5. The Non-Yankee Northeast

Besides the Yankee sections of the Northeast where Republican traditions are crumbling, there are other areas, traditionally Democratic and often Southern-oriented, where the GOP is gaining. This disparity relates back to varying Civil War reactions—and wartime political partisanship—rooted in different ethnic settlement, agricultural and socioeconomic patterns. A sizeable group of rural Northeasterners did not like Yankees, their Civil War or their Republican Party. And inasmuch as the Civil War was the fire from which arose much of the American party system of the next century, an analysis of the non-Yankee Northeast is obliged to begin with early colonial settlement patterns.

At the time of the signing of the United States Constitution, New England Yankeedom—almost entirely of English stock and largely Congregationalist (the Puritan-established church of several states) by religion—stood apart from nearby states to the west of New England; New York still showed many signs of its original Dutch settlers, especially the corridor of Dutch population reaching from New York City up the Hudson past Albany. Beyond the Dutch lived a small group of Palatine Germans, concentrated in the Schoharie Valley. New York also had Irish and Scottish elements, as well as quasi-feudal Anglican landholders (the DeLanceys and Livingstons) and Dutch patroons (the Schuylers, Van Cortlandts and Van Renssalaers). Other considerable numbers of Dutch lived in nearby northern New Jersey.

Even more than New York, Pennsylvania had a citizenry of diverse origin. As a result of successive waves of immigration, population spread across the state in ethnic layers. In the southeast, around Philadelphia, English and Welsh origins prevailed (a number of the English were Quakers, descendents of original settlers); next came Germans of varied Protestant sects who established themselves in the rich farming country north and west of Philadelphia; and after them came the Scotch-Irish who dominated the Cumberland and other Appalachian valleys. In 1790, one third of Pennsylvania’s population was German and another third was Scotch-Irish. Nor was this unimportant. As New England began to expand westward during the Seventeen-Seventies and Eighties, ethnic and provincial enmities were such that pitched battles were actually fought between Yankees and non-Yankees, Pennsylvanians and New Yorkers.37

Despite an influx of Scotch-Irish and Germans into western Maryland from neighboring Pennsylvania, the predominant character of Maryland continued to be defined by the tidewater area around Chesapeake Bay where most of the state’s population lived. Like Delaware Bay (lower New Jersey, Delaware and the southeastern corner of Pennsylvania), Chesapeake Bay was almost entirely English-settled. Otherwise the area bore less resemblance to Anglo-Saxon New England than to the Dutch, German and Scotch-Irish-tinged Middle Atlantic states. Lying below the Mason-Dixon line, Delaware, southern New Jersey and Maryland (especially the Eastern Shore of Chesapeake Bay) were—and still are—rich agricultural flatlands blessed with a 185-day growing season. Maryland and Delaware, finding slavery feasible, allowed it, even though they were not so well suited to the institution as states farther south. Agricultural productivity, together with abundant fish and waterfowl, made the Delaware and Chesapeake Bay areas a land of easy living—in marked contrast to the rocks and rills of New England farmlands.³⁸

As the Founding Fathers were drawing up the Constitution, Yankee New England was moving west, into the western New York and northern Pennsylvania lands cleared of Indians during the Revolution (isolating the upstate New York Dutch and Germans in the process); and the Scotch-Irish and Germans of Pennsylvania were moving south down the Appalachian highways and west into the Ohio Valley. It was not long before Northeastern settlement patterns had more or less stabilized; the frontier shifted to the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes and Northeastern sociopolitical alignments began to take shape. Map 9 illustrates the pattern and post-Revolutionary thrust of Northeastern settlement patterns. Rural Maryland and Delaware were definitely not Yankee; most of New Jersey and Pennsylvania were not; and by the early Nineteenth Century, the German-Dutch corridor stood out from the Yankee mass of upstate New York.

Map 9. Northeastern Ethnic and Settlement Patterns, 1790

From their first European settlement in the Northeast (New Amsterdam), the Dutch spread up the Hudson and into New Jersey. In 1664, the English took over the Dutch territory.
    Before that time, the English had settled in Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay during the Sixteen-Twenties; colonization of Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire and lower Maine began soon after. Another stream of English settled in Maryland in 1634, and in Delaware and lower New Jersey soon after. Philadelphia, laid out in 1682, was settled by William Penn and his English Quakers. The Puritans of New England were very different from the Catholics and cavaliers (Anglicans) of Chesapeake Bay.
    The Middle Atlantic provinces—New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania—not only separated the two mainstreams of Anglo-Saxon settlement (New England and Virginia-Maryland tidewater) but they received the bulk of non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants. Germans first came to Schoharie, New York in 1713. However, their concentration soon switched to Pennsylvania. At about the same time, leasehold difficulties on the Ulster Plantations triggered an outpouring of Scotch-Irish who likewise emigrated, mainly to Pennsylvania. Both groups spread south and west down the Appalachian valleys.
    The dotted line shows the extent of settlement in 1790. Thereafter, Yankee New England pushed west into upstate New York, northern Pennsylvania and lakeshore Ohio, while the Pennsylvania and Maryland Germans and Scotch-Irish moved south down the Appalachian valleys and west towards Pittsburgh and Ohio.

Although the political cleavage of the first half of the Nineteenth Century was not so much between Yankee and non-Yankee as between ethnic and economic rival groups, it is accurate to say that Yankees were wont to be Federalists and (later) Whigs, while the Germans, Dutch and Scotch-Irish gave enthusiastic support to the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian Democrats. Democratic Presidents Jackson and Polk were Scotch-Irish; Martin Van Buren was a Dutchman from New York’s Hudson Valley; and James Buchanan, whose fate it was to preside over the disintegration of the Union, was a Scotch-Irish Pennsylvanian who came from German farming country.

For the most part, the Germans, Dutch and Scotch-Irish had little to do with—and did not hail—the formation of the Republican Party in 1854; nor did the tidewater Whigs of Maryland, Delaware and lower New Jersey who had frequently made cause with Yankee New England on economic issues not involving slavery. The non-Yankee Northeast gave very little support to the Republican Party’s first presidential bid in 1856. Chesapeake Bay voted for the conservative and nativist American (Know-Nothing) Party; the Scotch-Irish and German counties went handily Democratic; New York’s Dutch (and increasingly Irish) Hudson River counties backed the Democratic presidential nominee; and the Delaware Bay area likewise opposed the new Republican movement. Of all these groups, the Scotch-Irish were the most Republican. Many Scotch-Irish were active in the anti-slavery underground railroads of southern Pennsylvania and others—among them Simon Cameron, soon to be governor—were about to join the new party.

Map 10. Scotch-Irish Pennsylvania

The counties of principal settlement are listed below along with towns evidencing the heritage of Northern Ireland and the western coast of Scotland and Northern England.

  1. Bedford County
Coleraine
Londonderry

  2. Blair County
Blair
Tyrone

  3. Fulton County
Ayr
Belfast
Dublin

  4. Huntington County
Barree
Dublin

  5. Franklin
Antrim
Hamilton
Letterkenny
Lurgan

  6. Adams County
Abbotstown
Cumberland
Hamilton
Straban
Highland

  7. Cumberland County
Carlisle

  8. Perry County
Duncannon
Toboyne
Tyrone

  9. Juniata County
East
Waterford
Fermanagh

10. Mifflin County
Armagh Derry

Lincoln’s election—a minority victory—witnessed little change in the patterns of 1856. Maryland and Delaware gave the GOP candidate minimal support and southern New Jersey went heavily against him. Nor did Lincoln carry New York’s Hudson Valley. The only non-Yankee state in the Northeast to back Lincoln was Pennsylvania, where the Republican candidate fashioned his majority out of Yankee and some Scotch-Irish support over the ballot opposition of the state’s large German minority.

Quite naturally, these partisan attitudes closely paralleled local feelings regarding the Civil War, the worth of which was questioned by much of the non-Yankee Northeast. As slave states, Maryland and Delaware even toyed with the idea of secession. Maryland voted to stay in the Union only after the Assembly moved from tidewater Annapolis, a strong pro-slavery center, to Frederick, where recalcitrant legislators could be overawed by federal troops. Martial law had to be imposed on Baltimore, and the Potomac tidewater counties—Prince Georges, Charles and St. Marys—were considered “occupied enemy territory” from the beginning of the war.39 In Delaware, Major General Henry Du Pont, commanding officer of the state militia, headed off rising secession sentiments by wiring north for federal troops.

Disaffection in Pennsylvania and New Jersey was less widespread, and neither state threatened secession. However, Confederate agents actively encouraged the unrest of Pennsylvania Germans by reminding them of their cultural treatment at the hands of English-speaking Pennsylvanians. (The Pennsylvania Germans’ frequent demands for German-language schools and the keeping of official records in both German and English had always been denied.) The agents promised them that they would be given preferred status if they brought Pennsylvania into the Confederacy. The Pennsylvania German press usually referred to the war as the “Brothers’ War,” labeling it useless and contrary to German interests. Even Philadelphia had considerable Southern sentiment; an avowedly Confederate newspaper was published under the name “Palmetto Flag,” and the city’s social clubs contained so many Southern sympathizers that Unionists formed new clubs. The leading zealots organized the Union League club, the prototype of similarly named organizations which became the postwar bastions of industrial Republicanism. All during the war, suspicions of Confederate-inspired uprisings gnawed at Pennsylvania authorities. Finally, in 1864, Major General Darius Couch and a body of more than one thousand troops marched into Columbia County to storm an alleged fortress (complete with Confederate cannon smuggled in from Canada!) high above Fishing Creek near the Susquehanna. First a number of local Democrats were rounded up and sent to jail at Fort Mifflin; then the federal troops advanced. But there was no fortress: the Fishing Creek Confederacy did not exist. All that could be said of Columbia County, and of Pike County farther east in the Poconos, was that local hills were a haven for draft dodgers.

New Jersey, the only Northeastern state above the Mason-Dixon line which refused to support Lincoln, mixed war-doubting Dutch—“Bergen County Dutch”—and Southern-leaning outlooks. Cape May resorts drew their clientele from Washington, Richmond and Baltimore as well as Philadelphia; and Princeton attracted a large number of Southern students. The northern reaches of New Jersey looked to New York City; not so the rest of the state. In his book, The Delaware, Harry Emerson Wildes describes the factors which influenced the Delaware Bay area:

Perhaps the key to the confusion lay in the geographic fact that Pennsylvania, Southern Jersey and Delaware lay on the borderline between North and South. Plantation farming in southeastern Pennsylvania bred a character not too unlike that of the leisured South; people of the Delaware had never been close friends with the “eastern states” nor with New York, but had close ties, socially and economically, with those who were now formal enemies. Delawareans and Jerseymen could not be moved by northern propaganda that the South was vicious, corrupt and treacherous. Yet folk in Jersey, Delaware and Pennsylvania were no friends of slavery, and they loved the Union. It was extremely difficult to make a final choice, and ofttimes families split badly in deciding, but the weight of popular opinion lay finally on the northern side.40

Division also prevailed in New York State; not just in New York City, where the Irish were anti-Yankee, anti-Negro and quite pro-Southern, but along the Dutch-settled Hudson Valley and in German-populated Schoharie. During the war, the Hudson Valley and Schoharie remained Democratic, opposing Lincoln and casting gubernatorial ballots for Horatio Seymour. (Elected governor in 1862, Seymour was called a Copperhead by Republicans for his dubious view of the Civil War.)41

Understandably, the Civil War was a crucible of postwar politics as well as wartime dissent. Later partisanship jogged along in the ruts of wartime opinion. In the years between 1868 and 1896, Delaware, Maryland and New Jersey each supported only one GOP presidential nominee, and although Pennsylvania was loyally Republican by dint of machines in the industrial cities, much of the Susquehanna Valley and Pennsylvania German Country voted Democratic.⁴² From Schenectady to Yonkers, New York’s Hudson Valley usually gave Democratic presidential nominees a majority, and, teaming up with New York City, often put New York State’s electoral votes into the Democratic column. One non-Yankee area which strongly supported the Civil War—the Pittsburgh-centered Black Country of western Pennsylvania—voted Republican under the guidance of local party machines backed by powerful iron, coal and steel interests.⁴³

Map 11. Rural Democratic Strength in the Non-Yankee Northeast, 1916

Northeastern rural Democratic traditions shrank back somewhat from William Jennings Bryan in 1896; his Wheat Belt and free silver radicalism offended the rich, rolling German farm counties and the bayside bailiwicks of the Delaware and Chesapeake. But Bryanism did not work any substantial re-alignment, and in 1916, although Wilson lost all of the Northeast states save New Hampshire and Maryland, he carried a substantial number of rural counties in the non-Yankee Northeast, as shown in Map 11. Meanwhile, not one rural Yankee county backed the scholarly president.

Eventually, the rise of the immigrant cities and the increasing coloration that they lent to the Democratic party of the Nineteen-Twenties began substantially to erode rural Democratic tradition. The first areas to crack were New Jersey’s Delaware Valley and the Schoharie and Hudson valleys of New York. As the Democratic parties of both states came under full-fledged control by urban Catholics—led by Al Smith in New York and Jersey City’s Frank Hague in the Garden State—the German Protestant rural areas began to shift to the Republicans. Schoharie County, New York, site of the original German Palatine settlement of 1713 and never before Republican in a presidential race, broke ranks in 1920 and remained Republican thereafter. Other New York counties, as well as Sussex and Warren counties in New Jersey, also historically Democratic, shifted to the GOP column in 1920. Of course, the movement was not confined to New York and New Jersey—rural Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware also trended Republican—but elsewhere the Democratic Party remained more attuned to rural and non-Catholic support. In New York and New Jersey, however, the rural re-alignment to the GOP was not to be undone.

Chart 37 illustrates the non-Yankee Republican trend of the Nineteen-Twenties. In 1928, when the nomination of Alfred E. Smith signaled the triumph within the Democratic Party of factions which were anathema to the countryside, the trot broke into a gallop and counties with well-nigh unbroken Democratic voting records went two- and three-to-one Republican. The trend was by no means wholly anti-Catholic; a broader spectrum of sociological objections—distaste for Tammany, Smith’s flagrant violations of Prohibition and his raucous accent—was at work. Still, as seen in Chart 37, religion was clearly the major force behind the massive trends of counties like York and Columbia, Pennsylvania.⁴⁴

Chart 37. Presidential Voting in the Non-Yankee Northeast, 1916–68

* Greene County also includes a substantial Irish population.

Despite the mortal blow national Republicanism suffered in the Depression, party strength did not retreat uniformly across the non-Yankee Northeast. In hotbeds of anti-Catholicism like York and Columbia counties, the 1932 GOP vote share slipped about 30 per cent below religion-inflated 1928 levels (although remaining above 1916 levels), but counties like Schoharie, New York, and Sussex, New Jersey, both reliably Democratic until 1920, remained Republican in 1932 notwithstanding Hoover’s hard times. A changing Democratic Party was leaving these counties behind.

