Talk:Old Stock Americans/Archive 1

Merge
I'd like to suggest a possible merge with the English Americans and American ethnicity pages into this page. Old Stock Americans were very much against the use of the hyphen and the term English-American is fairly new. (MelungeonEire (talk) 06:25, 16 July 2016 (UTC))
 * I agree with your proposal that this short article be merged with English Americans. It is not substantial enough to stand on its own. Jk180 (talk) 18:48, 23 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Redirect page to English Americans, for reasons given in section below. Neil S. Walker (talk) 11:37, 1 November 2017 (UTC)

Inappropriate or misinterpreted citations that do not verify the text
Randomly landed on this article, and immediately noticed problems with misinterpreted citations. Compare the article text with the sources:
 * Text:
 * Source: "However, religion shaped the composition of voter coalitions as Smith benefited from a pro-Catholic vote and Hoover from an anti-Catholic, Protestant vote that was not limited to evangelicals, old-stock Americans, rural folk or supporters of Prohibition."
 * "Consequently, anti-Catholic groups—that included the Know-Nothing party, the American Protective Association, and the Ku Klux Klan—espoused a form of bigotry, both religious and racially/ethnically motivated." Source makes no mention of "old stock Americans", nor the membership—"dominant" or otherwise—of the KKK or KNP.
 * Source is an NPR op-ed about the shift in US politics over the last 50 years; no mention of "old stock Americans".
 * No source provided.
 * "[Edward A.] Ross, for instance, believed that "old stock Americans" were committing race suicide, to be replaced by more fertile immigrant "races".... Ross feared the suicide of the "American race", which he saw as the fine product of generations of natural selection. He argued that the weak and the fearful did not make the treacherous ocean journey to America, and those weak specimens who did were the least likely to have survived and reproduced. Natural selection had taken place on the initial voyages out of England, and then again on the harsh frontier, producing the American "race" that Ross idealized."
 * Eugenicist Edward Ross is not "many Old Stock".
 * No source provided.
 * "[Edward A.] Ross, for instance, believed that "old stock Americans" were committing race suicide, to be replaced by more fertile immigrant "races".... Ross feared the suicide of the "American race", which he saw as the fine product of generations of natural selection. He argued that the weak and the fearful did not make the treacherous ocean journey to America, and those weak specimens who did were the least likely to have survived and reproduced. Natural selection had taken place on the initial voyages out of England, and then again on the harsh frontier, producing the American "race" that Ross idealized."
 * Eugenicist Edward Ross is not "many Old Stock".
 * Eugenicist Edward Ross is not "many Old Stock".

The article is a mess of faulty generalizations, association fallacies, cherry picking, and incomplete evidence. The use of links to Google Books is often an indicator that the writer does not have/has not read the complete book (losing critical context) and is instead trawling the internet for a specific search term or phrase: textbook confirmation bias. The article is a thinly-veneered "hit piece" against white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestants. There are several good Wikipedia articles that could be written—if they haven't been already—about wasp dominance of US politics, or anti-Catholic sentiment in the US, but this isn't it. There is an uncontested suggestion above regarding merging this page with English Americans. Frankly, there's very little worth saving in this article. I suggest instead that it be redirected unless and until someone is able to write an acceptable article about the named topic. Neil S. Walker (talk) 11:37, 1 November 2017 (UTC)


 * No, "Old Stock" Americans were not homogenously English (where do you people learn this stuff?) and every single "American" ancestry article on this encyclopedia has a section discussing the history of these groups in the US. There is nothing to merge here and you're totally misusing the term "WASP" (the wasp article makes it clear that this term primarily refers to a specific social class that used to dominate industry and politics in the late 19th/early 20th Century, and does not apply to every old stock American). Jonathan f1 (talk) 14:57, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

