To the Editor:

In “Ethnicity and the Schools” [September] Nathan Glazer notes that the new ethnicity is to be taken seriously in regard to education, and concludes that racism is an inadequate explanation for the features of contemporary ethnic feeling. But even so, he still manages to use the words “racism” or “racist” at least ten times in five pages, and makes additional references to “anti-black prejudice” and to “anti-black backlash.” It is disheartening that at this late date even a comparatively sympathetic social scientist finds that an analysis of white ethnic feeling must begin by distinguishing it from bigotry.

Mr. Glazer seems to think that even an educated audience is ignorant of such data as the . . . 1969 Gallup poll and the 1970 Harris survey. The Harris study for the Urban League revealed that native Anglo-Saxon Protestants are more likely to be anti-black than are Irish-, Italian-, or Polish-Americans. A March 1969 Gallup poll reported that while only 67 per cent of Americans would vote for a Negro for President, 78 per cent of Catholics would so vote. . . . Perhaps Mr. Glazer’s approach might more profitably have begun with the query: When will the rest of America finally become as open-minded as the ethnics?

White ethnic thinking about education, especially higher education, is not a petty side issue for conscientious scholars; demands that white ethnics should not be frozen in an inferior position and ignored are justified. Survey data published by Cornell’s Marshall W. Meyer disclosed that the percentage of students at Mr. Glazer’s own Harvard whose father’s religion was Catholic actually fell between 1969 and 1972.

The respected critic of American society, Peter F. Drucker, calls attention to the hard fact that at least as early as 1970 the relative proportion of young blacks enrolled in college already considerably exceeded the relative proportion of young Italian-Americans and Polish-Americans enrolled. There was even a black president of a major U.S. university (Wharton at Michigan State) before there was the first—and only—such Catholic (McGill at Columbia). If campus pressure on their own behalf from blacks is legitimate, so too is that from Italian- or Polish-Americans. . . .

George Steven Swan
Columbus, Ohio

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To the Editor:

I was somewhat surprised and dismayed to read that Nathan Glazer, the co-author of the distinguished work a decade ago which perceptively rejected the melting pot as describing social process, now apparently fears the undoing of that symbol. As a historian and an organizer of an ethnic-studies curriculum, I believe that Mr. Glazer has exaggerated the dangers of the current ethnic movement and may have mistaken the support that ethnic studies curricula are receiving. . . .

Mr. Glazer, I fear, errs in believing that certain articulate promoters, Michael Novak, Geno Baroni, and others, are group representatives. He may have forgotten that the white nationalities have had their own ethnic leaders, particularly those of group institutions, for a long time. The novel feature of the “new” ethnicity is the involvement of articulate publicists who have only lately become aware of their ethnic identity. Ethnic feeling has had much historical continuity among many groups; it is really quite old. For example, the two major Polish fraternal organizations, the Polish National Alliance and the Polish Roman Catholic Union, have been conducting their affairs for nearly a century with a substantial, though now static, membership. Of course, these and scores of other ethnic fraternal and voluntary associations have provided the superstructure of ethnicity for all that time and more. Thus, this kind of ethnic identification long antedates King’s march into Cicero and Groppi’s assault on Milwaukee’s South Side; it did not arise as a response to these events. This older, more substantial ethnic interest does not seek recognition of its “equal significance,” as Mr. Glazer suggests the “new” ethnics do, but a correction of the established view that its past has been of little or no significance. As a historian of Slavic America (although not Slavic myself), I feel that that demand is fully justified, in fact essential for an understanding of our national experience.

A second comment of Mr. Glazer about Americanization disturbs me even more, in part because of its inaccuracy. He says that “‘Americanization’ . . . was a great achievement . . . despite its harshness and arrogance.” If he is referring to the campaign before and during World War I, the standard historical work on the movement, Edward Hartmann’s The Movement to Americanize the Immigrant (1948), asserts that it was clearly unsuccessful. In fact, it made many groups more defensively ethnic. I can testify to its failure in the case of Slavic-Americans. However, on a more subtle level, “Americanization” has taken place and will continue to be effective, but in a manner which Mr. Glazer criticizes as divisive, not assimilative.

I see no danger and in fact considerable value in our learning about the pluralistic nature of our nation’s founding. Mr. Glazer is concerned that the apparently excessive enthusiasm for ethnic studies will make a number of ethnic heroes in the Revolution as important as Washington, Adams, and Jefferson, thus distorting our history. . . . But, for example, I think it valuable for Polish- and non-Polish-Americans alike to realize that Kosciuszko, Washington’s aide-de-camp, fought for the same philosophical principles as his military superior. From my knowledge, this ability to be “ethnic” and “American” is what ethnic leaders wish to convey to all.

Victor Greene
University of Wisconsin
Milwaukee, Wisconsin

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To the Editor:

I would like to add two points to Nathan Glazer’s fine article.

Presumably Mr. Glazer and I agree on a program that would look something like the following: appropriate reference to various minority groups in the proper context and proportion in grammar-school history courses; some electives available in high school and college; and perhaps advanced specialization available in some, though surely not all, graduate schools.

I would merely like to add that the quantity of courses available might appropriately be in very rough proportion to the sheer size of an ethnic group in a given area of the country. I suggest this in part because the culture and the heritage of the group could be available to members of the group, but in greater part because the rest of the community should have available the resources necessary to understand the culture and heritage of major components of the population. For the City University of New York, for example, not to have a major program in Italian studies is even more unfair to the non-Italians than it is to the Italians.

Second, Mr. Glazer is quite right that none of the ethnic groups is as large as the black community. But there is another minority group in American society, of very substantial size, which also has been the victim of oppression and discrimination, though obviously not as severe as what the blacks have had to endure: the one-quarter of the American population that is Catholic.

Again, my concern is more with the rest of society than it is with the Catholic component. Non-Catholic Americans, elite as well as non-elite, know very little about the Catholic heritage, experience, and culture. The elites seem quite content to settle for the interpretations provided in the New York Times and the New York Review of Books by such observers as Wilfrid Sheed and Garry Wills, observers who offer the consoling information that Catholicism is on the wane. It isn’t.

I am less concerned with fairness—though that is not unimportant—than I am concerned with the harmful effect of ignorance—and it is more harmful in high places than in low.

Andrew M. Greeley
Center for the Study of American Pluralism
University of Chicago
Chicago, Illinois

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Nathan Glazer writes:

The questions I raised in a very brief article deserve more discussion than they could receive there, or in this correspondence: not every topic was raised and not every base covered. Thus, I did not in any way suggest that Americans of non-Anglo-Saxon background are more prejudiced than those of Anglo-Saxon background: I accept the general import of the surveys George Steven Swan refers to, and my concern was to defend the groups of East European and Southern European origin from the charge of pure and simple racism, rather than to support this charge. The thoughtful letters of Victor Greene and Andrew M. Greeley underscore the problem to which I was pointing: how are we to handle ethnic studies in the school curriculum? I think we all share the same objectives: respect for and knowledge of one’s own background, and a sound knowledge of the way different groups have been related to the development of American society. Nor do any of us have a simple solution to the dangers of Balkanization of the curriculum. One point does deserve comment: the American immigrant was “Americanized,” in the sense that a basic cultural pattern (most impressively, a new language) and a common loyalty were successfully imposed. Perhaps this could only have been by the subtle and diffuse influences of American culture: I agree that these influences were crucial in Americanizing the immigrant. But I think certain specific decisions—e.g., to conduct the public schools only in English—must also have played an important role. I was concerned to argue that one influence on such decisions must be to maintain the unity of the American polity.