A Nation Turns Its Lonely Eyes to You

This is a bit besides the main point of Robert L. Fleeger's essay on ""Theodore G. Bilbo and the Decline of Public Racism, 1938-1947", but it's a pretty striking example of the past being a foreign country:

Furthermore, elites often expressed or ignored other forms of bigotry. Anti-Italian sentiment, while less acceptable than anti-black sentiment, could still be seen in major news publications before the war. Indeed, this rhetoric appeared in descriptions of the most popular Italian-American of the day, New York Yankees star Joe DiMaggio. In May 1939, Life wrote, “Although he learned Italian first, Joe, now twenty-four, speaks English without an accent and is otherwise well-adapted to most U.S. mores. Instead of olive oil or smelly bear grease he keeps his hair slick with water. He never reeks of garlic and prefers chicken chow mein to spaghetti.” The article also included a picture of DiMaggio with Joe Louis, captioned “Like Heavyweight Champion Louis, DiMaggio is lazy, shy, and inarticulate.”

Speaking personally, I would be a bit frightened to call a championship boxer "lazy."

Comments

And just WTF is "bear grease"?

Posted by Traven | November 23, 2007 12:46 PM

Lazy? Joe wasnt so lazy when it came to breaking off a piece of that Marilyn Monroe poontang,I betcha! Fuggettaboudit!!

Posted by joshrandall | November 23, 2007 12:50 PM

Important on the race-'n'-intelligence front to remember that "white" as currently constituted is a very recent category -- certainly less than a century old, as this article makes clear.

And in another 50 years, when the name Diaz sounds the same as DiMaggio, people will be having the same past-is-a-foreign-country response to our current immigration debates.

Posted by lemuel pitkin | November 23, 2007 12:54 PM

And just WTF is "bear grease"?

You'll find that it collects--in liquid form--in the bottom of the roasting pan whenever you cook a bear.

Posted by rea | November 23, 2007 12:54 PM

In fact, I'm pretty sure that the largest KKK mass-lynching in American history involved the deaths of something like 20-odd Italians in Louisiana in the early 1920s...

Based on everything I've read, the racial/ethnic status of Italians and Mexicans during that period was pretty similar, both being regarded as being "sort-of" white. Interestingly enough, the white-racialists of that era generally had much, much more favorable things to say about Mexicans than about Italians...

Posted by RKU | November 23, 2007 1:19 PM

also lol@chicken chow mein being an example of 'american food,' while spaghetti is foreign.

Posted by yoyo | November 23, 2007 1:28 PM

Thanks for the article, which provides fodder for a little Faulkner interpretation as well.

In The Sound and the Fury, Caddie's daughter runs off with a carnie worker. Her malevolent brother Jason keeps thinking about the guy's neckwear:

So when I looked around the door the first thing I saw was the red tie he had on and I was thinking what the hell kind of a man would wear a red tie.

The article MY quotes has this about Bilbo:

Alan Brinkley described Bilbo’s manner: "Stripped to his shirtsleeves, wearing a flaming red necktie with a diamond stickpin ...."

I find it difficult to believe that Faulkner didn't know perfectly well what kind of man was known for wearing a red tie, and that he wasn't satirizing Bilbo as a carnie-style politician. (This may be a staple of Faulkner interpretation, of course; I just read the novels, I don't study 'em.)

Posted by Anderson | November 23, 2007 1:32 PM

Bear grease made a natural pomade. It is very stiff and waxy at room temperature, but turns to a thin liquid when warmed slightly.

Your higher end products, like "Dapper Dan", contained seal oil. I'm sure the inferior and smelly "Fop" contained bear grease.

Posted by Njorl | November 23, 2007 1:35 PM

In a slightly alternate world, there's a Stephen Sailor who spends his time going on about the genetic inferiority of Italians, and praising the crackpot 'scientists' who provide fodder for these fantasies. I feel for the poor folks commenting on that-world Matt Iglesias' blog, and elsewhere, who are subjected to that . . .

Posted by Dan S. | November 23, 2007 1:39 PM

And in another 50 years, when the name Diaz sounds the same as DiMaggio, people will be having the same past-is-a-foreign-country response to our current immigration debates.
Posted by lemuel pitkin

In a dialogue conducted in Spanish in Hispanic majority areas in Los Estados Unidos. Much as with Quebec..

Sicilians like DiMaggio had a tough roe to hoe. Harder than most immigrants. More illiterate, less skilled, Mob tainted..Even fellow Italians sniffed at them - proud that Italy was as good as any other country in the north, but as their saying went: "Italy is all downhill once you go south and see Naples."

Posted by Chris Ford | November 23, 2007 1:54 PM

"And in another 50 years, when the name Diaz sounds the same as DiMaggio, people will be having the same past-is-a-foreign-country response to our current immigration debates."

What makes you think that? Mexicans have been in America longer than Italians and they are still thought of as under-achieving minorities. I guess the difference is that Italians worked their way up to into professions and business and became successful and Mexicans haven't.

Posted by Harry | November 23, 2007 1:59 PM

@yoyo

Well, Chicken Chow Mein in its current form was invented in America, after all. Most of what passes for "Chinese" out here was invented in California. Until recent waves of immigration brought more old country authenticity, most "Japanese" food was Californian too, and most "Mexican" was German-Mexican fusion from Texas.

