Chapter XIII: The Transformation of America

Under the impact of the "new immigration," most of it dating from the beginning of the present century, the complexion of the States which, as repeatedly shown, was almost wholly Nordic and Protestant, began to change rapidly. As concerned their native-born population, most of the States followed the rule, often mentioned in these pages, that a State is populated, in the first instance by its own increase, and secondly by movements from the States directly adjacent to it.

Maine, according to the 1930 census, with about one-tenth of the population of New England, is only five-eighths native stock, _i.e._, native white of native parents. These were mostly people born in Maine, with a few from surrounding States. Of its foreign stock, three-fourths were French Canadians.

New Hampshire presents a similar picture, with a slightly higher percentage of native Americans from nearby States.

Vermont's native population, aside from that portion born in the State itself, came from New Hampshire or Massachusetts and even more from New York. As in the two States previously mentioned, most of the foreign stock is from French Canada, and that which was not from Quebec is mostly Irish.

The Slavs and Italians have made little inroad in these three States.

Massachusetts in 1930 was more cosmopolitan, with 300,000 residents from other New England States and nearly 100,000 from New York. The old white stock, however, now makes up but one-third of the population of the Bay State. French Canadians, Irish, Italians, Poles, Russians, and Scandinavians, in the order named, have completely overwhelmed the native stock--even such a small country as Lithuania is represented in Massachusetts by more than 50,000 people.

Rhode Island's population, similarly, is now only one-third from the old stock. Its complexion is similar to that of Massachusetts. French Canadian Catholics control the government in many communities.

Connecticut, like Rhode Island, has about one-third old American stock. Here the Italians are the dominant element in number, with Irish, Slavs, and French Canadians almost equally numerous.

Thus New England, with its more than 8,000,000 population, has been virtually lost to the native Americans. Their birthrate in that area has long been far below the level necessary to prevent its dying out, and migration to the west is not now caused by the region's increase, as in Colonial times, but by an actual uprooting of families whose place is taken by others who in race, language, religion, culture, and institutions are quite out of harmony with American traditions.

A similar picture is observed when one turns to the 26,000,000 inhabitants of the Middle Atlantic States--the most populous, the wealthiest, and in many ways the most powerful section of the country.

The old stock makes up but one-third of New York's population. For its composition every State in the Union has been drawn on, with Pennsylvania and New Jersey furnishing the largest contingents. The State has well on to half a million Negroes--mostly in Manhattan, though the ratio of increase of Negroes in some of the other cities of the State vastly outstripped the ratio of increase of Whites between 1920 and 1930. Thus while the Whites of Buffalo increased 11 per cent in the decade, the Negroes increased 200 per cent; in Syracuse they increased twice, in Utica four times, in Rochester seven times, in Albany eight times, as fast as the whites--due, of course, to the migration of great numbers of mulattoes from the Southern States northward.

With its two million Jews, its million and a half Italians, its million Germans, and its three-quarters of a million each of Poles and Irish, together with substantial contingents from almost every other country on the map, the Empire State is scarcely able to meet the requirements of the Founders of the Republic, who, like Thomas Jefferson, feared above everything else the formation of an alien, urban proletariat as creating a condition under which a democratic form of government could not function successfully.

Three-eighths of New Jersey's population were still of the old native stock in 1930, though half of these were born in other States, particularly New York and Pennsylvania. The rest of the population was a heterogeneous mixture of half a million British (largely Irish), half a million southern Italians, a quarter of a million Poles, a somewhat larger number of Germans, and so on down the list.

Pennsylvania makes a somewhat better showing, with more than half of its population still old native Americans. Of the later arrivals the largest number, well on to a million, was of British (including Irish) extraction. Italy and Poland each sent more than half a million, Germany not much less, Russia and Czechoslovakia each more than 200,000.

In both these divisions, then, the New England and the Middle Atlantic States, containing as they do more than a third of the entire population of the United States, the old American stock is now reduced to a minority. Fortunately, this cannot be said of any of the other major divisions of the country, though it is true of a few other individual States--Wisconsin, Minnesota, and North Dakota--where the foreign-born or their offspring are in a slight majority, but of good Nordic stock. On the whole, it is the northern and central parts of the Atlantic Coast that have become the worst un-American parts of the Union. The South Atlantic States play a much less important part nowadays than they did a century ago, in furnishing population to the rest of the country; but they are still American. In the following discussion their Negro population is ignored, and consideration is limited to the Whites, unless otherwise stated.

Delaware, with more than three-fifths of its people belonging to the old stock, has drawn no great additions in late years except from its neighbors on the west and south, Pennsylvania and Maryland. Its alien element is a cosmopolitan one in which no single group particularly preponderates.

Maryland is three-fourths native. Its industrial and commercial life, centered in Baltimore, has drawn a population from an unusually wide area, and this tendency has been greatly accentuated because many of the cosmopolitan group in Washington, D.C., actually reside in Maryland. Thus in addition to the heavy contingents from Pennsylvania and Virginia, it has groups of a thousand or more each from half the States in the Union. The bulk of its foreign population is made up of Germans, Poles, Russians (including Jews), and Italians, in addition to the British.

The District of Columbia, as the seat of the Federal Government, naturally draws its residents from every part of the United States, the largest element of what may be called its permanent population being from Virginia and Maryland. There is no large foreign element, but the Negroes, more than one-fourth of the whole, are nowhere more aggressive. It is generally understood that the reason Congress has never been willing to grant the residents of the district the right to vote, even in local affairs, is that it would be likely to put the political control in the hands of this Negro block, which would always find unscrupulous white politicians ready to forget their own birthright and truckle to it.

Virginia is almost purely of old native stock, Virginian born. Its seaports and its proximity to the District of Columbia account for some residents from other States. After dealing in quarter millions and half millions to describe the foreign-born of the North Atlantic States, it is with something like incredulity that one notes only 23,000 foreign-born Whites of all sorts in the Old Dominion. The number who are native-born of foreign or mixed parentage, and therefore classified as "foreign stock," is twice as large; but many thereof are British. With Virginia, one reaches the region where the old native American holds his ground.

North Carolina makes a still more striking picture. In its population of more than three million, the 1930 census enumerators found scarcely 25,000 foreign-born or of foreign parentage. North Carolina is an active industrial State, yet it has been able to attain to its modern development from its own resources. Its neighbors on the North and South, together, have supplied a hundred thousand citizens; other regions have contributed a few; but the old white American stock in this State, as in many others of the South, has been largely self-sufficing.

South Carolina is not only of the American stock, but has had few outsiders, even from adjacent States. In addition to natives, a very few British and Germans, a very few Northerners, and moderate contingents from the nearby States make up its white population, which is still but slightly larger than the Negro element in the State.

Georgia fits into the same pattern, though it has attracted a few more of the "new immigration"--Slavs and Italians; and a few more Yankees, so that its population, on the whole, is somewhat more cosmopolitan.

Florida, on the other hand, has had an influx both of Northerners, who have almost changed the political complexion of the State; and of the foreign stock, largely Nordic, it is true, but with a West Indian element that is less assimilable. Of its million Whites, a sixth are of foreign stock, including almost every one of the nationalities found anywhere in the United States. But despite this somewhat cosmopolitan nature of its population, the State is overwhelmingly Nordic, like the other Southern commonwealths.

West Virginia, cut off from the Old Dominion by a technically questionable move at the beginning of the Civil War, showed by this very "secession" of its own that its population differed widely from that of the Tidewater. As pointed out earlier, the latter region was English and the mountains were Ulster Scotch, with a widely different outlook on life. The western part of the State had never been a great slave-holding region, partly because of the sentiment of the people, partly because there was little for a slave to do there that a free white could not do much better. To this day only one in sixteen of the population of West Virginia is colored, and it is still largely native white, despite the coal mines, which in other regions have come to depend largely on the labor of Slavs. In the 10 per cent of its foreign-stock population West Virginia has a scattering of Slavs, as also of almost every other people, but the largest element is British, the next German.

Kentucky offers no exception to the rule that the Southern States are still almost wholly native white. The only important foreign element is a small German one. It still retains a little of the tendency which made it, a century or more ago, one of the chief colonizing States, for it has more of its native sons scattered throughout the Union, than has almost any other Southern State.

Virginia still sends out a surplus population, and Georgia notably has done so, though mainly to the States nearest at hand. Kentucky and Tennessee have sent out pioneers to more distant regions. At present, for instance, they have as many representatives on the Pacific Coast as have all the South Atlantic States together.

Tennessee's racial make-up is very similar to that of Kentucky, although there is still the marked contrast in the "atmosphere" of the two States, which has existed from the beginning.

Alabama's composition is not very dissimilar to the two just mentioned, save that the Italian element is a little larger. Its main foreign stocks, however, are British and German.

What has been said of these States applies almost literally to Mississippi. The Whites, forming a little less than half of the total population, are almost all of the old native stock. The emigration of Whites (and of Negroes, too, for that matter) from the cotton States during the last fifteen or twenty years has been largely due to the ravages of the boll weevil, which made cotton less profitable and prevented many small farmers from making even their expenses.

Georgia has been hit harder than any other State, probably, by this movement out of the State and thousands of acres of good farming land are now lying idle there, for lack of hands to work them. The same holds good to some extent in other States of the region. Many of the small farmers have moved westward, first perhaps to Texas or Oklahoma, and then on to the Pacific Coast, the automobile now taking the place of the covered wagon of their forebears.

Arkansas differs in no important respect from Mississippi, save in having a much smaller proportion of Negroes. Its old white population has likewise begun to move, though more often northward, as to Missouri or Kansas. But Oklahoma and, also, Texas have been the great outlets for the Arkansas farmers.

The climate and resources of Louisiana have attracted some 50,000 Italians--a small element compared with those in the Northeastern States, but large for the South. Louisiana has always been more cosmopolitan than any of the other Southern States, and this is still the case, yet 85 per cent of its Whites are of the old native stock. Most of those not born in the State have come from States directly adjoining. While to a certain extent there has been the usual interchange, Louisianians going to other nearby States, mainly Texas, nevertheless Louisiana has been relatively unimportant in settling other States since the Civil War.

Its population is less homogeneous than most of the Southern States. The northern part of the State, with a majority of the inhabitants and with political control, is made up largely of Nordic Protestants who have come in from Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, or elsewhere, and who differ little from the inhabitants of those States. The southern part of Louisiana, on the contrary, is largely Roman Catholic in religion, and to a large extent French-speaking. In some towns there are no public schools. The parochial schools teach the children in French, and the Catholic Church has made particular efforts to perpetuate the use of that language. The State Convention which revised the constitution in 1921 made the literacy qualification for the exercise of the electoral franchise, the ability of a citizen to write his application for registration "in the English language _or his mother tongue_."

The State has the highest rate of illiteracy of any in the Union, whether one considers the total population including Negroes, or limits the figures to the native Whites. It has been part of the United States for one hundred and thirty years, but United States officials, when going into many parts of it, still have to be accompanied by an interpreter. With only two or three exceptions, every bishop who has been in charge of Catholic interests in Louisiana since Thomas Jefferson's day has been foreign-born and foreign-trained.

For such reasons the feeling of separate interests and lack of unity and national identity have tended to continue; and when the "Cajan" representatives attend the State legislature at Baton Rouge, they address the House in eloquent English, but among themselves, discuss their program in a French patois.

Oklahoma, due to its peculiar history, is one of the cosmopolitan States. When the territory was thrown open to settlement in the great land rush of April 22, 1889, speculators from all parts of the United States were attracted to the scene. But most of the settlers in the northern part came from Kansas or Missouri and in the southern, from Texas or Arkansas. In the next year, when the territory was formally organized, one-third of its population was Indian or Negro. Subsequent land allotments and colonization tended to perpetuate this dual origin of the settlers, but after the State became a famous oil field, in the early years of the present century, the population became so mixed that this distinction was partly lost. Meanwhile the Indian population was not only swamped by the Whites, but largely intermarried with them, partly because Indian women had titles to valuable oil land. At present Oklahoma is still credited with nearly 30 per cent of all the Indians in the United States, though it is supposed that not more than one-fourth of these are full-blood, and many of those who are legally counted as Indians have but a negligible amount of Indian heredity. The Creeks and a few others have mixed to some extent with Negroes, but this has not been general.

Texas, Missouri, Arkansas, and Kansas are still the principal sources of Oklahomans, in the order named; but there is not a State in the Union which is not represented here, many of them with large contingents. The foreign stock is of equally cosmopolitan background, but makes up only one-sixteenth of the whole. Considering the geographical location, it includes a surprisingly large number of Canadians.

Texas contains nearly half a million people of foreign stock, the German element being by far the largest. Second in importance among the foreign stocks is a Czechoslovakian population which has settled largely in the southeastern part. The Germans are mainly to the west of them. The State began to attract Italians just before the World War. The British element is important, while Galveston has long been largely dominated by Jews.

North Texas enjoyed a boom in 1875 and 1876 when a flood of homeseekers poured in with their emigrant wagons. Many of these were farmers from the Middle West who had been impoverished by the great grasshopper plague.

Western Texas was settled late, and periods of drought, such as that at the time of the World War, largely depopulated some sections, farmers packing up what they could carry and abandoning everything else to move into a region where nature was less reluctant to aid them.

Texas is still the offspring of the lower Mississippi Valley States, but commercial development and the oil industry have brought in many Northerners, particularly from the Central States. On the other hand, the State's contribution to Oklahoma dwarfs all the other streams that have gone out from it; but it has also contributed liberally to New Mexico and Arizona and in recent years to California.

Turning back now to the East North Central States, which comprise those originally carved out of the Northwest Territory of 1787, one again encounters the full tide of the so-called "new immigration." Here the old native stock is scarcely more than a numerical majority--fourteen million out of twenty-five, to be more exact; a striking contrast to the Southern States, which we have just been considering, where it still forms nine-tenths or more of the total white population.

Five millions of the later arrivals in the North Central States are Nordics, but a number almost equally large are Alpines. Half a million Mediterraneans are present in the Italian immigration, while the area from which the congress of the Confederation, as one of its last acts, declared that Negro slaves should be forever excluded, has acquired nearly a million free Negroes.

Ohio is still two-thirds native, and its great industrial development has drawn population from all sides, though four out of five of its citizens still find their names on the birth records of the State itself. Besides giving population to all its neighbors it has, like the other States of this region, sent a stream westward, not merely to such places as Kansas and Colorado, but particularly to the Pacific Coast.

While the German element in Ohio which, half a century ago, made such cities as Cincinnati centers of Teutonic kultur, is still the most important numerically, it is outnumbered by the Poles, Czechoslovaks, Hungarians, Yugoslavs, Lithuanians, and the like, if they are taken together. The easy access across the Great Lakes has given Ohio, like her sister States, an important Canadian element.

Indiana, most American of States in its early period, still makes an excellent showing, with nearly 85 per cent of its population native white of native parentage. In the interchange of inhabitants it still continues, as it did in the days of its founding, to draw an important Southern element from across the Ohio River. The State of Ohio does the same. The population still tends to move westward, not eastward, from Indiana, taking with it some of the best of American family lines and the purest of American traditions.

The half million of foreign stock within the borders of the State are at least half Nordic. No single group of the Slavs or Mediterraneans is represented heavily, although there are a few of all those national elements.

The people of Indiana deserve recognition for the way they have preserved their heritage. It is no accident that the "Indiana school" of writers has long sounded the authentic American note in literature, in striking contrast to the decadent tone of the output in some of the Atlantic Coast centers where the dominant element is quite un-American.

Illinois, by contrast, is barely more than half native, and the scandals of its politics in regions where the alien vote is self-conscious, have long been manifest to every newspaper reader. With 329,000 Negroes, according to the 1930 census, Illinois ranks in this respect only after Pennsylvania and New York, among the Northern States; but corrupt political rings have made of the Negro an important factor in the government of Chicago, as he has not been in New York or Philadelphia.

Of its foreign-born stock, Nordics are far below a million, as compared with a million and a half of Alpines and a quarter of a million of Mediterraneans. Under the pressure of this competition, the old native stock has shown a strong tendency to move West and South. Texas and Arkansas, for example, have drawn more heavily from Illinois than they have from any other Northern State, and Illinois has also been the greatest single contributor to the development of the Pacific Coast.

Michigan is now just half native. Its geographical location has attracted more than half a million Canadians, many of them belonging to the French Alpine stock there. In the foreign stock as a whole, Alpines outnumber Nordics not far from two to one. Among the 100,000 Italians are many Northerners in the copper mines--big fellows so unlike the Sicilian and Neapolitan to whom the American on the Atlantic Coast is accustomed, that he does not recognize them as Italians. These northern Italians, as previously noted, are not Mediterraneans, but mostly Alpine with remnants of Nordic blood from the days of the Lombards and Goths.

Wisconsin has almost escaped the Negro invasion of the North, so its three million inhabitants are at least white; but the native stock is in a minority, due largely to the great German inrush of the last century. With this came many Scandinavians.

From 1860 to 1880 the immigrant nationalities ranked in the order--German, Norwegian, Dane, and Swede. The only difference since then is that they rank in the order--German, Norwegian, Swede, and Dane. The great Swedish tide of immigration in the last half of the nineteenth century did not acquire full force until the Norwegian had passed its crest.

As late as 1900, three-fourths of the people of Wisconsin were of foreign parentage, and the Germans made up half of these. Milwaukee, with its Socialist administration, had long been conspicuously the center of German influence in the United States. Up to 1843, was a Yankee village, earnestly trying to supplant Chicago as the center of the Midwest. By 1856 a third of its population was German. By 1890 one-half of its population was of German parentage and one-fourth actually of German birth. That census year, however, saw the high tide of Germanism in Milwaukee. Poles, Russians, Slovaks, and Italians have modified since then the racial character of the city, which is only one-third German at the present time. In the characteristic political color of the State some students profess to see evidence of the fact that many of the German immigrants were revolutionists fleeing from the Fatherland.

In Minnesota, the Germans outnumber any single group, although less numerous than the three Scandinavian groups put together, so the State is correctly thought of as Scandinavian. Considerably less than half of its population is of the old American stock, but the State is overwhelmingly Nordic, the 150,000 Slavs who have invaded it in recent decades being of little account in its 2,500,000 population. Since the days of its founding, Minnesota has drawn from Canada a desirable element, and has given freely in exchange.

Due partly to its relatively late settlement, the State has not been one of those which have contributed heavily to its neighbors. Its greatest outflow has been to the Pacific Coast, as its inhabitants became prosperous enough to move to a milder climate in their old age.

Iowa, of about the same population as Minnesota, is two-thirds native and equally Nordic. It has contributed heavily to the prairie and mountain States, and also to the Pacific Coast, but the standing joke which ascribes to Iowa the parentage of all Southern Californians seems to be not quite exact--at least California as a whole has received more of its population during the past generation from Illinois, Missouri, New York, and Ohio, than from Iowa, which stands only fifth in the list.

Iowa, being pre-dominantly agricultural, has felt particularly the unfavorable status of agriculture since the World War. During the decade 1920-30, three out of every five of the villages in the State actually lost in population, the people having either moved into the cities or "gone West." Here as elsewhere, the small village seems unable to meet the needs of the inhabitants. One of the real problems of statesmanship in the near future is to work out a social and economic system under which a larger part of the old native stock, and particularly the most intelligent portion of it, can live under the favorable biological conditions of the small village.

Missouri has nearly a quarter of a million Negroes, in contrast with such States as the three last discussed, in which the colored population is negligible. But of its white population, three-fourths is native, the rest mostly German. Slavs and Italians have only begun to get a footing. On the whole, the State is strongly Nordic and sends out large contingents of Nordics to Illinois on the East, to Kansas and Oklahoma, and to the mountain and coast States westward. The importance of the Missouri stock, coming to a large extent from that of Virginia, has been much greater than is generally recognized, in the settlement of the whole West.

The great rush into Dakota took place in the decade after 1875. The Red River country was opened up by the Northern Pacific Railway, and the model farms which were established were advertised far and wide, so that the population of 6000 in this district in 1875 increased more than 2000 per cent in the following ten years.

In 1889 the territory of Dakota was divided on the 45° 55´ parallel, and North Dakota was admitted as a State with approximately 170,000 population. Its subsequent growth has kept it fairly homogeneous from a racial point of view, the State being almost wholly Nordic. Apart from the old native Americans the main elements have been British from Canada, Germans, and Scandinavians. The Norwegian immigration which began in the early '90's was particularly noteworthy. Norwegians now form about one-fourth of the total population of the State. An interesting small group is that of the Icelanders, representatives of one of the oldest, most highly cultured, and most stringently selected of all Nordic peoples.

The Russians in the State, approaching a hundred thousand in number, are mostly German-speaking. They are farmers whose ancestors were invited to South Russia several centuries ago, but who retained their speech and culture to a marked degree.

After the discovery of gold in the Black Hills, the country which is now South Dakota had a rush in 1876 and for some years following, much like that of Nevada and Montana during the Civil War and of California in 1849. This frequently does not result in a well-balanced permanent population, and the real settlement of South Dakota dates from the succeeding period when its prairie lands were taken up by wheat growers from the States of the upper Mississippi Valley. The wheat industry in Wisconsin gradually died during the decade of 1870-80, and many who found the ground unprofitable there moved farther west, as did others with similar motives from western New York and the States of the old Northwest Territory.

South Dakota has a slightly higher percentage of old Americans than its sister to the north; otherwise the two differ remarkably little in size, composition, and resources. In 1920, half of the inhabitants of North Dakota claimed South Dakota as a birthplace; while half of the inhabitants of South Dakota claimed North Dakota as theirs. Of all the forty-eight States, these two are unmistakably the Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

Nebraska after the Civil War continued to attract mainly the old American pioneer class, but it also became a haven for several foreign groups. It is said to contain about one-eighth of all the Bohemians in the United States. The serious permanent settlement of the State began in the early '70's. Many discharged soldiers seeking to make a new start went West with their families. It was only a few years later that the foreign tide began to reach these prairies and thereafter the State attracted large fractions of the Bohemian, Scandinavian, and German immigrations. Like some of the other prairie States it also received many settlers who were listed as Russian because of their nationality, but who, in fact, were Germans whose ancestors had gone to Russia and failed to prosper there. Nebraska, therefore, though less than three-fourths native, is overwhelmingly Nordic.

Kansas is still four-fifths native and nine-tenths Nordic. It has received the same foreign contributions as Nebraska, but in much smaller quantities. At the same time it has continued to receive settlers from the Mississippi Valley, and even from Eastern States, such as New York and Pennsylvania.

On the whole, the prairie States have been notably successful in assimilating their immigrants and maintaining an American tradition. The newcomers were not segregated in slums but scattered on farms. It was almost a necessity for them to learn the speech and adopt the customs of their hosts. While some of the Scandinavians, as in Minnesota, have tried to have their children learn the language and preserve the traditions of the "old country," these have at least been Nordic traditions, and any feeling of aloofness or separateness is rapidly disappearing.

The mountain States date largely from the Civil War, when another of the country's waves of migration and settlement broke loose from its moorings and started westward.

The first great migration of the American stock began immediately after the Revolution, and resulted in the creation of Kentucky and Tennessee by the Southerners, the transformation of western New York by the New Englanders, and a mingling of these two streams as they crossed the Ohio River to open up the Northwest Territory.

The second great migration reached its crest with the panic of 1819. It completed the settlement of the Ohio Valley and of the States along the lower Mississippi and the Gulf.

The third great migration reached its height with the feverish land speculation promoted by Andrew Jackson's experiments in banking and broke with the collapse of the prosperity which Martin Van Buren inherited from his predecessor. It witnessed the settlement of the Mississippi Valley throughout almost its entire length; together with the Nordic absorption of Texas.

The fourth wave, slightly more diffuse, washed over the "great plains" and broke on the crests of the Rocky Mountains during the Civil War, though a heavy splash had meanwhile reached the Pacific Coast. It began with the settlement of Kansas, motivated in part by land hunger, but also by definite political calculations. Meanwhile the conquest of California, the discovery of gold there, the settlement of Oregon, and the Mormon appropriation of Utah, brought into existence an active traffic across the plains, which was the beginning of Nebraska's existence.

The Rocky Mountain States grew up in the first place out of this traffic, then by the mining discoveries within their limits, and the fact that there was a restless population on the Pacific Coast, ready to surge back eastward, together with a footloose population to the East ready to move into any part of the West.

This Eastern contingent received its impetus from the panic of 1857, when many men, bankrupt or dislocated, were prepared to make a new start. The mining activities in the Far West encouraged adventurers to try their hand at the gold pan, and the country was full of prospectors, some of them professional but mostly amateur. Men who had no jobs at home thought they might as well seek a fortune in this way; it would not cost them much to live, and they could at least see the country. A similar renaissance of prospecting and small-scale mining took place all over the mountains of the West when the depression of 1929 was well under way.

To this element was shortly added another composed of people getting away from the Civil War. Some of these were actual deserters from military service; others went West to escape the pressure of public opinion toward enlistment; others in the border States, ruined by the conflict or unwilling to cast their lot with either combatant, simply started in motion as their fathers and grandfathers had done before them.

The population of the mountain States varied remarkably from month to month, as the crowd moved from one reputed bonanza to another. The government at Washington showed itself unusually ready to set up new governments in that region, because it was on the whole of unquestioned Union loyalty and, if the South, at the close of the war, should be brought back into the Union on the old terms, as President Lincoln evidently planned, a dozen new senators from half as many new Western States could easily be secured, leaving the South in the minority and breaking that deadlock of almost half a century which had been the source of so many compromises and the occasion of so many conflicts.

Colorado, at that time a part of Kansas, was an almost unknown "Indian territory" when prospectors struck gold in the neighborhood of Denver in 1858 and 1859. The rush from Kansas and Nebraska, when the legend "Pike's Peak or Bust," lettered on the sides of emigrant wagons, became traditional, disclosed how little was known of the country. Pike's Peak, though not near the gold diggings, was the only place in Colorado of which most Americans had ever heard.

In 1861 there was enough population to justify territorial government. Statehood was not attained until 1876. From then on until the agricultural period, the history of Colorado was the history of its fluctuating mining camps. But by 1930 the State had reached a permanent basis and a population of more than a million, of which two-thirds was native and the other third a heterogeneous lot, partly Nordic but containing strong Slav, Italian, and Mexican elements. So far as the native American population was concerned, its geographical origin still represented a fan spreading out from Pike's Peak until it reached the Atlantic Ocean. In large or small proportions, emigrants from most of the older States had converged on the Rockies.

Wyoming, first explored by trappers and fur traders, became important because it was traversed by the Oregon Trail; but it was merely a place to pass through, until the arrival of the Union Pacific Railway and the discovery of gold in the same year (1867) gave it a life of its own. Nearly 6000 persons spent the following winter in Cheyenne--a cosmopolitan crowd of adventurers and speculators. After its organization as a territory in 1859, agriculture had begun, stock raising became important, there were local gold rushes, and the region slowly developed until admitted to the Union in 1890.

Wyoming's population, smaller than that of any other State with the single exception of Nevada, is less than two-thirds native stock, and this represents a blend from all parts of the United States. Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, have all contributed more inhabitants than either of its neighbors, Colorado and Utah. In these mountain States the general rule that a State is settled by its neighbors, quite breaks down. Its foreign stock is equally mixed; while much is Nordic the State has also attracted its quota of Slavs and Italians, and even of Mexicans.

Idaho, after small Mormon settlements of farmers, owed most of its early population to its mines. During the Civil War it grew remarkably, but the fact that it could be reached more easily from the West than from the East, due to access by the Columbia River, made its settlement somewhat anomalous in American history, for it was settled largely by Westerners moving east from Oregon, Washington, and northern California.

In Idaho the development of Mormon colonies has given Utah a strong influence in the State. Apart from this, its population is made up nowadays more from the Mississippi Valley than from the mountain and Pacific Coast States. It is only three-fourths native, but most of the remainder is Nordic, British and Scandinavians both having sought its opportunities. A territory in 1863 and a State in 1890, Idaho now has a population of nearly half a million.

Montana, in the winter of 1862 and 1863 had a total population of 670 inhabitants of whom _The Chronicle_ complacently says: "Fifty-nine were evidently respectable women." Like Idaho, it attracted an element of Southern men escaping from the draft into the Confederate Army, but from then on a large part of its population was from the Northern States. Its growth of population was closely linked up with the fortunes of the mining industry.

Territorial status was given Montana at the time of the great gold discoveries in 1864, and the character of its population fluctuated a good deal, both as to quantity and quality, between that date and 1889 when it was admitted to Statehood. It has now more than half a million inhabitants, nearly half of whom are of foreign stock and largely Roman Catholics. Most of the natives are from the Central States; most of the foreigners are Irish, Germans, or Canadians, though Montana has also attracted more than 50,000 Scandinavians.

Utah's population is now about the size of that of Montana, and but slightly more native in character (three-fifths). These natives are to a large extent born in the State, the descendants of the Mormon pioneers. The "Gentiles" are of widely scattered origin. The foreign stock is mostly English or Scandinavian, the Mormon missionaries having worked diligently in those kingdoms. Utah, therefore, represents a Nordic population, and one with a high birthrate, whence it is evidently destined to continue spreading steadily in the Great Basin.

Nevada sprang almost full grown from the desert, as Venus did from the waves. It scarcely existed, though on the maps as a transmontane part of California, until the gold rush of 1849 brought settlements into existence to take care of the travellers. Then it was attached administratively to Utah, which was also inconveniently distant. The discovery of silver in the fabulously rich Comstock Lode (1859) led to the establishment of Virginia City, and to the inrush of a torrent of miners, particularly from California, where the gold deposits were becoming exhausted.

In 1861 Nevada was established as a separate territory, and Lincoln's administration pushed it through to Statehood in 1864 to get the advantage of two more friendly senators. With the exhausting of the silver deposits in a quarter of a century, Nevada had a severe decline, many of her inhabitants moving away. There was another mining boom in the first ten or fifteen years of this century, but the State has never made a steady and substantial growth, and the 1930 census credited it with no more than 91,058 inhabitants. Not much more than half of these were of the native stock. The foreigners were a scattered lot, with an unexpectedly large Italian contingent.

Arizona was cut loose from New Mexico in 1863, and, after the Civil War, became a typical Western mining community, with a fluctuating frontier population. A district might be active one year and a few years later abandoned.

The Mormons made some of the early settlements in the State and still form a significant part of its population. Like Colorado, Arizona has more than its share of Mexicans, while some of the other Western States, Utah and Nevada for instance, have only negligible numbers of them. The presence of more than 100,000 Mexicans in 1930 gave Arizona, with less than half a million inhabitants all told, a bad position as to its proportion of native stock. If one takes account only of the Whites, 80 per cent are natives of native parentage, the others mostly British or German, with again a surprisingly large Canadian contingent, considering how far removed the two regions are. The American population is of notably cosmopolitan origin, people having gone there from every State in the Union, in connection with mining, or for reasons of health. But Texas is by far the largest single contributor, with California a poor second.

New Mexico stands in the anomalous position of having an almost unparalleled percentage of its population born not merely in the United States, but within its own borders; and yet of having an unparalleled proportion of its population speaking an alien language. An official interpreter is still required in its State legislature, so that the local statesmen who boast of their Americanism but cannot speak English, can make their views known to the Americans. Since the "Spanish-Americans" are classified by the census as white, three-fourths of the population are listed as native white of native parentage. There were also, in 1930, about 60,000 Mexicans born south of the line, hence aliens. The other residents of foreign stock are scattering, with no one nationality greatly predominating.

