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.