that bind. If you know you have support from your community, that things will go well because people are generally nice and will back you up, that your local government is there to help, I don’t think you’ll need to be overlly polite to everyone you meet.

But, if you lack social cohesion, the support groups and social capital just isn’t there, you’re region might develop an overly polite personality to make up for it.

On the Cascadian Calm post, there are a handful of comments worth responding to. Here’s my first shot, which is mostly just a bunch of adding and subtracting.

First, from Anonymous:

…people are becoming aware of the “Seattle Freeze”, and as out-of-towners slowly take over the NW area.

Second, from Kim Bannerman:

There are far more transplanted people here in the Seattle area than
ever before. We’re not going away, Seattleites. Time to embrace the
change/different people and see that as a positive thing that makes your
life richer! We all have gifts and bring different things to share,
after all.

So, the claim is that all the outsiders coming in will eventually overwhelm natives (and people that have acclimated) to make us more open to your Southern charmy or otherwise not Cascadian Calm ways.

But, the number just don’t add up.

First, in Washington, a state with a population of just less than 7 million, here is a chart showing natural growth (births) versus migrants:

 

Certainly there have been eras of massive migration into both states. The 90s were very good to us in terms of getting new people here. But, The chart overall is pretty volatile and in the last few years in Washington have been some of the worst for migrants compared to natural births.

I’ll refer you back to the general population numbers. Even in the days of 50,000 plus migrants a year coming into Washington, they were hardly a drop in the bucket compared to our overall population. You may come here, but in terms of you getting together with your migrant friends and changing our culture? The numbers just don’t add up.

Let’s get back to one of my points in the original post, that the so-called Seattle Freeze (Cascadian Calm) is really a eye of the immigrant sort of thing. It really only exists in the eye of the new comer. That you start to see references to the Freeze in the 1990s (when post Boeing Bust migration peaked) certainly backs this up.

Also, Kim’s point about “embracing change” is well heard. We do embrace change, we are (along with Georgia) one of the most open regions, personality wise. We just don’t get all up in your face about it.

For the South, there’s a very and bright line clear line of when the era following the Civil War ended. Unfortunately for me, it is when the Alabama Crimson Tide beat the University of Washington Huskies in the 1926 Rose Bowl.

I kid you not, Southerners take this story very seriously:

It was more than a football game. It was the chance to avenge the
South, to reclaim the valor and honor of the Lost Cause. No longer would
this land be known for its hookworm and illiteracy. It would be the
home of the best damn football in the nation!

“The 1926 Rose Bowl
was without a doubt the most important game before or since in Southern
football history,” says Birmingham News sportswriter Clyde Bolton.

The 1926 Rose Bowl was a regionally defining event for Dixie (if not the broader south). It showed a way back to regional pride. And, no one can argue that college football is still very much top dog in terms of major sports in Dixie.

So, was there and equal reaction in Cascadia, turning us back when the South lurched foward? Taking a simple look at our history, it seems that the Husky’s performances in Rose Bowls  does seem to correlate with the region’s economic well-being.

The 1926 Rose Bowl in fact marked the high mark of the region since Washington statehood and the recession that followed. Since the 1890s, Cascadia had slowly begun transforming itself from frontier to a real region.

In the case of Seattle, the landscape was literally remade to make room for the city itself:

As the city matured, it sought to make further refinements to itself,
thus launching a campaign of civic improvement devoted to mastering
nature locally as well. One set of improvements revolved around leveling
the steep hills that encircled the downtown. Between 1900 and 1930 the
city re-engineered its natural setting by regrading the slopes around
the central business district. The hills were seen as an impediment to
real estate development; city officials assumed that by lowering the
hills they would facilitate the outward growth of the central business
district and accelerate the rise in property values. As workmen washed
and shoveled and hauled the hills away, they also straightened the lower
Duwamish River in order to facilitate shipping on that stream; created
Harbor Island, which added to the city’s waterfront; and filled in some
of the tideflats in the area just south of Pioneer Square (the spot
occupied by the Kingdome between 1976 and 1999).

