Hillary Needs Another Dragon

Rory Sutherland writes:

If Hillary loses narrowly to Barack Obama in the next few weeks, she can reasonably lay the blame on ethnic politics. And, in particular, on North America’s most ineffectual and uninfluential ethnic group: the Welsh.

Hillary, it seems, may be almost as Welsh as Obama is black. The Rodhams are of Welsh ancestry; her mother was born a Howell. How many votes was this worth? I’d estimate not far north of nil.

What’s extraordinary about Welsh Americans is not how insignificant they are: quite the reverse - their contribution to the US comfortably matches that of some far noisier Celts whose origins lie a few hundred miles offshore. But whereas any American who can claim 1/32nd Irish ancestry celebrates the fact at every opportunity by buying out-sized hats, pretending to enjoy Riverdance and decorating their house with nasty little green trolls, in the homes of Welsh Americans there is barely a love-spoon to be seen.

This is a sad lack of self-awareness in an ethnic group who provided one third of the signatories to the Declaration of Independence. Plus some or all of the ancestry of John Adams, Daniel Boone, Jesse James, Frank Lloyd Wright, William Penn, The Davises (Bette and Jefferson), The Griffiths (D.W. and Nanci), J.P. Morgan, Tammy Wynette (nee Pugh), Howard Hughes, Jack Daniel, Bob Hope, Teri Hatcher, Meriwether Lewis, Elihu Yale, Ted Williams, Tom Cruise and Warren Zevon (the last on his mother’s side, as you may have guessed). Not to mention the great Powys-born Chicago mobster Murray “The Camel” Humphreys.

(Bizarrely one of very few Americans apart from Frank Lloyd Wright to flaunt his Welshness seems to have been Elvis’s father Vernon - Elvis is a Welsh name, and there is a Church of St Elvis in Pembrokeshire - even though there is no evidence, unless you include singing ability, that the family was Welsh at all.)

As further proof of this dismal level of racial consciousness, a minuscule 0.6% of Americans record themselves as being of Welsh ancestry, despite the fact that Jones is the country’s fourth most common surname, on its own accounting for 0.6% of the population. (It should be remembered that surnames are not a perfect guide to ethnicity, and I accept that James Earl Jones and Colin Powell may not be entirely Welsh.)

In fact American ethnic awareness, particularly among those descended from earlier settlers, is increasingly a bit of a mess. Increasing numbers of English, Scottish or Welsh Americans record their ancestry as “American”, a new option on the Census which is now ticked by 20,000,000 people. (Between 1980 and 2000 the number of people in the US reporting English Ancestry almost halved). At the same time, it is believed that the majority of those 37m people reporting Irish ancestry are descended from Scottish Protestants: Including one John McCain.

Where the Huckabees come from, God only knows.

Devon, where it is normally spelt Huckaby.