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The Civil War was 160 years ago. The South's period as a cultural and economic backwater was largely over by the time most of the current enlistees were born. Are you seriously trying to make the argument that "generational trauma" or whatever is a thing? I guess that would also explain why blacks have disproportionately high enlistment rates.
The south was poor into the late twentieth century. Not subsistence farming poor, that was over by the seventies, but still poor.
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Another way of putting this is "your grandparents probably grew up around people who remembered the Civil War."
You could call it that if you wanted, I guess. I just think culture is very powerful. As you say, the South is no longer a cultural and economic backwater, but during the time that it was I think it formed a lot of habits that endured. However, I don't think the "hard times" are the ONLY reason for those habits - Southern marital culture, for instance, predated the Civil War. I do wonder if they helped preserve them.
IIRC Native Americans are the MOST over-represented group in the Armed Forces. Not to start up the oppression Olympics, but they have seen a lot of hard times. I suspect that "poor => military opportunity" is probably more relevant here than "tough => warrior spirit" but I imagine there's room for both, along with a hearty helping of family warrior tradition.
The average age of enlisted personnel is 27. If you assume their parents had them at age 30 on average, that would mean that their grandparents were born around 1938, which is probably a little early. 1938 was 73 years after the Civil War ended. Their grandparents would have grown up around people who remembered the Civil War in the same sense that someone born in 1991 grew up around people who remember World War I; I was born earlier than that and I don't recall a single instance of anyone talking about memories of WWI. The oldest people in my life, who were well into their 80s by the time someone born in 1991 would have been old enough to remember anything about world events, were themselves not old enough to have any meaningful memories of WWI. The last Civil War veterans reunion in 1938 at Gettysburg attracted 2,000 people. The average age was 94. Coincidentally, my own grandmother and great aunt's grandfather was a Civil War veteran, and I only know this because of genealogical research I did when I was in my 30s. Keep in mind that they were born in 1913 and 1911, respectively, and he died in 1920 at age 80, so that gives you an arbitrary example of when a fairly typical Civil War veteran would have passed, and how old one would have to be to have any memory of them being alive.
Anyway, I can't find good numbers on this, but a report from Brown University on the state of origin of people serving in post-9/11 wars at least points in the right direction. Assuming their work is representative, while the fact that the South provides a disproportionate number of soldiers is true, your thesis doesn't hold when you look at things at a more granular level. Most of this is driven by three states—Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina—that have vastly disproportionate numbers. But Florida gets an asterisk since its population didn't start taking off until well after the Civil War and relatively few of its present-day residents are culturally Southern, with only 43% born in the former Confederacy. Alabama is in the top-ten per capita, but Mississippi isn't; it's close to the national average, as are Arkansas and Louisiana, which has the highest native-born population of any Southern state at 78% born in-state.
Even if the effect does exist to the extent, it doesn't seem to have much of an effect when applied to the military as a whole. The top four states in terms of total enlistees mirror the top four states in population: California, Texas, Florida, and New York, in that order. Nine of the top ten are the same; Pennsylvania takes the biggest drop, from 5 to 9. Michigan, tenth in total population, is replaced by Virginia which is twelfth in total population. South Carolina, Alaska, and Hawaii punch above their weight when it come to producing enlistees, but their populations are small enough that it doesn't move them much on the list. South Carolina moves from 23 to 17. Alaska moves from 49 to 44. Hawaii moves from 41 to 39. The correlation between population and number of enlisted is 0.98. You can criticize the numbers because they are only a snapshot of a certain subset of enlisted men taken at a certain time and not representative of say, everyone who has served in the past 20 years, but I would expect variation due to sample size to smooth out with better data, not go in the opposite direction.
This is fair enough! You're correct that World War One is very far from us today, and World War Two is much further than the time I was a boy. But I think that cultural habits persist long after people are dead. The average age in the US is 39, and you can very quickly find Southerners much younger than 39 expressing sympathy for the Confederacy, less out of any neoconfederate ideological alignment and more out of nativist sentiment. One gentleman I spoke with once told me that he would have fought for Virginia even though he thought it was in the wrong. And so given those attitudes I am liable to give credence to the idea that other cultural attitudes might have hung on for just as long.
This is a respectable argument, but I don't think your more granular analysis tells the whole story.
