Language In North America

This has been a long time in coming, but now seemed like a good time to discuss the matter of language on our fair continent.  First, a few key points:

1. The United States of America does not have an official language.  There are practical and historical reasons for this, which we will get into.  The state of New Mexico actually has two official languages, English and Spanish.

2.  Nearly a quarter of the people on this continent do not speak English as a first language, BUT:

3.  Many people in Mexico learn English, and as a second language, rather than as a foreign language, the most popular choice for which is French.  In my own experiences in Morelos, Guerrero, The Federal District, Chihuahua, and Baja California, I found that every person I ran into either spoke English or knew someone who did.

4.  English is not going anywhere, stop worrying.  People in China, which trumps our three countries in population all together, are learning it despite clearly being in a position where they now have the commercial and political clout to tell us to speak Mandarin and Cantonese. 

Feel better?

5.  Many of the founding fathers spoke multiple languages and considered a working knowledge of Latin and Greek to be an essential mark of a gentleman's intellectual prowess. 

6.  In present times, several hundred thousand people in the United States and Canada do not speak English, French, or Spanish as a first language, if at all, in daily use, and they have been speaking these tongues before speakers of those three tongues ever arrived on our shores. 

7.  Many if not most consumer products will have an instruction or warning label in our three predominant languages.  In Canada this is required by law; everything thus has French and English on the label.  In the United States, this is promoted by private businesses and often features multiple choices beyond even the big three.

8.  Of all the current political topics on the table, language is the one issue that seems to raise the ire in even the most politically apathetic people.  I have lost count of how many times I have been threatened with bodily harm just for speaking with someone in Spanish, or, heaven forbid, French.  

So let's start with those bold, declarative statements for now.  I want to be careful about how I introduce such a topic without causing panic (and why yes, immigration will also be on the table, probably next week) and to promote the fact that these posts, and this blog, is not attempting to be the grand avatar of some horrid political agenda.  Rather, I hope to bring some clarity to otherwise cloudy places of knowledge for you guys/you all/y'all.  I'm going to go slowly on this one, and break it down into digestible portions of history, politics, maps, etc.  Oh, expect maps.  Expect many maps.  I like maps.  Let's start with this one:

Source cited in image.  As we can see, Maine is clearly the coolest state to live in.  Not that I am biased or anything.

A nice map we have here.  Yes, we do see a lot of Spanish, but remember, this is a map with a title that should disarm hostile opposition.  In each and every one of those counties, excepting maybe some in the hinterlands and present political frontiers, English is the main event spoken outside of the home, and is definitely available even there.

Damn Foreigners And Their Donuts

My apologies, but the internet has been shaky for me at best these last few days.  I intended to finally post on some big issues, namely immigration and language, but if the cogs and wheels inside this modern typing machine can't bother to move properly until later in the evening when my brain is spent, well... it's not as if immigration and language will stop being issues in North America tomorrow or the next day anyway.  In any event, for those of us wondering what particular group will be the topic of discussion, that would be the Spanish speaking peoples to the south of us.  While I am loathe to give a preview of a post that I have no plans on getting to on a holiday weekend, my readers can probably figure out where a bilingual French-Canadian ex-pat will stand on the issues.

Hint:  The United States has no official language, and this peculiarity is kept in place by people on both the political right and left of this country, and has been kept so by such people since its founding.  Just as French speakers in Canada tell the Alliance for the Preservation of English in Canada, however, English probably is not going to go anywhere.  On the topic of culture, even though Mexican-American and Puerto Rican kids enjoy copious amounts of their traditional cuisine at home, most of the ones that I know make a grand charge to the nearest McDonald's whenever they can get the chance to, just like any other American kid.  Amazing.  No, no, don't be alarmist and think that this blog is going to turn into some political podium for the encouragement of opening the flood gates to foreigners who want to take away our apple pie and soak up welfare funds, and on the other side don't think that I am totally against the American concept of assimilation.  That's the amazing thing about the United States of America!  This country takes the world and (gasp) tries to make it work together.  Yes, it tends to get turned into something else in the name of opportunistic capitalism, but more often than not this is worthy of a laugh in and of itself.

In that line of thinking, and considering that we are now just that much closer to July 4th, take a look at this amazing scene in southern Ohio:

The fabled city of Portsmouth, Ohio.

That's right, those hills in the background are actually Kentucky, and that is indeed a Tim Horton's which has made an advance on behalf of Canada this far south.  I was in complete shock when I saw one this far from the maple frontier, hitherto thinking that they were only to be found within two counties' distance of the Canadian border.  Before I go ahead saying "assimilate this" and having y'all shake in your boots, be aware that as with all things imported into this country, even Tim's is not immune to Americanization: you can get a coffee in a dangerously large, totally patriotic extra extra extra large mug. 

Resurget Cineribus

It Shall Arise From The Ashes

Detroit once burned to the ground, much like her rival Chicago.  In 1805, after a rather difficult first century of changing political hands twice and being under the perpetual threat of invasion from Canada (come on, you can laugh), the mostly French-Canadian inhabitants of the city found themselves having to start over from scratch.  Thus we have the motto of the city: Speramus Meliora; Resurget Cineribus.  While the dominant culture of the city would then change into a melting pot of both internal and external immigrants much like New York, the heart of her founding people would remain in a resilient population that would turn adversity into reason for existence.  How?

A precarious existence next to Upper Canada turned into a port of entry and departure.

