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Notes -
Very interesting, thank you!
Yes, the suggestion I made was that the Southern martial culture, plus postwar poverty, might have created (or sustained) a culture that was conducive to military service. (I mentioned elsewhere anecdotal data that, at least for a time - IIRC as late as WW1 - that there was actually social pressure for Southern men to stay out of the military for precisely the reasons you suggest.) In this suggestion the operative fact wasn't the trauma of defeat so much as "being poor" and the cultural narratives the war generated - perhaps I should have pushed back more clearly when you mentioned "generational trauma" since I think I'm suggesting something a bit more grounded. To the extent that the Civil War itself played a role, I think it has less to do with Confederate ideology per se and more to do with creating material conditions, plus war heroes like Lee and Jackson to idolize. The South for some time didn't have a lot else to idolize, so I don't think it's surprising that they would become something of a cultural nucleus of the postwar South.
I agree with your position that it's easy to construct any number of just-so stories. But doesn't this match my theory that material conditions + culture are driving the over-representation? Without tracking down specific numbers my assumption would be that during, say, the 1960s the military was a comparatively more attractive career for blacks in the South than in the North, even if you don't think Southern martial culture would bleed over horizontally from whites to blacks (I suspect that it would, at least some, but just for the sake of argument).
The generational military theory? It's definitely a factor, but if I'm understanding what you aren't putting stock in, it's "kids born at military bases muddying the waters." Which is interesting!
Yes, and as discussed, (much of) the South is no longer poor. I don't think this really speaks to whether or not the times when the South was poorer helped create the culture that continues to be overrepresented in the military. I'd be happy of course to pin it all on culture and remove the poverty angle from my calculus if we could do so, however.
Also it's worth noting that the absolute poorest of the poor are often basically disqualified from military service (they're insane or mentally ill, they are imprisoned, etc.) So the recruitment pool for the military is going to be less poor than a nationally representative sample.
Was this including officers? I'm not sure if they still use this system, but I've had recruitment described to me as a points-based system (the holy grail: a female nuclear engineer) and so if there are a lot of willing recruits in the South, it might sense that recruiters in the South wouldn't be as choosy as they can easily get all the recruits they need, whereas recruiters in really lean environments might concentrate hard on bagging top-tier recruits. It's also possible (particularly if this includes officers) that recruiters are getting recruits from very specific pipelines. (Back to the nuclear engineers: US News and World Report lists 18 schools with nuclear engineering programs, so we might expect, e.g., US Navy top-tier recruits to come disproportionately from those states - but that would be officers.)
What's the other explanation?
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