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7 o n e Into the Byrd Cage When James J. Kilpatrick went to Richmond in 1941, he had a limited understanding of writing for a professional newspaper, even less knowledge of Virginia, and only a nascent political philosophy. But that Kilpatrick was an authentic conservative in the making there could be no doubt. Although he did not come from aristocratic Virginia bloodlines or from a powerful political family, Kilpatrick was imbued from his childhood with the ideals of genteel southern conservatism tempered by individualism and the realities of capitalist imperatives. In perhaps unconventional ways, a sense of place, family background, and eventually acceptance of Richmond’s oldline high society added ingredients to a life that started in Oklahoma. Rising from the Plains Concerning Oklahoma’s identity in the early twentieth century, there was pure flux and only a shared consciousness of being “new.” If nothing else, Oklahomans understood that their Plains State, admitted in 1907, had little sense of a past and was hundreds of settlers, businessmen, opportunists, and the nation’s largest concentration of American Indians. In terms of cultural landscape, Oklahoma had entered a liminal zone, a threshold between the New West and the Old South. Tucked between two political cultures, the region soon fell under the South’s gravitational influence. The white voters of Oklahoma imported a Democratic power bloc in state politics and immediately established the southern way of life in race relations to control the hundreds of thousands of blacks who accompanied it from the South. Oklahoma may have looked western with its dry prairies and homesteads, but it felt southern in its proscriptions against racially integrated schools, transportation, and marriages. The insistence that a hierarchy of white over black differentiated the races and a premium placed on the natural orders of the world, particularly the idea that individuals stood free from impersonal institutions and government, shaped Kilpatrick’s upbringing.1 8 | Into the Byrd Cage The Kilpatrick family’s settlement in Oklahoma was the culmination of moves dating back nearly two hundred years. The Kilpatricks originated in lowland Scotland. Driven off their land in the wake of the eighteenthcentury Jacobite uprisings, the failed rebellions by Catholic Scots to put a Stuart king on the throne, they first went to Ireland. According to family lore, there the Kilpatrick clan acquired its temperament and its coat of arms when a remote ancestor—a county sheriff—chased a murderer into a church, stabbed him despite the sanctuary, and emerged onto the church steps with his dagger dripping blood. “I make sure,” the ancient Kilpatrick frankly stated, and the motto, which appears on the family crest along with a depiction of a hand clutching a blood-spattered blade, came to define the family spirit. After the Reformation, the Kilpatrick clan divided into Catholics and Protestants, relocating in Dublin and Belfast accordingly.2 Around the end of the eighteenth century, W. W. Kilpatrick, representative of the Protestant branch, arrived in New Orleans and became a lumber dealer. His son, Douglas Mitchell Kilpatrick, grew up in a merchant’s household, worked as a store clerk before the Civil War, and married a local girl named Alice Sedette Filleul, whose family descended from France. In the Civil War, Douglas Kilpatrick joined the city’s prestigious Washington Artillery and fought as a captain in the Army of Northern Virginia. In 1886, he named his newborn son James Jackson Kilpatrick in honor of the Confederate general Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson. By then, Douglas Kilpatrick had already built a lucrative retail business supplying food and provisions to ship captains in the Crescent City.3 In late-nineteenth-century New Orleans, the Kilpatricks were a prominent merchant family and members of the local gentry. Douglas Kilpatrick participated in civic life as president of the city’s Chamber of Commerce and even played a role imposing order on and restoring racial hierarchy in postwar New Orleans. Family history maintains that he suppressed an 1890s insurrection by African Americans. In reality, despite the fabled account, Douglas Kilpatrick was a ringleader of the paramilitary Crescent White League’s 1874 coup against the federally backed Reconstruction government that endorsed interracial democracy in Louisiana. Kilpatrick’s young, inexperienced volunteers, eager to emulate their older Confederate heroes, charged metropolitan police and federal soldiers armed with howitzers and Gatling guns in downtown New Orleans. The 1,500 White Leaguers routed the opposition and sacked the statehouse, customhouse, and arsenal. For years, Liberty Monument, an obelisk at the foot of Canal Street...

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