US Elections

Take it down south

By Jonathan Bradley in Newcastle, Australia

17 May 2011

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The U.S. Census Bureau has a great new toy up on its website. The graphic above tracks the path of America's centre of population throughout the nation's history. The centre of population is, as the Census Bureau explains, "the place where an imaginary, flat, weightless and rigid map of the United States would balance perfectly if all residents were of identical weight."

I'm interested in this kind of stuff because immigration, both external and internal, has always been a defining aspect of American identity. The first European immigrants to the continent in its colonial days were people willing to take a risk and uproot their lives in order to better themselves, and the country's populace has never lost this quality. As newcomers crowded into the cities of the East, Easterners packed up their things and ventured into the broad expanse of the plains under the dictum of manifest destiny; the belief that it was right and inevitable that America should expand to the very Western edge of the continent. The Oregon Trail, the California gold rush, and even Brigham Young's Mormon exodus to Utah are icons of a people unwilling to settle.

Since 1790, the centre of population has shifted from Kent County, Maryland to its current location in the tiny town of Plato, Missouri. It's course tells the history of America: its origins in the old centres of the North East, its industrialisation in the cities of the Mid West, and, over the past few decades, the reorientation of its economy to the post-manufacturing service industries of the South and West. From the suburban idyll of the 1950s, America is shifting toward the sprawling, decentralised exurbs of states like Florida and Arizona. According to the Census Bureau, over the past ten years the centre of population moved farther south and less far west than usual. This is a story in itself; towns like Atlanta and Charlotte, North Carolina have become the face of a new South. Where the New South was once exemplified in 1960s Atlanta's self-conception as the City Too Busy To Hate, these cities are becoming ones that don't hate even when they're not busy.

This shuffle is changing the country's political face, as well. Old Democratic strongholds like Michigan and the New England states are losing seats, while traditionally Republican states like Texas and Georgia are gaining them. But the changing culture of the South is similarly altering the political map: Barack Obama turned North Carolina, Virginia, and Florida blue, and in the case of the former two in particular, this was the result of demographic changes in a region that, as recently as the 1960s, would have prevented the current President from using the same bathroom as a white man.

Tags: Arizona, Atlanta, Center Of Population, Centre Of Population, Florida, Immigration, Manifest Destiny, North Carolina, Redistricting, The Census, The South, The Southwest, The West, Us Census Bureau

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