People Who Don't Need Heroes

...14.95...

...It isn't honest, because Webb has to know that neither history nor culture unfolds the way he suggests, with all edges neatly tacked down and the characters of peoples reducible to grand essences...

...In their songs, John Henry became a giant, his hammer growing from nine or ten pounds to forty, while earlier references to vulnerability ("The mountain was so tall, John Henry was so small/He laid down his hammer and he cried") disappeared...

...But white Southerners were not without choices...

...Belief...

...And prison records, too, are thin, except for a register noting that he was contracted out to work on the C&O Railroad in 1868, and that he was "5 ft 1 1/4" tall...

...As quoted by Nelson, a critic once wrote that Carson's performances carried "the feel of the old red clay hills of Georgia and the little old cabin with the golden corn swaying in the wind across the patch and the sour mash still bubbling out its distilled sunshine over the brow of the hill, where revenooers haven't looked yet...

...And then they may have gone along with Redemption, as the reinstitution of armed white rule post-Reconstruction was called, with lynching, Jim Crow, the Klan...

...Instinctively radical individualists, cold to unions and bosses alike, they sum up the nation's attitude to work in the country refrain, "Take this job and shove it...

...On a website dedicated to "John Henry," folklorists and others have argued that Nelson's story is preposterous...

...It was taken in 1936 in Kensett, Arkansas, and the man is B. H. Hodges, Webb's grandfather...

...Henry" was no doubt a given name, not a last name...

...Legends, as both books demonstrate, are thick with truth, not so much about things as they really were as about the people who tell the tales and the reasons they need them...

...industrial labor organization, the United Mine Workers, and the more radical Western Miners Federation...

...They breathed in silica dust, and one after the other they died...

...Thus the rollicking nature of so much of the music accompanying the ballad, most recently on Bruce Springsteen's We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions...

...He is angry at Yankees and corporations, which might as well be Yankees, even if their scions are named Walton and they're billionaires from Arkansas...

...If everyone pulled at once, it helped prevent backaches and muscle strain (both serious problems for railroad workers...

...The latter especially would count on solidarity of the skin from poor whites, whose scrawny children would laugh in photographs of black men flayed alive and then go home to where their only textbook was a Montgomery Ward catalog...

...Most of the region's people were plunged into want and ignorance, while rich white Yankees and rich white Southerners laughed their way to the bank...

...This isn't honest history, but it is knuckle-skinning autobiography...

...John Henry may have robbed a store...

...He is angry at Hollywood and liberals from fancy schools, at "cultural Marxists" and "the activist Left," which he inflates to a mighty force wielding the ultimate weapon, "political correctness," to destroy "the Southern redneck...

...Fear...

...Amazingly, he also denies his people credit for their substantial role in the Southern Tenant Farmers Union and in possibly the most important unions in the history of U.S...

...angry at the blacks, except Martin Luther King, for going too far and pushing the poor white around...

...He couldn't have been in leg irons...

...Weakness...

...He was born in Kentucky, mined coal in Carbondale, Illinois, and moved to Arkansas, where he'd heard there were diamonds but there weren't...

...And so Nelson begins trailing the legend, winding it back to the world of work that birthed it, the hammer songs leading him to "John Henry...

...In Atlanta, he experienced the louche life of sex, drink, and song on Decatur Street at night, and by day worked in the picker room of a textile mill...

...To Webb, he is "a mythical figure," a man who would have been a world champion "if there had ever been an Olympic event called 'never give an inch.'" A couple of days a week, Hodges would walk six miles to the town square, where "he argued the rights of the black and the poor, and the unfairness of local leaders...

...The John Henry they depend on couldn't have been a shade over 5 foot 1, some pipsqueak who could never have picked up a hammer, as the song says, "throwin' thirty pounds from my head on down," in some versions forty pounds, in some, more suggestively, "from his hips on down...

...They conformed the way members of every other group have, because they were tricked or rewarded or because life was just too tough not to and capitalism doesn't afford a lot of choices...

...John Henry," as sung by convicts at Parchman Farm, Mississippi, 1948 Pride is all that some men have...

...his bizarre name-dropping of Tom Wolfe on the campaign trail, boasting of the dandy poseur's praise for this book to mining families in the Virginia coal counties who stared back indifferently...

...Whatever his occupation, he was among thousands of black men, free-born and newly freed, who transformed the face of City Point and other towns in the county, prompting the Virginia legislature in 1865-66 to pass a series of "black codes," making blacks vulnerable to prosecution for, among other things, displaying an "air of satisfaction...

...Webb was not a politician when he wrote it, and though he presents the book as a history sweeping 2,000 years, he is also clear about his purposes: "In a society obsessed with multicultural jealousies, those who cannot articulate their ethnic origins are doomed to a form of social and political isolation...

...Uniquely spat upon and scorned, uniquely contradictory, they are thus uniquely deserving of a complex, empathic reading...

...In such arguments, there is an echo of the "extra gangs" of elite track workers, who also broke from overwork but were renowned for vigor and strength while they had them...

...He may have been on strike...

...But every wail of a train whistle at night would still evoke the ghosts of so many nameless others...

...And the "John Henry" sung by prisoners at Parchman Farm isn't a rollick but a dirge...

...Or maybe it was the fractured sense of place once he got the law degree and joined them among the elite-once he became Secretary of the Navy and a novelist, once it was clear he no longer fit in the old class but was not fully at home in the new...

...384 pages...

...In every case, there was honor or a job at stake, social ostracism or the destruction of a political career looming, or absolute hell in the offing...

...Born Fighting is thus an instrument of ethnic special pleading, the kind of thing Webb appears to despise even as he succumbs to it...

...Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America By James Webb Broadway Books...

...angry at anti-war protesters from the Vietnam era, whom he defines entirely as insufferably coddled rich white boys who went to Ivy League colleges...

...The first recording of "John Henry," for instance, was made in 1924 by a Southern white man, Fiddlin' John Carson, credited as an inventor of country music...

...Theirs were bragging songs, and next to them Nelson's history is too much, too painful, too true...

...Thus, too, the image of a giant John Henry, passed down from the pages of the New Masses to children's storybooks to the postage stamp issued a few years ago and the statue, courtesy of the Jim Beam distillery in Talcott, West Virginia, near the Big Bend Tunnel, where some famous versions of the song place John Henry's great race...

...The poor might have followed their slave-owning "Captains" to war...

...These, he argues, are a wild, ornery, wanderlusting people, a fierce people, stern in war and religion but also roguish, sensual, fond-often too fond-of the drink...

...At the time he was entered into prison records, on November 16, 1866, after having been convicted of "Housebreak & larceny" and sentenced to ten years, he was nineteen years old...

...that white liberals and leftists can claim no immunity from racism...

...This deeply autobiographical work is far more disturbing, though not in ways that would have been useful to the odious Allen...

...and that the white elite has long appreciated both racial division and superficial "diversity" as means of blunting class challenges...

...angry at the Republican Party for abandoning the redneck to the corporations and keeping him poor...

...For two years, between the last month of steam drill operation [October 1871] and the completion of the tunnel-in September 1873," he writes, "close to one hundred convicts died from a variety of diseases, most of them associated with lung impairments...

...He took his family back to the coal fields, then back to Arkansas, where they followed the crops as migrants before settling into the misery of the sharecrop in a shack without toilets, electricity, or running water...

...He may simply have had the wrong air at the wrong time and place...

...The workers who helped blast through the Lewis Tunnel on the VirginiaWest Virginia border were all convicts...

...He had been born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and went south either as a servant to the Union Army or as a day laborer, hired "to do the army's last work": harvesting Union and Confederate corpses from the swamps of Prince George County, just south of Richmond...

...Thus were capital punishment and the punishment by capital united...