As Chart 37 shows, most of the rural non-Yankee Northeast did not respond favorably to the urban, labor and ethnic minority group bias of the New Deal; Roosevelt’s 1936 vote levels dipped well below those of 1932 (except in Pennsylvania). The President’s slippage continued in 1940, although no ethnic factors gave the trend artificial size. Four years later, the Republicans gained again, and then again in 1948, although there were a few aberrations each year. Just as the urban, New Deal revolution solidified the Democratic hold on Northern cities, eradicating Civil War vestiges and machine holds, it shifted some rural Democratic areas into the Republican camp. (The principal holdout area, despite its slow trend to the GOP, was Maryland’s conservative Democratic and Southern-leaning Eastern Shore.)

There was, however, one major exception to the trend—a pro-New Deal movement by the western Pennsylvania Black Country. Not only the Catholics but the Appalachian whites of the steel towns, coal centers and railroad yards broke away from Republican machines to support the WPA and the multitude of other essential New Deal Democratic programs. Map 12 shows the Pennsylvania-Maryland-West Virginia-Ohio Appalachian industrial area drawn to the New Deal. In 1936, southwest Pennsylvania was far and away the most Democratic part of the state—Roosevelt swept the area by two-to-one majorities even though it had been strongly Republican during the Nineteen-Twenties. The Black Country is not really akin to the stereotyped rural non-Yankee Northeast of the Schoharie, Eastern Shore or Pennsylvania Dutch country; but neither is it a Catholic concentration set down among rural Yankees, and its Appalachian strain is an important element of non-Yankee Northeastern politics.

Map 12. The Appalachian Industrial Area

General Eisenhower was popular across the entire non-Yankee Northeast, albeit he did not win the core areas of the Pennsylvania Black Country in either 1952 or 1956. In the rural non-Yankee Northeast, he amassed support levels unprecedented except in the anti-Catholic outpouring of 1928. Only in the anti-Catholic reaches of rural Pennsylvania did Eisenhower fall well short of Hoover levels; and by no coincidence, it was only in these same areas that Richard Nixon, running in 1960 against Catholic John Kennedy, gained over Eisenhower.45 By the end of the Eisenhower years, there was not too much difference—on the presidential level—between the Republicanism of the rural Yankee and non-Yankee Northeast.

As the Nineteen-Sixties began, the rural Democratic bias of counties like Schoharie (New York), Sussex and Warren (New Jersey) and Pike (Pennsylvania) was a thing of the past, but Democratic tradition and local ballot dominance still persisted in Pennsylvania Dutch country and especially below the Mason-Dixon line in Maryland and Delaware. Whatever Richard Nixon’s presidential majorities on the Delmarva peninsula, the area remained satisfied with Democratic state leadership epitomized by the old-line and rural-based administrations of Governor Tawes (Maryland) and Governors Carvel and Terry (Delaware). In these two states, the Democratic Party had not yet repudiated its old semi-Southern traditions. However, such a change was soon to begin as a result of the Negro socioeconomic revolution and the U.S. Supreme Court’s “One Man, One Vote” decisions which transferred political power to the cities, destroying the rural support base of old-line Democratic machines.

In Maryland and Delaware, the civil rights revolution of the Nineteen-Sixties bore down heavily on local segregation patterns. Acting on behalf of African diplomats refused service on travels between New York and Washington, the federal government applied pressure to desegregate roadside facilities along the main highways. Resentments accumulated among white Marylanders until May, 1964, when Alabama Governor George C. Wallace almost won the state’s Democratic presidential primary. (Only unanimous Negro opposition denied him victory.) Map 13 shows how Wallace’s strength was negligible in western Appalachian Maryland, middling in the rolling foothills, heavy on all shores of Chesapeake Bay and fierce in the Southern-oriented Cambridge-Salisbury area of the Eastern Shore.

Much of the Chesapeake and Delaware Bay area experienced difficulty in the process of eradicating racial discrimination. Cambridge, Maryland, in the heart of the Eastern Shore, was troubled by racial friction from 1962 to 1964; finally, actual rioting broke out—one of the first of the mid-Sixties riots later to become so commonplace. However, notwithstanding these problems and the resentment evidenced by George Wallace’s primary success, the Democratic Party not only avoided further losses but carried the Chesapeake and Delaware Bay areas in the 1964 presidential election.

Against a nominee other than Barry Goldwater, this might not have been possible. However, the Arizona Senator was fatally caricatured as an extremist. Only one county in the non-Yankee Northeast—Dorchester County, scene of the Cambridge, Maryland, riots—gave Goldwater a better share of the vote than it had given to Nixon in 1960. Elsewhere, the Democrats gained—strongly in rural Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York (where behavior was coming to resemble that of Yankee areas), moderately in the western Pennsylvania Black Country and to a somewhat lesser extent in Delaware and Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Generally speaking, Goldwater pushed the GOP vote back to mid-depression levels, but here historic fidelities were not shattered as they were in the case of his Yankee losses. Whereas in 1936, the arch-Yankee counties of New England had produced Republican support twenty-five percentage points higher than that of the non-Yankee Northeast, the spread narrowed to virtually nothing in 1964. For the first time, a GOP presidential candidate fared much better on the Eastern Shore of Maryland than in Yankee Vermont. Throughout the Northeast, the civil rights revolution was overcoming Civil War political traditions.

Map 13. The Location of Support for George Wallace in Maryland, 1964–68

But if Barry Goldwater’s 1964 support in the non-Yankee Northeast was meaningful only in relative rather than absolute terms, the absolute trend was confirmed by the 1966 elections. Reacting against the social programs and philosophy of the Great Society, the non-Yankee Northeast elected a number of new Republican congressmen. In New England, New York, northern New Jersey and northern Pennsylvania, the GOP made a net gain of just two congressmen, recouping only a few of the dozen seats lost in the Goldwater landslide, but in southern Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland, the party recovered all three seats lost in 1964 and won two others.46 Representative Rogers C. B. Morton, later to be Richard Nixon’s 1968 pre-convention campaign manager, achieved an unprecedented 71 per cent re-election triumph in Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay district even as Maine elected its first all-Democratic House delegation since the creation of the Republican Party.

As Civil War voting tradition ebbed between 1966 and 1968, the division of the Northeast into Yankee and non-Yankee segments became increasingly appropriate as a portrait of change, not just between the parties but within them—and especially within the ascending GOP. During the Ninetieth Congress, many Yankee Republicans in Congress showed a trend towards support of Great Society measures like open housing, rent subsidies and the War Against Poverty; not so the new Republican congressmen from Delaware, southern New Jersey and southern Pennsylvania. And in a like vein, the non-Yankee Northeast gave considerable Republican convention support to Richard Nixon while Yankeedom—save for the middle-level party stalwarts of upper New England—on balance preferred Nelson Rockefeller.

In 1968, rural non-Yankees broke against the Democrats more sharply than any other Northeastern voting stream save the New York Irish. Maryland, Delaware, southern New Jersey and south-central Pennsylvania differed with Yankeedom over government policies towards the Negro socioeconomic revolution just as they had held different opinions on the Civil War a century earlier. In contrast to its gains in the Yankee Northeast between 1960 and 1968, the Democratic Party suffered a loss of five to twenty-five percentage points in the non-Yankee Northeast (excluding Pennsylvania’s Black Country) as conservatives lined up behind Richard Nixon and George Wallace. In 1968, Maryland and Delaware were the two worst Democratic states in the Northeast—even Vermont, New Hampshire and especially Maine gave Humphrey a higher share of the total vote—and New Jersey was not far behind. As a result of Wallace inroads and straight GOP gains, Nixon’s share of the two-party (Republican-Democratic) vote rose considerably over 1960 levels in formerly Democratic strongholds like Pennsylvania Dutch York County and the Eastern Shore of Maryland. (See Chart 37.) As for Wallace’s support, Map 14 shows how it was concentrated near and below the Mason-Dixon line; only in Maryland, Delaware, southern New Jersey and a handful of south-central Pennsylvania counties did the American Independent candidate pull better than 12 per cent of the total vote.

By and large, Wallace support in the Northeast correlated with rural or Southern-oriented Democratic tradition rather than with blue-collar unionism. The highest Wallace votes in the non-Yankee Northeast thus came from conservative Democrats, the great majority of whom had been trending Republican and would have voted for Richard Nixon in a two-party contest, as had been indicated by the considerable GOP gains in the prior off-year elections. In all likelihood, the Wallace candidacy stimulated the erosion of Democratic voting habits among Maryland, Delaware and southern New Jersey conservatives, and this erosion, together with accelerating Democratic identification with Yankees and Negroes, should speed Republican gains.

But if traditionally Democratic rural and non-industrial areas of the Northeast moved away from the Democrats, the Black Country did not. Western Pennsylvania, as well as kindred Appalachian mining, steel and railroad centers in West Virginia, extreme western Maryland and eastern Ohio gave Hubert Humphrey a higher share of the major-party vote than John F. Kennedy had won in 1960. Lack of a religious issue played a part; late in the campaign, the Democrats trumpeted alleged Republican opposition to Social Security, Medicare, full employment, union-backed labor legislation and Appalachian aid programs, all vital concerns in the Black Country, and succeeded in scaring many voters; and what is more, George Wallace cut into the usual Republican vote while failing to divert anything like the predicted number of blue-collar Democrats. Solid majorities in the Black Country helped Humphrey to carry Pennsylvania.

Map 14. The Geography of 1968 Wallace Strength in the Northeast

Chart 38. The Republican Leanings of Wallace Strength in Western Pennsylvania*

Chart 38 shows Wallace’s strength in the three third-class cities—McKeesport, Clairton and Duquesne, all strongly blue-collar—in Pennsylvania’s Allegheny County (Pittsburgh). Although the Alabaman won his highest ratios in this sort of normally Democratic district, with most of his support coming from nominal Democrats, analysis in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette indicating that Nixon’s 26 per cent support compared with usual 40 per cent GOP presidential levels suggests that the diverted electorate represented lost Nixon votes.

Except for the Black Country, the non-Yankee Northeast has clearly moved out of the Democratic orbit. In most of rural Delaware and Maryland, Hubert Humphrey’s 1968 share of the total presidential vote was the lowest recorded for a Democrat since the Civil War, and in Pennsylvania Dutch country (Adams, York, Lebanon and Lancaster counties) and the Scotch-Irish citadels (Fulton, Perry, Franklin and Cumberland counties), only the religious landslide of 1928 produced a smaller Democratic slice of the total vote for president. Along Maryland’s Eastern Shore, a majority of the (few) votes cast for Humphrey came from local Negroes. Of course, George Wallace was responsible for much of the Democratic decline, but although he swung some conservative Democrats away from their party for the first time, he principally injured Richard Nixon by diverting non-Yankee traditional Democrats who had been trending Republican. If non-Yankee Northeastern movement towards a Southern- and Western-dominated GOP continues, as appears likely, then Wallace’s third-party effort may be remembered as a way station—even as far north as central Pennsylvania—for Democratic traditionalists following party realignment into the Republican Party. Under such a regime, the non-Yankee states of Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey and Pennsylvania would become the most likely Republican presidential campaign election targets in the Northeast.

6. The Catholics

The emerging Democratic and liberal coalition of Negroes and silk-stocking voters is engendering an important conservative (and increasingly Republican) counter trend among working-class and lower-middle-class Catholics. This is yesteryear’s Al Smith electorate, anti-establishmentarian today (albeit less obviously) as it was upon disembarkation a century ago.

The first and foremost group of Catholic immigrants to arrive in the United States was the Irish; next in chronology and importance were the Germans. Both streams of migration increased sharply in the late Eighteen-Forties after Ireland’s appalling potato famine and the suppression of the 1848 revolutions in Europe. Before long, Catholics were numerous enough throughout much of the Protestant Northeast to excite harsh nativist feelings which gave excuse for violence, birth to the Know-Nothing Party and coloration to the generally anti-Catholic Whigs. Chart 39 structures the mid-century impact of Irish and German immigration; these two groups dominated the arrival lists until the Eighteen-Eighties.

Chart 39. Immigration to the United States, 1820–1910

NR—Not Reported
* Includes a substantial number of Jews
Note—During the years of preponderantly Irish and German immigration, many of the remaining immigrants were British and Scandinavian. Northern European immigration was strongly dominant until 1890.

Although quite a few Catholics went to Pennsylvania, lower New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland—Philadelphia had anti-Irish riots and Baltimore absorbed enough Germans to support many a brewery—most came ashore at New York City or points north. Once in America, the Irish took to politics like ducks to water, utilizing their unique familiarity (among immigrant groups) with Anglo-Saxon language, customs and political institutions. Almost to a man, they became Democrats, taking up cudgels first against the pro-British Federalists and later against the bourgeois and frequently anti-Catholic Whigs. Local politics offered the Irish a chance to continue the rivalries of the old country—on more advantageous terms. Most German Catholics found themselves on the same side as the Irish. By the Civil War, the Irish were a major political influence in New York City, trans-Hudson New Jersey, Albany and Boston.47

When the Civil War came, the Irish were not too enthusiastic. For one thing, the Washington representatives of the devoutly Democratic New York Irish had worked in close partisan harness with Southern congressmen. And unlike other Northern Democrats of more establishmentarian caste, the Irish did not seek to vanquish the South in order to end slavery and extend the sphere of existing Northern culture and influence westward. On the contrary, the typical Irishman feared Negroes as cheap labor competitors, Yankees as bigoted, self-serving moralists and industrialists as enemies of the working class. A few of New York City’s leading Democrats were openly pro-Southern and anti-Lincoln; there was even talk of secession.⁴⁸

The most striking evidence of Irish unrest occurred in New York City in 1863. Infuriated by military conscription which the rich could avoid by paying $300 for a substitute, thousands of New York Irish rioted in the streets, attacking both Negroes and such Establishmentarian institutions as Brooks Brothers clothing store and the offices of the Herald Tribune. Similar sociological instinct drew the mob toward the Wall Street financial district, but the authorities were able to turn them back. In the end, the death toll was considerable. Local Democratic politicians were not too firm with the rioters, but the Protestant Republican Establishment seethed with indignation. There was no redress of socioeconomic grievance; the Establishment labeled the rioters as carrion and cartoonist Thomas Nast—he is credited with originating the Republican elephant—drew the Irish as gorillas.

Elsewhere in the Northeast there was less trouble, although troops were needed (or requested) to put down Irish-stirred insurrections in Albany, Newark and the Pennsylvania anthracite country. New York’s Irish, it should be added, carried their doubts about the Civil War just so far. Regiment upon regiment of them fought in Union blue—one regiment under Tammany Sachem Colonel William Kennedy. But very few of the Irish embraced the overall war with the ideological fervor of the Yankee Republicans, and New York City voted strongly against Lincoln in 1864 as it had in 1860.

The caste and class overtones of the Civil War further ingrained the Democratic bias of the largely lower-class Irish and Germans. And when the war was over and Reconstruction at an end, New York City’s Irish Democratic politicians fell back into their old pattern of cooperation with the South in Washington and Tammany spoilsmanship at home. By the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century, Tammany was practically an Irish institution under sachems like “Mister” Murphy and “Honest John” Kelly; most key places in the organization were held by Irishmen. The same was true of the Democratic Party in Boston. Having been denied office by the Yankees in bygone days, the Irish reciprocated when their municipal day arrived in the Eighteen-Eighties.

At the turn of the century, the Irish controlled New York City (Irish-run Brooklyn had become a part of the city in 1898), Boston, Albany, Jersey City and some lesser cities, and they dominated the Democratic state parties of New York and New England. By and large, Irish immigration sought out the Northern climes which had also beckoned Yankeedom. And this contrast between the vocal working-class Catholic minority and the Calvinistic Anglo-Saxon majority, inevitable combatants, gave Northeastern politics its basic cleavage. In the more southerly states of Delaware and Maryland, together with much of Pennsylvania and lower New Jersey, Irish numbers were smaller, and the 1896–1932 era of Republican hegemony found many of them mute adherents of GOP machines (Philadelphia, Scranton, Pittsburgh, Camden and Wilmington) scattered through a closely divided countryside. If Irish politics derived strength from numbers, cohesion came from proximity to the Yankee enemy.

But not all of the cities of New York and New England were run by Irish Democrats, not even many that were predominantly Catholic. In the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century, the industrial prosperity of Yankeeland drew many non-Irish Catholics to the mills and factories; many of these last-wave immigrants came from Southern and Eastern Europe, others from the rural poverty of neighboring Quebec.49 Whereas the German Catholics had been—and remained—mostly allies of the Irish (in New York City), the Italians, Poles and French Canadians who began to pour into Yankeeland in the late Nineteenth Century disliked the exclusionary brogue of the Democratic Party. Along with the Portuguese of coastal Massachusetts, all of these blocs were thus induced to give considerable support to the Yankee Republicans. In a few cities—Rochester is an example—even the Irish adhered to the local Republican machine, and throughout New England, there were small towns and cities where Yankee industrialists and mill-owners controlled their employees’ ballots. The Republican predilections of all of these working-class Catholics were reinforced by the Democratic campaign of 1896; William Jennings Bryan’s aggressive agrarianism and evangelical Protestantism did not please them, and they were likewise scared by employer threats that Bryan’s election would force the closing of the mills.⁵⁰ The Grand Old Party had a clever and implicitly threatening slogan—McKinley’s “full dinner pail”—and profited considerably from it.

Well before the turn of the century, Yankees no longer cast a majority of the vote in Massachusetts and Rhode Island—the result of heavy Catholic immigration and the Yankee Exodus—but strategic appeals to the non-Irish ethnic groups kept both states unfailingly in the GOP presidential column.51 In New York, the numerous Italian and Jewish arrivals of the Eighteen-Nineties and thereafter gave as much support to the Republicans as to the Democrats. To unite the ethnic groups and dethrone the Yankees, the Irish needed a cause greater than their own fortunes—and they rarely had one.

Until the Nineteen-Twenties, neither of the two major parties had a decisive rural or urban bias on a national basis. True, the Irish cities gave the Democrats a large urban toehold, but other major cities—Philadelphia in particular—were Republican; and although the rural Yankee Northeast was solidly Republican, non-Yankee sections of the rural Northeast (and, of course, the South) were traditionally Democratic. Still, although either party could, in theory at least, have embraced a national urban orientation, the Democrats enjoyed a clear institutional and sociological head start. Despite the basic conservatism of the Northeastern Irish Democratic hierarchies, the Irish were underdogs; they were Catholic; and they understood the essential problems of the urban working class much better than did the Yankee and Protestant GOP oligarchy. By its very establishmentarian nature, the Republican Party could not become the vehicle of anti-establishmentarian Catholic political self-assertion, while the Irish Democratic machines, albeit rarely in the vanguard of progressivism, were often obliged by the socioeconomic status of their flocks to further a necessary amount of social and economic reform.

Map 15. Major and Minor Irish Concentrations.

Note: Older Irish Immigration no longer identifiable from Census data.

Map 16. Major and Minor Italian Concentrations

Map 17. Major and Minor Slavic, Czech and Polish Concentrations

Map 18. Major and Minor French Canadian Concentrations

The forging of an urban progressive majority was not easy. Many of the Irish politicians were actors, scoundrels and rogues who enjoyed their clubhouses, saloons, volunteer fire companies, police parades and municipal contract graft; only a few who were more perspicacious gave careful leadership to the fight for badly needed legislation.52 Under the prodding of Alfred E. Smith, New York’s Tammany Hall, although unpopular with intellectuals and the liberally inclined (Republican or Socialist) majority of Jews, did sponsor some important reform measures.

World War I and its after effects also put a crimp in the emerging ethnic and reform coalition. To many Catholics, not least the Irish and German pillars of the Democratic Party, Woodrow Wilson’s foreign policies were extremely unpopular. Germans understandably resented Democratic-sponsored United States participation in the war with the Vaterland—all the more so after the Peace of Versailles dismembered Germany and showed the cynicism of Allied aims. Many Irish voters were infuriated by United States intervention of 1917 in support of a Great Britain which had just put down Ireland’s Easter Rebellion (1915), and Anglophile Woodrow Wilson proceeded further to antagonize Erin’s sons by countenancing British refusal to discuss Irish independence at the peace conference. Even Italo-Americans took umbrage at the war—and at the failure of Italy to receive the Adriatic port of Fiume. One can exaggerate the importance of the purely territorial aspects of the peace conference as a factor in ethnic ballot unrest; it may be truer to say that ill-fated United States participation in European war and diplomacy caused a general stress and identity crisis among hyphenated Americans and evoked a “return to normalcy” support of Republican presidential nominee Warren Harding.

At any rate, the ethnic anti-Democratic vote of 1920 was quite emphatic. Enough Irish voters deserted the party ticket to put Boston in the Republican column; Jersey City and Albany likewise broke ranks; and only one Irish assembly district in New York City (Manhattan’s “Gas House”) supported Democratic presidential candidate Cox. The Italian, German and Jewish trend was also important. Chart 40 shows the Irish, Italian and German voting patterns of the Nineteen-Twenties in New York City.

This Republican strength did not last. For example, thirteen New York Republican congressmen, by-products of the 1920 landslide, lost their seats in 1922. But whatever the recovery of local Democrats, the national Democratic Party did not take up the positions needed to appeal to the Catholic vote. New York Governor Al Smith, re-elected in 1922 after defeat in 1920, sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 1924, only to fall slightly short of victory. Torn between the rising Catholic power of the cities and the old-line Protestant South and West (ebbing Bryanism), the Democratic party compromised, and in the process refused by a majority of one vote at the 1924 convention to condemn the Ku Klux Klan. As a compromise Democratic presidential candidate, Wall Street corporation lawyer John W. Davis ignited no passions on the sidewalks of New York or anywhere else in the Catholic Northeast, so that even laconic, coldfish, typical Yankee Calvin Coolidge was able to garner a plurality of the vote in many urban Catholic districts.53

Chart 40. Irish, Italian and German Presidential Voting in Manhattan, 1920–32

* The figures represent the vote cast by sanitation districts better than 70 per cent populated by the ethnic group in question; they are taken from Burner, The Politics of Provincialism (New York, 1967), pp. 234–236.

As Chart 39 shows, so many Southern and Eastern European immigrants came to the United States in the period between 1890 and World War I that the national Northern European Protestant majority finally moved to cut off immigration in the early Nineteen-Twenties. However, by that time the demographic die had been cast, and the Italians, Jews and Slavs of the Northeast began to come of political age, although their loyalties awaited full commitment.

In 1928, the urban Catholic wing won control of the Democratic Party by achieving the presidential nomination of Governor Smith. But the Governor did more than stamp the Democratic Party with the image sought by urban, immigrant America; he flaunted his origins and beliefs with a parochialism that smacked of a lack of concern for rural Protestant America. He consumed his highballs in practically open mockery of the Prohibition laws; he was unnecessarily willing to reaffirm his ties to the nationally suspect Tammany Hall; he paid little attention to speech patterns which grated on rural ears; and he participated in certain Catholic religious ceremonies—ones he was not obliged to—in such fashion as to heighten church-state separation fears.⁵⁴ Smith’s image offended the countryside, prompting an unprecedented GOP rural landslide, even as it occasioned a vast gain for the Democratic Party in the Northern Catholic cities. In the long run, Democrats lined up on the side of the urban revolution—a decisive breakthrough which outlived the year’s transient (largely religious-based) losses.

Quite naturally, Smith scored his sharpest gains over John W. Davis in New York and in New England, more particularly in the urban Catholic centers. In Boston, Fall River, New Bedford, Springfield and New York City, the Democratic presidential vote share climbed more than 25 per cent over 1924. Chart 10 lists the Democratic improvement by states and Chart 40 shows the gains Smith made among the Irish, Italian and German blocs in New York City.

As it happened, Smith won such heavy Catholic support in 1928 that Franklin D. Roosevelt was not always able to match it in 1932, despite the advent of the Depression. Heavily French Catholic Clinton County, New York, gave Hoover 1 per cent greater support in 1932; Hoover’s vote climbed 6 per cent in Elk County, Pennsylvania (a mining section with the state’s highest ratio of Catholics); and F.D.R.’s 1932 support in Boston fell six thousand votes short of that won by Al Smith. Granted that Smith’s 1928 candidacy had drawn Catholic urban blocs towards the Democratic Party, the 1932 vote suggests that much Catholic support for Smith was purely religious, and that without the Depression, a non-Catholic like Roosevelt might have slipped considerably below the levels reached by the Happy Warrior.

In retrospect, the urban Catholic commitment to the Democrats in 1928 was tentative; the Depression transferred the religion-achieved levels of 1928 to a non-Catholic in 1932; and in most cases, the New Deal policies of 1933–36 confirmed or ingrained these sociopolitical loyalties. A few Republican machines bucked the tide in 1928 and 1932, but by 1936 urban Catholic support for the Democratic Party was solid.

To the Irish, the New Deal brought a large treasure trove of power and patronage. In the Northeast, a very large proportion of Democratic county chairmen and party officials were Irish; they had been faithful throughout the lean years and now they gathered in spoils accordingly. But in another sense, the enlargement of the Democratic Party into a national majority and a force for social change promised to undo urban Irish hegemony. Under the auspices of the New Deal, no small part of which was anathema to the socially conservative Irish Democratic hierarchy, Poles, Italians, Jews and intellectuals began to come increasingly to the fore in the Democratic Party, originating and implementing new programs and policies for which Roosevelt and the Depression had fashioned a majority. Comfortable in their old role as the leaders of an institutionalized, parochially powerful and only occasionally progressive opposition to the conservative Yankee Establishment, the entrenched Irish Democratic machines were not suited to innovative social programming and leadership.55 As the New Deal took hold and became an ongoing cause, non-Irish ethnic groups looked for ways of supporting Roosevelt without supporting the local Irish Democratic Party. Nowhere was this feeling stronger than among New York City’s Jewish-run labor unions—and this liberal dissidence quickly took shape in the form of the (New York) American Labor Party.

Except among the Irish and the kindred Germans, Roosevelt increased his Catholic support between 1932 and 1936. Even as New Deal economic and labor reforms solidified upper-class toryism, they fully convinced the Catholic working-class and white-collar voters of the Northeast that the Democratic Party had their best interests at heart. Throughout the Northeast, urban and industrial counties which had been closely fought in 1932 (often with little change over 1928) went handily for Roosevelt in 1936.56

Roosevelt’s minor 1936 German and Irish losses were not attributable to Republican gains but to the isolationist inroads of Congressman William Lemke, the presidential candidate of the right-wing Union Party. World War II was slipping into focus by November, 1936: Hitler had already moved into the Rhineland. Civil War was raging in Spain, pitting Franco and the army—with moral support from the Catholic Church and military aid from the Nazis and Fascists—against the Spanish leftists, whose support came from the Communist-led International Brigade and Lincoln Brigade—and from the Soviet Union. Isolationists generally felt that Soviet Russia was as much or more of a threat to America than was Nazi Germany, and they were also disposed to support Franco’s side in Spain. American Catholics were particularly likely to give approval to Franco, praising the Church-backed insurgent cause and overlooking its alliance with Nazis and Fascists. They saw Spain as a bulwark against atheistic communism. Liberals and leftists invariably favored the Soviet-backed Spanish Loyalists. Political analyst Samuel Lubell has written how voter attitudes towards the Spanish Civil War delineated mainstreams in American and especially Democratic politics, the conservative side thereafter frequently breaking away in presidential elections as a result of disagreement with liberal internationalist Democratic foreign policies.57

Although the 1936 Lemke candidacy was not very important in the Northeast (its focal point was the Midwest), it achieved some importance in Irish and German Catholic areas. Union Party ballots were most numerous in Massachusetts, reaching 15 per cent to 25 per cent of the total in Irish wards of Boston, Lowell, Lawrence and Cambridge; elsewhere in New England, Lemke did fairly well in Irish precincts of Providence, Rhode Island, and Manchester, New Hampshire. Doubtless the German and Irish assembly districts of New York City would have given some comfort to the North Dakota isolationist, but the Union Party was not on the New York ballot.

Besides the populist isolationism Lemke brought to the surface in working-class Irish districts, another form of Irish discontent was taking shape in areas of cohesive and longtime group power—middle-class and upper-class distaste for the New Deal, its philosophy of government and its sociological impact on Democratic Party leadership. Such discontent was keenest in New York City, where Irish power had flowered first and most fully.⁵⁸ After opposing Roosevelt at the 1932 Democratic convention, Tammany failed to mend the breach. In turn, Roosevelt gave overt support to New York’s anti-Tammany “Fusion” Mayor Fiorello La-Guardia, elected to office in 1933 and kept there in later years by a coalition of Italian, Jewish, Negro and silk-stocking voters. Few Irish Democrats had joined Al Smith in bolting to support the Republican presidential nominee in 1936. But as 1940 approached, anti-Roosevelt sentiment grew because of (a) the third-term issue; (b) Roosevelt’s pro-British foreign policy impetus; (c) the Roosevelt-approved formation in New York of the American Labor Party—designed to give liberals (mostly Jewish) a chance to back the New Deal without supporting the Tammany party; and (d) the President’s 1938 attempt to purge Irish conservatives from the party.

Despite the multiple Irish grievances, the principal factor in the 1940 election—Irish, Jewish, Yankee, French and Italian trends all pivoted on this one issue—was Hitler’s war and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s plans with regard to it. Pre-war Irish opinion was so strongly opposed to United States intervention in another pro-British war that Roosevelt felt obliged to reassure a Boston audience that their sons would not be sent to fight overseas—a campaign pledge he probably did not expect to honor. As for the Italians, the President had alienated many of them by labeling Mussolini’s last-minute 1940 attack on Hitler-prostrated France a “stab in the back.” Perhaps it was, but Italo-Americans were sensitive to such analogies. Chart 12, which shows the ethnic pattern of 1940 trends, also conveys their particular intensity in Catholic areas of greater New York.

Historically, the trend-setting Catholic precincts have been those of New York City, the first and longtime citadel of Irish politics. In this vortex of Catholic conflict with the Protestant Establishment and other non-Catholic ethnic groups, Irish voting patterns have generally forecast the cyclical direction of Catholic politics. This was true in the Jacksonian prelude of the Eighteen-Twenties and in the Al Smith struggle of the Nineteen-Twenties—even if Gaelic wishes did not control the ensuing eras. The remote milltowns, where there is a directional lag in social conflict, also lag politically. Even in 1940, only eight years after the commencement of the New Deal cycle, the fact that the sharpest Republican trend in the East came in the Catholic Democratic bastions of New York City hinted at the next direction of Catholic politics.

Obviously, much of the Irish, German and Italian trend of 1940 stemmed from the ethnic stress of the war in Europe and related Rooseveltian foreign policy. But the 1940 vote was not the transient Republicanism of 1920—a short-lived adherence totally dissipated by 1928. While some of the wartime anti-Roosevelt voters would return to the Democratic Party in peacetime, many others were to remain alienated by the liberal internationalism which had plunged one generation of Americans into two wars and imposed a considerable strain on the psyches (although not the loyalty) of several major ethnic groups. In this way, an important new source of Republican votes took general shape as part of the membership of the groups experiencing their second wartime trauma began to forge pervasive isolationist and anti-Establishment attitudes akin to those enunciated by the increasingly dominant Midwestern wing of the Republican Party. Samuel Lubell has described this phenomenon as the “politics of revenge”—a desire to justify retrospectively in patriotic terms foreign policy beliefs originally rooted in ethnic stress.59 This behavioral stream persisted long after peace returned to Europe.

Despite the Catholic isolationist Republican surge of 1939–45, Franklin D. Roosevelt retained a solid majority of the Northeastern Catholic vote, perhaps 60 per cent in New York and 70 per cent in New England. This degree of Catholic support, however, would not have sufficed to overcome Protestant GOP strength in New York in 1940 or 1944; Roosevelt’s Empire State majorities depended on lopsided Jewish support.

The end of the war and the death of President Roosevelt removed the immediate sources of the disaffection of many Catholics from the Democratic Party. And perhaps more to the point, the new Democratic President, Harry S. Truman, did not grate on isolationist or anti-establishmentarian nerves. Truman indicted Russia as America’s principal enemy. Furthermore, he had not preferred Russia to Germany during the pre-Pearl Harbor era, and he pursued a generally anti-Soviet foreign policy.60 A onetime county judge, National Guard captain and unsuccessful haberdasher, he hobnobbed with Irish politicians, flailed Wall Street, tolerated a considerable amount of cronyism and graft, and was, in sum, quite acceptable to many of the Democrats who had opposed the patrician, Anglophile and condescending Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Running in 1948 for election to the White House in his own right, Truman did very well among Northeastern Catholics. In Massachusetts, where a birth control referendum brought out a whopping Catholic vote, Truman approached Roosevelt’s 1936 highs, winning more votes in arch-Catholic Boston than Roosevelt ever did. But Boston’s satisfaction with the Democratic Party was not matched by the Catholic areas of New York City, where minority group influence (there was practically none in Boston), gave the party a socially liberal cast and whetted foreign policy conflicts and memories. Even though Truman gained stature among Catholics as a result of his unpopularity with the leftist- and Jewish-dominated American Labor Party, he failed to carry Italo-Irish Staten Island and (then) Irish-German Queens, the two most Catholic counties of New York City. Chart 41 shows how most of the Queens and Staten Island voters who trended Republican in 1940 remained with the GOP in 1948. Upstate New York Catholics were less responsive to wartime or social conflict trends; the Jewish-Catholic conflict in New York City and environs had a unique effect in sharpening the policy animosities which were driving politically conservative Catholics into the Republican Party.

Before long, Truman lost the vigorous anti-Communist image he had enjoyed in 1948. Names like Harry Dexter White and Alger Hiss began to figure prominently in public conversation; evidence of Communist subversion of the government and foreign policy of the United States began to mount. Republican orators launched an attack on World War II policies, especially F.D.R.’s Yalta agreement with Stalin, as Communist-in-fluenced, and this general approach evoked an enthusiastic response among Irish, Germans and Italians (many of them convinced since 1936, for one reason or another, that the Soviet Union, not Germany or Italy, was America’s principal enemy, and that United States policies were unduly “soft” on communism). Finally, in June, 1950, North Korean troops crossed the 38th parallel and the cold war turned hot.

Although the isolationist contingent of Irish, Italians and Germans supported the anti-Communist struggle in Korea, many of them also saw the struggle as evidence of exactly the Communist threat they had postulated a decade earlier; this resurrected their resentment of Rooseveltian foreign policies and engendered a feeling that the Korean “police action” could have been avoided. Frustration grew, and with it Democratic vulnerability. Into this sociopolitical gap rode a young United States Senator from Wisconsin, a man with roots among rural German Catholics and the physiognomy of the Black Irish—Joseph McCarthy.

Chart 41. New York Catholic Presidential Voting Trends, 1936–48

The Junior Senator from Wisconsin suggested that America’s difficulties lay in conspiracy, subversion and betrayal by the Establishment. From his first statement in Wheeling, West Virginia, in May, 1950—he claimed to have in his hand a list of a specific number of Communists in the U.S. State Department—he probed ever deeper towards the jugular vein of anti-Establishment politics. Not only did he blame World War II policy mistakes on Communist subversion, but he blamed the Protestant Establishment for both treason and old school tie tolerance of it. He was by no means entirely wrong on either point, and the prospering new middle classes enjoyed hearing privilege and education correlated with treason or lack of patriotism.

As the Korean War lost popularity and bogged down, and the Administration seemingly refused to take the same firm line against the Soviet Union that had been taken against Hitler and Mussolini—Truman’s dismissal of MacArthur fueled this fire—McCarthy’s plausibility and political importance grew. A powerful figure in the 1950 congressional elections, he threatened to be even more pivotal in the 1952 presidential race. In the Irish and German Catholic communities whose Democratic trend had given Truman essential support in 1948, Senator McCarthy was little less than a hero. The typical Irish plumbing contractor and his work crew shared hearty amusement over McCarthy’s yanking of the English moustache of Secretary of State Dean Acheson (Groton, Harvard et al.); the nation’s largely Irish Catholic hierarchy also responded favorably to McCarthy.

The twin issues of Korea and Communist subversion keynoted the 1952 Republican presidential campaign in the Northeast, as the GOP successfully sought to capitalize on the ethnic thrust of McCarthyism.61 Although General Dwight Eisenhower was the candidate of the Northeastern Republican Establishment, he did not repudiate McCarthy and indeed emphasized some of the same themes McCarthy stressed that year. Throughout the Northeast, Eisenhower’s sharpest gains came in Catholic precincts, and Catholic votes provided the margin of victory in all of the Northeastern states which had backed Truman in 1948. Because of his strong showing among Catholics, Eisenhower swept the entire Northeast.

Not that foreign policy was the only impetus of the 1952 Catholic GOP trend; World War II prosperity had brought many Irish, Italians and Germans up the ladder to middle-class status. Like other middle-class voters, they were tired of Truman inflation, price controls and scandals; they were looking for a chance to enjoy their recently achieved affluence. From Boston to Washington, D.C., mile after mile of subdivisions were luring the new ethnic middle class into suburbia (where circumstances lent added focus to these bourgeois political considerations). It would have been difficult for some of these voters to support a Republican like Ohio’s Senator Taft, symbol of the remote and austere Protestant Establishment, but Dwight Eisenhower was a war hero and a fatherly figure in the Saturday Evening Post vein—many New Deal voters gave him their first GOP presidential ballots.

Eisenhower’s first term in office was generally applauded by Northeastern Catholics. The Korean War was brought to a halt six months after the retired general’s inauguration, and prosperity increased, crippling the Democratic bogeyman that a Republican administration would bring on a depression. Perhaps the only fly in the ointment was resentment over the treatment—censure and coventry—the Eisenhower Administration accorded Senator McCarthy, but the Wisconsin Senator’s irresponsibility in his last years undermined his public support.

As a result of this record, Eisenhower won even stronger Catholic backing in 1956 than in 1952. Chart 42 shows his gains in a cross section of predominantly Catholic Northeastern counties while Chart 43 structures the Republican support level in the most heavily Catholic New York City assembly districts. It is no exaggeration to say that Catholics brought about the overwhelming share of the 1948–56 increment in Northeastern GOP presidential strength. In the eleven Northeastern states, Eisenhower’s 1952 showing exceeded Dewey’s by 9 per cent, and in 1956, the President added another 5 per cent, reaching near landslide levels. And within these states, Yankee areas gave Eisenhower only a few percentage points more than they had given Dewey, but the difference in bellwether Catholic precincts was 15 per cent to 25 per cent.

While Eisenhower gained heavily throughout the Catholic Northeast, his actual 1956 Catholic vote shares were by no means constant throughout the region. In upper New England, where the Republican-Democratic conflict was Protestant-Catholic, mill owner-mill worker, Eisenhower may have won 30 per cent to 40 per cent of the Catholic vote. Whether along the dun-colored industrial canyon of the Merrimack or in remote factory towns, the typical local Catholic worker (unlike his restive colleagues in New York City) thought of the Democratic Party as his party and a vehicle of his ethnic group and class interests—and he was loathe to vote for the Republicans.62 Catholic support for Eisenhower climbed highest in the greater New York City where the Democratic Party was coming under silk-stocking and minority group influence. Chart 43 illustrates the huge Republican vote in the strongly middle-class Catholic assembly districts in Bay Ridge (Brooklyn), Staten Island, the North Bronx and Queens. Similar outpourings occurred in nearby New Jersey and Connecticut. These are the blue-collar, clerical and middle-managerial neighborhoods at the end of the subway lines; they are a kind of sociopolitical “outback,” to borrow an apt Australian term. In 1956, the middle-class Catholics of these semi-suburban pales appear to have endorsed Eisenhower by three-to-one majorities, and for the first time their leading assembly districts racked up higher GOP presidential percentages than the Manhattan silk-stocking bastions. Nor was this vote just Eisenhower’s; Republican congressional percentages also soared in the middle-class Catholic reaches of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.

Chart 42. Northeastern Urban Catholic Presidential Voting Behavior, 1948–60

    * Exact religious data is impossible to come by, but most of these counties are more than 50 per cent Catholic.

  ** Given the high Republicanism of the Protestant votein New England and the area around Scranton, Pennsylvania, Eisenhower’s 46 per cent to 58 per cent vote figures in Androscoggin, Bristol, Suffolk, Providence and Lackawanna counties probably indicate 35 per cent to 50 per cent Catholic support. Nixon probably won 20 per cent to 25 per cent of the Catholic vote in these counties.

Chart 43. Catholic Political Volatility in New York City, 1954–60

    * Assembly Districts are listed in the order of their support of President Eisenhower in 1956; all of the top Republican districts were heavily Catholic. These were Eisenhower’s top thirteen Assembly Districts.

  ** Queens Germans, being more strongly Republican than the Irish or Italians, showed somewhat less volatility. The sociological makeup of the 9th Queens was changing by 1960—it was becoming more Jewish.

Note: The two East Side Manhattan silk-stocking Assembly Districts (the 8th and 9th) were not among Eisenhower’s best, giving him 61 per cent and 63 per cent support. In these districts, where the Catholic vote is much less important, Eisenhower made small (6 per cent to 12 per cent) gains over the 1954 gubernatorial candidate, and Nixon’s losses were relatively diminished in 1960.

A new Catholic political direction was writ large in the 1956 elections, and the Democratic Party—dependent on Catholic adherence—took apprehensive note. Even before Eisenhower’s massive 1956 re-election, Democratic strategists concerned about the party’s Catholic appeal had drawn up a memorandum urging the choice of a Catholic vice-presidential nominee. Surveying the statistics of 1956, Democratic politicians gave the memorandum new attention. But notwithstanding the actual percentages and Democratic gains achieved by Al Smith in 1928, especially in the Northeast, false legends had sprung up around the Happy Warrior’s defeat which made many Democratic leaders uneasy about the prospect of nominating a Catholic.

As 1960 approached, however, a Catholic—young Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy—took the lead for and ultimately won the Democratic presidential nomination. Far from exemplifying the social characteristics typical of the turn-of-the-century Catholic immigrant, Kennedy—Harvard graduate, author, naval hero and millionaire—symbolized the consummation of the immigrant quest; and instead of flaunting his ties to Catholicism, he took pains to show that they exercised no sway over his decision-making process. The Kennedy nomination was eminently politic because Protestant America would have carped at a sociological reincarnation of Al Smith, and pro-Eisenhower Catholics (many of them middle-class and conservative) would have balked at a candidate who linked Catholicism to immigrant and lower-class behavior patterns.

Several political scientists and sociologists—Peter Viereck, Richard Hofstadter and Seymour Lipset—have described how conservatism exerts a special appeal on socially mobile individuals who are loosening ethnic group ties and rising in economic status.63 In 1956, middle-class Catholics gave extremely heavy support to Eisenhower Republicanism, and their return to the party fold in 1960 was crucial to Democratic victory hopes. One can see how John F. Kennedy would have appealed to these normally conservative voters as a personification of Catholic political and social coming of age in America.

The Kennedy candidacy, or some other like it, was almost inevitable in the evolutionary maneuvering of American politics. By 1960, as the New Deal cycle was entering its last decade, two major groups of the old coalition—the South and the Catholic North—were trending Republican. (The old progressive West had moved even farther.) A Southern Democratic nominee was unlikely; a Catholic nominee offered a chance to arrest somewhat artificially and roll back a major column of the GOP advance. But at the same time, no Catholic president could halt the trend that was turning Catholics Republican, while such an administration, by shattering the myth that no Catholic could be elected, would ease the social cohesion tending to keep Catholics together in the Democratic Party. Inasmuch as most Catholics were Democrats, and almost all of their leverage occurred within that party, the first Catholic president obviously had to come from Democratic ranks. Nevertheless, as we have just seen, his election would serve the long-range Catholic trend to the GOP. Such was the meaning—dimly perceived at the time—of what was happening in 1960.

As had been predicted, Kennedy peeled away Eisenhower’s massive Catholic vote increment (over 1948), and with these 20 per cent to 25 per cent gains among Catholics, the Democratic nominee swept Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware into the Democratic column; the last six states for the first time since 1944. The Democratic trends of the several states correlated with the size of their Catholic populations, and within each state county patterns showed similar linkage (see Charts 16–18). Just as Eisenhower’s 1948–56 increment was largely Catholic, so was Nixon’s 1956–60 decline.

To an extraordinary degree, Kennedy recouped exactly those voters, mostly Catholics, whom Eisenhower had attracted to the GOP. Chart 43 lists Eisenhower’s top thirteen assembly districts in New York City, all heavily Catholic. These were the very districts where Eisenhower had run farthest ahead of other Republicans (1948 presidential candidate Dewey and 1954 GOP gubernatorial candidate Ives). They were also the districts where Kennedy led the Democrats to the strongest comeback, with the result that Richard Nixon’s vote retreated to the inauspicious Ives levels.⁶⁴ Most of the 1948–60 political volatility of the Northeast was Catholic; the Protestant and Jewish electorates shifted very little in comparison.⁶⁵

Some observers were wont to minimize the religious (pro-Catholic) factor in the 1960 election by observing that the suburban Democratic trend was practically as strong as that of the cities—and so it was—but there too for religious reasons. Whereas in 1928 greater New York City’s Catholic trend had been confined to the city proper, by 1960 large numbers of Catholic urbanites had moved to the suburbs, so that the latter contained much of the 1960 Catholic trend.

In 1960, as in previous years since the evolution of the New Deal philosophy, Italian and Irish Catholics, whatever their bickering within the Democratic Party, demonstrated quite similar voting patterns. Both groups were socially conservative; their intra-party disputes hinged on power and not ideology. Generally speaking, they have moved together in national elections, although local elections have been something else again.

Despite his large and religion-correlating vote pickup over Stevenson in New York City, John F. Kennedy did not win an overwhelming majority of the local Catholic vote. His 20 per cent gain boosted Democratic Catholic levels to only about 60 per cent. And the large Catholic middle class of New York City seems to have given Nixon a clear majority.66 In Beyond the Melting Pot, Daniel Patrick Moynihan has told how Alfred E. Smith, Jr. backed Nixon; how the grandson of The McCooey rang doorbells for the Republican ticket in Greenwich, Connecticut; and of the fact that only the votes of Jewish students in the School of Pharmacy saved Irish and Jesuit Fordham University from going on record straw-pollwise as opposed to the election of the first Catholic president of the United States.⁶⁷

John F. Kennedy’s achievement among New York City area Catholics lay not in lopsided success—he did not achieve it—but in turning Stevenson’s disaster into victory. Outside the sociological cockpit of greater New York, Nixon’s Catholic strength was much less—about 20 per cent in New England, for example. Massive Catholic support enabled Kennedy to carry Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut, but he lost Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire where the Yankee vote predominates.

As for sheer political power, expressed in terms of people and their positions, 1961 was something of an Irish Catholic heyday. At no time before or since have Irish politicians been arrayed in so many high national offices (President, Speaker of the House, Senate Majority leader and others), but the sociological ascent which had kept the Irish in the forefront of the working-class party was already dispersing Irish residential blocs, partisan loyalties and intra-Democratic Party influence. Nowhere did Irish local displacement throb more poignantly than in New York City, seat of yesteryear’s glory. True, Irish leaders controlled the Democratic county organizations in several boroughs, but by 1961 they had lost Tammany, the New York City mayoralty and control of the state Democratic Party. There were many Irish at the top of the ladder in national Democratic politics, most of them men who got their start in another and more Irish Democratic era, but the bottom rungs of the party were becoming less hospitable and less attractive to wearers of the green. Nor were the Irish successful in turning their increasingly Republican voting pattern into leadership within the GOP; they were fended off by the Protestant Establishment, Jews and Italians.

Within both parties, the Irish trend was strongly conservative, and in 1961, dissident Irish Republicans and a few like-minded Democrats founded the New York State Conservative Party. The party was not organized as an Irish political vehicle, but from the first it had a decidedly Gaelic coloration. And in confirmation of its Irish thrust, as well as the radical wellsprings of neo-conservatism, the Conservative Party’s principal founders were almost all connected with families which had been active in the Irish Republican Brotherhood during the Nineteen-Twenties.68

John Kennedy’s religion warmed Catholic hearts, and he himself especially pleased the Irish by his 1963 return to the land of his fathers, but all in all, the socioeconomic thrust of the early Nineteen-Sixties was not conducive to easing the Catholic trend to conservatism. The civil rights revolution began to move into high gear, and across much of the Northeast the economic and geographic frontiers of the restless black ghetto impinged on Catholic trade unions and neighborhoods; rising taxes for escalating welfare bore down on small homeowners; soaring crime rates jeopardized blue-collar and middle-class lives; new sociological concepts hamstrung the police and undermined the neighborhood school; and new hiring policies and political realities disrupted the Catholic political clubhouses and municipal bureaucracies. More than any other Northeastern religious group, Catholics tended to inhabit the socioeconomic “combat zone,” confronting the Democratic Party with the cruel dilemma of aborting its ideological thrust or alienating the loyalties of its largest bloc of longtime supporters.

Signs of “backlash” emerged up and down the Megalopolis. By a record vote, Boston elected the neighborhood school advocate, Louise Day Hicks, as School Board Chairman in 1961; New York’s Conservative Party drew a surprisingly large vote in 1962; Philadelphia Irish and Italians enthusiastically backed conservative GOP mayoralty candidate James McDermott in the 1963 election; and Baltimore’s blue-collar Catholic wards endorsed segregationist Alabama Governor George C. Wallace in Maryland’s 1964 Democratic presidential primary. As a result of these trends, especially Wallace’s near majority in Maryland, observers predicted a major backlash in the 1964 presidential election.

But when November’s votes were counted, the backlash was exceedingly weak. Boston and Baltimore wards that had gone heavily for Louise Day Hicks and George Wallace went six- and eight-to-one against Barry Goldwater. Whatever the appeal of the 1964 GOP nominee’s civil rights stance, it was outweighed by the unpopularity of his position on labor legislation, aspects of the Social Security system and economic issues in general (none of which handicapped free-spending populist Democrats like Mrs. Hicks and Governor Wallace). As a result of his unpopular positions on issues of economic importance to the blue-collar and lower-middle-class electorates, to say nothing of the image given him as a foreign policy deviate, Senator Goldwater was able to tap only a small amount of the vast Catholic discontent with Democratic social policies.

Most of the Catholic Northeast gave Goldwater about the same degree of support which it had given to Richard Nixon in 1960. From Boston to Baltimore, arch-Catholic wards showed little 1960–64 change in their GOP presidential vote shares (see Chart 19), although in core precincts within these wards—neighborhoods where delicatessens stocked Guinness, oatmeal and soda-bread (or mozzarella, pasta and olive oil)—Goldwater often topped Nixon levels. Chart 44 illustrates the pattern in some ethnic strongholds of the Bronx, New York.

In strongly Catholic areas of New England—Irish South Boston is a good example—the fact that Goldwater held or bettered Nixon strength was of minimal importance. The vote shares in question were 10 per cent to 20 per cent, hardly the stuff of which electoral success is made. But Goldwater’s success in Catholic areas of New York City was something else again. There is good reason to suggest that Goldwater won a majority of the middle-class Catholic vote and perhaps 40 per cent of the city’s total Catholic vote.⁶⁹ And it is no coincidence that Catholic and middle-class Staten Island was Goldwater’s best county in all of New York State—the same Staten Island that in 1936 had been more Democratic than any of the state’s counties outside New York City! Sociopolitical upheaval in New York was turning Catholic voters into the vanguard of conservatism.

Chart 44. Italo-Irish Presidential Voting Trends in the Bronx, New York, 1960–64

	Republican Share of Total Vote for President
Assembly District	1960	1964
10th Bronx	49%	45%
Italo-Irish EDs,* Throgs Neck	—60%	—65%
Italian EDs, Pelham Bay	—56%	—56%
9th Bronx	29%	25%
Irish EDs, Bedford Park	—44%	—42%
8th Bronx	30%	27%
Irish EDs, Fordham	—46%	—48%
7th Bronx	26%	20%
Italian EDs, 187th St.-Little Italy	—40%	—44%

* Election Districts (Precincts)

Very few observers commented on Goldwater’s degree of support among New York Catholics, albeit the statistics were camouflaged in the ethnic heterogeneity of the city’s much gerrymandered assembly districts. But the phenomenon deserved attention. By dint of a position in the sociological vortex of political establishmentarianism, Catholic New York is an early and accurate litmus of Northeastern Catholic politics. New York Irish support of Tammany Hall helped mold the Jeffersonian coalition to which the then small Catholic population rallied; the Gotham Catholics of Andrew Jackson’s day helped forge his new majority to which inflowing Catholics adhered; and the Al Smith revolution, born in New York’s Irish “Gas House” assembly district, brought Catholic America into the future New Deal coalition even before the Depression. In all of these upheavals, Catholic New York took up its position with a Southern and Western alliance. Even in defeat, the embryonic re-emergence of this alliance was a major message of the 1964 election.

Far from reversing after Goldwater’s defeat, the Catholic conservative trend accelerated. In New York City, silk-stocking Republican Congressman John V. Lindsay, who had disavowed Goldwater in 1964, ran for mayor in 1965 and was elected as a result of Liberal Party support. But political commentator and journalist William F. Buckley Jr. opposed him for the Conservative Party, polling 25 per cent to 30 per cent of the vote in the leading Catholic Assembly districts. Some observers dismissed the 1965 Conservative vote as a Buckley-linked fluke, but the 1966 gubernatorial results—a large vote was cast by Catholics whose turnout was swollen by a desire to vote against the Police Civilian Review Board on referendum—confirmed the conservative impetus.

Other areas manifested a similar trend. Baltimore’s Catholic working-class wards helped segregationist Democrat George Mahoney to win the party’s 1966 Maryland gubernatorial primary, and they went on to give him overwhelming backing in the November general election. Irish and Italian Philadelphia wards gave GOP candidates a considerably higher level of support in 1966 than they had in 1964. And in the wake of the bloody race riots that spread across northern New Jersey (Newark in particular) during the summer of 1967, a heavy Italo-Irish trend helped transform a two-to-one Democratic legislature into a three-to-one Republican body. The off-year election of 1967 also saw Boston’s large Catholic population, especially the Irish, give a ballot majority to School Board Chairman Louise Day Hicks in her barely unsuccessful mayoralty bid. (Had her non-racial policies been somewhat more plausible, she might well have won.)

However widespread the conservative trend in Catholic politics, it found different outlets in Baltimore and Boston as compared with metropolitan New York. Still largely under Catholic control, the Democratic parties of Baltimore and Boston—or at least a major faction of them—represented Catholic blue-collar beliefs while the local Republican parties or leadership cliques stood for silk-stocking liberal inclination towards a Negro alliance. A different situation prevailed in metropolitan New York, where minority-group influence and more advanced re-alignment had carried a large number of Catholics into the ranks of the Republican electorate, with the result that the conservative tide helped accelerate Catholic changeover rather than manifesting itself principally within the Democratic Party. George Mahoney and Louise Day Hicks kept Catholic conservatism within the Democratic orbit in Baltimore and Boston, whereas in the Middle Atlantic states, Catholics trended Republican.

Good evidence of the little-appreciated post-Goldwater metamorphosis of the New York State Republican Party came in February, 1968, when the New York State Senate approved legislation to provide state dollar aid to (mostly Catholic) parochial schools. Only a handful of Democrats voted for the bill—most Democratic state senators were Jews and Negroes; there were not many Catholic Democrats representing Democratic New York City where the Irish had once ruled supreme.70 Where had all the Irish gone? To the suburbs and the Republican Party, as one alphabetical section of the list of pro-parochial school GOP senators (Conklin, Curran, Day, Donovan, Dunne, Flynn) proved quite vividly. The silk-stocking liberals in opposition could well have observed that “Rum, Romanism and Rebellion” was changing parties.

Competing against Protestant Hubert Humphrey in 1968, Richard Nixon fared better among Northeastern Catholics than he had in 1960, although once again there was a regional difference in Catholic voting behavior. In upper New England, from Democratic vice-presidential nominee Edmund Muskie’s home state of Maine to Rhode Island, Nixon proved unable to win even one quarter of the Catholic vote. With Protestants lined up on the Republican side, although less solidly than in the past, and with few minority groups to sway the local Democratic parties, the latter retained the allegiance of most Catholics. And although the Democrats made inroads among Yankees, it was the Catholic vote that furnished the numerical foundations of Hubert Humphrey’s 1968 New England victories. (Much the same Catholic-Protestant cleavage prevailed in western New York and Pennsylvania.) Furthermore, these areas where Humphrey ran well among Catholics also lacked the impetus to produce a sizeable Catholic vote for George Wallace. The former Alabama governor did poorly among the Catholics of New England, even (to a lesser extent) those of belligerently Irish South Boston.

Only within psychological range of greater New York City did Nixon’s Catholic trend take shape. Blue-collar areas of Connecticut’s suburban Fairfield County produced 1960–68 gains in the Nixon share of the two-party vote even as the silk-stocking suburbs showed a Democratic advance. A considerable Italian trend enabled Nixon to better his 1960 positions in such ethnic centers as New Haven and Bridgeport, Connecticut; Utica, New York; and Paterson, Camden and Newark, New Jersey. Oneida County (Utica) and Passaic County (Passaic and Paterson), both of which had backed Kennedy in 1960, switched to Nixon. Likewise, Irish strides enabled the GOP candidate to surpass his 1960 two-party vote shares in the Celtic strongholds of Yonkers and Jersey City. Along New York State’s Quebec frontier, Nixon recaptured two counties—Franklin and Clinton, both heavily French Canadian—where Catholics had broken ranks in 1960 to support their co-religionist John F. Kennedy. And in New Jersey’s blue-collar Middlesex County, the large Hungarian and Czech population trended sharply to Nixon. The only major Catholic group in Connecticut, New York and New Jersey not to show a 1960–68 shift to Nixon was the Polish contingent, and much of their Democratic loyalty stemmed from the Polish ancestry of Democratic vice-presidential candidate Muskie.

George Wallace also ran fairly well among the Catholics of the three-state area, particularly in locales where racial violence had broken out in 1967 or 1968. The third-party contender won 10 per cent of the vote in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and more in the New Jersey cities which had been badly hit by the riots in the summer of 1967. Wallace appears to have won 10 per cent to 15 per cent of the Italian vote in New Jersey. Most of the pro-Wallace Italians had voted Republican in the 1967 legislative elections; probably they would have done so again, had Wallace’s name not been on the ballot. One interesting sidelight: in a contest between Negro Black Power advocates and White Power Italians for a seat on the Newark City Council, victory in the citywide race went to pro-Wallace vigilante leader and karate expert Anthony Imperiale.

Taking into consideration both the Nixon and Wallace votes, there is no doubt that the Catholic electorate of Connecticut, New Jersey and upstate New York (excluding Buffalo) executed a sharp 1960–68 movement away from the Democrats. This Catholic shift played a major part in Richard Nixon’s New Jersey victory and in the Democrats’ failure to match the combined Nixon-Wallace total in Connecticut.

But the most emphatic evidence of the Catholic trend to Nixon came in New York City itself, where large numbers of Catholics who had backed J.F.K. in 1960 changed to Nixon. The result was that all of Nixon’s top eighteen New York City assembly districts in 1968 were largely Catholic in makeup. Whereas in 1960, New York City’s German, Irish and Italian Catholics had favored John F. Kennedy by an approximately five-to-four ratio, in 1968 they appear to have preferred Nixon over Humphrey and Wallace by a ratio of at least five-to-three-to-one. This trend took place despite the heavy Catholic exodus to the suburbs between 1960 and 1968 which removed many middle-income Republicans. Of all the Catholic groups, none matched the Irish in Republican impetus. For the first time, the New York Grand Council of Irish Societies endorsed a Republican presidential nominee; and one of the very few New York City show-business personalities to endorse Nixon was Brooklyn-born and Irish Jackie Gleason, whose program is one of the most Celtic-flavored on television.

Chart 45. The 1960–68 Catholic Trend to Nixon in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut

	Nixon Share of the Two-Party Vote for President
County or City	1960	1968
Substantially Italian*
New Haven County, Connecticut	42%	45%
Bridgeport, Connecticut	36	42
Richmond County, New York	56	62
Oneida County (Utica), New York	48	54
Passaic County (Passaic and Paterson), New Jersey	45	52
Substantially Irish*
Yonkers, New York	51	55
Hudson County (Jersey City), New Jersey	39	42
Substantially French Canadian
Clinton County, New York	45	53
Franklin County, New York	49	55

* In all of these cities and counties, the local Irish and Italian populations are only a minority, although a powerful one, and their trends, as evidenced here, have been diluted by the behavior of other voting streams.

Chart 46 lists Nixon’s eighteen top assembly districts in New York City. All of them were predominantly Catholic, although some in Brooklyn and the Bronx had sizeable (and trend-offsetting) Negro or Jewish minorities. Almost every Irish, Italian or German election district in New York City, however buried in other-minded environs, produced a Nixon (or Nixon-Wallace) majority. Richard Nixon ran better among the Irish firemen and bus drivers of Inwood—or the Italians of Little Italy—than among the sophisticates of the new residential tracts of Manhattan’s East Side.

Chart 46. The 18 Top Nixon Assembly Districts in New York City, 1968

* Based on figures reported by the New York Times, November 8, 1968. Note: All of these districts are predominantly Catholic; the other districts which, despite substantial numbers of Jews and Protestants, could be called predominantly Catholic—Brooklyn’s Park Slope and the Bronx’s Fordham-Kingsbridge—would follow almost immediately on an extended list. These heavily Catholic districts were also the best Wallace districts; only one other assembly district gave him over 6 per cent of the vote. Not one of the East Side Manhattan assembly districts was among the eighteen best Nixon supporters.

Nixon was not the only conservative to do well among New York City Catholics; George Wallace captured 7 per cent to 10 per cent of the total vote in the leading Catholic assembly districts and he reached 15 per cent in some lower-middle-class Irish election districts. Perhaps three quarters of the 122,000 votes Wallace won in New York City came from Catholics, especially Italian and Irish policemen, firemen, bus drivers and sanitation workers. By and large, Nixon support and Wallace support occurred among the same groups and in the same predominantly Catholic districts—conservative Republican or Conservative Party trend areas, for the most part—and the overwhelming majority of Wallaceites would have chosen Nixon in a two-party contest with Hubert Humphrey. Had Nixon been able to run under the banner of New York’s Conservative Party as well as that of the state GOP (top New York Republicans blocked such endorsement), he would have garnered much of the Wallace vote in the city and its (New York State) environs.

As a result of the 1968 presidential and legislative voting trends in New York City and its suburbs, the local Republican Party moved towards an increasingly Catholic image and constituency. Not only was Nixon’s city electorate about 75 per cent white Catholic—with the exception of white Protestants, he ran poorly among other groups—but Catholic districts elected twelve of the city’s thirteen Republican state assemblymen. Most of these were Republican-Conservatives; their abbreviated designation “R.-C.” conveyed the religion of their constituents as well as their own politics. Two of the new Republican state legislators elected in 1968 in lower-middle-class Italian and Irish districts were not even Republicans of more than immediate convenience; Queens neighborhood school advocate Rosemary Gunning was a Conservative, and Brooklyn property-tax-revolt agitator Vito Battista was a past mayoralty candidate of the United Taxpayers Party (a very minor party of minimal significance). Because of the lingering establishmentarian aura of the New York GOP, Battista and Mrs. Gunning needed the backing of a popular conservative third party to win election, but their success indicates the extent to which such politics are gaining control of New York City Republicanism.

As in the past, the Catholic political upheaval in New York City is being led by the Irish. Although the city’s Italians are almost as conservative, they were a wave behind the Irish in leadership and power within the Democratic Party, and they do not yet suffer the Irish degree of alienation. (Even in 1969, there were fourteen Italians among New York City’s Democratic assemblymen but only three Irishmen.) The Irish-led Conservative Party, which polled 1.1 million votes in its 1968 New York U.S. Senate effort, is the principal fulcrum of changing Catholic loyalties;71 the city’s small cadre of conservative intellectuals—National Review et al.—is substantially Irish;⁷² and Richard Nixon, himself a black Irishman whose family came from the counties of Cork and Kildare, was elected to the presidency in a campaign substantially planned by New York Irish conservatives.⁷³

Given the considerable 1960–68 Nixon trend among Catholics in and around New York City, together with the sizeable majorities given Nixon and other conservative candidates, there can be no doubt that the New York City Catholics—the Irish in particular—are joining the new Southern and Western conservative Republican coalition in its struggle with liberal Northeastern Democrats. As Yankees and upper-middle-class liberals turn Democratic, Catholic Republicanism ought to spread outward from New York City. In the first place, state and national Republican parties will become more populist in ideology and Catholic in makeup, thus gaining in appeal to Scranton miners and Boston bartenders; and secondly, the Democratic Party will increasingly become the party of just those groups—silk-stocking voters, Yankees, Negroes and Jews—against whom Northeastern Catholics have traditionally aligned themselves.

7. Suburbia

At one extreme, suburbia resembles prosperous urban blue-collar precincts; at the other, silk-stocking strongholds. The suburbia of crabgrass and commuter fame falls more or less in the middle. Back in the Nineteen-Twenties, suburbs were few in number, limited in importance and silk-stocking in character. Since that time, suburbia has multiplied twentyfold and its socioeconomic character has been revolutionized by a middle-class and increasingly non-Anglo-Saxon exodus from the cities. No longer the upper-middle-class group described by F. Scott Fitzgerald and later by John O’Hara, most of today’s suburbanites live and vote more in the fashion of their friends and cousins still residing in the Bronx or Jamaica Plain.

Chart 47. Suburban Presidential Voting, 1920–48

During the Nineteen-Twenties, suburbia was solidly Republican, although not too powerful. New York City’s two principal suburban counties, Nassau and Westchester, cast only one-eighth of the vote of the parent city itself. Along with the similar affluent outliers of Philadelphia and Boston, suburban New York stuck by Hoover and Landon in the presidential elections of the Nineteen-Thirties and elected an unbroken roster of anti-New Deal Republicans to Congress. Chart 47 illustrates the presidential voting behavior of the leading New York and Pennsylvania suburban counties.

Suburban growth lagged during the Nineteen-Thirties; the economic conditions of the decade prompted a migration to rather than from the big cities. From World War I until the end of World War II, the percentage of the total New York statewide vote cast by New York City continued to rise; only thereafter did the real suburban boom begin and the relative position of Gotham weaken (see Chart 13).

The first few years of postwar suburban growth were well-heeled years; the war-accumulated upper-middle-class housing demand was satisfied. But by 1949 and 1950 the great middle-income trek was under way, and names like Levittown entered the urbanologist’s lexicon to characterize the phenomenon. As a result of this growth, suburban political power swelled. In New York, the three suburban counties increased the size of their vote by more than 40 per cent between 1948 and 1952 (a greater gain than they had ever shown before or would show again).

While a heavy majority of the new suburbanites joined older residents in backing Dwight Eisenhower in 1952, their numbers nevertheless tended to dilute Republican suburban strength. Chart 48 shows how the fastest-growing New York suburban county (Nassau) evidenced almost no Republican gain between 1948 and 1952. There were considerable Republican sentiments among the new middle class, but these voters were not nearly so Republican as the older suburbanites.

During the Nineteen-Fifties, suburbia did not burgeon at the record rate of 1948–52; nevertheless it continued to expand rapidly. Around Boston and New York, one half of the persons moving to lawn-mower country were Catholics, and in New York perhaps another quarter were Jews. By the end of the decade, these displaced Democrats threatened the hegemony of entrenched town and county Republican officialdoms throughout most of suburban New York. Irish and Italian voters formed the bulwark of suburban Democratic strength (and the Irish generally officered the suburban Democratic Party organizations). Although an orthodox liberal Democratic presidential or gubernatorial candidate might offend them, many of the new middle-class Irish and Italian suburbanites preferred the local Catholic-run Democratic Party to still-ensconced old-line Anglo-Saxon Republicanism. The great Republican hero of the suburban new middle class was Dwight Eisenhower. In 1956, he further increased his suburban vote share over the already high levels of 1952. Not only was Eisenhower popular in his own right, but Adlai Stevenson, his Democratic opponent, was an alien being to upwardly mobile suburban Catholics. Locally, however, the Catholic new middle class was more likely to take sociocultural umbrage at an old-line Protestant Republican village trustee. For this reason, the years between 1958 and 1964 saw a large number of suburban offices and patronage fall to the Democrats.

Chart 48. The Political Impetus of the Great New York Suburban Boom, 1948–52

One graphic illustration of both the growth of suburbia and the emigration of city Democrats can be fashioned in a chart of the relative vote cast by Manhattan (the central city core of New York) and archetypal middle-class suburban Nassau County. Furthermore, no set of statistics better gives the lie to the allegation that the political future of America pivots on the central city.

As a result of the large Catholic exodus to the suburbs, New York’s suburban counties contained a more heavily Catholic population in 1960 than such minority group-populated boroughs of New York City as Brooklyn, the Bronx and Manhattan. Thus, even though Richard Nixon carried all of the suburban counties in 1960, the religion-linked 1956–60 Democratic trend was stronger in suburbia than in the city’s urban core. Nixon fell only 10 per cent below Eisenhower’s 1956 levels in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx (largely as a result of falloff in Catholic neighborhoods), but he slid 14 per cent to 18 per cent in the three major suburban counties. Indeed, many substantially Catholic middle-class suburban tracts turned in Democratic gains of 20 per cent to 25 per cent—comparable to those of the city’s middle-class Catholic assembly districts. The pro-Kennedy trend reached into all Catholic precincts, urban, suburban and rural, with equal attraction.74

Chart 49. Manhattan-Nassau County Total Votes* Cast for President, 1920–68

	Manhattan	Nassau
1920	464	43
1924	463	65
1928	521	113
1932	565	144
1936	711	172
1940	774	217
1944	773	238
1948	738	265
1952	765	438
1956	678	539
1960	635	588
1964	626	632
1968	519	639

* In Thousands

But although the great exodus to suburbia was filling up station-wagonland with longtime urban Democrats and dethroning old-line and typically unresponsive Republican local administrations, it was not, in the ultimate context of the Nineteen-Sixties, a liberal movement. On the contrary, much of the suburban exodus was prompted by the changing demography of the cities—Southern Negroes were moving to the Northeast in large numbers—and thus when the politics of the Nineteen-Sixties began to pivot more and more on the Negro socioeconomic revolution, the newer reaches of suburbia proved highly unresponsive. To many new suburbanites, their relocation represented a conscious effort to drop a crabgrass curtain between themselves and the increasingly Negro central cities. The Census Bureau is less than accurate in referring to suburban population growth as urbanization; psychologically, the suburban boom is an anti-urban phenomenon—an attempt to escape crime, slums and slumdwellers.

Of course, not all segments of suburbia shared these sentiments. Some of the most frequently caricatured (yet atypical) reaches of New York commuter country—Scarsdale, Great Neck and so forth—were rich silk-stocking bailiwicks fully participating in the establishmentarian liberal trend.75 Generally speaking, these areas were extremely affluent and little inhabited by ordinary middle-class refugees from the socioeconomic threat of changing urban neighborhoods. They are as unlike Levittown as Park Avenue is unlike, say, Hollis or Flatbush.

Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential candidacy evoked a mixed response from suburbia. On the surface, the suburbs broke with the politics of a lifetime as Goldwater lost every suburban county in the Northeast: Norfolk, Massachusetts; Fairfield, Connecticut; Westchester, Nassau and Suffolk, New York; Bergen, Morris and Union, New Jersey; Montgomery, Bucks and Delaware, Pennsylvania; and Montgomery and Baltimore, Maryland. Within these counties, however, striking behavioral differences emerged. While all of suburbia was generally leery of the portrait painted of Goldwater’s foreign and military policies, there was a considerable difference of opinion regarding his social policies; and his decline (in comparison with Nixon’s 1960 strength) was anything but uniform across suburbia’s socioeconomic spectrum. In New York’s three suburban counties, Goldwater dropped 15 per cent to 19 per cent below 1960 levels; however, the decline ranged from 30 per cent in the richest silk-stocking suburbs to less than 10 per cent in Catholic middle-class bailiwicks. In Westchester County, the only suburb which combined a heavy Republican bias with a small anti-Goldwater trend was rich and Catholic Pelham; it was the only town in the county Goldwater carried. Suburbia is a composite of the trends already analyzed—silk-stocking, Yankee, non-Yankee, Catholic, Jewish and Negro—and so was the “suburban” Democratic trend of 1964.

But notwithstanding Johnson’s 1964 victory and Democratic claims of a new middle-class majority following, suburbia and Great Society social programs were essentially incompatible. Suburbia did not take kindly to rent subsidies, school racial balance schemes, growing Negro immigration or rising welfare costs. A few silk-stocking suburbs joined in experimental racial balance or pupil-exchange schemes—actual integration was obviously no threat at all to such rich communities—but the great majority of middle-class suburbanites opposed racial or welfare innovations. In general, suburbia voted Republican in the 1966 elections, although the Democrats managed to retain most of the silk-stocking congressional seats which they had gained in 1964.

Conservative currents flowed more strongly in 1967 in the wake of the summer’s racial violence. From one end of New Jersey to the other, Republican candidates unhorsed suburban state legislators, while in New York, the Conservative Party won heavy enough support to deny election to liberal Republicans and oblige the local GOP to become more ideologically responsive.76

Despite the seeming suburban orientation of Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential appeal to the “forgotten man,” suburbia did not respond with one approving voice; instead, the cleavage of 1964 recurred. Middle-class suburbia showed a heavy conservative shift in comparison with both 1960 and 1964, but silk-stocking suburbia (and Jewish suburbs of all income levels) gave the Republican nominee a much smaller vote share than he had won in 1960.

The sharpest 1960–68 Nixon suburban decline occurred in the fashionable bedrooms of Boston (Wellesley, Newton, Brookline and Lexington), along Philadelphia’s rich Main Line (Montgomery County) and in the best-established suburbs of New York (Scarsdale and Pound Ridge in Westchester County; Westbury, Great Neck and Roslyn in Nassau County). Chart 50 sketches Nixon’s 1960–68 slide in silk-stocking suburbia, comparing it with the gains scored by Nixon in anonymous middle-class suburbs.

Chart 50. Suburban Voting Trends in the New York Metropolitan Area, 1952–68

* Westchester County; **Rockland County; ***Suffolk County; ****Nassau County

Legend and misinformation rather than fact produced a substantial post-1968 election impression that suburbia had moved towards the Democrats. Relatively few suburbs either in the Northeast or the nation as a whole evidenced a Democratic trend, and those that did were given undue importance. After all, places like those listed above are some of the best known suburbs in the country; twenty years ago, when two-thirds of today’s suburbanites still lived elsewhere, these were the archetypal homes of The Man In The Grey Flannel Suit; but now, with growing numbers of tweedy foundation executives, research directors, publishers and educators taking up residence—while low-middle-income groups flood into a very different breed of suburb—towns like Wellesley, Bryn Mawr and Scarsdale have become completely atypical. In comparison with the new subdivisions populated by salesmen, electricians, and supermarket managers, silk-stocking suburbia casts ever fewer votes, and its 1960–68 Democratic trend was no indicator of the general party slump in Northeastern suburbia (sketched in Chart 51). Neither was the movement of Jewish suburban tracts.

Of course, the substantial 1960–68 Democratic vote slippage in Northeastern middle-class suburbia was not always matched by equal—or even any—Republican gains. George Wallace diverted many conservative votes, reducing the lead that the middle-class suburban conservative trend would otherwise have given Nixon over Humphrey. Throughout suburbia, the Wallace vote tended to be strongest in middle-income areas shifting towards Nixon and weakest in silk-stocking towns trending towards Humphrey. In Scarsdale, New York, the Alabaman captured only one per cent of the vote, but in Suffolk County, the fastest growing suburban area in the state and simultaneously the bastion of the New York Conservative Party, Wallace captured 30,000 votes (8 per cent of the total), almost all of them at Nixon’s expense. Clearly, middle-income and low-middle-income suburban conservatives of the type who backed Wallace would have chosen the Republican nominee in a two-party contest. The conservative majority over Democrat Hubert Humphrey was much higher than the comparable edge over John Kennedy in 1960, although this was partly disguised by the fact that the Wallace-Nixon split in the conservative total enabled Humphrey to run close enough to Nixon in some areas to cause talk about a “suburban” Democratic trend.

Chart 51. Northeastern Suburban Growth and Voting Trends, 1960–68

Note: Prince Georges, Baltimore, Middlesex, Suffolk and Burlington counties are the prime examples of fast-growing middle- and low-middle-income suburbia. The only other fast-growing suburban county, Maryland’s rich Montgomery County, is a bedroom for Washington’s civil servants, and is thus a rather specialized product of the escalation of federal employment. The two particularly silk-stocking counties are New York’s Westchester and Pennsylvania’s Montgomery (Main Line Philadelphia). The two Montgomerys, Bergen, Nassau and Westchester counties include most of the Megalopolis’ suburban Jewish population. Boston’s suburban periphery is divided among a number of counties.

Contemporary suburban demography is very much on the conservative side. Across the nation, suburban growth is centered in middle-class locales—the suburbs of the South and Southwest—which gave Nixon and Wallace vast leads over Humphrey.77 Each year, the environs of Los Angeles, San Diego, Houston, Dallas and many Southern cities add 10 per cent to 20 per cent to their populations, whereas the leading silk-stocking suburban counties around New York and Philadelphia—storied Westchester and Main Line Montgomery County—are showing little or no growth. Even within the Northeast, there is considerable suburban growth, but it is coming in low-middle and middle-income tracts in counties far beyond the parent city, while the close-in, old-line suburban counties are gripped by unchanging, manicured (and unsubdivisible) estate sections and decaying urbanized areas increasingly attractive to Negroes. Chart 51 shows how the major increase in Northeastern suburban voting power is occurring in new middle-income conservative-trending areas, while the relative population and influence of silk-stocking suburbia declines.

A new suburbia is being built across America by many millions of blue-collar and middle-level white-collar families in their twenties and thirties. This is the new young America on the move, and from Southern California to Richmond, Virginia to Long Island’s Suffolk County, the movement is conservative. As Chart 13 shows by using New York as an example, the old, liberal cities are casting an ever-lower percentage of the vote in their states and nation. The power is shifting to this new suburbia; some call it the “white noose” around the increasingly Negro cities. Attempts to magnify the importance of the liberal Democratic trend among silk-stocking voters, whether young urban professionals or upper-middle-income suburbanites, constitute statistical myopia. A generation after Al Smith and Franklin Roosevelt, the burgeoning middle-class suburbs are the logical extension of the new popular conservatism of the South, the West and the Catholic sidewalks of New York.

B. The Northeastern Future

Whereas in 1932 the New Deal era had begun with the Northeast—and New England especially—as the most Republican section of the nation, the end of the Democratic cycle in 1968 saw the Northeast—and once again New England in the lead—giving nationally unequaled support to Democratic liberalism.

But the Northeast is not a regional monolith. Even while New England was moving one way, Chesapeake Bay was moving another. Maryland, by far the best Northeastern state for the Democrats of 1932, trailed only neighboring Delaware in the littleness of its 1968 support for party nominee Hubert Humphrey. In sum, the Democrats are gaining in the old states of post-Civil War Republican ascendancy, while the Republicans are turning the tables on their opponents in the non-Yankee bailiwicks of post-Civil War Democratic tradition.

This turnabout, which bodes poorly for the GOP in New England—even Vermont and New Hampshire are no longer safe—augurs well for Republican presidential chances in Maryland, Delaware and New Jersey, the three Northeastern states that spurned party candidates in almost all of the races between 1860 and 1892. George Wallace scored his best Northeastern percentages in these three states, and this electorate is one in motion between the parties. Because of similar, although reduced, influences, Pennsylvania should also be a presidential battleground of the upcoming cycle. On the basis of history, these are the Northeastern states to which the Republicans can look for support of a political movement rooted in the South and West.

The Republican future is also greatly aided by demographic trends not only internally reshaping the Northeast, but diminishing the region’s national influence. Chart 142 shows how the voting power of the big Northeastern cities diminishes as population shifts to suburbia, local and distant.

As Chart 52 illustrates, the Northeast and the South have maintained a changing position with regard to one another and the Republican Party throughout the entire New Deal cycle. From the peak years of the New Deal, the power of the Northeast within the Republican Party has been declining as the influence of the South has been rising. This upheaval was more or less consummated by the Goldwater nomination and defeat; in some ways, the 1968 election was merely a ratification, although it was the sine qua non, powerwise, of the basic geopolitical trend spotlighted and accelerated in 1964. The Republican Party is no longer the party of the Northeast—and an increasing part of its Northeastern strength is rooted in voting streams like the urban Catholics and rural non-Yankees who have historically been allies (often a local minority) of the political vehicle of the South and West.

Chart 52. The Relationship of the Northeast and South in the Republican Party During the Entire New Deal Cycle

To understand the position of the Northeast in national politics, it is also useful to consider the position of the South as a historic political foe of the Northeast; the two never seem to be going in the same partisan or ideological direction.

 

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1 Jean Gottman, Megalopolis (New York, 1961). Gottman defines his Megalopolis to include rural outliers like Cape Cod, western Maryland, Delaware and Pennsylvania Dutch country. Politically, these areas are not Megalopolitan.

² Of course, there were numerous exceptions. Under the guidance of Governor Alfred E. Smith, New York’s Tammany Hall utilized Jewish and Italian talents and won considerable support in return.

³ Most of the Irish machines were essentially ethnic institutions. Inasmuch as the Irish machines were not courting change—a national progressive upheaval would have displaced the Irish within the Democratic Party—they tended to be instruments of the status quo. Locally, they despised socialists and other leftist minor parties. And within the halls of Congress, congressmen and senators controlled by the Catholic machines of Northeastern states were regarded as “safe” by the conservative Republican leadership during the Nineteen-Twenties because they rarely made cause with the bipartisan minority of Western progressives.

⁴ Three-quarters of the leaders of post-Civil War finance and industry were Yankees: Huntington, Stanford, Crocker, Hopkins and Hill (railroads); Holley (steel); Rogers and Rockefeller (oil); Armour and Swift (meat-packing); Pillsbury and Washburn (Tour-milling); Morgan, Cooke, Drew, Gould and Fiske (finance). Although most of the power lay in the East, some of its practitioners headquartered in Chicago, Minneapolis and San Francisco.

⁵ Schoharie County, New York, is one example. Democratic in every presidential election from 1856 to 1916, it turned Republican in 1920. Not only did Schoharie County remain Republican in 1924 and 1928, but it continued to support the GOP during the depression of the Nineteen-Thirties.

⁶ Smith carried dozens of counties which had gone Republican in both 1920 and 1924. Much more important, he carried a number of counties which had been Republican since 1896—all of them strongly Catholic. Among these counties were Elk, Luzerne and Lackawanna, Pennsylvania; Clinton and Franklin, New York; and Chittenden, Vermont.

⁷ Two such assessments—that the 1928 election foreshadowed the Democratic majority which emerged in 1932—are Samuel Lubell’s book, The Future of American Politics (New York, 1956) and David Burner, The Politics of Provincialism (New York, 1967).

⁸ The counties showing the strongest anti-Smith trend were those in traditionally Democratic sections of Maryland and Pennsylvania. Monroe, Cumberland, Juniata and Columbia counties, Pennsylvania, produced 25 per cent Democratic declines; York County, Pennsylvania and Dorchester County, Maryland, lagged only slightly with 23 per cent Democratic losses between 1924 and 1928. At the other extreme, rural but Catholic Elk County, Pennsylvania showed a 31 per cent gain between 1924 and 1928. By and large, the anti-Smith counties showed the largest 1928–32 Democratic gains in the Northeast (25 per cent to 30 per cent); Elk County, however, was 6 per cent more Republican in 1932 than 1928.

⁹ All of the leading New England Yankee counties voted for Hoover in 1932. See Chart 26.

¹⁰ Although Philadelphia’s Republican machine was able to keep itself in municipal power until 1951, Franklin D. Roosevelt carried the city easily in 1936, 1940 and 1944.

¹¹ Most of the support Wallace won came from Jewish voters; thus Wallace ran his best race in the heavily Jewish areas of New York City, taking enough normally Democratic votes from Truman to give Dewey a plurality in New York State. Fewer than 10 per cent of the state’s voters backed Wallace, but many solidly Jewish precincts gave him better than a third of their vote. The Progressive Party was leftist and vaguely pro-Soviet. However, its anti-fascist stance appealed to Jewish liberals (who were also unhappy with President Truman’s hesitant policy towards Israel). Very few Protestants and fewer Catholics supported the Progressive candidate.

¹² The GOP finally lost Philadelphia’s City Hall in 1951.

¹³ The General did not run much ahead of Dewey’s 1948 levels in Philadelphia’s Main Line suburbs or in the fashionable suburbs of New York City.

¹⁴ A liberal Republican took over the district.

¹⁵ Milton Viorst, Fall From Grace (New York, 1968).

¹⁶ In his essay The American Establishment, Richard H. Rovere has observed, “It is characteristic of most writers and thinkers on the subject to define the Establishment in such a way as to keep themselves outside it and even victimized by it. Werner Von Fromm has suggested that they all tend toward a mild paranoia, and what little clinical evidence there is tends to support him.” Rovere, The American Establishment (New York, 1962) p. 5. But as Rovere, Digby Baltzell and Stephen Birmingham have demonstrated, “The Establishment” is a useful and reasonably legitimate term even if it is not a precise entity.

¹⁷ The college generation which came of age in the Nineteen-Sixties understands full well that a collection of vested liberal interests constitutes much of the contemporary Establishment.

¹⁸ The establishmentarian caste of “Reform” Democratic liberalism can readily be seen in the makeup of the Lexington Club. In his book The Amateur Democrat (Chicago, 1962), James Q. Wilson discusses the Club: “In 1960, there were 36 men and women nominated for office in the Lexington Democratic Club, the oldest of the reform organizations. Of the 34 who had graduated from college, 19 had attended the desirable schools of the Ivy League. The majority (20) had completed law school and were practicing law in New York City (mostly with firms in and around Wall Street). Most of the rest were in public relations, advertising, the theater, college teaching, radio and television and so forth. Of the five who were in other businesses, most were associated with investment houses…. When another reform club, the Riverside Democrats, was organized in 1957, all eight of its officers were college graduates and seven had done graduate work in prestigious eastern universities such as Harvard, Yale, Columbia and Princeton.” Within Manhattan, “Reform” ultra-liberalism controls the Democratic Party in the richest districts; old-line organizations rule only in the poorer districts.

¹⁹ There was nothing notable about Lindsay’s victory insofar as voting trends are concerned; he simply added the Liberal Party’s ballots to a typical Republican share of the vote. He did not win a majority, just a plurality. Had the prior Republican mayoralty nominee, New York State Attorney General Louis Lefkowitz, commanded the Liberal Party’s support, he too would have won election with a plurality in a multi-party contest.

²⁰ Stephen Birmingham, The Right People: A Portrait of the American Social Establishment (Boston, 1968), p. 340. The Ripon Society, a Harvard-based group of young Republican liberals, evinced a kindred pre-occupation in their June, 1968 Forum in describing their group necktie: “A British firm is preparing the design using the crest of Ripon, England, a lovely cathedral town from which Ripon, Wisconsin, the birthplace of the Republican Party, took its name.”

²¹ Lipset, Political Man (New York, 1963), p. 313.

²² These areas were not only the strongest for McCarthy in the local Democratic conventions (Connecticut) and primaries (New York), but they epitomized the typical residential addresses of the people who volunteered to help McCarthy or telephoned their support of his candidacy.

²³ The Yankees who moved west took their politics, religion and culture with them. When they set up new towns, they did so in New England fashion and named them for existing Yankee communities. Connecticut emigrants, for example, named more than a dozen cities after Hartford—New Hartford, Connecticut; New Hartford, New York; Hartfords in “Vermont, Maine and New York; Hartfords in New Jersey and Ohio; Hartford City, Indiana; Hartfords in Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa and Kansas; New Hartfords in Iowa, Missouri and Minnesota; Hartfords in South Dakota and Washington. They also took their prejudices and tastes with them. As Stewart Holbrook has written in his book Yankee Exodus (New York, 1950): “If you wanted to know exactly where the Yankee had gone, you could walk into the offices of Cross Company, bakers of Montpelier and St. Johnsbury, Vermont, and see on the books which western stores in Minnesota, Iowa, California and Oregon had been clubbed by transplanted New Englanders into ordering Montpelier or St. Johnsbury crackers. None but a Yankee wanted them. It was much the same with Mrs. Gorton’s dried codfish from Massachusetts and Portland Star Matches from Maine.” The Yankees who left New England (and subsequent Yankee departure points) remained members of the psychological Greater New England community. Their politics likewise generally followed the lead of New England.

²⁴ To make this point, it is not necessary to embrace the much-debated theory of an America divided between Southern Cavaliers and Northern Puritans. Suffice it to say that economic thrust of Yankeedom—manufacturing, shipping, finance and small-scale farming—conflicted with the impetus of the plantation slave-ocracy. Even though the large plantations of the South were not so socioculturally dominant as legend has made them, most of the South (excluding mountaineers) shared a general concern with the way of life maintained by slavery and Southern national political hegemony. Yankeedom, in turn, sought political control of the United States to advance its own economic interests. The pre-Civil War period was one of stalemate. Sooner or later, Yankee-based industry or Dixie-based plantation agriculture must have triumphed.

²⁵ Yankee abolitionism and opposition to the expansion of slavery coincided with the economic interests of New England. As for Yankee attitudes towards Negroes per se, throughout the entire Yankee territory from Ohio to California, Negroes were not allowed to vote; the Yankee-backed Kansas constitution prohibited free Negroes from even entering the state. The Negro cause has been useful to the Yankee Establishment because it generally diverges from the interests of Yankeedom’s traditional Irish and Southern foes.

²⁶ The northern roof of New England adjacent to Quebec also showed a pro-Roosevelt trend but French-Canadians rather than Yankees were principally responsible.

²⁷ From the Atlantic to the Pacific, the sharpest Democratic 1960–64 presidential vote gains came in rural Yankee counties and kindred silk-stocking precincts. In Oregon, Kansas, Iowa and Ohio, rural Yankee counties turned in Goldwater declines only a little less severe than those of upper New England.

²⁸ Yankee political strength is not what it used to be. Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont now have five congressmen; a century ago they had fifteen.

²⁹ The Yankee Northeast includes New England, New York (outside New York City), northern New Jersey and northern Pennsylvania.

³⁰ Despite the strong tradition of aiding and patronizing Negroes which exists in upper echelons of the Yankee Establishment, most GOP congressmen representing rural Yankee districts shunned urban subsidy legislation until it became a matter of sectional and party factional interest.

³¹ From the Pacific Northwest to eastern Kansas, Minnesota, Lake Erie and the Northeast, Rockefeller support was parochially concentrated in Yankee (and Scandinavian) districts.

³² Thus, in the eleven Negro districts comprising most of New York City’s Negro vote, Nelson Rockefeller won only 45,000 more votes in his 1966 gubernatorial race than Barry Goldwater had won in the 1964 presidential race.

³³ The 1912 and 1916 elections, where the Democratic nominee was Woodrow Wilson, were an exception.

³⁴ His reliance on social worker Belle Moskowitz and Judge Joseph Proskauer led to a song: “Moskie and Proskie are the brains of City Hall.” Connable and Silberfarb, Tigers of Tammany (New York, 1967), p. 266.

³⁵ Within solidly Jewish districts of New York City and Boston, researchers found that the Democratic vote varied little between income groups; it varied between the sexes (men were more Republican) and along other cleavages of exposure to non-Jewish values (working women were more Republican than housewives). Once the exposure to non-Jewish values was there, Jews were more likely to vote like other persons in their income brackets; thus the Republicanism of some suburban Jews. Lawrence H. Fuchs, “American Jews and the Presidential Vote,” American Ethnic Politics (New York, 1968), pp. 63–68.

³⁶ As Chart 35 shows, Nixon ran 1 per cent ahead of Eisenhower in deep Jewish Brooklyn and in Boston’s 14th Ward (Mattapan). Both areas are old-line, substantially Orthodox and strongly Zionist. Eisenhower’s 1956 percentages were depressed by reaction to his Suez policies; Nixon may have profited from a certain amount of anti-Catholicism and antagonism towards John Kennedy’s Irish background.

³⁷ The area around what is now Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, witnessed three “Penny-mite” wars. Immigrants from Connecticut, which state projected her boundaries west to encompass territory also claimed by Pennsylvania, took up residence and spurned Pennsylvania jurisdiction. Open conflict took place between armed forces of Connecticut men and Pennsylvanians three times beween 1770 and 1784. While the New Englanders were not dislodged, Pennsylvania sovereignty was eventually acknowledged. The populations of New York and New England were long separated by the Taconic and Berkshire mountains, but beginning in the Seventeen-Seventies, they clashed over the territory which was eventually to become the State of Vermont. The Green Mountain Boys, as the farmers of Vermont called themselves, defied the authority of both New Hampshire and New York, but they were particularly suspicious of New York with its patroons and Dutch, German and Scotch tenantry.

³⁸ The contrast was vivid. New England’s dour Puritans, unable to till a bountiful life from their stony fields, organized their lives, religion, polities and commerce to a degree unknown in the South. Puritans, and dissenters even before they embarked for the new world, their asceticism matched their culinary style. The boiled codfish and “boiled dinners” of New England stood in marked contrast to the rich oyster stuffings and sherried terrapin of Chesapeake Bay. Along the hazy inlets of the Chesapeake, especially the Eastern Shore, cavaliers, farmers and fishermen—Catholics, Episcopalians, Methodists, but never Congregationalists—saw no good moral or local reason for adopting the highly organized life of New England, and they disliked Yankees, their strong governments and their omnipresent “causes.”

³⁹ Gutheim, The Potomac (New York, 1954), p. 315

⁴⁰ Wildes, The Delaware (New York, 1940), p. 305.

⁴¹ Mitchell, Horatio Seymour (Cambridge, 1938). The maps facing pp. 256, 382 and 474 show the concentration of Democratic voting strength in the Hudson Valley.

⁴² Two German counties—Lancaster and Lebanon—were Republican. Both were rich farm counties; they were also the seats of Pennsylvania’s Amish and other “plain” sects. Whig before the Civil War while other German counties were Democratic, Lancaster and Lebanon voted Republican thereafter.

⁴³ Greene County, in the extreme southwest of Pennsylvania, once a part of Virginia and originally settled from that state, was the leading Democratic county in the western part of the state.

⁴⁴ Anti-Catholic voting was particularly strong in southern and central Pennsylvania because of the deep-seated anti-Catholicism of the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, the Lutherans, and the Reformed and German Protestants. Both the Germans and the Scotch-Irish had emigrated to America at a time when and from places where religious feeling ran high on each side.

⁴⁵ Throughout the entire non-Yankee Northeast, Kennedy slid below Stevenson levels in only fifteen counties, all of them in rural Pennsylvania. Except for Appalachian Greene County, all of these counties were German and/or Scotch-Irish.

⁴⁶ Two southern New Jersey seats were regained, as was the York-Gettysburg district of Pennsylvania. The GOP also captured the At-Large Delaware seat and a newly created Maryland suburban district.

⁴⁷ In these cities, where the Irish lived in large numbers, they stamped an unmistakable imprint on local politics. New York’s Tammany Hall, the archetypal Irish political institution, was founded by William Mooney, an Irish Catholic upholsterer in 1789. To a large degree, the Irish reproduced the climate of political morality which they had known in British-ruled Ireland. Daniel Moynihan has described how the Irish not only repeated the British practice of selling titles, jobs and elections, but recreated the central role which the saloonkeeper had occupied in old-country political life, and—in Tammany’s clubhouse system of extreme (Assembly district) parochialism and required submission to a slow, conformist advance through a hierarchy of prestige—more or less duplicated the basic social system of an Irish village. Glazer and Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot (Cambridge, 1963), pp. 223–228. Colorfully named gangs—the Dead Rabbits, for example—were another seemingly inevitable fact of Celtic politics from Nineteenth-Century New York to the Kansas City, Missouri, of Pendergast-Truman days.

⁴⁸ Fernando Wood, New York City’s flamboyant mayor at the beginning of the Civil War, went so far as to say “It would seem that a dissolution of the Federal Union is inevitable…. It cannot be preserved by coercion or held together by force…. With our aggrieved brethren of the Slave States we have friendly relations and a common sympathy…. Why should not New York City, instead of supporting by her contributions in revenue two-thirds of the expenses of the United States, become also equally independent?” Connable and Silberfarb, Tigers of Tammany (New York, 1967), p. 134.

⁴⁹ Maps 15 through 18 show the location of the Irish, Italian, Polish, Slavic and French Canadian populations of the Northeast. In New England, the Catholics are concentrated in the major cities and in the factory towns, except for the French Canadians, considerable numbers of whom are dispersed along the United States-Quebec border. The New York City area harbors the great (Italo-Irish) concentration of the Middle Atlantic states. In Pennsylvania, the coal mines and steel towns are the focal point of the state’s Catholic population, which includes the nation’s largest Czech-Polish-Hungarian-Slav bloc.

⁵⁰ The Irish alone among the Catholic blocs generally stuck by Bryan in 1896.

⁵¹ The Republicans did not offer the newly arrived ethnic groups much by way of jobs; they used economic leverage and power and played on anti-Irish feeling.

⁵² Two New Yorkers who epitomized the worst Irish rascal style of the early Twentieth Century were First Deputy City Clerk James J. McCormick, who ultimately accumulated $385,000 in gratuities from couples he married, and Brooklyn Registrar (later Sheriff) James “Peter-to-Paul” McQuade, who banked $520,000 in six years, all money allegedly borrowed here and there to support relatives—“the thirty-four starving McQuades.” Boston and Jersey City had many like them, and all in all, the Irish political opportunists far outnumbered those Celtic officials and legislators actually concerned with economic and social reform.

⁵³ Many Catholic voters split away from the Democrats to back the third-party Progressive candidacy of Senator Robert LaFollette. The Wisconsin Senator’s candidacy was strongest in the Farm Belt, Rocky Mountains and Pacific. However, he also showed some strength in the working-class East.

⁵⁴ Years later, Smith himself recognized how parochial he had allowed himself to appear. His actions are discussed at length in Burner, The Politics of Provincialism (New York, 1968), pp. 180–216.

⁵⁵ Many Irish machine adherents saw politics as a game and as a vehicle of (Irish) group status and power. Social change—the displacement of their interests as well as those of the conservative Establishment—was not their goal. Nor did they like some elements of New Deal welfare legislation. WPA projects, with their familiar patronage and navvy gang overtones, were acceptable, but government-provided social services undermined the position of the political clubhouse as the guardian and benefactor of grateful needy voters. Established Irish Democratic machines were often at odds with the forces unleashed by the New Deal.

⁵⁶ The sharpest Democratic gains came in industrial Pennsylvania where New Deal socioeconomic legislation and the 1934 downfall of the state GOP machine created a good climate for party pickup over the slim, machine-gathered Hoover triumph of 1932.

⁵⁷ Samuel Lubell, Revolt of the Moderates (New York, 1956).

⁵⁸ But while established Irish machines and their flocks often resented New Deal upheaval, things were different in cities of Pennsylvania, upstate New York and New England where the Roosevelt Revolution turned Irish-led Democratic minorities into majorities. In such localities, the Irish were second to none in their applause for the New Deal.

⁵⁹ Lubell, The Revolt of the Moderates (New York, 1956), pp. 52–74.

⁶⁰ In 1941, Truman had said: “If we see that Germany is winning, we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don’t want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances.” Adler, The Isolationist Impulse (New York, 1961), p. 285.

⁶¹ Not all Republicans rode the same impetus: liberal and internationalist Senator Henry Cabot Lodge was defeated in Massachusetts by John F. Kennedy, son of the isolationist wartime United States Ambassador to England, Joseph P. Kennedy. Some pro-Taft and pro-McCarthy Republicans backed Kennedy.

⁶² Even as Eisenhower was achieving a high level of popularity among the Irish, Polish and French Canadian working-class Catholics of Maine, Democratic Governor Edmund Muskie won about 85 per cent to 90 per cent of their votes in the September, 1956 gubernatorial election. Industrial cities like Waterville, York, Lewiston and Biddeford turned in huge Democratic majorities.

⁶³ See Viereck, The Unadjustment Man (New York: Capricorn Edition, 1962), and articles by Hofstadter and Lipset in The Radical Light (Garden City: Anchor Edition, 1964).

⁶⁴ Legislative reapportionment (1954) complicates comparison of 1956 voting with pre-1954 patterns.

⁶⁵ Jewish volatility occurred largely in 1948.

⁶⁶ As Chart 43 shows, most of the leading Catholic middle-class Assembly Districts either voted for Nixon or gave him heavy minority support kept under 50 per cent by the 4-to-l Democratic voting of local Jews and Negroes (usually 10 per cent to 25 per cent of the electorate even in the top Catholic Assembly districts).

⁶⁷ Glazer and Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot (Cambridge, 1963), p. 272.

⁶⁸ J. Daniel Mahoney, Actions Speak Louder (New Rochelle: Arlington House, 1968), p. 28.

⁶⁹ Barry Goldwater won 27 per cent of the vote in New York City. Among Jews, Negroes and Puerto Ricans, who cast about half of the city vote, his level of support was roughly 10 per cent. With 10 per cent strength among the minority-group half of the electorate (giving him 5 per cent of the total vote), he must have won 44 per cent of the votes of the other half of the city (white Christian) to amass, in sum, 27 per cent of the city’s ballots. In outlying middle-class sections of Queens, Staten Island, Bay Ridge and the North Bronx, many Catholic neighborhoods gave solid majorities to the Arizona Senator.

⁷⁰ In 1968, only two Irish Democratic state senators were elected in New York City and suburbs, whereas the same area elected thirteen Jewish Democrats and three Negro Democrats to the State Senate.

⁷¹ The three principal movers of the Conservative Party are its state chairman, J. Daniel Mahoney; his brother-in-law, Kieran O’Dougherty; and Fordham Law School professor Charles Rice. When the Conservative Party mounted its first major campaign in the 1965 New York City mayoralty race, all three of its citywide candidates were Irish Catholics.

⁷² William F. Buckley, Jr. is the most eminent of the Irish conservative intellectuals. With the assistance of several members of his family, he also puts out National Review.

⁷³ The Nixon family hailed from Cork; the Milhous family came from Kildare. Nixon’s 1968 national campaign manager was John Mitchell; his deputy campaign manager was Peter Flanigan. A large number of his domestic and foreign policy research and idea men were Irish.

⁷⁴ As indicated, the New York county showing the sharpest pro-Kennedy trend was Clinton, a rural and small-city (Plattsburgh) county along the United States-Quebec border. Clinton County is the most heavily Catholic in the state.

⁷⁵ For many years, Scarsdale was a caricature of conservative suburbia—the Scarsdale matron jokes, for example. Now it is a caricature of liberal suburbia. The common denominator is Scarsdale’s continuing wealth and fashion.

⁷⁶ New York’s suburban GOP organizations are also becoming more responsive from an ethnic point of view. Italians and Irish are playing an increasing role. The Nassau, Suffolk and Westchester delegations in the state legislature contain the plenitude of Irish and Italians necessary to harness the support of these groups.

⁷⁷ One of the fastest-growing suburban areas in the nation, while not yet a part of the Megalopolis, appears likely soon to extend Megalopolitan boundaries southward. Greater Richmond, Virginia, is expanding very rapidly, as are the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. Before long, the Megalopolis should extend south to Richmond. Since 1960, the suburban Richmond counties of Henrico and Chesterfield have doubled their vote, and there is considerable meaning in the fact that these fastest-growing of all suburban counties from Virginia to Massachusetts were also the least pro-Humphrey. Henrico and Chesterfield are Republican presidential bastions; Nixon won heavy majorities and Democratic candidate Humphrey captured only 15 per cent of the total vote in the two counties.