'That which we are'

The subject of WASPs and New England Yankees, and their role in our current national immigration crisis came up in a discussion earlier. I think this part of our history is more important than we realize in regards to the issue of who we are, and how we came to be in our present crisis regarding mass immigration. So I think it's useful to explore some of the history, which is discussed in this interesting blog entry from the race/history/evolution blog:

The descendants of Puritans ca. 1935

After Three Centuries: A Typical New England Family. By Ellsworth Huntington and Martha Ragsdale. Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins Co., 1935. Pp. viii+274. $2.50.

From eighteen thousand Puritans who painfully emigrated in 1620-1642 sprang a race, by multiplication almost without addition, that has molded modern civilization and made the name of Yankee to be "loved and feared thruout the world." One such obscure emigrant of 1633, Simon Huntington, died on the voyage, but his widow landed with her five children; and from these are descended at least nine-tenths of all the Huntingtons living in America today, numbering 5,500 born with that name, beside 1,500,000 Americans of other surnames. The 5,500 with the name today are the subject of this book, taken as a true sample of the whole Puritan, i.e. New England stock, and written up as a very interesting, novel, and valuable study in sociology and genetics, based on a new method--that of surname group--which should have wide utility to sociologists.

They are a great race, these Huntingtons and other Puritans. One in twenty-five of all the male Huntingtons who reach forty-five years gets in Who's Who. The most illustrious of them all, aided by the family association, the National Research Council genetists, and the vast researches of a southern lady outside the clan, have produced this book. It has originality, suggestiveness, pioneer quality, and caution not to claim more than it has proved.

Something was learned about 3,717 of the 5,500 living American Huntingtons, and the 1,085 families replied to questionnaires. Data were also secured on the frequency in various occupations and in high and low ranks, not only of the name Huntington, but of the exclusively Puritan names Trumbull, Lyman, Hooker, and Coolidge, the old Dutch Van Dyke...Always in proportion to their present numbers, the Puritans and Van Dykes surpass the common English names, although these include many Puritans, too, in the ratios of .5 for frequency of criminality and dependency, business ownership 1.3, government officials 1.6, lawyers 3, corporation directors 3.5, American Men of Science 4.9, authors 7.8, Notable Americans 9.6, etc. The harder the test, the more the Puritans shine forth, especially in scientific, literary, and philanthropic directions. The stocks who came later, although they settled in the better regions, are left far behind..

As to why the Puritan stock is so outstanding, particularly in pleasant and altruistic fields, the authors make no claim. But they present five chapters of evidence tending to the support of the heredity thesis. Like the Parsis, Maoris, and Icelanders the Puritans were highly selected at the start by their far and most difficult migration. Two centuries of eugenic survival and mating selection further improved them; and their migrations today are proved to be sifting out merit. The more-blue-eyed Huntingtons, and those known to be of pure English ancestry, are doing better today;

[. . .]
Long a separate race, the Yankee stock is now found to be rapidly intermarrying with others. Its birth-rate fell precipitously from 1810 to 1880, and it shows the usual most perverse tendency for the more children to be born and reared in the poorer stock and homes. But here, as elsewhere, bright harbingers appear while the night deepens, in the practical stop to their birth decline since 1880 and a tendency appearing for the most worth-while to increase their offspring and exceed the class below.


The New England Quarterly, Vol. 8, No. 4, (Dec., 1935), pp. 613-617''

It's interesting that the writer considers the 'Yankee stock' to be a separate race. The terminology is not politically correct, in this day and age which obstinately denies, officially, that race even exists. And most people of today would not agree with the designation of the Yankee New Englanders as a 'race'; my old anthropology teachers would have said they were a 'breeding population' but not a race.

