Essay: THE NEW MELTING POT

When I stood in the landing shed of this “promised land” . . .

I made a vow:

I’d fight my way to power if it killed me Not only for myself but for our kind.

THAT is how the politician hero of Hogan’s Goat, a recent play about the 19th century Irish in Brooklyn, recalls the era when ward politics was one of the few ways in which the immigrant masses could dream of sharing power. The ethnic vote—the vote of “our kind”—has remained part of the American political vocabulary for a century. Big-city bosses operated on the assumption that they could deliver that vote to whatever candidate they chose—all they needed was a Christmas turkey, a memory for the names of the children, and a fluency in the mother tongue. In fact, things were never quite that simple, but in a broad sense the picture was accurate enough. Even today, long after the Hogan prophecy was replaced by the reality of an Irish Catholic President, long after mass immigration became part of history, politicians still talk easily about the Irish vote, the Italian vote, the Polish or Jewish vote.

Statistically, the ethnic concern is understandable. Some 34 million Americans, or 19%, are listed by the most recent census as of “foreign stock,” which the Census Bureau defines as either foreign-born or with at least one foreign-born parent. Others have defined “ethnic” as any individual who differs from “the basic white Protestant Anglo-Saxon settlers by religion, language and culture.” Since, of the total population, 65% come from non-Anglo-Saxon stock, this amounts to a lot of voters, most of them in the big cities. In New York, as the Rheingold-beer ads say, there are more Italians than in Naples, more Puerto Ricans than in San Juan, more Greeks than in Sparta. Minority sympathies are still considered essential in civic affairs, and the ethnically balanced ticket remains something of a reflex.

All this suggests that the old notion of America as a melting pot was a romantic idea about something that never really happened. “Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men,” wrote that perceptive and enthusiastic observer of the American scene, St. John de Crevecoeur, in 1782. Emerson elaborated and sustained the vision, and by 1908, Israel Zangwill, an admiring English Jew, was completely carried away: “America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting Pot where all races of Europe are merging and reforming . . . Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians—into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American.”

From the viewpoints of the politician and the sociologist, the minorities in the crucible continued to behave separately and distinctly. Only in the last decade, nearly 200 years after its enunciation, has the melting pot finally begun to perform as longtime myth would have it.

Disintegrating Blocs

Though the essence of the change lies in rising incomes, education, family life and culture, the most visible demonstration is found in election returns. To the dismay of the pros—mostly Democrats, since the Democrats have long counted the ethnic groups in their column—minorities in the recent elections picked and chose with as much stiff-necked individualism as any Mayflower Yankee.

Some examples were dramatic. The Irish Catholics of Massachusetts split wide open, deserting Democrat Edward McCormack by the thousands to re-elect Italian Republican John Volpe, who had been a good and popular Governor. Volpe even took that oldest Irish stronghold of all, Boston, city of “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald and James Curley. In New York, the Democrats followed the ethnic book by put ting an Italian (Frank Sedita) on the ticket as attorney general, but Rockefeller handily carried the Italian vote.

In Texas, many Mexican-Americans deserted their Democratic habits, or simply stayed away from the polls, to help elect Republican Senator John Tower, as a protest against the conservative Democratic candidate, Waggoner Carr. In Michigan, Governor George Romney carried Macomb County, a district full of prosperous second-generation Poles, by an easy 18,000-vote margin over Zolton Ferency, “the man with the ethnic name.” Perhaps the most clear-cut demonstration came in Chicago’s heavily Polish Eleventh District, which has been represented for years by a professional Pole, Representative Roman Pucinski. Pucinski is part owner of a Polish-language radio station, his mother has her own Polish program on another station, and no one is a more assiduous attender of parades and anniversary celebrations. Two years ago, Pucinski won handily with a 31,500 majority. This year he barely squeaked past a candidate of no particular distinction named John Hoellen, of vaguely German extraction, whose appeal was his all-out opposition to open housing.

No Longer Embattled

Negroes, because they have made less economic and social progress than other minorities, still tend to bloc voting in the classic pattern. But even among Negroes, the racial lines did not always hold, and Stokely Carmichael’s retrograde, black-power appeal clearly upset nearly as many Negroes as whites. In Baltimore, 83% of the Negro vote went to Republican (and “ethnic” Greek) Spiro Agnew for Governor—though only two years ago it had gone equally heavily along its traditional Democratic lines for Lyndon Johnson. And though Edward Brooke drew the small Negro vote in his race for Massachusetts Senator, he won with white votes and was careful not to present himself as a Negro candidate. The Minneapolis Spokesman, a Negro newspaper, supported a white candidate running for Congress against a Negro (the white man won). “That newspaper would have committed suicide to endorse a white man over a Negro only a few short years ago,” said Louis Martin, the Democratic National Committee’s expert on ethnic voting and a Negro himself.

The changes have not come overnight. A striking example was the election of John Lindsay as mayor of New York in 1965. White Anglo-Saxon Protestants such as Lindsay make up probably no more than 5% of the city’s population. His opponent, Abraham Beame, was a Jew, and as has often been said, New York is the biggest Jewish city in the world. But Lindsay won. Says Michigan’s George Romney: “The bloc vote has disintegrated. In 1962, I got only 11% of the Negro vote. In 1965, it was up to 19%. This year I got 30% to 40%.”

None of this means that ethnic factors have disappeared from politics. It does mean that they are far more complex than they used to be, and are deeply intertwined with particular issues and the appeal of particular candidates.

The day seems incredibly distant when the block leader met immigrants at the dock and served as their only real protector and mediator in an alien land, or when immigrants huddled together in specific neighborhoods where they found the old customs, the old language, and relatives or friends to get them jobs. Today the U.S. receives fewer than 300,000 immigrants a year (even so, the rate is higher than that of any other nation in the world), and they still tend to seek out members of their own nationality. But for the most part, they find these in a state of established confidence that is far different from an embattled community simply welcoming reinforcements. Even the old neighborhoods are breaking up. University of Chicago Historian Richard Wade points out: “Apart from the nonwhite groups, more than half the members of each ethnic group in America have left the old neighborhood and scattered across the cities.” Mostly they have moved because they have edged up the income scale and can afford a better neighborhood or the suburbs.

The process is going on all over. Says Ohio’s State Senator Michael J. Maloney of Cincinnati: “It’s hard any more in Cincinnati to locate ethnic areas, the Italians and Germans in particular, and the Irish too. You don’t have the enclaves that used to exist, like the over-the-Rhine area across the canal.” Once, south St. Louis was as German as Berlin, studded with beer gardens. Turnvereins and regular Schutzen-fests. Today the beer gardens have become bars, the Turnvereins have disbanded, and the Germans who made their start in south St. Louis have prospered and dispersed. In Kansas City, the young Italians no longer set the old St. Joseph’s table for the poor on March 19, and it is ten years since the last Saint’s Day parade. As the national director of the Italian American Society says wistfully: “Within 20 years, there will be no need for Italian organizations.” In 1914, there were an estimated 1,300 foreign-language newspapers and periodicals; today there are fewer than 400.

Above all, as one analyst puts it, “fear is disappearing.” Save for the Negroes and the Puerto Ricans, most minorities no longer feel beleaguered. And therefore their need to cling together and seek out a protector who will tell them what to do is diminishing. Says Illinois State Representative Abner Mikva: “The Polish community in Chicago, for instance, has progressed to the point where there are no longer specifically Polish interests to be protected or promoted. If middle-class Poles are unhappy about the Democrats, it is because of civil rights or welfarism as threats to their economic wellbeing.” They find security by losing themselves in the mainstream of American life; they find any specific appeal to their Polish identity somehow insulting.

Cheerful Appreciation

Yale’s Professor Robert Dahl, in a study of New Haven politics, points out that a genuinely ethnic group remains seriously ethnic only so long as it remains proletarian. But the time comes when large segments of the group are assimilated into the “middling and upper strata … and look to others in the middling strata for friends, associates and marriage partners. To these people, ethnic politics is often embarrassing or meaningless.” In New Haven, he set rough dates for the achievement of this state by various groups—the Germans by 1920, the Irish 1930, Russians 1940, Italians 1950, Negroes—not yet.

Most ethnic groups have become so much integrated into the general political community that they are only remotely identifiable ethnically in political terms. The Swedish and Norwegian workingmen of North Minneapolis traditionally, and still do, vote Democratic; the richer Scandinavians of suburban Minneapolis and the richer farms of southern Minnesota habitually vote Republican. In Chicago’s 1963 mayoralty election, Republican Candidate Benjamin Adam-owski carried all the Polish blue-collar wards in the inner city but lost the vote of the richer Poles living in the suburbs. Even with Negroes, who have the added problem of color, the economic pattern is the same. Richard Nixon’s share of the Negro vote in 1960 was three times as high in the “suburbs as in the lower-income wards in the inner city.

In short, economic interests have displaced ethnic interests. But sociologists insist, with some justice, that this new melt in the melting pot extends chiefly to the political and economic spheres. In other areas, what they call “structural separation” persists. According to a theory first propounded by Sociologist Ruby Jo Reeves Kennedy, the U.S. is really a “triple melting pot,” with the true cohesion growing within religious groups. An Irish Catholic is more likely to marry another Catholic (Polish, German or Italian) than a Protestant; similarly, a Protestant Swede tends to marry another Protestant (Finn, Dutch, Scotch, English). In religion and in social relations, minorities still resist amalgamation, although even here the lines are not nearly as sharply drawn as they once were. Besides, the separation is largely voluntary, and characterized by an increasingly cheerful appreciation of one another’s differences.

Ethnic and racial humor, virtually taboo during the selfconsciously liberal years following World War II, is more acceptable than ever. The jokes are not the same as in the old vaudeville days, when they were based on the comic ignorance of the victim. The Rastus and Izzie jokes are gone. Today it is largely Jewish comedians who tell jokes about Jews, Negro comics about Negroes. Italian Comedian Pat Cooper (Pasquale Caputo) tells how his seven-year-old son asks what N.A.A.C.P. stands for. When he is told that it stands for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the boy wants to know whether the Italians have anything like it. “Sure,” replies Cooper. “We have the Mothers and Fathers’ Italian Association—the M.A.F.I.A.” Another case in point is the rash of Polish jokes (“Why won’t they let a Pole swim in Lake Michigan? Because he’ll leave a ring”), which began almost underground but now venture into the light. Explains Comic Phyllis Diller: “If it’s too close to the truth, it isn’t funny. The Poles are far removed from ignorance and dirt, so it’s all right.”

The decline of isolation among minority groups has brought about what Bernard Malamud calls “a flowering of interest in minorities generally.” This may help explain the strong popularity of Jewish writers, Malamud included, who are obviously read far beyond the Jewish audience.

Something to Teach

A great deal of ethnic feeling is still enshrined in political rituals. In New York City, for instance, there are the infuriating, hopelessly provincial national parades (on St. Patrick’s Day, Columbus Day, etc.), which paralyze Manhattan to very little purpose. Some Italians still get excited when somebody pushes Leif Ericson’s claim to be the discoverer of America, and John Gronouski, now U.S. Ambassador to Poland, was jeered by Polish fraternal organizations in the Midwest when they discovered that he could not speak the language. (He took some quick lessons.) There are many lingering ethnic sensibilities on foreign affairs, notably the widespread Jewish sympathy for Israel and hostility toward the Arabs. New York’s Mayor John Lindsay discovered this last June when Jewish objections impelled him to cancel a proposed luncheon in honor of Saudi Arabia’s visiting King Feisal. But many such protests are carried on by professional ethnic champions who profess to speak for their people but are far from solidly supported. The press too perpetuates a great many ethnic cliches.

In the subtlest melting process on the U.S. scene, the ethnic minorities (which together actually constitute the majority) greatly and constantly influence the Anglo-Saxon minority in culture, fashion, food and even philosophy. At the same time, the ethnic minorities continue to admire the Anglo-Saxon model. “The American’s image of himself,” says Professor Will Herberg of Drew University, “is still the Mayflower, John Smith, Davy Crockett, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln . . . and this is true whether the American in question is a descendant of the Pilgrims or the grandson of an immigrant from southeastern Europe.” In politics, write Harvard Professors Edward Banfield and James Wilson, “the perfect candidate, then, is of Jewish, Polish, Italian or Irish extraction and has the speech, dress, manner and the public virtues—honesty, impartiality, and devotion to the public interest—of the upper-class Anglo-Saxon.”

None of this should be taken too easily for granted in a world where Flemings still battle Walloons in Belgium, French Canadians are still at odds with British Canadians, and Indians of different faiths still slaughter one another by the thousands. Says Professor Daniel Moynihan, director of the Harvard-M.I.T. Joint Center for Urban Studies: “We are the only nation in the world that has seriously undertaken to establish a biracial democracy. We have shown a fantastic capacity to absorb an incredible range of ethnic groups. If this looked easy, the world is beginning to learn it is damn hard. America has something to teach here.”

One of the things it has to teach is that, in the American melting pot, complete amalgamation is probably not possible and certainly not desirable. But the process of blending continues, and the mixture grows more subtle all the time.