Comment on this story

Seeing red and feeling blue in Knoxville

by Jack Neely

Once, a very long time ago, it was the redcoats versus the bluecoats. Later it was the blue versus the gray. Then it was the blue collars versus the white collars. Then the white collars began worrying that the blue collars were becoming Reds.

Now, the team colors in the never-ending contest called America have been remixed once again. Pundits talk about Red America and Blue America. There are whole books about it.

You’ve heard about this latest color clash. Blue America, they say, is, if not liberal, at least endowed with liberal-arts degrees. They drive Volvos, live in restored historic houses, eat sushi, make pesto, drink lattes, know who won the last Nobel Prize for Literature, and tend to vote Democratic.

Red America is defiantly down-to-earth. Red America drives SUVS or pickups, lives in a new McMansion, shops at Wal-Mart, belongs to a large evangelical church, eats steaks at chain buffets, follows NASCAR, drinks Bud, is loyal and patriotic, knows how to fix a small engine, and tends to vote Republican.

I’m just quoting what they say. The whole thing seems calculated to bother folks like me who would prefer not to fit in to that scheme, who don’t feel constrained to do just one thing and never the other. Maybe some people like to think of themselves as so predictable that they can be dismissed with a swath of paint—which in our case indicates that our home state is not much worth campaigning in—but I’m not one of them.

Here’s another thing that bugs me: when the theorists divided America into two camps, who selected these particular colors? According to some observers, it was the TV networks, which, on election night in November 2000, at least, all used red for Republican states and blue for Democratic states. Tennessee wobbled on the edge for most of the evening—it had, after all, voted Democratic in ‘96—but by midnight, it was glowing red.

Blue was once the color of the Union army. In Civil War maps, the color of the loyal, patriotic Union states—which were, in 1860 and 1864, the Republican states. Furthermore, blue is cool, collected, the more conservative of the two colors. A blue suit is the classic conservative business suit.

A red suit is not. A red suit is favored by Satan and Santa Claus—both of them supernatural beings who have been linked, by Republicans, to the Democratic Party. Besides its allusions to the Prince of Darkness and overgenerosity, red looks by nature less conservative than blue. And red has long been the official team color of the international Communist Party. Didn’t Republicans used to call liberals Reds, or Pinkos?

But now, they say, red is conservative, blue is liberal, and who am I to say they’re wrong? Besides the TV studio maps, that’s the way Newsweek has it, too. One of the first articulations of the Red State/Blue State divide appeared in Newsweek, less than two months after the 2000 election.

But it kept bothering me. I had a vague memory that those Red State/Blue State colors were once different.

I was a political junkie when I was a teenager. I watched the Sunday talk shows, read Time magazine cover to cover, every single week. On a hunch, I went to the stacks on the third floor at Lawson McGhee, to check back issues. For all elections since 1960, I looked at the post-election graphics, which showed maps of the nation color-coded to indicate how each state had voted.

Until about 20 years ago, Time and other glossy magazines usually limited their graphics to three colors: black, white, and one primary color, usually either red or blue. It was quicker and cheaper that way. So they tended to render only one party in a bright color, usually a patriotic color like red or blue, to indicate the majority vote, with the minority vote relegated to white.

The first time that I found that Time used colors to show how states voted was in 1968. To illustrate Nixon’s Republican victory, they used the color blue to show the Republican states. Humphrey Democratic states were in white, and Wallace’s arch-conservative, deep South, American Party was, appropriately, in Confederate gray.

They didn’t run a map in ’72—it was such a Republican landslide that a map of the one state that went for McGovern would have seemed cruel—but in 1976, describing the Carter victory, Time colored America in a red majority, with Republican states white.

The first time that Time used two primary colors to show the nation, in 1988, it was blue Republicans versus red Democrats. They began using color-coded maps and tables and pie charts frequently during the ’80s, and the allegiance of the colors was always the same.

They have used those colors consistently ever since, up through 2000 (Nader was a nauseating yellow).

