ATTEMPTS TO FIND THE “FOREIGN VOTE”
It is exceedingly difficult to identify the part played in any particular election, or in elections generally, by foreign-born voters. Political leaders and others who make analyses of election returns have their theories and prepossessions, and find in figures what they want to find, to defend policies, support theories, and sustain positions generally. In the presidential election of 1920, this was especially evident. Those who supported the Republican ticket and platform and those who supported the Democratic; those violently opposed to the League of Nations and those devotedly in favor of it—alike found in the election returns, manipulated to suit their views, sustenance for argument as to the part played in the result by this, that, and the other racial group or political faction. Even the Socialists, whose basic theory is the most definitely declared of all political theories, find in a growing vote evidences of wide acceptance of their doctrines; in its shrinkage merely the desertion of mere protestors or sentimentalists who really do not understand Socialism at all! Personal prejudice and predilection exhibit themselves notoriously in political figuring. The process usually consists of more or less gratuitous assumptions, from which one may prove statistically—whatever he wants to prove.
An exceptional instance of an attempt to analyze an election without preliminary bias appears in a study of “The Political Mind of Foreign-born Americans,” contributed by Dr. Abram Lipsky to Popular Science Monthly several years ago,[169] in which he undertook by analysis of the election returns from a number of Assembly Districts in Greater New York, predominantly of a certain racial complexion, to infer the attitude of those racial groups on certain subjects. But it is clear that the inferences, however they may have been justified by the figures from this election, were based upon questionable assumptions. Still more important, it is altogether fallacious to assume that in another election, wherein the issues were stated differently or the general political atmosphere was different, these very districts, these very individual voters of whatever race, might not vote quite otherwise. A state of mind among the Italian-born voters, provoked, for example, by their understanding of the attitude of Mr. Wilson on the subject of Fiume, might produce Republican votes in one election; whereas a year later, in an election in which their interests at home or abroad were believed by them to be otherwise affected, their votes might be overwhelmingly Democratic.
One of the questions which Doctor Lipsky undertook to answer from the election figures was whether the voters in the selected districts “read the Hearst papers regularly.” He inferred his answer from the vote cast in those districts for the candidates which happened to be favored by the newspapers owned by William Randolph Hearst. But the basic assumption was fallacious, overlooking entirely the notorious fact that repeatedly elections in New York City have been won in spite of the opposition, or lost in spite of the support, of virtually the entire newspaper press of the city. As logically might one assume from any election that the vote, pro or contra, on any subject represented the circulation of some particular group of newspapers whose views the election indorsed.
Nearer the probabilities, but still subject to the same kind of discount, is Doctor Lipsky’s generalization as to the showing of one election on the subject of the attitude of certain racial groups as regards Tammany Hall and Socialism. This analysis is not without a certain degree of general significance.
Doctor Lipsky’s conclusion that “native-born Americans of American parents are opposed to Tammany government” is based upon a comparison of figures from districts predominantly of native Americans, in the elections for governor in 1910 and for mayor of New York in 1913, his primary assumption being that the candidacy of Judge Edward E. McCall for mayor embodied “Tammany” pure and simple, while that of John A. Dix for governor did not make “Tammany” a state issue. From this point of view Doctor Lipsky interprets the fact that the percentage of votes for McCall in those districts was strikingly lower than those for Dix in the state election of three years before:
TABLE XXXVII
Per Cent of New York City Vote Cast for McCall in 1913 and Dix in 1910 by Voters of Native Parents
| Assembly District | Per Cent of Native Parents | 1913 McCall | 1910 Dix | |
| 15th | Manhattan | 45.3 | 33.7 | 58.1 |
| 19th | “ | 40.0 | 33.2 | 52.3 |
| 25th | “ | 44.1 | 35.3 | 48.4 |
| 27th | “ | 51.5 | 37.6 | 55.8 |
| 4th | Queens | 41.3 | 31.1 | 46.2 |
| 17th | Brooklyn | 45.6 | 24.7 | 43.6 |
| 11th | “ | 38.0 | 34.9 | 50.5 |
| 18th | 39.0 | 28.3 | 46.3 | |
| 5th | 38.1 | 25.3 | 44.1 | |
| 10th | “ | 38.6 | 36.6 | 53.3 |