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

by Madison Grant

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.