In which I argue that America’s cultural diversity in the second decade of the twenty-first century resembles the America of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and that the mood is favorable for returning to a system accommodating that diversity.
IN EARLY DECEMBER 1964, Lyndon Johnson held a celebratory reception in the East Room of the White House for the new Democratic members of Congress. The election had given the Democrats two-thirds of the seats in each house of Congress, supermajorities that would enable LBJ to pass just about everything he wanted during the next two years. The president was in an understandably expansive mood. He concluded his remarks by quoting the words of his mentor, Sam Rayburn, from Rayburn’s maiden speech as a member of the House in 1913. Rayburn had said he dreamed of a country “that knows no East, no West, no North, no South, but inhabited by a people liberty-loving, patriotic, happy and prosperous; with its lawmakers having no other purpose than to write such just laws as shall in the years to come be of service to humankind yet unborn.”1 It was a philosophy, Johnson concluded, that “had served this country greatly.”
It’s poetically perfect: The words had originally been spoken in the year Woodrow Wilson, the first progressive Democratic president, was inaugurated. They were quoted by Sam Rayburn’s protégé in the year that saw the high-water mark of New Deal liberalism. Together, 1913 and 1964 are excellent bookends for an era in America’s history when it was indeed thought that we should, and could, be all one people, not just indivisible but unitary.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that notion would have struck most Americans as nonsensical. It is just as nonsensical for Americans in the twenty-first century.
The received wisdom about multicultural America goes something like this:
At the time of the founding, America’s free population was not only white but almost entirely British, and the nation’s culture was based on their common heritage. That monocultural domination continued through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as other white European immigrant groups were assimilated into the Anglo mainstream. In the twenty-first century, with people of color soon to become a majority of the population, the United States faces unprecedented cultural diversity.
Here is the alternative view that the rest of this chapter propounds:
America was founded on British political and legal traditions that remain the bedrock of the American system to this day. But even at the time of the founding, Americans were as culturally diverse as they are today. That diversity was augmented during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Then came an anomalous period from roughly the 1940s through the 1970s during which cultural diversity was dampened in some respects and masked in others. Since the late twentieth century, America has returned to its historic norm: obvious, far-reaching cultural diversity that requires room for free expression.
At the Founding
You may reasonably question whether America at the founding was truly as culturally diverse as it is today—after all, the free population consisted almost entirely of Protestants whose ancestors were English or Scottish. I therefore describe that period in some detail.
Historian David Hackett Fischer’s magisterial Albion’s Seed describes how the British came to America in four streams.2 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.3 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 my topic is cultural diversity as it affects the different ways in which Americans think of 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 eighteenth 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 multihour 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.4 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 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,” and was 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.5 He calculated that 94 percent of the brides in the marriages he performed in 1767 were already pregnant.
There’s much, much more. People in the four cultures had radically different parenting styles. They ate different foods and had different attitudes toward diet and alcohol. They dressed differently. Their approaches to formal education were different, and so were their opinions and practices regarding recreation, social rank, death, authority, freedom, and good order. Their work ethics and attitudes toward wealth and inequality were different.
The table on the next two pages adapts Fischer’s summary of some of the differences (his table in Albion’s Seed has many more) separating the four peoples who made up America’s free population at the founding. If Fischer had included a description of the folkways of the African Americans, it would have constituted a fifth culture as distinct as the other four.
Thus my reasons for arguing that 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. Go through each of the categories in the table and ask yourself about the differences in quotidian culture that now separate whites, blacks, Latinos, and Asians. In some respects, the differences are substantial—but seldom greater than the ones that separated the four original streams of Americans.
The Anti-Federalists believed that the cultural diversity of the thirteen new states was so great that a strong central government was unworkable, as expressed in the following passage from Brutus (the Anti-Federalists’ counterpart to the Federalists’ Publius), writing in the Anti-Federalist Papers #18:
The United States includes a variety of climates. The productions of the different parts of the union are very variant, and their interests, of consequence, diverse. Their manners and habits differ as much as their climates and productions; and their sentiments are by no means coincident. The laws and customs of the several states are, in many respects, very diverse, and in some opposite; each would be in favor of its own interests and customs, and, of consequence, a legislature, formed of representatives from the respective parts, would not only be too numerous to act with any care or decision, but would be composed of such heterogenous and discordant principles, as would constantly be contending with each other.
