Backwoods Scot anti-authoritarianism

Here's Ed Payne's take (email sent to me on September 23, 2009) on the distinction between the seemingly upright, lifelong Baptist Walter Scott McLemore, my great grandfather (son of Maj. Amos McLemore), and Walter's sons Amos, Howard and Leroy, who were moonshiners/"beer joint" owners.

* * *
But after finding the 1917 arrest article, I've been mentally stepping back somewhat from too much reliance on the "blame it on the 1920s" hypothesis. Let's go back to the analogy of conventional families who spawned drug dealing baby boomer children. In this case let us say that said family lives on a farm. Now we have to imagine the adult children continue to live on the farm with their supposedly conventional and upright parents. But these parents permit their children to continue living on the farm even after they have been busted numerous times. And the parents would have to at least suspect that their brood are growing pot right there on their property. At this point one has to wonder exactly how conventional the parents really are. If not in sympathy with their children's activities, they are at least very, very tolerant of them. Or maybe we need to question what "conventional" means.

So I have to return to your original multi-generational idea. I'm not so sure it has to do with family poverty, which you've heard was the common condition of the Piney Woods, so much as with some branches of the family going peckerwood. "Peckerwood" is a derisive term but one I will use here to denote those hard nosed, ornery, feisty and usually poor plain folks who some scholars (Grady McWhiney chief among them) have strongly equated with the Scots-Irish (aka Celtic) line. A peckerwood is suspicious / defiant of legal authority and will demonstrate a strong tendency to take the side of his or her kin--regardless of the transgression involved. I made passing noted of this mentality in my Sarah Collins article.

Now I think McWhiney went way overboard by seeming to associate peckerwoodness with genetics rather than cultural heritage. That said, I concede that peckerwood characteristics originally appeared most strongly among Scots-Irish immigrants. Take a peckerwood out of the Piney Woods and put him in Appalachia and he is a hillbilly. Put him in a more agricultural setting and he is a redneck. Put him in the oil fields and he is a roughneck. Put him on Fox News and he's Sean Hannity / Glenn Beck. You got a small dose of stereotypical criticism of blacks in Hattiesburg. Yet I can refer you to articles in which McWhiney characterizes Celts as lazy, ignorant, amoral, and indolent compared to their Anglo neighbors. Those terms sound familiar?

At some point the likely Anglo-Scots cultural moorings of Amos McLemore must faded in the midst of the surrounding peckerwood culture in which he and his descendants lived. Frontier necessity probably caused the shift from Episcopal to Baptist. Meanwhile, in the post Civil War period the tension between the rebellious, fiddle playing, whiskey drinking elements of that culture and the portion that sought to rein itself in by becoming teetotaling, dance-prohibiting Baptists grew more pronounced (and played itself out on a national level with Prohibition). Yet the Old Testament Baptist God of the teetotalers can himself be viewed as Supreme Ornery Cuss who created the Universe just so he could enjoy the satisfaction of tossing 97% of humankind into the eternal fires of hell--as the logic of full blown predestination doctrine demands. Once Baptist theology began inferring that being among the proper folks suggested you were among The Elect of God, Jasper Collins got disgusted enough to risk eternal hellfire by becoming a Universalist.

The point is that thus far your visit has been among the Baptist relations. But the peckerwood side of the McLemore family (and the Piney Woods in general) is still out there. It is living in mobile homes and less fashionable suburbs of Hattiesburg and it even shows up on the balcony of the Brownstone. It cusses and fusses and gets in family fights that smart folks know never to step in the middle of. And among the most outlaw of these peckwoods, moonshine has given way to meth labs.

Maybe the question is by what increments some members of the family became peckerwoods. Walter did not have to be a full blown peckerwood--just enough of one to side with "his boys" against the law. . . . [H]ow defensive could Walter have been concerning his moonshining sons and loose living daughters? Whatever his own feeling, no one else had better say a damn word.

Now consider one other element: Elma's brothers must have known about her affairs with Holmes and Bethea. Holmes was the county lawyer and thus a member of the hated legal authority and Bethea, though not Sheriff until 1948, was among the respectable people who certainly looked down upon the peckerwood, moonshining McLemore brothers. And they, in turn, despised the well-heeled social set of Hattiesburg, a goodly number of whom they knew had occasion to consume their products on the sly. No wonder they took their class hatred out on poor Jimmie French Moore. No wonder that he would have taken his own life if he felt that his efforts to lift himself up were in vain--that was and always would be a peckerwood like them. (Great mostly unknown movie on this theme is "Flesh and Bone" http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9F0CE5DB113DF936A35752C1A965958260 )

But I am back to the question of the transitional role of Walter S. McLemore. Was he only a passive "stand by your kin" peckerwood or had he himself ever been a peckerwood moonshiner? Or did William, Howard, and Leroy find their roll models among their neighbors and older cousins?