Sunday, November 16, 2008
One of the "fun facts" of American demographics is that the largest ancestry group consists not of Anglo-Saxon stock, but of Germans. So Wikipedia says, "They currently form the largest self-reported ancestry group in the United States, accounting for 49 million people, or 17% of the U.S. population." Considering that Germans were a numerous, if not dominant, group numerically as far back as the 18th century (majorities across large portions of southeast Pennsylvania), and then the significant 19th century migration this isn't totally implausible. On the other hand in the 2000 Census 8.7% of Americans claimed English ancestry. Many people find this very implausible, that is, far too low a figure. You can inspect the Census data and see what's going on, but I figured I'd bring some of the information in one post so that Wikipedia entries will no longer have a "citation needed" note when people make the claim for the low numbers of English Americans being an artifact.
And with proportions.... The proportions above use the white population in the Census as the baseline. It seems pretty clear here: the "American" group is sucking up many people of British Isles origin. Additionally, I haven't posted it, but there are weird changes in people claiming single or multiple ancestries. This is probably a result of the way in which the question was worded and results tabulated, the balance between single and multiple ancestries shifted a lot among many groups in favor of the former. This obviously doesn't make sense, these are European groups who aren't subject to a great deal of immigration, and have been intermarrying more & more each generation. Next there is some interesting data from page 38 Ethnic Options:
As you can see, British Isles groups tend to be very inconsistent year-by-year in their ethnic affinity. I believe this suggests very weak distinctive self-identification. In part this is probably due to the fact that the immigrant experience is so far back for people whose forebears arrived in North America in the 1600s and 1700s, but, I also believe that it is due to the fact that Anglo-Saxon culture is to some extant the default culture of the United States. The fact that Anglo-Saxon identity is so malleable and shallow in explicit (if not implicit background) terms also suggests one hypothesis for the relatively robusticity of a group like German Americans vs. English Americans over the past 30 years: German ancestry is more memorable, distinctive and "ethnic" than English ancestry. So if someone is 1/4 German and 3/4 "American," one might naturally give "German" as the response when queried about ethnicity because the "American" element is not coded as ethnicity at all. Checking through the Census data it also seems that "American" is tabulated only if no other ethnic groups are given by respondent. This suggests to me that there are many of the people bracketed into German, Irish, etc., probably listed "American" as one of their ethnicities, which itself is probably a proxy for Anglo-Saxon background. Relying on self-reports is obviously problematic for ethnicity in a nation where a large majority are likely compounds. How can we get a real sense of the distribution of American European ethnicities? Here's an idea: a social scientist could simply go back several generations in the genealogy of 10,000 random white Americans in the family Family Search database. Individual could be more appropriately coded ethnically. Labels: Ethnicity
Saturday, November 15, 2008
As a supplement of some of my posts, I've stitched together some maps from American Ethnic Geography. It should make everything clearer (the Midland region might some incoherent to you, but most of the Scots-Irish disembarked around Philadelphia and pushed inland and then expanded throughout the Upland South)....
Thursday, November 13, 2008
A few friends have emailed me some objections to the four culture model of american history. In short, though New England Puritans, Highland South Scotch-Irish and Lowland South Cavaliers are reasonable cultural entities which are easy to put a finger on, the Mid-Atlantic is a hodge-podge which to a great extent is simply thrown in a bin together for simplicity. In 1750 Pennsylvania was the first American colony where people of British descent became a minority. This sort of diversity makes it rather peculiar to speak of a Mid-Atlantic cultural folkway in which Germans, Dutch, Quakers, Roman Catholics, Swedes and Long Island Yankees can be thrown together into one pot. It's somewhat like assigning the term "environmental" to all the components of variance in quantitative genetics of a phenotype which can not be attributed to genetics. You know what it isn't, but what is it?