The Federalists prevailed not because they refuted these arguments but because the powers of the federal government were so constrained. Americans at the founding, Federalist and Anti-Federalist alike, demanded a Constitution that severely restricted federal power not just because of an abstract attachment to federalism or because of the single issue of slavery but because of the many concrete ways in which peoples with different ways of life didn’t want a government that would interfere with those ways of life.
FOUR REGIONAL CULTURES IN ANGLO-AMERICA, CA. 1700–1750
Definitions of quantitative indicators
P Proportion of first births within 8 months of marriage.
G Gini coefficient, ranging from .00 (perfect equality) to .99 (the uppermost percentile has all the wealth).
C Ratio of violent crimes to property crime.
Source: Adapted from “Four Regional Cultures in Anglo-America: A Summary of Cultural Characteristics, ca. 1700–50,” in Fischer (1989), 813–15.
The cultural variegation of America had just begun. The nineteenth 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.6 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.7
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-nineteenth 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 farmers who practiced advanced agriculture or highly skilled craftsmen. Michael Barone’s description of the culture they brought with them 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.8
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 twentieth century, famously chronicled by Willa Cather in the early twentieth century and over the last forty 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.[9]
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 twentieth 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. When in 1913 Sam Rayburn voiced his hopes for an America that knew no East, West, North, or South, the four points of the compass barely began to describe the patchwork of cultures that was America.
Over the next sixty years, events combined to both dampen and mask cultural diversity. First, World War I triggered an anti-German reaction that all but destroyed the distinctive German culture. In the 1920s, new immigration laws choked off almost all immigration from everywhere except Britain and northern Europe, and even that was reduced. With each passing year more children of immigrants married native-born Americans and fewer grandchildren of immigrants grew up to carry on the distinctive features of their Old World culture. By the middle of the century, the percentages of Americans who were immigrants or even the children of immigrants were at all-time lows. Most of the once-vibrant ethnic communities of the great cities had faded to shadows. No longer could you find yourself in an American street scene indistinguishable from one in Palermo or the Warsaw ghetto.
Among native-born Americans, our long-standing tradition of picking up and moving continued, with surges of the population to Florida and the West Coast. Then came World War II. [10] Almost 18 million out of a population of 131 million put on uniforms and were thrown together with Americans from other geographic, socioeconomic, and ethnic backgrounds.11 The economic effects of war production also prompted a wave of African American immigration from the South to the North and West.
These demographic changes occurred in the context of the culturally homogenizing effects of mass media. Movies were ubiquitous by the beginning of World War I, and most American homes had a radio by the end of the 1920s. These new mass media introduced a nationally shared popular culture, and one to which almost all Americans were exposed. Given a list of the top movie stars, the top singers, and the top radio personalities, just about everybody under the age of sixty would not only have recognized all of their names but have been familiar with them and their work.
After the war, television spread the national popular culture even more pervasively. Television viewers had only a few channels to choose from, so everyone’s television viewing overlapped with everyone else’s. Even if you didn’t watch, you were part of it—last night’s episode of I Love Lucy was a major source of conversation around the water cooler.
In these and many other ways, the cultural variations that had been so prominent at the time of World War I were less obvious by the time Lyndon Johnson came to office. A few cities remained culturally distinct, and the different regions continued to have some different folkways, but only the South stood out as a part of the country that marched to a different drummer, and the foundation of that distinctiveness, the South’s version of racial segregation, had been cracked by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. When, in December 1964, Lyndon Johnson evoked Rayburn’s dream of an America “that knows no East, no West, no North, no South,” he was giving voice to a sentiment that seemed not only an aspiration but something that the nation could achieve once the civil rights movement’s triumph was complete.