As the wounds of 1812 slowly began to heal through the 19th century, trade began to grow between the two banks of the river.  Western Ontarians were, and are, a far more agrarian folk than their brethren to the east of the Niagara Escarpment.  Michigan would later include a strong agricultural base, mostly in fruits and vegetables, in its diverse economic portfolio, but its emergence out of frontier life came at a comparatively slower rate than neighboring Ohio and Indiana.  People came to Michigan, after all, to harvest timber or trap beaver.  You came to Michigan for the one last piece of the frontier lifestyle that could still be found east of the Mississippi.  If your family followed, they would most likely set up camp in the more serene domesticity of the rich croplands of the true Midwest, not some off-the-beaten path place that would not even become a state until 1837.  That said, a lot of people did come to Detroit, all 46,000 of them by the time tempers flared at Fort Sumter.  They needed food, and what they could not provide for themselves they could find across the way.  Position was everything, after all.

Position was how Chicago grew from a backwater fort into one of the greatest cities in the world.  Chicago was a transportation hub, a gateway between east and west.  One would get off the boat in New York, sure, but if one wanted to move deeper into the land, one ended up with countless native born Americans before a great menu of destinations awaiting them at this gateway.  Despite the open nature of the continent, nearly all travel somehow centered on the great bottleneck there.  Traffic still does; multiple interstates get their start in the city, leading in a great radial pattern to all points except due east into the drink of Lake Michigan.  The great northern transcontinental roads and railways all stop here, and some of the success that New York achieved as the premier port of the United States was in the fact that Chicago was at the other end of a passage to the west, be it by canal and lakes or rail.

Chicago never had the benefit of being next to Canada, however, and certainly not the benefit of being a mere three hours and change away from Toronto, with a bit more of a double investment getting one to Montreal and thus the ocean.  Or, if one was feeling overly patriotic, one could still take the Empire route through Buffalo and onto New York.  Yes, Detroit had, and has, the distinct advantage of also being a transportation hub, and then one on international scale.  Detroit could serve as the staging point for more than just settlement expansion and agricultural commodities trading.  Detroit could serve, rightly so, as the center of a Great Lakes powerhouse of natural resources both arboreal and mineral.  Chicago was the doorstep to the west, sure, but Detroit was right at the center of everything industrial east of the Mississippi.  If ever there can be declared a true capital to the Great Lakes, it is the city right at the middle of them.  Of course, back then raw materials for industry were all the rage, and this included people themselves, some free, many not so free.

Detroit was for many the last place they would experience of an American existence.  Detroit was the last frightful stop for escaping slaves heading to safety in Canada through the Underground Railroad.

The thing was, some of these slaves would one day return, and Detroit became more than just a gateway.  Many other people would come in their wake, from many different lands and cultures.  They would come because of racial tolerance and freedom, not in spite of it.  They still do today; Detroit has one of the most diverse immigrant populations outside of the major port cities of New York and Los Angeles.  Freedom, a reasonable cost of living, good living conditions, excellent paying jobs in a number of fields, all of these and more attracted people to a city that truly encapsulated the American dream far more than the crowded slums of packed New York or even great gateway Chicago.

The new Underground Railroad works the same way.

Immigrants finding tough restrictions, discrimination, and economic difficulties in the United States have been increasingly turning toward Canada as an alternative destination nation.  Now, as then, many make a life for themselves there only to find that they still want to make a go for it, largely because of relatives who have done so, in the United States.  Detroit actually turns out to be one of the first places that springs to mind for making this happen.  How do I know?  Personal experience.  Having spent time in various INS offices, I can assure my readers that the two most diverse waiting rooms I have been to were in Detroit and New York.  In a rather sterile and tranquil modern version of Ellis Island, voices from around the world crowd daily into the immigration offices on Jefferson ave. in Detroit.  To most Americans, Detroit might symbolize decay and corruption, but to people from the rest of the world it symbolizes diversity and opportunity.  When I lived over in London in 2003, most of the people I met in that extremely cosmopolitan world city saw Detroit as a point of racial and national encounter.  Violent, perhaps at times, but for the most part a different view of the country and continent at large.

To these same people, a place like New York was more of a melting pot where cultural assimilation and absorption takes place.  Everyone picks up the habits and customs and tastes of everyone else and the country is enriched the more so even while the newcomers also become more American.  In Detroit, the process is a bit slower, and differences become far more apparent.  The movie 8 Mile was often pointed out to me as an artistic representation of this encounter between different worlds.  In reality, 8 Mile road is very much the boundary between the suburban and urban worlds here, and as the movie illustrated all too well, it can be a very messy border indeed.  As noted, though, encounters do not necessarily mean confrontation, just more so a lot of transmission without dilution.  Case in point, we have amazing musical talent here that has benefited from cultural fault-lines.  We also have the most diverse regional cuisine in, well, North America.  If you wanted to, you could gorge on a day of restaurant binges and get stuffed full of authentic Mexican, Italian-American, Polish, Arabic, Greek, Soul, and even Coney Island food.  Best of all, poutine has recently made a dramatic entrance here, and this gets us back to one of our two main events.

