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Historical Revenants

Purported sketch of Hugh Glass, circa 1830

Purported sketch of trapper and frontiersman Hugh Glass, circa 1830

 

This writer is guilty of going down some pretty deep online rabbit holes.Seeing a post about the 1970s cult film “Billy Jack” got me to thinking about the weird fascination in the USA with martial arts during that era.

This was the age of Bruce Lee.

This was the age of Elvis throwing kung fu moves on a Las Vegas stage in a spangled jumpsuit.

This was the age of the TV series “Kung Fu”, with David Carradine wandering the Wild West as a disowned, half-Chinese Shaolin monk, kicking cowboy ass pretty much everywhere along the way.

This post isn’t about Kung Fu, nor is it about the Chinese influence on 19th century American culture and ethnicity.

Nope, this post is about Hugh Glass, the trapper and frontiersman played by Leonardo DiCaprio in “The Revenant”.

It’s also about a celebrated American actress named Barbara Hershey.

Why?

Because she was lurking just around a dark bend in the rabbit hole, as the ex-partner of “Kung Fu” actor David Carradine.

Online biographies mentioned her “Scots-Irish” ancestry.

As someone who writes about ethnicity in America, that is like a red rag to a bull.

I begin to ponder the multitude of Americans who falsely claim a “Scots-Irish” identity.

I begin to ponder the multitude of Americans falsely attributed a “Scots-Irish” identity by others.

With that explanation of my weird rabbit-holing thought processes out of the way, let’s press on.

*****

Ms. Hershey was once considered something of a “kooky hippy chick”, but has grown old gracefully into one of the most respected talents of her generation.

Check out her relatively recent turn in Darren Aronofsky‘s psychological horror film “Black Swan”.

At any rate, as someone who writes about American ethnicities, the dark good looks of Ms. Hershey made me curious.  She certainly doesn’t look “Scots-Irish”, but of course that is a highly subjective take.

But yes, upon checking, she turns out to be of mixed-ethnicity.

Like most of the other creatives involved in the film “Black Swan” (Aronofsky, Natalie Portman, Winona Ryder, Mila Kunis, etc.) Barbara Hershey has a Jewish background, being born “Barbara Herzstein” in 1948 Hollywood, California.

But once again, this post isn’t about the Jewish influence on the American entertainment industry – a subject which could fill a hundred posts.

This is about Barbara Hershey‘s mother, “Melrose Moore“, an Arkansas girl by birth.

This how Wikipedia describes the ethnic background of Melrose Moore:

“…her [Barbara Hershey’s] mother, a native of Arkansas, was a Presbyterian of Scots-Irish descent.”

Really?  How odd that the two “sources” for this assertion of “Scots-Irish” ancestry are just dead links to old celebrity magazine interviews.

To borrow a line from Stephen Stills (writing for the band Buffalo Springfield in 1966):

“There’s something happening here,
what it is ain’t exactly clear…”

Did Barbara Hershey herself mention Scots-Irish ancestry to an interviewer?  Who knows?  The sources cited stubbornly refuse to appear in any internet search.

American actress Barbara Hershey at a party in 1966

American actress Barbara Hershey at a party in 1966

 

No matter.  When you’ve sniffed through old historical records for as many years as this old dog, certain things leap out immediately.

Like the relations between certain places and certain surnames.

“Arkansas” and “Moore“, for example.

The Moore surname runs through the underground river of Old Mix American ancestry like a seam of silver ore.

And when we walk a path back upriver, what we find are ancestors of Barbara like the Farrars (don’t ask – worth a post on its own), and early Moores and Goodmans of colonial era North Carolina who migrated into Kentucky.

Not a particular point of interest, if we agree to buy into the “Scots-Irish” history of frontier America and Appalachia.

Except these Moores and Goodmans are enumerated in the earliest census records as “free people of color”.

Not only that.

There is not one single line in the maternal ancestry of Barbara Hershey which can be readily ascertained as “Scots-Irish”.

Not one.

*****

This is not the first, second, or even hundredth time this researcher has seen this “phenomenon”.  It’s ubiquitous.

