...but I could make the case that among religious groups in America, white Protestant fundamentalists have shown by their voting (with comparatively few exceptions) that they are extremely tribal. They do not trust anything that looks or acts exotic -- even in having any obvious ties to any European culture. To them, Beethoven is suspect. They have been divorced from the UK of their origins.
We may be going back to a split of four distinct regional waves of American settlement in pre-Revolutionary times as shown in David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed. The largely middle-class settlers of early New England were largely from southeastern England, and they brought with them the Congregational (Puritan) churches. Settling a part of the New World that had few of the things that get-rich-quick settlers wanted (the climate was too harsh for subtropical crops that could be grown cheaply and sold profitably in Europe, no precious metals, and no practically First Peoples to exploit, they created a largely-self-sufficient world in which commerce as capitalist enterprise would be necessary. The rocky soils made expansive agriculture impossible. Institutions developed under those conditions, and violence was low. The criminal justice system was rigid, and people were expected to take their disputes to courts of laws instead of settling them in duels or drunken brawls. Slavery? Attempts failed because the Africans died in the harsh winters.
Southeastern Pennsylvania and most of New Jersey were different in being settled by more idealistic Quakers who were more working-class in origin from the English Midlands and Wales and by German and Swiss Pietists (like Mennonites) who had much the same religious values. They had less trust in outward shows of success, and thus little use for ornamentation that showed worldly gain, than the Quakers and Pietists. They put little value in front yards. They were more humanitarian in their ideals than other settlers. Although southeastern Pennsylvania is almost as warm as slave-holding northern Virginia, the Quakers and Pietists thought slavery an abomination because it implied people living slothfully upon the toil of others.
The Tidewater region (southeastern Virginia, the Carolinas, and much of Maryland) attracted Cavaliers, heavily second-and-third sons of aristocrats of the English Southwest, who came to the American Southeast to set up their own aristocratic domain. All that was lacking was the peasantry -- and nobody was going to take the dangerous overseas journey to a disease-ridden, rough colony when they could remain similarly oppressed on some aristocratic plantation in southwestern England. The Cavaliers brought over indentured servants who were highly likely to die before their indentures expired and could get a piece of land on which to be somewhat like an aristocrat. The First Peoples would never fit the highly-subordinate roles of near-slaves, and were likely to escape and bring back uninvited guests (their tribes who would put an end to such subjection in the most forcible way possible). The Cavaliers found a solution: slavery. That made all the difference in the world.
The fourth wave of Backwoodsmen was people from the rough-and-tumble world of the people of the wild English North, southern Scotland (which really is English), and Northern Ireland, an area of herdsmen whose capital was their livestock. Not so tied to land ownership as a measure of wealth, they ended up with quite possibly the least-valuable terrain of eastern North America, the Appalachians. They did not get along with any of the other waves of settlers -- too organized, to repressive, or with a slave institution. They could live on less (which explains why Appalachia is still a poor area). Where they lived were practically no slaves -- and they were hostile to the Confederacy. They hated the planter class of the South, and their presence in eastern Tennessee and northern Georgia explains why the Union could gain ground in mountainous terrain usually unsuited to military maneuvers. (Tennessee voted on whether to secede or stay with the Union, and the vote was nearly 50-50 with planters in western Tennessee wishing to go with the Confederacy having the bare majority. Slaves were not asked). Western parts of Virginia did their own secession in 1863, the Backwoodsmen seceding from Virginia. Virginia and West Virginia have typically been very dissimilar in voting, Virginia being Democratic as a piece of the former Confederacy until 1948 with West Virginia being Republican until the coal miners got political power -- and more recently, as the coal miners lost their political power and Virginia became full of government employees and contractors, Virginia has become more Democratic than the American average (descendants of slaves have a role in that) while West Virginia has become very Republican.
So, you say, that is not the whole story. Sure. It neglects the outflow of French-Canadians into Maine and New Hampshire; the Dutch settlement of what is now Greater New York City and the Hudson Valley, the Spanish settlements in Texas, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Florida; and some later immigrant waves from Ireland, southern Europe (especially Italy but also Greece and Portugal); later waves of Germans, west Slavs, and Scandinavians; Asian groups; the more recent Hispanic influx; and above all the huge early Irish influx.
Let's start with the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam; it wasn't particularly Dutch, with the Dutch as the minority in the short time of its existence. New Amsterdam, northeastern New Jersey, and the Hudson Valley attracted a huge contingent of Huguenots, French and Belgian Calvinists whose religion was identical to the Dutch Reformed Church except for having its services in French. The Dutch assimilated them. Also, New Amsterdam had large numbers of Calvinist Germans from a time in which the distinction between Germany and Holland was not so clear as it is today. The Dutch attracted Scandinavian sailors who decided to stay. As is so today there even were people with Spanish surnames -- but those were not Puerto Ricans and Dominicans as one might expect today. They were Jews, Sephardic Jews who had fled the Inquisition and its consequences. The Dutch also had African slaves to do the dirtiest work available. New York City has been a multi-ethnic community from when it was New Amsterdam.
The small and short-lived Swedish settlement in Delaware did not last long, The Dutch took it over, and turned it over to the British with New Netherland in return for Suriname and what are now the Dutch Antilles. The Dutch still have the Dutch Antilles, and it too is a multi-ethnic community not particularly Dutch.
The Irish? That is the biggest early wave of immigration in the time after American independence. They are not to be confused with the Protestant Scots-Irish who largely settled (?) the Backwoods of Appalachia and the Ozarks . Their Catholic religion set them apart from all prior waves of settlement. But they took over institutions as people from New England, New York, New Jersey, and southeastern Pennsylvania moved west. Irish Catholics took over political and cultural institutions as descendants of Puritans and Quakesr abandoned their original places of settlement for richer lands in the Midwest. Irish Catholics also settled in the Midwest. German Catholics, and largely-Catholic Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Lithuanians, Italians, and Portuguese did much the same around 1900. More recently, Puerto Ricans and Dominicans have done much the same more recently.
Southern Louisiana? The French influence remains. Cajun (white) and Creole (black) populations are very good at assimilating those who come into their communities. These are distinct communities in America.
Florida? Florida has never fit well into any region of America, not being an attractive area for people from the rest of America until the invention of air conditioning until about the middle of the 20th century.
Now for the Wild West. Some parts, like Nebraska and Utah, never were wild. Have you ever noticed how few violent Westerns are set in Nebraska? It was settled by people from Puritan and Quaker stock, so it never was the sort of place in which one could be thoroughly wild. Utah was settled by Mormons, whose origins are largely in New England. A Wild West outlaw would find Utah a fatal mistake, as a noose awaited him. Scandinavians fit the English pattern in the parts of the Midwest west of Lake Michigan.
The wildness of the Wild West was heavily associate with the Backwoods types who saw quick bucks from either mining (gold and silver were much more lucrative than coal if one was lucky) or cattle-driving. These were the ones most likely to get their pay, get drunk, and get violent. They were also likely to stir up trouble with First Peoples and the descendants of Spanish settlers or settled and assimilated First Peoples. The West could be as easily Little House on the Prairie as Gunsmoke, with Bonanza as an intermediate.
As for the Hispanic world -- it has been part of America since before there was a United States of America. The oldest European settlement in the New World is Saint Augustine, Florida. Cities on or near the California coastline from Santa Rosa to San Diego show their Spanish heritage from their names as cities on El Camino Real or the Cabrillo Highway, both mission trails. Tucson, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, El Paso, San Antonio, Laredo, Corpus Christi, and Galveston (Galvez' Town) were also all Spanish settlements. Whether it assimilates 'Anglo ways' or assimilates Anglos is a huge ambiguity. When the break-away republic of Texas was in its earliest stages, there was some question of whether it would be the Republic of Texas or la Republica de Tejas.
