Author's Preface to The Puritan Dilemma (1958)
While we're at it . . .
The first anti-slavery novel wasn't written by a "Yankee". It was written by Tory Englishwoman.
"Yankees" and women's suffrage
So it was not surprising that WASPy America was favorable ground for feminism in the early 20th century, as shown by the Yankee domination of the women’s vote movement. In contrast, the newer immigrants of the era, such as Sicilians and Jews, came from more patriarchal cultures.The Wikipedia edit actually claims:
The woman suffrage movement was led by old stock women, especially Yankees and Quakers of English or German ancestry, whose families had been in North America for generations.And, if this were completely accurate, it would hardly have been surprising that colonial stock Americans (still the majority of the US population in the mid-to-late 19th century and the overwhelming majority among the more educated) were the leaders of a particular intellectual movement in America (while noting that the comparable movements in Europe were led by Italian women in Italy, German and Jewish women in Germany, etc.). But if we scroll up in the same Wikipedia entry:
Agitation for equal suffrage was carried on by only a few individuals. The first of these was Frances Wright, a Scottish woman who came to the country in 1826 and advocated women's suffrage in an extensive series of lectures. In 1836 Ernestine Rose, a Polish woman, came to the country and carried on a different campaign so effectively that she obtained a personal hearing before the New York Legislature, though her petition bore only five signatures.Polish woman?
Ernestine Louise Rose (January 13, 1810 – August 4, 1892) was an atheist feminist, individualist feminist, and abolitionist. She was one of the major intellectual forces behind the women's rights movement in nineteenth-century America. [. . .]She was born on January 13, 1810, in Piotrków Trybunalski, Russia-Poland, as Ernestine Louise Polowsky. Her father was a wealthy rabbi and her mother the daughter of a wealthy businessman.
Haidt on moral foundations 2/2
But when we look at the Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity foundations, the story is quite different. Liberals largely reject these considerations. They show such a large gap between these foundations versus the Care and Fairness foundations that we might say, as shorthand, that liberals have a two-foundation morality.4 As we move to the right, however, the lines slope upward. By the time we reach people who are “very conservative,” all five lines have converged. We can say, as shorthand, that conservatives have a five-foundation morality. [. . .]
Figure 8.2 shows our data on the MFQ as it stood in 2011, with more than 130,000 subjects. We’ve made many improvements since Jesse’s first simple survey, but we always find the same basic pattern that he found in 2006. The lines for Care and Fairness slant downward; the lines for Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity slant upward. Liberals value Care and Fairness far more than the other three foundations; conservatives endorse all five foundations more or less equally.8 [. . .] We’ve found this basic difference no matter how we ask the questions."
Particular rules and virtues vary across cultures, so you’ll get fooled if you look for universality in the finished books. You won’t find a single paragraph that exists in identical form in every human culture. But if you look for links between evolutionary theory and anthropological observations, you can take some educated guesses about what was in the universal first draft of human nature. I tried to make (and justify) five such guesses:• The Care/harm foundation evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of caring for vulnerable children. It makes us sensitive to signs of suffering and need; it makes us despise cruelty and want to care for those who are suffering.
• The Fairness/cheating foundation evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of reaping the rewards of cooperation without getting exploited. It makes us sensitive to indications that another person is likely to be a good (or bad) partner for collaboration and reciprocal altruism. It makes us want to shun or punish cheaters.
• The Loyalty/betrayal foundation evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of forming and maintaining coalitions. It makes us sensitive to signs that another person is (or is not) a team player. It makes us trust and reward such people, and it makes us want to hurt, ostracize, or even kill those who betray us or our group.
• The Authority/subversion foundation evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of forging relationships that will benefit us within social hierarchies. It makes us sensitive to signs of rank or status, and to signs that other people are (or are not) behaving properly, given their position.
• The Sanctity/degradation foundation evolved initially in response to the adaptive challenge of the omnivore’s dilemma, and then to the broader challenge of living in a world of pathogens and parasites. It includes the behavioral immune system, which can make us wary of a diverse array of symbolic objects and threats. It makes it possible for people to invest objects with irrational and extreme values—both positive and negative—which are important for binding groups together.
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%.
Religion, ethnicity, and political alignment
Exploring the Bases of Partisanship in the American Electorate: Social Identity vs. Ideology. Political Research Quarterly June 2006 vol. 59 no. 2 175-187.
Group Components of U.S. Presidential Voting Across the States. Political Behavior. June 1999, Volume 21, Issue 2, pp 123-151
[. . .] We estimate multivariate, group-based logit models of presidential vote choice using 1988 CBS/ New York Times and 1992 Voter Research and Surveys exit poll data from each of the largest states.
[. . .] The estimates indicate that elements of the New Deal Democratic coalition remain intact across the largest states in recent presidential elections. For example, controlling for other factors, the voting poor in each state remain more inclined to support the Democratic standard bearer. [. . .]
