Ancestry and political attitudes

[All Along The Watchtower]

How much influence does an American region or locality's ancestral makeup (past or present) have on the political attitudes, beliefs, and tendencies of the residents, or the political culture of said region?

For example, the Upper Midwestern states of Minnesota, Wisconsin, North Dakota, etc. have a lot of Scandinavian and German ancestry. Surely that has influenced the rather peculiar political culture in that region?

[All Along The Watchtower]

As to German ancestry (that is the only one I really dare to say something about), it night help to keep several things in mind:

1. Unlike in the UK and Sweden, where protestantism was decreed by royal order (Henry VIII, Gustav Wasa), German and Swiss protestants had to fight a 30 year war for their right for religious self-determination (and more indpendence from Emperor and Pope). The Dutch fight even lasted eighty years. That has surely instilled a 'republican' attitude (meant first of all in a non-partisan sense, i.e. covering issues like civil liberties, self-determination and -organisation, anti-authoritarism etc.) into the collective memory. On top of that, of course, you get Weber's famous 'protestant ethics' ('don't wait for god to decide your faith and reward you after death, take matters into your own hands, and god will prove his favour already while you are still on this earth'). Last but not least, with Catholic structures, especially Monastries, destroyed, the former's educational, social and charitable tasks had to be taken over by local governments & communities, bringing forward a different understanding of social responsibility, and the role of government.

2. Many, although by no means all protestant German immigrans into the USA had a middle-class background.  For once, virtual all Free Imperial Cities (self-ruled cities not subjunct to any Count, Duke or Bishop, but only to the Emperor) were predominantly protestant (often with a sizeable Jewish minority). Such Free Cities included many major cities such as Hamburg, Lübeck, Bremen, Magdeburg, Dortmund, Frankfurt/Main, Nuremberg, Strassburg, or Augsburg,  but also a lot of smaller towns especially in South-Western Germany (plus Alsace). There were a few catholic Free Cities (most notably Cologne and Aachen),  as well as several larger residential cities (Protestant: Hannover, Berlin, Brunswick, Kassel - Catholic: Munich, Stuttgart, - nominally Catholic but de-facto protestant: Dresden),  but essentially, I would estimate those who immigrated to the USA before the Industrial revolution  from German cities to be at least 75% protestant, maybe 15% Catholic and the remainder Jewish. I probably don't have to go into detail what urban background, and exposure to local self-government means in terms of political attitude.

3. While not fully congruent, the Catholic-Protestant border drawn after the War of Thirty Years in North-Western Germany roughly coincides with the border between traditional Roman and traditional Saxon inheritance laws. Under Saxon law, an agricultural estate (farm) is passed on to the oldest child (irrespectively of its gender), which in turn has to take care of the parents for their old age. The younger childs are compensated in kind (cattle) or cash, albeit at a reduced rate to make up for the eldest taking care of the parents. This has preserved a structure of comparatively large, wealthy farms in North-Western Germany, but at the same time fostered an emigration culture of the later-born, which was one of the driving forces behind the mideaval German Eastern Colonisation (e.g. West & East Prossia), Germans settling in Russia on the call of Catherine the Great, and, of course, immigration into the US. What we are talking about here are young people with strong agricultural (entrepreneurial) background, reasonably well-being and -educated (for their rural background), equipped with some start capital from their inheritance compensation, and aware of a century-old emigration tradition. I don't have any statistial data at hand, but anecdotal evidence leads me to guess that many of them ended up as dairy farmers in Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin or the Dakotas (and quite a number saw their children continuing the migration tradition along the Oregon Trail). Oh- and before I forget - Saxon law was also about common land property (Almende'), and free access to forests for hunting (as it still exists in Sweden). After arriving in the USA, these people probably had little problem to self-identify themselves as WASP, and go with the (progressive wing of the) Republican party.

4. Things get a bit more complicated if you move further East (Mecklenburg, Pomerania, Brandenburg, East & West Prussia) - you could still find some of these medium-scale, free farmers there, but mostly the land was controlled by local low nobility, with the majority of the the rural population (a mix of germanised Slavonics and failed German colonists) subjunct to serfdom. On the other hand, the Prussian Kings attracted quite a number of Huguenots (french protestants) to the area - urban, well-educated, renowned for their handicraft skills; while the a good part of the Baltic coast was for most of the 17th and 18th century under Swedish control. So, a German Protestant from North-Eastern Germany may have been anything of the above, and you will really have to dig  deep into an individual setllement's / family history to find a connection between ancestry and political attitudes.

5. In contrast to Saxon inheritance law, under Roman law estates are equally split among all, or at least all male, children. Thus, in (predominantly Catholic) South-Western and South Germany, average farm sizes tended to get pretty small over the course of a few generations (unless there were major wars or epidemics to 'control' population growth). The rural population, while (as land owners) having less incentives for emigration, was forced to search for additional income sources outside agriculture, making them more industrous [The different terrain, more mountaineaous, i.e. better energy supply (wood, charcoal, water power) in comparison to Northern Germany, facilitated at the same time the development of pre-industrial processing activities}.  Thus, a typical Catholic German pre-WWI US immigrant would be much more likely than his Protestant counterpart to emigrate in order to escape poverty, arriving with hardly anything but his skills in the USA, and these skills might be more in blacksmithing or wheelwrighting than in agriculture. He would often also be less formally educated than a Protestant immigrant, maybe having undergone only some four years of church school training. In other words, he would be rather working-class than middle-class, and as such quite likely to be a staunch democrat (until when? Wilson entering WWI against Germany? Hoover/ Eisenhower, American Germans both becoming US Presidents on a Republican ticket? Post-Kennedy / Civil Rights party realignment in the US?).
 
6. Last but not least, there is the post WW-II "I married an american soldier" German immigration (2 friends of my parents, 1 friend of my parents-in-law), which, as I have been told, is not just an issue of the late 1940s, but has continued at least until the 1970s, as Army officers that had erved in Korea or Vietnam got to choose their foreign posts, and usually opted for Germany. Now, while there is probably little doubt about how retired US Army officers vote, their German-born wifes' vote may be more swingy ...

Don't know if this helped ..

Very informative post. Thanks!

[All Along The Watchtower]

Oldiesfreak:

Please, please, please don't clog up this thread with your...um..usual stuff.

Thank you.