Isegoria

The 19th century saw a series of surges in immigration that brought alien cultures to our shores:

In the single decade from 1846 through 1855, 1,288,000 Irish and 976,000 Germans landed on the East Coast. They brought not only the Irish and German cultures with them — both different from all four of the British streams — but also Catholicism, which until then had been rare in the United States.

The Irish who arrived during that surge were not like earlier generations of immigrants, who had been self-selected for risk-taking and optimism. They were fleeing starvation from the potato famine. More than half of them spoke no English when they arrived. Most were illiterate. They did not disperse into the hinterlands but stayed in the big cities of the East. Since those cities weren’t actually that big in the mid-19th century, the Irish soon constituted more than a quarter of the populations of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Providence, New Haven, Hartford, Jersey City, and Newark. Large urban neighborhoods became exclusively Irish and Catholic — a kind of neighborhood that America had never before experienced.

The Germans were the antithesis of the Irish, typically highly skilled craftsmen or farmers who practiced advanced agriculture. Michael Barone’s description of the culture they brought with them (in his book Our Country) is worth quoting at length:

As soon as they could they built solid stone houses and commercial buildings. They built German Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed churches, and they maintained German-language instruction in private and public schools for decades. They formed fire and militia companies, coffee circles, and especially singing societies, staging seasonal Sangerfeste (singing festivals). They staged pre-Lenten carnivals, outdoor Volkfeste, and annual German Day celebrations. They formed mutual-benefit fire insurance firms and building societies and set up German-speaking lodges of American associations. Turnvereine (athletic clubs) were established in almost all German communities and national gymnastic competitions became common. German-language newspapers sprung up — newspaper baron Joseph Pulitzer, a German-speaking Hungarian Jew, got his start in one in St. Louis — and German theaters opened in New York, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Chicago, and Milwaukee. Some German customs came to seem quintessentially American — the Christmas tree, kindergarten, pinochle.

In the 1870s, large numbers of Scandinavian immigrants began to augment the continuing German immigration, and most of them headed straight toward what Barone has called the “Germano-Scandinavian province,” consisting of Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, and the Dakotas, overlapping into parts of Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, and Montana. The mixed cultures of Scandinavia and Middle Europe in the small towns of those regions persisted long into the 20th century, famously chronicled by Willa Cather in the early 20th century and over the past 40 years by Garrison Keillor.

The Civil War created or intensified several kinds of cultural diversity. First, its conclusion marked the emergence of African-American culture from the shadows. Communities of American blacks in the South were no longer limited to the size of a slaveholder’s labor force but could consist of large neighborhoods in Southern cities or the majorities of populations in rural towns. All the categories of folkways that distinguished the various white cultures from one another also distinguished black American culture from the white ones.

The Civil War also led Southern whites, whether descendants of Cavaliers, indentured servants, or the Scots-Irish of the backcountry who had never owned slaves, to identify themselves as Southerners above all else. In many respects, they walled themselves off from the rest of the country and stayed that way for a century. White Southern culture was not only different from cultures in the rest of the country; it was defiantly different.

In the 1890s, America’s cultural diversity got yet another infusion from Eastern Europe and Mediterranean Europe that amounted to 20 million people by the time restrictive immigration laws were enacted in the 1920s. They came primarily from Italy, the Austro-Hungarian empire, and Russia, with this in common: Almost all of them had been second-class citizens in their homelands. The Italian immigrants came from rural, poor, and largely illiterate southern Italy and Sicily, not from the wealthier and more sophisticated north. Austro-Hungary’s immigrants were overwhelmingly Czechs, Serbs, Poles, Slovaks, Slovenians, and Jews, not ethnic Hungarians or Austrians. The immigrants from the Russian Empire were almost all Poles, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians, not ethnic Russians, with large proportions being Jewish as well. Occupationally, the Ellis Island immigrants had usually been factory laborers, peddlers, and tenant farmers, near the bottom of the economic ladder.

