32 The nature of American politics
Ethnic politics and multiculturalism
From the early 1930s, minority groups such as Italian-Americans, Irish-
Americans, the Jewish community and blacks tended to vote for the Demo-
cratic Party. The tendency was particularly noticeable in the large cities, but
in 1948 in the small city of Elmira, New York, Berelson and his collaborators
found that, while 81 per cent of the white native-born Protestants voted Re-
publican, only 33 per cent of the Jews, 19 per cent of blacks and 18 per cent
of the Italian-American voters followed suit. Here again, there is an over-
lapping of our simple categories. Minority groups, particularly blacks and
foreign-born immigrants, generally belong also to the lower-income groups.
Nevertheless, Berelson found that the tendency of these groups to vote for
the Democrats was not particularly affected by their socio-economic position.
The significance of such group voting can be very great. In the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries blacks had traditionally been loyal to the Re-
publicans, the party of Lincoln; but Roosevelt’s economic policies, and the
commitment of the Democratic Party at the national level to civil rights, led
blacks to support the Democratic presidential candidates in ever-growing
numbers. Civil rights legislation made it possible for more and more blacks
to get their names on the voting rolls, and as a consequence their electoral
importance, particularly in Southern states, increased dramatically. Thus in
two of the most closely fought elections since the Second World War – the
victory of John F. Kennedy over Nixon in 1960 and of Jimmy Carter over Ford
in 1976 – the allegiance of black voters to the Democratic Party’s candidates
was a vital factor in delivering victory to them. In 2004 88 per cent of black
voters cast their votes for the candidate of the Democratic Party, John Kerry.
Other ethnic groups play less dramatic, but no less significant roles in elec-
toral behaviour.
In the 1950s and 1960s Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy led a cru-
sade against communists in government. Samuel Lubell, in his Revolt of the
Moderates, found that McCarthy’s power base could be traced to those ethnic
groups who were deeply affected by the cross-pressures they experienced
as a result of America’s involvement in two world wars. Lubell showed that
in McCarthy’s home state of Wisconsin there had been a considerable shift
away from the Democratic Party by German-Americans, because that party
was associated with the policy of war against Germany. In 1932 eight largely
German Catholic counties in Wisconsin voted 74 per cent Democratic, but
by 1952 the Democratic vote had dropped to 32 per cent. This change was
reflected in German-American communities throughout the country. Lubell
emphasised that, as the, then, second most numerous ‘foreign stock’, the
German-Americans held the balance of power in many states, especially in
the Mid-West. Such support provided a formidable reservoir of emotion upon
which a man like McCarthy could draw, for these people wished to emphasise
their American patriotism, and at the same time to give expression to at-
titudes towards communism that were related to their religious beliefs. In