Germania
Follow up post on the Isles, the distribution of German Americans.
25th quartile = 0.10
Median = 0.20
75th quartile = 0.30
Correlation(German, English) = -0.16
Correlation(German, American) = -0.74
Correlation(German, Irish) = 0.11
Correlation(German, Scots-Irish) = -0.31
Now let’s exclude the South, where there are the fewest Germans.
25th quartile = 0.21
Median = 0.27
75th quartile = 0.39
Correlation(German, English) = -0.55
Correlation(German, American) = -0.47
Correlation(German, Irish) = -0.30
Correlation(German, Scots-Irish) = -0.37
FYI, the correlation between the frequency of German Americans as a proportion of the non-Hispanic white population and voting for Barack Obama is 0.21. The strong inverse relationship between the proportion of “Americans” and German Americans is in part a function of region. Germans are underrepresented in the Southeast quadrant of the country, where Americans are overrepresented. But that still punts the question as to why Americans define themselves in this way.
I think this is plain history. Though a minority of German Americans have ancestors who arrived in the 18th century (including Dwight Eisenhower), the German American presence in the United States dates to the period between 1840 to 1890. This is recent enough that it probably explains the vociferousness of Germanophobia during World War I, when there was still a German language school system extant in the United States. Lawrence Welk was born in the German community of South Dakota, and German was his first language, explaining his slight accent (whether this was affected or not is controversial).
By contrast, as documented in Albion’s Seed, most of the ancestors of British Americans arrived in the 18th century. In fact, in New England it may be that most of the English origin population (and their descendant who spread into upstate New York and the Midwest) descend predominantly from 20-30,000 Puritan men and women who arrived in the Great Migration of 1620-1640 (when the religious climate in England was hostile to Puritanism). The ancestors of the Scots-Irish arrived in the 18th century or earlier, peaking in the decades before the American Revolution.
Of course, as is obvious in previous maps, Americans tend to concentrate in the South, whose predominant wave of settlement was a century after New England. So antiquity is not all that is at work. It seems possible that the “Englishness” of New Englanders is in part a function of the fact that the immigration of Irish Catholics made their Protestant English identity more salient. By contrast, in the South the large numbers of blacks, or the relative nearness of blacks, allowed for the hybridization of the “Anglo-Celtic” white identity, which can be labelled as “American” (i.e., “real Americans”). It is interesting that the Germans in Texas still tend to identify as Germans. For Texas:
Correlation(German, American) = -0.60
Correlation(German, English) = 0.16
Correlation(German, Scots-Irish) = -.24
Correlation(American, English) = -0.37
Correlation(American, Scots-Irish) = -0.36
Remember that Germans who settled Texas were generally recent immigrants from Germany. By contrast, the Anglos who settled Texas were secondary immigrants from the South, often regions of later settlement such as Tennessee, settled from the Atlantic states such as South Carolina in the first place.
Addendum: As some commenters have noted, there is also a likely bias in terms of the most recent immigrant lineage. So in the many individuals with both German and Anglo-Celtic ancestry, the former is likely to have been more recent and memorable.
Labels: politics
It seems to me that most “German Americans” whose ancestors came over during the 18th century probably wouldn’t identify as “German Americans” today. I know I don’t. (I have Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry through my paternal grandfather–the surname is a corruption of “Giesi” or “Gysi”.)
My impression is that the similarity of cultures (including the ease of anglicizing names) has led to it being very easy for descendants of German immigrants (the founders of all those “Germantowns”) to assimilate into the general Anglo-based culture–with the notable exception of those (Amish, etc.) who have strenuously resisted assimilation.
My grandmother, who whose father and older brother were part of the great wave from Germany, would talk about “the Germans” / “we Germans,” etc., when talking about the problems they would encounter around World War I… And on a travel document when she visited the Carribean, she wrote her nationality as “German,” instead of American.
I don’t think she would associate the word “German” with people who happened to live in Germany, however, or with how the German culture back home had changed since her father and older brother left.
I think that the hierarchy of receptivity was something like British, Calvinist (Dutch), Protestant (Germans and Scandinavians), Northern European (Polish and Irish), White (Mediterranean, Orthodox), and Other (Chinese, Mexicans, Filipinos, blacks).
‘with the notable exception of those (Amish, etc.) who have strenuously resisted assimilation.’
Have they really, though? They reject certain aspects of modernity, but I have trouble regarding them as truly culturally alien in the way that say Hmong, Japanese, or Somalis would be. The protestant commonality is too strong. Even the French are in certain respects more different from the US mainstream than the Amish are.
just a minor note: most of the german immigrants in the 18th century were “reformed” by religion. not lutheran or catholic, but reformed. many of these rather combined with the congregationalist church to form the united church of christ.
It’s mostly about the Irish rather than Germans, but this is relevant regarding ethnic identification depending on the salience of recent immigrant ancestors.
“For some ethnic groups, intermarriage thins out the ethnic heritage because few offspring of mixed marriages remember ancestors from that group. For other groups, intermarriage is a recruitment opportunity because the offspring of mixed marriages often think of themselves as part of that group, simplifying their mixed heritage with a single mention or expressing the sense that they “feel closer” to one group than to the other. [...] Social increase stems from the joint effects of a high rate of intermarriage and the high probability that someone will express a particular ethnic attachment. For example, the social increase of the Irish and German populations in America has far outstripped their natural increase. [...] The nine-fold increase of the Irish population in the United States stems from the combination of favorable outcomes on each of these variables for the Irish. The Irish have been in the United States a long time; they are religiously diverse, highly educated, and dispersed throughout the country. In addition, an unexplained subjective “closeness” to Ireland contributed to the size of the Irish American population in 1980.”