In October 1984, less than a month before Election Day, the New York Times travelled to Cleveland, Ohio, to gauge political sentiment amongst the city's “ethnic” voters.Footnote ¹ These descendants of southern and eastern European immigrants – many traditional Democrats – had demonstrated surprising support for Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party four years earlier, and were again expected to be crucial to the election's outcome in a major industrial swing state. National political figures, including Democratic vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro – the first Italian “ethnic” on a presidential ticket – were flocking to the city to meet ethnic leaders, hold photo-ops in the city's ethnic restaurants, and secure the vital “ethnic vote.”Footnote ²

However, the “ethnic vote” seemed oddly elusive. Instead, the Times discovered in Cleveland a heterogeneous constituency, riven by cleavages of age, occupation, class and geography. In the West Side market and Slavic Village neighbourhood, older residents or those laid off by the city's steel mills and auto plants decried Reagan's impact on white ethnic concerns. But in the streets of rejuvenated Murray Hill or the city's suburban shopping malls, small-business owners and real-estate brokers, themselves of European ethnicity but often younger or more removed, spatially or emotionally, from their heritage, dismissed traditional partisan or ethnic affiliations as irrelevant. Those still employed in the auto and steel industries, shrugging off the recent layoffs, noted the growing availability of overtime work and increased disposable income, confessing, “You vote for who gives you the most, whether he's a Democrat or a Republican.” Many explained their changing political loyalties using a middle-class, conservative language of low taxes, opposition to welfare, individual aspiration and hard work, self-identifying as homeowners or taxpayers rather than workers, Catholics or “ethnics”: “We've had to work hard all our lives for everything we have, and don't like to see things given away to people who don't really need it,” declared small-business owner Cindy Kowalczyk. Thirty-four-year-old steelworker John Chaya personified the new ethnic conservatism. “I got tired of the Democrats being bleeding hearts,” Chaya told the Times. “It got to the point where it was bleeding me.” By contrast, “the Republican Party is more sensitive to the needs of the guy in the middle.” Explaining his own interests in highly individualized terms, devoid of ethnic content, Chaya was certain of why and for whom he was voting. “Things are good for me on the job. My taxes haven't been raised … I'll stick with Reagan.”Footnote ³ In November, large numbers of Cleveland's European ethnic voters followed his lead, helping Reagan improve on his strong 1980 showing in Cuyahoga County and contributing to the Republican capture of the state.

What had happened to Cleveland's “ethnic vote”? Why did many “ethnic” voters articulate their increasingly conservative electoral preferences in such nonethnic terms? And why were these trends so pronounced in a traditionally Democratic city known for its diverse European ethnic communities?Footnote ⁴ The answers to these questions lie in the guise of an unlikely figure: Ralph J. Perk, Republican mayor of Cleveland from 1971 until 1977. Perk – the “Ethnic Mayor,” as the Washington Post labelled him in 1973 – utilized his Eastern European heritage to mobilize diverse European ethnic communities behind his mayoralty.Footnote ⁵ Despite his underwhelming record in office and inability to halt Cleveland's slide towards fiscal crisis, Perk won three successive elections during the 1970s, reversing decades of Democratic hegemony in the city; established a powerful political organization built upon ethnicity; and converted many once-Democratic white ethnic voters to the Republican cause. To do this, Perk offered a new and transformative ethnic discourse, couched not in traditional indicators of ethnic distinctiveness or particularism but in the universalist language of property, work, neighbourhood and individual achievement and aspiration, which captured the changing landscape of Cleveland – and the changing meaning of ethnicity – during the 1960s and 1970s. In this way, Perk's reconfiguration of ethnicity opened white ethnic Clevelanders up to the Reaganite conservatism which would sweep through urban white constituencies – and much of the nation – in subsequent decades.

