INSTITUTE OF ENGLISH CULTURES AND LITERATURES FACULTY OF PHILOLOGY UNIVERSITY OF SILESIA IN KATOWICE John Eric Starnes Student’s number: 7190 Rebels Against the Dream The American White Nationalist Novel and the Culture of Defeat A dissertation written in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Ph.D. in Humanities at the University of Silesia in Katowice Thesis director: Paweł Jędrzejko, D.Litt, Ph.D. Assistant supervisor: Marcin Mazurek, Ph.D. KATOWICE 2017 INSTYTUT KULTUR I LITERATUR ANGLOJĘZYCZNYCH WYDZIAŁ FILOLOGICZNY UNIWERSYTET ŚLĄSKI W KATOWICACH John Eric Starnes numer indeksu: 7190 Sen o rebelii Amerykańska powieść białego nacjonalizmu a „kultura klęski” Praca doktorska Promotor: dr hab. Paweł Jędrzejko Promotor pomocniczy: dr Marcin Mazurek KATOWICE 2017 3 Table of Contents Preface..........................................................................................................................................................5 American White Nationalist Novels (1834–2015): A Timeline...........................................................................7 Introduction: “I’m a good ol’ Rebel”..............................................................................................................20 1. Visions of the Never-Ending War: Mapping the State of Research on American White Nationalism.................45 1.1 American White Nationalist Novels in Light of General American Historiography........................48 1.2 Academic Perspectives on American ‘Nativism’.............................................................................52 1.3 Research into the Reconstruction Ku Klux Klan and the Reconstruction South..............................54 1.4 The White Nationalist Right from the early 1900s until the late 1970s in Light of Academic Studies.................62 1.5 Present-Day White Nationalist Right (1980–2015) in Light of Current Research...........................66 1.6 American White Nationalism in Academic Reception: A Recapitulation.........................................80 2. American White Nationalism and the Theory of Cultural Defeat..........................................................82 2.1 The Culture of Defeat: Schivelbusch and the Confederacy..............................................................97 2.2 Lost in the Hurricane of Trauma: Psycho-history and American White Nationalism.............................106 2.3 The Prison of Memory: Between the Trauma of Defeat and the Brighter Future...........................110 2.4 In Search of a ‘Literary Psychohistory’: A Recapitulation.............................................................113 3. In the Wake of Defeat: Towards the Birth of the Literature of Trauma..........................................................119 3.1 In Search of the Mindset of Traumatic Defeat...............................................................................120 3.2 Traumatic Turns. Identifying the Cycles of White Nationalist Writing..........................................124 3.2.1 Cycle One: The Rumblings of Discontent. Pre-Civil War—Southern Nationalist Novels (1834–1860).......126 3.2.2 Cycle Two: The Passion to Illuminate. Klan Apologia/Redeemer Fiction (1882-1924).............................127 3.2.3 Cycle Three: The Threat of Tribulation. The First Red Scare and Yellow Peril novels (1878–1944)............130 3.2.4 Cycle Four: The Peril of Perfidy. American White Nationalism Finds Its Voice (1975–2001)....................131 3.2.5 Cycle Five: Fight or Die—No Surrender, No Retreat. The Contemporary Separatist Cycle of White Nationalist Novels (2003-Present)..................134 3.3 Fearing the Political left: Texts of the Latest Cycle and the Re-Triggering of Shame.............................136 3.4 Venting Anguish: The Emotional Framework of the White Nationalist Novel...............................143 3.5. Restating the Mindset of Traumatic Defeat...................................................................................152 4. Leitmotifs of White Nationalist Novels in the Prism of ‘Literary Psychohistory’..............................154 4.1 Manifestations of Trauma in White Nationalist Novels (Analytical Case Studies)........................155 4.1.1 Blood Memory........................................................................................................................156 4.1.2 Redemption.............................................................................................................................161 4.1.3 Revolution..............................................................................................................................176 4.1.4 Recapturing the Feeling of Victory: A Recapitulation of the Case Studies..............................185 4.2 Contextualizing the Analytical Findings in Light of ‘Literary Psychohistory’...............................186 4.2.1 Contextualizing the Motifs of Blood Memory........................................................................189 4.2.2 Contextualizing the Motifs of Redemption.............................................................................194 4.2.3 Contextualizing the Motifs of Revolution...............................................................................195 4.3 “If We Don’t Fight, We Will Surely Perish”: A Recapitulation......................................................200 5. Towards the Future: Possibilities for Further Research........................................................................202 5.1 Neo-Confederate Novels................................................................................................................203 4 5.2 Gender Issues in White Nationalist Novels....................................................................................205 5.3 Ideological Background and Ties to the TEOTWAWKI Novels....................................................210 5.4 Historical Periods and the Cycles of White Nationalist Novels.....................................................213 5.5 Recapitulating the Needs...............................................................................................................216 Conclusions.............................................................................................................................................218 Bibliography............................................................................................................................................224 Summary in Polish/Streszczenie w języku polskim.................................................................................243 Streszczenie w języku angielskim/Summary in English..........................................................................249 5 Preface I embarked upon this project nearly four years ago not to take sides: I was driven by the need to seek and find answers to questions that have affected me personally, both as an American and as a Southerner, both as a human and as a scholar. Suspended between mythology and resentment, between glory and shame, between the security of family home and the violence of the world outside, my need to explore the essence of what seems to be the unresolved duality of America have gradually been gaining substantiality since the time when I was 13 and terrified, watching the 1979 Greensboro Riot live on TV, a riot in which Ku Klux Klansmen and neo-Nazis killed five Communist Workers Party members in a “Death to the Klan” rally in North Carolina. The radical contrast of that experience with the almost idyllic stories my maternal grandmother told me about what it was like growing up in Catawba County, North Carolina in the early part of the 20th century and the memories of her grandfather, a Confederate soldier who had survived Reconstruction, was exacerbated even further when my father, seeing my interest in history, purchased a child’s magazine for me when I was 10: a magazine featuring a Reconstruction Klansman in full regalia on the cover and scurrilous article title “America’s First Terrorists: The Reconstruction Ku Klux Klan”. Schadenfreude. Mixed feelings. Confusion. Further experiences made the love-hate feeling with respect to the South even more acute, with the culture and demographics of my home area in North Carolina between the 1970s and 1980s slowly shifting to a more diverse makeup. My living experience of the thus far unspoken, yet tangibly unsettling duality, only received a “face” when I moved to Europe to study the history of ethnic cleanings in former Yugoslavia for my M.A. The first hand experience of besieged Sarajevo, the experience of a war that broke out as a result of a profound, complex ethnic conflict irreducible to any “commonsense” phrasings, gave me a very clear idea that the sense of duality I carried within me may have had roots as deep as those that flourished into a full blown war based on a refusal to understand that which had destroyed and traumatized the Balkans. Having seen what I saw, I could not help but wonder if ignorance and partisan side-taking would not take the United States down the same path. This work, therefore, is both a personal journey of exploration and illumination and an attempt to shed light upon phenomena frequently reduced to illogical non sequiturs in political manifestos. Within these pages, I am not taking sides. Far from it: I attempt to explain to myself and others the forces at work within American society that have the potential to ‘Balkanize’ the United States into ethnic nations, a fate that has befallen