Our Foreigners | Page 6

in the savage
wilderness, laboring faithfully at forge and shipyard and loom,
bartering in the market place, putting the fear of God into their children
and the fear of their own strong right arm into him whosoever sought to
oppress them, be he Red Man with his tomahawk or English King with
his Stamp Act.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: In 1773 and 1774 over thirty thousand came. In the latter
year Benjamin Franklin estimated the population of Pennsylvania at
350,000, of which number one-third was thought to be Scotch-Irish.
John Fiske states that half a million, all told, arrived in the colonies
before 1776, "making not less than one-sixth part of our population at
the time of the Revolution."]
[Footnote 2: John Fiske: The Dutch and Quaker Colonies in America,
vol. II, p. 351.]

CHAPTER II
THE AMERICAN STOCK
In the history of a word we may frequently find a fragment, sometimes
a large section, of universal history. This is exemplified in the term
American, a name which, in the phrase of George Washington, "must
always exalt the pride of patriotism" and which today is proudly borne
by a hundred million people. There is no obscurity about the origin of
the name America. It was suggested for the New World in 1507 by
Martin Waldseemüller, a German geographer at the French college of
Saint-Dié. In that year this savant printed a tract, with a map of the
world or mappemonde, recognizing the dubious claims of discovery set
up by Amerigo Vespucci and naming the new continent after him. At
first applied only to South America, the name was afterwards extended
to mean the northern continent as well; and in time the whole New
World, from the Frozen Ocean to the Land of Fire, came to be called
America.
Inevitably the people who achieved a preponderating influence in the
new continent came to be called Americans. Today the name American
everywhere signifies belonging to the United States, and a citizen of
that country is called an American. This unquestionably is
geographically anomalous, for the neighbors of the United States, both
north and south, may claim an equal share in the term. Ethnically, the
only real Americans are the Indian descendants of the aboriginal races.
But it is futile to combat universal usage: the World War has clinched
the name upon the inhabitants of the United States. The American army,
the American navy, American physicians and nurses, American food
and clothing--these are phrases with a definite geographical and ethnic
meaning which neither academic ingenuity nor race rivalry can erase
from the memory of mankind.
This chapter, however, is to discuss the American stock, and it is
necessary to look farther back than mere citizenship; for there are
millions of American citizens of foreign birth or parentage who, though
they are Americans, are clearly not of any American stock.

At the time of the Revolution there was a definite American population,
knit together by over two centuries of toil in the hard school of frontier
life, inspired by common political purposes, speaking one language,
worshiping one God in divers manners, acknowledging one sovereignty,
and complying with the mandates of one common law. Through their
common experience in subduing the wilderness and in wresting their
independence from an obstinate and stupid monarch, the English
colonies became a nation. Though they did not fulfill Raleigh's hope
and become an English nation, they were much more English than
non-English, and these Revolutionary Americans may be called today,
without abuse of the term, the original American stock. Though they
were a blend of various races, a cosmopolitan admixture of ethnic
strains, they were not more varied than the original admixture of blood
now called English.
We may, then, properly begin our survey of the racial elements in the
United States by a brief scrutiny of this American stock, the parent
stem of the American people, the great trunk, whose roots have
penetrated deep into the human experience of the past and whose
branches have pushed upward and outward until they spread over a
whole continent.
The first census of the United States was taken in 1790. More than a
hundred years later, in 1909, the Census Bureau published A Century of
Population Growth in which an attempt was made to ascertain the
nationality of those who comprised the population at the taking of the
first census. In that census no questions of nativity were asked. This
omission is in itself significant of the homogeneity of the population at
that time. The only available data, therefore, upon which such a
calculation could be made were the surnames of the heads of families
preserved in the schedules. A careful analysis of the list disclosed a
surprisingly large number of names ostensibly English or British.
Fashions in names have changed since then, and