Oral Histories of Italian Americans in the Great Depression

I talian 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 creating the Democratic majority that dominated U.S. politics for two decades until the Republican Party regained the White House with Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952. The timing in the shift of the political allegiance of Italian Americans from the GOP to the Democratic Party during the interwar years is well known and has been largely documented by analyses of election returns. Broadly speak- ing, voters of Italian ancestry began to desert the Republican Party between 1928 and 1932, consolidated their new Democratic allegiance in 1936, and went back, in part, to the GOP in 1940. 1 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.