Race Matters

Last year, perhaps as a response to this blog having gone live and certainly as an effort to gin up the quality of the image of supporters of the Second Vermont Republic after disclosure of its ties to the League of the South , Naylor wrote of his correspondence with George Kennan, the so-called "father of containment" of communism theory and who also possessed a fondness for European dictatorships.   Naylor hopes that Kennan might someday be thought of as the godfather of SVR. [1] [2]

In his piece Naylor excerpted one letter from May 1, 2002, where Kennan wrote,

“All power to Vermont in its effort to distinguish itself from the U.S.A. as a whole, and to pursue in its own way the cultivation of its own tradition.”

Nowhere in Naylor's piece about Kennan's support for SVR is there what I found in the Bill Kaufmann piece in The American Conservative magazine about SVR, presumably from that same 2002 letter Naylor quotes from:

"Ah, but there is a complication. Kennan was attracted to the Second Vermont Republic partly because he deplored the Hispanicization of the United States. Instancing Mexican immigration, Kennan saw 'unmistakable evidences of a growing differentiation between the cultures, respectively, of large southern and southwestern regions of this country, on the one hand,' and those of 'some northern regions,' including Vermont. In the former, 'the very culture of the bulk of the population of these regions will tend to be primarily Latin-American in nature rather than what is inherited from earlier American traditions.'”

“'Could it really be that there was so little of merit' in the American Republic, asked Kennan, 'that it deserves to be recklessly trashed in favor of a polyglot mix-mash?'” [3]

"Complication" indeed.   SVR being viewed and applauded by Kennan as a potential antidote to or bulwark against the untidy results of race-mixing.   The "race mixing" problem is one that is also a concern of other SVR supporters such as David Duke admirer, James Edwards.

I remember that then SVR Co-chair Rob Williams, who now runs "Vermont Commons", said at the 2006 Secession Conference in Burlington, VT, that "Secession is not a racist plot!" [4]   Why is it then that one needn't dig very deep into the thinking of SVR's intellectual supporters, like the LoS or Kennan, to find white supremacist or anti-miscegenational sentiments?