Posted by Senescent | November 23, 2007 2:02 PM

And while its pairing with heavy sauce and lots of meat is a distinctly Italian-American thing, spaghetti itself had a history in Italy, unlike chow mein in China. (Though if you trace back far enough, it, too, is ultimately based on native Chinese noodle dishes.)

Posted by Senescent | November 23, 2007 2:07 PM

I don't think chicken chow mein is offered in that excerpt as American food, just un-Italian. The belief that Italians just hang out in their reeking enclaves speaking Italian and eating spaghetti just drips off of the quoted paragraph like bear grease. And it's self-evidently the same prejudice exhibited by Chris Ford, who seems similarly perplexed by the notion that any person of Mexican ancestry would speak English if not forced to.

Posted by neil | November 23, 2007 2:12 PM

Mexicans have been in America longer than Italians and they are still thought of as under-achieving minorities. I guess the difference is that Italians worked their way up to into professions and business and became successful and Mexicans haven't.

Care to include any facts to support your purported explanation for why you and your comrades think of Mexican-Americans as under-achieving, at least compared to Italian-Americans? How many Italian-Americans are in the professions and business, as compared with how many Mexican-Americans? And if we're going to do apples-to-apples comparison, presumably we should compare Italian-Americans and Mexican-Americans whose families have been here for roughly the same number of generations, or beyond a threshold number of generations. So please, by all means, share some facts.

Also, do you consider Irish-Americans under-achieving minorities as compared with Italian-Americans?

The wide world of America is a wonderful place; I recommend you get out and see it, my friend.

Posted by Jeff | November 23, 2007 2:41 PM

My mother has told me about the time in the 1950s she and her mother got hassled by the Chicago police because they were Italians passing through a "white" neighborhood, and therefore suspect.

Ah, Machine-era Chicago.

Posted by cminus | November 23, 2007 2:43 PM

"Sicilians like DiMaggio had a tough roe to hoe."

Sicilians hoed fish eggs? Who knew?

Posted by Joel | November 23, 2007 2:44 PM

Actually, I think it's very easy to imagine a slightly different reality in which we have a Tom (Tomas) Tancredez running for President on the single issue of saving America from being swamped by the dusky hordes of Southern Italy...

That's also why those Latino activists who recently protested their "exclusion" from the Ken Burns series on WWII showed themselves to be so ridiculous and so totally ignorant of history. First, very, very few Latinos served in the U.S. military back then---probably not much above 1%---since the Latino population was so tiny. But those who did serve were regarded as being just as "white" as anyone else, unlike (say) the Japanese or the blacks who were placed into segregated units.

Anyway, Latinos didn't even exist back then, since they were only "invented" during the Nixon Administration.

As a further example of what I'm talking about, it's amusing to note that all during the conservative "white-bread" 1950s, the overwhelmingly most popular show on television involved the humorous escapades of a certain "mixed-race" couple...

Posted by RKU | November 23, 2007 2:58 PM

Love this bit from the article

On May 24, 1938, Bilbo formally proposed legislation to return blacks to Africa. During a floor speech on the proposal, he rejected new social science theories that suggested that environment rather than genetics determined an individual’s capabilities

“It is the height of folly,” he insisted,
“to assume that environment, discipline, education, and all other external devices can affect the blood, smooth down inequalities between
individuals of the same breed, much less between different breeds, or transmute racial qualities.”

Interesting to see how American punditry tolerated racists without comment in the 40s.

Posted by Ikram | November 23, 2007 2:59 PM

"He never reeks of garlic and prefers chicken chow mein to spaghetti."

...And when ordering at a restaurant, he rarely shouts, 'I want more iced tea, MFer!'

Posted by Grumpy | November 23, 2007 3:23 PM

I like the idea that spaghetti was this un-american foreign food

Posted by Eric | November 23, 2007 3:28 PM

"Care to include any facts to support your purported explanation for why you and your comrades think of Mexican-Americans as under-achieving, at least compared to Italian-Americans?"

In the words of a regular commenter here:

In reality, we've had sizable Hispanic communities in the United States since the 1840s, such as in the Upper Rio Grande River valley of New Mexico. That state has long been the most Hispanic in the nation.

So how is New Mexico doing after seven generations of Hispanic assimilation? On Meet the Press recently, Tim Russert gave New Mexico governor and Presidential candidate Bill Richardson an unfairly hard time that said less about the politician than about his constituents:

"They rank states in whole variety of categories from one being the best, 50th being the worst. This is New Mexico’s scorecard, and you are the governor. Percent of people living below the poverty line, you’re 48. Percent of children below, 48. Median family income, 47. People without health insurance, 49. Children without health insurance, 46. Teen high school dropouts, 47. Death rate due to firearms, 48. Violent crime rate, 46."

Richardson has his faults. But not turning New Mexicans into Minnesotans isn't one of them.

Similarly, East Los Angeles has been heavily Mexican since the Mexican Revolution.
PBS reported:

"Its present day population also has been one of the most entrenched and stable communities of the greater Los Angeles area over the past 50 to 75 years. East Los Angeles is … the
largest Hispanic community in the United States."

East LA is not Detroit -- which the forest is partly retaking -- but hardly is it New Jersey, which the Ellis Island immigrants have made into one of the most successful states in the country.

Here's a good test of the chestnut that Mexican immigrants are going to turn out just like the old Jewish immigrants: Long ago,East LA had a Jewish immigrant community, which arrived about the same time as its Mexican immigrants.
According to

PBS, in East LA after WWI:

"In many instances, Jews and Mexicans went to school together, played sports together, traded with each other, and particularly among the left wing thinkers, met and organized together."