California, which in 1860 had the highest percentage of foreigners, had not changed this situation strikingly in 1930, despite the great influx of old American stock from the Central States. Of its 5,677,251 residents, just over a half were native Whites of native parentage. The general character of the migration to California since the beginning of this century is too well known to require extended comment. Every part of the Union has contributed; even Florida is credited with a couple of thousand converts. On the whole, this influx has been of the purest Nordic stock, but if a constitutional convention were now to be called, its make-up would perhaps not differ greatly from that of 1849, which was attended by delegates born in thirty different States of the Union.

The foreign element in California is equally heterogeneous, though largely Nordic, so far as it is white at all. Canada has sent a quarter of a million, nearly all of English ancestry. Italy has contributed nearly a quarter of a million, who make an important part of the population in the northern half of the State. Unlike their fellow nationals in the Atlantic States, these California Italians are mostly from the northern part of that kingdom. Between North and South Italians there is not great sympathy--representatives of the two groups avoid intermarriage. They also avoid migrating to the same territories and, if the Neapolitan occupies the Atlantic States, the Genoese will push on to the other side of the continent. These northern Italians have played a much more prominent rôle around San Francisco than one would anticipate who knows only the southern Italian in New York or Boston.

The State has also attracted 150,000 Russians, partly refugees since the Bolshevik revolution, but mostly agriculturists of an earlier period; more than half a million British, including Irish, more than 300,000 Germans, more than 200,000 Scandinavians.

It is the non-white element that has attracted attention most continuously from the outside world. California had nearly half a million Mexicans, until the exodus which began after the depression of 1929 had made their manual labor less valuable.

It had 45,000 Filipinos, who created serious problems in some regions, both by competing with native labor, and by paying attention to white girls, which is resented by the Americans.

The State's population of 37,000 Chinese is declining steadily. The memorable agitation of the '70's for Chinese exclusion is now only a historical event, but it was important as helping to lay the foundation for a wise immigration policy in the United States. Mining, war times, and the building of the transcontinental railway had kept up inflated conditions for years. Chinese were pouring in, partly to the mines, and partly to the railway, which used them in construction work. Some 15,000 of these Oriental laborers, turned out of work by the completion of the Central Pacific Railway, principally in 1869-70, poured into San Francisco and made their presence unmistakable. A decade of dissatisfaction followed, particularly among American workingmen. The most conspicuous agitator was the Irish drayman, Dennis Kearney. In 1879 the State voted against the further immigration of Chinese by a majority of 154,638 to 883. There have been few issues in American history carried by a more nearly unanimous vote. In the same year the Federal Congress passed an exclusion act which established the principle that an unassimilable people may be shut out entirely, if necessary to protect American standards.

Agitation along similar lines sprang up about 1906-7, due to the rapid increase of Japanese in the State. It was settled, first by a "gentlemen's agreement" between the United States and Japan, by which the latter undertook to prevent the emigration of its laboring class to the Pacific Coast States; second, by a law later adopted in California, which prevented alien Japanese from owning land; third, by a final exclusion of all Orientals through national legislation.

The hundred thousand Japanese shown in the 1930 census are no longer increasing rapidly, in spite of a fairly high birthrate. The existence of these second-generation Japanese (and the same is true, in proportion, of the Chinese) has, however, created a serious problem all its own, since they are not accepted by either race. They usually do not speak the Japanese language. They are inclined to look down upon its institutions, and admire those of America. Hence the real Japanese element both dislikes them, and does not employ them because of the language barrier. On the other hand, the American does not accept them as Americans, and they cannot be employed easily alongside of and in competition with white natives of the United States. The second-generation Oriental is practically a man without a country. Because of these special racial problems, California has had difficulties that some of the other States have not fully or sympathetically understood.

Oregon's million inhabitants are two-thirds native Whites of the old stock. Canada, the British Isles, Germany, and Scandinavia, have been the other large contributors. The American population is largely from the Central States.

Washington now has more than a million and a half inhabitants, 56 per cent of whom are of old native stock. Eastern Washington felt a boom in 1862 when it began to accumulate population attracted partly by mines and partly by farming possibilities, until it reached an equilibrium with the Puget Sound end of the State which has always been an important political factor. Many settlers at this time were immigrants from the "border States" of the Civil War, who became disgusted with the guerrilla warfare to which they were subjected, and who were not enthusiastically for either side. During the '80's, the rapid construction of railway lines brought the population of Washington up to a respectable figure in a very few years.

The present Whites are mainly from the States of the upper Mississippi Valley. Canada has furnished 100,000 more of British ancestry, and a slightly larger number has come direct from the British Isles. Germany has contributed 100,000, Scandinavia 175,000. As against this, Italy is represented by less than 25,000, and the Slav countries altogether by not much more than 60,000. Hence Washington is entitled to claim that it is one of the most Nordic of the States.