As I’ve mentioned in my introduction post, I am mostly an Anglo-Saxon with roots in Colonial America. Granted, I also descend from European immigrants, so I’m not pure Old Stock, but I consider myself Old Stock to a certain degree considering much of my ancestry is Old Stock (50-60%). I’m also a Mayflower descendant. I descend from Francis and John Cooke, as well as John Alden and Priscilla Mullins. I have ancestry from New England, New York, Maryland, and South Carolina, and reside in a Northern state, though I won’t elaborate further so as to prevent doxxing myself.
Old Stock Americans are an extremely interesting people, one which I simultaneously feel connected to and divorced from. It’s a bittersweet feeling. These people, who are essentially my own, seem like such foreigners to me now. Even despite my Anglo-Saxon heritage and proud, semi-prominent English ancestors—who conquered the savage lands in refuge of a tyranny which had possessed their home of England and drove them out to Leiden and then to Plymouth—I cannot help but feel distant from them. It’s worth noting that I don’t have many friends IRL, but the few I’ve had throughout my life were certainly not Old Stock. I suppose another reason for this sort of alienation from this illustrious group of people is that much of my recent family are Catholics from immigrant backgrounds, mostly from Quebec, Southern Germany, Ireland, and Portugal, even though they assimilated into the Anglo-Saxon culture of America and even today prefer their English ancestry over their “crappy, boring immigrant” ancestry. So, yeah, my family dynamic is kind of weird religion-and-ancestry-wise and it’s hard to relate to either the Ellis Island crowd or the pure Hyperborean Anglo-Saxons.
It’s like being from Rome and having half-Roman ancestry and half-Barbarian or North African slave ancestry. It’s strange to be from a country where one is so ancestrally connected to it and yet not at the same time. My forefathers who fought to settle and later free this land are of a great stock, and I’m honestly a little saddened to not be completely one of them. I don’t resent my immigrant ancestors, because they worked hard and served this country well and overall made sure to integrate into it. It could also be worse. I could have negro ancestry, but thankfully don’t. I consider myself, proudly, to be White American. I am proud of my Old Stock heritage, even if I feel somewhat disconnected to it, and I hate hyphenated Americanism. That’s why I don’t call myself English-American, French-American, etc. but just American. I will point out that I am mostly English ancestrally when it is relevant, but I will never hyphenate myself so as to negate my American origin. I am American, I am proud to be American, and that is the end of the story, even though I do wish that I felt more connected to my illustrious and favorable roots.
Something which interests me though, and which gives me a certain degree of pride to have Old Stock origins is that I am related to many great Americans through my colonial roots. This will probably seem weird to people but I actually have quite an obsession when it comes to great Americans. Many of the books I read are biographies about American presidents, heroes, icons, etc. such as George Washington, Teddy Roosevelt, Ben Franklin, Eugene Sledge, or even Nikola Tesla. Well, that aspect is probably normal, but the weird part, I guess, is that I’m especially obsessed with great Americans that I happen to be related to. It’s like an even better sense of, say, being proud of the great men which one’s race or ethnicity births. I’m White, and I am proud of my race and its achievements. I’m proud to hail from the same race as Darwin, Dante, Descartes, and Dostoevsky—the four Ds—for instance, and to have an even tighter-knit relation with a great person, even if it’s distant and only in technicality, never fails to bring a smile to my face. It’s probably stupid, but it’s also the little things in life, I guess.
Some people I relate to are John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Calvin Coolidge, Frankin D. Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Cullen Bryant, Archibald MacLeish, H.P. Lovecraft, Marilyn Monroe, William Halsey Jr., Ezra Cornell, Amelia Earhart, Bill Gates, Lizzie Borden, Sir. Robert Laird Borden, Henry Fonda, Roger Sherman, William Tecumseh Sherman, General William Hull, Robert Treat Paine, Ezra Pound, John Steinbeck, and Sir. Winston Churchill. The ancestors I share with these people are: John Alden and Priscilla Mullins, Francis and John Cooke, Thomas Cornell, Roger Mowry, Douw Jellis Fonda, Samuel Sherman, and Douw Jellis Fonda. Now, like I said, I am aware that this is an odd thing to be interested in, though I think it has a somewhat normal basis. You see, I don’t care much about, say, Amelia Earhart personally, but I do care about our relation because it drives in the fact that America is not just an idea, but a nation, and we ultimately possess the same roots and ancestry which have compelled and inspired the great deeds of our people. It shows that we are a people. And I am far from the only person who has noble American relatives. I’ve met someone who descended from John Adams.
Not all Americans are Old Stock, nor was the American intended to be entirely Old Stock. After all, virtuous European immigrants were allowed full U.S. citizenship, and they went on to greatly serve our nation. So, the existence of non-Old Stock White Americans doesn’t negate our concept and understanding of nationhood, but at the same time, the roots of our nationhood are undeniably Old Stock, and I believe that it is a great honor and privilege to descend from the great men and women who arrived starved and sickened on the shores of a distant continent and stuggled to build a great civilization on it. And I believe we should venerate our ancestors, worship the great men of our distinct race of men, and strive for the very prospect of making our ancestors and countrymen proud along such lines.
The Old Stock is foundational, and we need to recognize this. Just as the Trojan migration to Italy is the founding myth of the Romans, at least to my understanding, the English migration to the Americas, especially on the Mayflower, is in many ways the founding myth of the Americans. Well, it’s not so much a myth as it quite literally happened, but it has been made into a national myth over time. The Old Stock is a symbol of our American heritage. It doesn’t matter if you’re ethnically Irish, Polish, Italian, or Swedish, our nation is America, and our myth and cultural heritage is that of the Anglo-Saxon conquest of eastern America, the formation of the revolutionary Old Stock, and the pan-European (though especially Anglo-Scottish and Southern) conquest of the west. I believe a Norseman in the U.S. should be proud of his ethnic heritage, just like how a Scotsman, Englishman, German, etc. would be, but we should also recognize our shared national origin and founding myth as sacred and honorable.
