White ethnic

Many came to provide labor for the industrial growth of the Northeast and Midwest, and multitudes of immigrants from non British or non-Germanic Protestant backgrounds settled in the nation's growing cities.

[citation needed] Separated from the ruling class by blood, religion and economic circumstances, white ethnics retained a strong and distinct sense of identity from the majority culture.

Historian and reformer Andrew Dickson White lamented that, in American cities, "a crowd of illiterate peasants, freshly raked from Irish bogs, or Bohemian mines, or Italian robber nests, may exercise virtual control.

[9][10] In the 1950s and 1960s, suburbanization caused many young ethnics, many of whom were veterans, to leave the city and settle in the nation's burgeoning suburbs with the hope of rising into a higher economic class.

[citation needed] White ethnic ward heelers dominated the Democratic political machines of America's major cities throughout the first half of the 20th century.

The ward heelers were often Irish Catholics in close alliance with those of other ethnicities, such as Ashkenazi Jews and Italians in New York City and Polish-Americans and other Eastern Europeans in Chicago.