But even as he spoke, the US Congress was only a year away from an immigration bill that would reopen America’s borders. Johnson’s own Great Society programs—plus Supreme Court decisions, changes in the job market, and the sexual revolution—would produce a lower class unlike anything America had known before.12 Changes in the economy and higher education would produce a new upper class unlike anything America had known before.13
Half a century after Johnson’s speech in the East Room, America is at least as culturally diverse as it was at the beginning of World War I and in some respects more thoroughly segregated than it has ever been. To put it in terms of the argument of this book: Today’s America is once again a patchwork of cultures that are different from one another and often in tension. What they share in common with the cultures of pre–World War I America is that they require freedom. In one way or another, the members of most of the new subcultures want to be left alone in ways that the laws of the nation, strictly observed, will no longer let them. They need to be left alone if they are to live their lives as they see fit.
Towns, Small Cities, Suburbs, Big Cities
The primary driver of quotidian cultural diversity throughout American history and continuing today, independently of ethnicity, religion, wealth, politics, or sexual orientation, is the size of the place where people live. At one extreme, in big cities of a million people or more, those other elements of cultural diversity all have room for expression. Neighborhoods are still segregated by ethnicity (though that has been slowly diminishing), but the megalopolises also have rich neighborhoods and poor ones; neighborhoods where families predominate and ones where singles do; neighborhoods where churches are active and ones where they are empty; tough neighborhoods and genteel ones; neighborhoods where bankers live and ones where artists live; and, in recent decades, gay and lesbian neighborhoods. Some cities have identifiably liberal neighborhoods and conservative ones.
If you live in a big city, enough money will let you choose to live in a neighborhood with just the right combination of characteristics to fit your priorities. Your “community” also probably consists of many pockets. Just as anywhere else, you can acquire close friends, but those friends tend to be scattered. Some of them live in the same geographic neighborhood but others live in virtual communities defined by your vocation or avocations.
So living in a big city does not mean living without community, but most of the city is anonymous, and so are almost all the interactions you have when you leave the confines of your immediate geographic neighborhood. If you’ve got a problem with a water bill or getting your trash picked up, you must deal with an anonymous city bureaucracy. The policeman who arrives when your apartment is burgled is someone you’ve never seen before and will never see again. If you get into a dispute with a neglectful landlord or an incompetent contractor, there is likely to be no personal relationship that you can use to resolve the dispute; you will have to take it to the authorities.
By its nature, the big city itself is an unfathomably complicated machine. It has large numbers of people with serious needs of every kind, for which there are a profusion of government agencies that are supposed to provide assistance. The technological and administrative complexity of the infrastructure that provides police protection, firefighting, water, sewers, electricity, gas, and transportation in a congested and densely populated place is staggering.
Now consider the other extreme, a small town or city. It might be 500 people, 3,000, or 15,000; it’s surprising how similarly communities function below a certain size. There’s no sharp cutoff point. In the quantitative work I’ve done for this discussion, I chose 25,000 as the upper bound, but that’s arbitrary.
First, it’s important to note that some things are the same everywhere. If a town or small city has an ethnic minority of more than a few families, its members will probably be clustered in the same blocks. Even small towns tend to have some clustering by socioeconomic class as well; they have a right side and a wrong side of the tracks. The residents don’t all know one another except in the tiniest places. Even people living in a town of just several hundred people cannot have what the anthropologists call “stable social relationships” with more than about 150 people, because that seems to be about the most that Homo sapiens can handle at one time.14
But daily life in a town or small city has a much different feel to it from life in the big city. For one thing, people of different ethnicities and socioeconomic classes are thrown together a lot more. There are only a few elementary schools at most, sometimes only one, and usually just a single high school. The students’ parents belong to the same PTAs and attend the same Little League games. The churches are centers of community activities, and while there are some socioeconomic distinctions among their congregations, the churches mix people up a lot.[15]
Small towns are not idyllic. The most bitter community disputes I have been part of occurred not in Washington, DC, but in a town of fewer than 200 people. My point is simpler: Hardly anyone in a town or small city is anonymous. Policemen, sales clerks, plumbers, and landlords are often people you know personally. Even when you don’t, you’re likely to know of them—if the plumber’s last name is Overholtz, your parents may have known his parents, or your friend’s daughter married an Overholtz a few years ago, or in a dozen other ways you are able to place that person in the matrix of the town.
