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The New Deal Realignment and the Italian-American Community of Philadelphia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Stefano Luconi
Stefano Luconi
Affiliation:
Stefano Luconi is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at the Third University of Rome, Department of American Studies, piazza della Repubblica 10, 00185 Rome, Italy.
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Extract

The formation of the New Deal coalition has been the subject of much scholarly discussion, as have the theories of voting behaviour which have informed that discussion. This essay seeks to investigate both the history and the theory. First, it analyses the timing and mechanics of the participation of Philadelphia's Italian-Americans in the Roosevelt coalition. Italian-Americans were a key component of the Democratic majority nationwide, and as pre-New Deal Republican bailiwicks that began to turn Democratic in the 1930s, Pennsylvania and Philadelphia are ideal settings to study the forging of the Roosevelt coalition not only on the federal but also on the state and local level. Secondly, the essay tests some hypotheses about the New Deal realignment. It suggests that none of the standard hypotheses convincingly explains what was happening in Philadelphia's Italian-American community in the 1930s and 1940s.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 28 , Issue 3 , December 1994 , pp. 403 - 422
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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References

1 Philadelphia voting statistics offer no ethnic breakdown. A sample of the Italian-American vote has been made by including the voting divisions where Italian-Americans were at least 80 % of the registered voters and no other ethnic group had more than 10% of the remaining registrants. The ethnic concentration of voting divisions has been identified through a name check conducted on the incomplete collection of the Street Lists of Voters (held by Philadelphia City Archives) and checked against census tract data and school district information for the missing years. The row votes by division have been obtained from the Annual Reports of the Registration Commission for the City of Philadelphia for presidential, gubernatorial and local elections; from The Pennsylvania State Manual (Harrisburg: Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, 1927)Google Scholar for the 1926 senatorial contest; from the Manual of the City Council of Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Dunlap, 1935)Google Scholar for the 1934 senatorial race; from The Pennyslvania Manual (Harrisburg: Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, 1931 and 1939)Google Scholar for the 1930 and 1938 senatorial elections; and from the unpublished tabulation sheets of the Philadelphia County Board of Elections (held by Philadelphia City Archives) for the remaining elections and all the primaries. Such row votes have been converted into the percentages which appear in table I. All the other percentages of the Italian-American vote also refer to the above-mentioned sample. For pioneer but outdated research on the voting behaviour of Philadelphia's Italian-Americans, see Maiale, Hugo, “The Italian Vote in Philadelphia between 1928 and 1946” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1950)Google Scholar.

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15 See the series of thirty articles Davis wrote for the North American Newspaper Alliance and published in Philadelphia in EB from 19 May to 21 June 1924.

16 OP, 9, 14 June 1929; South Philadelphia, 19 Apr. 1930.

17 OP 13 Dec. 1929.

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42 It has been assumed that each voting division had the same relief rate which is ascribed by the 1940 Census to the tract it belongs to. Table II assembles the voting divisions of the sample under the census tract in which they are included.

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