Estimating the proportion of Puritan genes in America's white population

Ellsworth Huntington estimated about 5500 people bearing the surname Huntington were alive in America circa 1930.

Census Bureau estimates put the number of whites bearing the surname Huntington in 2000 at 6325.

So the absolute frequency of New England genes might have increased something like 6325/5500 = 1.15 times in a 65 year period in which the American "non-Hispanic white" population overall increased 188 128 296 / 110 286 740 = 1.7 times. While there is uncertainty in these numbers, there's little doubt the relative representation of New England genes amongst American "whites" has fallen over the past century.

As for what the actual proportion of Puritan genes might be, we can make a crude estimate as follows.

There were 992 421 whites in New England in 1790, perhaps 7/8 of whom were of Puritan stock.

There were 687 Huntingtons in the US in 1790, about 85% of them in New England.

6325 / 687 = 9.2

9.2 * 992 421 = 9 130 273

Adding say 20% to account for people of New England stock outside of New England in 1790 brings us to 10 956 328.

10 956 328 / 188 128 296 = 5.8% (of overall US white ancestry)

As of 1930, just over 1/4 of Huntingtons in Ellsworth Huntington's tabulations were located on the "East Coast", so the fraction in New England proper will have been well under 1/4 even at that date. But if, to find an upper limit, we assume 1/4 of New England genes remain in New England today, we're left with the equivalent of 10 956 328 / 4 = 2 739 082 individuals. That's against a total New England "non-Hispanic white" population of 11 686 617 in 2000.

2 739 082 / 11 686 617 = 23.4% (upper limit for New England) [the correct estimate is about half this number; see update below]

And, again, that's an overestimate of the proportion of New England genes in New England's white population today. [see update for more accurate estimate], but it's pretty clear "Yankees" are not the dominant force in voting in slates of Irish Catholic Democrats.

Update: Corrected math error and checked a couple more names.

Coolidge - 2663.892 / 225 = 11

Conant - 4671.9 / 551 = 8.48

Huntington + Coolidge + Conant - 13661 / 1463 = 9.34

More names can be added, but these seem similar enough.

Update 2: It appears something like 613 / 4,571 = 13.4% of Huntingtons were living in New England at the time of the 1940 Census.

So with better numbers the estimate for the average degree of New England ancestry of today's white New England residents becomes 12.6%.

Dutch ancestry - two NYT articles

The Van Dusens of New Amsterdam:

As with the Old Testament patriarch who gave birth to a nation, it all began with Abraham, whose forebears were from the town of Duersen in northern Brabant. Known in official documents as “Abraham the miller,” or “Abraham Pieterszen,” as in son of Peter, he landed on the island of “Manatus” some time before February 1627. Nearly 400 years later, he has more than 200,000 descendants over 15 generations scattered across the Americas, according to several genealogical experts who have built on intensive studies of the family over the centuries. In the 1880 census, there were 3,000 heads of household with the name Van Dusen — or Van Deusen, Van Deursen, Van Duzer and other common variants — all, the experts say, traceable back to Abraham the miller.

Theirs is among a small cohort of large, long-running Dutch families — including under-the-radar Rapeljes, with more than a million descendants, and the more prominent Kips and Rikers, with their names on neighborhoods and institutions — whose well-documented histories provide a compelling window into the development of what would become New York and, later, the United States.

Two of Abraham’s progeny — Martin Van Buren, a great-great-great-grandson; and Franklin Delano Roosevelt (add four more greats) — served as presidents of the United States. A third, Eliza Kortright (Generation 7), married one, James Monroe. Egbert Benson (Generation 6) was the first attorney general of postcolonial New York. The Rev. Dr. Henry Pitney Van Dusen, a theologian (Generation 10), made the cover of Time magazine in 1954.

There were family members on both sides of the early border wars between New York and Massachusetts, the War of Independence and the Civil War. At the Battle of Gettysburg, Pvt. William Jackson Raburn of Indiana’s “Fighting 300” died of a gunshot wound on July 2, 1863; a day later, Matthew Henry Van Dusen — Raburn’s fourth cousin twice removed (by marriage) — a “reb” with the fabled Hood’s Texas Brigade, was sidelined with a head injury.

Cornelis Kortright (Generation 5) owned slaves accused of participating in a “Negro plot” in 1741. Jan Van Deusen Jr., Kortright’s second cousin, saved New York’s historical records when the British burned the state’s first capital to the ground in 1777. [. . .]

Phoebe shares her father’s fascination with the family, particularly since she read some of the excerpts from her great-great-great-great-grandfather’s Civil War diary. “It kind of amazed me that I knew someone who was part of what I was studying in school in textbooks,” she said. “A lot of my friends’ parents just came here and don’t speak English yet. And some came here two generations ago. The one who has been here the longest came from Scotland, and that’s only a hundred years.”

Jets’ Tebow Can Trace His Lineage to New Jersey:

Tim Tebow arrives in New Jersey, where the Jets practice and play, as the world’s most famous backup quarterback. It is a homecoming, of sorts, centuries in the making, because Tebow appears to be the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson of a man from Hackensack.

MetLife Stadium, home of the Jets and the Giants in East Rutherford, is about 10 miles from where an immigrant, Andries Tebow (spelled variously as Thybaut, Tibout, TeBow and other derivations), settled down after landing from Europe in the late 1600s. One of his children was Pieter, born in Hackensack and baptized there in 1696, records show.

More than 300 years and 10 generations later, Tim Tebow brings the family name full circle, according to the amateur genealogist — and Tebow’s fourth cousin, once removed — Dean Enderlin. [. . .]

It is unclear how much Tebow knows about his genealogy. While his own recent background is well chronicled — born to Christian missionaries in the Philippines, raised in Florida, now a preacher in a championship quarterback’s body — little has been examined about his deeper roots.

But there is no doubt that early generations of Tebows settled in what is now Bergen County, and Tim Tebow appears to be the latest link in a long chain of North Jersey arrivals. [. . .]

Enderlin said that, like many Tebows in the country, he and Tim Tebow can be traced to Andries Tebow, who sailed to the New World out of Bruges, Belgium. Enderlin is unsure where Andries lived — either Belgium or Holland — but he believes his family was Walloon, a French-speaking minority rooted in southern Belgium.

“Belgium was governed by the Catholic rulers of Spain and persecuted Protestants, forcing many to flee,” Myra Vanderpool Gormley wrote in an article for Genealogy Magazine titled, “Belgian Migrations: Walloons Arrived Early in America.”

“Many went to the northern parts of the Netherlands,” she wrote. “It was from their exile in Holland that they emigrated again.”

Dutch / English / Old American ancestry

Greg Cochran writes:

When responding to the Census, more than five million Americans claim to be of Dutch descent. And they mostly are, at least a little. Now you might wonder how they compare with the Dutch back in the Netherlands: you might wonder about the relative academic or economic success of these two groups, which presumably have a common ancestry. But you would be wrong to do so. You would be comparing apples and House of Orangemen.

There were four or five different Dutch waves of settlement in this country. The first is pretty well-known, the Dutch colony in New York. Of course, it was only about half Dutch in origin: the rest were Walloons and French Huguenots. Lots of people have some ancestry from that group, including people I know. Why, if there was any justice, Henry Harpending would own a fine farm on Manhattan Island right now.

Of course, Henry isn’t all that Dutch. His surname is. He comes from an area of New York State that really did have some Dutch settlement. The thing is, white Protestants in this country have been intermarrying rather freely for several hundred years: it is rare to find someone in that category whose ancestors all come from one ethnicity. I would be surprised if Henry is 1/8th Dutch. In much the same way, my patrilineal lineage is Ulster Scot (who fears mention the battle of the Boyne!?) but the rest includes English, Welsh, Scottish, Green Irish, and a component that, I suspect, only became Dutch in 1918, and was Bavarian before that. We’re talking about ye olde Americans, not Ellis Island types. Not that they haven’t mixed as well, but less so… [. . .]

Most of the people who self-identify as Dutch-Americans are mostly something else. Why? Sometimes a family tradition, or a surname, but more than anything else, fashion.

Fashions change. For example, the fraction of Americans who report English ancestry has dropped drastically since 1980 – so much that so that you would have to wonder about secret death camps if you took it seriously. But it’s fashion. I looked at the census numbers for my home county, and then looked at the phone book: Census result was 20% English ancestry, real number was more like 80%. Of course this means that people in the US claiming a particular ethnicity can not only have limited ancestry from that group, but be oddly unrepresentative as well.

Henry Harpending confirms:

I would probably put “Dutch” on a census form if an answer were required. I am either 1/32 or 1/64 Dutch, and worse the supposed Dutch ancestor was a Huguenot or something like that, so I am likely really 0% Dutch. No matter…….