The same thing is true of whatever interactions you have with government in a town or small city. In the big city, postal clerks are so often brusque and unhelpful that the stereotype has become notorious. In a small town, the postal clerk is more likely to add the necessary postage when you’ve understamped and collect later, or may phone to let you know that a package you were expecting has arrived. It’s not because the United States Postal Service assigns its friendliest postal clerks to small towns but instead is the result of age-old truths about human interactions: When you know that an encounter is going to be one-time, it’s easier to be brusque and unhelpful than when you expect the encounter to be repeated. Repeated encounters tend to generate personal sympathies, understandings, and affiliations.
The mayor and city council members of a small town are people you can phone if you have a problem. In a small city, solving your problem may involve as little as a phone call to the right person in a municipal bureaucracy that numbers a few dozen people. Not all problems will get solved that easily, but as a rule the representatives of government in a town or small city are more reluctant to play the role of an “I’m just following the rules” official than someone working in the bureaucracy of a city of a million. They are more willing and able to cut their fellow citizens some slack. It’s a variation on the reason why a village postal clerk is likely to be helpful. Bureaucrats in towns and small cities aren’t faceless. They have to get along with the citizens they govern. In fact, they can’t even get away with thinking of their role as “governing” their fellow citizens. They have no choice but to be aware that they are, in fact, public servants.
As for social capital—the potpourri of formal and informal activities that bind a community together—the range and frequency of things that still go on in towns and small cities is astonishing. Such places have not been immune from the overall reduction in social capital that sociologist Robert Putnam documented in Bowling Alone.16 Social capital has been hardest hit in the most distressed communities in parts of the country where jobs have disappeared.17 But in towns and small cities that still have a stable core of middle-class and blue-collar citizens, the traditional image of the American community survives in practice. These are still places where people don’t bother to lock the door when they leave the house and the disadvantaged are not nameless “people on welfare,” but individuals whose problems, failings, and virtues are known at a personal level.
As cities get larger, the characteristics I have discussed shift toward the big-city end of the scale, but it happens slowly. The earliest change, and an important one, is that socioeconomic segregation becomes more significant. When a city is large enough to support two high schools, you can be sure that the students who attend each will show substantial mean differences in parental income and education. The larger the population, the more that churches will draw their congregations from different social classes.
But many of the activities that go under the rubric of social capital continue. The churches remain important sources of such social capital, and so do the clubs such as Rotary, Kiwanis, American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, and others that are still active in cities of up to a few hundred thousand people (and sometimes beyond). Mid-size cities often have strongly felt identities, with solidarity and pride that carry over into concrete projects to make the community better. Even in cities of 300,000 or 400,000, the local movers and shakers are a small enough group that they can be brought together in a variety of ways, as members of a local civic organization or more informally, and they are often able to deal with local problems without a lot of red tape.
I could discuss these characteristics of life for still another kind of community, the suburbs of the great metropolises, but by now the point should be made: The simple size of the places where people live creates enormous diversity in daily life, in the relationship of citizens to the local government, in the necessity for complex rules, and in the ability of communities to deal with their own problems.
We aren’t talking about a small, quaint fraction of American communities that can deal with their own problems. Madisonians are often chastised for confusing today’s highly urbanized America with an America of a simpler time. I think the opposite mistake is a bigger problem: assuming that most of America is like New York or Chicago. As of the 2010 census, 28 percent of Americans still lived in rural areas or in cities of fewer than 25,000 people. Another 30 percent lived in stand-alone cities (i.e., not satellites of a nearby bigger city) of 25,000–499,999. Fourteen percent lived in satellites to cities with at least 500,000 people. Twenty-eight percent lived in the sixty-two cities with contiguous urban areas containing more than 500,000 people—the same proportion that lived in places of fewer than 25,000 people.
What Does “Contiguous Urban Areas” Mean?
For each of the largest fifty cities, I defined a “Greater X”—e.g., “Greater Kansas City”—that is based on contiguous high-density census tracts rather than the official city limits. City limits often bear no relationship to the actual extent of a city, especially on the East Coast, where the city limits may have been defined in the eighteenth century. The map and the discussion in the text are based on those modified city definitions.[18]
The 28 percent who live in the large contiguous urban areas don’t take up much space, as the map below shows.
