Ethnic Politics and the Persistence of Ethnic Identification (Michael Parenti)

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Ethnic Politics and the Persistence of Ethnic Identification
AuthorMichael Parenti
PublisherAmerican Political Science Review
First published1967-09
TypeArticle
Sourcehttps://www.jstor.org/stable/1976090

Ethnic Politics and the Persistence of Ethnic Identification was an article by Michael Parenti, published in the American Political Science Review in September 1967. Some of the language within the article which would be considered outdated by today's standards has been changed.

Text

A question that has puzzled students of ethnic politics can be stated as follows: in the face of increasing assimilation why do ethnics continue to vote as ethnics with about the same frequency as in earlier decades? On the basis of his New Haven study, Robert Dahl observes that "...in spite of growing assimilation, ethnic factors continued to make themselves felt with astonishing tenacity."[1] Nevertheless, he asserts, "the strength of ethnic ties as a factor in local politics surely must recede."[2] Dahl sets up a "three-stage" model to describe how political assimilation will follow a more general social assimilation. However, one of his co-researchers, Raymond Wolfinger, demonstrates in a recent article in this Review[3] that ethnic voting patterns persist into the second and third generations, and that "at least in New Haven, all the social changes of the 1940's and 1950's do not seem to have reduced the political importance of national origins."[4] The same observation can be made of religious ethnic identities, for as Wolfinger notes, citing data from the Elmira study, social mobility in no way diminishes the religious factor as a determinant of voting behaviour; in fact, in the case of upper and middle class Catholics and Protestants, religion seems to assume a heightened importance as a voting determinant.[5] Wolfinger marshals evidence to support the arresting proposition that, melting pot or not, ethnic voting may be with us for a long time to come, a finding which craves explanation.

Part of the reason for the persistence of ethnic voting may rest in the political system itself. Rather than being a purely dependent variable, the political system, i.e., party, precinct workers, candidates, elections, patronage, etc., continues to rely upon ethnic strategies such as those extended to accommodate the claims of newly-arrived ethnic middle-class leadership; as a mediator and mobiliser of minority symbols and interests, the political system must be taken into account.[6]

Wolfinger suggests several further explanations, which may be briefly summarised as follows: (a) "Family-political identification." Voting studies show that as many as four-fifths of all voters maintain the same party identification as did their parents, a continuity which is not merely a reflection of similar life conditions but is in part ascribable to the independent influence of primary group relations.[7] (b) "Critical elections theory." The emergence of highly salient ethnic candidates and issues may cause a dramatic realignment so that a particular party becomes the repository of ethnic loyalty even after the ethnically salient candidate and issues have passed.[8] (c) "Historical after-effects." Partisan affiliations, as Key and Munger have demonstrated for Indiana, persist generations after the reasons for their emergence have ceased to be politically relevant. Thus "even when ethnic salience has faded, [...] its political effects will remain."[9] (d) "Militant core-city residue." The ethnic community may retain a group awareness despite a growing class heterogeneity because the assimilationist-minded will advance to the suburbs while those among the upwardly mobile who choose to stay in the ethnic city settlements are more likely to be the most strongly in-group oriented.[10]

Several comments are in order before we proceed further: of the above explanations, there seems to be some question as to whether (a), (b), and (c) are concerned with independent variables. It does seem that the Key-Munger historical aftereffect idea in (c) is an extension of the "fixation" of the "crucial elections" notion in (b) and that both must rest in large part on the strong inheritance and continuity of family partisan identifications in (a). Explanation (d), while suggestive, is wanting in substantiating data. What evidence we have does not necessarily support the "militant core-city residue" idea, and certainly does not lend substance to the image of a homogenised, assimilated suburbia, as we shall see below. Nevertheless, the above hypotheses submitted by Wolfinger may serve as useful explanations for the political continuity of all social groups, ethnics included.[11]

Yet, after all is said and done, I cannot free myself from the suspicion that perhaps a false problem has been created which can best be resolved by applying certain analytic and theoretical distinctions, supported by data that extend beyond the usual voting studies. If, in fact, it can be demonstrated that assimilation is not taking place, then the assimilation theory as propounded by Dahl, along with Wolfinger's alternate explanations are somewhat besides the point. And the question, why do ethnics continue to vote as ethnics despite increasing assimilation, becomes the wrong one to ask—because the answer may simply be that minorities are not assimilating. At first glance, such an assertion seems to violate the evidence of our senses. Have not old-world immigrant cultures all but disappeared? Are not the ethnics scattering into homogeneously Americanised suburbs? Is not the educational level of the national minorities continually increasing? Are not ethnic occupational distributions changing? etc.

The confusion rests, I submit, in the failure—common to many of us political scientists, and even to some sociologists and anthropologists—to make a conceptual distinction between "acculturation" and "assimilation." The distinction is crucial in reading correct meaning into our data and in guiding us to fruitful theoretical conclusions. For while it is established that ethnics have accommodated themselves to American styles and customs (acculturation) by the second generation, and while perhaps they may enjoy increased occupational and geographic mobility, it is not at all clear that they are incorporating themselves into the structural-identificational-group relations of the dominant society (assimilation). On close examination we find that the term "assimilation," as commonly used, refers to a multiplicity of cultural, social, and identificational processes which need closer scrutiny.[12]

I. Acculturation and Assimilation

At the outset, it is necessary, as Talcott Parsons and others have urged, to distinguish between cultural and social systems: the cultural is the system of beliefs, values, norms, practices, symbols, and ideas (science, art, artefacts, language, law, and learning included); the social is the system of interrelations and associations among individuals and groups. Thus a church, family, club, informal friendship group, formal organisation, etc., composed of individuals interacting in some kind of context involving roles and statuses are part of the social system, or one might say, represent particular sub-societal systems within the society; while the beliefs, symbols, and practices mediated and adhered to by members of the church, family, club, etc., are part of the cultural system or sub-cultural systems within the total culture. By abstracting two analytically distinct sets of components from the same concrete phenomena we are able to observe that, although there may often be an important interaction, the order of relationships and the actions and conditions within one are independent of those in the other. Attention to this independence increases analytical precision.[13]

What was considered as one general process becomes a multifaceted configuration of processes. And if it can be said that there is no inevitable one-to-one relationship between the various processes, and that imperatives operative in one system are not wholly dependent upon the other, then ethnic political behaviour becomes something less of a mystery. For ethnic social sub-systems may persist or evolve new structures independent of the host society and despite dramatic cultural transitions in the direction of the mainstream culture.

Since early colonial times, nearly every group arriving in America has attempted to reconstruct communities that were replications of the old world societies from which they had emerged. With the exception of a few isolated sectarian enclaves such as the Hutterites, the Amish, and the Hasidic, they failed to do so. If culture is to be represented as the accumulated beliefs, styles, solutions, and practices which represent a society's total and continuing adjustment to its environment, then it would seem to follow that no specific cultural system can be transplanted from one environment to another without some measure of change. Unable to draw upon a complete cultural base of their own in the new world, and with no larger constellation of societal and institutional forces beyond the ghetto boundaries to back them, the immigrants eventually lost the battle to maintain their indigenous ways. By the second generation, attention was directed almost exclusively towards American events and standards, American language, dress, recreation, work, and mass media, while interest in the old world culture became minimal or, more usually, non-existent. To one extent or another, all major historical and sociological studies of immigration and ethnicity document this cultural transition of the American-born generation.[14]

However, such acculturation was most often not followed by social assimilation; the group became "Americanised" in much of its cultural practices, but this says little about its social relations with the host society. In the face of widespread acculturation, the minority still maintained a social sub-structure encompassing primary and secondary group relations composed essentially of fellow ethnics. A study of a Polish-American industrial town illustrates this cultural-social distinction. The Polish children treat their immigrant parents with either patronisation or contempt, speak American slang, are addicted to American popular music and popular culture, and accept fully the American way of piling up money and material goods when possible. Yet they keep almost all their social contacts within the confines of the Polish-American community and have no direct exposure to, and little interest in, middle-class American society.[15] Similar findings were made by White and Gans in their respective studies—done twenty years apart—of Italian-American communities in Boston. American styles, language, sports, and consumption patterns predominated, but interpersonal relations and social group structures were almost exclusively Italian-American in both the North End of the 1940's and the West End of the 1960's.[16]

From birth in the sectarian hospital to childhood play-groups to cliques and fraternities in high school and college to the selection of a spouse, a church affiliation, social and service clubs, a vacation resort, and, as life nears completion, an old-age home and sectarian cemetery—the ethnic, if he so desires, may live within the confines of his sub-societal matrix—and many do.[17] Even if he should find himself in the oppressively integrated confines of prison, the ethnic discovers that Italian, Irish, Jewish, Black, and Puerto Rican inmates coalesce into distinct groups in "a complex web of prejudices and hostilities, friendship and alliances."[18]

Hollingshead, in a study of New Haven, discerned vertical social divisions based on race, religion, and national origin along with the expected horizontal cleavages due to income and residence. Cutting across the class strata were the parallel dissections of the black and white worlds, with the latter further fissured into Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant components which, in turn, subdivided into Irish, Italian, Polish, et cetera. Within this highly compartmentalised world were to be found ethnic associational patterns.[19]

II. Heterogeneity Within the Homogeneous Society

Could not such unassimilated sub-structures be more representative of a time when urban areas were segmented into ghettos untouched by post-war affluence, upward occupational mobility and treks to the suburbs? This is the question which seems to anticipate both Dahl and Wolfinger. In actuality, while individual ethnics have entered professional and occupational roles previously beyond their reach, minority group mobility has not been as dramatic as is often supposed. A comparison of first and second generation occupational statuses as reported in the 1950 national census shows no evidence of any substantial convergence of intergroup status levels. The occupational differences among ethnic groups, with the Irish as a possible exception, remain virtually the same for both generations, leading C. B. Nam to observe that even with the absence of large-scale immigration, "the importance of nationality distinctions for the American stratification system will remain for some time to come."[20] If today's ethnics enjoy a better living standard than did their parents, it is because there has been an across-the-board rise throughout America. Fewer pick-and-shovel jobs and more white collar positions for minority members are less the result of ethnic mobility than of an overall structural transition in our national economy and the composition of our labour force.[21]

Furthermore, despite our popular literature on the hopeless homogeneity of suburbia,[22] suburbs are not great social melting pots. Scott Greer, after noting the breakup of some of the central city ethnic communities, cautions: "The staying force of the ethnic community [in suburbia] must not be underestimated." The good Catholic, for instance, "can live most of his life, aside from work, within a Catholic environment,"[23] in a sub-societal network of schools, religious endogamy, family, church, social, athletic, and youth organisations, and Catholic residential areas. Similarly, Robert Wood observes that suburbs tend towards ethnic clusters. In the more "mixed areas," ethnic political blocs are not unknown. As in the city, the tension between older resident and newcomer sometimes reinforces ethnic political alignments and ethnic social identifications.[24] Minority concentrations are less visible in suburban than in urban areas because less immigrant and second-generation persons reside there. Lieberson's study of ten major metropolitan areas shows that the groups most highly segregated from native whites in the central city are also most residentially concentrated in the suburbs, so that suburban patterns bear a strong similarity to those found in the city.[25]

Finally, residential segregation is not a necessary prerequisite for the maintenance of an ethnic sub-societal structure; a group can maintain ethnic social cohesion and identify, while lacking an ecological basis.[26] The Jews of Park Forest live scattered over a wider area and "participate with other Park Foresters in American middle-class culture," that is, they clearly are acculturated. Yet in one year a Jewish sub-community consisting of informal friendship groups, a women's club, a B'nai B'rith lodge, and a Sunday School had emerged. Similarly distinct Lutheran and Catholic social groupings also had developed in which national origin played a large part. (Religion, according to Herbert Gans, was not the exclusive concern of any of the three groups.)[27]

The neighbourhood stores, bars, coffee-shops, barber shops, and fraternal clubrooms which serve as social nerve centres in the ecologically contiguous first-settlement urban areas are difficult to reconstruct in the new topography of shopping centres and one-family homes, but they are frequently replaced by suburban-styled church, charity, and social organisations, informal evening home-centred gatherings and extended family ties kept intact over a wide area with the technical assistance of the omnipresent automobile. The move to second and third settlement areas and the emergence of American-born generations, rather than presaging an inevitable process of disintegration has led to new adjustments in minority organisation and communication. Even when most of the lifestyles assume an American middle-class stamp, these in-group social patterns reinforce ethnic identifications and seem to give them an enduring nature. Today identifiable groups remain not as survivals from the age of immigration but with new attributes many of which were unknown to the immigrants.[28] In short, changes are taking place in ethnic social patterns, but the direction does not seem to be towards greater assimilation into the dominant Anglo-American social structure.

In addition to the movement of ethnics from first settlement areas to the surrounding suburbs there is a smaller "secondary migration" to the Far West. What little evidence we have of this phenomenon suggests that highly visible acculturation styles do not lead to the loss of ethnic consciousness. The numerous Italian, Armenian, Greek, Finnish, and Jewish sub-societal organisations, to cite the West Coast groups that have come to my attention, suggest that structural assimilation into the Anglo-Protestant mainstream is far from inevitable in the "newer America." Friedman, observing how the Jews in Alberquerque are so well integrated as to be "almost indistinguishable from the community at large," then goes on to describe a Jewish network of social organisations such as Hadassah, B'nai B'rith, Shul, Temple, et cetera.[29] The strenuous efforts made by West Coast Greek-Americans on behalf of Mayor Christopher of San Francisco, including appeals that reached segments of the Greek community in New York, indicate that old-style political ethnic appeals are not unknown in California. The recent gubernational contest in Nevada, with its appeals to Mormons, Catholics, and Italians, moved one observer to comment that "the Nevada campaign made it clear once again that American elections more often than not are heavily dependent on a maze of ethnic, religious, and minority group voting factors that few candidates discuss in public."[30] At the same time, the emerging political articulation of Mexican-Americans throughout the Far West should remind us that growing acculturation often leads to more rather than less ethnic political awareness.[31]

