You Know You Live in a Small(ish) Town When...

[LizzieMaine]

Whitest state in the union? Well, I think it depends on who gets to say who's white (or white enough) and who isn't.

"Whiteness" is something that's always been defined in opposition to "The Other" in American culture. Up until quite recently Maine people of French descent were that "Other," and were the target of considerable "racial" persecution. Within my own lifetime, "stupid Frenchman" jokes told in an exaggerated Quebecois accent were mainstream humor, French people in general were considered dumb, dirty, and superstitious, and kids raised in French-speaking families were under strong pressure not to speak French in public. When the KKK crawled out from under our cultural rocks to have its brief day in the local sun in the 1920s, its persecution was directed almost entirely against working-class people of French descent. "Froggy pope-kissers are gonna take our jobs and marry our daughters!"

 

[Harp]

"Froggy pope-kissers are gonna... marry our daughters!"

Est-ce si mal?

 

[BlueTrain]

So did they?

 

[belfastboy]

It's like that old Mac Davis song..."happiness was Lubbock, Texas in my rearview mirror..." Or as someone else once put it..."I was born in Lubbock and lived there until I got my driver's license." Not that Lubbock is a one horse town. It just feels like it.

My favourite quote from my Mother who moved to the west coast from a small prairie town as a very young woman....."I got tired of scraping the ice off the inside of the house and knew in my bones I had to get out."

 

[LizzieMaine]

Well, the Francophone community is now healthier than it's been in decades, while the Klan has been reduced pretty much to an assortment of basement-dwelling pimply-faced degenerate Internet jackasses, so I know who *I'd* rather have my daughter marry, if I had one.

 

[belfastboy]

I live in the "whitest state of the Union," but that's not as homogenous as you'd think. It's very likely if someone here tells you "Oh, I'm part Indian" that they do, in fact, have Native American ancestors not too far back in the line. Intermarriage with the Penobscots and Passamaquoddies was very common for the French and Scotch-Irish people who made up the bulk of the population here during the Colonial era, with the result that there's basically nobody here who's all one ancestry. Add in a heavy immigration of Finns and Germans in the nineteenth century, and Russian Jews in the early twentieth, and we're a pretty diverse brand of "white people."

Small note....It is more correctly Scots-Irish...Scotch is a drink.

 

[BlueTrain]

Two foreigners who invaded the United States sometime in the 1940s were Emilieu and Dolores Labonville, who established a business in New Hampshire, which is still going strong. They retail forestry and work equipment and manufacture some of it there in New Hampshire.

 

[BlueTrain]

By the way, those of us who don't drink are free to use "Scotch" for other purposes, including anything connected to Scotland. And some of us are descended from Scotch-Irish settlers, although none will admit it. All those that I know who are deeply believe they are the original Americans and the only true Americans.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The Scotch-Irish -- which is the term generally used in the US to describe this specific ethnicity -- are descended from the "Ulster Scots" who flooded into Ireland under English auspices during the 17th Century, where they soon made themselves unpopular by joining with the Irish in opposing English authority. Many ended up coming to the Colonies as indentured servants. They were by far the dominant English-speaking group in my part of the country during the Colonial era, and were not well-regarded by the poncy mercantile aristocrats of New York, Philadelphia and Boston, except perhaps as cannon fodder.

A lot of Scotch-Irish drifted South and West after the revolution, and many settled in Appalachia, where they maintain a strong presence today. They're still the most common ethnic group along the Maine coast, where just about any smelly lobster sternman you can flush out of a bar could boast a pedigree that would put any DAR lady in the shade. If they cared about such things.

 

[BlueTrain]

Most of my own ancestors came directly to Virginia from England, some of them having only lived there a generation or two since having emigrated there from Northern Germany. We shouldn't imagine there was only emigration to the Americas during the almost 300 years of colonial history in North and South America. I was the first one in my line not born in Carroll County, Virginia, since (just) before 1800. I still live in Virginia. My wife was commenting the other day that historically, people often never lived more than twenty or thirty miles from where their ancestors were born. In her case, it's still true.

My stepmother was a McKinney, which is probably Ulster Scots. Other old families in that same region include Graham, Cook (from Koch), Mills, Shrewsbury and so on. There were lots and lots of McKinney's. That area and the Southern Appalachians generally were only begun to be settled in the late 1700s after the Indians were "pacified," meaning driven away. Kephart described those people as "our contemporary ancestors."

 

[LizzieMaine]

I've got both Ulster Scot and straight-up Scot in me -- my paternal great-grandfather was a fish cutter from Aberdeen, but most my other ancestors were Scotch-Irish, mostly by way of Nova Scotia. I do have one Italian great-grandmother, who left me her moustache, and my father did not look like any Scot I've ever seen -- he was short, swarthy, had wavy black hair and a rather prominent proboscis -- so I suspect there are other strains in the line that have not been documented.