Not all self-identified British Americans are Old Stock
That should be obvious - the definition is immigrated in the 17th/18th centuries. Thus if my only British ancestors were the Woods who arrived in the 19th century, I'd have no Old Stock ancestors (although I do via the Mayflower). Of course by now I don't know how we'd identify Old Stock except of course through reliable sources. We can't make up our own definitions to arrive at contemporary numbers. Doug Weller talk 10:17, 15 January 2019 (UTC)
 * What do you think about redirecting this article to British Americans? Cordless Larry (talk) 09:01, 16 January 2019 (UTC)
 * with a short paragraph in the BA article? Doug Weller  talk 16:25, 17 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Sure - if it can be reliably sourced! Cordless Larry (talk) 18:04, 17 January 2019 (UTC)
 * I suggest we expand the article here . lots and lots of sources. As this term deals more about Protestant scared about the new Catholic influx. We talk about the ethnic idea at American ancestry.... well this article should expand on the idea of the Protestants versus the Catholics. This article should cover the aspect that it wasn't just about old immigrants from a certain time. it was about old immigrants with a specific religious orientation concerned about new immigrants not following the same religious Doctrine. Redirecting to an ethnic article in my view is missing one of  the main points of the term. --Moxy (talk) 19:56, 17 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Hmm, OK - maybe not, then. Cordless Larry (talk) 09:43, 18 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Thinking more about i, User:Moxy is correct, although I think the term does get misused at times - something we should avoid doing here. Doug Weller  talk 16:10, 18 January 2019 (UTC)
 * I opened a new talk section with a reliable source that gives a clear account of the early settlers of the 13 colonies. You are correct that the definition used in this article is somewhat made-up and not properly sourced. Jonathan f1 (talk) 02:50, 15 November 2022 (UTC)

Inaccurate photo
I haven't found any evidence supporting the claim that the subject of the photo in this article is William Poole. The photo's file summary states that it is of a butcher from circa 1875. Since William Poole died in 1855, and since this photo is clearly not from the 1850s, and since the person depicted within this photo may very well not be of old stock descent, I think it should be removed. Arovovo (talk) 04:31, 18 May 2019 (UTC)

Sourcing issues
This article is not properly sourced in key places and needs to be rewritten with different source material.

First, the group in question needs to be defined with references to legitimate (and recent) social historical scholarship. Since this article deals primarily with ethnicity and immigration in the 17th & 18th Century, use The Oxford Handbook of American Immigration and Ethnicity (2016). The Handbook describes the peopling of British America like this:

''Men and women from the British Isles predominated, but those summarily called “Anglo-Americans” were highly differentiated: The ethnically and linguistically diverse English-speakers included Anglicans and Dissenters, Protestant and Catholic Irish, Highland and Lowland Scots, Scots-Irish, and some Welsh. By 1700, the Crown’s Caribbean and North American possessions counted some 270,000 inhabitants of British background. Among the next cohort, around 260,000 British immigrants from 1700 -1775, the majority were Irish, Scots ranked second, and 50,000 were English. More White and freer migrants came to the colonies in the seventeenth century than in the eighteenth century, when the ratio of European bound and African slave migrants increased. To the 1830s more Africans than Europeans reached the Americas as a whole. English and Scots also migrated to colonized Ireland; Scotland had migratory traditions to Continental Europe; and, following Oliver Cromwell’s victories, Scottish prisoners were sent to Tangiers, Guinea, and the Americas. Clearances of land from tenants, commercialization of agriculture, linen recessions, and crop failures added to the potential for emigration. For the Irish, poverty, population increase, and English overlordship were push factors for multidirectional migration in the Americas to a region extending from the St. Lawrence to the La Plata rivers. These many-cultured English- and Gaelic-speakers needed to learn to get along with each other and to form a culture and institutions that would be called “Anglo America.” (pp.. 36 -38)''

So the settlers were more diverse than this article lets on, but coalesced into a common English-speaking and (largely) Protestant identity.

There also seems to be an overreliance on the figures in the 1790 Census composed 90 years ago which have been hotly debated by scholars for several decades. Here are some revised estimates for the 1790 populations of Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania. See how they compare. Jonathan f1 (talk) 02:21, 15 November 2022 (UTC)

Expanding on previous talk section..
In response to Doug Weller -No "user Moxy" is not correct. The Catholic/Protestant divide in the 19th Century has little to do with this article and as it stands now the material is presented too simplistically and selectively. "Old Stock" American means descendants of colonial settlers and is not synonymous with "nativism" or "anti-Catholicism" -this is a caricature of the political divides that existed in the 19th Century; it makes it seem as if the entire native-born population of the US was involved in anti-Catholic politics, which is total nonsense (the Democratic Party courted Catholic immigrants and the Whig/GOP was divided on the issue).