The marginal Jewish effect approaches, and occasionally surpasses, that for race across the states. Relative to mainline Protestants, Jews remain much more Democratic in their presidential voting (see also Manza and Brooks, 1997b). This marginal effect is powerful across the states in both 1988 and 1992, showing that Jewish identification manifests itself in terms of distinctive political behavior both in states with sizable Jewish populations (e.g., New York) and in states with much smaller Jewish populations (e.g., Illinois).
The effect of Catholic identification on Democratic voting was uniformly positive in 1988, but much less potent than the influence of being Jewish. A noteworthy Catholic effect was evident in states as dissimilar as Massachusetts and Texas. Relative to the support for Dukakis in 1988, the Catholic support for Clinton in 1992 was much spottier." Only results for the voters of Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania revealed a powerful, positive Catholic influence across both 1988 and 1992. With the possible exception of these three states, it appears that Democratic presidential candidates can no longer depend on a reservoir of support among large-state Catholics (see also Petrocik, 1987; Green and Guth, 1991; Kellstedt and Green, 1993). Some accounts suggested that the strong appeal of Reagan shook many Catholics loose from their Democratic moorings. But the results from 1992 suggest that this shift is more than a Reagan phenomenon.
Group Components of the Presidential Vote, 1952–1984. The Journal of Politics. Volume 51, Issue 02, May 1989, pp 337-346.
Except for bivariate analyses, previous research on the group basis of partisan strength in the United States has focused on party identification as the dependent variable. This essay examines the group basis of the presidential vote, 1952–1984, using a multivariate logit approach. Our multivariate analysis shows the persistence of group-based divisions between Republican and Democratic voters. Among other patterns, class-based divisions have noticeably increased.
[. . .] Over the full 32-year span of this study, the major group effects are race, religion, and class. This of course is not surprise. However, it may be a surprise to see the effect of being Jewish (vs. Protestant) is almost as great as the effect of being black (vs. nonblack), and that membership in the "no religion" category generally makes one more Democratic than does being Catholic. It may also be a surprise to see the more important "class" measure to be union membership rather than poverty.
[. . .] The bottom row of table 1 traces the voting behavior of non-group members, 1952-184. These nonmembers are northern white male Protestants who are not college educated but not poor, over thirty and living outside the largest SMSAs. These "vanilla" voters show a steady Republicanism that sometimes reaches margins of more than four to one.
Religion, Ethnicity, and Party Affiliation in the U.S.: Evidence from Pooled Electoral Surveys, 1968–72. Social Forces (1977) 56 (2): 637-653.
By analyzing a white Christian subsample of pooled national survey data collected in 1968, 1970, and 1972 (subsample's n = 4,142), we try to determine whether ethnicity has a direct effect on party identification net of parental party identification. In so doing, we raise a number of subsidiary issues: (1) how best to measure ethnicity, (2) the need to distinguish between ethnically identified and ethnically assimilated respondents, and (3) possible regional variation in the impact of ethnicity. We find that religion alone (Protestant versus Catholic) is an adequate measure of ethnicity for this analysis, there being little intrareligious variation in party identification by national origin. Second, religion's effect is largely limited to the ethnically identified. Third, its effect holds up when controlling for parental party identification and SES. Fourth, regional variation in the impact of religion is understood as largely flowing from regional variations in the distribution of Catholics. [. . .]
We had suggested that ethnicity's impact should be greatest in the Northeast and negligible in the South. Indeed, the explained variance estimates (R2s) of the ethnic (or religious) effect reported in Table 2 seem to bear out those hypotheses. [. . .] On the other hand, inspection of the unstandardized coefficients for those equations---a more appropriate way of comparing impact across populations with different distributions of dependent and independent variables---reveals only negligible differences between the Northeast and the other nonsouthern regions. In the Midwest and West the difference is virtually identical (Catholics are about one half a standard deviation unit more Democratic than Protestants) while in the North it is only slightly larger (about seven-tenths of a standard deviation unit). In the South, as expected, there is virtually no difference in the political identification scores of Catholics and Protestants.
New Deal coalition
"The New Deal coalition [. . .] united the many enemies of the old Puritan ethic: Catholic immigrants, Jewish intellectuals, southern gentlemen, black sharecroppers, Appalachian mountain folk, Texas stockmen and California hedonists."
Excerpt from Albion's Seed:
Political donations, 1980-2012: Puritan vs. other names
I'm only looking at donations that feature "repub" or "democ" in the name of the recipient. This saves time but excludes most or all donations to specific candidates. To do this properly, I suggest: (1) look at all donations (which will require sorting donations to specific candidates into republican/democrat or conservative/liberal); (2) aggregate donations to the level of individual donors, so we're comparing the number of individuals on each side, rather than the number of donations; (3) increase the number of "Puritan" and other names looked at; (4) also break down comparisons by region (or even by state, if statistics allow).
Where genealogical information is available, donors with Puritan surnames can also be divided into bins based on their actual degree of New England ancestry to see if any trends hold.
The Puritan name list includes the names used by Weyl (which came from Huntington) and some other names mentioned by Huntington here. "Lyman" has been adopted by Jews (e.g., Democratic donor "Princeton Nathan Lyman" writes about having lunch with anti-apartheid activist Joe Slovo: "That day we talked a little about our roots, as we were both products of Lithuanian Jewish parents. Slovo had been born in Lithuania and came to South Africa as a child. He would credit his Jewish roots for some of his social conscience, but he was never religious."), so I prefer to exclude it. For the same reason, I excluded "Cole" from the English list and "Ross" from the Scottish list. The remaining name lists are based on Weyl ("The Geography of American Achievement"), except for the list of the ten most common Irish surnames, which I added.
| repub | democ | repub/democ | ||||
| records | dollars | records | dollars | records | dollars | |
| PURITAN (excluding lyman) | 703 | 595098 | 241 | 206523 | 2.92 | 2.88 |
| ENGLISH CLERICAL | 3864 | 3673871 | 1196 | 1287126 | 3.23 | 2.85 |
| SCOTTISH | 4057 | 3665089 | 1471 | 1291021 | 2.76 | 2.84 |
| ENGLISH | 3933 | 2983327 | 1106 | 1056399 | 3.56 | 2.82 |
| IRISH | 4903 | 5291109 | 1660 | 2036620 | 2.95 | 2.6 |
| PURITAN (including lyman) | 755 | 619566 | 318 | 242962 | 2.37 | 2.55 |
| IRISH (top 10) | 6535 | 6888658 | 2103 | 3249880 | 3.11 | 2.12 |
| GERMAN | 3832 | 3094483 | 1044 | 1510555 | 3.67 | 2.05 |
| “NEW” CHINESE | 18308 | 17037579 | 6982 | 9232097 | 2.62 | 1.85 |
| KOREAN | 1124 | 998377 | 276 | 583543 | 4.07 | 1.71 |
| ITALIAN | 415 | 267295 | 111 | 172194 | 3.74 | 1.55 |
| WELSH | 1485 | 1172239 | 527 | 779238 | 2.82 | 1.5 |
| FRENCH | 725 | 990795 | 274 | 724305 | 2.65 | 1.37 |
| INDIAN | 755 | 649459 | 380 | 599444 | 1.99 | 1.08 |
| “OLD” CHINESE | 1969 | 1533353 | 702 | 1598841 | 2.8 | 0.96 |
| JEWISH | 4476 | 7374127 | 6904 | 15332169 | 0.65 | 0.48 |
| AFRO-AMERICAN | 49 | 89210 | 61 | 224389 | 0.8 | 0.4 |
Puritan names
Religious affiliations of Puritan descendants, as of 1935
This book belongs to the new science which deals with the growth and qualities of a population. It is a combination of sociology, economics, eugenics, geography, and history. It chooses a group of people and sees what changes have taken place in their numbers and quality from generation to generation during the three centuries since the United States was settled. Starting with typical New England Puritans the history of a sample family is traced from 1633 to the present. The modern representatives are also analyzed in comparison with people of other descent. Although the investigation on which the book is based began as a study of the Huntington family, it soon expanded into a more general analysis of the millions of people who claim descent from the Puritan stock of early New England. The typical quality of the people who are here analyzed is one of the main features of the book. Although these people all bear one name they are descended from two or three thousand old New England families and are typical of the entire Puritan stock. A second feature of the book is that a genuinely random sample of the people descended from a specific type of colonial ancestors has been examined. Equal effort has been devoted to obtaining information about all kinds of persons, no matter whether they are of world-wide eminence or criminals and paupers. A third feature is that this books attempts to study population by a new method, namely, the use of family names and the analysis of a fairly complete sample of all the people bearing the name. [iii-iv]
Another interesting phase of religion is the great extent to which the old New England stock has changed its denominational affiliations (Table 21). The original Puritans all belonged to the Congregational Church, although a few soon became Quakers. In our day the leading denominations are the Episcopalians and Methodists, each with 19 per cent of those for whom information is available. Then come the Baptists, Presbyterians, and finally the Congregationalists, each with about 12 per cent. The rest are divided among many denominations, among whom Roman Catholics on the one hand, and atheists, agnostics, and people of no denomination on the other hand, each number about two per cent of the total. [p. 145]
Ipsos-Reuters 2012 presidential polling data
New England Protestants favored Romney (43-35). Catholics and Jews favored Obama (43-37 and 59-29).
Looking only at Maine, we see the same trend. Protestants (n=678) were 44-38 for Romney and Catholics (n=475) 48-35 for Obama. The 18 Maine Jews surveyed were 83-11 for Obama.
Maybe Catholics and Jews just happen to have a heightened susceptibility to "mutated Puritanism" -- or maybe people like foseti should start to strongly consider the possibility they have been pwned by Moldbug.
Ethnic origins of leadership of large foundations
Here's how the ethnic origins of their boards of trustees break down.
Ford Foundation: I count 3 blacks, 1 East Asian, 1 South Asian, 1 Middle Easterner, 1 mestizo, 1 Jew, 1 Hungarian, 3 Southern whites, and an Englishman. I count zero Yankees/Puritans.
Rockefeller Foundation: 5 blacks, 1 Asian, 1 Mexican, 2 Jews, 1 Irish Catholic, 1 German, and 1 98-year-old with significant New England ancestry.
Carnegie Corporation: 2 blacks, 6 Jews, 2 Armenians, 2 Iberians, 2 Italians, 2 Irish, 1 Irish/Italian, 1 Southerner, and one person of mixed colonial ancestry including a minor New England component.
Full lists of names below:
Ashkenazi Jewish gene pool derives from "recent severe bottleneck" of 300-400 individuals ca. 800 years ago
(1) "In accordance with historical records, recent studies showed that AJ are genetically homogeneous with mixed European and Middle-Eastern ancestry and that the AJ population had undergone a severe bottleneck around 800ya followed by an extremely rapid expansion. [. . .] Analysis of identical-by-descent segments, which are abundant in AJ and highly informative on recent history, confirmed a recent severe bottleneck of merely ≈300-400 individuals. [. . .] the fraction of European ancestry in AJ to be ≈55±2%."
(2) "For the AJ, we estimated mean ancestral proportions of 0.380, 0.305, 0.113, 0.041 and 0.148 for Middle Eastern, Italian, French, Russian and Caucasus ancestry, respectively."
(3) "Employing a variety of standard techniques for the analysis of population structure, we find that Ashkenazi Jewish samples share the greatest genetic ancestry with other Jewish populations, and among non-Jewish populations, with groups from Mediterranean Europe and the Middle East"
Full abstracts below:
Here is an actual "Yankee" politician
Fred Upton appears to come close to having solid New England ancestry on both sides. There will be exceedingly few if any other serving House members about whom that can be said.
For example: of 8 current Massachusetts congressmen, 6 are Irish Catholics and one is a half-Irish Italian. The other is a woman with a French surname who was born in California and married a Greek. All are Democrats. Vermont: Irish Democrat. New Hampshire: one Irish Catholic and one woman with a Scottish-surnamed father and German-surnamed mother. Maine: a French Canadian and a Minnesota-born woman with Jewish husband. All of these are Democrats.
Upton is a Republican from Michigan.
Upton was born in St. Joseph, Michigan, the son of Elizabeth B. (née Vial) and Stephen Edward Upton. [. . .] Upton's grandfather, Frederick Upton, was co-founder of appliance manufacturer and marketer Whirlpool Corporation, which is headquartered in Benton Harbor. His wife’s name is Amey, and he has two children, Meg and Stephen.[41] Upton's niece is supermodel Kate Upton
See below for his sure-to-be radically-leftist platform:
Inverse relationship between percentage of population reporting English or American ancestry and Obama 2012 election share, for Maine counties
X-axis: percent of people reporting English or American ancestry in the 2000 Census (according to Wikipedia)
Y-axis: fraction of votes cast for Obama in 2012 (www.maine.gov/sos/cec/elec/2012/2012prescounty.xls)
This took me about 5 minutes. It could be repeated with more finely-grained data (town/city-level instead of county-level), using more recent ancestry information, and controlling for the presence of non-whites. But I don't anticipate the trend reversing.
Ethnic origins of presidents of Harvard University
[2007–] Drew Gilpin Faust - Grew up in Virginia. Southern father; New Jersey mother (with some New England ancestry, but also, e.g., German ancestry). Jewish husband.
[2001-2006] Lawrence H. Summers - Jewish. Summers says "WASPs" who wear ties and demand he enforce the honor code are assholes. "Rarely have I encountered such swagger, and I tried to respond in kind."
[1991-2001] Derek Curtis Bok - Born in Pennsylvania. Father's father was a Dutch immigrant; mother's father was born in England. Does have some New England ancestry through other lines, but not exactly a prototypical "Yankee". Married Gunnar Myrdal's daughter.
[1971-1991] Neil L. Rudenstine - "His father was a Russian Jewish immigrant from Kiev, while his mother was Catholic and the daughter of immigrants from Campobasso in Italy."
[1953-1971] Nathan Marsh Pusey - "Pusey was born in Council Bluffs, Iowa, to John and Rosa Pusey." Southern ancestry. "Dr. Pusey, a native of the Midwest, was the first non-New Englander to head the nation's oldest and richest university. [. . .] His father died when he was a year old; his mother, who supported the family as a $65-a-week school principal, taught him the value of study and a need for better salaries for educators. He won a scholarship to Harvard" (New York Times Biographical Service, Volume 32). "Pusey vigorously opposed McCarthyism in the 1950s and supported the U.S. Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. His clashes with Joseph McCarthy were especially significant because Pusey's position at Lawrence College placed him in the senator's hometown (Appleton, Wisconsin) and amid the political power base of the then-conservative Fox Valley." (Wikipedia)
[1933-1953] James Bryant Conant - New England ancestry, but:
Conant never tired of pointing out that despite this lineage, he was not a "proper Bostonian," one of the aristocratic Back Bay and Beacon Hill Brahmins that were so pungently evoked by Cleveland Amory and John P. Marquand, but the offspring of hardworking, middle-income parents, James Scott Conant and Jennett Orr Bryant, who came from small villages in Plymouth country to raise their son and two daughters in the working-class Boston suburb of Dorchester. [James G. Hershberg. James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age.]Also:
When Conant came into office, Lowell gave him his view of the matter, unchanged from a decade before: "The time has not come for any theoretical solution of the Jewish question. I tried, as you know, to find an open, fair and practical solution, but was howled down by the preference of most people to profess one principle and act upon another. Any educational institution that admits an unlimted number of Jews will soon have no one else."Conant's pro-quota position in the early 1920s, his preference for more students from small towns and cities and the South and West, and his cool response to the plight of Jewish academic refugees from Hitler suggest that he shared the mild anti-Semitism common to his social group and time. But his commitment to meritocracy made him more ready to accept able Jews as students and faculty. [. . .]
By 1944 over 30 percent of the students in the remaining civilian student houses were Jewish. In calculating the proper size of the wartime class of 1946, the "quota for a certain type" was dropped. The result: about 19 percent of the class was Jewish, the highest percentage since the early 1920s. [. . .]
Still, old demons lurked in the background. After the war ended, the house masters resumed their prewar screening and sharing practices. Not until May 1950 did they agree to take every house applicant and relegate the * designation to history's dustbin. [Morton Keller, Phyllis Keller. Making Harvard modern: the rise of America's university.]
[1909-1933] Abbott Lawrence Lowell - "Lowell was born on December 13, 1856 in Boston, Massachusetts, the second son of Augustus Lowell and Katherine Bigelow Lowell. His siblings included the poet Amy Lowell, the astronomer Percival Lowell, and Elizabeth Lowell Putnam, an early activist for prenatal care. They were the great-grandchildren of John Lowell and, on their mother's side, the grandchildren of Abbott Lawrence.[4] [. . .]
Following Lowell's earlier reform of Harvard's admissions process to increase the admission of public school students, the Jewish proportion of the student body rose from 6% in 1908 to 22% in 1922, at a time when Jews constituted about 3% of the U.S. population. Lowell, continuing to focus on the cohesiveness of the student body, described a campus where antisemitism was growing and Jewish students were ever more likely to be isolated from the majority. He feared—and recent developments at Columbia University supported him—that the social elite would cease sending its sons to Harvard as Jewish enrollment increased. He cited what he saw as the parallel experience of hotels and clubs that lost their old membership when the proportion of Jewish members increased. He proposed limiting Jewish admissions to 15% of the entering class. [. . .]
The faculty committee eventually rejected Lowell's proposed quota. Instead, Harvard's new guiding principle in admissions would be the top seventh rule. Harvard would reach out to youths in smaller cities and towns, even to rural communities, with the guideline that the student place in the top seventh of his class. It would seek "to pick out the best pupils from good schools, here, there, and everywhere." Though some suspected this was nothing but a covert way to decrease Jewish enrollment, the policy had the opposite effect. The numbers of non-Jewish students attracted from the South and West could not match the larger numbers of Jews admitted from the Middle Atlantic and New England states. By 1925, Jews made up 27% of the entering class.[49]
Lowell then found another way to accomplish his goal, this time less publicly. He first won approval from the Harvard Board of Overseers for a new policy that would, in addition to traditional academic criteria, use letters from teachers and interviews to assess an applicant's "aptitude and character," thus introducing discretion in the place of the strict top seventh rule. He even persuaded one doubtful Overseer that this would not support discrimination against Jews as a group, but merely "careful discernment of differences among individuals." When Lowell gained final approval of these modifications in 1926 and appointed a compliant Admissions Committee, he had won his way.[50] When Lowell left his position in 1933, Jews made up 10% of the undergraduate population.[51]"
[1869-1909] Charles William Eliot - "Charles Eliot was a scion of the wealthy Eliot family of Boston, and was the grandson of banker Samuel Eliot. His mother Mary Lyman Eliot had ancestral roots in early Massachusetts Bay Colony as a descendant of Edmund Rice.[1]
[. . .] But instead, he used his grandfather's legacy and a small borrowed sum to spend the next two years studying the educational systems of the Old World in Europe. [. . .] Eliot's approach to investigating European education was unusual. He did not confine his attention to educational institutions, but explored the role of education in every aspect of national life. [. . .] Eliot understood the interdependence of education and enterprise. In a letter to his cousin Arthur T. Lyman, he discussed the value to the German chemical industry of discoveries made in university laboratories. [. . .] During nearly two years in Europe he had found himself as much fascinated by what he could learn concerning the methods by which science could be made to help industry as by what he discovered about the organization of institutions of learning. He was thinking much about what his own young country needed, and his hopes for the United States took account of industry and commerce as well as the field of academic endeavor."
Ethnic origins of presidents of Yale University
[2013-] Peter Salovey - Jewish.
[1993–2013] Richard C. Levin - Jewish. 'With the forces of globalization becoming ever more visible in the early 1990s, Levin called in his inaugural address for Yale to become "a world university." Updating the time-honored view of Yale as a training ground for the next generation's elite, he expanded its traditional vision from a national to a global one, urging Yale to "aspire to educate leaders for the whole world."' (Jerome Karabel. The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale ...)