What is Detroit good for?  Being plain exciting and having what is possibly the most potential of any city in North America.  If we can rely more so on the strengths of our racial differences than the bigotry that can exist between them, we can easily, along with what I envision to be our ideal sister city of Toronto, become one of the new prime destination cities of the country.  Recent plans to reintroduce efficient high-speed rail service to the United States incorporates Chicago as the primary central hub of connections, one of which is as the terminus of a corridor stretching to Montreal, through Detroit and Toronto, the true lifeblood of this circuit.  We already have a second major international crossing on the way to help facilitate commercial traffic, and Canada already has the high speed lines built on their end.  We also have the wealth here to reinvigorate what treasures do remain in our city, which we see in the next post on what Detroit has to offer to the world.

For now, we have soul, and we sure do have hope.

The best way to illustrate this post would be an early morning shot of the city, taken just as the sun is making its way up.  We sure do have a tree-filled city!

We have this virtue not in the memory of a glorious past or in spite of rampant corruption and decay, but because of an energy which never did get dissipated during so many rough times, it just got either redirected or channeled into different values for a different age.  Again, come by next post to see what we have accomplished.

And oh yes, I am a proud Michontarian, a word I predict will have a much wider usage in the coming decades.

Another Savanna Post, or What Did We Have and What Have We Done With It?

And yet again another exciting post from Jim McCormac over at Ohio Birds and Biodiversity.

http://jimmccormac.blogspot.com/2012/07/pearl-king-savanna.html

His post is a look at the Pearl King Savanna, one of last remaining oak savannas in Ohio.  In all honesty though, some of its grass cover is extensive enough to consider it as something of a prairie; a few of his excellent photographs reveal that the horizon is quite distant.  Perhaps this is because of the surrounding farmland.  Though this adjacent agricultural space is very much a landscape of our creation, it is important to remember that it is there because the settlers who poured into the region found such open and "barren" land an attractive place to start plowing and planting.  What could be more pleasant to an immigrant farmer than land that nature has already cleared, and left rich soils to enjoy as well?  The Ohio Valley and Great Lakes were settled relatively fast not only because they had the one thing those living east of the Appalachians craved the most, space, but also because the open landscape only added to the concept.

This had me wondering just how much of the Nearwest and even parts of the interior eastern seaboard used to have savannas and prairies.  Wildfire regimes, both historical and conjectured modern, seem to indicate that they could have been very widespread.  These days, we still have many pine barrens from Long Island southward into southern Florida which have probably survived or renewed themselves because of undesirable soils and/or changing employment patterns.  If the climate and natural processes could support "barrens" in coastal regions, surely they could do they same where they were not entirely different back in the interior valleys of the Appalachians and the lakeplains of Lake Ontario and Erie.  Buffalo, for instance, once thrived in the valleys of Virginia and, you guessed it, the area around Buffalo, NY.  The early colonists and settlers, both French and English, reported the majestic herds in such areas.  They were less thorough in reporting about the landscapes they were found in, except where they found towering forests.

Perhaps this was because nature provided inspiration when the migrants found roadblocks such as mountains and great rivers and lakes.  The scale of the continent's unspoiled lands inspired whole schools of painting that highlighted such expanses, particularly in the work of the Hudson River School.  Such lands also provided inspiration for the birth of the natural romantics like Thoreau and Emerson, and the conservation movement which they spawned.  In contrast, however, little fuss was made about lands that were either convenient, like prairies and savannas, or roadblocks that did not serve to inspire (at least in that era) such as swamps, dry plains, and deserts.  The most striking historical portraits we have of such desires would be in  our conserved lands.  With the exception of swamps set aside for bird refuges, most of the early saved lands were mountains and dramatic valleys.  The Everglades, again in contrast, were viewed as undesirable (despite being one of the most amazing bird habitats in the entire world), and were even being targeted for drainage and destruction by the same people that were promoting conservation elsewhere!

There we have it.  A mountain or large lake could not be moved out of the way, and served as a reminder of the forces that were greater than humanity that could not be tamed.  A grassland?  Well, that would be something more akin to a field that nature had left wild and was just begging to have cultivated for more "useful purposes".  A swamp?  Yuck!  Why would the settlers make a mention out of something they could instead just transform into a monument of expanding civilization, a monument which would leave a much better record and legacy of who they were and why they came there?  Nature was just starting to become appreciated for its own sake back in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and well over a century would go by wherein civilization was still hailed as the primary triumph of man's dominion over creation.

What did we have?  What have we done with it?  Thankfully, we have people like Jim to show us a glimpse of an answer to these questions.  That in mind, let's keep exploring!

On the Concept of Native Gardening, Part Three.

Part One.

Part Two.

In the years following the Spanish conquests and explorations of the sixteenth century, entire populations of Native Americans started dropping dead.  The Spanish had brought (inadvertently) a host of diseases with them which the isolated populations of the Americas had thus far managed to avoid.  While Europeans, Asians, and Africans had managed to build up immunity to certain diseases, maladies like smallpox now had the chance to affect a vulnerable population in the New World.  Along with their diseases, the newcomers also brought plants and animals that would find an open market to thrive and threaten to overtake their native counterparts, a tragedy which continues to this day.

So? Who cares?  Nature can't take care of itself?  Well it can, and sometimes nature can respond rather rapidly to sudden introductions between environments, but in many cases, we are a force of change that outpaces natural evolutionary process.  Sure, nature can be catastrophically destructive on its own, too, so we should not get upset when a hurricane or tornado wipes out homes and such, right?  You see the point...