I also cited some updated estimates for the 1790 population and I see none of this has been absorbed. The Irish population, which was at least 6% of the colonial population, has been ignored while groups like "Finns" who made up less than a fraction of a percent are cited (see sources in previous talk section). This article needs more work preferably by editors who aren't totally clueless. Jonathan f1 (talk) 14:46, 27 June 2023 (UTC)


 * Moxy -Maple Leaf (Pantone).svg 04:50, 28 June 2023 (UTC)
 * You continue to conflate "nativism" with the subject of the article -these topics overlap but are not the same thing. "Old Stock" American means white Americans who descend from 18th Century ancestors and is not limited to "nativists". The source used to support the statement in the lead says Old Stock nativists and does not say anything about all Old Stock Americans being nativists (which is factually incorrect). The source you just cited here was a general overview of American ethnic history by a specialist of Norwegian-Americans written 50 years ago (the fact that you cite the year 2020 means you didn't read the source and have no clue who Carlton Qualey is -he died in 1988) . And there are several problems with the content in this source, the content in the article and what the historical record actually indicates: for one, "Nordic" was not a common racial category in the middle of the 19th Century, when Germans and Irish Catholics predominated the immigrant pool. The term used to describe "Germanic" people was "Teutonic" and the term for Irish was "Celtic". By the turn of the 20th Century, most racialists had abandoned the "Celtic/Teutonic" categories and replaced them with "Nordic" which included both Irish and Germans (Catholics and Protestants). Madison Grant, an infamous American "Nordicist" and nativist, lays this all out in The Passing of the Great Race ("Grant reasons that the United States has always been a Nordic country, consisting of Nordic immigrants from England, Scotland, and the Netherlands in Colonial times and of Nordic immigrants from Ireland and Germany in later times".) Nordicism was also far more nuanced than a simplistic North/South European divide: Grant believed there were pockets of "Nordics" in Italy, particularly Lombardy, and while he classified most of the Irish, English and Scottish as "Nordic", he also classified the Welsh as "Mediterranean" (the same racial stock as most Southern Europeans).
 * "Old Stock American" (OSA) speaks more about "ancestry" than "ethnicity", which are not the same thing. The notion that all OSAs, from regions as far afield as the Deep South and New England, formed a coherent ethnic group (let alone political faction) is far-fetched, and studying US ethnic history through the narrow and simplistic prism of "ancestry" will run you into all sorts of complications. Anna Ella Carroll, for example, was a prominent female anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic polemicist of the middle 19th Century, but was also descended from Irish Catholics (not just any Irish Catholic, but the sole Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence, and thus an "old stock" American). Michael Walsh (New York politician) was not only of Irish descent, but was born and schooled in Ireland, emigrated to the US and founded the Bowery Boys gang (the nativist gang that terrorized Catholic immigrants, made famous in the movie Gangs of New York). Thomas Nast was also an influential American nativist, the son of German Catholic immigrants; Abraham Lincoln, an OSA, was highly critical of the nativists in his party and OSAs in the Democratic Party courted the Catholic immigrant vote.
 * So there were OSAs with Irish (and German) ancestry, OSAs who were pro-immigrant, nativists with Irish/German ancestry and nativists and anti-Catholic activists who were not OSAs. This is why if you don't have any clue about the subject you shouldn't be opening this can of worms in an article that is potentially off-topic (we have articles on nativism/Know-Nothingism/the American Party that covers this stuff).
 * Insofar as OSA ancestries go, editors like to rely on the 1790 census compiled 100 years ago and seem to be totally unaware that these figures were contested by scholars and revised in the subsequent decades. The Oxford Handbook of American Immigration and Ethnicity (2016) describes the peopling of British America like this,
 * "Men and women from the British Isles predominated, but those summarily called “Anglo-Americans” were highly differentiated: The ethnically and linguistically diverse English-speakers included Anglicans and Dissenters, Protestant and Catholic Irish, Highland and Lowland Scots, Scots-Irish, and some Welsh... These many-cultured English- and Gaelic-speakers needed to learn to get along with each other and to form a culture and institutions that would be called “Anglo America.” (pp.. 36 -38, preview available on Amazon)
