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Partisan and Nonpartisan Ballots and Ethnic Populations The Political Incorporation of Portuguese Americans in New England: Partisan and Nonpartisan Ballots and Ethnic Populations Dulce Maria Scott Anderson University Abstract. After a brief examination of structural factors that have been identified in the literature as having an impact on the path of political incorporation of immigrant populations, this paper provides a succinct comparative analysis of the political incorporation of Portuguese Americans in New Bedford, Fall River, Taunton, and East Providence, USA. The political integration and incorporation of Portuguese Americans has been highly successful in some of these cities, while in others the political potential of this population group has not been fully realized. This study also provides a brief, but more extensive, analysis of the election of Portuguese Americans in New Bedford, first to this city’s City Council and second to the Massachusetts Legislative Assembly. This historical study shows that Portuguese political incorporation in American society, among other factors, has been impacted by variable electoral system structures and varying ethnic population dynamics in the four cities examined. Keywords: Portuguese-American politics, Portuguese in New Bedford, New Bedford politics, immigrant political integration, political incorporation of Portuguese Americans In the summer of 2012, while attending a conference in Portugal’s second largest city, Porto, I happened to mention to an educated resident of that city that I was researching the phenomenon of political incorporation of Portuguese Americans into the American political system. To my surprise, the person asked: “Ah, isso na política americana são só um ou dois portugueses, não é?” [Ah, in American politics, there are only one or two Portuguese, right?]. Even though this interrogatory assertion caught me off guard, in reality it reflects what has been until recently a prevalent assumption concerning the level of integration of the Portuguese and their descendants in the United States, that is, that this population group is not well integrated culturally, socioeconomically, and politically in this society.1 In reality, however, there have been few studies that have explored in a scientific and systematic manner the socioeconomic integration and, even to a lesser extent, the political integration and incorporation2 of the Portuguese- 193 194 │ InterDISCIPLINARY Journal of Portuguese Diaspora Studies Vol. 4.2 (2015) American population. A few recent studies (Barrow, 2002; Barrow & Borges, 2005; Bloemraad, 2009; Marinho & Cornwell, 1992; Moniz, 1979; Portuguese American Citizenship Project; Scott & Fraley, 2014) indicate that while in some areas of New England the political integration and incorporation of this population group fell somewhat short of its potential, in other areas it assumed theoretically expected parameters, particularly when one takes into consideration that Portuguese immigrants, for the most part, arrived in this country with low levels of education and were destined to the manual labor market of the American economy (Scott, 2009). Sociologists (inter alia, Portes & Böröcz, 1989; Portes & Rumbaut, 2006; Waldinger, Aldrich, Ward, & Associates, 1990) argue that the historical path of integration taken by any group of immigrants into the host society is influenced by several factors and interactions among them. As I explained in a September 2012 interview with Observatório da Emigração (Scott & Pinho, 2012): Some of these factors are related to the cultural and socioeconomic attributes brought over by the immigrants, including their family structure, their levels of education and occupational skills, and their social class. Yet, of particular causal significance is the interaction of the immigrants’ transposed cultural and structural attributes with conditions found upon arrival in the host society. The latter include the economic opportunity structure, the context of reception (whether or not they are well-received by the dominant and other ethnic groups), and the characteristics of the pre-existing ethnic communities in the host country. All of these factors are also influenced by the evolving political and public policy contexts found upon arrival. A study of the political integration and incorporation of the Portuguese and their descendants in the United States, thus, needs to take into account factors such as the structure of the political systems in the cities of immigrant settlement: if, for example, it is a partisan or nonpartisan electoral system;3 if primary elections are open or whether the candidates are nominated by political parties; the size of the political districts (inter alia, Cornwell, 1980; Marinho & Cornwell, 1992; Pomper, 1966; Wright, 2008); as well as the prevailing political cultures and subcultures within different regions of the United States (Elazar, 1984, 1994), among other variables. As the culture and political systems are molded by the characteristics of the population in areas where immigrants settle, as well as by the level of competition for power among groups of distinct ethnic backgrounds, variables related to the size and ethnic composition of the population of a given political division also need to be taken into account. As stated by Hero and Tolbert (1996): “States’ politics and policies are products of the cooperation, competition, and/or conflict between and among dominant and subordinate (minority) groups, not only of the dominant group(s) within a state” (p. 854). In this study, I take into consideration the impact of electoral structures and population factors in the political incorporation of the Portuguese in four cities, three in Massachusetts (New Bedford, Fall River, and Taunton) and one in Rhode Island (East Providence).4 Dulce Maria Scott / The Political Incorporation of Portuguese Americans │ 195 This study shows that Portuguese Americans historically have not been apolitical, that they have attained varying degrees of political incorporation in different urban contexts, and that such incorporation has been impacted by structural and demographic variables found in the host communities. After some theoretical considerations and a brief overview of comparative data pertaining to the four cities mentioned in the previous paragraph, this article provides a more detailed, albeit brief, analysis of the political incorporation of Portuguese from New Bedford into that city’s municipal government and the Massachusetts Legislative Assembly (also known as the State House and the Massachusetts General Court). Partisan Versus Nonpartisan Electoral Systems and Their Interaction With Population Factors Scholars (inter alia, Cornwell, 1960, 1968, 1980; Dahl, 1961; Glazer & Moynihan, 1963; Luconi, 2004; Marger 1979; Williams & Adrian, 1959; Wolfinger, 1968) have found that the political incorporation of immigrants (e.g., Irish and Italian) in the United States was positively impacted by partisan political systems. Competitive electoral efforts lead political “bosses” to include immigrants in their parties’ voting lists or tickets as a way of attracting the vote of members of new immigrant groups. Further, political parties mobilize the bases to bring out the vote in their favor, a process that results in the coordination and directing of the voting potential of new immigrant groups. In nonpartisan systems, which eliminate the involvement of political parties in the electoral process, newcomers, unable to benefit from the support, resources, and organizational infrastructure of political parties, will encounter overwhelming obstacles in the competition for office against candidates and incumbents from older and more established immigrant groups.5 Thus, as studies have shown, after nonpartisan electoral schemes were put into place during the Progressive Era (1890–1920), the political incorporation of immigrants was substantially reduced in some of America’s major cities (Adrian, 1952; Marger, 1979). In Massachusetts, cities generally adopted nonpartisan electoral systems in the early twentieth century, while in Rhode Island the political machines survived the Progressive Era reforms, remaining influential until the 1970s, particularly those of the Democratic Party (Moakley & Cornwell, 2001). In a comparative analysis of the Sixth Ward in New Bedford and the First Ward in Providence, wards with high Portuguese-American population concentrations, Cornwell (1980) argues that before the adoption in New Bedford of the nonpartisan ballot in 1938, the Portuguese were very successful in winning elections into the City Council,6 being included in ethnically balanced party tickets containing at least one candidate from the four largest ethnic groups in the Sixth Ward (English, French Canadians, Irish, and Portuguese). After 1938, despite running for office, the Portuguese were no longer able to win elections, as the power vacuum left by the exclusion of political parties from the ballot came to be filled by members of a powerful French-Canadian family, the Saulniers. After 1940, members of this family achieved a nearly monopolistic control of the Sixth Ward City Council 196 │ InterDISCIPLINARY Journal of Portuguese Diaspora Studies Vol. 4.2 (2015) seat, and later on also of the Massachusetts House of Representatives seat that included New Bedford’s Sixth Ward within its boundaries. By contrast, according to Cornwell (1980), in Providence’s First Ward, where partisan elections remained the norm, over time, the Portuguese gained complete political control of the First
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