I've commented on this phenomenon before (e.g.), but a periodic reminder is useful. I don't see a problem with someone identifying with his patrilineal national origin for census purposes while remaining aware of his overall ancestry. What I find irritating is the eagerness of some with American ancestry to identify as "Scotch-Irish" after reading a review of Albion's Seed, or "Celtic" in the name of Celtic Southronism, or "German" because they had a German great-grandfather, and then declare themselves at war with or at least safely distinct from evil/culpable "WASPs" / "Anglo-Saxons" (which appellations in reality describe the core of the breeding population from which the newly self-identified Borderer/Celt/German sprung).

DNA USA: A Genetic Biography of America

Apparently not due out for another year, but here's what Bryan Sykes has been working on:

The best-selling author of The Seven Daughters of Eve now turns his sights on the United States, one of the most genetically variegated countries in the world. From the blue-blooded pockets of old-WASP New England to the vast tribal lands of the Navajo, Bryan Sykes takes us on a historical genetic tour, interviewing genealogists, geneticists, anthropologists, and everyday Americans with compelling ancestral stories. His findings suggest: Of Americans whose ancestors came as slaves, virtually all have some European DNA. Racial intermixing appears least common among descendants of early New England colonists. There is clear evidence of Jewish genes among descendants of southwestern Spanish Catholics. Among white Americans, evidence of African DNA is most common in the South. European genes appeared among Native Americans as early as ten thousand years ago. An unprecedented look into America's genetic mosaic and an impressive contribution to how we perceive race, this is a fascinating book about what it means to be American.

Also of possible interest: Viking DNA: The Wirral and West Lancashire Project (Stephen Harding, Mark Jobling, Turi King); Surnames, DNA, and Family History (George Redmonds, Turi King, David Hey).

Ezra Pound: racial preservationist

From one of his World War 2 radio speeches:

I am not arguing, I am just telling you. One of these days you will have to start thinking about the problem of race, BREED, preservation.

I do NOT like to think of my race as going toward total extinction, NOR into absolute bondage.

The Cincinnati etc. erred from snobbery. They did not in George Washington’s time organize on racial basis. No one thought of it, no one could have then thought of it. There WAS a racially homogeneous population in the newly freed colonies. Certain privileges were dear to the privileged. Snobbism is NOT conservative. Fashion is not conservative. La Mode, etc. is a ramp.

[#51 (July 2, 1942) U.S.(B65) DISBURSEMENT OF WISDOM]

Incidentally, Ezra Pound is another person with more New England ancestry than George Gilder. (Four of Pound's great-grandparents were born in Massachusetts; one was born in New Hampshire; one was born in New York, with ancestry entirely tracing back to Connecticut; one was a Quaker from New Jersey; and one was from Ireland.) Update: More from Pound below.

Hrdlicka: A new Uncle Sam is in the making (1927)

Anthropologist Ales Hrdlicka on the "Uncle Sam" type:

We do not know who created the effigy of "Uncle Sam." The name itself, as is well known, dates from 1812 or 1813, and is assumed to have been simply a play on the letters "U. S." It was apparently first applied to a well-known Government servant. But the graphic representation of the "Uncle Sam" type appears later. It is somewhat provincial. It was never quite adopted by the Farther South, and it is not quite at home in the West. Its essential characteristics are a spare but sinewy frame, good but not very tall stature and a thin, shrewd but kind face, with eyes full of humor. The whole picture embodies picturesque conservatism, shrewd politics and, above all, unbounded patriotism.

Such a physical type belongs primarily to the Yankee territory. It does not agree with the prevailing types in the large cities of the country, in the North Central States, in parts of the South, in the pioneer West, Southwest and Northwest, nor with those in Alaska and our possessions. In all these regions it is the newer American type that is emerging.

Hrdlicka observes:

given time, aggregates of any groups and any number of groups of people, particularly if all belong to one and the same fundamental race will fuse and tend to develop a new resultant, new prevalent type, characteristic of that particular nationality. [. . .] America, too, may develop a prevailing type of its own.

Based on Hrdlicka's studies of "Old Americans":

it may be seen that the ideal "Uncle Sam" type was not far from the true one. A little taller stature, a bit less hooked nose, perhaps a trace shorter arms, and the rest fits nicely.

But this type over a large part of the country tends to be superseded by another, newer type. If the old American families could remain without further admixture for several more centuries, the type would undoubtedly be further crystallized and fixed; but there is not much hope that this may be accomplished. Instead of that, there is developing the newer American type, which has already been mentioned. [. . .]

The Neo-American type will be in all probability, on the average, tall, more sanguine and somewhat less spare than the old. It will remain an intermediary white type in pigmentation, head form and other aspects. It will show for a long time a wider range of individual and local variation in all respects. And it may well be expected to be a wholesome and effective type [. . .]

"Cousin William," then, will be tall, well nourished, with a good-sized, well-filled head, though more or less bald, and with an oval, also well-filled, intelligent but frank, jovial, "enjoy-and-let-enjoy," beardless face, and smiling, mixed-light pair of eyes, fond always of a good story, a thoroughly good sport, without hypocrisy or malice, and ready for anything big or ingenious or highly profitable or for politics, at any time. A fine, big shrewd but generous young or old boy, in general.

Czech immigrant Hrdlicka assures the reader:

The future of the older American stock need cause no concern. [. . .] None of these newcomers is physically so different from the older stock that the admixture with them could be regarded as of possible biological danger.

To close, here's the inflammatory opinion of Georges Vacher de Lapouge on the physical type of the Indo-Europeans:

As regards physical type, however, the image evoked by the name Aryan differs according to the author that one reads. For Mortillet, Topinard, or Drumont, the Aryan is an averred brachycephalic, resembling the chestnut peddler on our streets or the typical peasant of Piedmont, Auvergene, or Savoy. If the author is Ammon, Penka, or Wilser, the image is that of the typical globe-trotter from England or the "Uncle Sam" of the Yankees--lank-bodied, dolichocephalic, leptoprosopic, usually blond, adventurous, and aggressive. In my view, both these types were represented among the Aryans, but the dominant classes among them, the builders of the Aryan civilization, were of the type of "Uncle Sam," or, to use the terminology most suitable from the anthropological point of view, were of the race H. Europaeus.

Reference: Ales Hrdlicka. A NEW UNCLE SAM IS IN THE MAKING; Anthropology Finds Emerging From the Melting Pot "A Fine, Big, Shrewd but Generous Young Or Old Boy," Who Is Destined to Replace the Familiar Yankee as the Typical American A NEW UNCLE SAM IN THE MAKING. The New York Times. January 16, 1927, Sunday. Section: MAGAZINE, Page SM3, 3233 words.

Related posts:

• What Americans (used to) look like
  
• Hrdlicka on the "American type"
  
• Carleton Coon on the racial types of Americans
  
• Brues on American physical types
  
• Hrdlicka on Old New Englanders
  
• Two maps
  

Immigration to the United States, 1789–1930

NEHGS eNews describes one of Harvard's online collections:

While the collection stretches from the signing of the Constitution to the start of the Great Depression, the greatest focus is on the nineteenth century. The collection includes 1,800 books and pamphlets, 9,000 photographs, 200 maps, and 13,000 pages from manuscript and archival collections. [. . .] Themes include the Chinese Exclusionary Act, Scandinavian Immigration, and the Settlement House Movement. Both sides of immigration are illustrated with organizations such as the Children’s Aid Society, North Bennet Street School, and the Immigration Restriction League. [. . .] One of the books available online, for example, is America’s Race Heritage: An Account of the Diffusion of Ancestral Stocks in the United States During Three Centuries of National Expansion, and a Discussion of its Significance by Clinton Stoddard Burr, published in 1922. In discussing later immigration, Burr states:

“But from the year 1845 the crest of the immigration flood shows waves and troughs directly corresponding to economic or other variations in foreign countries, or to industrial conditions in the United States. The first great influx occurred in the decade from 1845 to 1854, when the potato famine in Ireland and the revolution in Germany brought many thousands to this country. The gold rush to California also attracted thousands, from England and other countries of Europe. Then followed a depression during the War of the Rebellion, recovery following only after the signing of the peace.” (p. 91)

Stoddard also imparts the view of many nativists of the time when he states:

“If we could recall the years, how many of us would wish the South to be populated in part with Negroes? Yet an even more rampant danger, from so-called white people of lowest quality, now threatens our native white stock; for we may segregate the Negro because of his remote racial type, but the qualities of low class Europeans will gradually and inevitably demoralize our body politic through introduction of a new heredity character and temperament among us.” (p. 168)

Stoddard was clearly a bigot, prejudiced against individuals of many ethnic backgrounds. However, an understanding of this point of view will allow you to greater understand your immigrant ancestors' experience in their new home.