 * Thomas L. Purvis produced revised estimates for the 1790 population on p. 98 here (see table II). He has the English at 59.7% of the population, the Welsh at 4.3%, the Scotch-Irish at 10.5%, the Scottish at 5.3%, the Irish at 5.8%, the Germans at 8.9%, the Dutch 3.1%, French 2.1% and Swedish 0.3%. The Irish numbers are low (and are likely underestimated) primarily because their presence was small in New England and mainly concentrated in Southern colonies/states, where they hovered around 10% of the European population and were usually the third largest group after the English and Scots-Irish. Yet you make no mention of any Irish presence in the 18th Century but do cite the Ulster-Scots/Scots-Irish (who are treated separately in these sources), the Welsh and Scottish (whose numbers were smaller than the Irish), the Dutch (whose population was half the Irish population), French Huguenots (who numbered less than the Dutch) and Swedes and Finns (who made up a small fraction of 1% of the US population).
 * So having said all this (and I apologize for the length), I'd call for removing the statement about nativism in the lead for reasons above mentioned (it's too generalized, misleading and merely one overlapping facet of the OSA subject), but do support some mention of nativism/anti-Catholicism in a section of the article (with the usual caveats concerning nuance/neutrality). And you need to update the demographic section to reflect what reliable sources and data say about the European origins of early Americans. Jonathan f1 (talk) 18:50, 28 June 2023 (UTC)
 * Let's forget any original research based on statistics on an area that covers more than the United States British America....what do sources say ??? . Moxy -Maple Leaf (Pantone).svg 02:02, 29 June 2023 (UTC)
 * None of the statistics I cited were "original research" or "covering an area more than the US" -they were estimates for the ancestry demographics of the original 13 states in the 18th Century, exactly what this article is covering. Surely you're capable of clicking on a link, turning to a page and copying numbers off the page. Update the demographic section so that it reflects what reliable sources say about the European origins of the US population in the 18th Century (table ii p. 98).
 * Unlike you I actually read Michael Carroll's study and nothing he wrote supports what you're trying to say here. He dedicated an entire chapter to the Irish and writes that the colonial population consisted of both Protestants and Catholics and that most Irish Catholics converted to Protestantism in British America -totally consistent with other reliable sources.
 * OSAs are defined in the lead as:
 * "Old Stock Americans, Pioneer Stock, or Colonial Stock are Americans who are descended from the original settlers of the Thirteen Colonies of mostly European ancestry who emigrated to British America in the 17th and the 18th centuries."
 * This does not restrict the topic to "nativists" -most nativists were OSAs, but not all OSAs were nativists. The source cited in the lead speaks about a particular type of OSA -"nativists" who "demonized cities and discounted foreigners" -and does not say all OSAs were nativists. You twisted this description and extended it to the entire OSA population, which is a misreading of the source and may even count as original research. Jonathan f1 (talk) 16:11, 29 June 2023 (UTC)
 * I see why your not allowed to edit articles. Good luck. Moxy -Maple Leaf (Pantone).svg 18:47, 30 June 2023 (UTC)
 * And I see why this article has been given a C rating -"missing important content or contains irrelevant material." Because both apply here. Jonathan f1 (talk) 19:10, 30 June 2023 (UTC)
 * Should be lower then C class in my view. That said ...great walls of text and insults. Do you have any content recommendations that can be sourced? Not sure how this time sink is helping. Moxy -Maple Leaf (Pantone).svg 19:18, 30 June 2023 (UTC)
 * It probably should be lower than C but C does accurately reflect the nature of these issues.
 * I think the revised estimates for the 1790 population (sourced above) are relevant. Scholars generally work with these figures to get a sense of colonial demography because no reliable figures for earlier periods exist. These numbers were drawn from a census commissioned 100 years ago, based mainly on family names, and have been revised several times since.
 * In terms of nativism -again, this is a broad subject and is not limited to OSAs. In US history, there were episodes of nativism that had nothing to do with OSAs (eg the 'red scare' in the mid 20th C.) and not all OSAs fit the description of "nativist". In addition to that, trying to link "anti-Catholicism" to nativism is not so simple. One school of thought considers anti-Catholicism a subset of nativism, another views it as mainly a theological conflict, while a third sees it as political and social paranoia. This review may be helpful in framing the subject, but I do not think it belongs in the lead -this article mainly pertains to a much broader subject of ancestry/ethnicity. Jonathan f1 (talk) 19:40, 30 June 2023 (UTC)
 * To provide encyclopedic value, data should be put in context with explanations referenced to independent sources. Moxy -Maple Leaf (Pantone).svg 19:50, 30 June 2023 (UTC)