...I had to cross the state before I found a copy, but along the way, in Richmond, I discovered Nelson's incandescent story of John Henry...

...Maybe it was in the Vietnam War, which revolted his career-military father for its fixation on body counts, or maybe it was growing up with that father, with the rented houses and military projects, the moves from base to base, the pain the old lion exacted along with love to man the boy up...

...Court records are confounding, except for the sentence...

...Old witnesses claimed to have seen him elsewhere, said he was at least six feet tall at least, the strongest man alive...

...angry at those who see in the Confederate flag "nothing more than the symbol of a racist heritage," accusing said persons of "one of the great blasphemies of our modern age...

...Something happened to Jim Webb...

...Unlike the steel drivers at the Big Bend Tunnel, this John Henry worked beside steam drills...

...The book, a couple of years old now, was not among those from which Webb's opponent, George Allen, quoted in television commercials intending to tar their author as a pervert indifferent to man's inhumanity to man-and especially woman...

...More than that, the book is a primary document of the injuries of class...

...right that the North since before the Civil War has been monstrously hypocritical...

...It was a no-ties-on-me romance that Carson wrapped himself in, then sold to white millworkers who longed for a piece of the same, a hillbilly legend no truer than "John Henry" but as satisfying and for the same reasons...

...The new Senator from Virginia, populist hope of the Democratic Party, appears to be furious at everyone but the Scots-Irish, whom he credits with contributing America's "most definitive culture," many of its greatest soldiers, some of its greatest Presidents, the "core character of the nation's working class," the "defining fabric of the South and Midwest," "the most distinctly American form of music," one of the truest American folklore styles, Mark Twain, John Wayne, Tallulah Bankhead, and NASCAR racing...

...Everyone else may be skimmed over or made into a cardboard figure for Webb to barrel over on his way to the next effusion about his people's peculiar grace and greatness...

...It is an ugly history that America has to own, North and South, and no populist politics worth a damn would excuse it or seek a new solidarity of exclusion, this time against people the Webb campaign too easily called "illegals...

...He wasn't in Virginia or West Virginia, but in Alabama or Arkansas or Texas, all of which have historical markers claiming he fought the steam drill there...

...In folklore John Henry was the strongest man alive, huge and black and free, whopping steel with a hammer called Lucy, laying track in the Reconstruction-era South, and drilling mountain rock for railroad tunnels that would allow ribbons of steel to connect the East Coast with the ever-expanding West...

...These men accommodated the transfer of the formerly state-controlled Southern railroads to private hands, supplying convict laborers like John Henry, praising the railroads for helping to bring about the end of "Negro rule...

...In the process, he shows the realities of life for the largest industrial workforce in the postwar South: the 40,000 black men in railroad gangs, their work processes and cocaine-aided pain relief, their itinerancy and night-time diversions in mess tents and bunkhouses, where the ring of the hammer or the huh of the trackline transmuted into the backbeats and caesuras of what would become the blues...

...Or: John Henry told his captain "A man ain't nothin' but a man Before I let your steam drill beat me down I'll die with this hammer in my hand I'll die with this hammer in my hand...

...After 1873, John Henry vanishes from prison records...

...Opportunism...

...The huh in the song told workers to push their dogs down and lever the rail up...

...John Wm...

...The capitalist interests that Webb decries for immiserating the postwar South did not do so without Southern collusion...

...Like white Southerners throughout history who confound Webb's typology and are therefore forgotten, B. H. Hodges was a resister, a natural man, like the real John Henry, his life at once too small and too large for legend...

...He was usually "in either a minority or a majority of one...

...Blackballed from the mills, Carson turned to music full time, singing in front of courthouses, at Democratic rallies, becoming an early member of the Ku Klux Klan and reinventing himself from militant linthead city boy intimately acquainted with blacks to freewheeling, law-shirking, adamantly white mountain man...

...angry at the North, at the snobs in academia and publishing and SDS, for manipulating the blacks (whom they didn't much like anyway) to push the poor white around...

