Not only that, there is no other state more dominated by a single ethnic group. Strong work ethic. Beer and brats. Jack Holzhueter, an editor at the State Historical Society in Madison, cautions against giving these stereotypes too much heft. For one thing, the census overstates Wisconsin's German ancestry, he says.
People associate their German ancestry with a language group, rather than a country of origin.
Those of Swiss, Austrian and Luxembourger ancestry, for example, have become absorbed into the larger German culture over the years. We were encouraged to forget where we came from. We became Pan-German. I n Wisconsin, as elsewhere in the country, minority populations are growing much faster than the white population. The state, however, remains very white.