Note 30 — CHAPTER FIVE

Leyburn, The Scotch-Irish, p. 271. Leyburn points out that since the Scotch-Irish were never a "minority," in the sense that their values differed radically from the norms of their areas of settlement, they never suffered the normlessness which Durkheim calls anomie—the absence of clear standards to follow. As Leyburn states it,

Anomie was an experience unknown to the Scotch-Irishman, for he moved immediately upon arrival to a region where there was neither a settlement nor an established culture. He held land, knew independence, had manifold responsibilities from the very outset. He spoke the language of his neighbors to the East through whose communities he had passed on his way to the frontier. Their institutions and standards differed at only minor points from his own. The Scotch-Irish were not, in short, a "minority group" and needed no Immigrant Aid society to tide them over a period of maladjustment so that they might become assimilated in the American melting pot.

This, however, is not to suggest that minorities are necessarily anomic. The Jews, for example, were always a cultural minority in Europe, yet they adhered intensely to their own cultural norms.