8. The thinly veiled policy of license advanced by the Tammany candidate did not draw them from Mr. Hearst, though he vigorously condemned license and its advocacy.
And Mr. Bennet added, “these things have been proved concerning the immigrant. Without going into specifications, which are, however, well understood locally, these things are not proved”:
1. That he always votes for a fellow countryman or a coreligionist.
2. That he can be invariably stampeded by a race or religious issue.
3. That he votes blindly.
SOME RESULTS FROM CLEVELAND
It is impossible to forecast the working out in our politics of the passions aroused by the World War among the various racial groups by the relations and enmities of their respective fatherlands in that vast turmoil, and the effects of the behavior of native-American elements toward particular races, and even toward “foreigners” generally. It is evident that for any intelligent understanding of what, in the long run and under approximately normal conditions, are the political attitudes and activities, we must derive our facts largely from an earlier period—at least antedating the armistice and the bitter conflicts growing out of the Peace Treaty and the partisanship characterizing the controversy about the League of Nations which so greatly confused the issues in the presidential election of 1920.
A series of elections in the city of Cleveland, Ohio, in the period between 1911 and 1918 seemed to offer opportunities for study of a number of large racial groups under reasonably normal conditions. It is not claimed that this Study was conclusive in its results or fully scientific in its method; but it certainly produced a significant exhibit of facts, and in general confirmed what is known to everyone who ever has worked With or candidly observed at first hand the part played by the foreign-born voter in American politics—namely, that he is in no important respect different from the native-born; that he is swayed by the same motives and emotions, and is not essentially different in respect of responsiveness to appeals to his civic pride.
The first step was to select for study a group of election precincts including as large a proportion as possible of the various nationalities, and for comparison another group of districts which would show the action of native-born voters. Ten of the latter were selected, including populations both relatively wealthy and relatively poor, and both habitually Republican and habitually Democratic. For foreign-born racial groups the following were selected as most important: Czechs, Magyars, Poles, Jugo-Slavs, Italians, and Jews. Owing to the scattered nature of the racial distribution, it was impossible to find a large number of districts predominantly of any particular race; but it was possible to segregate three for each of these races, and four for one, for comparison with them of the native born; so that 29 precincts were studied, as follows: