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.