Italian Americans and the New Deal Coalition

Abstract

With an estimated eligible electorate of nearly four million potential voters nationwide in the prewar decade, Italian Americans were a key component of the coalition of ethnic groups that elected Franklin D. Roosevelt to the White House in 1932 and contributed to the creation of the Democratic majority that dominated U. S. politics, at least in presidential contests, for roughly two decades (Mott ; Jensen). Conventional scholarly wisdom usually has it that most Italian Americans shifted thei...