The black circles represent cities of more than 1 million people. They contain 21 percent of the population. The gray circles identify cities of 500,000 up to 1 million, with 7 percent of the population. The sizes of the circles roughly correspond to the size of the geographic spaces they encompass (that’s why the circle for New York is so much smaller than the one for Los Angeles). Now look at all that space outside the circles. Specifically, look at the area including the state in which you live, and consider that a small geographic portion of your state consists of big cities—something that’s true of even the most urban states.
My proposition is that the people in that space, comprising fully 72 percent of the population, need a lot less oversight from higher levels of government than they’re getting. The municipal governments in that space need a lot less supervision from state and federal government than they’re getting.[19] For cities under 500,000, a compelling case can be made that their citizens should be given wide latitude to live their lives as they see fit. Once we’re down to cities under 25,000, I think that case becomes overwhelming, with access to a few block grants (carrying only the most basic bureaucratic strings) being nearly the only role that higher levels of government need to play.
I now turn to the topic that dominates the national conversation about growing American cultural diversity: growing ethnic diversity. My message is that it’s important but not revolutionary.
In 1965, America reopened immigration to people from around the world, and in so doing opened a new era. The figure below shows the story from the earliest census data in 1850 to the 2010 census.
The chart gives a specific example of two themes of this chapter: Midcentury America was anomalous, and America today bears some striking similarities to America of the nineteenth century.
The inflows of different ethnic groups since 1965 has indeed led to a major change in the ethnic composition of the American population. In 2012, non-Latino whites (hereafter just whites) constituted only 63 percent of the population, compared to the 80-plus percent that had held true from the founding through 1980—a big drop.20 The second largest ethnic group in 2012 was Latino, amounting to 17 percent of the population, surpassing the group that had hitherto been the largest minority, blacks, who in 2010 were 13 percent of the population. Asians in 2010 had reached 5 percent of the population. By now, almost everyone is familiar with the Census Bureau’s projection that whites will be a minority of the American population before midcentury.21 These are momentous changes in America’s ethnic mix at a national level. But they have caused, and will cause, little change in quotidian culture in the vast majority of American towns and cities, because changes in the ethnic mix of specific places have been so intensely concentrated.
LATINO AMERICANS. Start with the great surge in Americans from Mexico, Central and South America, and Cuba. In 1970, 9.3 million Latinos constituted less than 5 percent of the American population, concentrated in the border counties of Texas and Arizona, all of New Mexico, southern Colorado, and southern California, plus a growing Cuban presence in southern Florida and a large long-standing population of Latinos, mostly Puerto Ricans, in New York City.
From 1970 to 2010, the census shows an increase of 41.2 million Latinos. That’s a huge increase—but 71 percent of it was in the places I just mentioned, leaving just 29 percent of the increase in the Latino population to be scattered everywhere else in the country.22
The upshot is that county-by-county maps of the Latino presence in 1970 and 2010 look remarkably similar. Typically, the increase in the Latino population means that a local culture already influenced by Latinos is somewhat more influenced. With the exception of a few cities—mainly Chicago; Washington, DC; and Atlanta—places that had a minor Latino presence in 1970 still had a minor presence in 2010. So two different thoughts about cultural diversity fostered by Latinos need to be held in one’s mind at the same time:
1. The last fifty years saw the advent of a Cuban American culture in South Florida and the spread of an existing Mexican American culture in parts of Southwest America and California that have importantly affected quotidian culture in those places. The increase in the proportion of Latinos in those areas has also affected the political power balance. As of 2010, Latinos constituted an absolute majority of the population in 28 incorporated cities of more than 100,000 people. In some much larger cities, Latinos were approaching an absolute majority, constituting more than 40 percent of the population as of 2010 in Dallas, Houston, Albuquerque, Phoenix, Tucson, Los Angeles, Long Beach, Fresno, and Bakersfield.[23] In all, 18.2 million Americans in the Southwest and California lived in zip codes that were majority Latino.