In general terms, the new "affluence," often cited as a conductor of greater assimilation, may actually provide minorities with the financial and psychological wherewithal for building even more elaborate parallel sub-societal structures, including those needed for political action. In prosperous suburban locales, while the oldest and most exclusive country clubs belong to old-stock Protestant families, the newer clubs are of Jewish or varying Catholic ethnic antecedents. Among Chicago's debutantes, established "society," primarily Anglo-Protestant, holds a coming-out at the Passavant hospital ball. Debutantes of other origins make do with a Presentation Ball (Jewish), a Links Ball (Black), and the White and Red Ball (Polish). Similar developments can be observed in numerous other urban and suburban regions.[32] Rather than the expected structural assimilation, parallel social structures flourish among the more affluent ethnics. Increasing prosperity among Catholics has been accompanied by an increase in Catholic institutional and social organisations including a vast parochial education system,[33] and the proliferation in sectarian higher education often means a heightened ethnic consciousness. Thus Lenski finds, after controlling for income and party affiliation, that parochially-educated Catholics tend to be more doctrinally orthodox and politically conservative than publicly-educated Catholics.[34]

If ethnic social relations show this notable viability, it might also be remembered that ethnic subcultures have not been totally absorbed into mainstream America. Numerous writers have observed the influence of ethnic cultural valuations on political life, causing one to conclude that not only is there slim evidence to show that assimilation is taking place, but there is even some question as to whether acculturation is anywhere complete.[35]

That ethnic subcultures may still operate as independent variables in political life can be seen in the recent Wilson and Banfield study. In twenty referenda elections held in seven major cities between 1956 and 1963 for expenditures to pay for public services such as hospitals, schools, and parks, it was found that the groups which, because of their income level, would pay little or nothing while benefitting most, were least likely to support such services, namely Poles, Czechs, Italians, Irish, and other ethnics.[36] Conversely, upper-income White Protestants and Jews, the very groups that would be paying the costs while benefitting least, were the strongest supporters of these proposed expenditures. The correlations are too compelling for one to assume that the voters of all groups were acting out of ignorance of their actual material interests. More likely, the authors conclude, there is something in the White Protestant and Jewish subcultural belief systems which tends "to be more public-regarding and less private—[self or family]-regarding" than in other ethnic subcultures.[37] In sum, cultural belief systems or residual components of such systems may persist as cultural and political forces independently of objective and material factors.[38]

III. Identificational Durability

From the time he is born, the individual responds to cultural cues mediated by representatives that help shape his personal character structure. As Parsons suggests, besides the distinction made between the cultural and social systems, one must take into account the personality system.[39] Insofar as the individual internalises experiences from earlier social positions and subcultural matrices, his personality may act as a determinant—or character interpreter—of his present socio-cultural world. To apply that model to our present analysis: ethnic identifications are no matter of indifference even for the person who is both culturally and socially assimilated to the extent that his professional, recreational, and neighbourhood relations and perhaps also his wife are of the wider White Protestant world. A holiday dinner at his parents' home may be his only active ethnic link, or it may be—as Stanley Edgar Hyman said when asked what being Jewish meant to him—nothing more than "a midnight longing for a hot pastrami sandwich"; yet it is a rare person who reaches adulthood without some internalised feeling about his ethnic identification. Just as social assimilation moves along a different and slower path than that of acculturation, so does identity assimilation, or rather non-assimilation enjoy a pertinacity not wholly responsive to the other two processes.

There are several explanations for the persistence of individual ethnic identity in such cases. First, even if the available range of social exposure brings a man into more frequent contact with out-group members, early in-group experiences, family name, and filial attachments may implant in him a natural awareness of, and perhaps a pride in, his ethnic origins. An individual who speaks and behaves something close to the Anglo-American prototype may still prefer to identify with those of his own racial, religious, or national background because it helps tell him who he is. For fear of "losing my identity" some individuals have no desire to pass completely into a "non-descript" "non-ethic" American status. In an age of "mass society" when the "search for identity" concerns many, an identification which is larger than the self yet smaller than the nation is not without its compensations.[40]

