The Conquest of a Continent; or, The Expansion of Races in America

by Madison Grant

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.