Mississippi. The Whites, forming a little less than half of the total
population, are almost all of the old native stock. The emigration of
Whites (and of Negroes, too, for that matter) from the cotton States
during the last fifteen or twenty years has been largely due to the
ravages of the boll weevil, which made cotton less profitable and
prevented many small farmers from making even their expenses.
Georgia has been hit harder than any other State, probably, by this
movement out of the State and thousands of acres of good farming land
are now lying idle there, for lack of hands to work them. The same
holds good to some extent in other States of the region. Many of the
small farmers have moved westward, first perhaps to Texas or Oklahoma,
and then on to the Pacific Coast, the automobile now taking the place
of the covered wagon of their forebears.
Arkansas differs in no important respect from Mississippi, save in
having a much smaller proportion of Negroes. Its old white population
has likewise begun to move, though more often northward, as to Missouri
or Kansas. But Oklahoma and, also, Texas have been the great outlets
for the Arkansas farmers.
The climate and resources of Louisiana have attracted some 50,000
Italians--a small element compared with those in the Northeastern
States, but large for the South. Louisiana has always been more
cosmopolitan than any of the other Southern States, and this is
still the case, yet 85 per cent of its Whites are of the old native
stock. Most of those not born in the State have come from States
directly adjoining. While to a certain extent there has been the usual
interchange, Louisianians going to other nearby States, mainly Texas,
nevertheless Louisiana has been relatively unimportant in settling
other States since the Civil War.
Its population is less homogeneous than most of the Southern States.
The northern part of the State, with a majority of the inhabitants
and with political control, is made up largely of Nordic Protestants
who have come in from Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, or elsewhere,
and who differ little from the inhabitants of those States. The
southern part of Louisiana, on the contrary, is largely Roman Catholic
in religion, and to a large extent French-speaking. In some towns
there are no public schools. The parochial schools teach the children
in French, and the Catholic Church has made particular efforts to
perpetuate the use of that language. The State Convention which
revised the constitution in 1921 made the literacy qualification for
the exercise of the electoral franchise, the ability of a citizen to
write his application for registration "in the English language _or his
mother tongue_."
The State has the highest rate of illiteracy of any in the Union,
whether one considers the total population including Negroes, or
limits the figures to the native Whites. It has been part of the United
States for one hundred and thirty years, but United States officials,
when going into many parts of it, still have to be accompanied by
an interpreter. With only two or three exceptions, every bishop who
has been in charge of Catholic interests in Louisiana since Thomas
Jefferson's day has been foreign-born and foreign-trained.
For such reasons the feeling of separate interests and lack of unity
and national identity have tended to continue; and when the "Cajan"
representatives attend the State legislature at Baton Rouge, they
address the House in eloquent English, but among themselves, discuss
their program in a French patois.
Oklahoma, due to its peculiar history, is one of the cosmopolitan
States. When the territory was thrown open to settlement in the great
land rush of April 22, 1889, speculators from all parts of the United
States were attracted to the scene. But most of the settlers in the
northern part came from Kansas or Missouri and in the southern, from
Texas or Arkansas. In the next year, when the territory was formally
organized, one-third of its population was Indian or Negro. Subsequent
land allotments and colonization tended to perpetuate this dual origin
of the settlers, but after the State became a famous oil field, in the
early years of the present century, the population became so mixed
that this distinction was partly lost. Meanwhile the Indian population
was not only swamped by the Whites, but largely intermarried with
them, partly because Indian women had titles to valuable oil land. At
present Oklahoma is still credited with nearly 30 per cent of all the
Indians in the United States, though it is supposed that not more than
one-fourth of these are full-blood, and many of those who are legally
counted as Indians have but a negligible amount of Indian heredity. The
Creeks and a few others have mixed to some extent with Negroes, but
this has not been general.
Texas, Missouri, Arkansas, and Kansas are still the principal
sources of Oklahomans, in the order named; but there is not a State
in the Union which is not represented here, many of them with large
contingents. The foreign stock is of equally cosmopolitan background,
but makes up only one-sixteenth of the whole. Considering the
geographical location, it includes a surprisingly large number of
Canadians.
Texas contains nearly half a million people of foreign stock, the
German element being by far the largest. Second in importance among
the foreign stocks is a Czechoslovakian population which has settled
largely in the southeastern part. The Germans are mainly to the west of
them. The State began to attract Italians just before the World War.
The British element is important, while Galveston has long been largely
dominated by Jews.
North Texas enjoyed a boom in 1875 and 1876 when a flood of homeseekers
poured in with their emigrant wagons. Many of these were farmers from
the Middle West who had been impoverished by the great grasshopper
plague.
Western Texas was settled late, and periods of drought, such as that at
the time of the World War, largely depopulated some sections, farmers
packing up what they could carry and abandoning everything else to move
into a region where nature was less reluctant to aid them.
Texas is still the offspring of the lower Mississippi Valley States,
but commercial development and the oil industry have brought in many
Northerners, particularly from the Central States. On the other hand,
the State's contribution to Oklahoma dwarfs all the other streams that
have gone out from it; but it has also contributed liberally to New
Mexico and Arizona and in recent years to California.
Turning back now to the East North Central States, which comprise those
originally carved out of the Northwest Territory of 1787, one again
encounters the full tide of the so-called "new immigration." Here the
old native stock is scarcely more than a numerical majority--fourteen
million out of twenty-five, to be more exact; a striking contrast to
the Southern States, which we have just been considering, where it
still forms nine-tenths or more of the total white population.
Five millions of the later arrivals in the North Central States are
Nordics, but a number almost equally large are Alpines. Half a million
Mediterraneans are present in the Italian immigration, while the area
from which the congress of the Confederation, as one of its last acts,
declared that Negro slaves should be forever excluded, has acquired
nearly a million free Negroes.
Ohio is still two-thirds native, and its great industrial development
has drawn population from all sides, though four out of five of its
citizens still find their names on the birth records of the State
itself. Besides giving population to all its neighbors it has, like the
other States of this region, sent a stream westward, not merely to such
places as Kansas and Colorado, but particularly to the Pacific Coast.
While the German element in Ohio which, half a century ago, made such
cities as Cincinnati centers of Teutonic kultur, is still the most
important numerically, it is outnumbered by the Poles, Czechoslovaks,
Hungarians, Yugoslavs, Lithuanians, and the like, if they are taken
together. The easy access across the Great Lakes has given Ohio, like
her sister States, an important Canadian element.
Indiana, most American of States in its early period, still makes an
excellent showing, with nearly 85 per cent of its population native
white of native parentage. In the interchange of inhabitants it still
continues, as it did in the days of its founding, to draw an important
Southern element from across the Ohio River. The State of Ohio does the
same. The population still tends to move westward, not eastward, from
Indiana, taking with it some of the best of American family lines and
the purest of American traditions.
The half million of foreign stock within the borders of the State are
at least half Nordic. No single group of the Slavs or Mediterraneans
is represented heavily, although there are a few of all those national
elements.
The people of Indiana deserve recognition for the way they have
preserved their heritage. It is no accident that the "Indiana school"
of writers has long sounded the authentic American note in literature,
in striking contrast to the decadent tone of the output in some of the
Atlantic Coast centers where the dominant element is quite un-American.
Illinois, by contrast, is barely more than half native, and the
scandals of its politics in regions where the alien vote is
self-conscious, have long been manifest to every newspaper reader.
With 329,000 Negroes, according to the 1930 census, Illinois ranks in
this respect only after Pennsylvania and New York, among the Northern
States; but corrupt political rings have made of the Negro an important
factor in the government of Chicago, as he has not been in New York or
Philadelphia.
Of its foreign-born stock, Nordics are far below a million, as compared
with a million and a half of Alpines and a quarter of a million of
Mediterraneans. Under the pressure of this competition, the old native
stock has shown a strong tendency to move West and South. Texas and
Arkansas, for example, have drawn more heavily from Illinois than they
have from any other Northern State, and Illinois has also been the
greatest single contributor to the development of the Pacific Coast.
Michigan is now just half native. Its geographical location has
attracted more than half a million Canadians, many of them belonging to
the French Alpine stock there. In the foreign stock as a whole, Alpines
outnumber Nordics not far from two to one. Among the 100,000 Italians
are many Northerners in the copper mines--big fellows so unlike the
Sicilian and Neapolitan to whom the American on the Atlantic Coast is
accustomed, that he does not recognize them as Italians. These northern
Italians, as previously noted, are not Mediterraneans, but mostly
Alpine with remnants of Nordic blood from the days of the Lombards and
Goths.
Wisconsin has almost escaped the Negro invasion of the North, so its
three million inhabitants are at least white; but the native stock
is in a minority, due largely to the great German inrush of the last
century. With this came many Scandinavians.
From 1860 to 1880 the immigrant nationalities ranked in the
order--German, Norwegian, Dane, and Swede. The only difference since
then is that they rank in the order--German, Norwegian, Swede, and
Dane. The great Swedish tide of immigration in the last half of the
nineteenth century did not acquire full force until the Norwegian had
passed its crest.
As late as 1900, three-fourths of the people of Wisconsin were of
foreign parentage, and the Germans made up half of these. Milwaukee,
with its Socialist administration, had long been conspicuously the
center of German influence in the United States. Up to 1843, was a
Yankee village, earnestly trying to supplant Chicago as the center of
the Midwest. By 1856 a third of its population was German. By 1890
one-half of its population was of German parentage and one-fourth
actually of German birth. That census year, however, saw the high tide
of Germanism in Milwaukee. Poles, Russians, Slovaks, and Italians have
modified since then the racial character of the city, which is only
one-third German at the present time. In the characteristic political
color of the State some students profess to see evidence of the fact
that many of the German immigrants were revolutionists fleeing from the
Fatherland.
In Minnesota, the Germans outnumber any single group, although less
numerous than the three Scandinavian groups put together, so the
State is correctly thought of as Scandinavian. Considerably less than
half of its population is of the old American stock, but the State is
overwhelmingly Nordic, the 150,000 Slavs who have invaded it in recent
decades being of little account in its 2,500,000 population. Since
the days of its founding, Minnesota has drawn from Canada a desirable
element, and has given freely in exchange.
Due partly to its relatively late settlement, the State has not been
one of those which have contributed heavily to its neighbors. Its
greatest outflow has been to the Pacific Coast, as its inhabitants
became prosperous enough to move to a milder climate in their old age.
Iowa, of about the same population as Minnesota, is two-thirds native
and equally Nordic. It has contributed heavily to the prairie and
mountain States, and also to the Pacific Coast, but the standing joke
which ascribes to Iowa the parentage of all Southern Californians seems
to be not quite exact--at least California as a whole has received more
of its population during the past generation from Illinois, Missouri,
New York, and Ohio, than from Iowa, which stands only fifth in the list.
Iowa, being pre-dominantly agricultural, has felt particularly the
unfavorable status of agriculture since the World War. During the
decade 1920-30, three out of every five of the villages in the State
actually lost in population, the people having either moved into the
cities or "gone West." Here as elsewhere, the small village seems
unable to meet the needs of the inhabitants. One of the real problems
of statesmanship in the near future is to work out a social and
economic system under which a larger part of the old native stock, and
particularly the most intelligent portion of it, can live under the
favorable biological conditions of the small village.
Missouri has nearly a quarter of a million Negroes, in contrast
with such States as the three last discussed, in which the colored
population is negligible. But of its white population, three-fourths
is native, the rest mostly German. Slavs and Italians have only begun
to get a footing. On the whole, the State is strongly Nordic and sends
out large contingents of Nordics to Illinois on the East, to Kansas
and Oklahoma, and to the mountain and coast States westward. The
importance of the Missouri stock, coming to a large extent from that of
Virginia, has been much greater than is generally recognized, in the
settlement of the whole West.
The great rush into Dakota took place in the decade after 1875. The
Red River country was opened up by the Northern Pacific Railway, and
the model farms which were established were advertised far and wide,
so that the population of 6000 in this district in 1875 increased more
than 2000 per cent in the following ten years.
In 1889 the territory of Dakota was divided on the 45° 55´ parallel,
and North Dakota was admitted as a State with approximately 170,000
population. Its subsequent growth has kept it fairly homogeneous from
a racial point of view, the State being almost wholly Nordic. Apart
from the old native Americans the main elements have been British
from Canada, Germans, and Scandinavians. The Norwegian immigration
which began in the early '90's was particularly noteworthy. Norwegians
now form about one-fourth of the total population of the State. An
interesting small group is that of the Icelanders, representatives of
one of the oldest, most highly cultured, and most stringently selected
of all Nordic peoples.
The Russians in the State, approaching a hundred thousand in number,
are mostly German-speaking. They are farmers whose ancestors were
invited to South Russia several centuries ago, but who retained their
speech and culture to a marked degree.
After the discovery of gold in the Black Hills, the country which is
now South Dakota had a rush in 1876 and for some years following, much
like that of Nevada and Montana during the Civil War and of California
in 1849. This frequently does not result in a well-balanced permanent
population, and the real settlement of South Dakota dates from the
succeeding period when its prairie lands were taken up by wheat growers
from the States of the upper Mississippi Valley. The wheat industry in
Wisconsin gradually died during the decade of 1870-80, and many who
found the ground unprofitable there moved farther west, as did others
with similar motives from western New York and the States of the old
Northwest Territory.
South Dakota has a slightly higher percentage of old Americans than
its sister to the north; otherwise the two differ remarkably little
in size, composition, and resources. In 1920, half of the inhabitants
of North Dakota claimed South Dakota as a birthplace; while half of
the inhabitants of South Dakota claimed North Dakota as theirs. Of all
the forty-eight States, these two are unmistakably the Tweedledum and
Tweedledee.
Nebraska after the Civil War continued to attract mainly the old
American pioneer class, but it also became a haven for several foreign
groups. It is said to contain about one-eighth of all the Bohemians
in the United States. The serious permanent settlement of the State
began in the early '70's. Many discharged soldiers seeking to make a
new start went West with their families. It was only a few years later
that the foreign tide began to reach these prairies and thereafter the
State attracted large fractions of the Bohemian, Scandinavian, and
German immigrations. Like some of the other prairie States it also
received many settlers who were listed as Russian because of their
nationality, but who, in fact, were Germans whose ancestors had gone to
Russia and failed to prosper there. Nebraska, therefore, though less
than three-fourths native, is overwhelmingly Nordic.
Kansas is still four-fifths native and nine-tenths Nordic. It has
received the same foreign contributions as Nebraska, but in much
smaller quantities. At the same time it has continued to receive
settlers from the Mississippi Valley, and even from Eastern States,
such as New York and Pennsylvania.
On the whole, the prairie States have been notably successful in
assimilating their immigrants and maintaining an American tradition.
The newcomers were not segregated in slums but scattered on farms.
It was almost a necessity for them to learn the speech and adopt
the customs of their hosts. While some of the Scandinavians, as in
Minnesota, have tried to have their children learn the language and
preserve the traditions of the "old country," these have at least been
Nordic traditions, and any feeling of aloofness or separateness is
rapidly disappearing.
The mountain States date largely from the Civil War, when another of
the country's waves of migration and settlement broke loose from its
moorings and started westward.
The first great migration of the American stock began immediately after
the Revolution, and resulted in the creation of Kentucky and Tennessee
by the Southerners, the transformation of western New York by the New
Englanders, and a mingling of these two streams as they crossed the
Ohio River to open up the Northwest Territory.
The second great migration reached its crest with the panic of 1819. It
completed the settlement of the Ohio Valley and of the States along the
lower Mississippi and the Gulf.
The third great migration reached its height with the feverish land
speculation promoted by Andrew Jackson's experiments in banking and
broke with the collapse of the prosperity which Martin Van Buren
inherited from his predecessor. It witnessed the settlement of the
Mississippi Valley throughout almost its entire length; together with
the Nordic absorption of Texas.
The fourth wave, slightly more diffuse, washed over the "great plains"
and broke on the crests of the Rocky Mountains during the Civil War,
though a heavy splash had meanwhile reached the Pacific Coast. It
began with the settlement of Kansas, motivated in part by land hunger,
but also by definite political calculations. Meanwhile the conquest
of California, the discovery of gold there, the settlement of Oregon,
and the Mormon appropriation of Utah, brought into existence an active
traffic across the plains, which was the beginning of Nebraska's
existence.
The Rocky Mountain States grew up in the first place out of this
traffic, then by the mining discoveries within their limits, and the
fact that there was a restless population on the Pacific Coast, ready
to surge back eastward, together with a footloose population to the
East ready to move into any part of the West.
This Eastern contingent received its impetus from the panic of 1857,
when many men, bankrupt or dislocated, were prepared to make a new
start. The mining activities in the Far West encouraged adventurers
to try their hand at the gold pan, and the country was full of
prospectors, some of them professional but mostly amateur. Men who had
no jobs at home thought they might as well seek a fortune in this way;
it would not cost them much to live, and they could at least see the
country. A similar renaissance of prospecting and small-scale mining
took place all over the mountains of the West when the depression of
1929 was well under way.
To this element was shortly added another composed of people getting
away from the Civil War. Some of these were actual deserters from
military service; others went West to escape the pressure of public
opinion toward enlistment; others in the border States, ruined by the
conflict or unwilling to cast their lot with either combatant, simply
started in motion as their fathers and grandfathers had done before
them.
The population of the mountain States varied remarkably from month to
month, as the crowd moved from one reputed bonanza to another. The
government at Washington showed itself unusually ready to set up new
governments in that region, because it was on the whole of unquestioned
Union loyalty and, if the South, at the close of the war, should be
brought back into the Union on the old terms, as President Lincoln
evidently planned, a dozen new senators from half as many new Western
States could easily be secured, leaving the South in the minority and
breaking that deadlock of almost half a century which had been the
source of so many compromises and the occasion of so many conflicts.
Colorado, at that time a part of Kansas, was an almost unknown "Indian
territory" when prospectors struck gold in the neighborhood of Denver
in 1858 and 1859. The rush from Kansas and Nebraska, when the legend
"Pike's Peak or Bust," lettered on the sides of emigrant wagons, became
traditional, disclosed how little was known of the country. Pike's
Peak, though not near the gold diggings, was the only place in Colorado
of which most Americans had ever heard.
In 1861 there was enough population to justify territorial government.
Statehood was not attained until 1876. From then on until the
agricultural period, the history of Colorado was the history of its
fluctuating mining camps. But by 1930 the State had reached a permanent
basis and a population of more than a million, of which two-thirds was
native and the other third a heterogeneous lot, partly Nordic but
containing strong Slav, Italian, and Mexican elements. So far as the
native American population was concerned, its geographical origin still
represented a fan spreading out from Pike's Peak until it reached the
Atlantic Ocean. In large or small proportions, emigrants from most of
the older States had converged on the Rockies.