Any readers here see a film called “The Revenant” with Leonardo DiCaprio?  Based on the life of American frontiersman Hugh Glass?

Faceless “experts”, including page editors on Wikipedia, have decided over time that Hugh Glass – just like Barbara Hershey‘s mother – was also “Scots-Irish”.

WITHOUT ONE SOLITARY SHRED OF DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE.

The Wikipedia annotation meant to act as a “source” confirming Glass‘s purported birth in Pennsylvania to Irish or “Scots-Irish” parents, points to a 2013 article published by the online “History Herald”.

This “source” article was written by a retired man named Jim Keys, whose short bio says that he is “indulging his passion for history” since his retirement – having “spent his working life in the motor trade”.

This writer has a lot of time for autodidacts.  But the self-educated must stick to the same high standards expected of those with higher degrees in a specialist subject.

One cannot claim to be writing a history article if one is not willing to stand-up every assertion made.  Opinion must be flagged as “opinion”, and speculation must be called “speculation”.

In fairness to Wikipedia, a second annotation points to a 2016 article in The Irish Examiner which quoted a professional historian at The Mountain Man Museum in Pinedale, Wyoming as stating:

“So far no records have come to light on Glass’s birth place and origins. So there is no real evidence as to his place of birth and rearing. There is a great deal of speculation regarding his life adventures, both at sea and on land. He was supposedly born in the vicinity of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania sometime around 1783, although the exact date and the precise location are unknown.”

Why do hundreds, even thousands, of articles and web pages in the USA insist on repeating an inaccurate recounting of American history?  Especially ethnic history?

And why are so many people said to be of mostly “Scots-Irish” extraction, when they clearly are not?  People like J. D. Vance, for example?

Because the myth of the American frontier must remain firmly rooted in the soil of “White Protestant”, or at least “White Christian” America.

Yet “Glass” is a surname found commonly among Indigenous and partly Indigenous American people of Appalachia.

“Glass” is also a surname found among descendants of Black Appalachians.

Where did these people “borrow” their “white” surnames?

The answer is “from a lot of places”.

“Glass” is a surname also found among Palatine German Redemptionist immigrants, the majority of whom disembarked at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, just like many immigrants from Ulster.

Among these German-speakers fleeing war and famine were many Jewish and Sinti (German Romani) people.

Not to mention the many Gaelic-speaking or bilingual Irish and Scottish Catholic immigrants who arrived in a steady stream to America’s shores during the two centuries BEFORE Irish famine refugees.

These latter also often arrived in America via Ulster – just like their better-known Protestant co-travelers – although one rarely hears of it.

In fact, when found in the British Isles/Ireland, the very surname “Glass” tends to point more commonly to such people of a Gaelic or Welsh background, with “Glas” being found across all Celtic languages (Scots-Gaelic, Irish Gaelic, Welsh, Manx, and Cornish) as a word usually describing a gray or bluish-green color.

Our “Hugh Glass” might have just as easily been a Welshman calling himself “Huw Glas“.  Or a German Jew adapting the name “Hubert Glass” to an American idiom.

To presume that anyone arriving in America from Ulster during the 1700s must have been “Scots-Irish” is simply, utterly wrong.

But the point is moot.

We cannot even say whether Hugh Glass was the son of recent immigrants, let alone whether they arrived from Ulster.

Mr. Glass could have been a run-of-the-mill descendant of early colonial English settlers.  The surname was already present in 1600s Virginia Colony.

Letters attributed to a 40-year-old Glass show a firm grasp of English and its spelling, pointing to some level of education.

The fact is, without new primary sources coming to light, or DNA analysis of his or his immediate family’s descendants, no one can know the true origins of Hugh Glass.

He COULD have been “Scots-Irish”.  But until we know it for a fact, his biography should read “origins unknown”.

*****

Trying to keep a lid on “conjured history” would be a full-time job for an army of volunteers willing to play “whack-a-mole”.

Within 10 minutes of my first re-edit of the Hugh Glass Wikipedia page (to reflect actual facts), someone had jumped in and re-edited my re-edit, reasserting Glass‘s “Scots-Irish” ancestry.