Many of the books in the collection have probably also been digitized by (and might be more conveniently viewed at) Google Books or archive.org (as the Clinton Stoddard Burr book mentioned above has), but I would guess much of the material is not available elsewhere (e.g., the records of the Immigration Restriction League).

Skulls of Old New Yorkers

H. L. SHAPIRO
Old New Yorkers
A Series of Crania from the Nagel Burying Ground, New York City
AXEPIICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY, VOL. XIV, NO. 3
JULY-SEPTEMBER. 1930

Among the various elements which make up the heterogeneous population of the United States, there is one which may conveniently be called Old American. Its exact proportion in the present population is unknown, and naturally would vary with the arbitrary standards one might adopt for such a classification. Following, however, the precedent of Hrdlicka (1) , Old Americans are “those American whites who those Americans whose ancestors on each side of the family were born in the United States for at least two generationsin other words, all those whose parents as well as all four grandparents were born in this country. The third native generation of adults means roughly an ancestry on each side of the family of at least 80 to 150 years American.” On the basis of this classification HrdliEka has made in his “Old Americans’’ an important contribution to the study of the somatological characteristics of the oldest American white stock in the population of this country. Unfortunately, up to the present time there have existed no data on the actual ancestors of the population with which HrdliEka was dealing. Consequently, a study on the stability of this physical type was hardly possible. One might, for example, compare Old Americans with the inadequate data on living Englishmen, but that is hardly as satisfactory as a comparison with ancestral whites of the colonial period, for inevitably the question of selection comes up. What has been needed, then, is data on the physical type of the colonial immigrants to the United States.

In this paper I am presenting such data on the actual American ancestors of the old American stock. The principal problems dealt with are the characteristics of a local New York group, their relationship to Old World types, whether they represent a random or selected type, and, finally, if their descendants have preserved the same characters under the influence of the American environment. The answers to these questions are vital in both a practical and a theoretical sense, but they can only be regarded as tentative until vastly more material is available to confirm or alter the conclusions suggested by the material in this paper. [. . .]

Late in November, 1926, I became aware that during the course of some excavations for the 207th Street Yard of the Rapid Transit System of New York City an obliterated burial ground was discovered between 212th Street and 213th Street, near the Harlem River. This district is in the northernmost part of Manhattan and within the present city limits of New York. Upon investigation by the Board of Transportation, it was learned that this site was the former Nagel, or Nagle, Cemetery, [. . .]

The origin of the Nagel cemetery was apparently as a family burial ground for the Nagels and the Dyckmans, who were settled in the neighborhood in the second half of the seventeenth century. [. . .]

The national origin of those buried in the Nagel cemetery is mainly Dutch and English. The principal landholders who inhabited the neighborhood of the Nagel cemetery were, in the late seventeenth century, the Dyckmans, the Nagels, and the Kortrights. Jan Dyckman and Jan Nagel, the original immigrants, were from Westphalia. Kortright was Dutch. Another important neighboring family was the Vermilyeas (Vermilye, Vermilya). The first Vermeille was a French Huguenot, who, after residing in Holland, emigrated to America. By 1800, when the headstones were generally inscribed in this cemetery, the Kortrights were no longer residents of the district. Many of the Nagels had moved to Westchester as a result of the Revolution, but William Nagel, the surviving brother of a large family, continued to live here until after 1800. Of these original families, only the Dyckmans and the Vermilyeas are marked by inscribed headstones. Nevertheless, we know from town records that this district of upper Manhattan was occupied principally by Dutch families in the early days. Intermarriage was the rule, so that the few Huguenots were soon absorbed in the dominant Dutch strains. Genealogical records also indicate that the Dyckmans and Nagels very early married into Dutch families. After Manhattan was taken over by the English in 1674, very few new Dutch settlers migrated to New York. During the eighteenth century the English immigration attained considerable proportions, coming in part from the New England colonies and from the home country. Just when the displacement of the Dutch in upper Manhattan by newer English settlers took place is difficult to estimate. Mr. Bolton is of the opinion that by the second half of the eighteenth century upper Manhattan was already largely English or mixed Dutch-English, for many of the original families were marrying the newer stocks. At any rate, when our information becomes definite, after 1800, the names recorded on headstones are predominantly English.

[. . .] the series, represented in this paper, are in all probability largely of English origin, with some Dutch admixture, and dating from the eighteenth century. [. . .]

In spite of what we might reasonably expect in a former Dutch colony, the physical type of the New Yorker in the eighteenth century was similar in most respects to that of the seventeenth century Londoner and the Lowland Scot. In relation to both these types, the Nagel series appears to represent a group from the same fundamental population, with the discrepancies one would expect in a small sampling. The one notable exception to this broad but tentative generalization is the marked difference in cranial height between the Nagel and London crania. This map be accounted for by regarding the Londoners as variants of the generalized English type in the direction of low-vaulted crania. The other alternative is that in New York the presence of a Dutch strain has made for a cranium much higher than is to be found in the London cousins of the New Yorkers of the eighteenth century. This latter hypothesis is unnecessary, in view of the presence of the same degree of head height in other British series.

[. . .] by estimating cephalic means from the cranial averages of the Nagel series, a cursory comparison with living Old Americans was possible. Recognizing the error inherent in such a procedure, it is interesting to note that, even after a century, apparently the Old Americans have remained similar to their colonial ancestors of New York.

Height of Northern Europeans and Italians in the U.S.

HOWARD V. MEREDITH
Stature of Massachusetts children of North European and Italian ancestry.
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTRROPOLOGY, VOL. XXIV, NO. 3
JANUARY-MARCH, 1939

[. . .] The subjects were 237 males and 190 females in attendance at the public schools of Beverly and Revere (two small cities in the vicinity of Boston, Massachusetts) during the years 1923 to 1934. They represented two racial groups. One hundred and fifty-seven of the males and 124 of the females were of North European ancestry. The remaining eighty males and sixty-six females were of Italian stock.

Two methods had been used to determine the racial stock of the subjects. Initially the Growth Study staff had employed geographical and sociological criteria. Here, the main basis of classification had been the birth-place of the parents, though such items as the language spoken in the home and the family name had also been considered. North European subjects included ‘descendants from the Old American stock together with more recent arrivals from the British Isles, Germany, Scandinavia, and the Baltic States, as well as English speaking Canadians and Newfoundlanders.' Italian subjects, as determined by this approach, were children of parents born in Italy, children from Italian speaking homes, and children whose family names were Italian and whose general physical appearance did not contradict Italian descent.

It had been decided later to differentiate racial groups in a strictly anthropological manner. Criteria involving nationality, language, and culture had here been abandoned. Classification was made solely in terms of combinations for physical items such as skin pigmentation, facial features, eye and hair color, form of hair, and type of build. The disagreements for the two methods were found not to involve more than 4% of the Growth Study cases. [. . .]

1. The mean stature for males of North European descent exceeds that for males of Italian descent over the entire period from 7 to 17 years. In amount, the difference is 4.2 cm. at 7 years, 4.6 cm.. at 10 pears, 4.7 cm. at 13 years, and 4.5 cm. at 17 years. On the whole, during the decade of growth under study the North European males are taller than the Italian males by 4.6 cm., or 1.8 inches. [. . .]

Gebhart, in 1924, published stature means for children of Italian stock living in “a congested Italian district in New York City.” His study was made in connection with a ‘practical health program’ conducted at the Mulberry .Health Center. [. . .]

Stature means for children of North European stock in attendance at private schools in New York, Massachusetts, Illinois and California were published in 1931 by Gray and Ayres. The subjects of this particular racial grouping were all children of parents born in the United States. Two or three of the grandparents of each child were born in the United States, while the remaining one or two grandparents were born in Canada or in Northwest Europe (Scandinavia, Netherlands, British Isles, France or Germany). [. . .]

During the age interval common to the studies of Gebhart and of Gray and Ayres, the mean stature for males of North European descent in attendance at private schools exceeds that for Italian males from a congested urban district by 14.8 cm., or 5.8 inches. This amount of difference is striking. In the opinion of the writer, it constitutes a forceful challenge to intensive investigation of the question, What specific constellations of factors relating to racial descent and socioeconomic status are sufficiently potent to produce such wide divergence in the mean stature of children of school age living in the United States.

More on "Old Americans"

I came across a 1917 publication (full text freely available at Google Books) in which Hrdlicka outlines his rationale for studying "Old Americans" and some of his preliminary findings. More complete findings were published in 1925 in The Old Americans.