The size of these immigrant groups led to huge urban enclaves. In New York City alone, the Italian-born population at the beginning of the 20th century was larger than the combined populations of Florence, Venice, and Genoa, mostly packed into the Lower East Side of New York. A few blocks to their west were 540,000 Jews, far more than lived in any other city in the world. To enter either of those neighborhoods was to be in a world that bore little resemblance to America anywhere else. And that doesn’t count New York’s older communities of Irish, Germans, and African Americans.

The United States faces unprecedented cultural diversity, according to common wisdom, but the differences separating Yankees, Quakers, Cavaliers, and Scots-Irish at the Founding were at least as many and as divisive as those that separate different ethnic groups in America today, Charles Murray says:

Historian David Hackett Fischer’s magisterial Albion’s Seed describes how the British came to America in four streams. From East Anglia came the Puritans seeking freedom to practice their religion. They settled first in Massachusetts. By the time of the Revolution, they had spread throughout New England and into the eastern part of New York and had become known as Yankees.

From the south of England came the Cavaliers, who had lost out during the English Civil War, accompanied by large numbers of impoverished English who signed contracts to work as their indentured servants. The first wave settled in Virginia’s tidewater, and the second around the Chesapeake Bay. They spread southward through the tidewater regions of the Carolinas and Georgia.

From the North Midlands came the Quakers, who, like the Puritans, were seeking a place to practice their religion unmolested. They settled first in the Delaware Valley and then spread throughout eastern and central Pennsylvania, with some of them drifting southward to Maryland and northern Virginia.

The fourth group came from Scotland and the northern border counties of England. Some of them arrived directly from their ancestral homelands, but the great majority arrived in the New World after an extended stopover in the north of Ireland—hence the label by which we know them, the Scots-Irish. They landed in Philadelphia but quickly made their way west on the Great Wagon Road to settle the Appalachian frontier running from west-central Pennsylvania to northeast Georgia.

The four groups did indeed share a common culture insofar as they had all come from a single nation with a single set of political, legal, and economic institutions. But our topic is cultural diversity as it affects the different ways in which Americans think about what it means to “live life as one sees fit.” That consists of what I will call quotidian culture: the culture of everyday life. In terms of quotidian culture, the four streams shared the English language, barely. They differed on just about everything else, often radically.

Religion was culturally divisive. Anglican Christianity among the Cavaliers retained much of the pomp and ritual of Catholicism, and it permitted a lavish, sensuous lifestyle that the Yankees’ religious heritage, Puritanism, and Quakerism forbade. But Puritanism and Quakerism were also very different from each other. The Puritans saw themselves as God’s chosen people—“the saints”—and the religion they practiced was as harsh and demanding as reputation has it, epitomized by the title of the most famous sermon of the 18th century, Jonathan Edwards’s “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” The Sunday service, which might last five or six hours, even in unheated churches in the dead of a New England winter, consisted mostly of long lecture-like sermons and long teachings of the Word. It also included a ritual of purification, as members who were known to have committed specific sins were compelled to rise and “take shame upon themselves,” which sometimes included crawling before the congregation.

The Quaker First Day meeting was completely different. Whereas the congregation in a Puritan church was seated according to age, sex, and rank, Quakers were supposed to take the seat nearest the front according to the order of arrival. There was no multi-hour lecture or even a preacher. Anyone who was moved by the spirit could speak, including children, but the strictly observed convention was that such interventions lasted only a few minutes. Sometimes nothing would be said for the entire meeting, and those were often thought to be the best—“gathered” meetings during which the spirit of God was felt wordlessly by all. Instead of trying to live blamelessly to avoid the wrath of an angry God, Quakers worshipped a God of love and forgiveness. Sinners in need of forgiveness were “held in the light.”

Meanwhile, the Scots-Irish in the Appalachian backcountry combined passionate enthusiasm for Protestant teachings with equally passionate hostility toward the religious establishment. Thus an Anglican missionary to the region was told by one family that “they wanted no damned black gown sons of bitches among them” and was warned that they might use him as a backlog in their fireplace. Others to whom he intended to minister stole his horse, drank his rum, and made off with his prayer books.

The nature of the family varied across the four streams. Yankee and Quaker families were nuclear. To them, marriage was a covenant that must be observed by both husband and wife, and it could be terminated when one party failed to live up to the bargain. But Yankees and Quakers differed in the roles assigned to each party. Among the Yankees, marriage was a strict hierarchy with the man in charge; among the Quakers, marriage was seen as a “loving agreement,” a partnership between man and wife.

Among the Cavaliers, the father was the absolute head of an extended family that embraced blood relatives, other dependents, and sometimes slaves. Marriage was not a covenant but a union before God, and indissoluble. A Scots-Irish family was a series of concentric rings, beginning with the nuclear family and successively widening to include extended family and American versions of Scottish clans, lacking the formal structure of clans in their ancestral home but consisting of related families with a few surnames who lived near one another and were ready to come to one another’s aid.

Marital and premarital morality varied among the four streams. The criminal laws of Puritan Massachusetts decreed that a man who slept with an unmarried woman could be jailed, whipped, fined, disfranchised, and forced to marry the object of his lust. In cases of adultery, both Yankees and Quakers punished the man as severely as—sometimes more severely than—the woman. Among the Cavaliers, it was just the opposite: Men who slept with women not their wives were seen as doing what comes naturally and were treated leniently. Women were harshly punished for accommodating them.

Once people were married, Puritanism wasn’t all that puritanical. Surviving letters between Yankee spouses commonly expressed their love in ways that leave no doubt about their mutual pleasure in sex. It was the Quakers, more gentle and consensual in many aspects of marriage, who were more likely to see sex as sinful in itself. Many Quaker marriages included long periods of deliberate sexual abstinence.

Yankees, Quakers, and Cavaliers alike looked down on the morals of the Scots-Irish, who practiced an open sexuality that had no counterpart among the other three groups. That persecuted Anglican missionary to the Scots-Irish I mentioned was scandalized that, among other things, the young women of the backcountry “draw their shift as tight as possible round their breasts, and slender waists” in a deliberate display of their charms. He calculated that 94 percent of the brides in the marriages he performed in 1767 were already pregnant.

The whole point of writing down history is to make it easy to find the patterns in human interaction, Spandrell reminds us:

As I often say, all things considered,  the best historical tradition in the world is that of China. The imperial government has put lots of people and resources into writing history there for 3,000 thousand years. And one of the results of this emphasis is that they have left a lot of interesting stories about important patterns in political history, often in the form of neat 4-letter idioms.

By making them into tiny and neat idioms, you make them much more accessible to the public’s memory. Which is why any decently educated Chinese knows what zhi lu wei ma means.

Letter by letter it is “point deer make horse”. It tells the story of Zhao Gao, one of the closest ministers of the First Emperor of Qin. The Qin Emperor died in 210 BC, and soon after the Chen Sheng rebellion (another good example of history as a mirror for government) started, which in a few years destroyed the first empire that the Qin house had spent centuries to achieve.

[...]

So Zhao Gao brings a deer into the palace. Grabs it by the horns, calls the emperor to come out, and says, “Look, your majesty, I brought you a fine horse.” The Emperor, not amused, says, “Surely you are mistaken, calling a deer a horse, right?” Then the emperor looks around at all the ministers. Some didn’t say a word, just sweating nervously. Some others loudly proclaimed what a fine horse this was. Great horse. Look at this tail! These fine legs. Great horse, naturally prime minister Zhao Gao has the best of tastes.

A small bunch did protest that this was a deer, not a horse. Those were soon after summarily executed. And the Second Emperor himself was murdered some time later.

This story made it into the Records of the Grand Historian, by Sima Qian, around 100 BC, through which it became part of common knowledge for Chinese intellectual life. From then on, every time somebody tried to pull off a similar stunt, opposing ministers could say “you’re trying to say a deer is a horse, huh,” which could get other lukewarm ministers to wake up and support you. Or get you killed with your whole family.

In the West of course we have Hans Christen Andersen’s tale about the kid and the emperor’s new clothes. The funny part is it’s fiction. And the story is just about a child, who having a pure heart, dares to say the truth against the powerful. The moral is that we should be ashamed of ourselves and aspire to be as virtuous as this child. But of course in reality this child would have been arrested and executed, alongside his parents. Which is obviously why nobody tells the king about his new clothes. They’re not stupid.

This says a lot about Western sensibilities.