For some reason, though, eighty years later, the descendents of East LA's Jewish immigrants are living in Beverly Hills and Malibu, while the descendents of East LA's Mexican immigrants are in Van Nuys or still stuck in East LA.

Posted by Harry | November 23, 2007 3:40 PM

Harry you idiot did you ever paus to wonder why Juarez, El Paso, Sante Fe, Las Vegas, San Diego, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Monterey, the Sierras, Salinas, Santa Cruz, the Presidio in San Francisco and Sacramento all ended up with Spanish names? These towns and were all established by Spaniards from Mexico decades and sometimes centuries before the fist Italian fisherman showed up in Alta California. You could look up mission history, examine how royal land grants came into play and then look into the aftemath of the Mexican War that attached these areas to the US or you could look like a racist ignoramus. The upper levels of early Spanish settlement simply assimilated long before secondary influxes of more mestizo based laborers came in. Did you ever to pause to think why almost all major California cities and many smaller ones and a lotof major roads and highways have Spanish names?

Try 1560's and not 1840's for Spanish migration to the SW and California. Come on try something beyond the cartoon version here.

Posted by Bruce Webb | November 23, 2007 5:04 PM

I have not read the article yet so I may be repeating a point, but there were at least two significant events 1938-47. One was WWII, but the other was what Paul Krugman calls the "Great Compression", the massive decline in levels of economic inequality. All three stories (war economy, lowering inequality, and the decline of racism)continued for a decade or so after WWII.

I could not begin to prove causal connections between the three events/trends if any exist.

Posted by bob mcmanus | November 23, 2007 6:17 PM

But I do believe causal connections exist. I suppose we should look at WWI and the post-war economic policies and the post-WWI nativism/racism before saying that war unites a people. And maybe there are examples of gov't policies promoting economic & political egalitarianism & inclusion that had strongly divisive/tribal effects, although I can't think of any.

Posted by bob mcmanus | November 23, 2007 6:34 PM

"Sicilians like DiMaggio had a tough roe to hoe."
Sicilians hoed fish eggs? Who knew?
Posted by Joel

Got me, Joel! Though I add that DiMaggio was the son of a Sicilian fisherman that did sell all the fishroe they got.

*****************************

RKU - That's also why those Latino activists who recently protested their "exclusion" from the Ken Burns series on WWII showed themselves to be so ridiculous and so totally ignorant of history. First, very, very few Latinos served in the U.S. military back then---probably not much above 1%---since the Latino population was so tiny. But those who did serve were regarded as being just as "white" as anyone else, unlike (say) the Japanese or the blacks who were placed into segregated units.

Not so hot on history, RKU, though you do get dibs for recognizing that "Hispanic" is an artificial race construct invented by the two Jewish lawyers Nixon appointed to start up EEO and create policy. Mighty impressive. Jews are so influential they can create a whole race or two from nothingness. Imagine though how peeved various Pacific Islanders are about being the wrong sort of Pacific Islanders when Racial entitlements are handed out. Samoans, yes, Tahitians, no. Hawaiians yes, Japanese and Filipinos - no! And of course the two lawyers classic "Native Americans" are born in America or Canada ruling. Which has 98% black "Indians" running Casinos and getting filthy rich on their "native poker and slots tradition as wise stewards of the environment and gaming halls - while full-blooded Native Americans from Guatemala and Mexico clean their Casino's toilets and wash dishes.

*****************************
Burns twists history in ignoring Hispanics, who had more Spanish-surnamed people in combat, more medals than blacks, barred in most cases from combat or other frontline jobs did....But as expected, Burns does his usual PC about how great the black combat contribution was and how they almost won the war with the ever-so-predictably showcased Tuskagee Airmen who where 4/100ths of 1% of the men the US had in air squadrons.
I think more medals went to Puerto Ricans than to blacks, and next to Native Americans, and West Virginians, SW Hispanics had the highest volunteer rate of any ethnicity. Jews and West Coast Japanese ethnics, the lowest.

The truth is that Japanese who did serve on our side were treated as fellow Americans without hindrance on jobs or career promotion except for a "deal" where Command wanted them under white officers...which they almost already had, being mostly led by college-educated white Hawaiians. At no time were any Chinese, Filipino, or Japanese ethnics subjected to segregation in the military. Nor were there any Jim Crow Laws that applied to Orientals on or off base. They were accepted into the officer corps and generally thought they were credited as their work merited. There was discrimination - Filipinos were slotted in as stewards and messboys by Navy tradition and had to work harder for more coveted slots, and with some chinese-americans, who hated Japs more than white Americans, were sometimes beaten up by racist whites and blacks.

Posted by Chris Ford | November 23, 2007 7:11 PM

Citation, please, on the volunteer rate of Jews in WWII. According to the Jewish Virtual Library, Jews constituted 3.3 of the US population during the war and 4.2 percent of the armed forces. http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/US-Israel/ww2jews.html

Posted by Bloix | November 23, 2007 7:28 PM

Chris Fraud, the scummiest racist of them all. Filled with a determinisation to spread racism everywhere. The scummiest of the scummy, Chris Fraud.

Posted by Jennifer | November 23, 2007 7:38 PM

Bruce Webb,

Spaniards aren't Mexicans. Please educate yourself as to the differences. Thanks.

