Listener Calls

PETER ONUF: At the beginning of today’s show, we heard about how Loyalists fleeing the American Revolution took their values with them to new lives in new lands. And the same thing happened here. The settlers who emigrated to Liberia were motivated by very American beliefs in freedom and opportunity. But their world view also had a darker side– an obsession with racial hierarchy. In a painful irony, the very people who suffered most from American racism ended up building it into a new country they founded.

If you’re just joining us, this is BackStory. And we’re talking today about Americans who have chosen to leave the country, in search of a better life abroad. We’ve reached the point in our show where we listen to you listeners. First up today, we have Francis, joining us on the line from Los Angeles.

ED AYERS: Francis, what’s happening?

FRANCIS: Well, I heard you were doing the topic of immigration. And I’m a seventh-generation Syndey-sider but living here in LA now. But back in our gold rush in Australia, which happened to happen two years after yours– it was 1851– one of my ancestors– he was from Georgia. And he came out to the gold rush in California. I guess he didn’t have much luck. And so kind of figuring that there was another horizon that he could get past, he sort of came out to Australia for the gold rush we had.

PETER ONUF: It’s like the Yukon gold rush.

FRANCIS: And what’s funny is you go across these country towns in Australians or mining towns and stuff, and there’s always– this is today– there’s always a quirky American guy in every one of these little mining towns. At least one or two of them.

BRIAN BALOGH: That’s funny.

ED AYERS: It’s our contribution to your culture.

BRIAN BALOGH: That’s funny, because there’s the same one guy in the little American empty mining towns, Francis.

FRANCIS: Right, right.

ED AYERS: Well, you know, Australia is the perfect place to go. It’s got all of the bounty of a apparently unexploited continent and the same Ideals of freedom and opportunity and boundlessness. I mean Australia is like Canada, but with better weather.

FRANCIS: Exactly.

PETER ONUF: Yeah, you don’t find a lot of Americans up there in the Yukon. They didn’t say for the surfing.

FRANCIS: Or at least staying there.

PETER ONUF: Or the skating. I would just add to that, I think there is a comfortable– this is the point Ed was making. There’s a cultural dimension to this that these are places where people feel at home. And we can romanticize it retrospectively as the frontier or as settlement or as engaging with native peoples, as of course the Australian whites did with Aboriginals. These are common themes in Anglo world history, not all world history.

ED AYERS: And, Peter, thank you for agreeing with me, which means I of course will stab you in the back immediately, for doing so.

PETER ONUF: Yeah, that’s because we’re all convicts. That’s the reason.

FRANCIS: [INAUDIBLE] I wasn’t going to bring up the C-word, if you didn’t.

ED AYERS: But let’s think about South Africa. Why has there not been parallel movement of migration of Americans and sort of emotional investment in South Africa. Is it because South Africa is too literally like the hardest parts of American history.

FRANCIS: Yes. Because it’s interesting. I mean there’s still, there’s a lot of British people today moving to South Africa. I don’t think it bothers them. But I think it would be– an American looking at the situation is going to go, that’s a hot button I don’t need to press anymore.

ED AYERS: And then you, speaking as a white Southerner, to know that apartheid is basically an adaptation of American segregation, basically doing what many advocates of segregation wish they could have done. I think you really have to be sort of over the top in your obliviousness to the ironies of history to do that.

PETER ONUF: I think emigration shows us something about how we can provide a broader context for the so-called American dream. That is what motivates people to move. And that has a special place for us in our national narrative. But it happens to be very much like the national narratives of lots of people who have similar histories. And I think that’s the connection you’re helping us make. Because Australia is very much an American place or America is very much an Australian place.

BRIAN BALOGH: Thank you, Francis.

PETER ONUF: Thanks for your call.

FRANCIS: Thank you, guys.

ED AYERS: Bye bye.

FRANCIS: Bye bye.

PETER ONUF: While we were putting the show together, a listener named Robert left a comment at backstoryradio.org with some interesting examples of emigration that we haven’t touched on yet. Here’s what he had to say.

Two examples came to mind, both connected. One is the secession crisis and Civil War. The South chose to leave the United States without physically leaving the geographic land mass. With the loss of the Civil War, the second example is the Confederados, those former Confederates who chose to move to South American states rather than live within a reconstructed union. The Confederados made such a deep cultural impact that there are still festivals in Brazil that celebrate Southern heritage.

ED AYERS: That’s very interesting. Two kinds of emigration that are occasioned by Southern secession. So what do you guys think? Was secession a kind of de facto emigration?

PETER ONUF: Oh yeah, they didn’t move, but they redrew the boundary, didn’t they? And they might say ours is the more righteous real American part of the ruptured union. But they’re changing boundaries. And that, in a way, is another version of the history of– well– expansion and contraction that defines American history.

ED AYERS: So it’s like they take what they would see as a purified version of the founding vision.

PETER ONUF: Yeah.

ED AYERS: Because they say, look, we’re not changing a darned word in the Constitution. We just want to leave. And we’re also honoring the Bible. We’re also honoring the founding vision of the 3/5 clause and all that. You guys are the ones who have changed. You’re emigrating from us.

PETER ONUF: That’s exactly right.

BRIAN BALOGH: And that’s why I don’t think it’s emigration. I think it’s exclusion. Let’s get rid of all of these artifacts that have been created since the original founding. We’re not going anywhere. We are simply taking what we were endowed with and getting rid of all those external influences.

ED AYERS: Yeah, a way to think about it is the Yankees have emigrated from us.

BRIAN BALOGH: That’s right.

ED AYERS: And it’s no accident that the patron saint of the Confederacy is George Washington.

BRIAN BALOGH: We don’t need to go anywhere to have the founding fathers.

ED AYERS: So once they lose– and I think that’s right. This is the way the Confederates would have seen things. Once they lose, then they say now–

BRIAN BALOGH: We’re out of here.

ED AYERS: –it’s time to get out of Dodge. Some of them tried to escape to the West of the United States and start new lives. They thought about escaping to Cuba, to Mexico, places where some variety of this racialized society that they knew and loved have been in place. And the most colorful example, in many ways, are those that Robert refers to, the Confederados, who flee to Brazil. And maybe 10,000 move to Brazil and set up a colony that basically tries to reconstruct, so to speak, Southern society in another country.

PETER ONUF: So, Ed, is this something like the diaspora of the Loyalists after the Revolution? Many Loyalists stayed in place, and many came back to the US. But then others went out across the world. And it seems this is an echo of that.

ED AYERS: Yeah, you’re exactly right, Peter. The difference is that the Confederates are representing a failed, rather than a successful, state. There are these remnants of a failed revolution.

PETER ONUF: There’s no empire to plug into.

BRIAN BALOGH: One that had not been around all that long.

ED AYERS: Exactly. And a major destination for them is the North, is the New York City. And there’s actually the New York Southern Society that flourishes in the late 19th century. And it’s Southern emigres who then, in a great act of reconciliation with the North, where they’re making their livings, inviting people to come in and talk about Northern and Southern reconciliation.

So, Peter, what you find is that the Southern diaspora, the white Southern diaspora, which precedes the black Southern diaspora, because black Southerners are not allowed to leave, is in many ways sort of a scattering of these dreams of the nation that might have been wherever they can take it in the world.

PETER ONUF: Well, we want to know what you listeners think about this. You can leave a comment for us at backstoryradio.org. While you’re there, have a look at the topics we’re working on, and give us a call. Our number is 434-260-1053.

BRIAN BALOGH: It’s time for that another short break. When we come back, African-Americans flee the Great Depression in search of a better life. Growing cotton in Uzbekistan. You’re listening to BackStory. We’ll be back in a minute.