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.