But that's just an aside. You might infer from the image above that the point of this post is not to explore what the term "Mid-Atlantic" can tell us in any model of social history. Instead, I want to focus on one aspect of American coalitional politics which might be of interest in the next 4 years: Mormon America is a representative of the New England Puritan cultural tradition in "Red America." A map is going to be more informative here than words. When I say Mormons are "Puritan," I'm not saying this as a figure of speech; Mormon America is to a great extent both a direct cultural and genetic descendant of New England Puritanism! The proportion of "English" ancestry in Mormon America is somewhat exaggerated by the fact that missions were sent to England and so you had direct migrants from Europe to Utah. But this can't explain the whole of the phenomenon, American Mormonism began as a religion of Greater New England. First in upstate New York, and later in northern Ohio. Its relocation to the Midwest was problematic for a host of reasons, but the fact that they were often neighbors of people whose origins were in the South and they were quite clearly Yankees probably exacerbated tensions. Mormonism is a very communitarian religion, not unexpected from a faith with Puritan origins. Mormon settlements in Utah were laid out like New England towns, as opposed to isolated yeoman farmsteads. Brigham Young socialized water usage to optimally allocate resources for irrigation. A tendency toward campaigns for temperance and high fertility were features of New England society. Mormons are famously fertile (relatively) and do not drink. In Wisconsin administrators preferred Yankee settlers because they were more likely to be willing to raise money for pubic goods such as schools than migrants from the South. Mormons may be low-tax Republicans, but those in good standing tithe a very large proportion of their income obligately in their private life (10% from what I recall), while the church runs itself like a corporation which has economies of scale. Unlike evangelical Christians in the South, Mormons do not acceptwith resignation that many youth may "raise hell" before settling down. Mormons do not accept the Protestant contention that salvation is through faith alone. Behavior matters. Social pathologies and the personal disorder which has been a feature of Southern cultural life since its inception are not features of Mormon America, which reflects Puritan fixation on public order as a check on private liberty. Over the past generation Mormons and Southern Protestants have entered into a de facto alliance because of their social traditionalism. The recent controversy over Proposition 8 in California will likely result in even more esteem for the Mormon church from structurally suspicious evangelicals (they do not believe Mormons are Christian, and resent that they claim that they are Christian). In other ways Mormons have come to identify themselves with conservative Protestant America, which to a great extent means Southern America. There are data which show that while 70% of Brigham Young University students rejected Creationism in 1930, 70% now accept it. I believe this is due to cultural influence from evangelical Protestantism, with whom Mormons are now politically allied. But I believe that the differences between Puritan Mormon America and Southern evangelical America need to be kept in mind. Some of Mitt Romney's supporters were irritated that some conservative kingmakers (e.g., Richard Land) were leaning to Fred Thompson because of cultural affinities. Culture matters. Mormons may be aligned with the South, but the alliance will always play out in the framework of differences in cultural priors. Mitt Romney is a social conservative, and likely was before he had to lie to become governor of Massachusetts. But he is not a Southern social conservative, and that matters, and when he pretended to be he seemed phony. Addendum: One can encapsulate what I'm trying to get at by considering an even more extreme case: Jews & black Americans. These two groups are most Left-leaning and Democratic demographics in American society, but, they obviously aren't equivalent and there are qualitative differences in their liberalism. This doesn't mean that the position of both these groups on the American Left is in question, but there will always be a tension within the alliance. Labels: culture, Ethnicity, Religion
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science asks where asks where all the Smiths have gone:
Sam Roberts writes,In 1984, according to the Social Security Administration, nearly 3.4 million Smiths lived in the United States. In 1990, the census counted 2.5 million. By 2000, the Smith population had declined to fewer than 2.4 million.Where did all the Smiths go from 1984 to 1990? I can believe it flatlined after 1990, but it's hard to believe that the count could have changed so much in 6 years. Here's another explanation, it's the inverse of the phenomenon of those claiming Native American ancestry in the United States doubling in 10 years. Many Smiths were at one point Schmidts, who knows if some of them didn't revert now that WASP surnames aren't as value-added? I strongly suspect that the number of ethnic whites in the USA is overstated because those with mixed-ancestry emphasize the most non-traditional quanta of their heritage. That means if someone is 1/4 German & 3/4 English they might declare their ethnicity as German. I'll probably have to look up some social science on this question at some point.... Note: the rank of Schmidt increased in terms of rank by 33 from 1990 to 2000. Update: I took a bunch of German names and their English or Anglicized variants and compared their ranks between 1990 and 2000. I'm sure that the trend you see is the combined result of the decrease in proportion of those with very common Anglo names because of the decline of the non-Hispanic white fraction as well as a moderate stream of new German immigrants. But who knows?
Update II: Proportion of German Americans dropping faster than English Americans? Update III: Took some Census 2000 data and produced this....
I think the ratio of First to Second ancestry is probably a pretty good sense out admixture/outmarriage rates. Look at the Welsh; not very distinct from other British Isles groups and far less numerous, ergo lots of second ancestry. Update IV: Median age for people of English ancestry is 44. For German it is 37. Same with Irish. What's up with that? |