The Old White Americans
Ales ̆ Hrdlic̆ka.
Published: Washington DC : [s.n.], 1917.
Series: Proceedings of the International Congress of Americanists ; 19th, December, 1915.

Introduction

FROM early in the seventeenth century the Temperate Zone of North America has been receiving successive contingents of the white race who have settled on the available land and multiplied and spread, thus forming the American nation. These newcomers were derived from Europeans of various physical types, ranging from the prevalently tall, blond, blue-eyed dolichocephalic Northmen to the mostly dark-haired, brown-eyed, medium tall, and brachy- cephalic Celts; and according to all indications they were, as a lot, physically, and especially mentally, above the average of their parent groups, for both the pioneers, whose ideals were religious and political liberty, and who would brave the dangers of the long sea journey with the hard conditions of life in the New World, as well as those commonly classed as adventurers, can well be assumed to have been on the whole men with a surplus of mental power and physical energy.

The men, and the women who accompanied them and who were probably of similar good material, encountered in large measure new environments and lived a new life. They reared their families under these changed influences, and the children accommodated themselves completely to the new conditions—they became Americans. Then followed intermarriage, both within and without the various contingents that reached this land, and the original heterogeneity slowly gave place to a blend which constituted the body of the rising nation.

How successful this new conglomerate proved to be, morally, intellectually, in defense and otherwise, are matters of history. It is certain that there was no loss of the original endowments; and also that there resulted in the course of time a considerable approach to unification of all those characteristics of mentality and behavior which are most readily subject to adaptation. It may be safely said that so far as outward manifestations are concerned, the descendants of the Old Americans constitute today a fairly easily separable strain of white people, which is no longer English, Dutch, French, or Irish, but American.

In view of these interesting facts anthropology for a long time has been confronted with the question, Have there also taken place in the descendants of the Old Americans physical changes which produced, or tend to produce, a separate sub-type of the white people?

[. . .] Possibly even in some important respects the type has already passed its zenith, as would seem to be indicated by the lowering birth-rate among its latest representatives, a rate now hardly sufficient in many districts to keep up the numbers of the Old Americans. And how will the type, if it exists, be affected by the growing mixture with whites of recent immigration? Would it be well to try to keep it pure—have the Old Americans marry only among Old Americans—or is new blood desirable?

It is well known that such nationalities as the French, English, German, and others possess, notwithstanding their mixed and relatively recent origin, distinctive physiognomy and other physical features by which in a large majority of cases it is possible to segregate both men and women who belong to them, and the claim has often been made that much the same is true in relation to the Americans. Writers and illustrators have made frequent efforts to define this hypothetical American type, and have even arrived at certain crystalized conceptions, such as "Uncle Sam", the "American girl", and the "American young man", though inconsistently leaving out the remaining periods of life. The Southerner in particular, and the Yankee, as well as the Westerner, a're believed each to have distinctive characteristics by which in the majority of cases they can readily be identified; yet at the same time these "types" are supposed to differ from each other so that any one of wider experience can readily distinguish them. Writers who attempt to define the American physical type do so generally without entering into embarrassing particulars; and the artist either follows certain famous or admired individual types or creates abstract conceptions of what he would have as Americans. Suggestions have even been advanced by some, who might have been expected to know better, that the American type is approaching that of the American Indian, the idea being presumably that the American environment produced the Indian and that it would in due time shape other peoples here to the same mold. Finally, certain scientific reports on the physical changes of Jewish and Italian children in this country appeared to show that the type of the immigrant changed with remarkable rapidity.1 Were this true, the formation of a new, more homogeneous American type ought to be a question of but a few generations, and the type should be already well advanced toward maturity among the descendants of the oldest American families. Unfortunately, however, although under good direction, the examinations on which these results were based were made by college students and not by trained anthropologists; the grandparents and parents of the supposedly changing children were not examined, nor were the children themselves studied at different periods of development; and no data have been given on the important and often significant variations in the children of individual families; so that it is not certain whether the differences the Jewish and Italian children seemed to show from the general type of their nationality or group were not perhaps fortuitous, or hereditary, and thus of pre-American origin.

The above uncertainties can properly be met in but one way, and that by anthropological observations on normal living representatives of the oldest American families, carried on under favorable circumstances and with the greatest possible care and precision. Such a test the writer decided to apply, so far as it might be in his power; and with this view arrangements were made, in the fall of 1912, in the anthropological laboratory of the United States National Museum, for a series of investigations which should extend to at least 300 healthy adult descendants from old American families. Since that time, save for interruptions due to other demands on the writer's time, the work has been progressing slowly. The number of subjects stated, 150 men and 150 women, is regarded by the writer as the smallest number which in a fairly uniform group would cover the more important individual variations in the group and thus give a reasonably clear notion of the type. To make certain that only those would be included in the series whose families have long been subject to the effects of the American environment, it was decided to examine only those who on both sides were American for at least three generations; in other words, those whose parents and all grandparents were born in this country. As to locality, Washington was recognized as the most suitable for the study, for among those settled here as well as among visitors there are Americans from all parts of the country. The measurements and tests, finally, were to be sufficiently thorough to show clearly the physical type of those examined, but involve only a minimum of inconvenience to the subject and a minimum of exposure of the body. To avoid including those not fully developed and the decrepit, the age limits were set at from 24 to 60 years; otherwise there was no selection. [. . .]

As a total result of the efforts made there have been examined to date 140 men and 135 women, including representatives of some of the very oldest and best American families. The conditions of the examination have been ideal: a well-lighted laboratory, the best of instruments tested by standards, no haste, and every subject dealt with with all due care by the writer himself; the possibilities of error, therefore, it is safe to say, have been reduced to the minimum, and the data obtained may claim more than ordinary confidence. They are presented here in preliminary form, yet even thus they are of considerable interest.

The present report will deal, for the sake of easier presentation of the results, with the first 100 men and 100 women who were measured. The data will be given in brief form only, detailed discussion being reserved until the work shall have been completed. The results will doubtless be modified somewhat by the additional number of subjects to be examined, yet on the whole the changes can not be expected to be very material and the data as here presented may already be regarded as fairly definite. [. . .]

Besides the individual variations, certain marked differences will be seen to appear in both the physical and the physiological status between the two sexes. On the whole, it may be said that the male representatives of the Old Americans are excellent specimens of humanity, and there are also physically splendid individual women; but a certain proportion of the latter sex shows a physical development, especially in the upper part of the body, which leaves more or less to be desired. It seems, however, that this is largely a result of long-lasting defects in the proper rearing of female children from the physical standpoint rather than a matter of heredity, and that conditions in this respect are much improved in the present generation of young women. [. . .]

The head among the Old Americans is in many cases remarkable for its good development. This is particularly noticeable in the males, as will be seen from the following tables, especially from that showing the cephalic module, or mean diameter of the head. It will be interesting to note in this connection that among twelve groups of male immigrants from Europe measured within the last two years at Ellis Island under the writer's direction, and comprising together more than 500 individuals, not one group equals in this respect the Americans, the closest approach being noted in the Irish, English, Poles, and North Italians. [. . .]

Conclusions

The study of the actual representatives of the oldest American families has proved throughout one of absorbing interest. The results, however, may prove quite sober and disappointing to those inclined to expect sensational revelations. Nevertheless, they will be valuable both to science and in application. They show quite clearly that no definite, already formed, strictly American type or
sub-type of the whites as yet exists; and as intermarriages of the Old Americans with more recent elements in this country are rapidly becoming more numerous there seems no chance for the formation of something like a separate American type of population, at least within many centuries.

The examinations have shown in many instances a remarkable persistence of heredity characters and their strong individuality, as we may express it, with slow, irregular, unwilling yielding to a complete and permanent fusion with other characters of the same class.

Yet there are indications that some progress has been made toward such a fusion, and that if the Old American families could be kept in full vitality and free from intermixture with newer elements for several more centuries, there would eventually come into existence in this country a real separate sub-type of white people, which would possess numerous if not great distinctive characteristics from the European whites and would be strictly American.

Intermarriage and Social Distance

[Intermarriage and Social Distance Among U.S. Immigrants at the Turn of the Century
Author(s): Deanna L. Pagnini and S. Philip Morgan
Source: The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 96, No. 2 (Sep., 1990), pp. 405-432 Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2781107]

The pattern of assortative mating among European immigrants and native whites is examined by ethnicity and generation using a na­tional sample drawn from the 1910 census manuscripts and a sam­ple of marriages registered in New York City between 1908 and 1912. The pattern of assortative mating is virtually identical in the two data sets. Endogamy was strong for all groups examined, but was castelike for the "new" ethnics from eastern and southern Europe. Marriages between "old" and "new" ethnics were espe­cially rare. The pattern of ethnic intermarriage was nearly identical for men and women. [. . .] While the existence of ethnic and generational endogamy at the turn of the century is not surprising, its strength has not previously been estimated with appropriate statistical tech­niques. Further, these techniques reveal more detailed features of the pattern of assortative mating that are not well known and pro-vide important facts for theories of immigrant assimilation and as­sortative mating.

