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Craig White's Literature Courses Historical Backgrounds
Immigration Waves & Sub-Cultures
see also "Two Sets of Founding Fathers" & Scotch-Irish |
 thanks to http://humansarefree.com/2015/01/ the-anglo-american-empire-wages.html |
The "Anglo" culture from Great Britain arrives in America speaking the English language, which becomes the default language for the USA's dominant culture, making English-speaking peoples from Britain the most defining ethnic group of the "First Wave" of European immigration from the 1600s to the 1800s.
British immigration arrives in three distinct waves that populate different parts of the colonies and the early USA with different ethnic identities, histories, and lifestyles or values, especially regarding the individual's relation to a larger community, from family, church, or plantation to town, colony, state, nation, or empire.
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Wave 2: 1607 (Jamestown) but mostly 1640s-50s "Cavalier"
(aristocrat) immigration
from southern England to Virginia and other
mid-Atlantic colonies; aristocratic society of large plantations with
African American slaves instead of European peasants, plus middle-class or working-class whites with smaller holdings.
Historical / political profile: Property owners > Stockholders;
corporate class; "business conservatives"; unregulated free-market capitalism
and low taxes on wealthy. Generally tolerant
of cultural differences as long as property rights are
respected: capitalism, science, human nature as self-interested (or
sometimes self-deluded).
Attitude(s) toward immigration: pro-immigration: lower
wages, growing consumer markets;
Period and Religion: 17-18c
Enlightenment &
Deism conservative traditions resisting government direction
or regulation
of wealth or property; property rights over human rights.
Plantations as prototypes of profit-driven, hierarchical corporate leadership of
unequal society.
indifference to public education > support of private education (e.g.
tutors, bible academies, home-schooling) but maintenance of literacy for elites,
government, courts, land titles, etc. (Public schools in South were rare
before post-Civil War Reconstruction.)
Essential course texts and pages:
Crevecoeur,
"What is an American?" & "Description of Charles-Town:
Thoughts on Slavery . . . " ;
Declaration
of Independence &
U.S. Constitution, the
Enlightenment |
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Wave 3: 1700s
Scotch-Irish immigration
from Northern
England, Scotland, and Ireland to interiors of mid-Atlantic and southern
colonies, especially to foothills and Appalachian Mountains, where they
served as buffer between Indians and East Coast elites.
Historical / political profile: White Working Class.
"Social conservatives." Evangelicals / Fundamentalists.
Hillbillies, Rednecks, Okies.
Attitude(s) toward immigration: Threatened by
cultural or religious differences, globalization and cultural diversity, +
immigration may cause downward
pressure on wages (on account of more low-skill workers).
Period and Religion:
Romantic era (emotion over
logic, common man) + Second Great
Awakening & evangelical / fundamentalist
Protestantism. shifting political allegiances: support "New Deal" before Civil Rights
Movement; afterward support small-government freemarket policies (except
when they don't).
mostly rural or small-town, insular culture distrustful of larger
communities or authorities beyond family or church
Scotch-Irish and associated European cultures associate themselves with
USA's dominant culture through shared whiteness and English language, but may also resemble
minority cultures in mistrust of
larger systems and experts, mixed attitudes toward higher education,
religious
fundamentalism over science, record of exploitation by corporate America
and alienation from welfare state, traditional / dysfunctional families, traditional
gender roles (esp. male privilege), early child-bearing and
(increasingly) single
motherhood or unmarried partners.
Essential course texts and pages:
J.D. Vance, "Introduction" & Chapter 9, Hillbilly Elegy;
J.D.
Vance, Hillbilly Elegy page,
Scotch-Irish,
Scots-Irish Immigration |
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The Scotch-Irish arrived later than the English Puritans or Virginians, who as East Coast ruling elites had established two different versions of Anglo-American civilization.
Puritans of New England:
controlled and regulated middle-class community with social safety net;
materialism balanced by spiritual or social ideals; public education for all.
Cavaliers
(i.e. aristocrats) of Virginia (& South
generally): freemarket individualism dividing to rich and poor;
private education; individual rights but esp. property rights
The Puritans and the Virginians established two types of American society that continue to contend for dominance.
The divisions between the Puritans and Virginians eventually led to the U.S. Civil War (1861-65), and most analysts continue to describe the political divisions in terms of the Civil War, with the North representing a middle-class, educated economy and the South as a society more divided between rich and poor, but these divisions precede the Civil War by 200+ years.
The Scotch-Irish, like later immigrant groups, vary in their allegiance to either, but mostly align with the Southern rich-poor model of property rights and lack of commitment to public education.
Both the Puritans and Virginians looked down on the Scotch-Irish for their clannishness, rowdiness, noisy hellfire religion, and indifference to manners or education, but these earlier elites also used and exploited the Scotch-Irish.
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Elites pushed the Scotch-Irish to keep moving west into the "backcountry" of the foothills and mountains of Appalachia, the Southern interior, and the Ohio River Valley.
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There the Scotch Irish served as Indian fighters (or soldiers in the American Revolution), relieving pressure on the East Coast.
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While the Puritans and Virginians made many political decisions during and after the Revolutionary War, the Scotch-Irish provided many soldiers for the continental armies and much of the manpower for plantation management. (Scotch-Irish still the largest ethnic group in U.S. Armed Forces.)
Today the Scotch Irish resent both the Puritan communitarian tradition and the Virginian corporate tradition but mostly imitate or aspire to the second model.
The Scotch-Irish may dislike the corporations that exploit their labor or move their jobs overseas, but they accept jobs on whatever terms and prefer the freemarket, rich-poor, low-tax, deregulatory corporate business culture to the big-government, tax-and-regulate middle-class regime developed by the Puritans' higher-education culture.