So how bad are invasive plants?  Unlike the exotics that will rarely reproduce or do so at the same pace and type of spread of other plants, invasives are species that can do any or all of the following, in the absence of their native biological controls:

1. They grow much faster in their new home to the point at which they simply outgrow other things.

2. They can thus also crowd out other vegetation, meaning that if other things would start to grow along with them, they would be denied sunlight and nutrients, or even just sheer space, by the invader.

3. In doing this, and even when native plants do hold their own in competition, the invaders take away from the available food sources for animals.

4. They release either salts or chemicals into the soil to actually prevent anything from becoming competition again.

And then also, dependent on us yet again,

5. We still find such invaders beautiful and tasty and actually remove natural vegetation in favor of the invaders.

Now, this does far more than just outrage native purists like myself who like to see the landscape as it was designed by the Creator (yes, yes, I know, a loaded statement on all sides of the debate of Darwin vs. everyone else).  While I would like to illustrate the heinous nature of Kudzu (Pueraria Montana, and don't ask me how an Asian plant got a Latin name like that), it appears that I missed out on some photo ops of the deadly vine.  You can read more about it, and find some amazing pictures, here:

http://www.jjanthony.com/kudzu/houses.html

Instead, we can take a look at the forests and wooded places of Michigan yet again and stare sylvan death in the face.  I speak, of course, of Garlic Mustard (Alliaria Petiolata).  Garlic Mustard bears all five of the above marks of destruction.  Here we have two pictures of our "friend", the first for an example of how densely packed it can grow, the second for an example of what it can do to a forest.

Now, if the second image did not look at all that terrifying, keep in mind that that spread of the stuff goes well back into the underbrush.  It crowds out everything else, even itself, and when it dies it releases over a thousand seeds that explode into a decent cover of the area around each plant.  As if this were not enough, it releases allelopathic chemicals into the soil which its roots grow in.  If for some reason the plant would not reseed and germinate successfully, it would prevent anything else from doing that either.  It spreads like crazy, enough so that eradicators such as myself have been completely demoralized by seeing it everywhere. (And yes, this is what I do with my days, tromp through the forest, swamps, and prairies looking for stuff like this and removing it).

What happens when hopeless cases like me don't get out there and tell it to die and never come back?  You see that lovely forest up there?  That would become a memory.  Sure, it will not kill the trees outright, but eventually, they will fall or die by some other means and not produce future generations...  This thing literally not only harms biodiversity, it outright eradicates it.  In its native lands of Eastern Europe there are things that eat it and plants that have some degree of defense to its chemical warfare.  Here, even a starving deer will not even touch it, and our normally robust native plants get all wimpy around it.    Perhaps in time plants would adapt to this pest, but by then our natural lands would look very, very different and be quite dead... So how did it get here?  People thought it was tasty.  It tastes like garlic, well... bland garlic.  A bag full of the stuff smells like someone torched an Olive Garden, meaning it can make even a garlic lover like myself want to turn my nose.  Some people even think it is pretty and consider it a wildflower, which they either try to replant or let wreak havoc on the margins of their gardens and properties.  In this case, the choice to not garden with natives actually destroys the local ecosystem rather than simply result in an "also ran" landscape. 

Perhaps this would not be so bad if it were only Garlic Mustard engaging in ecological war crimes, but the truth of the matter is that we have a lot of invaders out there.

http://plants.usda.gov/java/noxComposite

Now don't get me wrong, this happens elsewhere in the world too.  We send stuff to Europe that has already had fun in destroying what little virgin landscape they have left there.  Invaders are just bad news everywhere.   Before you plant or before you decide not to weed, look up what you are introducing/neglecting.  Likewise, when traveling, be aware that not everything you see might belong there, which can sometimes kill the mood when you are impressed by the local flora, but can also help one appreciate what does belong there even more.  We are blessed in that for the most part, our continent still has a fair portion of its natural appearance intact where the lands remain undeveloped or have reverted to the wild.

On the Concept of Native Gardening, Part Two.

Part one can be found here.

In the last post of this series, we explored the wonderful world of native elements in a garden and yard.  Now we move on to things that we have introduced to this continent, which are otherwise known as exotic plants.  For today, we can stick to the relatively good stuff, and just leave it at exotic and not invasive, which we can take a look at Monday.

Exotic Plants.


The word can be deceptive.  While exotic can indeed refer to something really beautiful and stunning, it mostly just refers to things which are foreign to the native habitat in which they are now cultivated.  In many parts of North America, especially in urban and suburban areas, exotic plants account for at least a third of what you see, including invasives.  Many of the more functional plants, namely trees used for shelter, shade, and windbreaks, lawn grasses, and some crops have been imported from Europe.  What can we say?  We like bread made from wheat and beer made from hops and barley.  We like our wine to be made from various strains of Vitis Vinifera rather than the more robust tasting North American natives.  We absolutely adore orderly rows of Lombardy Poplars (Populus Nigra) when lining our city streets and making windbreaks on farm fields.  We are not entirely Euro-centric, however.  Your average flower bed and garden will have Asiatic hollyhocks and hydrangeas growing well, and in the warmer parts of the continent African and Australian plants are all the rage.

For that matter, exotics do not even need to be from another continent.  We have an overabundance of Colorado Blue Spruce (Picea Pungens) in the eastern United States and Canada.

These are exotic, having been introduced from the other side of the Great Plains.  Likewise, Floridians are fond of the towering Mexican Fan-Palms (Washingtonia Robusta), and California and northwestern Mexico accept Southern Magnolias (Magnolia Grandiflora) in return, which are also planted northwards as far as the climate can support them when cultivated with care.  The point is that, like much of the rest of the world, North America has a ton of foreign elements in our botanical ensemble.

Now, are these bad?  No, at least as long as we maintain some wilderness and wild spaces, parklands, and make sure that our native ecosystems are not threatened by new species.  Why are they good?  Well, you try eating a baguette made out of corn.  A corn tortilla is amazing.  A corn baguette is a mistake.  Our gardens have been greatly enhanced by combining elements of flora from around the world, and I personally cannot live without a bed of snapdragons planted every year.  I am exceedingly fond of my Bald Cypress growing 300 miles north of its natural range, so much so that I record minute details of its growth every day.  (What?  We all have quirks.)  Don't get me wrong, native plants are lovely and impressive, but variety can be the spice of life, and zone and climate denial is a very fun aspect of gardening.  Not only is variety fun, it is also a wonderful reminder of how we have coped with our environment from the time we first learned to stick something in the ground and make it grow a certain way.  We have developed so many cultivars of flowers, fruits, vegetables, grains, and even trees in a relatively short length of evolutionary timescales.  Exotic plants are essentially an extension of our interaction with the natural world into that same world, a real miracle in and of itself.  While we can decry pollution and resource mis-management, we can applaud leaps in efficiency regarding agriculture and sustainable forestry.  In North America, we have managed to do this really well:



At the same time, on this same continent, we can also see how much we have changed in the past few hundred years.  People who don't think much about the abundance of Blue Spruces probably figure them to have always been there (some even think they grow in straight rows naturally).  People might figure that Los Angeles might not have always had skyscrapers and freeways, but they also might assume there were always a variety of palm trees growing in pre-colonial California (they were not).  Southern Florida has been changed beyond recognition, even in parts of protected areas.  Sometimes the ignorance has extended into professional forestry, with exotic trees being planted instead of the natives that belong and can flourish better there.  While invasives can thrive because of ignorance, non-invasive exotics can sometimes grow nicely but fail to reproduce.  Worse yet, the plants themselves, while remaining benign and non-intrusive, can still host certain insects and pestilences that can devastate our natural flora.  The disappearance of the stately and formerly widespread American Elm (Ulmus Americana) is but one very sad example of what happens when disease travels with garden imports.  We can end up losing our natural heritage at worst, and diminish an appreciation of our natural ecosystems at best.  The most helpful thing to do is to remind ourselves that an exotic is exotic.  It was put there by us, sometimes only survives because of us, and can compete with or make us forget about what was there before us, which happens to be remarkably good at surviving without us (which is a very helpful thing economically, no?).

Exotics are not evil, and by no means do we need to get on an aggressive campaign to eradicate them.  Invasive exotics, on the other hand...

Segregation Outside of the South

Yesterday we took a look at the grave of Elvis Presley, and I made a few remarks about his role on helping to end racial segregation in the United States.  While he was not one of those brave students who simply tried to walk to school in Little Rock or a very special woman who refused to take a seat all the way in the back of the bus when many of the front seats were open, he attacked the hind quarters of the beast of racism: de facto (rather than de jure), or passive segregation.  What is passive segregation?  Essentially, it is an unenforced apartheid wherein racial groups tend to stick to themselves, thinking that that the "other" people have either nothing to offer them, or at worst have an undesirable lifestyle.  Pretty much all of humanity experiences this, even in supposed havens of tolerance.  In Canada, for instance, French and English speakers did not really mingle amicably until the 1960's (and that is just a cultural divide).  In Mexico, some of the wealthier mestizos from the northern and central cities tend to look down on the "blanket wearing Indians" who live in Oaxaca or Chiapas.  In the United States, where segregation of races was actually enforced, things got a bit more extreme.

In the northern states, you would usually be hard pressed to hear about lynch mobs, everyone would drink at the same drinking fountain, and someone walking down Woodward avenue in Detroit in the 1950's was just as likely to be black as they were to be white.  All the same, different groups tended to actually live in their own neighborhoods, and by and large, your average church or school would pretty much be all black or all white.  Heck, until that same decade, some neighborhoods and their social institutions were pretty much all Polish or entirely of some other ethnic group!  No one thought much about it at the time; such people lived where they wanted to by choice, rather than law... or fear, right?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  Because the United States had been taking in the rest of the world as immigrants, the country was a pretty diverse place, far more so than any other nation in history, save maybe Imperial Rome.  The concept took some getting used to, and then, as now, some groups were worried that their identity would be expunged by all the new groups melting together.

Warning: Soapbox Rant.

Today we have white Americans fearful of domination by Hispanics, who fear in turn that their kids are getting too comfortable with being Americans.  While that is a post for another day, I would have to tell my readers not to freak out from one side or the other.  English is here to stay, because if your kids play video games, and they do, they chat over microphones with people around the world in it.  The kids might speak Spanish at home, but so what?  Many of the founding fathers spoke multiple languages, and they never forgot how to swear in English.  We might start eating more tacos, but we pretty much have been eating spaghetti and other assimilated foods for a century now, and coke, burgers, bacon and eggs, and steaks from Wyoming and Texas have yet to disappear.  Finally, no one likes paying more taxes, and this will be the thing that holds all true Americans together.  The point is, even in the north, we have tendencies to stick to our own folks, which is a choice, and is fine.  The downside of exclusivity is that we can erect barriers between one another accidentally out of choice, and not because we are actively racist.

End Warning.