[. . .] This im­migrant flow included a number of what historians termed "new" immi­grants. These included immigrants from southern and eastern Europe: the Italians, Russians, Poles, and Jews, who had not emigrated in large numbers before the 1880s. These groups were very different from the "old" British, Irish, Scandinavian, and German immigrants in appear­ance, customs, and demographic characteristics (Lieberson 1980; Higham 1963; Abrams 1973; Kraut 1982). [. . .] The groups most inclined to congregate in the cities were the Jews, Irish, Poles, and Italians. [. . .]

While physical distance was a factor affecting mate selection, social distance was important also. The ability to speak English, which allowed for interaction with those of other ethnic groups and with natives, was an important aspect of social distance. The new immigrants were the least likely to speak English (table 2, col. 2), especially the Poles and Italians (see Cheney 1988).4

Further social distance arose from the xenophobia of the native whites. Native whites perceived the new immigrants as a threat to the old Ameri­can order and as a possible contamination of the white American race. While each immigrant group had its own stereotyped reputation, the new immigrants were always perceived as the worst. The new immigrants were seen as inferior in looks, morals, and intellect (see Hall 1915, pp. 69-70). According to a sociologist at the time, that the new immigrants "are morally below the races of Northern Europe is as certain as any social fact" (Ross 1915, p. 74). [. . .]

Xenophobia, coupled with the high birthrate of the new immigrants and the low fertility of the native whites, led to the fear that the American race was being diluted by "unworthy bloods." Many believed that "the peoples of the Mediterranean region were biologically different than those of northern and western Europe and that the differences sprang from an inferiority of blood and could be observed in certain social characteris­tics" (Handlin 1957, p. 77). Ross stated that "it is fair to say that the blood now injected into the veins of our people is sub-common" (1915, p. 73). Those concerned over the intermingling of blood clearly opposed inter-marriages. The fact that some immigrants were seen as providing good genetic stock while others were undesirable provided ideological support for a range of sanctions against intermarriage. Resistance to intermar­riage may have come from within the immigrant groups as well, as the older generation tried to maintain the traditional culture.

[. . .]

Net of the social distance parameter between old and new immigrants, an examination of residuals revealed several additional areas of special affinity. First, as mentioned previously, there was a much greater ten­dency for British and Irish immigrants to marry each other than other-wise implied by model 2 (such a match was over five times more likely than one with other old immigrant groups [. . .]

The next pattern of attraction crosses the new-old ethnic boundary: Germans were much more likely to marry Poles than any other new immigrant group. Furthermore, Germans were the only old immigrant group especially likely to marry Poles. If national data are used, German-Pole marriages were 5.5 times more likely than any other new-old immi­grant match. The greater ethnic detail in the NYC data allows us to say that disproportionate numbers of these German-Pole marriages are with Poles from Austria-Poland, not those from Russia-Poland.

The third pattern of attraction is between the central and eastern Euro­pean Jews. This is the strongest pattern of intermarriage by far. In the national data, eastern-central European Jewish intermarriages are close to 500 times more likely than any other Jewish intermarriage. In the NYC data the effect is roughly two times larger-Jews from central and eastern Europe were over 900 times more likely to marry among themselves than to marry other groups. Thus, while there was social distance between these two groups of Jews, marriages with other Jews were clearly more common than marriages with non-Jews. Attitudinal data presented by Bogardus (1928, table 4) from native-born Jews are consistent with the actual marital data we present. He demonstrated that Jews clearly pre­ferred to marry other Jews.

The final two zones of attraction also involve Jews but are different in two respects. First, they are only fitted to the NYC data; there were too few Jewish intermarriages in the national data to detect these patterns. Second, these are the only asymmetric effects fitted in either table. To explain, a Jewish husband (from central or eastern Europe) was less likely to marry an Italian or Polish woman than a woman from the old immi­grant stock (i.e., a British, Scandinavian, or German woman). Net of other effects, Jewish men were only about .3 times as likely to marry these non-Jewish new ethnics as those from the old ethnic groups. The result is that the old-new social distance effect is partly neutralized for Jewish men. Again, such preferences for old stock groups, following the prefer­ence for Jewish intermarriage, can be seen in Bogardus's (1928, table 4) attitudinal data. For "Americans," new immigrants, and especially Jews, were the least-desirable spouses. For Jews, the old immigrants were the first preference as intermarriage partners after other Jews. The NYC data suggest these differential social distances are canceling one another out. We are unable to explain why this effect is asymmetric, holding only for Jewish men. But perhaps successful Jewish men were able to marry "up" in status while Jewish women were less able to do so. The final effect operates in the opposite direction for eastern European Jewish women. They were three times more likely to marry Italian men than Polish men (or, net of other effects, men from old immigrant groups). Perhaps Jewish women, unable to marry "up" as Jewish men did, "settled" for Italian men who far outnumbered the available Italian women. Detailed tabula­tions (using the NYC data) not shown here reveal that these Jewish-Italian marriages most often involved men from southern Italy and Jew­ish women from Hungary and Russia. Both of these asymmetric effects operate regardless of spouses' generations.

[. . .] the greater endogamy for new (compared to old) immigrants that we document still persists, although endogamy is much less extreme for all white ethnics now. In the contemporary period, Lieberson and Waters (1988) partly attribute this greater endogamy of the new immigrants to less intermarriage in the past, giving these groups less highly mixed an­cestral categories. Our paper shows which groups intermarried at the turn of the century, yielding more mixed groups. An important difference in the historical and the contemporary pattern lies in the strength of the old-new distinction. Marriages across this old-new distinction were quite rare in 1910. Historians of the turn of the century, and writers at the time, described the discrimination, differences, and social distance between the old and new immigrant groups. In large measure, our analysis of data on assortative mating fits well these characterizations of intergroup rela­tions. This old-new distinction is much less visible now (see Alba and Golden 1986), a change that reflects the socioeconomic integration of these groups (see Neidert and Farley 1985; Lieberson and Waters 1988).

[. . .] Lieberson and Waters show that intermarriage rates between two groups are higher when the proportion of Catholics in the two groups is similar. This result implies that ethnic intermarriages are frequently religiously endogamous. We found this to be true at the turn of the century for Jews, and possibly for Poles and Italians. But we found no heightened tendency for Irish to marry Poles and Italians-a straightfor­ward expectation if religion played a dominant role in assortative mating. Other work (see Peach 1980a, 1981) has challenged the claim that there was a Catholic melting pot including Irish, Poles, and Italians. The ab­sence of any special affinity between these groups illustrates the over­whelming power of nonreligious factors reflected in the old versus new distinction. These factors included (1) high levels of residential and occu­pational segregation, (2) period of immigration and the selectivity operat­ing in different immigrant streams, which produced ethnic socioeconomic differentials, and (3) great social distance between groups supported by an ideology heavily laced with xenophobia.

"Old Americans" of the South

Old Americans of the south. Anthropometry of college women of southern birth and ancestry
HARLEY N. GOULD
American Journal of Physical Anthropology, VOL. XXI, NO. 1
JANUAEY-MARCH 1936

The anthropology of the ‘Old Americans’ is a subject which has captured the interest of laymen as well as scientists since the publication of Doctor Hrdlicka’s classic work under that title in 1925. More subsequent studies might and should have been made to record the characteristics of this people, before it loses its newly acquired identity. Whatever the characteristics of the Americans of the future, their actual genetic connection with the settlers of the United States probably will be very tenuous. [. . .]

Several years ago Doctor Hrdlicka suggested to the writer the desirability of an anthropometric study of people whose ancestry was not only ‘Old American’ but ‘Old Southern.’ The subjects readily available were women of Newcomb College of Tulane University, New Orleans, and mostly of rather local origin. Casual inquiry disclosed that about one in three of them had all southern-born ancestry to the grandparents, at least. During 3 years, 200 such ‘Old Southern’ women were measured and those measurements constitute the basis of this paper. [. . .]

The results of the study have been such as to strengthen one’s confidence in the conservatism of those body characters commonly regarded as non-adaptive. Southern ‘ Old American’ women do not seem to diverge, anthropometrically, from other women of similar pioneer stock, except in those few characters which may be interpreted as individual adaptations. [. . .]