The fact is, however, they were a distinct group of Englishmen, being mostly from East Anglia.
From Kevin McDonald on The Puritans, McDonald cites David Hackett Fischer on the Puritan colonists and their way of life:

Puritanism originated in East Anglia in England, spread to New England, and became the most important cultural influence in the United States beginning in the 18th century down to the mid-20th century. East Anglian Puritans "became the breeding stock for Americas Yankee population" and "multiplied at a rapid rate, doubling every generation for two centuries.
[...]
The great majority of the Puritan founders of Massachusetts arrived with their families (Fischer 1989,25). Most were middle-class or above, but only a few were true aristocrats. Even fewer were poor: "Less than five percent were identified as laborers—a smaller proportion than in other colonies. Only a small minority came as servants—less than 25 percent, compared with 75 percent for Virginia," and "nearly three-quarters of Massachusetts immigrants paid their own passage—no small sum in 1630" (p. 38)."

Puritans also married out less than other groups of colonists, and had strong family ties and careful child-rearing practices. Literacy was almost universal among the Puritan colonists; some were university-educated, but all held education in high regard.

Puritans were also especially prominent in law and commerce. East Anglian historian R. W. Cretton-Cremer described them as "dour, stubborn, fond of argument and litigation" (in Fischer 1989, 49). Interestingly, Havelock Ellis's A Study of British Genius found East Anglia to have the highest average intelligence in Britain and "a larger proportion of scholars, scientists, and artists came from East Anglia than from any other part of England" (in Fischer 1989,49). . . .

Both East Anglia and New England had the lowest relative rates of private crime (murder, theft, mayhem) . . .

Phillips (1999) traces the egalitarian, anti-hierarchical spirit of Yankee republicanism back to the fact that East Anglia was settled by Angles and Jutes in pre-historic times. They produced "a civic culture of high literacy, town meetings, and a tradition of freedom," distinguished from other British groups by their "comparatively large ratios of freemen and small numbers of servi and villani" (Phillips 1999, 26). East Anglia continued to produce "insurrections against arbitrary power"—the risings and rebellions of 1381 led by Jack Straw, Wat Tyler, and John Ball, Clarence's in 1477, Robert Kelt's rebellion of 1548, which predated the rise of Puritanism. President John Adams, cherished the East Anglian heritage of "self-determination, free male suffrage, and a consensual social contract" (Phillips 1999,27).''

I would say that our political system owes much to this 'anti-hierarchical spirit of republicanism', which was not exclusive to these people, but was perhaps more strongly pronounced among them.

Why is it, then, that these Puritan colonists (and by extension, their descendants) so often the target of scathing criticism and blame? According to people like George Walden, the Puritans are the source of just about everything many people dislike about America.

'Americans reveal their Puritan roots, whether in business, sex, or war'

ANYONE WHO THINKS of American foreign policy in the Middle East as cussed, overzealous, hot-headed and hypocritical will be unconsoled to learn that this was the kind of thing people were saying about Puritanism and its adherents some four hundred years ago. Like so much else in modern America, its actions abroad should be viewed through the prism of the country’s root religion, Puritanism.

To understand its continued centrality, imagine an America with no Mayflower and no New England. The national temperament would be less earnest, less moralistic, gentler. There would be fewer people in jail, and no executions. There might also be fewer Republican presidents and Bible literalists, and because a non-Puritan America would be less mesmerised by sex and introspection, less pornography and fewer psychiatrists’ couches.

An improvement on the America we have got, you may say. But the country might also have been less energetic, less enterprising, less rigorously democratic, less uncompromisingly freedom-loving. A poorer, milder America would be less able to do good as well as harm in the world.
[...]
But America is what it is, a country that is still 60 per cent Protestant. This could be a handy guide to its behaviour, except that Puritan doctrine was notoriously contradictory. All you can be sure of is its tendency to fly to extremes.

[...] Proclaiming itself a beacon of hope has rarely inhibited a pugnacious foreign policy, it will be objected, but then America cannot win. If it behaves like the French and puts self-interest cynically to the fore it is damned for selfishness. And when its actions are genuinely altruistic, it is accused of buying the world’s favours. If there is one thing America is accused of more frequently than imperialist interference, it is of not interfering enough. America’s Puritan origins do much to explain why it is the maddening and exhilarating, ancient and modern, progressive and conservative, sophisticated and simplistic, creative and destructive country it is. It explains why it finds itself in the throes of religious revival when secularism is advancing across Europe. At exactly the moment when their Puritan habits of thought are in crisis Americans are being enjoined to return to their religious roots. A case not only of the cure being worse than the disease, but of the cure reviving the malady.

But that is how America is. In dealing with it, as with anywhere else, we must take account of its national temperament."

And as if to confirm Walden's rather obvious anti-American bias, note the name of his next book: God Won’t Save America: The Psychosis of a Nation.


This writer takes a rather critical attitude toward Walden's book but repeats many of the accusations, seemingly with some credulity.

Don't blame it on the Puritans

© Culture Wars.
''The truth about Puritanism is that it was a schizoid condition, whose contradictions are becoming more visible and revealing in America today than at any time in its history.’ - George Walden

The idea behind this book is a simple one. The basic premise is that America owes its many paradoxes to one single root cause: Puritanism. It is to this facet of the nation’s history that George Walden attributes the many contradictions found in all aspects of American life, from sex and commerce to politics and international affairs. Why, for example, is there such hypocrisy surrounding American attitudes towards sex? How does a country so advanced in science and technology demonstrate such a crude and primitive approach to capital punishment? How can Americans reconcile their religious piety with the selfishness and greed of their economy? And how can the democratically elected leader of a nation with the capacity to send men and women into space think there is somebody up there who appointed him president? All these questions, and many more, are answered by blaming the pilgrims. ''

Just for balance, let me repeat what Carleton Putnam, himself of New England Brahmin descent, said about this kind of thing:

Envy of our Anglo-American civilization, and of the qualities of mind and character which built it, is widespread among certain races, and operates in the same way—there is a strong drive to dispense its benefits to everybody while denigrating the source as "Puritan" or "reactionary".

It does seem that it is popular these days, whenever someone wishes to denigrate America, to blame it on our 'Puritanism.' And what is odd about this is that we are at the same time told that America is a 'nation of immigrants', a country of no fixed identity or culture, which was made by everybody, for everybody. Yet when some fault is found, who is to blame? Not the 'everybody', the immigrants who supposedly 'made America', but the white-bread Puritans. I suppose they attract the animosity because not only were they white and Anglo-Saxon, but they were 'religious fanatics' (read: Christian believers). So they are the whipping boy when it comes to finding fault with America. While America is the product of immigration, its faults are the product only of the WASP 'Puritans'.

The leftists condemn the Puritans for the reasons I mentioned above; many on the right blame their modern-day descendants for selling out this country to the One World cabal, for opening the floodgates to mass immigration, and for their overall tendency to champion 'progressive' politics.

However this has more to do with the wrong turn taken by many Christians at the time of the Enlightenment, when the old-time Biblical faith gave way to this-worldly crusades for 'social justice' and equality. What predisposed the Puritan descendants to fall for this particular type of social crusading religiosity is the question.

Nevertheless, there have been old-stock New England Yankees who were on the right side, namely Carleton Putnam, quoted above, and his cousin Carleton Coon. Another example was this Congressman, William Newell Vaile, speaking during an immigration debate in 1924:

Let me emphasize here that the restrictionists of Congress do not claim that the ‘Nordic’ race, or even the Anglo-Saxon race, is the best race in the world. Let us concede, in all fairness that the Czech is a more sturdy laborer…that the Jew is the best businessman in the world, and that the Italian has…a spiritual exaltation and an artistic creative sense which the Nordic rarely attains. Nordics need not be vain about their own qualifications. It well behooves them to be humble. What we do claim is that the northern European and particularly Anglo-Saxons made this country. Oh, yes; the others helped. But…[t]hey came to this country because it was already made as an Anglo-Saxon commonwealth. They added to it, they often enriched it, but they did not make it, and they have not yet greatly changed it. We are determined that they shall not… It is a good country. It suits us. And what we assert is that we are not going to surrender it to somebody else or allow other people, no matter what their merits, to make it something different. If there is any changing to be done, we will do it ourselves."

That was no one-world globalist speaking. What Congressman of today would say anything like that?

President Teddy Roosevelt, party of New England stock and partly Dutch, says here:

The substocks of the Caucasian race which I call interchangeably English-speaking or Anglo-American were well defined by Theodore Roosevelt in 1881: "on the New England Coast the English blood was as pure as in any part of Britain; in New York and New Jersey it was mixed with that of the Dutch settlers—and the Dutch are by race nearer to the true old English of Alfred and Harold than are, for example, the thoroughly Anglicized Welsh of Cornwall. Otherwise, the infusion of new blood into the English race [more accurately, English amalgam] on this side of the Atlantic has been chiefly from three sources—German, Irish, and Norse; and these three sources represent the elemental parts of the composite English stock in about the same proportions in which they were originally combined—mainly Teutonic, largely Celtic, and with a Scandinavian admixture. The descendant of the German becomes as much an Anglo-American as the descendant of the Strathclyde Celt has already become an Anglo-Briton . . . It must always be kept in mind that the Americans and the British are two substantially similar branches of the great English race, which both before and after their separation have assimilated, and made Englishmen of many other peoples. . . " Works of Theodore Roosevelt, National Ed., 1926, New York, Vol. VI, p. 23.'

And here, Carleton Putnam again:

The United States, was founded on, and developed through, the laws, institutions and traditions of the English-speaking stocks of the White race. The majority of our population still consists of these stocks. We will be unwise if we adopt policies to please other stocks or races which either directly violate our institutions or which indirectly, through unrestricted immigration, lead to their violation by so changing the nature of our population that they will be voted or interpreted out of existence.''

There are and have been many liberals of New England colonial descent; why is it that we focus only on those negatives and ignore the Carleton Putnams and the William Newell Vailes? Another example, although held up by many as a bad example, was New England writer H.P. Lovecraft, who had very strong anti-immigration sentiments, and who wrote in a very politically incorrect fashion about his Anglo-Saxon origins.

As the quotations I included above indicated, the Puritan descendants were people of high achievement, and of course they would be overrepresented among the ranks of the wealthy, or among men of letters and academia. Unfortunately such people often have a more cosmopolitan and 'progressive' attitude than the average American. It does seem that always, those with more education adopt very liberal political and social views. If there are a greater number of such 'progressives' among Puritan descendants, this would be the obvious explanation, not their supposed theological inclinations or their DNA.

It's well to remember, too, that there are many average Americans who are descendants of these Puritan colonists; not all became Ivy-league educated elites or socialites. Although a high proportion of this group seem to have been successful people, not all successful people are political movers and shakers or privileged elites in high places.

Because so few Americans claim New England Anglo-Saxon roots these days, preferring the more 'colorful' ethnic origins, the WASPs, especially New England Puritans and their mostly secular descendants, become the scapegoats, the embodiment of all that today's people find wrong with white America. This, in too many cases, looks like another variation of white self-castigation. It's a bad habit to which many Americans have become addicted, and above all, it's counterproductive.

I think what is needed is more emphasis on the good qualities, the positive aspects of our Puritan forefathers. We are criticized from all sides; why do we make it easier for our many enemies by joining in the chorus?

Much that is good today in American culture comes from the Puritans and even more so, from our Anglo-Saxon heritage generally. We hear far too little about the good traits and accomplishments of our ancestors.

Everybody else is entitled to their ethnic pride; why not us?
We don't have to have Puritan ancestry or all Anglo-Saxon descent to take pride in our common culture. Let's appreciate it and make the most of it before it disappears into some kind of multicultural fondue pot.

I think if we renew a sense of our connection to those past generations who accomplished so much, we might find a greater strength in ourselves through them.

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson