"300,000 Thrifty Letts in U.S.:" speculation and exaggeration in reports about early Latvian immigrants in America.

Estimates of the number of ethnic Latvian immigrants and their descendants who lived in the United States and Canada before World War II have varied widely. Reports in scholarly and popular publications from the period, as well as later work, often relied on replication of unsubstantiated information or on incomplete readings of federal census data. This article examines these sources and suggests that the population of pre-war ethnic Latvians was much smaller than often reported, a finding that has ramifications for how we understand their perceived failure of cultural maintenance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]