Except for one year—1980, when, without explanation, the magazine used red to show the Republican landslide—Time has used blue consistently for Republicans, and red for Democrats. With all the discussion of Red America and Blue America in the last four years, it will be interesting to see how they go this time.

I wonder if the TV stations shifted to blue for Democrats and red for Republicans in 2000 just as a one-time thing to throw us off, do the unexpected thing one year? Not knowing that the two colors would be canonized as the official cultural team colors of a nation sharply divided.

It still seems a little twisted to think of Red Republicans and Blue Democrats; for it always requires a quick translation. But let’s assume the present contest is between conservative Red America and liberal Blue America.

In most of the country, blue is based in the cities, red in the countryside. Some have remarked that many states are divided. One essayist divided Minnesota into Red Minnesota and Blue Minnesota. Pennsylvania has famously been called “Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and Alabama in between.”

But even on a microcosmic level, cities are divided, too. Knoxville is a little United States. Based on both voting patterns in the 2000 election and yard signs today, the rural and suburban areas around the edges of Knoxville are overwhelmingly Republican. But the old city of Knoxville is Democratic—four years ago it voted for Gore by a wide margin—and it gets more Democratic the closer to downtown you get.

It’s been like that for at least 140 years. At the time of the Civil War, Knoxville—then defined roughly by what we know as downtown—was politically distinct from the rest of the county. Then, Knoxville was Gray America, and rural Knox County was Blue America. By 1865, rural Knox County was Republican; since then, only the assigned team colors have changed.

The night of the first televised debates, two weeks ago, downtown was full of people. There was an Autumn on the Square show going on featuring Mindy Smith, a pop singer not known for her politics. The bars were packed. From a large advertised meeting at the City County Building to various pubs all around, lots of people were watching the debates downtown, in public.

There’s not much that’s inherently un-Red about downtown. It’s the oldest part of town, after all, and the district sports a couple of old-fashioned steakhouses and an Arby’s. Blue America, especially on the leftish coasts, is famously squeamish about smoking, but downtown Knoxville brazenly hosts a couple of tobacco shops. There are probably more churches per acre downtown than anywhere else in the county, among them the city’s oldest Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches and a new evangelical church group that meets downtown weekly. There are lots of banks—bastions of conservatism—and Knoxville’s oldest Masonic Temple. There are lots of American flags flying downtown. We do still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse, after all, and the area’s biggest Veterans’ Day parade is always there, too. A new veterans’ monument is planned for downtown. John Sevier’s grave is downtown.

The city mayor and county mayor, both Republicans and staunch Bush supporters, are downtown advocates. Thanks to the sales-tax recapture deal, the more money Knoxvillians spend downtown, the wiser historians will regard Republicans like Victor Ashe, currently Bush’s ambassador to Poland; and Bill Haslam, co-chair of the local Bush campaign. And the more money we spend downtown, the lower our property taxes will have to be.

You’d think Republicans wouldn’t be able to stay away from the joint.

The night of the presidential campaign debates there were several restaurants and bars open well into the night, thousands of people downtown, and nothing inherently partisan going on. But judging only by the Kerry bumper stickers on Gay Street, the Kerry campaign booth on the square, the hoots at the TV screens in the pubs, the signs in the condo windows, and T-shirts and buttons at the City County Building, downtown Knoxville was only slightly less pure Blue America than the Democratic National Convention.

Why? Some conservatives are still as skeptical about downtown as they were in the ‘50s, murmuring about muggers, the homeless, rogue librarians. For some, maybe, avoiding downtown has become the very definition of conservatism.

And, it may be more the draw of a suburban home than any repellant qualities of downtown. A Republican might well prefer to watch debates on TV at home with family and friends rather than downtown in a roomful of strangers. Blue Americans may well prefer the roomful of strangers.

Conservative commentator David Brooks may have offered a couple more clues. He says blue staters prefer to eat in fancy, distinctive restaurants and to shop in small, pretentious shops—in other words, the kind of businesses you’re most likely to find in a downtown—while Republicans strongly favor sensible places like Wal-Mart. There are lots of things we might expect to arrive in downtown in our lifetimes; Wal-Mart, which institutionally favors rural and suburban locations, is probably not one of them.

