we show that the migrations of millions of Okies from the central plains to California has a demonstrable effect on political outcomes to this day, even after accounting for other relevant geographic and demographic factors. After demonstrating this pattern at the electoral level, we leverage a decade’s worth of survey data and show that Hispanics living in areas with large Okie migrations in the 1930s are much more likely to have conservative social values and, importantly, to vote and identify as Republicans. Put together, these results suggest that the historical legacies of migration can have a strong and sustained impact even after nearly a century after the fact.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen.
Woodard has staked out the position that cultural differences across U.S. regions are the result of early settlement patterns. He does not hesitate to include in “Greater Appalachia” regions far from the vicinity of the mountain range. In the nineteenth century, folks migrated from Appalachia to parts of the Midwest and to rural Texas and Oklahoma. Then in the 1930s they settled in parts of California.
If you compare the politics of Oklahoma, where Obama did not carry a single county in 2012, and California, not sure how you get that migration has a current impact on politics. Also, Hispanics is a made up name. Most “Hispanics” in California and Texas are Mexican American, though Houston has significant population of Central Americans. But often Mexican Americans from a certain region in Mexico go to certain location in the US. I have been told a large portion of the Mexican Americans living in Dallas are from a certain area in Mexico. Mexican Americans in California and Texas seem politically very different (where, if memory serves me, Bush 2 captured 40% of Hispanic vote in Texas). But is that because immigrants adopt the local politics or because Mexican Americans in California and Texas are from different parts of Mexico? I have often thought most Asians vote democratic because most live in democratic areas (like California)
The graph in Figure 5, “Density of Republican Support Over Time” is really stunning. Looks like something that happened more recently. Why would the “Okie Homeland” have been less distinguishable politically before, and indeed, relatively recently – up until 30 years ago, before “The Great Polarization”?
My guess is that the “Okie Homeland” just tends to overlap with rural California Areas, and the political difference is simply a coincidence that just reflects the clear and stark urban-rural political split in the rest of the country.
We need good measures and good quasi experiments when we can get them.
Somewhere in John C. Hudson’s book _Across this land_ he notes that slave state “Midlanders” moved out of (say) the Bluegrass and partly into Missouri, a slave state, and partly into central Illinois which was a free state (from NW Ordinance) and unlikely to ever become a slave state.
(More generally, the “Cultural Gradient” between Iowa and Missouri seems to be pronounced, as a digression.)
I’ve looked at Woodward’s book and it’s interesting and provocative. It’s not a waste of time to read him. But I still wonder how well his grand theory holds up to careful scrutiny.
Another interesting study would be to look at the Black “Great Migration” from certain counties in the Deep South and look at the difference between those who ended up in (say) liberal, near-socialist, Germanic/Lutheran Wisconsin and those who went to much more conservative, “Root Hog or Die” sorts of places. Perhaps that could be Texas, or Southern California.
I wonder, however, if labor market effects might trump all else.
Happy Black Friday, everyone
Merely anecdotal, and second hand, is the following:
At a conference once I had lunch with some fellow attendees and one of them (must have been a geographer or geologist or natural resource management type) talked about the challenge of working with backwoods mountaineer types in the Ozarks. This was related to dams being built in the area, so probably this would have been the…1970s? In SW Missouri if I recall correctly.
He said about half the people in the dam effected area were “cash grain farmers,” mostly German descended. But the other half were backwoods mountain types who were very shy and suspicious of strangers. They just weren’t used to outsiders.
To deal with the latter, you couldn’t go and knock on their door (to their backwoods house or cabin or trailer). You pulled into their driveway in your car and honked your horn. By no means were you to get out of your car, much less go knock on their door. If you honked and they were accepting callers they would come out and talk. But to get out of your car and go knock on their door, especially if you were a stranger, was perceived as unwarranted aggression to the extent that one person (researcher, extension agent, whatever) had a shotgun pulled on him. All the grant participants got wised up on how to deal with the locals after the shotgun incident.
Probably in the Albion’s Seed typology these folks would have been “Borderers,” and likely Scots-Irish or “Ulster Presbyterians.”
You wonder what it would be like when those folks moved to California, where I would bet some of them ended up living.
Harriet Arnow’s _The Dollmaker_ is supposed to be a good novel about Mountaineers who had moved to Detroit, from WV or KY. I bought it but never read it.