While my first instinct is to point out 8 mile road in Detroit as a prime example of this behavior, the situation of passive segregation in that city, as well as in other rust belt cities like Buffalo, Gary, and Chicago, is a bit more complicated than simply pointing a finger at choices and blaming everything on our preferences. Instead, let's head over to Kansas, specifically to Topeka.  Now, Kansas has a history of disliking racism that started back in the decade before the Civil War when it was opened up to the concept of "popular sovereignty".  Basically, the state settlers got to choose if Kansas would allow slavery or not, simply by how many pro or anti-slavery people would move in.  It got pretty messy, needless to say.  In the end, the abolitionists won, and their victory was cemented in the Civil War.  Still, there were enough people of the opposite camp around that voiced their opinions in the state government who managed to enact laws that enforced racial segregation in schools.  In 1896, in the case of Plessy vs. Ferguson, the Supreme Court of the United States confirmed their right to keep people separated, and any law in the United States that supported separate but equal facilities were upheld as legal.  Such laws were usually present and enforced only in the southern states, while most of the northern states forbade such laws as contrary to their individual constitutions.  Then there were states, most in the west, that had a sort of ambivalence about them, like Kansas.

Topeka, for the most part, was a pretty relaxed city that did not have a ton of racial tension.  Like most of Kansas, it welcomed freed slaves following the Civil War, and the city featured the first black schools to be founded west of the Mississippi.  When segregation laws did come around eventually, they were not much of a big deal, as the schools already tended to be de facto segregated just based on the demographics of the neighborhood.  Only the elementary schools were segregated, as Topeka High School had been integrated since it was founded in 1871. The schools were funded in equal measure with their white counterparts, and reportedly had good teachers and facilities.  One of the elementary schools still stands, and now serves as the centerpiece for Brown vs. Board of Education National Historic Site.

So what was the problem, and why did the court case I just mention get some press from sleepy Topeka?  Well, once World War II was over, the country started seeing a rapid expansion of its cities, owing to renewed prosperity and a ton of new automobiles being on the roads.  The American Dream started to include a nice house with a big yard that came with a larger commute time and neighborhoods being broken up as people headed for new, open areas of the city environs.  Topeka was no exception to this expansion, and all of sudden, some parents found that they did not have a school that they could legally send their children to, unless they wanted to send their kids all the way across town.  Some concerned parents found that the local legislature was uneasy about opening up a potential hornet's nest of racial warfare, and refused to properly attend to the situation.  One such parent, Oliver Brown, took the matter to the Supreme Court, where the justices were already reviewing similar cases from across the country.  In the end, Plessy vs. Ferguson was overturned, and Topeka quietly adapted to the situation.  In the south, the situation was a bit less friendly...

Anyway, within a few decades, de facto segregation largely evaporated from much of the rest of the country.  People like Elvis helped to break down these barriers from a cultural standpoint, while people such as Brown took the challenge on a bit more directly.  Yes, we still have divides between people, but these days we are largely at a point where the matter is able to be talked about, and often, laughed over.  The challenges these days largely stem from a political corruption of the issues, which should not be a shock considering the age we live in.  What remains of race and class tension has in some ways become transformed into ideological polarization which feeds the existence of career politicians and the interest groups which support them.

Defining the Not-Midwest: Settlement Patterns

"You know, I like Buffalo.  It's not quite northeast, not quite midwest, but its own sort of thing."
-Anonymous friend from Albany.

In recent years, the citizens of West Virginia have been getting uppity.  No longer content to be labeled anything along the lines of "Appalachian" or "borderline southern", the residents have desired to be counted in the census as, wait for this, midwesterners and southerners.  In the north, particularly in the panhandle, the cultural essence of the state shares much in common with the neighboring parts of Pennsylvania and Maryland, right down to local accents and dialects, and even restaurants and common retail outlets.  For whatever reason, and the next few posts will be about theorizing why this is the case, they have instead opted to be considered midwestern, which they think Ohio pretty much is.  Now, Ohio at least has been called this before.  So?  What's the problem?

Well, West Virginia is, uh, due north of the Carolinas, and south of Pennsylvania and New York.  It lies roughly half way into the eastern timezone.  It was a part of Virginia until the Civil War.  Need I go on?  Apparently I do, because it seems that inclusion in the midwest is one of the most desirable things out at the current time; heartland affiliation is passionately sought after by conservatives claiming to be American traditionalists.  That's right.  I brought politics into this.  Why?  Because they are screwing with geography and don't need to!  For the next few days, I am going to go in depth as to what I think the Midwest consists of, and to be up front and honest, I am excluding Michigan, a good third of Ohio, and most assuredly, I am excluding anything to their east.  Now, why?  Well, I am not trying to do this because I dislike the right, the left, or anything called the heartland.  I am trying to do this because I think there is more regional diversity to this country than often gets recognized.  I am doing this because history and geography deserve to be more than just political wands and magic spells.  I am doing this because I LOVE Michigan, northern Ohio, southern Ontario (and look, I just attacked a boundary), and western New York.  I think these places are unique areas that deserve more than being ignored by greater political camps who only use them to their advantage.  East coasters, midwesterners, you have great lands!  East coasters, midwesterners, don't pass these ones off as more of what you are, and come visit us!  Well, with that out of the way...

Let's start off the series with (and note, I am not using the word "lesson" here) a look into Euro-American settlement of the lands beyond the Appalachian crest.

I realize that this is a mess of map, and that some of the colors look alike.  Let's code it down, then, starting with teal.  Teal, in the valleys west of the Blue Ridge mountains in Virginia, is essentially where the cradle of western expansion lies.  It was from these valleys that the already rustic pioneer population made tracks towards Kentucky, following men such as Daniel Boone through Cumberland Gap, which is the red dot between the two states.  Following, and often with the initial Virginians, would be immigrants from Pennsylvania, including many Germans and other European immigrants who had already been settling there for about 70 years.  The expansion from Cumberland Gap started in 1775, and took off almost overnight.  By 1792, enough people had settled in Kentucky for it to become the first state west of the eastern seaboard.  By 1812, as you can see from the lighter blue on the map, the Kentuckians had spread out along the waterways of the Ohio, Tennessee, Scioto, Miami, Wabash, and finally Mississippi-Missouri rivers.  Today, the southern portions of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois bear a culture and attitude that was handed down to them by these pioneers.  They are in many ways the first midwesterners, and together with later immigrants who arrived in Chicago and from the National Road, mingled with them, and are the modern midwesterners.

As you can see, however, they did not make it all the way north.  From the upper Potomac and historic core of Pennsylvania, including Philadelphia, a great immigrant port, we have those brown arrows and lines, which consisted of migrants of what have since been referred to as the "midlanders".  With the exception of the Mormons and some religious groups from New England, most of the minority Christian religious groups settled this region, and often started here as well.  Their accents and dialects of American English are markedly different from the Virginians and Kentuckians, without much of a drawl of the south, or the nasal characteristics of the north.  The people of this region that did end up constantly pressing west took the valley road down to Virginia and mixed in with the groups in the south that moved past the Cumberland Gap.  Those that stayed often slowly moved into the interior of the Appalachians and Allegheny Plateau.  They followed the valleys and ridges, often along rivers such as the Delaware and Susquehanna.  Others cut further west on the Potomac and raced ahead of the National Road that began construction in 1811.  They settled in places like Pittsburgh, Wheeling, Cumberland, Altoona, and into Ohio.  From around Columbus and eastward, they mingled with the Kentucky crowd, and founded cities like Indianapolis and Vandalia.  In the parts of Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and a tiny bit of the southern tier of New York, they remained a more distinct culture and maintained their dialect and accents.  These regions are also dominated by a staid adherence to colonial architecture, almost as if Philadelphia extended out with the migrants.

Further north still was another great gateway of American expansion, New York City.  From here we see a dark blue stream emerge, with migration that began during the American revolution, and that really got underway after the construction of the Erie Canal.  Unlike the wilderness pioneers of the Cumberland route, or the small town and farm mentality of the National Road expansion, these settlers would be largely urban, extremely diverse, and continue as a stream of immigration well into the 1890s.  Here the American and German majorities would be joined by large groups of Irish, Italian, and Polish settlers.  In the first half of their colonization, and this is key now, they would settle in the areas around Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, Erie, Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit, and would pretty much settle most of interior New York, lakeshore Pennsylvania and Ohio, and nearly all of the lower peninsula of Michigan.  Starting with waves of Irish immigrants who started coming to the United States (instead of formerly to just Canada) in the 1840's, the second half of this migration found European immigrants, notably those listed above, also coming to these areas.  More and more, however, the great destination became the interior gateway of Chicago, wherein they settled and spread out across the west to help form part of the modern midwestern culture.  Again, however, such a mixing did not largely happen in Michigan, northern Ohio, and so on.  These areas are to this day largely devoid of Kentuckian influence.

Of particular note are two sub-groups that took part in the early stages of this migration.  The bright yellow stands out a bit, in more ways than one.  As you can see, it starts in Connecticut and joins the Erie Canal route, but then promptly leaves the lakeside migrant routes in northeastern Ohio.  You see, back when the 13 colonies were chartered, they tended to have no western boundary and theoretically shot all the way to the Pacific.  The shore colonies from Delaware northwards were hemmed in by their western neighbors in this regard, but a few of them claimed land beyond the Appalachian frontier anyway.  Connecticut claimed the north shore of Ohio, and until 1800, when it gave up its claim, sent its emigrants to the area.  The "northwestern reserve", to this day, feels like a little bit of New England, with much of the architecture and city plans a spot on match for those back home in the "Constitution state".  The salmon arrows (sorry, I realize salmon looks almost like pink, I have a limited color selection to choose from) that extend from Albany and Buffalo towards Canada are the routes taken by the loyalists of the northeast as part of their exodus from the United States.  Much of southern and eastern Ontario, and a good portion of the land around Montreal, contains the descendants of these people.  Of course, they were not fortunate in having a canal to escape on.  By 1812, they had been joined by Americans taking the water level route through New York, and they with other immigrant groups, mainly from the British Isles and some from Germany, formed the cultural area that has since become southern Ontario.  The region, of course, has many similarities with Michigan and many more with western New York, with the key difference being obvious.

Finally, we have the pink lines representing French colonization.  The French were very compact in their colonization process, probably because they were largely frontiersmen looking to trade and hunt with the native peoples.  Their path of settlement is quite linear compared to the other migrant pathways, and they usually stuck quite densely to the waterways, especially along the St. Lawrence and Detroit rivers.  Much of their presence in the interior of the continent outside of Canada is now largely in names of cities,counties, and rivers, with the exception of places such as northern Maine, the eastern upper peninsula of Michigan, the metro-Detroit area (where many family names are still French), and scattered locales such as Vincennes, Indiana.  Though largely an evaporated influence, the French-Canadian-American presence still adds something unique to parts of the interior, notably southeastern Michigan.

So how do we know how much this has impacted the land, aside from romanticizing the effect immigration has had on this country largely considered to be a melting-pot in which immigrants are absorbed into the American cultural machine?  Well, we could stop to remember that absorb is perhaps a less effective word in describing the evolution of a nation that was essentially added to by all these peoples.  We drink far more coffee than tea, spaghetti is a common place dinner, more perogis are consumed here than anywhere else on earth outside of Poland, and Lutherans and Catholics far out populate Episcopalians.  That said, Lutherans are going to be a lot more common west of Lake Michigan than east of it, perogis are common menu items in Detroit and Buffalo, and you will be hard pressed to find a Tim Horton's in the United States outside of western New York, northern Ohio, or Michigan.  Interesting cultural coincidences, no?  Still skeptical?  Well, come back for the next few days as we delve into this a bit deeper.  You can also check out this interesting linguistic map in the meantime.

Now, I am sure my cultural familiarity with the places and peoples mentioned will be contested, but I can at least be counted on to be an authority on things Michigan, western New York, and Ontario, having lived most of my life in one of these three places.  Come by tomorrow to read more of why I think the Lakes/Nearwest region is unique, and of course, check out this earlier post that explains what I think is unique and special about the actual Midwest.  As always, feel free to leave comments, even and especially if you want to tear me apart on this.  My blog is not a place for totalitarian academic speeches, it is a place where perspectives are shared.

Neo-Gothic Churches in North America: A Little Bit of the Old Country in a New Home.

In the middle and late 19th century, the United States, and to a lesser extent, Canada, saw an increase in immigration among German and other northern European peoples.  Such peoples made their way inland and to this day their descendants continue to populate the areas shown on the U.S. Census map below.

A great deal of these immigrants were Roman Catholics, and quite proud of their heritage.  The villages and cities that they left behind often had grand monastic or cathedral parishes, and they wanted to re-create something of that world of majesty in the new lands that they would settle.  Coinciding with this desire to establish a little bit of Europe in North America was a Victorian penchant for romanticizing the medieval past, while also elaborating on it with gilded ribbed vaulting and dark, rich wooden interiors.  The new styles caught on amongst the immigrant populations, perhaps in part because some types of wood were still relatively inexpensive and readily obtainable.  The result was a vigorous building of grand parish churches that beautified a somewhat bleak industrial era urban landscape.  On the Plains, in some of the smaller towns, these churches tend to really stand out.

Kansas, somewhere off of I-70

Then, in the cities, we have places like St. Patrick's Cathedral, which, while dwarfed to some degree by modern structures, adds a presence of soul and lasting culture to an otherwise heavily commercialized street like Fifth avenue.  St. Patrick's was a bit of a different story from many of the other Neo-Gothic churches built further inland, however.  For the most part, it was a project endorsed by the ruling ecclesiastical authorities (Archbishop Hughes came up with the concept in the first place), and it had ample funding from rich donors and poor parishioners alike.  Non-Irish communities were usually not as fortunate, and sometimes German, Polish, and other ethnic communities had to fight with the predominately Irish bishops just to get the rights to form a parish in the first place.  That, however, is a story for another post.  Let's take a look at one of the German parishes.

This is St. Joseph's, built between 1870 and 1896.  She is still an operating parish, and one that offers everything from your typical Sunday Mass to traditional Latin Masses and the odd Mass now and then in German.  Like many parishes in urban cores throughout the United States, its membership has dwindled somewhat in recent decades because of demographic shifts, but it still serves the neighborhood, and its setting and architecture draw visitors from far and wide.  Want to take a look inside?

While it is something of a misnomer to label her a "typical" American immigrant Neo-Gothic parish church, what you see above is generally what one will see in such churches.  Overall, St. Joseph's has a majestic simplicity to it.  Not every edge is painted, not every window is as grand and detailed as the next (funding situations often resulted in windows being installed in stages, and thus not all turned out the same, or were even completed as desired), but the place is clearly beautiful.  All three nave stretches are equal in height, which was apparently inspired by southern German "hall church" styles.  Much of the structure was raised by parishioners, and many of the windows and other decorations were locally produced in Detroit.  When the community had to stretch the budget, they did, but in general, they wanted to leave a lasting monument to their perseverance and faith, and thus spared no expense.  Instead of using plaster, carvings in the church were made from wood.  The window below, imported from Innsbruck, Austria, is more evidence enough of a desire to build a truly majestic monument and temple.

The scene depicted is the death of St. Joseph.  Now, this is one of those photographs that does not do the window justice.  The colors are absolutely brilliant, and I could only image what the Church would look like if the rest of the windows were produced by the same people from Austria.  Of course, the other windows are just as lovely, and by no means should my admiration for this piece be a sign that the Detroit artists were inferior.  Costs aside, the parishioners could have probably imported more art from the old country, but they chose not to.  This was Detroit, this was their new home.  The local artists poured their hearts and souls into a true labor of love, unashamed to be compared and seen next to foreign talent.  In fact, some of the earliest use of American architect firms in producing stained-glass design is found in the other windows, which can all be seen on the parish website, linked above.

St. Joseph's is one of the many churches in Detroit that is worth a visit.  The history of a hard-working and determined immigrant community can be seen quite visibly here.