Posted by Harry | November 23, 2007 7:40 PM

Well, I'd hardly claim to be a huge expert on the WWII era. But I'd really be surprised if the Hispanic percentage in the American military was much above 2-3%, which I thought was the upper bound of their national percentage at the time. If you can produce a source contradicting this, I'd gladly stand corrected.

As for the Japanese, I'll admit I always vaguely assumed that they overwhelmingly served in all-Japanese units (with white officers) such as that famous Regimental Combat Team in the Battle of the Bulge. But if I'm wrong about that, I also stand corrected.

But my main point was that for those Latino activists to fault Burns for "ignoring" the Latino contribution to WWII is a little like Italian activists faulting him for "ignoring" the Italian-American role in the Civil War---there were very, very few Italians living in America during the Civil War, since they mostly started arriving a generation later.

Anyway, I haven't actually seen Burns' series, so I can't judge its quality otherwise.

Posted by RKU | November 23, 2007 7:42 PM

Hey, Moron RKU, Puerto Ricans were subject to the draft in both World Wars and fought with great distinction. OK, just to start with Moron?

Posted by Jennifer | November 23, 2007 7:53 PM

Well, Jennifer, I already said I wasn't a huge expert on the WWII period. But remember that PR's population is pretty low, and was (I suspect) relatively much lower back then.

I'm perfectly prepared to admit that my casual 2-3% upper-bound estimate for America's Latino population back then might be wrong if you can find a source so indicating, as I already mentioned to Chris Ford.

Since you and Chris Ford like each other so much, maybe you can team up on this particular project...

Posted by RKU | November 23, 2007 8:16 PM

It should also be remembered that we also fought a white supremacist system (at least in the European theater), which obviously then was defined as the enemy. You don't want to be like one of your country's worst enemies, do you? Not wanting to be like the Nazis did help shift the debate a little bit toward a more tolerant outlook over time.

"As a further example of what I'm talking about, it's amusing to note that all during the conservative "white-bread" 1950s, the overwhelmingly most popular show on television involved the humorous escapades of a certain "mixed-race" couple...

Posted by RKU | November 23, 2007 2:58 PM"

Ironically, Desi Arnaz was almost bumped off by the mob because we was a creator and producer of "The Untouchables," but the hit got botched.

Posted by Reality Man | November 23, 2007 9:05 PM

Wow, Harry, I thought when you said

I guess the difference is that Italians worked their way up to into professions and business and became successful and Mexicans haven't

you were going to offer some evidence for that claim, rather than some entirely other claim, which is what you seem to be talking about. I was all ready to discuss what the causes of the facts you were going to adduce were. But then, you didn't offer any facts to support your contention. Oh well. Somehow I suspect you don't even get the basic ways that one makes observations and then seeks to explain them. Instead there's just some totally unsupported and almost certainly completely imprecise observation about Italians and Mexicans; followed by some disconnected quotations from someone else about New Mexico, East LA, and Jews.

Posted by Jeff | November 23, 2007 9:38 PM

Well, RKU, according to Wikipedia: "Hispanic Americans comprised 2.3% to 4.7% of the Army. However, the exact number is unknown, as at the time Hispanics were integrated into the general white population census count. Separate statistics were kept for African-Americans and Asian-Americans." So, while Hispanics weren't a massive part of the US military, they were something substantially higher than around 1% of the soldiers (which was your initial guess). Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispanic_Americans_in_World_War_II

Also, Ken Burns really dropped the ball on this point because the Hispanic civil rights movement was really galvanized by World War II and its aftermath. The leading Hispanic civil rights group for years was a group called the GI Forum that was composed of WWII vets. The war probably had an even bigger effect on the Hispanic civil rights movement than that of African-Americans, but that's a debate for another time. For a guy who is so interested in looking at how WWII affected American society, Burns's initial omission of how it affected Hispanics was a pretty big omission. I don't think his omission was done for racist reasons, however. I think it's just a matter of Burns being an East Coast/Upper Midwest sort of guy with a blind spot for such matters (which are of bigger salience in the Southwest), and a certain degree of auteur hauteur when he was called on it.

Posted by Mark in Houston | November 23, 2007 9:51 PM

Further, regarding professional advancement, one thing to keep in mind is that unlike other groups, Hispanics in the US (particularly in the Southwest) include people who have been here for many generations and people who quite literally just got here. If you look at areas in which there has been a big historical Hispanic presence and a comparatively lower amount of discrimination (such as the Rio Grande Valley of Texas and parts of New Mexico), you'll see that among people who have been here for many generations, the level of professional advancement is pretty high. There's no shortage of Latino doctors, bankers and lawyers in Laredo, for example. There also is no shortage of unskilled Mexican immigrants, either, which affects the general numbers.

And, for what it's worth, I'm a Hispanic lawyer in Texas whose family has been in Texas since the 1700s, so I'm somewhat familiar with the history of this place.

Posted by Mark in Houston | November 23, 2007 9:58 PM

Mark in Houston:

Thanks for locating that 2.3%-4.7% estimate of Latino participation in WWII, which seems perfectly plausible. It also would be roughly consistent with my vague 2-3% population estimate of that era, since the rate of Latino military service was probably high then, just as it is today. And I'd certainly realized that the casual 1% figure I'd thrown out was certainly low the moment it was first challenged.

I'll admit I never dreamed there'd be a Wikopedia entry on this exact question. Some people are clearly much more experienced at Internet data-mining that other people...