 But, following the 1926 Rose Bowl (not immediately after, but soon) all that came to a crashing halt.

The economic depression through the 1930s dragged the entire country down, but it hurt Cascadia even more than the national average. Unemployment in our region was far above the national average throughout the depression. Investment stopped and the growth that our region had expected halted.

By 1933, lumber exports stood at about half what they had been in 1929.
Many agricultural products brought prices so low that they were not
worth shipping to market; some apple and prune growers uprooted their
trees and burned them for fuel. Mining output in Idaho dropped from $32
million in 1929 to $9 million in 1933. By 1933 income levels across the
three states had declined to about 55% of what they had been four years
earlier. Rates of tax delinquency and business failure, of course, had
climbed greatly. The surest sign of an interruption in the normal course
of things was that, for the first time since the 1840s, mainstream
society was united in trying to discourage migration to the region from
back east—for fear that newcomers would only add to already overburdened
welfare rolls. In fact, the population of the area did not stop growing
during the 1930s; it actually increased by about 10%, largely because
so many people from the Midwest moved to the region seeking work.

 But, unlike Dixie, Cascadia didn’t see the Rose Bowl in terms of regional identity. The Seattle Times coverage on January 2, 1926 was typical of a losing city.  A few paragraphs on the front page and then full page coverage in the sports section. While the Crimson Tide were being great by brass bands and crowds on their train trip home through Dixie, the Huskies were greeted with shrugs and “I guess we’ll get’em next year fellas” attitude.

And, it didn’t seem that unrealistic that the Huskies would be back soon. They tied Navy two years earlier in their first visit to the bowl game and had won conference titles twice more in ten years.

But, as Cascadia entered the Depression, the Huskies would have a long road back to the Rose Bowl. Their coach in 1926, Enoch Bagshaw resigned after a losing season in 1929 and died the following fall.

Huskies would lose in 1937 and 1944 without scoring a point.

In fact, the next (and scoring at all) in the Rose Bowl for the University of Washington would be in 1960 when the fate of Puget Sound and broader Cascadia seemed bright again. The Huskies would face off against Wisconsin and beat them 44 to 8. Later that summer, the Seattle World’s Fair was announced.

The Huskies would  repeat in the Rose Bowl, beating Minnesota this time 44 to 8. When the fair was held in 1962 it crystallized the hope and audacity of the region that had dragged itself back from the depths of the Depression.

By 1964, the Huskies were back to losing the game and entering a 14 year Rose Bowl drought. In the middle of that Rose Bowl desert, the Boeing Bust hit Puget Sound, taking the spirit of the 1962 World’s Fair with it.

The Huskies returns to the Rose Bowl from 1978 through 1982 buck my nice neat trend. The Huskies were 2-1 in these years, but Cascadia and Puget Sound were going through some roller coaster years. The economy in the late 70s was pretty good, but had dropped off by the time the Huskies beat Iowa in 1982.

In the early 1990s, the Huskies again went 2-1 in Rose Bowls, winning a national championship and finishing undefeated in 1992 against Michigan. This game could very well mark the high point in Husky football history and the high mark of Cascadia’s economy and cultural influence.

While the Huskies were making their way through national football powers, Grunge was happening, Seattle was becoming the most livable city.

Yes, Cascadia changed in the 1990s and the Huskies were there in Pasadena.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post trying to connect how Appalachian and New England settlers have shaped Cascadia. I used a map to shortly show how some things (like legalizing marijuana) cuts across the usual political barriers in at least one part of Cascadia, Washington State.

Muto_krang on a reddit thread about the post questioned the conclusion I’d drawn, so I’ll try to explain it a bit better here.

This is a fairly typical statewide result map for an election in Washington State:

  

Democrats win the urbanized Puget Sound and some traditional Democratic holdouts on the coast. Republicans win the rest. But, this is only when the race follows traditional (and typically national) lines of debate. Republican and Democratic candidates in Washington typically discuss things like taxes and abortion, things that the different parties argue about everywhere.

But, when the debate becomes about something neither party really lays claim to (say marijuana) we can see the real regional personality of our Cascadian politics come through. And, that is where you get a map like this: