The electoral-vote.com website’s current front page contains a link to this map pertaining to the dominant ethnic background of the United States, on a per-state and per-county basis.
Am I reading this correctly? Was is jetzt schon wieder los? Alles der counties, das Deutchse Vaterlanden haben? Diesen Americaner, der Kraut und der Bratwurst ben essen am jeden hinterhof und im den dining-zimmeren?
How, amidst the myriad discussions of ethnic makeup here in the United States, did I miss the massive plurality if not outright majority of folks of Germanic origin? Heck, you can’t even find a decent German restaurant in most cities!
Yup, I’ve heard this before; the population of the US is more German than it is anywhere else. That doesn’t make German-Americans a majority, just a plurality, and by a fairly narrow margin at that. But it’s a plurality that is spread fairly evenly across the US, so you get a lot of counties, and come to that a lot of states, in which the most common ethnicity is German.
You understand, though, we German-Americans blend in pretty well. We look like average white people. Our names don’t stand out, and in fact many have been anglicized - Weber -> Weaver was fairly common, for example. We mostly belong to mainstream Christian denominations, so our churches don’t stand out either. And after some serious unpleasantness in 1918, we haven’t really done anything to draw attention to ourselves.
But there are a lot of us. We didn’t come to the US in any huge waves, like the Irish during the Potato Famine for instance, but we came in a fairly steady stream that lasted a long, long time. And once we got there, we made lots of babies.
This data assumes that people have only one ethnicity, when the reality is that many people have ancestors from several different countries.
This data allows people to self-identify.
Unmarked ethnicities (such as English) are not always known or considered.
Several factors will influence a choice of ethnicity: an obviously ethnic surname (O’Gallagher, Schneeweisschen); a recent immigrant ancestor; identification with a colorful / interesting ancestry (ooh! I’m a Celt!)
This map is geographical, and the large German-dominated sections are comparatively sparsely populated.
In other words, while interesting and accurate as far as it goes, I think the map is based on some flawed data.
Most of these German Americans speak no German, have never been to Germany, and just have ancestors who came to the US in the 18th or 19th century from Germany, or places nearby.
Maybe you plan didn’t get that Dutch in names in America is often really German or Deutsch. Pennsylvanian Deutsch is a term I’m sure you heard and thought was Dutch. If you did know the difference, I have no idea why you didn’t realize there were so many of German decent in America.
It could be that many German-Americans who seemed more obviously German once upon a time de-Germanized their names during one of the two World Wars, when Germany was exceedingly unpopular. (and they had the ability to blend in with non-German Americans, unlike the Japanese)
The German states of the 18th and 19th century experienced massive amounts of emigration to the new world. One factor was that Germany was overpopulated in mid-to-late 19th century. Emigration was officially encouraged to reduce excess population, and was also seen as a way of promulgating German culture to the globe, since Germany had largely missed out on becoming a colonial power.
As noted, this was long enough ago that most descendants of those immigrants have simply melted into the mainstream, and intermarried with other ethnicities. You do, however, find many small towns that were established by German immigrants during the 19th century, and still make a point of their German heritage. Many groups of German immigrants were very well organized in comparison to those of other enthnicities, and came prepared to establish a functioning town in the middle of nowhere. As opposed to settling in ethnic enclaves of the major cities.
My maternal grandfather’s parents despite both being born in the US spoke german in the home. Then when he was about five, they decided that the whole family was going to speak only english from now on. They consciously decided to de-germanify themselves.
There used to be neighborhoods and whole towns where you’d hear more german than english, just like today there are neighborhoods where you’ll hear more spanish than english. First generation immigrants might learn english but they typically don’t become fluent, they learn enough to get by. Their kids speak both english and the language of their parents, but they speak english natively. And the third generation kids often don’t know more than a smattering of their grandparent’s language.
My grandfather who grew up speaking German in the home until he was five-ish ended up unable to speak german at all, with only a few german words sprinkled in here and there, like kaffeekuchen instead of coffee cake.
So German immigration happened long enough ago that all living memory of the barely-english speaking immigrants has gone. Add in WWI and WWII and german ethnicity faded into generic american.
The first wave of Germans arrived earlier than most other non-British immigrants, when land was still available and factory jobs, by and large, weren’t. More Germans became farmers and filled up all those light-blue counties on the map.
By the time the majority of Poles, Italians, Hispanics, etc. arrived, the land was taken but there were jobs in the big cities.
"During the century preceding the First World War, a pluralistic German-language culture existed in America; as late as 1910 an estimated nine million people in the United States still spoke German as their mother tongue. They formed the broad basis for readership of a large variety of German-language newspapers and publications, supplied membership for German-language clubs and parishes, and were the force behind assorted attempts at offering German as a language of instruction, or at least as a foreign language elective, in the public schools. "
Slight hijack, but the map is a bit odd. It lists Norwegian heritage (1.6%) and Finnish (0,5%), but not Swedish (1.6%) or Danish (0,5%) which are both larger than Finnish, and Swedish as big a percentage as Norwegian (wiki figures). Not that it matter much, but it makes one doubt the map a bit.
I would have been surpised had “German” not popped up on the list at all. But I thought a bigger turnout would be for Italian and Irish in the northeast (instead of little speckles), and I would have expected Scottish sprinkled throughout Appalachia (they don’t even make it into “Other”). I would have expected far more English. More Russian (at least a county or two in Brookly and Queens).
And what’s with the “American” throughout the South? Does that equate to “been so long we haven’t a clue”? I mean, talk about missing the point…
Yeah, this whole ethnicity thing in the US is, in large part, BS. How many of us trace all our ancestry back to one country? I trace mine back to at least 6 different European countries, and those are only the ones I know of.
Speaking for myself, I’m 102 pounds German, 48 pounds Italian, 36 pounds Irish, and 3 pounds each English and Shawnee. At least, so far as I know: There are some hints in the geneaology that some of that German might actually be French or Hungarian. Yet, despite Irish being third in the list, that’s what I identify with most strongly.
And yes, I do find it convenient that my weight in pounds is a multiple of 64.
I have to question what difference there is between the German ancestry of people of Ohio and Indiana and the American ancestry of the people of Kentucky and West Virginia.