And that's also a very fair point about the crucial social impact of WWII in sparking the creation of the GI Forum after that burial controversy in Texas.

I'd also certainly agree upon the difficulty of accurately analyzing Hispanic socio-economic advancement, given the various different waves of immigration. Another factor is that quite a lot of longest-established segment is so thoroughly assimilated that very few people even realize they're Hispanic, e.g. Raquel Welch or James Jesus Angleton, the eccentric top-ranking CIA leader, whom I only very recently discovered was apparently half-Mexican.

Posted by RKU | November 23, 2007 10:24 PM

Jeff,

How about this? Since you are the one with the obviously false premise (that Mexicans have succeeded in America to a comparable extent with Italians), how about you provide the evidence of that?

The success of Italian-Americans is pretty obvious in this country. As the piece I quoted from noted, New Jersey (which is heavily populated by Italian-Americans) is one of America's most successful states. Italian-Americans are ubiquitous at the highest levels of business, culture, law, etc. in America. On the contrary, Mexican-Americans have been laggards for generations. See pages 12-13 of this PDF from Harvard for statistics illustrating this.

Posted by Harry | November 23, 2007 10:31 PM

RKU writes: "I'd also certainly agree upon the difficulty of accurately analyzing Hispanic socio-economic advancement, given the various different waves of immigration. Another factor is that quite a lot of longest-established segment is so thoroughly assimilated that very few people even realize they're Hispanic, e.g. Raquel Welch or James Jesus Angleton, the eccentric top-ranking CIA leader, whom I only very recently discovered was apparently half-Mexican."

You can add Ted Williams to the list if you're compiling one. I doubt he was counted as "Hispanic" when the WW2 participation totals were being done, but his mother was Mexican, though sources differ as to whether she was born in Mexico or in El Paso.

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | November 23, 2007 11:45 PM

Oh brother. Harry, this is flatly false, if you had been able to read my previous comment:

Since you are the one with the obviously false premise (that Mexicans have succeeded in America to a comparable extent with Italians)

I'm trying to figure out what you're arguing exactly, and why. But you can't even seem to state clearly what it is you're arguing. The claim I would offer in direct contradiction to your original claim is that in fact Mexicans have indeed worked their way up into business and the professions - perhaps not in the numbers or at the rate we would like, but they have, and to the extent that it's not in the numbers we would like, the next question is, why. And you haven't even begun to give an account of why - and forgive me if I don't take seriously the deranged arguments of that sometime serious social scientist Samuel Huntington, or his rather misleading presentation of data in graphic form.

Let me put it as straightforwardly as I can: I don't think you understand or are interested in the concept of causality.

We could try again, if you want to address my question of whether you consider Irish-American an underachieving minority, and if so, why?

Posted by Jeff | November 24, 2007 12:40 AM

I don't know about the earliest Mexican migrants, but the generational trends for immigrants now is anti-assimilation, or perhaps regression to American ghetto norms. America makes them worse. Crime, illegitimacy and welfare dependency all consistently go up from the first generation to second and from second to third. Education does go up from the first generation to the second, but goes down from second to third, indicating a plateau rather than catching up.

Posted by TGGP | November 24, 2007 2:11 AM

A site that frequently posts information from the General Social Survey by ethnic group (and so could compare Italians to Hispanics/Mexicans) is the Inductivist.

Posted by TGGP | November 24, 2007 2:13 AM

Jeff,

This sentence of yours clearly implied that you believed Mexican-American achievement was comparable to that of Italian-Americans:

"Care to include any facts to support your purported explanation for why you and your comrades think of Mexican-Americans as under-achieving, at least compared to Italian-Americans?"

As even you seem to acknowledge now, Mexican-Americans, as a group, have under-achieved Italian-Americans. So there's no point arguing something you apparently concede.

"and forgive me if I don't take seriously the deranged arguments of that sometime serious social scientist Samuel Huntington, or his rather misleading presentation of data in graphic form."

Your ad hominem attacks on Huntington don't challenge the data; he didn't make it up. The data come from the U.S. Census Bureau and a research paper called "Mexican Immigrants, Mexican
Americans, and American Political Culture" by Rodolfo O. De la Garza, Angelo Falcón, P.
Chris García.

"Let me put it as straightforwardly as I can: I don't think you understand or are interested in the concept of causality."

I didn't bring up causality because it wasn't relevant to my initial, implicit point. Since you many not have grasped it then, I'll make it explicit: opinions of one-time under-achieving groups have changed in America when those groups became successful in this country. The Chinese, for example, were once derided as coolies. That changed and Chinese climbed the ladder of economic success. Italians and Irish did the same. Mexicans, for the most part, haven't.

If you want me to explain why Mexican-Americans haven't done as well as Ellis Island immigrants, I don't know the definitive answer. Occam's Razor suggests that their lower average IQs are a factor; culture may play a part as well (having children early and having many of them, thus reducing parental investment per child; lack of enthusiasm for education, etc.).

"We could try again, if you want to address my question of whether you consider Irish-American an underachieving minority, and if so, why?"

I don't consider the Irish an underachieving minority because they aren't one. 150 years ago, I might have had a different opinion of them, but today they are successful and self-sufficient, on average. Mexican-Americans, on the other hand, are an underachieving group: 41% of fourth generation Mexican-Americans don't have a high school degree. Do you see the difference between them and Irish and Italians?

Posted by Harry | November 24, 2007 5:32 AM

Harry, I'd really like to see those numbers broken down by region as well as generation. As I mentioned earlier, a big issue regarding professional advancement is the issue of discrimination. In some parts of the country, Mexican-Americans were subject to heavy racial discrimination, and the lack of education and professional advancement that generally goes with discrimination, while in other parts of the country they didn't suffer from discrimination as much (though such discrimination did exist). I suspect the 4th-generation education numbers are better in El Paso than they are in East LA, for example.

Lack of professional advancement or education can be attributable to discrimination, among other factors. It's a complicated story. For example, one of the ugly secrets about this sort of thing in Texas is that one of the reasons why Hispanics have done better here than in other states (like California) and have less militancy in their politics than other states (again, like California) is because in Texas, the worst discrimination was reserved for another group - African-Americans. The foul legacy of the Old Confederacy, and all that. For example, Hispanics were allowed (in limited numbers and in not-always-friendly environments, however) to go to Texas universities like Texas A&M and the University of Texas for decades before African-Americans were allowed to. Factors like this make a one-size-fits-all ethnic analysis problematic at best.

Also, let's remember that Italian-Americans originally emigrated en masse into the most urban and urbane parts of the country, and as such education was more important for advancement from day one than would be the case had they emigrated more rural, agricultural parts of the country, as Hispanics generally have until recently. I would love to see the education numbers of, for example, Hispanic ranchhands vs. those of rural white Southerners, for some interesting context.

Last, as pointed out above, a lot of Hispanic numbers may be watered down by the fact that lots of people of Hispanic descent don't necessarily identify heavily as such, either in self-identification or the identification of others. The Raquel Welch and James Jesus Angleton examples are good ones, as well as possibly (I'd need to know more about his personal life experience) the example of the legendary American liberal online pundit Matthew Yglesias. (Okay, he's part Cuban, not part Mexican, but you get the point.)

There's a joke among Latinos - there are no rich Mexicans in the US, because Mexicans turn into Spaniards when they get rich. Sometimes jokes tell you more than statistics.

Posted by Mark in Houston | November 24, 2007 10:46 AM

"Imagine though how peeved various Pacific Islanders are about being the wrong sort of Pacific Islanders when Racial entitlements are handed out. Samoans, yes, Tahitians, no. Hawaiians yes, Japanese and Filipinos - no! "

Again, I think, we get back to one of the reasons that some folks find Saletan-style musings on race and IQ so convivial . . .

Posted by Dan S. | November 24, 2007 11:15 AM

I'd certainly agree that Mark in Houston's analysis is much, much closer to the reality than that of Harry. But I think his impression of the situation in California---my home state---is a little distorted.

One thing many people don't realize is just how extremely recent California's "Hispanicization" actually is. For example, today's CA population is probably close to 40% Latino, but as recently as 1970 it was just 12% Latino, and probably below 10% for most of the previous decades.

Although the state was originally heavily Hispanic during the mid-Nineteenth Century, the total population was minuscule and almost completely swamped and assimilated by waves of Anglo immigration during the following century. Nearly all the pre-1970 CA Latinos actually trace their origins to the big immigration wave following the Mexican Revolution (hence they actually arrived a generation after most Italians) but even that wave wasn't all that large.

Although there's certainly been some history both of anti-Latino discrimination in CA and of Latino "militancy," I'd personally argue that both these phenomena are actually pretty small factors which have been enormously exaggerated by the media.

And if you filter out those CA Latinos who've arrived as poor immigrants within the last thirty years---that is, the vast majority of them---the others have moved up the socioeconomic ladder reasonably well, doing better than some other ethnic groups and not as well as others.

Even the most recent immigrants are actually doing pretty well by some historical measures. For example, as I'd previously noted in another thread, it's really quite interesting that crime rates in gigantic and very heavily Latino immigrant working-poor Los Angeles have now fallen to their lowest point in *fifty* years, matching where they stood when the city was almost 90% white-European and America's greatest "suburban paradise."

Posted by RKU | November 24, 2007 11:36 AM

I have a comprehensive cookbook from 1943 with a recipe for spaghetti in the foreign food section. And about the same year, my mother's girlfriend married an Italian man, and Mom says he wanted spaghetti for a side dish with every dinner, even with Thanksgiving turkey and cranberry sauce.

Posted by Joyful Alternative | November 24, 2007 11:42 AM

Mark,

You're on pretty weak ground when you attempt to bring in Matthew Yglesias (one quarter white Cuban, three quarters Ashkenazi Jew) as an example of a successful Mexican-American. The numbers speak for themselves; perhaps they are slightly less awful in Texas, but 41% of 4th generation Mexicans not having graduated high school is atrocious. There's no way to put a positive spin on that.

Discrimination is also a weak excuse: every college admissions officer in America would salivate over the prospect of accepting and throwing scholarship money at a brilliant, motivated Mexican-American, precisely because they are so rare. So would every corporate HR exec. Also, Mexican-Americans often dominate the local political machinery of their communities, as you know, so they often discriminate in favor of themselves in government employment, and against other minorities (e.g., blacks -- this is pretty common in Southern California now).

RKU,

As Steve Sailer has pointed out, illegal immigrants often have lower crime rates than natives -- they tend to be older than peak criminal years, and they are afraid of getting deported. Their children are totally different -- second-generation Mexican-Americans commit crimes at about 3 times the white rate (though still less than half the black rate).

Posted by Harry | November 24, 2007 2:22 PM

Harry:

I'd actually be a little careful in using "statistics" without investigating them a little...

Take the Los Angeles example I cited. You say that the American-born Latino crime rate is *three* times the white rate. Do you really believe that only a small fraction of LA's Latinos are American-born? Most of the LA area's Latino immigrants arrived as young adults maybe 20-25 years ago. By an amazing coincidence, the public schools have been jammed and heavily Latino for maybe 15-20 years. Have all those young Latinos vanished once they reached "crime-age"? But otherwise how could the overall crime rate be so low?

Here's another reality check. The most heavily Latino-immigrant large cities in America include El Paso, Santa Ana, and Anaheim, which have been that demography for decades. By an amazing coincidence, these are also among the lowest-murder/lowest-crime large cities in America. Do all the American-born Latino children in those cities also just "disappear" once they reach the "crime years"? Or is it just that Latinos in those cites don't have children?

Posted by RKU | November 24, 2007 2:56 PM

Exactly what RKU said. The Latino crime rate is around 4% (lower than whites) and the illegal immigrant crime rate is 2.5% (just about the lowest for any group of people). When someone starts citing Samuel "blacks like South African apartheid because of lots of telephones... oops Soweto just happened" Huntington and Steve Sailer as sources on immigration, they're not to be taken seriously.

Posted by Reality Man | November 24, 2007 3:23 PM

Harry doesn't know fuck-all about New Mexico. Hispanics in New Mexico occupy all socio-economic strata, and are equally represented in the business leader class.

The numbers that Russert quotes are merely the sorts of numbers that one finds in the poorest US states—which are not exclusively minority-laden. West Virginia's whites are comparable. This is a function of the socioeconomics of development, not ethnicity.

By the way, the Hispanics of Northern New Mexico have been here for 400 years, it's the anglos who are the newcomers and the US, the occupying nation. Not that most aren't proud Americans—not the least reason being that they were never really Mexicans, being loyalists to the Spanish crown during the Mexican revolution.

Posted by Keith M Ellis | November 24, 2007 4:08 PM

RKU, I apologize not knowing at first how you were thinking. California, by the way, for decades prohibited inter-racial marriage. For many Hispanics, the point was to be Anglo when possible.

Posted by Jennifer | November 24, 2007 4:36 PM

Suppose, for a brief moment, that "Mexicans" (by which I think Harry means anyone speaking Spanish) haven't assimilated as well as Italians or anyone else, and that the stats hold up. A stretch, I know, given that we have to ignore a lot of the Western states and the entire Hispanic middle class... but let's say it's right. Pretend with me.

Shouldn't the fact that most of the Italian immigration was over at the turn of the last century and "Mexican" immigration is still ongoing, plus the fact that education is more important to middle class success than it was when my Sicilian grandfather dropped out of eighth grade, account for most of the difference? It was easier to get ahead two generations ago. One could do it buy dropping out of eighth grade and delivering produce for the next 50 years. The fact that that's no longer possible is an indictment of something, but not the so-called "Mexicans." You got a long way to go before you can start blaming it on genetic inferiority.

One wonders if people today, had they lived in the thirties, would have lamented about how they were being overrun by Italians and their foreign spaghetti. They don't respect our laws, the Mob enforces it, they'll never assimilate.

Posted by Cala | November 24, 2007 4:51 PM

Cala, we've got data on multiple generations of Mexican immigrants. I posted links earlier. You can call it assimilation if you want, but it's the reverse of what happened to Italians. That's the difference. If you've got data telling a contrary story, link to it.

Posted by TGGP | November 24, 2007 9:03 PM

The article itself gives insufficient play to the role of Communists, Communist front organizations, and communist sympathizers in unseating Bilbo. The author seems to take for granted that we all know what it meant to run with Henry Wallace for President, and makes only brief citations to the recent literature on the Cold War and civil rights. It is not just that the communists and their firends (no small number in those years) advocated unseating Bilbo, but that civil rights supporters had to compete with the communists on thsi issue for both foreign and doomestic reasons.

It would be interesting to know what these same coomunist-linked civil rights crusaders made of the Slansky trial and the Doctors' plot.

Posted by Michael Kochin | November 24, 2007 9:28 PM

RKU, while the media may have overblown Hispanic discrimination and radicalism in California, my impression from people who are from there is that both issues are stronger there than they are in Texas. But that is of course an issue of degree, based on where one is, I'd imagine.

Harry, first of all, I think I made it clear that my little comment about Matt being a member of the new Mexican overclass was a joke. That having been said, he is one of your new Hispanic overlords, and you for one should welcome them.

There are two separate points at issue here - professional advancement among (i) Mexican-Americans whose families have been here for many generations and (ii) Mexican-Americans whose families have been here for one generation or less. Frankly, the massive amount of people in column (ii) pretty much covers the general issue of lower education levels so as to make discussion of column (i) somewhat inconsequential when it comes to trends regarding Hispanics as a group (as RKU points out with his discussion of the massive demographic changes in California, the newcomers may be swamping the old-timers, but that would also make the comparisons between Italians and Mexicans even less relevant), but if we are going to focus on column (i), as you did, we have to talk about the present effects of past discrimination and who is in that demographic group. While it's great that HR managers and college administrators in 2007 are "salivating" at the prospect of bringing in Latino prospects (what a lovely mental image, nothing like a warm tongue-bath), the fact is that in much of the US, Latinos who have been here for many generations were kept out of the educational and economic mainstream in many parts of the country. If you are going to look at this issue seriously, you have to keep that in mind and make distinctions accordingly. People who can look back and see doctors and lawyers in their US-born families (such as Latinos in Laredo) are more likely to focus on educational and professional advancement than those who do not (such as those in places where Latinos weren't allowed to advance similarly), and act accordigly. If working hard and getting an education won't help you much in the end, you're unlikely to focus on that as a goal. That's also not to mention all sorts of other complicating issues, like the ones I mentioned above about identity and assimilation, rural vs. urban issues, or one other big issue - racial breakdowns and disparities within the Hispanic community itself regarding professional and social advancement (i.e.: the position of white Hispanics in the social pecking order vs. those of mestizo descent).

In other words, it's a hell of a lot more complicated a topic than can be understood by just doing a simple Mexicans vs. Italians comparison. Now go eat a taco and relax.

Posted by Mark in Houston | November 24, 2007 11:05 PM

"Suppose, for a brief moment, that "Mexicans" (by which I think Harry means anyone speaking Spanish)"

I have been perfectly clear here in referring specifically to Mexican-Americans. Either you have trouble with reading comprehension or are deliberately trying to obfuscate the issue by conflating Mexicans with more successful Spanish-speaking groups (e.g., Cuban-Americans).

"Shouldn't the fact that most of the Italian immigration was over at the turn of the last century and "Mexican" immigration is still ongoing, plus the fact that education is more important to middle class success than it was when my Sicilian grandfather dropped out of eighth grade, account for most of the difference?"

What part of this sentence don't you understand?:

41% of Fourth Generation Mexican-Americans don't graduate high school.

Is it the fourth generation part? That refers to Mexican-Americans whose families have been in this country since their great grandparents arrived ~100 years ago, i.e., their great grandparents got here the same time that most Italian-Americans' great grandparents did. That's an apples-to-apples comparison, and one in which the fourth generation Mexican-Americans woefully lag fourth generation Italian-Americans.

"When someone starts citing Samuel "blacks like South African apartheid because of lots of telephones... oops Soweto just happened" Huntington and Steve Sailer as sources on immigration, they're not to be taken seriously."

Huntington's data came from the U.S. Census Bureau. Your ad hominem attacks on this Harvard professor won't make the data change. They are reality-based, unlike your delusions.

Posted by Harry | November 25, 2007 1:37 AM

"Harry, first of all, I think I made it clear that my little comment about Matt being a member of the new Mexican overclass was a joke. That having been said, he is one of your new Hispanic overlords, and you for one should welcome them."

Nice head fake, but Matt is of my Jewish overlords. Matt isn't alone among Jewish intellectuals in strenuously opposing realism in discussions of IQ and race. As Steve Sailer pointed out:

"My observation over the last couple of decades has been, going back to Gould's Mismeasure of Man and Kamin, Lewontin, and Rose's Not In our Genes, that while most of the talk is about the white-black IQ gap, among those who take the lead in demonizing realists, most of their angst, anger, and underlying agendas are actually driven by concerns that the masses will learn about the Jewish-gentile IQ gap, which would cause them to pick up their torches and pitchforks and stage pogroms across America. It's the kind of triple bankshot reasoning that intellectuals take seriously -- If James Watson is not allowed to mention race and IQ, then the process of discovering that Jews tend to be smarter than gentiles can't get underway! -- not realizing that 90% of the people who have never heard of James Watson roughly understand the reality already (e.g., listen to what arrested mafioso and rap stars say about which kind of lawyer they want)."

Posted by Harry | November 25, 2007 2:06 AM

Harry:

I'd personally be a little skeptical about that claim that 41% of 4th generation Mexican-Americans don't graduate high school. What's the source for it?

As for the economic advancement of recent Latino arrivals, there was an extremely interesting op-ed in the NYT a couple of months ago by Doug Besharov (one of the holdovers from the pre-insane AEI). He noted that the poverty rate of Hispanics in America had dropped by one-third in just the last 12 years alone, which really is quite striking, while median Latino family incomes had risen by 20% in real terms during that same period.

These improvements are especially remarkable when we consider that they occurred despite the very large continuing influx of initially impoverished newcomers into this population group, which would heavily depress the average. Here's the link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/01/opinion/01besharov.html?_r=1&n=Top/Reference/Times%20Topics/Subjects/I/Immigration%20and%20Refugees&oref=slogin

But you can find the same sort of analysis from very different sources as well. For example, if you visit VDare.com, a leading anti-immigrationist website, you'll see numerous columns by Ed Rubinstein arguing that a hugely disproportionate share of American economic gains in recent years have been captured by Latino immigrants.

Now this might or might not be a valid reason to oppose immigration---obviously native-born workers aren't thrilled by this situation---but it does paint a very different picture than the claim that Latinos are trapped in a "cycle of endless poverty."

Posted by RKU | November 25, 2007 10:56 AM

"I'd personally be a little skeptical about that claim that 41% of 4th generation Mexican-Americans don't graduate high school. What's the source for it?"

The source is the U.S. Census Bureau, as I've mentioned in this thread a couple of times before.

Posted by Harry | November 25, 2007 6:01 PM

The source is the U.S. Census Bureau, as I've mentioned in this thread a couple of times before.

But you don't provide a link. I'm skeptical about this statement, but if you have the data, show it, and I'll believe it.

Posted by Dave | November 26, 2007 9:56 AM