![[Image: albion_gene.jpg]](http://slatestarcodex.com/blog_images/albion_gene.jpg)
We may be going back to a split of four distinct regional waves of American settlement in pre-Revolutionary times as shown in David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed. The largely middle-class settlers of early New England were largely from southeastern England, and they brought with them the Congregational (Puritan) churches. Settling a part of the New World that had few of the things that get-rich-quick settlers wanted (the climate was too harsh for subtropical crops that could be grown cheaply and sold profitably in Europe, no precious metals, and no practically First Peoples to exploit, they created a largely-self-sufficient world in which commerce as capitalist enterprise would be necessary. The rocky soils made expansive agriculture impossible. Institutions developed under those conditions, and violence was low. The criminal justice system was rigid, and people were expected to take their disputes to courts of laws instead of settling them in duels or drunken brawls. Slavery? Attempts failed because the Africans died in the harsh winters.
Southeastern Pennsylvania and most of New Jersey were different in being settled by more idealistic Quakers who were more working-class in origin from the English Midlands and Wales and by German and Swiss Pietists (like Mennonites) who had much the same religious values. They had less trust in outward shows of success, and thus little use for ornamentation that showed worldly gain, than the Quakers and Pietists. They put little value in front yards. They were more humanitarian in their ideals than other settlers. Although southeastern Pennsylvania is almost as warm as slave-holding northern Virginia, the Quakers and Pietists thought slavery an abomination because it implied people living slothfully upon the toil of others.
The Tidewater region (southeastern Virginia, the Carolinas, and much of Maryland) attracted Cavaliers, heavily second-and-third sons of aristocrats of the English Southwest, who came to the American Southeast to set up their own aristocratic domain. All that was lacking was the peasantry -- and nobody was going to take the dangerous overseas journey to a disease-ridden, rough colony when they could remain similarly oppressed on some aristocratic plantation in southwestern England. The Cavaliers brought over indentured servants who were highly likely to die before their indentures expired and could get a piece of land on which to be somewhat like an aristocrat. The First Peoples would never fit the highly-subordinate roles of near-slaves, and were likely to escape and bring back uninvited guests (their tribes who would put an end to such subjection in the most forcible way possible). The Cavaliers found a solution: slavery. That made all the difference in the world.
The fourth wave of Backwoodsmen was people from the rough-and-tumble world of the people of the wild English North, southern Scotland (which really is English), and Northern Ireland, an area of herdsmen whose capital was their livestock. Not so tied to land ownership as a measure of wealth, they ended up with quite possibly the least-valuable terrain of eastern North America, the Appalachians. They did not get along with any of the other waves of settlers -- too organized, to repressive, or with a slave institution. They could live on less (which explains why Appalachia is still a poor area). Where they lived were practically no slaves -- and they were hostile to the Confederacy. They hated the planter class of the South, and their presence in eastern Tennessee and northern Georgia explains why the Union could gain ground in mountainous terrain usually unsuited to military maneuvers. (Tennessee voted on whether to secede or stay with the Union, and the vote was nearly 50-50 with planters in western Tennessee wishing to go with the Confederacy having the bare majority. Slaves were not asked). Western parts of Virginia did their own secession in 1863, the Backwoodsmen seceding from Virginia. Virginia and West Virginia have typically been very dissimilar in voting, Virginia being Democratic as a piece of the former Confederacy until 1948 with West Virginia being Republican until the coal miners got political power -- and more recently, as the coal miners lost their political power and Virginia became full of government employees and contractors, Virginia has become more Democratic than the American average (descendants of slaves have a role in that) while West Virginia has become very Republican.
So, you say, that is not the whole story. Sure. It neglects the outflow of French-Canadians into Maine and New Hampshire; the Dutch settlement of what is now Greater New York City and the Hudson Valley, the Spanish settlements in Texas, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Florida; and some later immigrant waves from Ireland, southern Europe (especially Italy but also Greece and Portugal); later waves of Germans, west Slavs, and Scandinavians; Asian groups; the more recent Hispanic influx; and above all the huge early Irish influx.
Let's start with the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam; it wasn't particularly Dutch, with the Dutch as the minority in the short time of its existence. New Amsterdam, northeastern New Jersey, and the Hudson Valley attracted a huge contingent of Huguenots, French and Belgian Calvinists whose religion was identical to the Dutch Reformed Church except for having its services in French. The Dutch assimilated them. Also, New Amsterdam had large numbers of Calvinist Germans from a time in which the distinction between Germany and Holland was not so clear as it is today. The Dutch attracted Scandinavian sailors who decided to stay. As is so today there even were people with Spanish surnames -- but those were not Puerto Ricans and Dominicans as one might expect today. They were Jews, Sephardic Jews who had fled the Inquisition and its consequences. The Dutch also had African slaves to do the dirtiest work available. New York City has been a multi-ethnic community from when it was New Amsterdam.
The small and short-lived Swedish settlement in Delaware did not last long, The Dutch took it over, and turned it over to the British with New Netherland in return for Suriname and what are now the Dutch Antilles. The Dutch still have the Dutch Antilles, and it too is a multi-ethnic community not particularly Dutch.
The Irish? That is the biggest early wave of immigration in the time after American independence. They are not to be confused with the Protestant Scots-Irish who largely settled (?) the Backwoods of Appalachia and the Ozarks . Their Catholic religion set them apart from all prior waves of settlement. But they took over institutions as people from New England, New York, New Jersey, and southeastern Pennsylvania moved west. Irish Catholics took over political and cultural institutions as descendants of Puritans and Quakesr abandoned their original places of settlement for richer lands in the Midwest. Irish Catholics also settled in the Midwest. German Catholics, and largely-Catholic Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Lithuanians, Italians, and Portuguese did much the same around 1900. More recently, Puerto Ricans and Dominicans have done much the same more recently.
Southern Louisiana? The French influence remains. Cajun (white) and Creole (black) populations are very good at assimilating those who come into their communities. These are distinct communities in America.
Florida? Florida has never fit well into any region of America, not being an attractive area for people from the rest of America until the invention of air conditioning until about the middle of the 20th century.
Now for the Wild West. Some parts, like Nebraska and Utah, never were wild. Have you ever noticed how few violent Westerns are set in Nebraska? It was settled by people from Puritan and Quaker stock, so it never was the sort of place in which one could be thoroughly wild. Utah was settled by Mormons, whose origins are largely in New England. A Wild West outlaw would find Utah a fatal mistake, as a noose awaited him. Scandinavians fit the English pattern in the parts of the Midwest west of Lake Michigan.
The wildness of the Wild West was heavily associate with the Backwoods types who saw quick bucks from either mining (gold and silver were much more lucrative than coal if one was lucky) or cattle-driving. These were the ones most likely to get their pay, get drunk, and get violent. They were also likely to stir up trouble with First Peoples and the descendants of Spanish settlers or settled and assimilated First Peoples. The West could be as easily Little House on the Prairie as Gunsmoke, with Bonanza as an intermediate.
As for the Hispanic world -- it has been part of America since before there was a United States of America. The oldest European settlement in the New World is Saint Augustine, Florida. Cities on or near the California coastline from Santa Rosa to San Diego show their Spanish heritage from their names as cities on El Camino Real or the Cabrillo Highway, both mission trails. Tucson, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, El Paso, San Antonio, Laredo, Corpus Christi, and Galveston (Galvez' Town) were also all Spanish settlements. Whether it assimilates 'Anglo ways' or assimilates Anglos is a huge ambiguity. When the break-away republic of Texas was in its earliest stages, there was some question of whether it would be the Republic of Texas or la Republica de Tejas.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.