These people are creating a terrible problem in our cities. They can't or won't hold a job. They flaut the law constantly and neglect their children. They drink too much and their moral standards would shame an alley cat. For some reason or other, they absolutely refuse to accommodate themselves to any kind of decent, civilized life. This was said in 1956 in Indianapolis, not about blacks or other minorities, but about poor whites from the south. Nor was Indianapolis unique in this respect. A 1951 survey in Detroit found that white southerners living there were considered undesirable by 21% of those surveyed, compared to 13% who ranked blacks the same way. In the late 1940s, a Chicago employer said frankly, I told the guard at the plant gate to tell the hillbillies that there were no openings. When poor whites from the south moved into northern cities to work in war plants during the Second World War, occasionally a white southerner would find that a flat or a furnished room had just been rented when the landlord heard his southern accent. More is involved here that a mere parallel between blacks and southern whites. What is involved is a common subculture that goes back for centuries, which has encompassed everything from ways of talking to attitudes toward education, violence, and sex, and which originated not in the south, but in those parts of the British Isles from which white southerners came. That culture long ago died out where it originated in Britain, while surviving in the American south. Then it largely died out among both white and black southerners, while still surviving today in the poorest and worst of the urban black ghettos. It is not uncommon for a culture to survive longer where it is transplanted and to retain characteristics lost in its place of origin. The French spoken in Quebec and the Spanish spoken in Mexico contain words and phrases that have long since become archaic in France and Spain. Regional German dialects persisted among Germans living in the United States after those dialects had begun to die out in Germany itself. A scholar specializing in the history of the south has likewise noted among white southerners, archaic word forms, while another scholar has pointed out the continued use in that region of terms that were familiar at the time of the first Queen Elizabeth. The card game Wist is today played almost exclusively by blacks, especially low income blacks, though in the 18th century it was played by the British upper classes and has since then evolved into bridge. The history of the evolution of this game is indicative of a much broader pattern of cultural evolution in much more weighty things. Southern whites not only spoke the English language in very different ways from whites and other regions, their churches, their roads, their homes, their music, their education, their food, and their sex lives, were all sharply different from those of other whites. The history of this red neck or a cracker culture is more than a curiosity. It has contemporary significance because of its influence on the economic and social evolution of vast numbers of people, millions of blacks and whites, and its continuing influence on the lives and deaths of a residual population in America's black ghettos, which is still not completely escaped from that culture. From early in American history, foreign visitors and domestic travelers alike were struck by cultural contrasts between the white population of the south and that of the rest of the country in general, and of New England in particular. In the early 19th century, Alexis de Tokville contrasted white southerners with white northerners in his classic Democracy in America, and Frederick Law Olmsted did the same later in his books about his travels through the antebellum south, notably Cotton Kingdom. The cultural values and social patterns prevalent among southern whites included an aversion to work, pronest of violence, neglect of education, sexual promiscuity, improvedance, drunkenness, lack of entrepreneurship, reckless searches for excitement, lively music and dance, and a style of religious oratory marked by strident, rhetoric, unbridled emotions, and flamboyant imagery. This oratorical style carried over into the political oratory of the region in both the Jim Crow era and the civil rights era, and has continued on into our own times among black politicians, preachers, and activists. Touchy pride, vanity, and boastful self-dramatization were also part of this red-neck culture among people from regions of Britain, where the civilization was the least developed. They boasted and lacked self-restraint, Olmsted said, after observing their descendants in the American antebellum south. While Professor Grady McWiney's Cracker culture is perhaps the most thorough historical study of the values and behavioral patterns of white southerners, many other scholarly studies have turned up very similar patterns, even when they differed in some ways as to the causes. Professor David Hackett Fisher's Albion Seed, for example, challenges the Celtic connection thesis put forth by Professor McWiney, but shows many of the same cultural patterns among the same people, both in Britain and in the American south. Popular writings of the 19th and 20th centuries have likewise described similar behavior, including the Indianapolis residence comments on white southern migrants to that city, which sounds so much like what many have said about ghetto blacks. None of this is meant to claim that these patterns have remained rigidly unchanged over the centuries, or that there are literally no differences between whites and blacks in any aspects of this subculture. However, what is remarkable is how pervasive and how close the similarities have been.