“In red America, the self is small,” Brooks writes. “People declare, in a million ways, ‘I am normal.’” And downtown, we have to admit, does seem to draw people who aren’t “normal.” And you can almost hear them whisper at the various suburban tabernacles, “Is it true that the main street downtown is Gay Street?”

A general Red State resentment of downtowns may explain the unexpected resentment of the good country people who this past summer were so unexpectedly opposed to a downtown library project. Brooks says pretentious Blue Americans are more likely to brag about the fact that they read books, and some Red Americans may be opposed to the idea of a public library on general principles.

But here, some objected to the proposed new library stating their suspicions that it might be a place where people drink latte. Social critic Thomas Frank, author of What’s the Matter with Kansas, has referred to the conservatives’ “latte label”—which he says is “the suggestion that liberals are identifiable by their tastes and consumer preferences and that these tastes and preferences reveal the essential arrogance and foreignness of liberalism.”

Some conservatives may refer to whipped-milk coffee drinks in the same way that Cas Walker used to talk about the “silk-stocking crowd.” But silk stockings never caught on to quite the degree that latte has. You can get latte in a styrofoam cup at Weigel’s.

But leave Bluish downtown in any direction, and within five miles, whether you find yourself in farmland, a trailer park, or on a McMansion cul-de-sac, you’re in Red America.

The entry into Red America effect is especially impressive going west, where Blue Knoxville seems to end in a border state of divided loyalties known as Bearden. Kerry signs outnumber Bush signs in most neighborhoods until you get to Northshore. Even traditionally conservative Sequoyah Hills seems to favor Kerry about 3-2.

Then at Northshore, they practically end altogether. In some of the newer cul-de-sac subdivisions of West Knoxville, every single yard sign touts Bush and Cheney. Red America’s even stronger in the suburbs and rural areas than Blue America is in town. That’s why, despite how blue downtown can seem on a temperate evening, Knox County will almost certainly go red.

There are some obvious reasons why the suburbs may favor Republicans. It may not have so much to do with the new paradigm of red vs. blue America, but with traditional wealthy Republicans. People vote their pocketbooks, they say, and the wealthy benefit more from tax cuts, of course. Also, the suburbs wouldn’t work at all without a steady flow of cheap gasoline. A disruption in Saudi Arabia alone could drive up gas prices sharply and affect property values in suburban America. Though neither Bush nor Kerry favors adding federal gasoline taxes, people do associate the idea with the Democrats. Bush is famously friendly with the Saudis, too.

On my computer thesaurus, the word conventional appears as a plausible synonym for conservative. I know conservatives who aren’t conventional at all, and as we’ve seen, liberals are often suckers for their own conventions. But conservative commentators like Brooks say that normalcy—a word invented by a Republican presidential candidate 84 years ago—is a motivating principle for many Americans. The suburbs are perceived to be “normal”—that’s part of their appeal to normal people—and so is George W. Bush.

It’s not necessarily the low-profile normalcy of Harding. As Frank writes of his home state, “Kansas may be the land of averageness, but it is a freaky, militant, outraged averageness.”

Red Knoxville is often the orangest part of town. The idea of showing a united front clad entirely in orange and, perhaps, quietly resenting those who are not, has a strong appeal to Red Knoxvillians. But it might be vaguely embarrassing to Blue Knoxvillians—some alumni and longtime Vol fans we know prefer to root for the Vols in a blue or gray shirt. However, a politically conservative Michigan grad moving to suburban Knoxville may be wearing an orange jersey within his first month in town. Red Americans want to fit in.

Blue Americans maybe don’t. If a Blue American found himself swamped in a neighborhood entirely of yard-sign-labeled Kerry supporters, he might be tempted to put out a sign for Nader. Or Draft Perot.

In any case, on Nov. 2, Fox News will light up the state of Tennessee in red or blue. From other planets, the earth looks blue. But we might do well to remember that up close, it’s a much more complicated picture.

October 14, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 42 © 2004 Metro Pulse