It is something of an issue that there isn’t a strong, explicitly English identity in Americans of such extract. As the English have arguably been the most successful ethnic group in history, equal to or beside the Jewish people. I hope a certain level of ethnogenesis (or realization) spreads among the English diaspora.
After four centuries on the North American continent, speaking "English diaspora" in some ethnic sense is a big stretch. You used the word "Ethnogenesis." That is what happened. A new branch of NW-European civilization was launched in North America.
Perhaps it will be something of a heresy to say, but I think that, at some point in American history, that America ceased to be an English society and instead became charged with the accidental duty of extirpating English identity. I should probably note that we are in an anthropologically postmodern paradigm where, instead of the natural succession from when one ethnic group (or collection of groups) aligns to create a New Ethnic Group, it is the case rather; that the ethnic group’s evolution to a New Ethnic Group is stilted and only serves as an annihilatory construct.
We used to have this, many television shows in the 70’s made references to the mother country. Bewitched, Andy Griffith, the Waltons, Beverly Hillbillys not to mention films from Disney ...nursery rhymes, the British Invasion music, recipes...I don’t know when it changed.
It's easier to maintain an ethnic identity with a different language or religion, as in the case of the Irish Catholics. I believe D. H. Fischer said there wasn't much English immigration in the early 19th century, so the next wave of immigrants didn't have existing enclaves or family to join.
A "gentleman" from London (1844-1904) married my great-grandmother's aunt. I've no idea what would attract him to what's now backest-backwater NC (near Soul City) during Reconstruction. Hiding out?
Looks like a bunch of Scots came over during Britain's post-WWI industrial decline and then went home during our Depression or when WW2 started. What did 20th century German immigrants do?
The overwhelmingly English character of middle America's white population is pretty clear if you look at just about any directory in your typical town or small city.
America is also much more Welsh than people realize: two Welsh surnames, Williams and Jones, make the top five US surnames.
I think the problem with the English ethnic thing is partly that it didn't really catch on in England itself until early modern times. England means "land of the Angles," but the Germans who settled mostly identified as Saxons, right? So it's kind of a misnomer.
The language we speak is a hybrid of Saxon, Norman French and a little Norse. The population is ethnically, for the most part, native British. Early Americans were well aware of all this: Benjamin Franklin even suggested we be careful about German immigration because our (British) forefathers made that mistake before.
I think it's pretty clear that colonial Americans weren't all that attached to English as an identity. We readily gave it up, and even the loyalists were more attached to the crown than they were to Mother England or any such 20th century type of nationalism.
I personally feel a kinship with English people, who are culturally not all that different from me, but despite having plenty of "English" ancestors, the English identity in the nationalist sense seems pretty foreign. In a sense, English and American ethnicity are not compatible precisely because we come from the same root stock. There must be some division to make our American identity meaningful.
A surname analysis will tend to overestimate British-Isles contributions because of name changes.
Every branch of Ron DeSantis' ancestral tree ties back to Italy. But his mother was born with the name Karen Rogers. Neither an adoptions nor a marriage caused that name. The arriving ancestor, leaving Italy with the name "Antonio Ruggiero," arriving at New York in 1912 at eighteen; within a few years he was going by the name "Tony Rogers."
A son, named James at birth, raised in Lowellville, Ohio, used the name "Jimmie Rogers" his whole life, perhaps active with the Republican Party (even in the highly-Democratic-voting area of industrial Ohio his family lived). When I wrote that DeSantis ancestral profile, I commented on how we see early indication of what Ron DeSantis would do based on some of these trends evident in his family already in the early-20th century.
.
________________
[quote from "Son of Florida, grandson of Industrial Ohio, great-grandson of Italy: The ancestry of Ron DeSantis"]
[....] There is Karen Rogers’ paternal grandfather and his choice to call himself “Tony Rogers” (nee Antonio Ruggiero). He had arrived in 1912, at age eighteen; already on the June 1917 draft registration, he gave his name as “Rogers,” but someone crossed it out and wrote “Ruggiero.” (One imagines the Ohio draft board man asking the foreign-seeming man in front of the board if “Rogers” was really his name, No? It’s not your legal name, you say? Please write your legal name.)
Tony Rogers gave his children the following (non-Italian) names: John, Mary, James, Anne, Philip, Ernest, and Samuel. Philip Rogers is Karen Rogers’ father (and the Florida governor’s grandfather). [....]
That was a pretty standard thing for immigrants to do at that time. My grandparents arrived in the U.S. from Transylvania in 1912 and 1913. I remember when I was child in the 1970s and '80s asking my mom why we didn't identify as "Hungarian-Americans", and she said that when she was growing up, the idea was to become as American as possible as quickly as you could; ideally shedding your weird foreign names and losing the thick accent. She was extremely annoyed by the idea of being a "hyphenated-American" and had absolutely no patience with people who lived in the U.S. but didn't learn to speak English. My brother and I always joked about how my mom's family went from being what we felt was a more interesting ethnicity to being the most white-bread-and-mayonnaise Americans within a single generation. My grandparents did the same thing with their children's names; my mom and her siblings all had the most American-sounding names my grandparents could think of.
The British-U.S. rivalry and mutual distrust was persistent through all the 19th century, even as of the later 1890s still it held, manifesting in little crises here and there. It was only in the 1900s decade that a U.S.-British alliance of sorts, or geopolitical alignment, fell into place. And that was thanks to the imperialistic-type Weltpolitik of Theodore Roosevelt (of Dutch-colonial ancestry).
I live near a triangle of forts built in the late 19th century specifically designed to keep the British out of Puget Sound. They feature not only heavy concrete bunkers but also some pretty massive gun emplacements for mortars as well as cannon. It's a great place to take kids to teach them about artillery and the mathematical principles it employs.
Your example of the Puget Sound reminds me of something obvious: the existence of British-controlled Canada. The existence of "Canada," under British control, is itself a possible answer to Steve Sailer's question here. As well as a big explanation for the longevity of US-British rivalry and often-poor relations decade after decade, really until the ten-or-fifteen years before the 1914 war.
North America had two rival powers: The "United States" and the British in Canada, the latter representing a global empire and leading naval and commercial interests, which meddled in all kinds of pies in every corner of the globe and outclassed American efforts in most places most of the time in the 19th century.
An Englishman showing up in the USA in the 19th-century and holding fast to an English/British identity might be analogous to an ethnic-German from elsewhere in the world moving to Cold War-era West Germany but expressing a strong 'East German' identity. In other words, an identity to an overlapping identity with the same-language ad similar institutional heritage, but to an outright-rival state.
Rivalry in the Oregon Territory (which includes today's Washington State) was heated enough to lead to some armed confrontations prior to the Civil War. And later on the continuing hostility is what prompted the Russians to sell Alaska to the US.
The Russians were worried that the British could easily seize the relatively defenseless territory from their base in Victoria on Vancouver Island and then stage attacks on the Russian far eastern ports. They figured that American ownership of Alaska would prevent them from dominating the north Pacific/Bering Sea region.
My grandparents were all born Eastern European Jews but on account of my language and education (in the 80s) I regard myself as pretty darn English. I imagine that most Americans do.
Our shared English language gives us all the opportunity to play at having peripheral identities because the English part is taken as a given. That's why so many descendants of English-folk play up their (occasionally imagined) Irish or Scots-Irish aspects.
Counterintuitively, as England continues to diminish in importance, Englishness (and Caucasianness) will rise as an "interesting identifier".
You can already see this in what once regard as the "new" parts of the Kingdom. I have met both South Asians and Africans who talk up some (mythical?) English ancestor as for why they regard themselves (in eloquent English) as Englishmen.
My own education (in entirely Orthodox Jewish schools) was heavy on the magna carta and English history as "our history" as Americans. As this decreases and England's importance fades "Englishness" is due for a proud revival in nostalgia for times long gone.
Part of the explanation is that America owes so much of its culture and ethnic identity to England. Therefore, Englishness doesn't feel very exotic, or even very distinct. To be an English-American isn't very different from being an American-American.
Cary Grant (Archibald Alec Leach) seems to be another Bob Hope-like story, although he came here at age 16, and helped developed the “Mid-Atlantic” accent used in early films…
J. D. Vance, in or near the elite 'Law' world for 15 years now, mysteriously converted to Catholicism in the late 2010s. That being around the time he was about to evolve towards the Right. Vance's elite-Hindu wife wouldn't be the influence there. But she was a SCOTUS law-clerk.
The cult of Ellis Island and the desire for some kind of heritage means that a lot of people reduce their heritage to "most recent immigrant ancestor." So a lot of people who are really 50+% British by heritage will say they're "Irish" or "Italian" or whatever because of their one ancestor of that origin.
For others, there's the related "most exotic national ancestor" so people will ID as French or emphasize being "part Native American" when such heritage is minimal or, in the latter case, doesn't even exist.
The degree of the "underestimation pr understatement of older-stock ancestry" phenomenon that you identify could probably be modelled based on a sample of 23andMe results vs. simple surveys of stated ancestry from the general population. I wonder if anyone has tried.
English versus British identity. Between the colonisation and independence of America, they were coagulating into two different sorts of thing.
The Irish distinguish between nationalists and republicans. Republicanism is about loyalty to the state, the flag, the constitution and a political tradition, while nationalism is a cultural attachment to things like Gaelic sport, the Irish language, descent from kings, ancient monuments and so on. There is a bit of both in most of them. To an Englishman, this is exactly the difference between Union Jack, King and Country British patriotism, and English patriotism. The latter is about green hills and castles, but also football crowds, the industrial revolution, and certain times of year, notably early November.
Presumably all nationalities feel the distinction, but it is particularly clear cut if they are attached to two different flags, both of them yours. And I would imagine that they are more easily transplanted as one identity than two.
Crosby's public Irish identity was likely a very calculated commercial move---get those large middle-class Irish families of the time listening to his shows and into the theaters to see him --- in the same way Robert DeNiro played up his Italian roots when really he's a mutt.
That said, many WASPs would wonder *why* they would ever need to play up their ethnic roots. If you don't know who they are, then you aren't worth talking to -- because they are the masters of the house.
Recall the old ditty about the Boston Brahmin WASP elite:
As a non-WASP in every way, I have long thought that this one line from Matt Damon in *The Good Shepherd* was pretty much the most kick-ass pro-WASP, anti-other-ethnicities line I've ever heard:
It is something of an issue that there isn’t a strong, explicitly English identity in Americans of such extract. As the English have arguably been the most successful ethnic group in history, equal to or beside the Jewish people. I hope a certain level of ethnogenesis (or realization) spreads among the English diaspora.
After four centuries on the North American continent, speaking "English diaspora" in some ethnic sense is a big stretch. You used the word "Ethnogenesis." That is what happened. A new branch of NW-European civilization was launched in North America.
Perhaps it will be something of a heresy to say, but I think that, at some point in American history, that America ceased to be an English society and instead became charged with the accidental duty of extirpating English identity. I should probably note that we are in an anthropologically postmodern paradigm where, instead of the natural succession from when one ethnic group (or collection of groups) aligns to create a New Ethnic Group, it is the case rather; that the ethnic group’s evolution to a New Ethnic Group is stilted and only serves as an annihilatory construct.
How dare you call me stilted, sir. I demand satisfaction.
Yeah, it happened when our ancestors threw the tea in the harbor. No self-respecting Englishman would waste perfectly good tea.
We used to have this, many television shows in the 70’s made references to the mother country. Bewitched, Andy Griffith, the Waltons, Beverly Hillbillys not to mention films from Disney ...nursery rhymes, the British Invasion music, recipes...I don’t know when it changed.
As in John Derbyshadow?
"newcomers from England apparently turned into unhyphenated Regular Americans almost immediately"
At what point did Peter Brimelow become a 'Regular' American?
It's easier to maintain an ethnic identity with a different language or religion, as in the case of the Irish Catholics. I believe D. H. Fischer said there wasn't much English immigration in the early 19th century, so the next wave of immigrants didn't have existing enclaves or family to join.
A "gentleman" from London (1844-1904) married my great-grandmother's aunt. I've no idea what would attract him to what's now backest-backwater NC (near Soul City) during Reconstruction. Hiding out?
Looks like a bunch of Scots came over during Britain's post-WWI industrial decline and then went home during our Depression or when WW2 started. What did 20th century German immigrants do?
Settled in Texas and Kansas
Steve’s neglecting religion. The Irish clustered in neighborhoods because they were Catholic (unlike most English).
In Canada we got more Scots (also mostly Protestant) who did not cluster in separate neighbourhoods.
My English grandmother married a Scottish immigrant that she met in Canada. They were both Protestant.
The overwhelmingly English character of middle America's white population is pretty clear if you look at just about any directory in your typical town or small city.
America is also much more Welsh than people realize: two Welsh surnames, Williams and Jones, make the top five US surnames.
I think the problem with the English ethnic thing is partly that it didn't really catch on in England itself until early modern times. England means "land of the Angles," but the Germans who settled mostly identified as Saxons, right? So it's kind of a misnomer.
The language we speak is a hybrid of Saxon, Norman French and a little Norse. The population is ethnically, for the most part, native British. Early Americans were well aware of all this: Benjamin Franklin even suggested we be careful about German immigration because our (British) forefathers made that mistake before.
I think it's pretty clear that colonial Americans weren't all that attached to English as an identity. We readily gave it up, and even the loyalists were more attached to the crown than they were to Mother England or any such 20th century type of nationalism.
I personally feel a kinship with English people, who are culturally not all that different from me, but despite having plenty of "English" ancestors, the English identity in the nationalist sense seems pretty foreign. In a sense, English and American ethnicity are not compatible precisely because we come from the same root stock. There must be some division to make our American identity meaningful.
A surname analysis will tend to overestimate British-Isles contributions because of name changes.
Every branch of Ron DeSantis' ancestral tree ties back to Italy. But his mother was born with the name Karen Rogers. Neither an adoptions nor a marriage caused that name. The arriving ancestor, leaving Italy with the name "Antonio Ruggiero," arriving at New York in 1912 at eighteen; within a few years he was going by the name "Tony Rogers."
A son, named James at birth, raised in Lowellville, Ohio, used the name "Jimmie Rogers" his whole life, perhaps active with the Republican Party (even in the highly-Democratic-voting area of industrial Ohio his family lived). When I wrote that DeSantis ancestral profile, I commented on how we see early indication of what Ron DeSantis would do based on some of these trends evident in his family already in the early-20th century.
.
________________
[quote from "Son of Florida, grandson of Industrial Ohio, great-grandson of Italy: The ancestry of Ron DeSantis"]
[....] There is Karen Rogers’ paternal grandfather and his choice to call himself “Tony Rogers” (nee Antonio Ruggiero). He had arrived in 1912, at age eighteen; already on the June 1917 draft registration, he gave his name as “Rogers,” but someone crossed it out and wrote “Ruggiero.” (One imagines the Ohio draft board man asking the foreign-seeming man in front of the board if “Rogers” was really his name, No? It’s not your legal name, you say? Please write your legal name.)
Tony Rogers gave his children the following (non-Italian) names: John, Mary, James, Anne, Philip, Ernest, and Samuel. Philip Rogers is Karen Rogers’ father (and the Florida governor’s grandfather). [....]
https://hailtoyou.wordpress.com/2021/10/12/the-ancestry-of-ron-desantis-son-of-florida-grandson-of-industrial-ohio-great-grandson-of-italy/
__________________
Jimmie Rogers addendum:
https://hailtoyou.wordpress.com/2021/10/12/the-ancestry-of-ron-desantis-son-of-florida-grandson-of-industrial-ohio-great-grandson-of-italy/#comment-47976
That was a pretty standard thing for immigrants to do at that time. My grandparents arrived in the U.S. from Transylvania in 1912 and 1913. I remember when I was child in the 1970s and '80s asking my mom why we didn't identify as "Hungarian-Americans", and she said that when she was growing up, the idea was to become as American as possible as quickly as you could; ideally shedding your weird foreign names and losing the thick accent. She was extremely annoyed by the idea of being a "hyphenated-American" and had absolutely no patience with people who lived in the U.S. but didn't learn to speak English. My brother and I always joked about how my mom's family went from being what we felt was a more interesting ethnicity to being the most white-bread-and-mayonnaise Americans within a single generation. My grandparents did the same thing with their children's names; my mom and her siblings all had the most American-sounding names my grandparents could think of.
The British-U.S. rivalry and mutual distrust was persistent through all the 19th century, even as of the later 1890s still it held, manifesting in little crises here and there. It was only in the 1900s decade that a U.S.-British alliance of sorts, or geopolitical alignment, fell into place. And that was thanks to the imperialistic-type Weltpolitik of Theodore Roosevelt (of Dutch-colonial ancestry).
I live near a triangle of forts built in the late 19th century specifically designed to keep the British out of Puget Sound. They feature not only heavy concrete bunkers but also some pretty massive gun emplacements for mortars as well as cannon. It's a great place to take kids to teach them about artillery and the mathematical principles it employs.
Your example of the Puget Sound reminds me of something obvious: the existence of British-controlled Canada. The existence of "Canada," under British control, is itself a possible answer to Steve Sailer's question here. As well as a big explanation for the longevity of US-British rivalry and often-poor relations decade after decade, really until the ten-or-fifteen years before the 1914 war.
North America had two rival powers: The "United States" and the British in Canada, the latter representing a global empire and leading naval and commercial interests, which meddled in all kinds of pies in every corner of the globe and outclassed American efforts in most places most of the time in the 19th century.
An Englishman showing up in the USA in the 19th-century and holding fast to an English/British identity might be analogous to an ethnic-German from elsewhere in the world moving to Cold War-era West Germany but expressing a strong 'East German' identity. In other words, an identity to an overlapping identity with the same-language ad similar institutional heritage, but to an outright-rival state.
Yes, and good analogy.
Rivalry in the Oregon Territory (which includes today's Washington State) was heated enough to lead to some armed confrontations prior to the Civil War. And later on the continuing hostility is what prompted the Russians to sell Alaska to the US.
The Russians were worried that the British could easily seize the relatively defenseless territory from their base in Victoria on Vancouver Island and then stage attacks on the Russian far eastern ports. They figured that American ownership of Alaska would prevent them from dominating the north Pacific/Bering Sea region.
I think it's because we are ALL English.
My grandparents were all born Eastern European Jews but on account of my language and education (in the 80s) I regard myself as pretty darn English. I imagine that most Americans do.
Our shared English language gives us all the opportunity to play at having peripheral identities because the English part is taken as a given. That's why so many descendants of English-folk play up their (occasionally imagined) Irish or Scots-Irish aspects.
Counterintuitively, as England continues to diminish in importance, Englishness (and Caucasianness) will rise as an "interesting identifier".
You can already see this in what once regard as the "new" parts of the Kingdom. I have met both South Asians and Africans who talk up some (mythical?) English ancestor as for why they regard themselves (in eloquent English) as Englishmen.
My own education (in entirely Orthodox Jewish schools) was heavy on the magna carta and English history as "our history" as Americans. As this decreases and England's importance fades "Englishness" is due for a proud revival in nostalgia for times long gone.
Part of the explanation is that America owes so much of its culture and ethnic identity to England. Therefore, Englishness doesn't feel very exotic, or even very distinct. To be an English-American isn't very different from being an American-American.
Cary Grant (Archibald Alec Leach) seems to be another Bob Hope-like story, although he came here at age 16, and helped developed the “Mid-Atlantic” accent used in early films…
N.B. Cary Grant once worked impishly worked own real name into a movie, the classic *His Girl Friday*:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBX9IJPvvpo
And not a single Protestant on the Supreme Court for some time now.
J. D. Vance, in or near the elite 'Law' world for 15 years now, mysteriously converted to Catholicism in the late 2010s. That being around the time he was about to evolve towards the Right. Vance's elite-Hindu wife wouldn't be the influence there. But she was a SCOTUS law-clerk.
That's because Supreme Court Justices serve for life, and experience has shown that Protestants appointed by Republic presidents tend to evolve left.
The cult of Ellis Island and the desire for some kind of heritage means that a lot of people reduce their heritage to "most recent immigrant ancestor." So a lot of people who are really 50+% British by heritage will say they're "Irish" or "Italian" or whatever because of their one ancestor of that origin.
For others, there's the related "most exotic national ancestor" so people will ID as French or emphasize being "part Native American" when such heritage is minimal or, in the latter case, doesn't even exist.
This is absolutely right.
The degree of the "underestimation pr understatement of older-stock ancestry" phenomenon that you identify could probably be modelled based on a sample of 23andMe results vs. simple surveys of stated ancestry from the general population. I wonder if anyone has tried.
English versus British identity. Between the colonisation and independence of America, they were coagulating into two different sorts of thing.
The Irish distinguish between nationalists and republicans. Republicanism is about loyalty to the state, the flag, the constitution and a political tradition, while nationalism is a cultural attachment to things like Gaelic sport, the Irish language, descent from kings, ancient monuments and so on. There is a bit of both in most of them. To an Englishman, this is exactly the difference between Union Jack, King and Country British patriotism, and English patriotism. The latter is about green hills and castles, but also football crowds, the industrial revolution, and certain times of year, notably early November.
Presumably all nationalities feel the distinction, but it is particularly clear cut if they are attached to two different flags, both of them yours. And I would imagine that they are more easily transplanted as one identity than two.
Crosby's public Irish identity was likely a very calculated commercial move---get those large middle-class Irish families of the time listening to his shows and into the theaters to see him --- in the same way Robert DeNiro played up his Italian roots when really he's a mutt.
That said, many WASPs would wonder *why* they would ever need to play up their ethnic roots. If you don't know who they are, then you aren't worth talking to -- because they are the masters of the house.
Recall the old ditty about the Boston Brahmin WASP elite:
"Here’s to the town of Boston
The land of the bean and the cod
Where the Lowells speak only to Cabots,
And the Cabots speak only to G*d."
As a non-WASP in every way, I have long thought that this one line from Matt Damon in *The Good Shepherd* was pretty much the most kick-ass pro-WASP, anti-other-ethnicities line I've ever heard:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQMzJ5Z7zBw