Assimilation Through Intermarriage

The rates at which residents of Buffalo, New York with Polish or Italian names married partners of similar background were examined for sample years between 1930 and 1960. In-group marriages among Italians fell from 71 percent in 1930 to 27 percent in 1960, and among Poles from 79 percent to 33 percent. The trends indicate a steady and pronounced decline for in-group marriages with a prospect of such marriages becoming rare by 1975. T HE "MELTING-POT" hypothesis pictures the gradual development of a new American society as the various immigrant groups and their descendants venture forth from their original settlements in the population centers and mingle with their neighbors, learning new ways. At the same time it is assumed that the neighbors may "invade" the immigrant settlement and thereby establish a two-way channel of interaction. Some of this interaction results in marriages between members of the differing groups, at first only on a limited scale as "old country" loyalties, language, customs, and physical proximity maintain group solidarity. Subsequently as these barriers are weakened and as economic, transportation, and other factors such as the influx of other foreign groups begin to play a role, the rate of interaction may alter. The rate of interaction is difficult to measure because of the manifold ways in which it can operate. One index of what must be considered a serious and important degree of interaction might be the intermarriage rate. To determine this it would only be necessary to count the number of intergroup marriages year by year, comparing this with the number of intragroup marriages and * The writer is indebted to Dr. Louis Wienckowski for assistance with tabulation of part of the data. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.20 on Fri, 23 Dec 2016 04:50:03 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms ASSIMILATION THROUGH INTERMARRIAGE 149 thereby discovering whether a group is maintaining a solidarity and continuity or whether it is assimilating. To determine the rate of inor out-group marriage, however, proves not to be a simple task. It is first necessary to identify members of such groups, and once we have passed the original immigrant group which could be identified by country of origin, it is difficult to identify second generation and succeeding generations because although they might be considered members of the original immigrant group in some fashion as "hyphen-Americans," and even accept such a designation themselves, there are no reliable sources for such data. They are American citizens in every legal respect and cannot be easily identified as members of any particular subgroup. This lack of ready identifiability does not deter politicians, for example, from appealing to the "Polish vote" or the "Irish vote" or referring to some 6,000,000 Poles in the United States when such a number never came to this country. The possible reality of population voting blocs is not being challenged here. The question that is being raised is: How do you identify a German-American or Italian-American? And, further, how do you discover how many there are to determine a baseline for computing any changes? A possible solution to the first problem and a way of avoiding the second problem without getting into difficulties might exist in the procedure of identifying a person as a member of a subgroup by noting his color, or the church he attends, if we are concerned about his race or creed. If our concern is with national or ethnic origins, the solution is not so easy for all groups but appears feasible if the members of such groups have names that are characteristic of some particular nationality group. On the American scene at least two such groups are available for study, namely the Polish and Italian populations. Practically all Italian names are readily recognizable through their characteristic vowel ending; Polish names, similarly, are detectable through their common "ski" and "wicz" endings. There are, to be sure, many "pure" Polish names that do not have such endings but which are easily recognized by anyone familiar with the Polish group. Sometimes, in cases of doubt, a first name like Stanley or Angelo will confirm the identification. It is proposed, in this study, that some approximation of the minimal rate of assimilation of Italian and Polish subgroups in the American population can be determined by observing the percentage of individuals with Italian and Polish names who marry "inside" and "outside" their respective groups. The procedure of identifying a person as a member of the Polish group or the Italian group by use of name characteristics obviously eliminates from the population anyone who has changed his name beyond recognition as Polish or Italian. It also eliminates children of Polish or Italian females who have already married outside their groups. Such losses from the total population under consideration, however, reflect already completed assimilation, to some degree, and suggest that whatever is learned about the remainder represents a minimum assimilation rate, i.e., the findings cannot exaggerate the situation. It should be pointed out, of course, that children of mixed marriages where the father is Italian or Polish and the mother is not, will falsely inflate the data by inclusion of such "half-Pole" and "half-Italian" people as members of the Polish or Italian groups. Such children might have little or no sense of identification with the father's groups. If it can be assumed that group membership of Poles and Italians can be established by their names, we can attend to the second problem mentioned above: How do you establish their numbers in the population so that rates can be determined? This formidable problem can be eliminated by ignoring the actual totals in any given community and noting only how many members of each group marry in any given period. By comparing the number of those who marry within their groups with the number who marry outside their groups we can establish ratios of such activities even though we have no absolute data on how many individuals make up the total group. If the ratio of marrying out to marrying in increases over the years, we might quite reasonably draw the conclusion that the rate of assimilation is increasing.