The American-Americans

Matt Yglesias posted an interesting map the other day:

It's a map drawn from US Census bureau data on ethnicity and ancestry. According to the census, however, some 7% of Americans look puzzled when you quiz 'em about their ancestry and write American rather than "Irish" or "Polish" or Korean" or "Cuban". This map shows where those American-Americans live, leading Matt to argue, vis a vis Jim Webb's prospects for the Vice-Presidency, that "Webb's favorite ethnic group, in short, seems to be the ethnic group with the least ethnic consciousness." (I concur with Matt, incidentally, in recommending Eve Fairbanks' fine Webb profile in this week's New Republic)

Well, yes, and that's one of the reasons Webb felt compelled to write his history of the Scots-Irish in America, Born Fighting. It's precisely because he felt that his ain folk were, to borrow from Ian Fleming, "a tough, forgotten race" that Webb leapt into the fray.

Still, if you were to plot Scottish (and Ulster) immigration to the US on a map, you'd end up with something similar to the "American" map above. And that goes some way towards explaining why there's no significant Scottish political constituency in the United States. Equally, though some Scots and Ulster immigrants (the latter mainly Scots who'd been in Ulstr for a generation or two) left for the New World involuntarily, many more did not. They were leaving for a reason and had little cause to look back with sentiment.

And of course, they left a long time ago (emigrants from post-WW1 Scotland, tended to head to Canda or New Zealand) and, being for the most part practical protestants, they did not so much assimilate into America as build it in the first place. No wonder, then, that despite the St Andrews' and Caledonian Societies scattered across America there's never been much of a Scots Lobby in American politics. The SNP, of course, would love it if there were such a lobby. But there are no collection tins being passed around Appalachian churches or in the bars of Columbia or Knoxville.

Equally, it's precisely because the descendents of these immigrants from lowland Scotland, Ulster (and the counties of northern England) consider themselves unhyphenated Americans that they have harboured, I'd suggest, suspicions of those more recent arrivals who consider themselves "ethnics" or otherwise hyphenated-Americans.

Anyway, one other thought with regard to immigration: does anyone know of a study comparing assimilation rates between immigrants who left their home countries willingly and those who, for whatever reason, were compelled to leave? My suspicion - and it is only that - would be that Mexicans arriving in the United States seeking economic advancement (and planning to stay permanently) are likely to become unhyphenated-Americans more quickly than, say, those forced out of their home countries for other reasons (eg, the Cuban community in Florida). But that's just a guess...

Comments

[David]

This NYRB piece on Webb is also good:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21530

[toby]

Interesting contrast with Irish Catholics, generally from Southern Ireland. Before the Jewish lobby, the Irish lobby was the strongest ethnic influence on (particularly) Democratic Presidents. Even FDR had to gesture to the Irish lobby.

Well,

- Being Catholic in a Protestant country, the Southern Irish were more alien and less easily assimilated.
- They arrived a century or so after the Scots-Irish who were dispersed among rural communities. The Catholics arrived when America was urbanising so they crowded into the cities and became powerful voting blocs in the big city machines.
- Many of the Catholic Irish arrived after and during the creation of Irish nationalism (the 1798 Rebellion, the O'Connell & Young Ireland years of the 1840s, and the Fenian years from 1858 on) which exerted a powerful influence.

[Kevin D Stallings]