2. America as a whole is not being Latinized. Outside the areas where the Latino presence is concentrated, Latinos constitute a small portion of the population—6 percent. That’s far short of a percentage that has much effect on quotidian culture. Furthermore, the surge in the Latino population is in a prolonged pause and may be over. According to analyses by the Pew Foundation, net Latino immigration stalled after the Great Recession of 2009.24 Michael Barone points out that the other great ethnic surges of immigration have petered out after about twenty-five years, and the Latino immigration may well be doing the same thing.25 Based on past experience, most of the Latino immigrants who do arrive will go to areas that already have large Latino populations. The best guess is that towns and cities with small Latino populations now will continue to have small ones for the foreseeable future.
AFRICAN AMERICANS. Similar generalizations apply to the African American minority: in certain specific parts of the United States, the influence of blacks on quotidian culture is large, but most American places have very small black minorities.
African Americans have been concentrated in the same places for many decades: the former states of the Confederacy and large urban areas in the Northeast and Midwest, plus large concentrations in Los Angeles and Houston. Adding up the black population in the onetime states of the Confederacy and the nineteen cities outside those states with at least 100,000 blacks in the 2010 census leaves only 12.8 million blacks living in the rest of the country, less than 7 percent of its population.[26] The diversity in quotidian culture introduced by African Americans is great, but isolated. There is no reason to think this pattern will change.
ASIAN AMERICANS. The most intriguing, least predictable cultural change being fostered by ethnicity is where you might least expect it: with Asian Americans. Amounting to only 5 percent of the population, Asians would seem to be too small a group to have much influence on the culture. For almost all of the country, that’s true. We have become accustomed to seeing Asian physicians in medical centers all over the country, and Asians running restaurants, dry-cleaning establishments, and convenience stores all over the country, but these amount to isolated moments in daily life.
Yet in a few geographic areas Asians are establishing a presence that already affects quotidian culture. The New York City and Los Angeles metropolitan areas each had almost 2 million Asians in 2010, and San Francisco had over 1 million. Four other metropolitan areas had more than 500,000 Asians, and nine others had over 200,000. What makes these numbers especially interesting is that Asians are heavily overrepresented in the elite zip codes of those cities. If the Asian population continues to grow—and, unlike immigration from Latin America, immigration from Asia is not slackening—the population of America’s elite zip codes could easily be one-quarter Asian by the 2020s. To my knowledge, no one has given any thought as to how that might play out in the elite culture.
The most dramatic current example of an Asian presence that already affects quotidian culture is in Silicon Valley, which effectively stretches from the southern suburbs of San Francisco to San Jose.[27] Silicon Valley, with a population approaching 2 million, is unique in its concentration of people in the top percentiles of IQ—surely a higher concentration than in any other American geographic area with such a large population. Their talents are being put to work in the information-technology industry, which is the single most important industry in reshaping daily life for people around the globe. And 33 percent of the population of Silicon Valley is Asian. In ten of Silicon Valley’s zip codes, Asians constitute a majority of the population. How might this affect the culture of Silicon Valley and, more broadly, the evolution of the IT industry? It is another intriguing but unanswered question.
ETHNIC DIVERSITY IN PERSPECTIVE. The day a few decades from now that a majority of the American population consists of nonwhites will be historic, but in my view it will not have much effect on daily American life. Opinions to the contrary are abundant. They range from ugly nativism of the kind America has known since the 1840s to thoughtful argumentation. For an example of the latter, see Who Are We? by the late Samuel P. Huntington, one of the most distinguished social scientists of the past half century.
My discussion of the ethnic overlay is intended not to minimize the degree of cultural diversity that growing proportions of minorities will create, but to place it in perspective. Suppose that American towns and cities had always mirrored the national ethnic distribution. In that case, the typical place where we lived in 1970 would have consisted of 83 percent whites, 11 percent blacks, 5 percent Latinos, and 1 percent Asians. Forty years later it would have consisted of just 63 percent whites, 17 percent Latinos, 13 percent blacks, and 5 percent Asians. That change would have betokened a transformative shift with many effects on quotidian culture.