...Not so heroism, the special attribute of those who, in the whiskered adage, "would rather die on their feet than live on their knees...

...Just as sea shanties told sailors when to pull on the rigging, hammer songs told trackliners when to dog the track...

...The frequent references in "John Henry" to the "C&O line," the Chesapeake & Ohio that ran from Richmond through the Allegheny Mountains to the Ohio River, led Nelson to reconsider a document that had always bothered him, a report of excess deaths at the Richmond Penitentiary in the early 1870s, and from there to a real John Henry, Prisoner No...

...What made Carson invert so far as to join the Klan...

...They drilled pilot holes in the slate and shaley sandstone with a hammer and spike, and next to them steam drills "jabbered crazily spitting crystalline dust in every direction...

...It is bracing, in a sense, to read a politician's book unmassaged by the consultant's caution, and without illusions about white culture, or at least part of it, as some neutral slate upon which every other group might scratch in its story...

...Dynamite was inserted in these holes, and through the clouds of dust convicts were ordered to remove the rock, quick-quick, because construction was on deadline...

...And he is right that racism is an American, not merely Southern problem...

...And as in the song, the steam drills failed...

...JoAnn Wypijewski is a columnist for Mother Jones...

...Then they cut spending for every decent service to pay down the debts the states had incurred while building the railroad before the war...

...According to forensic anthropologists who examined almost 300 nineteenth century corpses later excavated from the penitentiary site, about 80 percent were of black men in their early twenties...

...The left, he contends, is taming the America that the rednecks single-handedly created: "doing everything in its power [over the past fifty years] to sue them, legislate against their interests, mock them in the media, isolate them as idiosyncratic, and publicly humiliate their traditions in order to make them, at best, irrelevant to America's future growth...

...In style, it evokes some of the earliest versions of the song, sung by convicts, and the spare, rhythmic predecessors of the ballad, sung by railroad trackliners and coal miners to regulate the pace of work and to remind themselves, Nelson writes, "to slow down...

...I went in pursuit of it for insight into the prickly, palpably bottled-up Webb, who was taking every opportunity on the election trail to revile gross inequalities of wealth, prompting starry talk about a resurgent populism...

...This old hammer, huh Killed John Henry, huh Killed my brother, huh Won't kill me, huh Won't kill me, huh Nelson likens the hammer songs to tools: "Gangs of four to twelve [railroad] workers sang them as they dug up, or 'dogged,' track...

...Iwas glad for my accidental discovery of Steel Drivin' Man while reading Born Fighting, because the latter is bitter gruel, until it nears its end, where the bitterness doesn't cease but the cause of it is at least plain, in one abysmally sad, true family story...

...As he says, "The slurs stick to me...

...But in Webb's telling, Southern whites emerge as victims-first of the Union Army, then of Reconstruction, then of the railroads and corporate interests that kept them poor, and so on...

...Webb cannot avoid the racist legacy of the South, but he deflects it...

...That one came to grief, as so many did...

...As a youth in the 1880s, Carson had been a waterboy on the railroad, refreshing black trackliners, soaking up their stories and songs, later mixing those with what he knew from white fiddle traditions and brewing up something different still...

...Born Fighting" was his campaign slogan, blazoned in yellow across yard signs and decaled to the side of a chrome-bright, camouflage-painted Jeep vehicle that he used for the final stump through southwest Virginia, the part of the state his ancestors settled and which, because of them, he claims as home...

...What made anyone in the South do the same...

...By JoAnn Wypijewski Well they's some said he come from England Well they's some said he come from Spain (a yah) Well but I say he musta been a West Virginia man Cause he died with the hammer in his hand (my lord) Well he died with the hammer in his hand...

...He doesn't record capital's vicious campaign against textile workers throughout the South, the crushing of their unions and outright murder of their organizers...

...Henry," so listed in the Richmond census of 1870 as resident at the penitentiary, fits no profile of a legend...

...It might be fair to say Hodges was an original, a contradiction, there in his loneliness, to his grandson's effort to make him stand for the whole, an emblem of the Scots-Irish and white Southern spirit...

...He is angry at the Democratic Party for abandoning the redneck to "the Left" and keeping him poor...

...Tom Watson, the once-great populist, may have moved from racial inclusion to racist demagoguery...

...I came upon these books while on the road in Virginia, following Webb, whose victory on Election Day would hand the Senate to the Democrats...

...He crossed the small-town baron A. P. Mills one day when he told local blacks that they were being charged higher interest rates than whites at Mills's grocery store, told Mills he was un-Christian and could go to hell...

...Maybe it was something as simple as the easy use of "trailer trash" in the press as a seemingly adequate explanation for why people in all kinds of scrapes come to a bad end...

...On the wall in Webb's new Senate office, there no doubt hangs a four-by-seven black-and-white photograph framed in barn wood of a gaunt man in overalls and knee-high boots with "a hard, bitter look that could crack a rock...

...Maybe it was the sting of knowing his father's struggle over twenty-six years to get a college degree, while the white boys at Georgetown Law School wore their privilege thoughtlessly...

...This was also one of the first songs Carson recorded...

...When they got too sick to work or died, they were returned to the penitentiary, buried in a ditch beside a fence next to a big white prison building...

...And there is something awfully touching in his need for validation from the same quarter he holds in contempt: his careful noting of prizes and Ivy League pedigrees attaching to authors who agree with him...

...Those were Webb's novels...

...James Webb set out to write history and wove a legend, complicating the story of the Scots-Irish who settled the Appalachian South, rescuing them from the slur of "white trash" but in the process simplifying them and the forces around them to a different kind of caricature...

...Jim Webb is an angry man...

...He broke a hip in an accident that left him with an infection and an open wound, for which his wife kept two sets of bandages, and one day he lay down on a corn shuck mattress in the middle of the day and died...

...They took John Henry to the white house, And buried him in the san' And every locomotive come roarin' by, Says there lays that steel drivin' man, Says there lays that steel drivin' man...

...It would be nice to imagine him like the hero in Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, escaping instead of dying, leaping in triumph at the top of a hill...

...After years of acquaintance with the brutalities of industrialism, he joined a strike there in 1914...

...The dog was a railroad pick, and everyone jiggered his dog under the track as he sang a phrase in the song...

...The fact is, the Scots-Irish bent the knee all the time, sometimes to other, more powerful Scots-Irish who forced the kneeling...

...But steam drills weren't used on the Big Bend Tunnel, as Nelson, a historian of nineteenth century railroad workers in the South, discovered...

...There wasn't sand but dirt by the penitentiary...

...Free black and white workers had struck at Big Bend rather than tunnel through "bad air," but convicts couldn't strike...

...He fought a quintessential battle, man versus machine, which he won and lost and won again: pounding steel fourteen feet deep while "the steam drill only made nine," moaning "Cool drink of water 'fore I die," and being resurrected as the hero of an epic ballad that, in some 200 iterations, became one of the first blues songs, one of the first country songs, and the most researched folk song in the United States, if not the world...

...Scott Reynolds Nelson started out chasing a legend and struck history, whether his John Henry is the "steel drivin' man" who, in a celebrated contest, beat steam drill with his hammer and died, or one of hundreds of unsung black chain-gang laborers who worked alongside steam drills in the Appalachian Mountains and died to make the railroads run...

...By 1867, the Yankees allowed the largest Confederate landowners back into politics...

...Webb suggests the Scots-Irish are anti-union by nature...

...John Henry dies, but then death comes for everyone...

...Pride and a body, but a body will break while pride carries on, in legends and resentments, in the stories people tell themselves and the songs they sing, making a romance of the past and sometimes calling it history...

...Webb is not entirely wrong, but it's disingenuous then to go on about this people's essential nonconformism, their refusal to join, to "bend the knee...