It was possible to assemble a group of seventy-one whose ancestors practically all appeared to have come from the British Isles. As will be shown, these people have a physique of significantly larger average than the rest. The amount of French ancestry in the 200 subjects was less than would have been expected in Louisiana, and undoubtedly less than if the sample had been drawn from the convents or from the colleges in the interior of the state. Only three out of the 200 appeared to be of practically pure French origin.

A group of forty-six young women who had, collectively, about 41 per cent of French ancestry was isolated and will be discussed, although it may be said here that the effect of French admixture, other than a lowering of stature, is not clearly demonstrated. [. . .]

The British subgroup averages larger in almost all measurements
than the entire 200 of whom they are a part. The
French-mixed group, on the contrary, averages smaller in
almost all dimensions. [. . .]

It was a surprise not to find more differences in the pigmentation of hair and eyes in these two samples, particularly since many of the old Louisiana French immigrants appear to have been of the southern or Gascon type. There was a somewhat smaller percentage of light eyes among the French mixtures (17.4 per cent as contrasted with 25.4 per cent in the British), but the proportion of brown eyes was almost the same (36.6 per cent and 37 per cent, respectively, in the British and part French). There were more ‘mixed’ eyes in the French mixtures (45.6 per cent) than in the British (38 per cent). The hair color ran a little darker in the French mixtures, and there was more spread of distribution through light brown, medium brown and dark brown, while in the British there was more concentration in the medium brown class. There was only one decided blonde among the French mixtures but she, although a mixture of French and Spanish with only one north European great-grandparent (Irish), had extremely light yellow hair, eyebrows and eyelashes, and light gray eyes with only a mere trace of brown; combined with rather full lips and a large, convex, Spanish nose.

To summarize, the characteristics of these two groups, the ‘British’ and the partly French, are just about what one would expect, except, perhaps, as regards pigmentation. The British are the tallest and largest skeletally, but are not relatively heavier. [. . .]

GENERAL CONCLUSIONS

The outstanding result of this regional study of ‘Old American’ women is the evidence of close correspondence, in average physical measurements and morphological characters, with similar groups from other parts of the United States. There is very little suggestion of a development, through geographical isolation, of a ‘ southern type ’ of American woman. It is significant that the closest approximation of the different means is found where the location of points for measurement is most easily determined; while some of the wider divergences are in those dimensions wherein there might reasonably be expected more individual differences in the anthropometric technique of various observers; or in those which might be affected by environmental influences such as climate and physical activity. The group measured appears to have a more slender build, a slightly more dolicocephalic cranium, smaller lower face, flatter chest, and more slender hand, than the average ‘Old American’ woman of college age. There may possibly be a higher percentage of dark-eyed women among Old Americans of the Gulf Coast region than in other localities, judging from our sample, but there is no good evidence of any particular difference in hair color.


Stature in Old Virginians
ROBERT BENNETT BEAN
American Journal of Physical Anthropology, VOL. XV. NO. 3
APBIL-JUNE, 1931

This study was undertaken to assist in establishing standards for future comparison, at all ages and in both sexes, of a stock that has been in one environment for at least three generations. It is to supplement Hrdlicka’s studies on the Old Americans. Physical examinations and measurements have been made during the past twelve years on more than 3000 Old Virginians of both sexes between the ages of six and sixty years, whose families have been residents of Virginia for two generations or more, many since the earliest settlements. [. . .]

4. Conclusions

General. The Old Virginians and other Old Americans are the tallest great group of peoples in the world.

The Old Virginians of the mountain section of the state, the western part, including the Valley of Virginia and the Piedmont section, are taller than those from the Tidewater section on the east. This may be partly the result of environment, but is also partly the pioneer British, and especially the Scots, who make up the larger part of the population in the western portion of the state.

The planters of Albemarle county and other suburban residents are taller than the urban population. The Old Virginian students at the University of Virginia are taller than the drafted men or volunteers of the army in the World War, also Old Virginians. [. . .]

Throughout the world the peoples of the temperate zone are generally taller than those of the arctic or tropic zones and those of the interior are taller than those of the sea coast. [. . .]

Ethnicity and pain

I found this amusing:

Zborowski (1952) compared attitudes towards pain in three cultural groups from New York City by interviewing patients, doctors, nurses and other health professionals, as well as some healthy individuals from each of the cultural groups. The cultural groups were Italian-Americans, Jewish-Americans and Old-Americans.

Italians were preoccupied with the sensation of pain and complained a great deal while they were in pain with moaning and crying, but once the pain was treated they resumed their normal activiites.

On the other hand, Jewish patients were also very emotional when in pain and tended to exaggerate pain symptoms. However, they worried more about the effect of the pain on their health and the overall welfare of their families than about the pain itself. At times, they had difficulty resuming their normal activities because of a preoccupation with the underlying cause of their pain.

The Old-American patients were more detached in their response to pain and they were more concerned with not bothering anyone. [. . .]

Zborowski (1952) believed that attitudes towards pain are part of any culture's child-rearing practices. He found that both Jewish-American and Italian-American parents in his study were generally overprotective and overly concerned about their child's health and their children were frequently reminded to avoid fights, possible injuries and catching colds. Crying elicited considerable sympathy.

However, Old-American parents were less concerned and expected that the child would not run to the parent with a small problem. Children were taught to anticipate some pain while playing and they were expected not to show excessive distress.

[Pain. Jenny Strong, Anita M. Unruh, Anthony Wright, G. David Baxter, Patrick D. (FRW) Wall]

(Via Mangan.)

Some WWII aviation trivia

Real differences were found in national extraction and possibly in education. The principal extraction in all flyers was Old American, with the rest overwhelmingly Northwest European - British, Irish, Germanic, and Scandinavian, in that order. Four per cent were of Slavic and 1% of Mediterranean descent. Successful combat pilots were significantly more Old American in ancestry than cadets, an Old American being a person whose 4 grandparents were born in the United States. Twenty-two per cent of cadets and 60% of the successful combat pilots were Old American on both sides; on one parental side only, an additional 24% and 15%, respectively. This highly significant difference (p < .01) is hardly attributable to geographic provenience, since 10% more of the combat pilots than of the cadets were from the East coast, where recent immigrants are most numerous. Old Americans may have tended to become pilots rather than bombardiers or navigators. The greater metrical homogeneity of pilots as compared to the latter groups (tables 1 and 4) lends some support to this hypothesis; but even so, with twice as many pilots in the AAF as bombardiers and navigators combined, pilots should resemble cadets in national extraction more closely than they did. If Old Americans actually were more successful in military flying - still an assumption awaiting confirmation in larger samples - were they eliminated less often from training? Had they “sounder” personalities; or do the physical traits associated with flying success occur more often or more strongly among Old Americans? Any one of these possibilities might repay further study.

[Damon. Physique and success in military flying. Am J Phys Anthropol. 1955 Jun;13(2):217-52.]


A truly odd bit of data emanating from the war was the fact that aces (those with five or more air-to-air kills) tended to have blue or light-colored eyes (over tow thirds) [. . .]

[James F. Dunnigan and Albert A. Nofi. Dirty Little Secrets of World War II]

"WASP" decline: two papers

Kaufmann, Eric. "The Decline of the WASP?: Anglo-Protestant Ethnicity and the American Nation-State" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Marriott Wardman Park, Omni Shoreham, Washington Hilton, Washington, DC, Sep 01, 2005 . 2009-02-05 <http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p40195_index.html>

This paper argues that the United States possessed a dominant ethnic group or 'core ethnie' (Smith 1986; 1991) like most European and Asian nations. This ethnie was intimately linked to the nation's identity. This WASP (or Anglo-Protestant) ethnic group went into decline largely because it failed to continue processes of Anglo-conformity and immigration restriction which were integral to the maintenance of its hegemony. Reform originated largely within the WASP community among religious and secular liberals in the first half of the 20th c., which facilitated external challenges from subaltern groups.

Wright, Theodore. "The Identity and Changing Status of Former Elite Minorities: the Contrasting cases of North Indian Muslims and American WASPS" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Marriott Wardman Park, Omni Shoreham, Washington Hilton, Washington, DC, Sep 01, 2005 . 2009-02-05 <http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p40194_index.html>

My paper, unlike the others on this panel, approaches the subject of “core ethnic groups” comparatively. My research focus for forty-five years has been not on my own ascribed identity group, the so-called White Anglo Saxon Protestants (WASPs) of North America, but on the 12% of the post-independence population of India who are Muslims by religion, whom I have categorized as a “former elite minority”. (1) The comparison occurred to me at the time of the publication of Peter Schrag’s “Decline of the WASP” (2) and several other popular books with the same theme. It explained why I found attractive a group generally viewed unsympathetically by upwardly mobile academics as “oppressors” of minorities. Other examples of this type are the Manchus of China, the Tatars in Russia, former European colonists in Kenya and Algeria, the Afrikaners of South Africa since 1994, the Watutsi of Rwanda and the Arabs of Zanzibar; Fijians and Maoris in Oceania, in Latin America possibly one could count the Spanish-descended Creoles after the Mestizos seized power from them; in North America the French-Canadians; and in Europe the Anglo-Irish and the various German, Hungarian and Turkish communities which were left outside of their former homelands by defeat and boundary changes after the two world wars, most noteably including the Sudeten Germans until their expulsion from Czechoslovakia in 1945.