That’s what has happened in America’s largest cities, most of which have become genuinely multicultural now in a way they were not in 1970. I don’t see that as a bad thing. Large cities are the ideal place for multiple ethnicities to flourish and to make local life more interesting.
But outside the largest cities, it has been exceedingly rare for town and city populations to mirror the national distribution. Instead, America has had a combination of one-ethnicity towns or cities (mostly with a dominant majority of whites, but some with dominant majorities of African Americans, Latinos, or American Indians) and two-ethnicity towns or cities (white-black, white-Latino, and a few that were white-Indian). Most of these local mixes are decades or even centuries old, and the charms of life in different parts of the country are decisively affected by them. The distinctiveness of life in Charleston or Savannah would be impoverished without its black-white mix. The unique culture of New Orleans depends on its black-white-Cajun mix. Miami has its unique mise-en-scène because of its many Cuban Americans. San Antonio, Albuquerque, Phoenix, and Los Angeles are all richer and more textured places to live because of their large Mexican American populations.
It’s not just cities. If you want to think of it that way, the enriching element of ethnicity is still in play in nearly all-white communities. The distinctiveness of quotidian culture in some places in Maine is owed to the centuries-long predominance of Yankee stock, while daily life in parts of Tennessee and Kentucky reflects the continuing predominance of the Scots-Irish. All of these and many other ethnically grounded cultural differences are an essential part of what makes America special. They aren’t about to disappear anytime soon, for reasons that I have tried to explain, and it’s good that they aren’t going to disappear.
The Cultural/Political Overlay
Places of the same size and similar ethnic mixes can nonetheless be culturally at opposite poles, because for the last three decades America has been busily segregating by socioeconomic status and politics.
The United States has always been a mobile country, with people pulling up stakes and moving long distances. But until the 1980s, the motivation for Americans to move around within the country was usually economic. People moved to escape a place where jobs had disappeared, moved to where job opportunities were attractive, or both. When it wasn’t economic, the motive often had to do with climate, as people left the cold winters of the Northeast and Midwest for the sun of Florida, the Southwest, and California. From the 1980s onward, large numbers of people have been choosing where they wanted to live for other reasons. They moved to places with a lifestyle that appealed to them, which also usually meant moving to places where people shared their politics, their socioeconomic class, or both.
The degree to which Americans have sorted themselves according to their class and politics has been described by Bill Bishop in The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart.28 You are familiar with the basics of the situation just from following the news. For example, you have surely seen many versions of the red-state/blue-state map. They vary depending on the election, but the consistent theme is a mass of red states in the interior of the country and solid blue in the Northeast and along the West Coast. Red/blue maps based on counties reveal a more accurate picture: The blue is concentrated in the largest cities and surrounding areas. It’s not that California, Oregon, and Washington are entirely blue, but that the coastal strips of those states are blue. Away from those coastal strips, California, Oregon, and Washington are bright red—those parts of the state just don’t have nearly as many people as the coastal strip. Colorado is not blue all over but mainly in a narrow corridor running from Boulder to Colorado Springs plus an island of blue in Aspen. The same phenomenon can be found in most states.
In one sense, there’s nothing new here. Since the solid South broke up in the 1960s, urbanized areas have always generally voted Democratic while rural and small-city areas have generally voted Republican. What’s different is that those tendencies have changed from mild to extreme. The Big Sort opens with two maps of the American presidential vote by counties, one for the 1976 contest between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter and the other for the 2004 contest between George W. Bush and John Kerry. In terms of the national vote, the results were nearly evenly divided—50.1 percent to 48.0 percent in 1976, 50.7 to 48.3 percent in 2004—but the electoral maps look completely different. In 1976, 73 percent of America’s counties were defined as “competitive,” meaning that the difference between the winner and loser was fewer than 20 percentage points.[29] The electoral map everywhere outside the South and Texas was dominated by competitive counties. In 2004, only 52 percent of counties were competitive, and the electoral map was dominated by huge blocks of counties between the coasts, especially in the plains states and mountain states, that went for George W. Bush by more than 20 percentage points, while the landslide counties for John Kerry were concentrated in the counties with the nation’s largest cities.30
A 2014 Pew Foundation study gives us additional ways to calibrate the change. Historically, both major political parties in the United States have been dominated by centrists. In the last few decades, those on the ideological extremes have grown dramatically. Among politically engaged Democrats, the percentage who hold consistently liberal views grew from 8 percent in 1994 to 38 percent in 2014. Among Republicans, the proportion of the politically engaged who hold consistently conservative views rose from 10 percent in 2004 to 33 percent in 2014.31 Furthermore, people increasingly associate only with those who share their politics. Forty-nine percent of consistent liberals and 63 percent of consistent conservatives say that most of their close friends share their politics.32 That’s the kind of polarization that produces neighborhoods sorted by politics.
