Geoff Russ: Royal visit a timely reminder of America’s British roots

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In the half-century that preceded Roosevelt’s speech, the industrial expansion of America that followed the Civil War, along with the spread of railroads and western settlement, brought in vast numbers of immigrants from Europe.

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Between 1870 and 1900, 12 million of them arrived, transforming older American cities like New York, Boston and Philadelphia. People from Italy, Ireland and Eastern Europe permanently altered the American electorate. They formed labour unions and started replacing the moral and political assumptions of the country they had arrived in. Urban political machines took advantage and harnessed them into ethnic voting blocs in New York City and elsewhere.

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Boston, once the citadel of Protestant “Yankee” New England, became known for its Irish-Catholic politics and culture, and that reputation has endured to this day. Anglo-America did not vanish overnight, but it did start retreating into its private clubs and universities like Yale and Harvard, while ceding politics to the newcomers who could outvote it in droves.

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The culmination of this shift was the 1932 presidential election and the arrival of the New Deal, ironically led by Theodore Roosevelt’s cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, or “FDR.” Catholic immigrants in New England and New York City overcame the WASP establishment to help give FDR the first of four dominant electoral wins.

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It was telling that the states most resistant to FDR and the New Deal were rural states in the Northeast, still very much the preserve of the Revolution’s colonial stock. Two of these were Maine and Vermont, the only states to vote against FDR in his 1936 re-election campaign, one of the most lopsided in American history. To this day, Maine and Vermont are among the least diverse states in the Union.

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Italian Americans were an especially strong force in FDR’s New Deal coalition, and made their mark on local political machines and labour politics. Research on historical immigration has found that immigrants from Continental Europe who had been previously exposed to the ideas of redistribution and proto-welfare-state politics were highly amenable to the social democracy of FDR’s New Deal.

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Arguably the most important Italian American politician of FDR’s time was New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia, who was a strong proponent of the New Deal despite being a Republican.

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The son of Italian immigrants, La Guardia greatly expanded government-run public housing and made alliances with labour. Even today, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, himself an immigrant, has held up La Guardia as a role model.

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In 1908, author and playwright Israel Zangwill popularized the idea of America as a “melting pot,” a theology that declared that America could no longer be defined by its heritage but by those who moved to it from abroad.

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Theodore Roosevelt’s idea of Americanization as the process of consciously becoming Anglo-American fell by the wayside. Even by 1924, less than 44 per cent of white Americans were of colonial heritage. By 1980, self-identifying British-Americans were 32 per cent of the American population. In the 2020 American census, less than 12 per cent of Americans identified their background as solely British.

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John F. Kennedy, soon to be America’s first Irish-Catholic president, even published a book titled “A Nation of Immigrants” in 1958.

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Another way to examine the fall of Anglo-America is through the lens of popular culture. The Western films of the 1940s and 1950s that celebrated the heroic American cowboy on the frontier gave way to prestige pictures about Italian American gangsters, such as The Godfather and, later, Goodfellas, the stories of immigrant sons and the desire for material wealth. Michael Corleone took the place of John Wayne.