A paranoid or conspiracy-minded person might be forgiven for wondering if “white” nationalists or “white” supremacists actively “work” Wikipedia, inserting their preferred ethnic background into the biographies of many more American figures.

So the next time you see the term “Scots-Irish” anywhere in the context of American history, have a care.

As suggested earlier in this post:

“There’s something happening here,
what it is ain’t exactly clear…”

But we’ll keep trying to make it clearer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

J. D. Vance and Misbegotten Memoirs

 

James Donald Bowman, aka J. D. Vance

James Donald Bowman, aka J. D. Vance

 

(This is an essay I wrote in 2020.  I have updated it in light of the shocking scenes which took place in The Oval Office on 28 Feb 2025, in which a vice president of the USA ambushed and attempted to shame an ally in front of the world’s cameras)

In the USA, having a publicly accepted and respected “self identity” is a privilege often enjoyed only by those people with access to the levers of power.

Property.  Money.  Education.  Social connections.  Weapons.  The right skin color.

A man called J. D. Vance (his own name the product of a carefully selected identity) wrote a book about eight or nine years ago at the ripe old age of 32 called Hillbilly Elegy, in which he purported to explain the source of many Appalachian social problems. A successful venture capitalist, he offered his advice for “bootstrap” solutions to these problems.

J. D. Vance goes big on “poor white people”, because that is how he chooses to perceive his so-called “hillbilly” identity.

In his book, he speaks of his “Scots-Irish” roots and “Scots-Irish” cultural traditions, and the trans-generational effect he believes the culture of these people had on the creation of an Appalachian or Hillbilly “mentality”.

“The Scots-Irish are born fighters, blah blah, blah…”

“The Scots-Irish don’t like Big Government, blah, blah, blah…”

His book received endless blurbs and praise from the urban “intelligentsia” press, eager to find an easily digestible answer or simple reason for rural Appalachian poverty and voting habits.

For “voting habits”, read “Republican or Trump voters”.

Four years after publication, director Ron Howard made a film based on Vance’s carefully curated memoir.

For “carefully curated”, feel free to insert the words “self-serving”, or “ideologically driven”.

Although boasting some decent acting, the film falls down for blindly accepting Vance‘s unschooled sociological hypothesis and retro-fitted recounting of events.

*****

Vance brags about his own bootstrapping attitude, and how he had the get-up-and-go to get-up-and-leave his blighted community.

And how did he escape?  Saving money while working at Walmart?  Selling lemonade?  No.  He did what exactly a million other underclass kids do every decade. He joined the US military.

The US military-industrial complex is so deeply embedded in American culture that “the services” are virtually beyond criticism.  Even American lefties won’t touch the subject.

The military is on our sporting fields.  In our high schools.

But “protecting our freedom and liberty” has become a dead mantra, utterly detached from the real world meaning and consequences of American militarism and foreign policy.

US presidents start wars in places like Iraq at the drop of a hat, making billions for their insider cronies while killing half a million people.

Back on US soil it’s “Thank you for your service”.

No questions asked.

It seems to have never occurred to gung-ho capitalist and paleoconservative Vance that the US military is socialized, just like police or fire departments.

US taxpayers footed the bill which allowed Vance to escape his hometown via the US Marine Corps.

Vance would rail against such taxpayers funding universal health care or third level education, but these taxpayers are fully expected to fund a vast military with 544 US bases in 43 foreign states (with another 159 in US overseas territories).

What about all the young men and women of the Rust Belt who believed the Iraq War was immoral, and wanted no part in offering their “service”?

Where is a taxpayer-funded leg-up in the world for these citizens?

This writer is convinced that the very reason healthcare and third level education are not publicly funded in America, is to ensure a steady stream of young recruits for whom the military is their only hope of accessing further education (and any chance of a better future).

I should know.  I was one of these kids, joining the army on my 17th birthday.

And please.  Don’t thank me for my service.

*****

Mr. Vance is wrong, utterly wrong, about the historical causes of Appalachian poverty.

Even more than this, Mr. Vance misrepresents his own cultural roots, almost certainly by design rather than ignorance.

His “Scots-Irishness” is conjured from thin air to suit his White Christian Nationalist ideology.

