Is the Pacific Northwest Overwhelmingly Nordic?
No, But It Was
I like when I get asked questions about specific regions because they’re usually things I wouldn’t have thought to explore otherwise. Recently, in response to this article, Casey Michel asked me:
My first response was to find the idea of an overwhelmingly Nordic Pacific Northwest laughable on its face. No way! Everybody knows the Nordic immigrants settled in Minnesota.
It turns out, it’s a bit more complicated than that.
I want to start out by saying I really do not care about what the political valence of the question, or the article it came from, may be. I don’t know anything about Evergreen State University, and I don’t intend to pontificate about its protests one way or another. I have no opinion on that.
All I’m interested in is this very specific demographic claim:
Where Were People Born?
Let’s look at what the data says. Here’s the Nordic-born share of the population (defined as Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, and Lappland) in Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, North Dakota, and the US on the whole, 1850–2015.
I compare with Minnesota and North Dakota because those are the two states that are reliably the most Nordic-dominated places in the union. As you can see, Oregon and Washington definitely did receive more Nordic migration than the nation on the whole, but not as much as Minnesota and North Dakota. Their peak Nordic-born population shares were 3–5 times as high as the national peak, and yet less than 1/2 as high as the MN/ND peaks.
Notably, Nordic settlement of OR/WA peaks later than settlement of Minnesota and North Dakota. Many of the Nordic settlers in the PNW were probably domestic migrants exiting the not-as-good-as-promised lands of North Dakota especially.
So the PNW did get a significant amount of Nordic migration… but it wasn’t overwhelming in the way it was for North Dakota or Minnesota. And certainly by the 2000s the Nordic-born share of the population is practically 0%.
But place of birth is just one kind of data we have available.
Where Were Peoples’ Parents Born?
We have various ways of getting at the question of parentage. Before 1970, the Census Bureau often asked about parentage, so we have data. But not all of it is easy to parse out. So below, I provide a rough estimate of what percent of the non-foreign-born population probably had Scandinavian parents.
Here, again, Minnesota and North Dakota dominate by a large margin, but not by quite as much. Washington and Oregon are still far above the national average. If we add together this Scandinavian-parentage native group with the foreign-born group, we get this as our “Scandinavian population”:
So here, Washington and Oregon are… still way below Minnesota and North Dakota, and way above the nation on the whole. They’re not Nordic hotspots like Minnesota, but they’re definitely more Nordic than Ohio, New York, or Texas.
Sadly, our parentage data cuts out in 1970. But, blessings be, we’ve got subjective self-assigned ancestries from 1980–2015!
What Do People Say They Are?
One of the best ways to look at the population mix somewhere is just to ask people what they identify as. This gives a since of culture, of self-perceived identity, and of which prior ethnic groups have most successfully subsumed other groups within themselves. So, what do PNW residents say they are?
So, again, the PNW is substantially more Nordic than the nation on the whole… but dramatically less Nordic than Minnesota or North Dakota. Interestingly, the gap in present-day ancestry is substantially larger than the gap in parentage or ancestry was when immigration was curtailed in the 1920s. In other words, Nordic self-identification has been more reliably transmitted across generations in Minnesota and North Dakota than in Washington or Oregon. Or, put another way: PNW has been a major inflow-receiving part of the country since the 1940s, while MN/ND have been major outflow-sending parts of the country.
If we want, we can try and loosely extrapolate ancestry backwards. Incorporating some basic assumptions about ancestry-identification intergenerationally, we can take a less-than-totally-wild guess at what share of the population may have been any kind of Nordic-descended-or-identifying.
So, North Dakota was overwhelmingly Nordic; that is, it’s plausible that better than 50% of North Dakota’s population was ancestrally, familially, originally, or culturally Nordic/Scandinavian. Minnesota was pretty high up there too. Furthermore, while both states have seen declines, the decline has been far from linear. There are ups and downs. Rather, it seems plausible that Nordic self-identification in North Dakota and Minnesota has seen more churn since the 1930s than real movement (though that may be changing in the present generation).
For Oregon, that’s somewhat true as well. But for Washington, we’ve seen a pretty steadily decline in the likely Nordic population share. From highs around 1940 when possibly as much as a quarter of the population had some kind of Nordic/Scandinavian identification, it’s just a bit over 10% now. Indeed, indexing to maximum values suggests that while ND/MN/OR and the US generally are all roughly 35–40% down from peak-Nordic-share, Washington is nearer 50% down.
This is all a loose approximation. True values could be fairly different. But there’s a final, telling comparison we can make.
Where Do People Go to Church?
It bugs me when people talk about Nordic cultural norms. There is a lot of difference among the Nordics. Sweden and Norway are not identical, and Finland is even more different. Iceland and Denmark are also their own things. Rather, what actually makes these countries culturally similar isn’t even something like Viking heritage: it’s Lutheranism.
We can get data on Lutheranism’s historic population share for states and for the Nordic countries. The Nordics were virtually all 95%+ Lutheran in the early 1900s (most were as recently as the 1970s!), and we can get exact data from the Lutheran state churches for recent years. For the US, we can use Pew religious survey data for states, and we can use the old U.S. Religion Censuses for back years, in this case 1906. So what do we see?
For whatever reason, the Scandinavians who moved to Oregon and Washington did not bring their Lutheranism with them, while those who moved to Minnesota and North Dakota did. So if you see cultural “Nordicness” in Minnesota, be aware you’re probably identifying cultural Lutheranism. Places with large Nordic populations like Oregon and Washington don’t smack of Nordic-ness as much, not merely because they had smaller Nordic populations, but because their Nordic populations did not establish the institutions that transmit culture most effectively: religious bodies.
Oregon and Washington in 1906 actually had lower rates of Lutheran membership than the nation on the whole had, which is fairly striking. I should add that I’m using slightly different definitions of Lutheran identity in 1906 vs 2015 for the US and US states, so don’t worry about the time series change.
Conclusion
Even though the genetic stock for the PNW was much more Nordic than the nation on the whole, it was far less Nordic than the major Nordic states like Minnesota and North Dakota. And what Nordic genetic stock did exist was less effective at transmitting its identity, practices, and lifeways, which is why life in North Dakota is distinctively Nordic, while life in Oregon is not.
Check out my Podcast about the history of American migration.
If you like this post and want to see more research like it, I’d love for you to share it on Twitter or Facebook. Or, just as valuable for me, you can click the recommend button at the bottom of the page. Thanks!
Follow me on Twitter to keep up with what I’m writing and reading. Follow my Medium Collection at In a State of Migration if you want updates when I write new posts. And if you’re writing about migration too, feel free to submit a post to the collection!
I’m a native of Wilmore, Kentucky, a graduate of Transylvania University, and also the George Washington University’s Elliott School. My real job is as an economist at USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service, where I analyze and forecast cotton market conditions. I’m married to a kickass Kentucky woman named Ruth.
My posts are not endorsed by and do not in any way represent the opinions of the United States government or any branch, department, agency, or division of it. My writing represents exclusively my own opinions. I did not receive any financial support or remuneration from any party for this research.
