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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.