 

[ChiTownScion]

We traced my father's German roots to a lovely little village outside of Trier, the oldest city in Germany and birthplace pf Karl Marx. The hillsides along the Mosel River are covered with vineyards: the region has produced wine at least since the earliest years of the Roman Empire when it was occupied by the Treveri. The Roman emperor Caligula was born there while his father was on a military campaign in that frontier of the Empire. Had the pleasure of honeymooning in that village where my family's roots trace back to at least the 1600's: it was surreal in an almost spiritual sense.

Now the interesting part: my Dad had green eyes, not a common trait among the Swedes and Germans from whence he came. In fact, no one in the family had green eyes- although he had other facial features shared by siblings and parents. I used to kid my father that his green eyes were a family legacy from a Greek wine merchant of Roman times who stopped off for a night of passion almost two millennia ago.. but it's certainly within the realm of possibilities that joke was not far from the truth.

A lot of Palatinate Germans settled in the US in the early years after the War for American Independence, including a former musical instrument merchant who decided to get into the fur trade by the name of John Jacob Astor. My Dad's family came to America decades later.... and our economic fortunes were not quite as dramatic as Mr. Astor's.

 

[BlueTrain]

We visited Trier when my daughter was living in Germany. Nice town. She was living in a little village not far to the south.

My own name is an Anglicized form of the word Questenberg, a village in Saxony-Anhalt. Supposedly an ancestor went to England (becoming, I suppose, Anglo-Saxon) sometime in the 16th century and a descendent then came to Virginia in the mid-17th century. It's a nice story and I hope it's true. If it isn't I don't have a better one. Even so, I'm almost positive I have ancestors going back that far but I can't prove it.

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

Small note....It is more correctly Scots-Irish...Scotch is a drink.

But not in Scotland. There, it's called "whiskey."

 

[Fading Fast]

But not in Scotland. There, it's called "whiskey."

It took me a long time to untangle the Scotch-Whiskey-ScothWhiskey-Bourbon knot in my head and, with more than a shot or two of any of those in me, it all gets tangled up again.

 

[HudsonHawk]

But not in Scotland. There, it's called "whiskey."

Actually, the Scots call it "whisky". Otherwise, they might be mistaken for the Irish. Then all hell would break loose.

 

[sheeplady]

"Whiteness" is something that's always been defined in opposition to "The Other" in American culture. Up until quite recently Maine people of French descent were that "Other," and were the target of considerable "racial" persecution. Within my own lifetime, "stupid Frenchman" jokes told in an exaggerated Quebecois accent were mainstream humor, French people in general were considered dumb, dirty, and superstitious, and kids raised in French-speaking families were under strong pressure not to speak French in public. When the KKK crawled out from under our cultural rocks to have its brief day in the local sun in the 1920s, its persecution was directed almost entirely against working-class people of French descent. "Froggy pope-kissers are gonna take our jobs and marry our daughters!"

I am significantly Eastern European on my mother's side. Growing up, a certain person on my father's side of the family made a big deal out of whiteness and how my mother's family was from Eastern Europe, blah, blah. In other words, my mother was less white than my father, and oh my goodness, mixing.

I took a DNA test around the first of the year, and as it turns out, I am one of the 4 to 5% of white Americans who have African DNA... And it's on my father's side... And this person shares the bloodline.

I have been laughing ever since.

 

[BlueTrain]

Most immigration up until after WWII was European, not counting all the Africans brought here as slaves or all the Asians on the West Coast. But more recently, there has been more immigration from other places, including Latin America, South Asia, Africa, especially from Somalia and countries in that region, South East Asia and East Asia and the Middle East and Afghanistan. Not so many from Europe anymore. In theory, one would think that all the previous prejudices would go away because they don't fit into neat categories like people have been accustomed to seeing the world. Yet it still happens. One is either white or one isn't. And in some cases, actual skin color simply doesn't enter into the matter. Life is not fair.

Why doesn't all Heaven ever break loose.

 

[LizzieMaine]

We have a very substantial Somali population in, of all places, Lewiston -- a city which was almost entirely working-class French up until the 1990s. And while there have been tensions from time to time, in general the adjustment has been quite smooth. A bunch of Kluxers tried to stir the pot some years back and announced a demonstration -- and less than forty demonstrators showed up. Several thousand people, however, turned out to laugh at them.

 

[MisterCairo]

And those of us who are Scots are free to say in return Scotch is a drink; a Scot is man. - James Bond

By the way, those of us who don't drink are free to use "Scotch" for other purposes, including anything connected to Scotland. And some of us are descended from Scotch-Irish settlers, although none will admit it. All those that I know who are deeply believe they are the original Americans and the only true Americans.