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7/27/2019 Shaping Our Nation by Michael Barone - Excerpt
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7/27/2019 Shaping Our Nation by Michael Barone - Excerpt
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Preface: A Story for Our Time
looking back on our decades o published writings, I can
discern a common theme: I have been trying in dierent ways
to understand American politics and the course o Ameri-
can history, starting with the twenty-two editions oteamcf
amecpco which I have been coauthor since the rst edition
was published in 1971. The amcdescribes every state and con-
gressional district and its members o Congress, and over the years Ihave been able in its pages to ollow political and policy developments
in granular detail. My1990 book, ouCuy: te s f amec
fm reve re,1 was a narrative history o American politics
rom 1930 to 1988, buttressed by demographic and electoral analysis
intended as an alternative to the prevailing analyses o the New Deal
historians. In tenewamec2 I argued that the minority groups
o today resembled, up to a point, the immigrant groups o a hundredyears ago: blacks resembled Irish, Latinos resembled Italians, Asians
resembled Jews. My thesis implied a certain continuity in the Ameri-
can experience, with o course some contrasts and dierences. Inhd
amec, sf amec3 I contrasted the zones o American lie where
you have competition and accountability (Hard America) and those
where you dont (Sot America). This was an attempt to view various
developments in the twentieth century through a dierent and mostlynonpartisan lens, with an understanding that we dont want every part
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[ 2 ] Shapi ng Our Nation
events generally known as the Glorious Revolution o168889, the
ouster o King James II and the installation o King William III and
Queen Mary II, the Catholic Jamess Protestant daughter and son-in-law and nephew. These events, I argued, greatly advanced the causes
o representative government in Britain and in its North American
seaboard colonies as well as guaranteed liberties, global capitalism,
and an anti-hegemonic oreign policy. The Glorious Revolution was
a very chancy and close-run thing, with strong reverberations to this
day; it not only inspired but made possible the American Revolution
and put rst Britain and then America on their ways to be a leadingorce or liberty and the rule o law throughout the world.
For my next book, I sought a way to look at the American expe-
rience through a new prism, and my editor, having heard me ri on
this theme, suggested a book on American migrations, internal as
well as immigrant. In examining the data, it became apparent that to
a great extent the United States was in large part peopleda word I
borrow rom historian David Hackett Fischer, author o the superbab seed5by surges o migration, large mass movements across
the oceans or within the nation, which typically lasted only one or
two generations but in that time reshaped the nation . . . and created
lasting tensions dicult to resolve. None o these surges o migration
was widely anticipated, and most o them ceased rather suddenly and
contrary to expectations.
I was inspired as well by the picture painted by historian WalterMcDougall in the rst pages o his magisterial history o the United
States rom 1829 to 1877:6 He described that i you could be trans-
ported back in time our hundred years and view the world in 1600,
you would nd most o the concentrations o population very similar
to todays. There were great population masses in Ming China and
Mogul India, a Muslim world o many varieties and schisms, a west-
ern Europe o ertile arms and trading ports, and a Russia expand-ing rom its Muscovite base. In the Western Hemisphere there were
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pefce: a sy f ou tme [ 3 ]
and priests. But North America then was very dierent rom today. It
was not vacant, as the writer Charles C. Mann has inormed us in his
wonderul books 14917
and 1493;8
Indian arming and hunting civili-zations o various degrees o advancement had developed there over
centuries. But these civilizations had only the slightest o connections
to the more advanced societies o Europe and Asia, and their peoples
were soon to suer rom enormous depopulation due to diseases or
which they had no immunity.
In their place today, in vivid contrast with the years around 1600,
is a nation with 5 percent o the worlds population that produces25 percent o its economic product and deploys more than 50 percent
o its military capacity, a nation in which only1 percent o its current
population claims ancestry rom the peoples variously called Ameri-
can Indians or Native Americans. The peopling o the United States
is one o the most important stories o the last ve hundred years, a
story o successive surges o migration, across the oceans and across
the continent.It is oten said that in the past quarter century America has
become culturally diverse. But it was culturally diverse rom its colo-
nial beginnings, and each successive surge o migration has changed
the cultural and ethnic and political balance o the country. Ameri-
cans have learned not only to cope but even to prosper as a nation
with cultural variety, but that diversity has also led to grave and seem-
ingly irrepressible confict.The history o American migrations is a story o surprises: ew
anticipated when these surges o migration would begin and even
ewer predicted that they would abruptly end, as most did. That may
be especially relevant, as this is written, or the vast Latino migration
o the quarter century rom 1982 to 2007 seems to have tapered o
sharply, with net migration rom Mexico apparently below zero, while
internal migration sharply slowed with the onset o recession in 2007,as it did even more sharply in the economic depression o the 1930s.
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pefce: a sy f ou tme [ 5 ]
augmented by those arriving in some orm o servitudeslaves orc-
ibly imported rom Arica and indentured servants rom England
obliged to work a term o years in return or payment o their pas-sage, plus a ew convicts sent to the new colony o Georgia. So these
colonies, starting o as narrow patches o land on coasts and bays,
grew lustily because o very high birth rates and what was proba-
bly the highest protein diet or the masses o any in the world. By
the middle o the eighteenth century, the population o these colo-
nies was vastly increased to some 1.2 million. They included about
360,000 in New England, where the cold climate proved unhealthyor slaves; 220,000 in the Delaware River coloniesPennsylvania,
Delaware, New Jerseywith another 75,000 in Dutch-settled and
ethnically diverse New York along the Hudson; and about 370,000
in the Chesapeake colonies, about 30 percent o whom were slaves.
In addition there were about 140,000 in the colonies to the south,
sparsely settled North Carolina, slave-majority South Carolina, and
tiny Georgia. Small handuls o colonists three and our centuriesbeore did much to determine the culture and character o a nation
o310 million.
The subject o this book is the much larger surges o migration,
internal and immigrant, that came next, starting with the mass move-
ment rom 1763 to 1775 o the Scots-Irish rom Northern Ireland
and Lowland Scotland to the Appalachian rontier, the ourth o the
British olkways in Fischers ab seed. This was an internationalmigration in the sense that people sailed across the Atlantic Ocean
to a land that would soon become a separate and independent nation.
But it was also an internal migration in the sense that the Scots-Irish
were moving rom one unruly ringe o the British Empire to another,
motivated not just to seek a better living but even more to establish
a community where they could live as they pleased. Unlike previous
colonial migrations, it was not organized by prot-minded propri-etors like the leaders o the Virginia Company or by community lead-
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[ 6 ] Shapi ng Our Nation
convicts o slaves. And it was a migration dierent in kind rom those
that came beore.
It was, like surges o migration over the next two centuries andmore, a seemingly spontaneous movement o large numbers o like-
minded people, motivated in part by the desire to make a better
living, but also and more important determined to create a new com-
munity in which they could thrive and live as they wanted. Ameri-
can migrants were not just seeking more money; they were pursuing
dreams or escaping nightmares.
Voluntary mass migrationssettler migrations, as historianJames Belich calls themare a relatively late phenomenon in world
history and could not occur without the right combination o techno-
logical, political, and economic actors. Migrants need available and
aordable transportation and must not be prevented rom moving
by government action. Economic historians have disagreed on when
these conditions have been met; some say ater the conclusion o the
world war between Britain and France in 1815,9
others, ater Britainrecognized the independence o the United States in the Treaty o
Paris o1783.10 But the Scots-Irish migrated to North America in sig-
nicant numbers ater the Treaty o Utrecht ended a British-French
war in 1713 and, in mass numbers encouraged by those who came ear-
lier, ater the Treaty o Paris ended another war in 1763. They came
in numbers that no one seems to have predicted and stopped com-
ing suddenly in a way that almost no one oresaw. In these respectsthe Scots-Irish migration was a prototype o later, post-Independence
American migrations, both immigrant and internal. They sought a
new place to establish their way o lie, where they could fourish and
perhaps be an inspiration to others as well.
~thisaccount will start o with the Scots-Irish migration and show
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pefce: a sy f ou tme [ 7 ]
o the Mississippi Valley and how their emblematic leader, Andrew
Jackson, successully promoted the acquisition o Florida, Texas, and
Caliorniaour rst, second, and soon-to-be third most populousstatesto the young republic. Having accomplished this enterprise,
the Scots-Irish seemed to stop in their tracks and occupy the same
swath o the nation today. But their achievement presented the nations
political leaders with the dicult issue o whether slavery should be
allowed in the new territories, an issue that could not be peaceably
settled but resulted in a bloody and hugely divisive civil war, one in
which the Scots-Irish ought on both sides.The next section o the book will look at two surges o inter-
nal migration in the rst hal o the nineteenth century: the Yankee
diaspora spreading rom New England across Upstate New York and
the Great Lakes states and across the Mississippi, and the southern
grandees extension o plantation slavery rom the Atlantic coast to
the Mississippi Valley. These migrations were motivated not only by
a desire to establish sae havens or each o these two colonial Ameri-can cultures but were increasingly aimed at extending their cultural
infuence beyond their regional bases, to shape the national character
in their own image. The collision this produced was the Civil War,
in which the Yankee vision was not only the cultural but the military
victor, and in which the deeated southern cultureor rather cul-
tures, white and blacksubsequently lived apart rom the rest o the
nation or three-quarters o a century.The second pair o migrations were the two immigrationso
Irish Catholics and o mainly Protestant Germansthat began sud-
denly in great numbers in the middle 1840s and continued, with
scarcely a pause during the Civil War, until the middle 1890s. Irish
came over in vast numbers1.3 million in the rst decade, 184655,
and about hal a million in each o the next our decades. Germans
came over in even larger numbersabout1 million or ve succes-sive decades, except or hal a million in the decade that included the
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[ 8 ] Shapi ng Our Nation
the Civil War. Irish Catholics established communities in major cit-
ies and actory towns, which did much to determine the character o
politics and popular culture in urban America; they built an Ameri-can Catholic Church that or a century was very much an Irish insti-
tution. Germans started o settling in rural areas as well as in New
York City and in large cities in the interior. They ended up estab-
lishing a Germano-Scandinavian zone in the Old Northwest, north
o the Yankee diaspora settlementsin Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota,
the Dakotas. That zone has always had a distinctive politics, hospita-
ble to bureaucratizing reorms and cooperative enterprises and hostileto military involvement abroadthe most pacist, isolationist, and
dovish part o the nation or more than a century.