The Old Stock are one of the most incredible peoples in world history, much like their cousins who remained in England as they journeyed to the New World. I think that virtuous European immigration did help uplift us to greatness, but frankly we wouldn’t be a nation without the Old Stock. The Old Stock built this nation, and it’s a shame that they’re being forgotten. Perhaps it’s natural that a country with such radically changing demographics has become so apathetic to its origins, origins which their people do not share whatsoever. At least the Irish, English, Germans, etc. were all White, ethnic Europeans. The Old Stock is either cursed or ignored. A nation cannot survive if it does not venerate its ancestry, and when our nation is polluted by foreigners, it should come as a surprise to nobody that such aliens do not care about our own forefathers. They view this country as something to be taken advantage of. We are to be robbed blind and milked like dairy cows until we are tossed aside and completely replaced. And soon, it will be the immigrant-descended Europeans who will be forgotten alongside the Old Stock.
A master race which takes for granted its own hegemony will die, and a subpar race which maintains its hegemony lives on. We are a dying master race among men. We have achieved things unlike anybody else, but we are engaging in an assisted suicide. The Jews are, indeed, largely responsible for the importation of millions of immigrants, and they are responsible for the film, music, and porn industries which have degenerated people into mongrel-worshiping deviants, raping our birth rates. We are not the only ones harming ourselves, but we are harming ourselves nonetheless, and as hard as it may be, we must commit ourselves to a racial and national revival. A palingenesis, if you will. But if we are to commit ourselves to such a task, we must realize and acknowledge the significance of the Old, Founding Stock, in both a symbolic and actual recognition. I cannot see how our nation will prosper—or even survive—if we do not.
"It doesn’t matter if you’re ethnically Irish, Polish, Italian, or Swedish, our nation is America, and our myth and cultural heritage is that of the Anglo-Saxon conquest of eastern America, the formation of the revolutionary Old Stock, and the pan-European (though especially Anglo-Scottish and Southern) conquest of the west. I believe a Norseman in the U.S. should be proud of his ethnic heritage, just like how a Scotsman, Englishman, German, etc. would be, but we should also recognize our shared national origin and founding myth as sacred and honorable."
I will always poke at this myth because its kind of a meme that came about at the end of Manifest Destiny, at the end of our great western expansion and the completion of the American project. Prior to that, there were more mixed views on what America was, and what our founding myth was.
Our civil war proves we were never united, that part was always a myth. We had way too many different types of British - cavaliers, roundheads, jacobites, etc etc. We had way too many different types of continental Europeans who sided with these sub groups. It led directly to the civil war because these different types of Heritage Americans never agreed on a common vision for America. This is why when you ask different White people "what does it mean to be American?' you get answers related to their familial histories. I tend to notice its Anglos who have this rosy view of America being this great Anglo endeavor, when its in fact a European endeavor, and many Gaels and Germans have been at the forefront of much American expansion. My own family history is testament to this, and I must affirm this history as vital to my understanding of my nation. Its important to me, because its my family, but why would someone with a different history care? They won't care, they will just view America their own way.
An Irishman who's family has been here since the mid-1800's will view America different from the Scots who were here in the 17th century colonies. A German mercenary who fought in our Revolution, or a german industrial worker or farmer from the early 19th, will view America much different than those Anglo-Saxons who make up the bulk of the nation. This is why you feel two different pulls on your spirit, brother. You have those different views in you. I think you are more akin to your immigrant grandparents and you assimilated so hard that you now ignore the other strains of Americanism that existed here from the start, deigning to join the Anglo version of events. As I said, our country split along ethnic and tribal lines during the Civil War, and its from earlier differences back in Britain. Modern Americans carry both lines in them today. It's partly why Southerners and Westerners hate East Coast folk. We come from different lines who warred back in Europe and here in America.
Reading the words of our founders, we can find great pride in the Anglo-Saxon majority! I will never undermine that by speaking out of turn or falsely on them, in fact like you I have great respect for them. Many of my relatives are Anglo-Saxon. However, most of my non-Gaelic family were recent implants to America, they are not Heritage Americans from England. My direct male forefathers have been here since the start, and they never once stopped identifying with Scotland. They've always known themselves as "American" because that is their nation, but they were not Anglo-Saxons. This does not fit the myth you described.
America is much more akin to Britian in this sense. Within the British Empire you had Scots, Irish, and Englishmen, but they were all British. Within America, you have Scots, Irish, and English, but we are all American. It's like when Anglo-Saxons try to claim the glory of the British Empire all for themselves. They have every right to claim the majority, for that is their lot, but they do not claim the whole pie. It's an Anglo trait, imo
My direct forefathers have been in America from the start and they've never once stopped calling themselves Scots, and they often married Scots even though they were in the middle of the American South. Where did they find so many Scots to marry if we are all Anglo? Why would Appalachia have an Irish presence? Why would Louisiana have a French presence? What of the many Spaniards who joined America when we bought southern colonies? They are all true Americans, and yet they are not Anglo even if they have four recent Anglo ancestors. That's not how it works. This is why when Rome fell, there were so many different polities that sprouted up - because the Romans were not all one people, they were many peoples claiming to be the same.
I know many non-Anglos like me, we are very proud of America and our Anglo-brethren. We do not negate America by affirming our tribes and families. We are in fact affirming the history of America by identifying with our fathers who founded this nation.