Furthermore, the acculturated ethnic may be no more acceptable to the nativist than the unacculturated. Since the beginning of our nation, the native population has wanted minority groups to acculturate or "Americanise", a process entailing the destruction of alien customs and appearances offensive to American sensibilities. But this was not to be taken as an invitation into Anglo-American primary group relations. (It seems that nativists well understood the distinction between acculturation and assimilation.) To be sure, there is little to suggest that the host society has been a gracious host.[41] Even if full social acceptance is won without serious encounters with bigotry, it is unlikely that from childhood to adulthood one will have escaped a realisation that some kind of stigma is attached to one's minority identity, that one is in some way "marginal."[42] Ethnic identifications are, after all, rarely neutral. Few things so effectively assure the persistence of in-group awareness as out-group rejection, and much of the ethnic cradle-to-grave social structure, often considered "clannish," is really defensive.[43] The greater the animosity, exclusion, and disadvantage, generlaly the more will ethnic self-awareness permeate the individual's feelings and evaluations. For groups enjoying some measure of acceptance ethnicity plays an intermittent rather than constant role in self-identity, whereas for those groups which have experienced maximum hostility and oppression—for instance, the Black American—the question of ethnic identification takes on a ubiquitous quality, there being few instances when, for real or imagined reasons, race does not define, shape, or intrude upon both the ordinary business of living and the extraordinary business of politics.[44]

As long as distinctions obtain in the dominant society, and the foreseeable future seems to promise no revolutionary flowering of brotherly love, and as long as the family and early group attachments hold some carry-over meaning for the individual, ethnic identifications and ethnic-oriented responses will still be found even among those who have made a "secure" professional and social position for themselves in the dominant Anglo-Protestant world.

IV. Conclusion

By way of concluding I may summarise my major propositions and discuss their broader political and theoretical applications.

1. If the wrong question is asked, then the answers are irrelevant. If our conceptual and analytic tools are insufficient, then we fail to do justice to our data. The question of why ethnics continue to vote as ethnics despite increasing assimilation focuses on a false problem because minority groups are not assimilating. Using an admittedly simplified application of Parson's model, we arrive at the hypothesis that the cultural, social, and personality systems may operate with complex independent imperatives to maintain ethnic consciousness. Assimilation involves much more than occupational, educational, and geographic mobility. From the evidence and analysis proffered in the foregoing pages, there is reason to believe that despite a wide degree of second and third generation acculturation: (1) residual ethnic cultural valuations and attitudes persist; acculturation is far from complete; (2) the vast pluralistic parallel systems of ethnic, social, and institutional life show impressive viability; structural assimilation seems neither inevitable nor imminent; (3) psychological feelings of minority group identity, both of positive-enjoyment and negative-defensive varieties, are still deeply internalised. In sum, ethnic distinctiveness can still be treated as a factor in social and political pluralism.

Dahl's assertion that the Germans, Irish, Jews, and Italians of New Haven are entering into the "third stage of assimilation" in which middle-class jobs, neighbourhoods, ideas, associates, and styles of life make ethnicity a negligible factor, and Wolfinger's assertions that "ethnic consciousness is fading; it is already faint in some parts of the country and for some ethnic groups," and that "continuing increases in education, geographic dispersion, intermarriage, and inter-group contacts are all likely to reduce ethnic consciousness,"[45] should be scrutinised carefully. We can see that (a) increases in education have not necessarily led to a diminished ethnic consciousness; indeed, the increase in sectarian education often brings a heightened ethnic consciousness.[46] (b) Increases in income adaptation to middle-class styles have not noticeable diminished the viability and frequency of ethnic formal and informal structural associations. Such stylistic changes as have occurred may just as easily evolve within the confines of the ethnically stratified social systems, thereby leading to a proliferation of parallel structures rather than absorption into Anglo-Protestant social systems. (c) Geographical dispersion, like occupational and class mobility has been greatly overestimated. Movement from the first settlement area actually may represent a transplanting of the ethnic community to suburbia. Furthermore, as we have seen, even without the usual geographic contiguity, socially and psychologically contiguous ethnic communities persist. (d) Inter-group contacts, such as may occur, do not necessarily lead to a lessened ethnic awareness; they may serve to activate a new and positive appreciation of personal ethnic identity. Or intergroup contacts may often be abrasive and therefore conducive to ethnic defensiveness and compensatory in-group militancy. Perhaps intermarriage, as a genetic integration (for the offspring) will hasten assimilation; where hate has failed, love may succeed in obliterating the ethnic. But intermarriage remains the exception to the rule, and in the foreseeable future does not promise a large-scale structural group assimilation. Furthermore, in the absence of pertinent data, we need not assume that the offspring of mixed marriages are devoid of ethnic identifications of one kind or another.

2. While not denying what was granted earlier, namely that the political system itself may be an instigator and fabricator of ethnic appeals, we would do well to avoid common overstatements along these lines. It is quite true that politicians are capable of amazing alertness to ethnic sensibilities even in instances where such sensibilities fail to materialise.[47] Yet in the light of the above discussion it would be unduly hasty to conclude that politicians betray a "cultural lag" or perceptual laziness by their continued attention to ethnic groups. The political organisation attempting to mobilise support faces the problem of having to construct definitions of its constituency which will reduce the undifferentiated whole into more accessible, manageable, and hopefully more responsive components. The politician, then, is not completely unlike the scientific investigator—if we may allow ourselves an extended analogy—who in dealing with a mass of data must find some means of ordering it into meaningful and more manipulatable categories. More specifically, he must find means of making his constituency accessible to him in the most economical way. Given the limited availability of campaign resources and the potentially limitless demands for expenditure, the candidate is in need of a ready-made formal and informal network of relational sub-structures within his constituency. He discovers that "reaching the people" is often a matter of reaching particular people who themselves can reach, or help him reach, still other people.

A growing acculturation may have diminished the salience of the more blatant ethnic appeals, and the candidate knows that a nostalgic reference to the old country no longer strikes the resonant note it did thirty years ago; indeed, it may elicit a self-consciously negative response from the American-born generations. But he also should know that social assimilation (whether he calls it that or not) is far from an accomplished reality, as he finds himself confronted with leaders and members from a wide mélange of ethnic associations, be they professional, business, labour, veteran, neighbourhood, educational, church, charitable, recreational, or fraternal. Unhampered by any premature anticipations of assimilation, the politician can work with what is at hand. Even if "ethnic issues," as such, do not emerge in a campaign, ethnic social life provides him with ready-made avenues to constituent audiences, audiences which—no matter how well acculturated—are not noted for their indifference to being courted by public figures.

That many urban and suburban politicians persist in giving attentive consideration to minority social groupings in American-born constituencies, then, may be due less to their inveterate stupidity than to the fact that ethnic sub-structure and identifications are still extant, highly visible, and, if handled carefully, highly accessible and responsive. The political practitioner who chooses to ignore the web of formal and informal ethnic sub-structures on the presumption that such groupings are a thing of the past does so at his own risk.

3. Historically, the theoretical choice posed for the ethnic has been either isolated existence in autonomous cultural enclaves or total identificational immersion into the American society. We have seen that neither of these "either-or" conditions have evolved. In 1915, Woodrow Wilson observed: "America does not consist of groups. A man who thinks of himself as belonging to a particular national group in America has not yet become an American."[48] As was so often the case when he addressed himself to the problem of national minorities, Wilson took the simple view. His was the commonly-accepted assumption that a person's identity or position in the social system were indivisible qualities; therefore, identity choices were mutually exclusive. But in reality a person experiences cumulative and usually complementary identifications, and his life experiences may expose him to some of the social relations and cultural cues of the dominant society while yet placing him predominantly within the confines of a particular minority sub-structure. For the ethnic, a minority group identity is no more incompatible with life in America and with loyalty to the nation than is any regional, class, or other particular group attachment. A pluralistic society, after all, could not really exist without pluralistic sub-structures and identities. Ethnics can thus sometimes behave politically as ethnics while remaining firmly American. it may be said that minorities have injected a new meaning into a national motto originally addressed to the fusion of thirteen separate states: e pluribus unum, a supreme allegiance to, and political participation in, the commonality of the Union, with the reserved right to remain distinct unassimilated entities in certain limited cultural, social, and identificational respects.

The disappearance of ethnicity as a factor in political behaviour waits in large part upon total ethnic structural-identificational assimilation into the host society. Perhaps even in that far-off future "when national origins are forgotten, the political allegiances formed in the old days of ethnic salience will be reflected in the partisan choices of totally assimilated descendants of the old immigrants."[49] If so, then the forces of political continuity will once more have proven themselves, and ethnicity will join long-past regional ties, wars, depressions, defunct political machines, deceased charismatic leaders, and a host of other half-forgotten forces whose effects are transmitted down through the generations to shape the political continuities and allegiances of all social groups. But before relegating them to the history of tomorrow, the unassimilated ethnics should be seen as very much alive and with us today.

