FOREIGN BORN AMERICANS 397 



THE POLITICAL MIND OF FOREIGN-BO UN AM KIM CANS 



I'.v ABBAU LIPSKY, I'n.D. 



.N'KW YOIlK CITT 



AN election i jrchological experiment on a larr."' scale. The 



trouble with most elections, however, as psychological tests, is 

 that the questions submitted are vague, complex and variously under- 

 stood. If one could put a simple and unequivocal question such as 

 "Are you in favor of capital punishment?" or, "Do you prefer co- 

 operative to family housekeeping ?" the answers might be of great 

 informative value as to the mind of the population. If such questions 

 could be submitted, it would then he interesting in analyzing the returns 

 to look for the influence of economic, social and racial factors. 



The City of New York, as it happens, is an excellent laboratory for 

 studying the responses of several foreign nationalities. There are, 

 according to the Thirteenth Federal Census, 340,765 Kalians in New 

 York who were horn in Italy, 484,189 foreign-born Russians, 278,114 

 foreign-born Germans, 252,662 Irish, horn in Ireland. These national- 

 ities are not evenly disfrihuted over the area of the city. Here and 

 there exist communities as large as good-sized cities composed almost 

 entirely of people of one nationality, and these communities constitute 

 distinct political units, to the extent that a ward or an assembly district 

 is a distinct political unit. Thus there were in the eighth assembly dis- 

 trict in 1910, 51,438 foreign-bom Russians; 83.8 per cent, of the males 

 of voting age were foreign-born and naturalized ; only 2. ."3 per cent, were 

 native horn, of native parents. In the third assembly district there 

 were 33,531 foreign-born Italians; in the sixteenth there were 9,144 

 Irish from Ireland; in the third district of Queens County there were 

 15,548 Germans horn in Germany. We are thus enabled to pick out 

 districts in which one or other nationality largely predominates and 

 from the election returns can determine how the district voted upon 

 every candidate or proposition submitted. 



Candidates are- hut Tarely propositions. Only when they are 

 does an election take on the character of an experiment in social 

 psychology. Now, the election of November, 1913, was one of the 

 rare sort. The issues were clear, simple, unequivocal, understood 

 very generally in the same sense. The propositions for which 

 the candidates stood might have been formulated as follows: 

 CI) Are you in favor of government hy an organization such as 

 Tammany? (2) Are you in favor of Socialism ? (3) Do you read the 



