Anglo-Americans
Anglo-Americans, also referred to as English Americans, are a major ethnic group in the United States comprising individuals whose ancestry derives primarily from England. This demographic reported approximately 46.6 million people with English ancestry in the 2020 U.S. Census, positioning it as the largest specified European ancestral category among those identifying as White alone or in combination with other races.[1] Due to extensive intermarriage and cultural assimilation over generations, actual numbers may be higher, as many descendants identify simply as "American" without specifying English origins.[2] The historical foundation of Anglo-Americans lies in the waves of English migration to North America beginning in the early 17th century, with key settlements like Jamestown in 1607 marking the onset of sustained English colonization.[3] These settlers established the thirteen colonies that evolved into the United States, contributing disproportionately to the Founding Fathers and the framing of core institutions such as the common law system inherited from England. Their cultural imprint includes the predominance of the English language, Protestant individualism, and traditions of self-governance that underpin American democracy and economic dynamism. Anglo-Americans played pivotal roles in the nation's expansion, industrialization, and global influence, fostering innovations in governance, science, and commerce that propelled the U.S. to superpower status. Defining characteristics encompass a heritage of empirical pragmatism, emphasis on personal liberty and property rights, and a legacy of entrepreneurial risk-taking, which empirical studies link to higher rates of socioeconomic mobility in regions with strong Anglo-American settlement patterns. Controversies surrounding this group often stem from historical conflicts, including displacement of Native American populations during westward expansion and tensions with non-Anglo immigrant waves, yet their foundational contributions remain empirically central to the causal chain of American exceptionalism.[4]Definition and Terminology
Etymology and Historical Usage
The term "Anglo-American" originated as a compound of the prefix "Anglo-," derived from the ancient Angles—a Germanic tribe that settled in Britain and contributed to English ethnogenesis—with "American," denoting residents of the American continents.[5] The noun form, referring to an English settler in North America, first appeared in print in 1738, often to distinguish such individuals from contemporaneous German immigrants.[6] The Oxford English Dictionary identifies 1769 as the earliest evidenced use, in correspondence attributed to Benjamin Franklin.[7] Merriam-Webster dates the term's initial recorded application to 1776.[8] As an adjective, "Anglo-American" emerged by 1797 to describe phenomena specific to English-descended populations in America, shifting by 1812 to signify connections between England and the United States.[6] Early historical usage frequently highlighted ethnic and linguistic distinctions among European colonists; for instance, in late colonial Louisiana, French-speaking Creoles employed the term from approximately 1790 to 1830 to denote Protestant, English-speaking migrants from Anglo-Protestant regions of the United States, contrasting them with local Catholic, Francophone communities.[9] [10] This regional application underscored cultural divides in former French territories acquired by the U.S. via the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. By the 1830s, amid American expansion into former Spanish domains, "Anglo-American" increasingly contrasted English-speaking settlers with Hispanic populations in the Southwest, reflecting settlement patterns during events like the Texas Revolution of 1835–1836.[6] In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the term extended to diplomatic and cultural contexts, denoting the evolving "special relationship" between Britain and the U.S., as seen in references to shared legal traditions and wartime alliances.[11] Over time, it also denoted white, English-speaking North Americans differentiated from those of Latin American descent, a usage persisting into mid-20th-century demographic analyses.[11]Modern Definitions and Distinctions
In contemporary demographic analysis, Anglo-Americans are primarily defined as individuals in the United States whose ancestry originates from England, forming a core ethnic group within the broader white American population. This usage traces to the term's etymological roots, denoting English settlers in North America as distinct from contemporaneous German immigrants as early as 1738. U.S. Census Bureau data from 2020 records 25.5 million people reporting English ancestry alone and 46.6 million reporting it alone or in combination with other ancestries, underscoring its prevalence despite tendencies toward underreporting through assimilation into a pan-American identity.[12][6] The distinction from other white ethnic groups emphasizes Anglo-Americans' role as the predominant colonial founding population, in contrast to later 19th-century immigrants from Ireland, Germany, or Italy, whose arrivals preserved more segmented cultural enclaves. For instance, "Anglo" specifically excludes those of Irish or German descent, focusing on English heritage rather than broader Western European origins. This ethnic specificity highlights causal contributions to U.S. institutional frameworks, such as English common law and parliamentary traditions, which non-Anglo European groups integrated into rather than originating.[13] Regionally, particularly in the American Southwest and Louisiana, the term "Anglo" expands to encompass any non-Hispanic white individuals, serving as a linguistic shorthand against Hispanic majorities irrespective of precise ancestry. This broader application reflects practical social divisions rather than strict genealogy, diverging from national ethnic categorizations. In cultural terms, Anglo-American identity often connotes a Protestant heritage derived from Western European Anglo-Saxon roots, aligning with mainstream American norms but distinct from Catholic-influenced groups like Irish or Polish Americans.[9][14] Academic and media sources, frequently exhibiting institutional biases toward emphasizing diversity over historical continuity, may understate Anglo-American distinctiveness; however, self-reported ancestry data and settlement patterns affirm its empirical persistence as the substrate of U.S. demographic and cultural formation.[1]History