Notes

  1. ↑ Robert Dahl, Who Governs? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), p. 59.
  2. ↑ Ibid., p. 62. See also pp. 32–62 inclusive.
  3. ↑ Raymond E. Wolfinger, "The Development and Persistence of Ethnic Voting," this Review, 59 (December 1965), 896–908.
  4. ↑ Ibid., p. 907.
  5. ↑ Ibid., see also Bernard R. Berelson et al., Voting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), p. 65.
  6. ↑ Besides the studies cited in Wolfinger, op. cit., and his own data on New Haven, almost all the literature on the relationship between the political machine and the ethnic lends support to this proposition.
  7. ↑ Cf. Wolfinger op. cit., p. 907 and the studies cited therein. Also Herbert Hyman, Political Socialization (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1959), and much of the work done by Fred I. Greenstein.
  8. ↑ Here Wolfinger is applying Key's hypothesis. See V. O. Key, Jr. "A Theory of Critical Elections," Journal of Politics, 17 (February 1955), 3–18.
  9. ↑ The quotation is from Wolfinger, op. cit., p. 908. See also V. O. Key and Frank Munger, "Social Determinism and Electoral Decision: the Case of Indiana," in Eugene Burdick and Arthur J. Brodbeck (eds.), American Voting Behavior (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1959), pp. 281–299.
  10. ↑ Wolfinger, loc. cit.
  11. ↑ For a more extended and systematic treatment of the question of political continuities and discontinuities see Seymour M. Lipset et al., "The Psychology of Voting: An Analysis of Political Behavior," in Gardner Lindzey (ed.), Handbook of Social Psychology, Vol. II (Cambridge, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1954), pp. 1124–1170.
  12. ↑ For instance, Wolfinger uses the term "assimilation" synonymously with "general acculturation and occupational differentiation," in the same body of propositions, op. cit., p. 906.
  13. ↑ A. L. Kroeber and Talcott Parsons, "The Concepts of Culture and of Social System," American Sociological Review, 23 (October 1958), 582–583; also Talcott Parsons, The Social System (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1951).
  14. ↑ See for instance: Oscar Handlin, Boston's Immigrants, A Study in Acculturation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, rev. ed. 1959); Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1951); R. E. Park and H. A. Miller, Old World Traits Transplanted (New York: Harper, 1921); W. I. Thomas and F. Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, 5 vols. (Boston: Badger, 1918–20); E. V. Stonequist, The Marginal Man, A Study in Personality and Culture Conflict (New York: Scribner, 1937); W. L. Warner and Leo Srole, The Social Systems of American Ethnic Groups (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1945); William Foote Whyte, Street Corner Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1943); Herbert J. Gans, The Urban Villagers (New York: Free Press of Glencoe), 1962.
  15. ↑ Arnold W. Green, "A Re-examination of the Marginal Man Concept," Social Forces, 26 (1947), 167–171.
  16. ↑ Whyte, op. cit., and Gans, op. cit. A socially unassimilated pluralism is readily visible in many areas of American life. Thus, in a single weekend in New York separate dances for persons of Hungarian, Irish, Italian, German, Greek, and Polish extractions are advertised in neighbourhood newspapers and the foreign language press.
  17. ↑ See Milton M. Gordon, Assimilation in American Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 34; also Erich Rosenthal, "Acculturation without Assimilation?" American Journal of Sociology, 66 (November 1960), 275–288; Amitai Etzioni, "The Ghetto—a Re-evaluation," Social Forces (March 1959), 255–262; J. Milton Yinger, "Social Forces Involved in Group Identification or Withdrawal," Daedalus, 90 (Spring 1961), 247–262; Y. J. Chyz and R. Lewis, "Agencies Organized by Nationality Groups in the United States," The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 262 (1949).
  18. ↑ M. Arc, "The Prison 'Culture' From the Inside," The New York Times Magazine, 28 February 1965, p. 63.
  19. ↑ August B. Hollingshead, "Trends in Social Stratification: A Case Study," American Sociological Review, 17 (1952), 685 f; see also Gans, op. cit.; Warner and Srole, op. cit., for further evidence of ethnic subsocietal systems.
  20. ↑ C. B. Nam, "Nationality Groups and Social Stratification in America," Social Forces, 37 (1959), p. 333. The assumption that Black Americans have been enjoying a slow but steady economic advance is laid to rest by Dale Hiestand, Economic Growth and Employment Opportunities for Minorities (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964).
  21. ↑ See Lewis Corey, "Problems of the Peace: IV. The Middle Class," The Antioch Review, 5, 68–87.
  22. ↑ For instance William H. Whyte, The Organization Man (Garden City: Doubleday, 1957); A. C. Spectorsky, The Ex-Urbanites (New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1955).
  23. ↑ Scott Greer, "Catholic Voters and the Democratic Party," Public Opinion Quarterly, 25 (1961), p. 624.
  24. ↑ Robert C. Wood, Suburbia, Its People and Their Politics (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1958), p. 178. As impressive as it is the trek to the suburbs, more recent developments should not go unrecorded. Of great significance, and hitherto unobserved because it is of such recent occurrence, is the effect of the revised and liberalised national origins quota system of our immigration laws. Direct observation of immigration into several of the Italian and Greek communities in New York during 1965–66 leaves me with the conviction that the ethnic core-city community is far from declining. In certain urban centres, such as the Brownsville section of New York, the gradual depletion of old ethnic neighbourhoods is being amply and visibly counterbalanced by new injections of Polish refugees, along with Italian, Greek, and Latin American immigrants who not only reinforce the core-city neighbourhoods but frequently lend them certain first-generation touches reminiscent of an earlier day.
  25. ↑ Stanley Lieberson, "Suburbs and Ethnic Residential Patterns," American Journal of Sociology, 67 (1962), 673–681.
  26. ↑ See Etzioni, op. cit., for a discussion of this point.
  27. ↑ Herbert J. Gans, "Park Forest: Birth of a Jewish Community," Commentary, 7 (1951), 330–339.
  28. ↑ Cf. Etzioni, op. cit., p. 258; also Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot (Cambridge: M.I.T. and Harvard University Press, 1963), pp. 13–16.
  29. ↑ Morris Friedman, "The Jews of Alberquerque," Commentary, 28 (1959), 55–62.
  30. ↑ Tom Wicker, "Hidden Issues in Nevada," The New York Times, 23 July 1966.
  31. ↑ See Joan W. Moore and Ralph Guzman, "The Mexican-Americans: New Wind from the Southwest," The Nation, 30 May 1966, pp. 645–648.
  32. ↑ Cf., E. Digby Baltzell, The Protestant Establishment, Aristocracy and Caste in America (New York: Random House, 1964), p. 357; and "Life and Leisure," Newsweek, 21 December 1964.
  33. ↑ John Tracy Ellis, American Catholicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), passim; also James P. Shannon, "The Irish Catholic Immigration," in Thomas T. McAvoy (ed.), Roman Catholicism and The American Way of Life (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1960), pp. 204–210.
  34. ↑ Gerhard Lenski, The Religious Factor (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963, rev. ed.), pp. 268–270.
  35. ↑ Cf., Wesley and Beverly Allinsmith, "Religious Affiliation and Politico-Economic Attitude," Public Opinion Quarterly, 12 (1948), 377–389; Lawrence Fuchs, The Political Behavior of the American jews, (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1956).
  36. ↑ James Q. Wilson and Edward C. Banfield, "Public Regardingness As a Value Premise in Voting Behavior," this Review, December 1964), 876–877.
  37. ↑ Ibid., pp. 882–885. Wilson and Banfield offer no delineation of these subcultural ingredients. For an attempted analysis of the components of religious belief systems which are politically salient see Michael Parenti, "Political Values and Religious Cultures: Jews, Catholics, and Protestants," The Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, (forthcoming).
  38. ↑ For the classic statement of this proposition see Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Scribner's Sons, 1958). For application of this proposition to the American scene see Seymour Martin Lipset, The First New Nation (New York: Basic Books, 1963), pp. 110–129.
  39. ↑ Parsons actually constructs a four-systems model which includes the social, cultural, personality, and physiological systems; the fourth system is not immediately pertinent to our discussion. See Talcott Parsons, "Malinowski and the Theory of the Social System" in R. Firth (ed.), Man and Culture (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960).
  40. ↑ See Gordon, op. cit.; also Gans, "Park Forest," op. cit.
  41. ↑ See Baltzell, op. cit., for a study of White Protestant exclusiveness; also Gordon, op. cit., pp. 111–2.
  42. ↑ For supporting data see Michael Parenti, Ethnic and Political Attitudes: Three Generations of Italian Americans, (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1962); also Gordon W. Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958).
  43. ↑ Hansen observes: "When the natives combined to crush what they considered the undue influence of alien groups they committed a tactical error, for the newcomers, far from being crushed were prompted to consolidate their hitherto scattered forces": Marcus Lee Hansen, The Immigrant in American History (New York: Harper and Row, 1960 ed.), p. 136.
  44. ↑ Race consciousness is, James Q. Wilson notes, "an ever-present factor in the thought and action of Negroes of all strata of society," and is "the single most consistent theme in Negro discussion of civic issues." Negro Politics: The Search for Leadership (Glencoe: Free Press, 1960), p. 170. It is true, however, that members of any one group, because of individual experiences and personalities, may vary as to the amount of emphasis they place upon their ethnic status: see Aaron Antonovsky, "Toward a Refinement of the 'Marginal Man' Concept," Social Forces, 35 (1956), 57–62, for a study of in-group attitudes among Jewish males; also Irwin Child, Italian or American? The Second Generation in Conflict (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1943). To my comparative study of in-group awareness. The impression one draws from non-comparative studies as implied above is that the groups most disliked by the wider society harbour the greatest number of individuals of militant ethnic self-awareness.
  45. ↑ Dahl, op. cit., pp. 35–6; Wolfinger, op. cit., p. 908.
  46. ↑ Lenski, loc. cit. Lenski's entire study points to the persistence of subcultural religio-ethnic variables in political and economic life. The transition away from the Democratic Party by Catholics is not, as Wolfinger seems to suggest, a symptom of assimilation; in fact, by Lenski's data, it is a manifestation of a growing commitment to religious conservatism.
  47. ↑ See, for instance, the study of balanced ticket calculations in a New York state-wide campaign in the concluding chapter of Glazer and Moynihan, op. cit.
  48. ↑ Quoted in Oscar Handlin, The American People in the Twentieth Century (Boston: Beacon press, 1963, rev. ed.), p. 121.
  49. ↑ Wolfinger, loc. cit.
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