ABSTRACT

In American pluralist politics, groups have only mattered insofar as they have wielded political clout. In the Democratic party, Polish-Americans helped shape an entire era in American politics. The new ethnic politics produced a fresh wave of mobilization and organization among groups like the Poles. In some places, the new ethnic politics did revive interest in interracial coalition-building. The new ethnic politics criticized the middle-class Lockean individualism enshrined in American law, promoted new forms of social and economic organization, and advanced a new concept of rights. The National Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs, however, mingled class and ethnic positions together to sketch out a political vision that departed from both the reactionary politics of "backlash," which attempted to do the same thing, and the hierarchical, formalistic, bureaucratic pattern that has evolved since the New Deal. The Polish Guardian Society, for example, sued actor Burt Reynolds for anti-Polish material that appeared in The End, a motion picture in which he starred.