In terms of Richard Schermerhorn’s (3) fourfold typology of ethnicities within a matrix of power and numbers: dominant majorities, dominant elites, subordinate mass subjects and subordinate minorities, these groups have slipped by loss of political dominance from Schermerhorn’s “dominant elite” to his “subordinate minority”. [. . .]

I'm not overly impressed with either paper, though Kaufmann's at least offers a reasonable framework for further discussion. The Wright paper sounds interesting enough in concept but descends into conflating the blending of NW European ethnies among old-stock Americans with interracial marriage, and bizarrely arguing "WASPs" will maintain dominance by mixing themselves out of existence.

CEU HapMap sample

The CEU HapMap sample consists of "Utah residents with ancestry from northern and western Europe". The paper Geographical Affinities of the HapMap Samples contains this bit of retardation:

The lack of detailed similarity between the genome-wide autosomal genotypes of the CHB and CEU samples and the HGDP-CEPH panel could reflect the combination of high discriminatory power from such a large number of SNPs and the small number of comparison populations. In a more detailed comparison of the CEU with 2,457 individuals from 23 European populations, individual's SNP genotypes were clustered using principal component analysis [26]. Individuals from each European population generally clustered together and although the populations formed overlapping clusters, the broad North, South, East and West geographical areas of Europe were readily separated. In this analysis, the CEU were most similar to samples from the Netherlands and the UK, in agreement with the Y-chromosomal data, but in contrast were quite distinct from Spanish and Portuguese samples, which were not significantly different at the Y-chromosomal level (c.f. Figure 3B). We compared the number of samples that showed different or not different Y-chromosomal distances from the CEU in Central, Northern, Southern, Eastern and Western Europe with, in each case, the rest of Europe, using a Fisher exact test and found a striking enrichment of similar samples in Western Europe (p<0.000001) but in no other region. Some differences between a single locus and the combination of a large number of loci is unsurprising, but may also reflect the limited number of Y-STRs available for the detailed European comparison and the similarities in Y-chromosomal haplotypes throughout much of Western Europe, where haplogroup R1b predominates, being common in both Britain and Iberia [27], [28], for example. Together, these results show that the CEU, in contrast to the HapMap recommended descriptor ‘Utah residents with ancestry from northern and western Europe’ (http://www.hapmap.org/citinghapmap.html) are not appropriately described as having Northern European ancestry; Western or North-western Europe ancestry would be more accurate.

Apparently, this is what happens when Chinese lead authors try to write about Europe. Hint: Northwestern Europe is the intersection of Northern Europe and Western Europe. Every analysis I've ever seen supports the NW European affinities of the CEU sample (also see "Geographical structure and differential natural selection amongst North European populations"), including analyses in this paper. Low-resolution Y-STR matches throughout western Europe are expected and are absolutely irrelevant.

Newsweek alarmed about dysgenics

For wildlife:

Researchers see 'evolution in reverse' as hunters kill off prized animals with the biggest antlers and pelts.

Some of the most iconic photographs of Teddy Roosevelt, one of the first conservationists in American politics, show the president posing companionably with the prizes of his trophy hunts. An elephant felled in Africa in 1909 points its tusks skyward; a Cape buffalo, crowned with horns in the shape of a handlebar mustache, slumps in a Kenyan swamp. In North America, he stalked deer, pronghorn antelope, bighorn sheep and elk, which he called "lordly game" for their majestic antlers. What's remarkable about these photographs is not that they depict a hunter who was also naturalist John Muir's staunchest political ally. It's that just 100 years after his expeditions, many of the kind of magnificent trophies he routinely captured are becoming rare.

Elk still range across parts of North America, but every hunting season brings a greater challenge to find the sought-after bull with a towering spread of antlers. Africa and Asia still have elephants, but Roosevelt would have regarded most of them as freaks, because they don't have tusks. Researchers describe what's happening as none other than the selection process that Darwin made famous: the fittest of a species survive to reproduce and pass along their traits to succeeding generations, while the traits of the unfit gradually disappear. Selective hunting—picking out individuals with the best horns or antlers, or the largest piece of hide—works in reverse: the evolutionary loser is not the small and defenseless, but the biggest and best-equipped to win mates or fend off attackers.

[. . .]

Tusked elephants, like the old dominant males on Ram Mountain, were "genetically 'better' individuals," says Festa-Bianchet. "When you take them systematically out of the population for several years, you end up leaving essentially a bunch of losers doing the breeding."

[Lily Huang. It’s Survival of the Weak and Scrawny. NEWSWEEK. Published Jan 3, 2009. From the magazine issue dated Jan 12, 2009]

This is not the first time someone's made this sort of observation.

At the age of sixteen, Madison was sent to the German city of Dresden, where for the next four years European tutors provided him with the best possible classical education. During this tie he managed to travel to every country in Europe (where he visited all the zoos and most of the natural history museums of the continent) and throughout North Africa and the Middle East as well. But his most significant visit was to Moritzburg, the baroque hunting lodge just outside Dresden, where my guess is that Grant found himself transfixed by the extensive collection of red deer antlers. The trophies--which had been collected three hundred years earlier--were impressively large, and the more the young student stared at them the more troubled he became. At some point, it occurred to him what was amiss: antlers of that size simply did not exist anymore on living European deer. Grant realized that, contrary to the Victorian understanding of evolutionary progress, the red deer had been getting smaller and smaller over the years. The species was actually degenerating.

Furthermore, Grant's naturalistically inclined mind apparently put together what he knew of the geographic range of the red deer, along with the sizes of the various specimens he had encountered in the wild, and he instantly envisioned a perfect continuum: At the far eastern edge of the red deer's range (in the Caucasus) the animal was almost as large as it had been in the sixteenth century. But toward the west (in the Carpathians) the deer began to diminish in size. Even farther west (in Saxony) the stags were smaller still, and at the far western limit of the animal's range (in Scotland) the red deer had shrunk to their smallest proportions.

Grant reasoned that this decline in size was indubitably the result of trophy hunting. Trophy hunters, of course, target the largest bulls with the finest antlers, which leaves the breeding to the inferior males. As one moves from east to west across Europe, the human population increases, as does the number of hunters, and the inevitable result is an ever-greater decline across space, and over time, in the size and vigor of the deer stock. In other words, as human civilization advanced, the deer declined. And Grant was struck by the fact that if the trend were to continue, the red deer would diminish in size and vitality to the point where ultimately the species would not be able to survive in the wild.

[Jonathan Spiro. Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant. Vermont: 2008. pp. 7-8.]

[source]

I don't foresee Newsweek opening their pages to consideration of human dysgenic breeding trends any time soon. Madison Grant, of course, wasn't so limited.

Indeed, wherever one looks in the world, the Nordics appear to be an endangered species. [. . .] The demographic decline of the European Nordics is hastened by the fact that they are currently killing each other off in the fratricidal Great War, which is nothing less than "class suicide on a gigantic scale."

[. . .]

Even in North America, the habitat to which they are so well acclimated, the Nordics are passing from the scene. "Survival of the fittest," after all, means the survival of the type best adapted to prevailing environmental conditions. In colonial times, the environment that confronted the settlers was an untamed continent, and survival entailed clearing the forests and fighting the Indians--tasks for which the Nordics were eminently suited. But the United States has changed from an agricultural to a manufacturing society, and "the type of man that flourishes in the fields is not the type of man that thrives in the factory." The truth is that the dark, little immigrant can operate a machine and navigate a sweatshop far better than "the big, clumsy, and somewhat heavy Nordic blond, who needs exercise, meat, and air, and cannot live under Ghetto conditions." It is with great pain that Grant is forced to admit that, "from the point of view of race," the environment of his homeland is leading to the "survival of the unfit."

Little wonder that America patricians are refusing to bring children into a society where they must compete with the Italians, the Slovaks, and the Jews. And, as with the Red Deer of Moritzburg Castle, when the fittest males do not breed, the result is racial degeneration. The old-stock American is "withdrawing from the scene, abandoning to these aliens the land which he conquered and developed."