The political sorting is symptomatic of a deeper class sorting. It was led by the emergence of a new class in America during the 1980s. It has gone under many labels. Robert Reich called them “symbolic workers”; Richard Herrnstein and I called them the “cognitive elite”; David Brooks memorably called them “Bobos,” short for “Bourgeois Bohemians”; and Richard Florida called them “the creative class.” All of us have been referring to the population of very smart, highly educated people for whom the economy of the last thirty years has been tailor-made. For an acute (and often hilarious) description of the new class, I refer you to David Brooks’s Bobos in Paradise, still as accurate today as it was when it was published in 2000. For a summary account of how this new class came to be and where they live, I refer you to the first four chapters of my own Coming Apart.33
Briefly, a revolution in higher education beginning around the 1950s subsequently produced a much larger cohort of college graduates than the nation had ever known and, within that population, a subset distinguished by high levels of intellectual talent and common socializing experiences in the nation’s elite colleges and universities.34 They developed a culture with distinctive tastes in everything from food and alcohol to sports and avocations to marriage and child rearing. It’s not primarily a matter of money. An associate professor at Oberlin making a modest salary is probably as fully immersed in the new elite culture as a programming genius at Google with millions of dollars of Google stock. In contrast, an affluent business executive in Des Moines who likes living in Des Moines probably has a lifestyle that is largely indistinguishable from that of a middle-class American. He probably has a bigger house (not a mansion) than someone in the middle class and drives a more expensive automobile (not a flashy one), but that’s about it.
The members of the new elite culture have flocked to the cities where they will find the most like-minded people. In the tenth-anniversary update of The Rise of the Creative Class, Richard Florida presents a “creativity index” that measures the attractiveness of cities to the creative class.35 Within the twenty-five top-ranked places are a dozen that are home to the nation’s most highly regarded research universities, including Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Stanford, Caltech, and Duke. Others of the top-ranked places are synonymous with hip and high-tech: Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Portland, Austin, Seattle, Denver. Others are large cities that don’t fit the pattern so obviously but have quietly become places with high-tech industries whose workforces have led to an ambience that attracts still more members of the creative class—Atlanta, the Boston area, Minneapolis, San Diego, Sacramento, the Los Angeles area, and the Washington, DC, area.
The ethos and values of this new elite are seldom directly political. It is not political that the new elite watches hardly any television at all except for a few fashionable series (as I write, Downton Abbey), while the average television elsewhere in the United States is on for thirty-five hours a week. It is not political that new elite mothers typically have their children in their thirties while mothers in mainstream America bear their children in their early to mid-twenties. Such lifestyle differences sometimes have political implications, but the more important point is that the differences are substantial. Tell a member of the new elite that he is being relocated from San Francisco to Des Moines, and he is likely to be so unhappy about the prospect that he looks for a new job rather than accept the transfer. He won’t feel at home in Des Moines. It works both ways. Go back to my affluent Des Moines businessman. If he is a devout Christian, for example, with traditional views about the definition of family, San Francisco probably won’t feel like a good match. If he is politically conservative, it will feel even worse. In San Francisco, he won’t be able to live his life as he sees fit as well as he can in Des Moines.
I have only touched on the other kinds of sorting that have been at work. I have not mentioned, for example, the massive influence that an aging population has had on the culture of retirement regions of the Sun Belt. But spelling out all those kinds of sorting here would be overkill. My point is not really a matter of dispute: Cultural sorting has added a complex array of ways in which American communities differ from one another. “Living life as one sees fit” has different definitions in different cultural pockets of the country.