Colonial Foundations (1607–1776)
The establishment of Jamestown in Virginia marked the inception of permanent English settlement in North America on May 13, 1607, when 104 men and boys dispatched by the Virginia Company of London selected a site in the Chesapeake Bay region.[15] [16] Initial challenges included famine, disease, and hostilities with the Powhatan Confederacy, reducing the population to as few as 60 by 1610 during the "Starving Time."[16] Survival and expansion ensued following the introduction of tobacco as a cash crop around 1612 and the arrival of women and additional supplies, fostering a plantation-based economy reliant on indentured English labor.[15] In 1619, the Virginia House of Burgesses convened as the first representative legislative assembly in the English colonies, instituting elected governance under royal charter.[17] Parallel developments in New England commenced with the arrival of the Mayflower on November 9, 1620, carrying 102 passengers, including Separatist Puritans, who drafted and signed the Mayflower Compact aboard ship to form a "civil body politic" for mutual governance beyond their intended Virginia patent.[18] [19] This Plymouth Colony emphasized congregational church autonomy and communal land use initially, though private property rights evolved amid harsh winters and alliances like that with the Wampanoag in 1621.[19] The subsequent Great Migration from 1630 onward brought over 20,000 English Puritans to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, establishing covenant-based communities prioritizing religious orthodoxy, literacy, and town meetings as precursors to democratic deliberation.[20] These settlers imported English common law traditions, adapting them to local needs through institutions like general courts that balanced royal authority with colonial input. By the mid-18th century, the thirteen English colonies spanned from New Hampshire to Georgia, with English-origin settlers comprising the predominant demographic group, though supplemented by smaller inflows of Scots, Welsh, and other Britons.[21] Population estimates indicate growth from approximately 1,500 English colonists in 1630 to over 2.1 million by 1770, driven by natural increase—doubling roughly every 25 years—and sustained migration, outpacing European rivals' footholds.[22] [23] Economic diversification emerged: southern Chesapeake colonies focused on staple agriculture with headright systems granting land for imported laborers, while New England pursued mercantile trade, fishing, and small farms, reinforcing a Protestant work ethic rooted in English nonconformist values.[20] These foundations instilled core Anglo-American traits, including adherence to English legal precedents like habeas corpus and trial by jury, alongside emergent self-reliance forged in frontier conditions.[24] Colonial assemblies proliferated, asserting fiscal and legislative prerogatives against imperial oversight, as evidenced by resistance to taxes without representation by the 1760s.[17] By 1776, this English-derived populace, numbering about 2.5 million, declared independence, framing their polity in terms of inherited liberties from Magna Carta and the Glorious Revolution rather than continental abstractions.[23] The era's legacy lay in transplanting and adapting British institutions to American soil, prioritizing individual agency, property rights, and limited government amid demographic expansion and territorial consolidation.[24]Expansion and Assimilation (1776–1900)
Following American independence, Anglo-American settlement rapidly expanded beyond the Appalachian Mountains. The Treaty of Paris in 1783 secured British recognition of U.S. sovereignty up to the Mississippi River, opening the Old Northwest for migration. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 organized this territory into townships, prohibited slavery north of the Ohio River, and outlined a process for new states to join the union on equal footing, facilitating orderly Anglo-American colonization. The Louisiana Purchase in 1803, acquiring 828,000 square miles from France for $15 million, doubled U.S. territory and spurred expeditions like Lewis and Clark's (1804–1806) to map resources, enabling further Anglo settler influx into the interior.[25] The doctrine of Manifest Destiny, articulated by journalist John L. O'Sullivan in 1845, framed this expansion as a divine imperative for Anglo-Americans to spread republican institutions across the continent, justifying aggressive territorial gains.[26] Annexation of Texas in 1845, the Oregon Treaty with Britain in 1846 settling the Pacific Northwest boundary, and the Mexican-American War (1846–1848) resulted in the Mexican Cession, adding California and the Southwest—over 500,000 square miles—predominantly settled by English-speaking Protestants displacing Mexican and Native populations.[26] The Indian Removal Act of 1830 authorized forced relocation of southeastern tribes west of the Mississippi, exemplified by the Trail of Tears (1838–1839) affecting 60,000 Cherokees and others, clearing lands for Anglo-American farmers and planters.[27] By 1890, the U.S. Census declared the frontier closed, with the national population surging from 5.3 million in 1800 to 76 million in 1900, driven by high natural increase among Anglo descendants and land availability. Amid expansion, assimilation reinforced Anglo-American cultural hegemony as approximately 12 million immigrants arrived between 1820 and 1900, primarily from northwestern Europe (Ireland, Germany, Britain), swelling urban and frontier populations.[28] Public policies emphasized anglo-conformity, requiring adoption of English language, Protestant work ethic, and common-law traditions; common schools promoted by reformers like Horace Mann integrated newcomers into this framework, while nativist movements like the Know-Nothings targeted Catholic arrivals to preserve the Anglo-Saxon core.[29] By mid-century, an emergent Anglo-American ethnicity—rooted in 80 percent British Isles ancestry and 98 percent Protestantism at independence—acculturated diverse whites through intermarriage and shared myths of liberty, maintaining dominance despite demographic shifts, as evidenced by persistent English legal and linguistic primacy in new states.[29] This process subordinated non-Anglo groups, including Mexicans in annexed territories, to the expanding settler society's norms.20th Century Identity Shifts
During the early 20th century, Anglo-American identity, rooted in English Protestant cultural dominance, encountered pressures from mass immigration of Southern and Eastern Europeans, leading to intensified assimilation campaigns. President Theodore Roosevelt, in a 1915 address, condemned "hyphenated Americanism" as a threat to national cohesion, insisting that true Americans owed undivided allegiance without ancestral qualifiers.[30] This rhetoric, amplified during World War I amid fears of divided loyalties, promoted the absorption of immigrants into the prevailing Anglo-Protestant norms of language, law, and values, effectively reinforcing Anglo culture as the unhyphenated standard.[30] World War II further eroded explicit Anglo-Saxonist expressions, as Nazi appropriations of Teutonic and Aryan superiority tainted associations with Anglo heritage in intellectual and public discourse.[31] Postwar economic expansion, suburban migration, and the rise of national mass media homogenized white identities, diminishing distinctions among European ancestries including English.[32] Sociological analyses document this blurring, where by mid-century, occupational and social achievements among white ethnics converged, rendering specific Anglo ties less salient in everyday identification.[32] By the late 20th century, intermarriage rates exceeding 50% among white groups and high geographic mobility had subsumed Anglo-American self-conception into a generic "American" or pan-European label, with census ancestry responses reflecting this shift—English origins, once comprising an estimated 37.8% of the population in 1900, became underreported as descendants prioritized national over ethnic markers.[33] Research by Richard Alba underscores this transformation, attributing it to structural assimilation where Anglo roots faded into the mainstream white identity amid declining salience of ethnic origins for socioeconomic outcomes.[34]Post-1965 Immigration and Decline Narratives
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, commonly known as the Hart-Celler Act, abolished the national origins quota system established in 1924, which had prioritized immigrants from Western Europe, including those of Anglo-American descent.[35] [36] Instead, it emphasized family reunification, skilled labor, and refugee admissions, resulting in a surge of legal immigration from Asia, Latin America, and Africa—sources that comprised less than 10% of inflows prior to 1965.[37] [38] By 2015, the foreign-born population had risen to 13.9% of the U.S. total, up from 4.7% in 1970, with non-Hispanic whites declining from 84% of the population in 1965 to 62%.[39] [40] Self-reported English ancestry in U.S. Census data illustrates a parallel trend specific to Anglo-Americans. In the 1980 Census, approximately 49.6 million individuals, or 26% of those reporting ancestry, claimed English origins, reflecting the historical dominance of this group.[41] By 2000, this figure had halved in proportional terms amid rising multiple-ancestry responses and a shift toward generic "American" self-identification, with English claims stabilizing at around 7-8% of the population by 2020, or roughly 46.6 million individuals when including partial heritage.[41] Demographers attribute part of this apparent decline to assimilation and underreporting rather than absolute population loss, compounded by low fertility rates among native-born whites (below replacement level since the 1970s) and minimal post-1965 immigration from England, which averaged under 10,000 annually.[39] Decline narratives emerged prominently in conservative scholarship, positing that post-1965 immigration accelerated the erosion of Anglo-American cultural hegemony. Political scientist Samuel Huntington, in his 2004 book Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity, contended that the U.S. was founded on an Anglo-Protestant core—encompassing English language, Protestant ethics, and values like individualism and the rule of law—which sustained national cohesion through prior assimilative waves.[42] He argued that rapid inflows from non-European sources, particularly Hispanic immigration exceeding 50% of totals since the 1980s, resisted full assimilation due to bilingualism, chain migration, and multiculturalism policies, fracturing this core and risking balkanization.[43] Huntington cited data showing limited English proficiency among 20-30% of second-generation Hispanics and geographic enclaves as evidence of slower cultural convergence compared to earlier European groups.[42] Paleoconservative commentator Patrick Buchanan amplified these concerns in The Death of the West (2001), framing mass immigration alongside sub-replacement fertility (1.6 births per woman among whites by 2000) as an existential threat to Western civilization, including its Anglo-American variant.[44] Drawing on U.N. projections of Europe's and America's native populations halving by 2050 without immigration, Buchanan warned of a "remaking" of the U.S. into a non-European majority nation by mid-century, diluting institutions built on Anglo traditions like common law and limited government. He attributed policy failures to elite cosmopolitanism, which prioritized globalism over preserving the founding ethnic stock responsible for America's exceptionalism.[45] These narratives extend to the waning influence of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs), historically synonymous with Anglo-American elites. Post-1965 reforms, alongside civil rights expansions, diminished WASP overrepresentation in politics, finance, and Ivy League admissions—from near-monopoly in the mid-20th century to under 20% of Congress by 2010—amid rising diversity and affirmative action.[46] [47] Scholars like Eric Kaufmann link this to post-1960s liberal shifts favoring ethnic assertion over assimilation, with WASP identifiers increasingly viewing their heritage as generic rather than distinct.[48] Empirical support includes Pew projections of non-Hispanic whites falling below 50% by 2045, prompting debates on whether renewed emphasis on civic nationalism can sustain Anglo-derived norms amid pluralism.[39] Critics of decline theses, often from migration advocacy groups, counter that historical patterns show eventual assimilation, but proponents emphasize the unprecedented scale and non-European sourcing as causal factors in accelerated identity dilution.[49][36]Demographics
Ancestry Claims and Underreporting
In the 2020 United States Census, 46.6 million individuals self-identified as having English ancestry, either alone or in combination with other ancestries, representing the largest reported European ethnic group and surpassing German ancestry at 45 million.[1] This marked a shift from prior decades when German was typically listed as the top response, reflecting changes in self-reporting patterns rather than demographic upheaval.[41] However, U.S. Census ancestry data relies entirely on subjective self-identification, which captures cultural affinity and personal awareness rather than objective genetic or historical lineage, leading to systematic underreporting for highly assimilated founding populations like those of English descent.[50] Demographers observe that English ancestry claims are particularly prone to undercounting because descendants of 17th- and 18th-century English colonists—comprising the majority of pre-1776 settlers—have largely merged into a pan-American identity over 250 years of endogamy and cultural homogenization.[50] This assimilation discourages specific ethnic labeling, with many opting instead for the "American" category, which drew 17.8 million responses in the 2022 American Community Survey and correlates strongly with unmixed colonial-era stock in areas like Appalachia, the Upland South, and rural New England, where English and related British Isles migrants predominated historically.[1] Unlike more recent immigrant groups (e.g., Irish or Italian), which retain hyphenated identities through 19th- and 20th-century chain migration and communal institutions, English-derived Americans exhibit lower salience of ancestral specificity, as their heritage forms the baseline "norm" against which other identities define themselves. Reported English ancestry peaked at 49.6 million (26.3% of the total population) in the 1980 Census before declining in subsequent surveys, a pattern attributed not to intermarriage or out-migration but to intergenerational erosion of ethnic self-consciousness among white Americans of deep colonial roots.[1] Prior to mass immigration from non-British Europe (post-1840), English and broader British Isles settlers accounted for over 60% of the white population by 1790, with natural increase sustaining their dominance until the late 19th century; adjusting modern self-reports for this baseline and the "American" proxy suggests the effective share of individuals with majority English descent exceeds official figures by 10-20 percentage points.[28] Genetic ancestry testing, while not census-based, reinforces this by showing elevated British Isles components (often 30-50%) in self-identified "generic" white Americans from founding-stock regions, though such data remains ancillary to official demographic measures.[50]Geographic Concentration and Migration Patterns
Anglo-Americans, primarily identified through self-reported English ancestry in U.S. Census data, exhibit concentrations in rural and small-town areas of the Northeast, Appalachia, the Upper South, and the Mountain West, reflecting historical settlement patterns and lower rates of assimilation into generic "American" ethnic identities compared to urban ethnic enclaves. The 2020 Census recorded 46.6 million individuals claiming English ancestry alone or in combination, making it the largest detailed White ethnic group nationally and predominant in 35 states.[1] Percentages are highest in states with early colonial English roots or later targeted migrations, such as Utah, where Mormon converts from England contributed to a 25.4% share of the population identifying as English-descended.[51] Absolute numbers peak in populous states like California (over 2.1 million) and Texas (nearly 1.9 million), driven by internal migrations rather than direct immigration.[51]| State | Percentage of Population | Approximate Number (2023 est.) |
|---|---|---|
| Utah | 25.4% | 906,000 |
| Maine | 20.5% | 289,000 |
| Vermont | 18.6% | 121,000 |
| Idaho | 17.4% | 354,000 |
| New Hampshire | 17.4% | 247,000 |