His roots are to be found far more among the mixed-ethnic communities of Ohio, including among the people known as “Carmel Indians”.

Groups like the “Carmel Indians” (or the somewhat better known “Melungeons”) are an integral part of the ethnic fabric of underclass America, largely forgotten by mainstream history.

Much of the transgenerational poverty of Appalachian people stems not from something innate to their culture and genes (as claimed by Vance in his execrable book), but from the fact that many Southern Appalachian families started off as a mixed-ethnic, dirt-poor, subsistence farming underclass in the not-so-distant past, partaking of all the disadvantages which that entailed.

Note that Vance uses his mother’s maiden name; by usual naming conventions he would be called James Donald Bowman.

Some Appalachian Vances CAN trace their roots directly to Ulster in Northern Ireland, but our friend J.D. is not one of them. His mother’s Vance line fades into the undocumented mists of early 1700s Buncombe County, NC and Russell County, Virginia, where an ancestor was hanged for the murder of his son-in-law, a man named Lewis Horton.

It is hard to know whether these people were “Vances“, German “Wentzes“, or indeed Scottish “Vauses” due to a colonial era transcription error.

It is in fact certain that many of these Appalachian Vances were of non-European background altogether.

The current VP’s own Vance forebears might well have arisen from people of an African, Jewish, Shawnee, or Romani background, or indeed from any of the other peoples of the colonial and frontier eras who commonly borrowed a surname from “white” settlers and neighbors.

What IS certain (barring out-of-wedlock shenanigans) is that J.D. Vance is descended from Bowmans, Crafts, Gabbards, Creeches, Salyers, Taulbees, Bakers, Hensleys, Rudds, Blantons, Hounshells, Howards, Hammonds, Bollings, Sizemores, Lovelys, Workmans, and others.

He is profoundly mixed-ethnic, and of predominantly German stock (including “Black Dutch”), with some English, Dutch, Melungeon, and almost certainly some indigenous American and African ancestry.

He’s about as “Scots-Irish” as an enchilada.

The ultimate foundational myth of Appalachia revolves around a predominantly “Scots-Irish” identity for its people.

An identity designed to meet all of the right criteria. Non-British, Protestant, rebellious, and “white”.

A safe, all-encompassing, and often racist dog whistling identity, if you will – and in Vance’s case, an outright fake identity.

*****

This is the US senator who fell-into lockstep with the fake reality being propagated by his master in the run-up to last year’s election.

Sane US citizens now find themselves trapped between two ideological camps who have contracted a marriage of convenience.

On one side, we have the technocrats, corporations, and oligarchs (Thiel, Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg).

On the other side, we have the faces and puppets these technocrats, corporations, and oligarchs have installed to do their bidding.

Trump has no ideology. He will change policies 17 times a day, if it means he gets richer and richer while remaining the center of attention.

He’s easy for the billionaires to handle.

But Vance? This reprehensible, shapeshifting opportunist is now a breath away from the most powerful political office in the world.

And the billionaires will have to be careful, because Vance appears to have finally settled on an ideology.

White Christo-Fascist Nationalism.

Because Vance is an inveterate liar, it is difficult to know how much of his ideology he actually believes, and how much is a show for the MAGA base.

The old PayPal mafia who funded his political rise is certainly rife with believers in “New Eugenics” and “Population Diversity” – in other words, white supremacists looking for scientific cover to justify their racism.

It will be a fascinating and horrifying few years watching the slow-motion death waltz between technocracy and right wing populism.

This is the man who made a public name for himself by throwing his long-suffering community – his own people – under the bus, blaming their poverty on “genes” and an imaginary Scots-Irish culture.

When you owe your position to billionaires, blaming rampant and rapacious capitalism, historical classism/racism, and corrupt government for transgenerational poverty and social dysfunction is out of the question.

Vance is already on record saying he would support the suspension of The Constitution.

This is man who views women as “breeders”.

This is a man who made sure to be on-hand for the gang-ambush of Zelenskyy in the Oval Office.

A man fake in every way, ready to bring some very real and very ugly stuff to a town near you…

 

[updated 15 Jul 2024; 1 Mar 2025]