Although less substantial than the historiography of postwar Sunbelt conservatism, the rightward shift of working- and middle-class urban ethnic whites during the 1960s and 1970s has received reasonable scholarly attention.Footnote ⁶ Few of these works, however, have moved beyond national politics to interrogate the local dynamics involved in this transition.Footnote ⁷ Fewer still, it seems, have considered its intersection with the concept of ethnicity itself, in particular the emergence of a “New Ethnicity” – a politics of which Ralph Perk was a notable agent – during the same period.Footnote ⁸ Instead, in both popular and scholarly narratives, Perk and his white ethnic strategies have been remembered in one of two rather limiting guises. In the first, Perk is a parochial, even anachronistic, political curiosity, notable for his folksy, heavily accented appeals to his beloved “etnics.”Footnote ⁹ In the second, Perk represents the forces of white ethnic “backlash,” his openly “racist appeal” ensuring he joined Philadelphia's Frank Rizzo, Roman Gribbs of Detroit and Minneapolis's Charles Stenvig in a cadre of white “law-and-order” mayors, each attractive to fearful urban whites at the start of the 1970s.Footnote ¹⁰

Intriguingly, these two images mirror the dual representations attached to white ethnic affirmation during the 1970s. First, as an Old World adjunct to Tom Wolfe's “Me Decade”: an ethnic “revival” or “reverie,” a largely performative quest for belonging and identity, defined by trivial, commodified visions of white, European ethnicity, from television shows and national cuisine to Hollywood films and ancestral “roots trips.”Footnote ¹¹ Alternatively, as an urban, northern, analogue to the “southern strategy” of George Wallace and Richard Nixon, an interpretation in which ethnicity and its inherent complexities and cleavages are collapsed into a monolithic whiteness, integral to the construction of a new national conservative coalition founded upon racial backlash.Footnote ¹²

However, this analysis of Perk's ethnic strategies argues that neither of these two rather reductive interpretations is accurate, and that the “Ethnic Mayor” warrants greater historical significance. Both readings largely reinforce a “primordial” view of ethnicity, anchored around Clifford Geertz's “assumed ‘givens’ of social existence” – language, national origin, social custom, race.Footnote ¹³ Neither captures either the dynamism or the mutability of the “New Ethnicity” of the late 1960s and the 1970s – including its politically constructible quality – nor the import, during this period, of the spatial, cultural and demographic changes affecting Cleveland's white European ethnic communities which defined their politics. Instead, the significance of Perk's ethnic strategies lies in their active reconfiguration of ethnicity, to reflect, first, the inherently negotiable, unstable nature of ethnicity; second, the increasingly context-specific quality of white European ethnicities, defined as much by ethnic whites’ lived experience as by Geertz's “givens”; and third, a diverse local white ethnic constituency, increasingly suburban, consumerist, middle-class – even post-ethnic – able to select from a menu of distinct identities (or, in Mary Waters's phrase, “ethnic options”).Footnote ¹⁴ Together these trends proved crucial to both the transformation of ethnicity and the rightward shift of urban ethnic communities during the 1970s, yet are rarely identified by historians exploring the intersection between white ethnic identity politics and the rise of conservatism.

Thus this paper joins with Matthew Lassiter's criticisms of historians’ overemphasis on simplistic, overly rigid “race-reductionist narratives to explain complex political transformations” and ignorance of sectional and demographic differences and changes within purportedly homogeneous white communities.Footnote ¹⁵ This is not to say that race was absent from Ralph Perk's ethnic strategies; racial subtexts and anxieties were embedded within them, and Perk's use of ethnicity at times employed a racial conservatism which ignored, or even worked to preserve, the existence of white, and indeed white ethnic, privilege in Cleveland. But by becoming fixated with race and whiteness alone, we overlook their interplay with other important identities such as class, region or ethnicity. We ignore those other identities’ power and agency in late twentieth-century political change. We obscure the significance of local contexts, the fluidity and complexity of ethnicity and contemporary white ethnic politics, and the diversity of the constituency such a politics purported to represent. Indeed, like Lassiter's “color-blind” southern white suburbanites, many ethnic whites in Cleveland increasingly identified with an ostensibly ethno-racially neutral “ethnic” discourse which identified them not as Poles, Slovaks, or even whites, but as almost post-ethnic “homeowners,” “taxpayers,” or “guys in the middle.” Such a discourse reflected the changing context and composition of white ethnic Cleveland by the 1970s, and Perk's ability to create a political language and vision of ethnicity which responded to these trends proved critical to the Republican ascendancy of the late twentieth century, both in the city and beyond. In this sense, then, an analysis of Ralph Perk offers a more perceptive vision of white ethnicity, a more temporally, contextually and politically sensitive brand of white ethnic conservatism than simple racial backlash, and a more valuable insight into the changing currents of urban politics, conservative Republican strategy, and European ethnic identity at a critical juncture in contemporary American history.

