Pursuing the American Dream: White Ethnics and the New Populism. By Richard Krickus. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976. Pp. xv + 424). 12.50,cloth;12.50, cloth; 12.50,cloth;3.95, paper.) (original) (raw)

1978, American Political Science Review

White ethnicity seems to have caught on as a subject of serious writing Richard Krickus's Pursuing the American Dream-like Michael Novak'i The Rise of Unmeltable Ethnics, and Irving Howe's World of Our Eathers reflects the growing attention of sociologists and historians toward the immigrant experience of those millions of Americans neither WASP nor blacl who have occupied so uneasy a place in the liberal perspective. Indeed, th« genesis for the Krickus book was the ignorance about working-class Americans, specifically those of southern and eastern European descent, which he encountered among the presumably enlightened Washington bureaucracy ol the Johnson Administration. Himself descended from the second wave ol European immigration-after the Irish and Germans, and after 1880-Krickus attempts to correct the view prevalent in liberal circles since the midsixties that working-class Americans represent at best Archie Bunkers-simple-minded if harmless in their support ofthe war and their opposition to reform-and at worst northern, hardhatted versions of rednecks. Krickus argues that a myopic folly led such liberals, notably those responsible for the McGovern campaign, to calculate that, like the rednecks, working-class ethnics were no longer essential to Democratic presidential aspirations. He scarcely hides his scorn for the "Cosmopolitan-Left" who felt that their party could and should at last purge itself of the embarrassing ethnic remnant of an older, dirtier, but now happily expendable politics. Krickus pretty evenly divides his attention between the unfairness of the way white ethnics have been viewed and treated, and the mistake of excluding them from a key role in the national Democratic Party. He describes those main ingredients which have produced dominant white ethnic attitudes toward American society and politics. From their first arrival from Russia, Italy, or Poland, the ethnics experienced the scorn and exploitation ofthe already-established nativists. The pressure for Americanization, which grew strident during World War I, produced a feeling of displacement among first-and second-generation ethnics: a self-consciousness about their origins coupled with a guilty pride in a heritage they could not easily cast off. Krickus suggests that liberal scorn for ethnic loyalty to the political machines ignores the historical reality of an America in the late-nineteenth and earlytwentieth century hostile to the newly-arrived immigrants, where usually the only source of reliable information and aid was the local party hack, whose friendliness and concern understandably commanded the newcomer's loyalty at election time. Where socialists and other radicals proved too dreamy or intellectual for the poor working immigrant, and where basic social services