Word: irishness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Black candidate as a means of advancing their political presence in city, state, and federal politics they are not committing a racist act--anymore, say, than are Jews who vote as a bloc to elect New York state's first Jewish-American governor (Herbert Lehman in 1932), or Irish who vote as a bloc to elect the first Irish-American governors of Illinois (Charles Deneen--1905, Edward Dunne--1913), or Boston Irish who vote as a bloc to elect the first Irish American governor and U.S. Senator in Massachusetts (David Walsh after World War 1). Such ethnic-bloc voting...
...example, after nearly two generations of ethnic subordination by Boston's WASP elites, the political empowerment of Irish-Americans dictated Irish ethnic-bloc voting for Boston's first Irish mayor--Hugh O'Brien in 1884--who was followed by other Irishmen like Patrick Collins and John "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald. But this Irish breakthrough to political parity did not exclude WASPs from the mayorality of Boston. The reason for this is that the inclusive pluralism of American political culture--a democratic pluralism that encourages inter-ethnic power sharing--militating against political exclusivism and ethnic-oligarchy tendencies. So that in 1917 "Honey...
This viewpoint implies that Afro-Americans, as they achieve greater parity of political and social status with whites, are somehow less capable of responding to the norms and rules of American politics inclusive pluralism than Jews, Italians, Irish, Poles, Greeks, and other ethnic groups. It is, alas, precisely this attitude toward Blacks that sparked the pathetic pandemonium in Chicago's Democratic party--a pandemonium skewed toward barring Chicago's Blacks from parity of political status with whites, and as such warrants the label "racist". When ethnic-bloc voting seeks to exclude groups from political and social parity it is then...
Conversely, the white ethnic wards, which have voted solidly Democratic since William ("Big Bill") Thompson was elected the last Republican mayor in 1927, went heavily for Epton. In the Polish-Irish-Russian 13th Ward on the Southwest Side, Epton took 34,856 votes to Washington's 1,457. Even the famed Eleventh Ward of Bridgeport, the bedrock Democratic base of the late Mayor Daley, voted overwhelmingly Republican. Holding the electoral balance were the city's six affluent "Lakefront Liberal" wards. Undecided until the very end, they finally gave Washington 40% of their vote, enough to assure...
Certain ethnic groups, Vaillant found, are collectively maladaptive. Irish men in the study generally grew up in families where alcohol was forbidden, drinking took place apart from meals and away from home, and male drunkenness was tacitly admired. The Irish in the survey also became alcohol dependent seven times as frequently as the Italians, who as children learned that drunkenness was frowned on and drank with family groups and with meals (thus diminishing the addictive effect of the alcohol "high"). To Vaillant, these sharp differences (which are also true of the more alcoholic Northern Europeans as contrasted to moderate Jews...