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Abstract

Threats to interests and values are the basis of inter-group conflicts. This article looks historically at conflict and cooperation in America to reveal the factors and events involved in both. Various groups—Dutch, Irish, blacks, Chinese, Jews, Italians, Hispanics, and others—are discussed, and interminority relationships in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Miami, and elsewhere are analyzed. Competition over political power, jobs, neighborhoods, and cultural values was often an essential element of conflict, as were explosive issues that quickly and forcefully pitted groups against each other. Also a factor in an emerging conflict was a group's insecurity and defensiveness within the larger society, which had often been the result of nativistic or other attacks on the minority. Interminority affairs are complex, involving both the minority groups' perceptions of each other and their treatment by the majority.

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References

1. For a more extensive discussion of competition and conflict, see Ronald H. Bayor , Neighbors in Conflict: The Irish, Germans, Jews, and Italians of New York City, 1929-1941, 2d ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 1-2, 168-169.

2. Thomas J. Archdeacon , New York City, 1664-1710: Conquest and Change (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976), pp. 97-99, 102, 113-115, 142, 145-146.

Sean Wilentz , Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 85-86.

4. Handlin , Boston's Immigrants, p. 178.

5. Mitchell , Paddy Camps, p. 99.

Gilje , Road to Mobocracy, pp. 156-158, 160, 162-168.

7. Iver Bernstein , The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 5.

8. Ibid., pp. 5-6, 9-10, 27-28, 77-78, 113, 120, 123.

Shih-Shan Henry Tsai , The Chinese Experience in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 56-58, 67, 70.

10.

10. Gary R. Mormino and George E. Pozzetta , The Immigrant World of Ybor City: Italians and Their Latin Neighbors in Tampa, 1885-1985 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), pp. 11, 202, 239-247, 256, 319-321.

11.

11. Bayor , Neighbors in Conflict, p. 5.

12.

12. On the German American experience during World War I, see Frederick C. Luebke , Bonds of Loyalty: German Americans and World War I (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974).

13.

an account of the Boston conflict is in John F. Stack, Jr. , International Conflict in an American City: Boston's Irish, Italians, and Jews, 1935-1944 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979).

14.

14. Bayor , Neighbors in Conflict, p. 99.

15.

15. Ibid.

16.

John Higham has noted that in World War I, anti-German hostility took interest away from Catholics: “Instead of invigorating anti-Catholicism, anti-Germanism stole its thunder.” See his Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (1955; reprint ed., New York: Atheneum, 1965), p. 201.

17.

Maurice Berube and Marilyn Gittell , eds., Confrontation at Ocean Hill-Brownsville (New York: Praeger, 1969), pp. 5, 13-15, 163.

18.

18. Ravitch makes the connection between the Irish-Protestant school conflict of the 1840s and the black-Jewish one of the 1960s. Ravitch , Great School Wars, pp. 31, 34-35, 40, 45, 48, 57, 61, 67-68.

19.

ibid., 1 Sept. 1989; ibid., 3 Sept. 1989; ibid., 4 Sept. 1989.

20.

20. The tensions in the Miami area are described in Raymond Mohl , “On the Edge: Blacks and Hispanics in Metropolitan Miami since 1959,” Florida Historical Quarterly, pp. 37-40, 42-48, 50-55 (July 1990).

21.

21. Bayor , Neighbors in Conflict, p. 1.

Historical Encounters: Intergroup Relations in a “Nation of Nations”

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