The third pair o migrations consists o one very large surge o
migration and one potential surge o migration that never happened
at all. In the three-quarters o a century between the Civil War and
World War II there was a vast movement rom rural to urban Amer-
ica, as the economy grew robustly though unevenly. From the 1890sthrough the 1930s, the development o mass production techniques
created a demand in labor markets or mass production workers, and
wages in the industrial Northeast and Midwest drew workers rom
arms. But not evenly. From the American South, where wage lev-
els were less than hal those in the North, very ew migrants ven-
tured northward during these decadesonly about1 million whites
and 1 million blacks. The enormous impact o the Civil War andthe continuing bitterness it engendered created a psychological bar-
rier between North and South, as i a wall had been built along the
Mason-Dixon Line and the Ohio River.
Immigration rom traditional sourcesBritain, Ireland, and
Germanydropped o as those nations economies developed roughly
in tandem with Americas. Instead there was a vast and unanticipated
Ellis Islander immigration to the northern states rom regions oEurope that had produced ew immigrants beore the 1890s. These
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pefce: a sy f ou tme [ 9 ]
EuropeJews and Poles rom tsarist Russia; Poles, Czechs, and other
Slavs rom the Hapsburg Empire; and southern Italians rom the
northern-dominated kingdom o Italy. While American Southernersound the culture o Northern America unwelcoming, second-caste
peoples rom the ar sides o Europe ound it more attractive than their
native lands. The Ellis Islander migration halted during World War
I and was ended by the restrictive Immigration Act o 1924, which
allocated immigration quotas according to the national origins o the
nations population in the preEllis Island year o1890.
I the Civil War was a divisive confict, leaving the southernculture alienated rom the northern one, and vice versa, World War
II was an annealing event, bringing Americans together, putting
them in uniorm and sending them around the country and around
the world. Altogether 16 million Americans served at one time or
another in the military, in a nation o131 million; the proportionate
number in 2010 would be 38 million. The unity o the war eort also
ostered cultural uniormity, promoted already by mass media withuniversal appeal, the radio o the 1920s and 1930s, and the movies o
the 1930s. The demands o war industries brought Southerners, black
and white, to the great cities and actory towns o the North. The
war in the Pacic drew or the rst time millions o the 90 percent
o Americans who lived east o the Rockies to the West Coast. These
wartime movements introduced many Americans to what they came
to regard as a promised land and stimulated two surges o migra-tion, which continued or the rst postwar generation and which are
the subject o the next section o the book, the movement o mostly
white Midwesterners to Caliornia and the movement o one-third
o American blacks rom the rural South to the urban North. Those
surges o migration lost momentum when the destination no longer
seemed to be a promised landthe black northward migration wan-
ing in the middle 1960s as eective national civil rights legislationwas passed, and the Caliornia migration, in the early1980s when its
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[ 10 ] Shaping Our Nation
The nal chapter concerns the two unpredicted and vast surges
o migration over the our decades rom 1970 to 2010. One was the
vast migration rom Latin America and Asia rst to major metropoli-tan areas, especially in Caliornia, Texas, and Florida, plus New York
City and Chicago, then dispersing over time to smaller but rapidly
growing metropolitan areas in other states. The other was volitional
migration, primarily rom high-tax states to low-tax states, but also
or many liberals and conservatives movement to culturally conge-
nial surroundings.