[1992–1993] Howard R. Lamar - "He was born in 1923 in Tuskegee, Alabama, U.S.,[3] and was drawn into history in part by his rich family history which includes two United States Supreme Court justices and the second president of the Republic of Texas."
[1986–1992] Benno C. Schmidt, Jr. - Born in New York to Texas-born parents; half-German father.
[1977–1986] A. Bartlett Giamatti - "Giamatti was born in Boston and grew up in South Hadley, Massachusetts, the son of Mary Claybaugh Walton (Smith College '35) and Valentine John Giamatti. His father was professor and chairman of the Department of Italian Language and Literature at Mount Holyoke College.[1] Giamatti's paternal grandparents were Italian immigrants Angelo Giammattei (Italian pronunciation: [dʒamaˈttɛi]) and Maria Lavorgna (Italian pronunciation: [laˈvɔrɲɲa]): his grandfather Angelo emigrated to the United States from Telese, near Naples, Italy, around 1900."
[1977–1977] Hanna Holborn Gray - Born in Germany. Daughter of "Hajo Holborn, whose wife, however, was Jewish" (http://www.ushmm.org/research/center/publications/occasional/2006-02/paper.pdf)
[1963–1977] Kingman Brewster, Jr. - New England ancestry (also see here).
[1951–1963] Alfred Whitney Griswold - Born in New Jersey. New England ancestry. "Furthermore, even if the candidate from Bronx Science was not Jewish himself, he came from a school that was predominantly Jewish [. . .] at a time when anti-Semitism in Yale's admissions was covert but active. Brewster's predecessor Whitney Griswold did not condone this kind of discrimination, but neither was he interested in rooting it out. [. . .] In the early 1960s, Yale was found to accept a lower percentage of Jews than any other Ivy League college." (Geoffrey Kabaservice. The Guardians: Kingman Brewster, His Circle, and the Rise of the Liberal ...)
[1937–1951] Charles Seymour - New England ancestry.
A big part of the problem was the exceptionally ingrown character of the Yale faculty: as late as 1950, half its members had Yale degrees. As Kabaservice points out, "Standards for appointment and promotions tended to emphasize citizenship rather than scholarship, clubbability rather than real merit," and "inheritance, wealth, background and social standing" remained "significant criteria." In such an atmosphere, "dark blossoms of anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism flourished" in many departments.Yale's admissions policy only compounded the problem. Under the admininstration of CHarles Seymour (B.A. '08, Ph.D. '11), Yale's president from 1937 to 1950, the selection of students was consistently and powerfully tilted toward the usual handful of preferred categories: athletes, alumni sons, and boarding school graduates, many of whom had less than sterling academic qualifications. [Jerome Karabel. The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale ...]
[1921–1937] James Rowland Angell - New England ancestry.
[1899–1921] Arthur Twining Hadley - New England ancestry.
[1886–1899] The Reverend Timothy Dwight V - New England ancestry.
Ethnic origins of presidents of Princeton University
[2013-] Christopher L. Eisgruber - Jewish.
[2001-2013] Shirley M. Tilghman - Canadian with Jewish husband.
[1988-2001] Harold T. Shapiro - Canadian Jew.
[1972-1988] William G. Bowen - "William Gordon Bowen was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on October 6, 1933. He was the first and only surviving child of Albert Andrew Bowen and Bernice Catherine Bowen. The Bowens, both originally from Indiana (Indianapolis and South Bend), had moved to Cincinnati because of Albert's job as a salesman for National Cash register." (Princeton Alumni Weekly - Volume 72 - Page 58)
"Bill Bowen is one of the great figures in American higher education," said Princeton President Christopher L. Eisgruber. "His legendary leadership of this University simultaneously elevated Princeton's stature and strengthened its core values. After stepping down from the presidency, he resumed his scholarly study of higher education, producing research of unsurpassed quality. [. . .]Other books, including "The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions" (1998) and "Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education" (2005), expand on Bowen's commitment to the importance of seeking diversity in building faculty and student bodies. [Former Princeton President Bowen awarded National Humanities Medal]
[1957-1972] Robert F. Goheen - "Robert Francis Goheen was born on August 15, 1919 to Anne (Ewing) and Dr Robert H. H. Goheen in Vengurla, India, where both his parents were serving as Presbyterian medical missionaries. [. . .] Goheen taught classics at Princeton as an assistant professor from 1950 until 1957, when he was appointed the university’s 16th president. At 37, he was the youngest man to assume that position since the 18th century. Faced with the social and political challenges of the 1960s, Goheen encouraged student involvement in decision-making processes and initiated active recruitment of minorities, as well as overseeing the admission of women in 1969." Son of Robert H. H. and Anne (Ewing) Goheen. Pennsylvania ancestry.
[1933-1957] Harold W. Dodds - "Dodds was born on June 28, 1889 in Utica, Pennsylvania, the son of a professor of Bible Studies at Grove City College."
[1912-1932] John Grier Hibben - "Hibben was born in Peoria, Illinois [. . .] He was the only son of the Rev. Samuel and Elizabeth (Grier) Hibben. The Hibbens were of Scottish and Scots-Irish descent. [. . .] Elizabeth Grier was a native of Peoria, from a large family with partial German ancestry. She later was one of the pioneers in the movement for woman's suffrage."
[1902-1910] Woodrow Wilson - Scottish and Scotch-Irish ancestry.
[1888-1902] Reverend Francis L. Patton - "He was born in Warwick Parish, Bermuda, and attended Warwick Academy. He studied at Knox College, Toronto and at the University of Toronto; graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1865; was ordained to the Presbyterian ministry in June 1865"
[1868-1888] Reverend James McCosh - "McCosh was born of a Covenanting family in Ayrshire, and studied at the Universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, obtaining his M.A. at the latter"
Ethnic origins of presidents of the University of California system
Somewhere on the internet, a chinegro Jamaican is babbling excitedly about Yankees "preaching diversity" and "SWPLs" being "literal" Puritans. When challenged, "JayMan" is unable to list a single actual name of a "Yankee" preaching diversity. Others engage in similar behavior. These are people whose love for abstraction outruns their knowledge, or who are motivated by ethnic animus. They don't like to name names, and when they do, they tend to be very selective or hilariously incompetent at driving forward this line of thought.
It's should be simple enough to just pick an actual category of people (less meaningless/amorphous than "SWPL") and look at their names.
Inspired by a recent Education Realist article, and since college administrators are commonly among the more vocal and destructive proponents of "diversity" today, we'll start by looking at UC system presidents.
The incoming UC president looks like some kind of beast but is said to be half Italian and half "German and Austrian". For those hard of seeing, she's not a Yankee. Nor were most of her predecessors during the period in which members of the group that founded the University of California saw themselves largely dispossessed of it.
Among 4 UC presidents since 1992, I count 2 Jews, one presumably British-descended Canadian with a Jewish wife, and one child of English/French(-German?) immigrants.
Among the 4 office holders for 1958 to 1992, I see one person with probable New England ancestry, two other Americans without obvious New England connections, and one Jew.
Among the 11 UC presidents from its founding in 1870 to 1958, I count 8 with at least half New England ancestry.
New Englanders disproportionately contributed to building the UC system. Others are leading the way in destroying it.
[2013- ] Janet Napolitano - "Janet Napolitano was born on November 29, 1957, in New York City, the daughter of Jane Marie (née Winer) and Leonard Michael Napolitano, who was the dean of the University of New Mexico School of Medicine.[6] Her father was of Italian descent and her mother had German and Austrian ancestry.[6][7]"
[2008-2013] Mark G. Yudof - "In 1993, he and his wife, Judy, were the co-recipients of the Jewish National Fund Tree of Life Award."
[2003-2008] Robert Carr Dynes - Canadian (who happened to be married to a Jewess at the time he was appointed UC president).
[1995-2003] Richard Chatham Atkinson - Born in Illinois; father from England, mother from Alsace-Lorraine (source).
[1992-1995] Jack W. Peltason - Born in St. Louis, Missouri; "s. of Walter Peltason and Emma Hartmann" (presumably Jewish). Author of such books as "Fifty-Eight Lonely Men: Southern Federal Judges and School Desegregation".
[1983-1992] David Pierpont Gardner - "Gardner was born in Berkeley, California to Reed S. Gardner and Margaret Pierpont Gardner. [. . .] Gardner was an active member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church)". Presumably has some New England ancestry (the only person on the list up to this point we can say that about). Incidentally:
The Hispanic Coalition on Higher Education, representing 83 statewide educational and civil rights organizations, gave Gardner's affirmative-action record an "F" grade and released a "letter of no confidence" by a UC staff group. The letter sent to Gardner by the University of California Chicano-Latino Consortium complained that the UC administration has demonstrated only a "mechanical interest" in reversing a "serious underrepresentation" of Latinos and other minorities among students, faculty and management.And:
As president of the University of California nine-campus system, from 1983-1992, President Gardner met with intense controversies over issues ranging from affirmative action and animal rights to AIDS research and weapons labs.
[1975-1983] David S. Saxon - "David was born in St. Paul, Minnesota on February 8, 1920, the older of two sons. His parents moved to Philadelphia when he was a young boy. His upbringing in a large and lively Eastern European Jewish household instilled in him a deep commitment to both family and education. [. . .] A few years after his arrival, David found himself embroiled in what became known as the loyalty oath controversy. The University of California Board of Regents, responding to postwar pressures to remove alleged Communists from university faculties, instituted a requirement that all faculty members must sign a loyalty oath as a condition of employment. David was one of thirty-one faculty who refused to sign, along with such distinguished older figures as psychologist Edward Tolman and the medieval historian Ernst H. Kantorowicz. " Summary or excerpt of a 1976 article:
David Saxon, president of the University of California, says that the school's program to encourage minority enrollment is the only way to correct social inequities caused by past racial discrimination. The University has a responsibility to attract more minority students.
[1967-1975] Charles J. Hitch - "Hitch was born in Boonville, Missouri to Arthur M. Hitch and Bertha Johnston." Father's parents from Delaware; mother's parents from Missouri (source).
[1958-1967] Clark Kerr - "Kerr was born in Stony Creek, Pennsylvania, and earned his A.B. from Swarthmore College in 1932, an M.A. from Stanford University in 1933, and a Ph.D. in economics from UC Berkeley in 1939."
[1930-1958] Robert Gordon Sproul - "Robert Gordon Sproul was born in San Francisco on May 22, 1891. His father, Robert Sproul, an auditor of the Southern Pacific Company, was a native of Scotland and a graduate of the University of Glasgow. His mother, Sarah Elizabeth (Moore) Sproul, was a New Englander." Wikipedia:
By the time he left office in 1958, the University of California, Berkeley was a distinguished university recognized worldwide for the excellence of its programs. And the University of California had a total of eight campuses from Davis to Los Angeles. There is a Sproul Hall on every UC campus, except for the recently opened and not fully built-out UC Merced, as well as the UCSF campus.
[1923-1930] William Wallace Campbell - "He was born on a farm in Hancock county, Ohio, the son of Robert Wilson and Harriet Welsh Campbell."
[1919-1923] David Prescott Barrows - "David Prescott Barrows was born in Chicago on June 27, 1873. The family moved to California in 1874, and Barrows was reared on a ranch in Ventura County." According to this bio, Barrows was "of New England ancestry".
[1899-1919] Benjamin Ide Wheeler - "Benjamin Ide Wheeler was born at Randolph, Massachusetts, on July 15, 1854, the son of the Rev. Benjamin and Mary Eliza (Ide) Wheeler. His father was successively a church pastor in Plaistow, New Hampshire; Pawtucket, Rhode Island; Randolph, Massachusetts; Haverhill, Massachusetts; Saco, Maine; Franklin, New Hampshire. His mother, Mary Eliza Ide, was born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, daughter of Ebenezer Ide of the Ide family which had its origin in South Attleborough, then Rehoboth. Their only son, Benjamin Ide Wheeler, had his education first in the public schools of Haverhill and Saco, Maine. [. . .] Under Wheeler the University of California underwent one of its periods of greatest growth." (Note: This is what an actual Yankee looks like. Also, note the date.)
[1893-1899] Martin Kellogg - "Martin Kellogg (March 15, 1828 – August 26, 1903) was born in Vernon, Connecticut to Allyn Kellogg and Eliza Kellogg née White. He graduated from Yale as valedictorian of the Class of 1850. He was ordained as a missionary in the Congregational Church and served as a pastor in Shasta, California in 1855, then in Grass Valley, California from 1857 to 1860, and then in Oakland, California starting in 1861." (Another actual Yankee.)
[1880-1890] Horace Davis - "Davis was born in Worcester, Massachusetts. He attended the Worcester public schools and Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts, graduated from Harvard University in 1849, and then studied law in the Dane Law School of Harvard University [. . .] Davis sailed for San Francisco, California around Cape Horn in 1852, and upon arriving, engaged for a brief time as a gold miner, a lumber supercargo surveyor for a coastal steamer, and a purser for the Pacific Mail Steamship Company. In addition he helped found the Mercantile Library Association of California (its oldest public library). [. . .] he was elected as a Republican to the United States House of Representatives of the Forty-fifth and Forty-sixth Congresses (March 4, 1877 - March 3, 1881), where on June 8, 1878 he spoke in support of a bill to restrict Chinese immigration." (Yankee.)
[1885-1888] Edward S. Holden - "He was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1846 to Jeremiah and Sarah Holden. From 1862-66, he attended Washington University in St. Louis, where he obtained a B.S. degree. He later trained at West Point in the class of 1870." (New England stock on at least his father's side.)
[1881-1885] W.T. Reid - "W.T. Reid (1842–1922) was born in Jacksonville, Illinois and served as the Fourth President of the University of California from 1881 to 1885."
[1876-1881] John LeConte - "LeConte was born in Liberty County, Georgia to Louis Le Conte, patriarch of the noted LeConte family. He attended Franklin College at the University of Georgia (UGA) in Athens, where he was a member of the Phi Kappa Literary Society and graduated in 1838."
[1872-1875] Daniel Coit Gilman - "Born in Norwich, Connecticut,[2] the son of Eliza (née Coit) and mill owner William Charles Gilman, a descendant of Edward Gilman, one of the first settlers of Exeter, New Hampshire, Daniel Coit Gilman graduated from Yale College in 1852 with a degree in geography.[3] At Yale he was a classmate of Andrew Dickson White, who would later serve as first president of Cornell University. The two were members of the Skull and Bones secret society, and traveled to Europe together after graduation and remained lifelong friends. Gilman would later co-found the Russell Trust Association, the foundation behind Skull and Bones." (Yankee.)
[1870-1872] Henry Durant - "Henry Durant (Acton, Massachusetts, June 18, 1802 – Oakland, California, January 22, 1875) was the founding president of the University of California.[1]" (Yankee.)