[. . .]

But, of course, there is hope, and it is provided by the new faith of eugenics. Unfortunately, so long as the United States is a democracy, it will be extremely difficult to enact a eugenic program. Ever since "the loose thinkers of the French Revolution and their American mimics" inflicted on us "the dogma of the brotherhood of man," Americans have had a perverse fondness for democracy. The consequences of republican government were not overly detrimental as long as the electorate was predominantly Nordic. But in the late nineteenth century the country had permitted the beaten men of beaten races to enter its portals, and then carlessly granted political rights to these incoming "plebeians." The effect of universal suffrage has been to secure "the transfer of power . . . from a Nordic aristocracy to lower classes predominantly of Alpine and Mediterranean extraction." And it is difficult to see how the enfranchised "helots," indoctrinated by "the assumption that environment and not heredity is the controlling factor in human development," will ever allow the government they now control to enact eugenic measures.

[Spiro. pp. 153-155]

Selection, isolation, and the Puritans

Vanishing American has posted excerpts from an article on the origins of the Puritan settlers of New England, which I reproduce in part below:

While search for the physical means of sustenance is thus in most cases the principal motive for immigration, and was a principal motive in the case of most of the American colonies, the settlement of Massachusetts does not seem to have been determined to any appreciable extent by such a cause. Neither would it be quite correct to describe the founders of Massachusetts as driven from England by persecution, like the men who settled Plymouth.

[. . .]

They attached such great importance to regular industry and sedate and decorous behavior that for a long time the needy and shiftless people who usually make trouble in new colonies were not tolerated among them. Hence the early history of Massachusetts is remarkably free from those scenes of violence and disorder which so often made hideous the first year of new communities. On the other hand, the strictness with which the Puritan colonists sought to realize their theocratic ideal of society resulted sometimes in reprehensible intolerance.

[...] All things considered, then, the character of emigration to New England appears to have been pre-eminent for its respectability. Like the best part of the emigration to Virginia, it consisted of country squires and yeomen, but with this difference in its favor, that a principle of selection had been at work whereby the squires and yeomen who followed Winthrop had approved themselves men of exceptionally serious and lofty characters, with minds that had been purified through steadfast devotion to a noble and unselfish ideal.

[...] Thus, as regards their social derivation, the people of New England were homogeneous in character to an unparalleled degree, and they were drawn from the sturdiest part of the English stock.

[...] In all history there has been no other instance of a colony so exclusively peopled by picked and chosen men. The colonies knew this, and were proud of it, as well they might be. It was the simple truth that was spoken by William Stoughton when he said, in his election sermon in 1688,"God sifted a nation that he might send choice grain into the wilderness."

[...] Those 21,000 English Puritans, who came over to New England before the meeting of the Long Parliament, have now increased to nearly 13,000,000. According to the most careful estimates, at least one-fourth of the whole population of the United States at the present moment is descended from these men. Striking as this fact may seem, it is perhaps less striking than the fact of the original migration, when we stop to contemplate it in its full meaning."

["From the Harper's Magazine collection, 'New England', 1990. The collected pieces were all written around the turn of the 20th century. The following is from 'Colonial New England', p. 212"]

Ellsworth Huntington documented a sample of the descendants of these Puritan settlers, who, as might be expected, went on to be quite successful. Starting from the example of the Puritan settlement of New England, Huntington draws a perhaps obvious lesson:

The lesson, as we see it, is that by proper selection the people of the United States as a whole, just as they are today, may give rise to descendants who possess unusually high qualities. Selection is the key word of this whole book.

If selection is to accomplish its full work it must be followed by segregation, or better still by continued selection from generation to generation. It is a common and very true saying of anthropologists that individual differences, even among closely related people, are far greater than the average differences between races. We believe that selection on the basis of individual differences is the reason why the New England type stands out so conspicuously. But since the selection occurred mainly in a single generation, segregation of the selected people was absolutely essential to permit them to develop their individuality. If it could produce desirable results by selecting certain person among the people of eastern England three centuries ago, there is no reason why it should not produce still better results if a more rational system of social selection in each successive generation can be devised here in the United States today. [After Three Centuries, p. 184]

"White Anglo-Saxon Protestant"

"WASP" is a pejorative for (unhyphenated) "American". The term may be applied to broad or narrow segments of the founding American ethny, in terms of class, region, and ancestral background, leading to many opportunities for confusion and misdirection. "WASP" functions primarily as an instrument for delegitimizing and dispossessing the progeny of the founders.

Exactly who it is that will take over the center is a problem of definition. Wasps are not so easily characterized as other ethnic groups. The term itself can be merely descriptive or mildly offensive, depending on the user and the hearer; at any rate, it has become part of the American idiom. In one sense, it is redundant: since all Anglo-Saxons are white, the word could be Asp. Purists like to confine Wasps to descendants of the British Isles; less exacting analysts are willing to throw in Scandinavians, Netherlanders and Germans. At the narrowest, Wasps form a select band of well-heeled, well-descended members of the Eastern Establishment; at the widest, they include Okies and Snopeses, "Holy Rollers" and hillbillies. Wasps range from Mc-George Bundy and Penelope Tree to William Sloane Coffin Jr. and Phyllis Diller. Generously defined, Wasps constitute about 55% of the U.S. population, and they have in common what Columnist Russell Baker calls a "case of majority inferiority."

A Quiet Retreat

Sometimes Wasps are treated like a species under examination before it becomes extinct. At the convocation of intellectuals in Princeton last month, Edward Shils, professor of social thought at the University of Chicago, announced: "The Wasp has abdicated, and his place has been taken by ants and fleas. The Wasp is less rough and far more permissive. He lacks self-confidence and feels lost." Other observers feel that the growing dissension in American life is a clear sign that the Wasp has lost his sting, that his culture no longer binds. The new radicals and protesters are not in rebellion against Wasp rule as such, but they deride the Wasp's traditional values, including devotion to duty and hard work.

Although it is possible to exaggerate the decline of the Wasp, who has never really left the center of U.S. power, he is indisputably in an historical retreat. The big change came with the waves of migration from Europe in the 19th century, when many of his citadels—the big cities—were wrested from his political control. In a quiet fallback, the Wasps founded gilded ghettos—schools and suburbs, country clubs and summer colonies.

Lately, the non-Wasps have pursued them even there. A few years ago, Grosse Pointe, a Wasp suburb of Detroit, was notorious for rating prospective homeowners by a point system based on personal characteristics; Jews, Italians and "swarthy" persons almost invariably got so few points that they could not buy houses. Now all that has been abandoned, and Grosse Pointe has many Roman Catholic and Jewish residents. Downtown private clubs remain bastions of Wasp exclusiveness, but doors are opening. One recent example: Jews gained admission to the Kansas City Club in Kansas City, Mo., after an uproar over exclusionary policies; a rumor got out that the Atomic Energy Commission refused to locate a plant in the city because of private-club discrimination.

Non-Wasp groups are far better represented in Ivy League schools than they used to be: Jews, for instance, constitute about 25% of the student bodies. So traditional an Episcopal prep school as Groton now includes some 25 Roman Catholics, a dozen Negroes and three Jews. Jews stand out sharply in the nation's intellectual life, and Jewish novelists are beginning to overtake the fertile Wasp talent. Scarcely a single Wasp is a culture hero to today's youth; more likely he is the bad guy on the TV program, where names like Jones and Brown have replaced the Giovannis and O'Shaughnessys. The banker who made Skull and Bones is no model for undergraduates, writes Sociologist Nathan Glazer in FORTUNE. "Indeed, often the snobberies run the other way—the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, generally from a small town or an older and duller suburb, is likely to envy the big-city and culturally sophisticated Jewish students."

Proper Wasps still rule in tight little enclaves of high society that are rarely cracked by newcomers. Yet anyone with a will—and money—can find a way to outflank Wasp society, which is often haunted by a sense of anachronism. Such is the hostility to the Veiled Prophet parade, an annual Wasp event in St. Louis, that the queen and her maids of honor last year had to be covered with a plastic sheet to protect them from missiles tossed from the crowd.

[ARE THE WASPS COMING BACK? HAVE THEY EVER BEEN AWAY? Time Friday, Jan. 17, 1969]

What Americans (used to) look like

From an early article on Ales Hrdlicka's work [1]:

 

 

From The Old Americans by Ales Hrdlicka:

[1] "The 'Melting Pot' a Myth," Journal of Heredity, VIII (March 1917), 99-105 (link)

Related:

• Hrdlicka on "American type"
  
• Hrdlicka on Old New Englanders
  
• Coon on American racial types
  
• Brues on American physical types
  
• Harry Laughlin's definition of an American