How would we measure a cultural angle? It's hard, but I don't think impossible to probe the idea. We could look at whose tactics and strategy was emulated and studied by the US military. (Realistically, I think the answer here is disproportionately German.)
Or we can look at current people in elite positions. For instance, we can look at the Joint Chiefs of Staff right now. But illustrating my point above, some of it's fuzzy. For one thing, Lunday is from South Carolina, but he's from the Coast Guard and so merely an attendee of the JCOS. I'm not sure where Wilsbach was born, but it seems likely he grew up in Florida. And Smith is from Plano (Texas), but was born in Missouri. So generously, 4/9 JSOC members are Southern - SOUTHERN BIAS CONFIRMED! - but conservatively, only 1/8 (Caudle, from North Carolina).
Or, we can look at historical commanders of JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command) and SOCOM (Special Operations Command). JSOC has had 18 commanders, and we should expect those commanders to have a lot of influence in the modern US war machine. By my count, 5 of those came from the former Confederacy (including 2 from Texas, 3 if you count McRaven who moved there in elementary school). If JSOC perfectly represented current population trends, we would likely expect it to have 6 from the South, but on the flip side, 5 probably is a slight overrepresentation of the population in 1980 (when JSOC was stood up, and the South was closer to 25% of the population). Things get funny if you look at SOCOM: 6/14! Nearly half! Wild overrepresentation! But this is only if I exclude Raymond Smith since he was only in office for 41 days as acting commander - which I think is fair enough - and INCLUDE Holland, born in WEST VIRGINIA. I'll leave it to you to decide if that counts as a former Confederate state.
Or you can look at the Blue Angels, if we assume that they are likely to represent the best America has to offer - the South puts up 2/6 pilots (about right statistically), 7/17 officers on the team, (a bit more than we would expect, particularly if you drop the two not born in US states; one is Puerto Rican and one is from the Philippines); and, finally, 51 or 52/134 enlisted, depending on if you count West Virginia, and if you remove people born in Puerto Rico or otherwise overseas you lose about 10 people - that number is about what we would expect based on current demographics.
I don't think these are slam-dunk arguments - they suggest to me that the South might be slightly overrepresented in elite US military institutions if we control for birth year, but while I don't particularly find them hugely persuasive I at least find them to be entertainingly granular. The military is an institution, and when you're looking at how a culture impacts the military, analyzing it like intellectual history is, I think, a valid approach.
I was going off of the good old USA.gov (that's also why I specified enlisted; officers matter too, of course): https://usafacts.org/articles/is-military-enlistment-down/
It (in turn) is pulling yearly enlistment data from 2022. This makes it a good snapshot of the current sorts of people who are entering the military (but not necessarily of who is in the military as a whole). So this might be better at grabbing trends, while your dataset might be better at grabbing the long view.
Florida, Georgia, Texas, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Alabama, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Mississippi are above the national average (for enlistments ages 18 - 24, anyway) in that order, although Mississippi and Louisiana are not notably so. Arkansas and West Virginia are below.
California is above, but less than even Mississippi and Louisiana - practically average. New York is notably below. Other items of note:
Top ten US states by enlistment per capita, by my eyeball:
So the former CSA takes 6/10.
Now, to be clear, I think this is an oversimplification if you present this entirely as an artifact of Southern martial culture - for instance, I am sure that a lot of the recruits in Texas are Hispanics with no particular direct attachment to the martial culture of the antebellum South (although I do believe culture transmits horizontally as well as vertically). As [your least favorite politician] said (probably), the world is a complicated place, with a lot of things going on. But I do think that there's something going on, rooted in the attitudes and traditions of the peoples there, and at least some of that is causally downstream of the Civil War, and much of it is downstream of events far beyond it in time.
Hawaii and Nevada are also going to be confounded by having a large active military population. I recall hearing somewhere that Joint Base Hickam would be the second most populous city in Hawaii (behind Honolulu) if it were a city.
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I feel like you need to be in your 50s(?) for that to be true. My grandmother was born ~1940 so it would be hard for her to interact with an adult with meaningful memories of 1865.
I am not yet 35 and one of my grandparents was born before 1930 and I think they were all born before 1940...but perhaps this is unusual!
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Martial or marital culture? I'm presuming from context that you meant martial as in military. Otherwise, I'm quite curious about the intricacies of the continued culture surrounding marriage from before the Civil War.
Martial, my fat-fingers!
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