The turning points here came at the end o the rst postwar gen-eration, in the years on either side o1970. Formerly immigration was
minimal, thanks to the Immigration Law o 1924 and the postwar
economic recovery in European nations with large immigrant quo-
tas. When the immigration law was rewritten in 1965, little thought
was given to potential immigration rom other sources. In act immi-
gration rom Latin America was theoretically restricted more by the
1965 law than previously. But country quotas proved beside the pointas millions immigrated legally using amily unication provisions and
millions more immigrated illegally by crossing the border clandes-
tinely or overstaying visas.
As or volitional immigration, the generation rom 1945 to 1970
saw the conclusion o longtime arm-to-actory internal migration.
Growth concentrated in major metropolitan areas including the cor-
ridor rom New York City to Washington, D.C., and in the industrialactory cities o the Midwest, where auto and other manuacturers
were siting new plants. From 1970 to 2010 the picture is very dier-
ent. The population o the major metropolitan areas o the North-
east and the Midwest (with the conspicuous exception o Washington)
stagnated, as millions fed increasingly high state and local taxes. The
major northern immigrant destinations, including Los Angeles and
the San Francisco Bay Area, starting around 1990 saw internal out-migration or similar reasons. Domestic infow was channeled largely
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pefce: a sy f ou tme [ 11 ]
The rule-proving exceptions were infow into tax havens in the
Northeast and Midwest, including New Hampshire, Delaware, and
South Dakota.By1970 the cultural uniormity o World War II and early post-
war America was being replaced by a cultural diversity more typical o
the nation in the long run o its history. As a result many Americans
in deciding where to live their adult lives or where to retire sought out
places compatible with their liestyle. This was particularly true o
proessionals and others in a position to choose where to live. Liber-
als gravitate to New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, universitytowns, and ski resorts, while conservatives gravitate to Dallas, Hous-
ton, and Atlanta and retirement towns in the Smokies or the Ozarks.
The result is what journalist Bill Bishop has called the big sort, with
liberal areas becoming more liberal and conservative areas, more
conservative.
The surges o migration in these our decades have produced
an America that seems to be fying apart. It may not be headed toa collision as dramatic as the Civil War, which was the result o
the surges o migration in the rst sixty years o the nineteenth
centurythough culture-wars political rhetoric sometimes gives that
impressionbut it can seem sorely in need o some less-than-total-
war equivalent o the annealing experience o World War II. Just
when the centripetal orces seemed at their maximum, the recession
and nancial crisis o the late 2000s produced a sudden halt to thesurges o migration that had been occurring or at least a quarter
century. Immigration rom Asia ell and immigration rom Latin
America plummeted, with more reverse migration back to Mexico,
particularly o illegal immigrants, than migration rom Mexico to
the United States. It seems at least possible that immigration rom
Mexico and perhaps rom all o Latin America will never again reach
the levels o the almost entirely prosperous years rom 1983 to 2007.The surge o Latin immigration may have stopped as abruptly as the
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[ 12 ] Shapi ng Our Nation
addition, domestic migration also was sharply reduced, though not to
the very low levels o the 1930s.
The post-1970 surges o migration, like surges o migration inthe past, have led many to question whether and how Americans with
diverse cultural, religious, and political belies can live together. This
is a question Americans have always had to grapple with, not one that
has suddenly and or the rst time been posed by the transormation
o a long-homogeneous country to one with cultural and racial diver-
sity. The Framers o the Constitution and the Bill o Rights had to
deal with similar problems. They were well aware o the dierent reli-gious and cultural backgrounds o the dierent states. They had seen
that the colonies were unable to come together in response to a pro-
posed plan o union at the Albany Conerence in 1754. They learned
to their dismay that the ederal government set up by the Articles o
Conederation lacked the power to eectively tax and protect its citi-
zens. They were determined to create a stronger ederal government
but one whose powers would be limited in order to reduce culturalconfict and preserve zones o autonomy. And they were careul in
their grants o power to the president and the Congress; they were
vague about the powers o a supreme court; they required in a reli-
giously diverse nation that there would be no religious test or ederal
oce (although religious tests or state oce persisted through the
late nineteenth century). This was a revolutionary doctrine, adopted
when England required public ocials to be members o the estab-lished Church o England and when in all European nations Jews
were subject to civic disabilities, including prohibitions on holding
public oce.
The First Amendment, ratied in 1790, provided that Congress
shall make no law . . . regarding an establishment o religion, nor
prohibiting the ree exercise thereo. They acted knowing that di-
erent colonies had had dierent established churches and as severalstates, notably Virginia, were amid controversy regarding disestab-
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pefce: a sy f ou tme [ 13 ]
1831. The Framers ormulalimited government and individual
rightshas not always been applied aithully in American history,
and it was not enough to prevent the outbreak o a civil war. But ithas provided a ready and useul template or the accommodation o
diverse peoples, even as the nation has been peopled by successive and
culturally diverse surges o migration.
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