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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