This is just about the most useless catch phrase sweeping this country today. It is being pushed forth by the right as a way to show that we are “Just plain Americans”. From this country’s inception we were never “Just plain Americans”. I saw this guy wearing a T-shirt that said “ Unhyphenated American” on the front. This clown doesn’t understand that without hyphenated Americans there would be no America. I think that Hyphenated Americans scare right-wingers only when there are three words in front of the hyphen: African, Mexican and Asian. You never hear from these right wing nuts when the National Italian American Foundation (NIAF) sponsors the Italian American festival in Sterling Heights, MI every July. They don’t come out to the Polish-American Memorial Golf tournament in Vicksburg, MI wearing their “Unhyphenated American” t-shirts. They would.never tell members of the Irish-American Republican organization to be“Just plain Americans” because the terms Italian, Polish and Irish are just not as troublesome as African, Mexican and Asian seem to be. I saw this mans t-shirt and was a little offended because, I’m surrounded by hyphenated Americanism everyday. African-American, Mexican-Americans and Asian-Americans helped shape the America we enjoy today. Dear Mr. Unhyphenated American t-shirt man, I would like to invite you to a nice Italian dinner and after dinner we can have a couple of Polish Paczki’s for dessert and then we could adjourn to the nearest Irish pub on St. Patrick’s day for a nice glass of green beer. Maybe then you will see that without hyphenated Americans America would not exist. Hyphenated Americans unite!!!!!!!!!!! Celebrate our differences. Peace

Kevin D Stallings

[ndm]

Kevin Stallings writes:

I think that Hyphenated Americans scare right-wingers only when there are three words in front of the hyphen: African, Mexican and Asian.

I think you can drop Asian from that list. There may be parts of American with perhaps some disliked Asian rare subgroup coming to town but elsewhere Asians have successfully and fully integrated into American society. I believe, for example, that Asians form the largest ethnic group in every class at UC Berkeley.

I'm not sure we should be encouraging all the "amateur drinking" that goes on every St. Patrick's Day. That's the one day of the year when the average American bar is best avoided. Let's hope Cinco di Mayo doesn't have the same fate.

The best t-shirt I've seen recently said:

Mexican
Not hispanic
Not latino

Actually, I lied that is the second best. The best was a Balkan Beat Box (girls) t-shirt with an image of a cockerel.

[Gary Ross]

A very interesting article.

As a Canadian of Scottish origin, I was puzzled some years ago when I first began researching the details of my family. Initially, the trail led to a quaint old cemetery in rural southern New Brunswick where the family patriarch was buried.

On the obelisk headstone the first of two puzzles appeared: Two names were inscribed there, one, an Alexander Ross, and the other, a Hugh Rose. Both were born in Nigg, Ross-shire, Scotland in the late eighteenth century.

The second puzzle appeared in subsequent census return searches when I discovered that the children of Alexander Ross were listed as having been born in Ireland. At first, I thought it to be a mistake. My ancestors were identified as being illiterate so I assumed the census taker might have committed an error.

Later in my life I had the good fortune, while doing research work for a book that I was writing, I visited the Nigg, Ross-shire area and was able to unlock some of the mystery.

My sources, who had been involved in helping write the history of the Nigg Rosses, told me that it was a common practice in the earlier days for kin-folk to slightly alter their name, perhaps to avoid notice by the law, or just to be a bit different. This was, so I was told, a common practice for the transition between Ross and Rose. It was my sources assumption that the two different names on the burial marker were very likely brothers.

I also became astutely aware that at the time of the Highland Clearances, many of the highlanders were taken by ship from the east coast of Scotland north and around the coast of Scotland to, what would have been, a fairly long voyage the Londonderry region of northern Ireland.

This was the fate of my ancestors. Children were born and not long after came the Fever Plague and the Potato Famine. These events, as well as the Clearances, were opportune circumstances for the hated English who had a very serious problem in the New World.

Having "conquered" the French at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1763, the English were faced with a serious imbalance between the royalists and the early French settlers. Winning the battle was no assurance of holding the victory.

The English grabbed the opportunity associated with the circumstances in both Scotland and Ireland, and arranged the mass exodus of displaced or starving Scots, Irish, and Scots-Irish, from the British Isles to the heavily French populated parts of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Quebec. Along with the cruel expulsion of French families who had been settled in the area for decades, the English, to some extent, achieved their aim.

Many of the members of these families, as what happened in mine, later crossed over into the United States, in search of a more hospitable climate.

Have a look at my site: garyross.ca

Keep up the good work,

Gary