Born to first-generation Czech immigrants in Cleveland's Broadway-Fleet community, where he began working life selling ice door-to-door, Ralph Perk was elected a Republican city councilman in 1953 and then, in 1962, Cuyahoga County auditor. Perk was the first Republican to hold countywide office for nearly fifty years, yet he proved a popular county auditor, winning reelection on two further occasions, often with bipartisan support.Footnote ¹⁶ After two unsuccessful mayoral campaigns in 1965 and 1969, in which he lost to incumbent Carl Stokes by less than 3,500 votes, Perk took control of City Hall in 1971, when a three-way race, the polarization of city politics during the Stokes years, and the heavy mobilization of white ethnic voters all contributed to his becoming the first Republican mayor of Cleveland for over three decades.

Perk's Cleveland was a city in flux. It was home to as many as forty-five different ethnic – or “cosmo” – communities, each divided by language, culture and nationality and each with their own network of fraternal orders, political clubs and unions. These largely working-class communities had traditionally wielded considerable influence on city politics, their votes crucial to three decades of Democratic domination of City Hall. Yet by the late 1960s white ethnic political and cultural power was waning, undermined by major structural and demographic changes. Cleveland's economic base was changing rapidly: deindustrialization, suburbanization and the completion of a new innerbelt freeway in 1965 incentivized the flight of industry, jobs and citizens from the central city. eighty thousand blue-collar jobs left the city between 1953 and 1964, replaced by thirty thousand largely suburban white-collar positions. The number of ethnic whites resident in Cleveland shrunk dramatically as many, often younger, ethnic whites left old urban neighbourhoods for newer suburbs such as Mayfield, Lyndhurst and Garfield Heights on the city boundary.Footnote ¹⁷ This suburbanization of labour and residents rendered the “cosmo vote” increasingly difficult to locate and threatened to break down traditional ethnic loyalties or bonds of community: parishes or neighbourhoods defined by ethnic or national origin were depopulated; ethnic media, institutions and political clubs dwindled; and, amidst white ethnic residential assimilation in the suburbs and an influx of black migrants into the inner city, differences of language or nationality became subsumed within larger “white,” “ethnic” or “Catholic” identities.Footnote ¹⁸

Against this backdrop of white ethnic assimilation, racial succession had become a growing reality in Cleveland, where the black population had almost doubled between 1950 and 1965 and now totalled over one-third of the electorate. Traditional white ethnic control of the city council and the county Democratic Party was challenged by increasing black political power, reflecting ethnic whites’ suburbanization and the fragmentation of their traditional bloc votes. In 1967, after two years building a powerful black insurgency outside the local Democratic organization, African American Carl Stokes ousted incumbent Ralph Locher to become the first black elected mayor of a major American city, winning 95 percent of the black vote in the process.Footnote ¹⁹ Stokes's tenure was notable for major efforts at economic revitalization – notably an infusion of federal urban aid into the city and an ambitious regeneration programme for the deprived inner city, Cleveland Now!, supported by the city's mainly WASP and Jewish business sector – and a concerted effort to increase black personnel in city agencies and the police department. The symbolic power of his mayoralty and his endorsement by both the city's financial and media elite and the federal government in Washington gave Stokes a national profile and a strong platform for his agenda. But these efforts were undermined by what biographer Leonard Moore calls his “confrontational and careless style of governance,” including a breakdown in relations with the police, allegations of corruption, fiscal mismanagement and racial favouritism, and open conflict between the administration and the city council and Democratic Party. Such conflict convinced Stokes to further institutionalize black political power in the city, creating the all-black 21st District Caucus, independent of the traditional Democratic organization, which would campaign for further black political representation and nominate its own candidates for office.Footnote ²⁰

This changing urban landscape presented a considerable challenge to Cleveland's older white ethnic politicians. Many struggled to remain relevant, unable to master a new politics of rights, rewards and representation and new political concepts such as federal urban aid and black power while their traditional constituencies fragmented. By the decade's end, former Locher strategist Bronis Klementowicz could observe, “The machine has eroded. The wards have changed. The ethnic vote isn't what it once was.”Footnote ²¹ Perk, however, recognized the need for a new white ethnic politics, one that could, in the wake of such transformative changes to the city and its politics, organize increasingly disparate communities, rebuild white ethnic political power, and, in its mobilization of voters behind a unified white ethnicity, come to rival Stokes's insurgency. In the aftermath of his 1965 defeat, Perk, saluting the black template, concluded that the result was “a good lesson” for ethnic whites: “The Negro community voted en mass [sic] for their candidate, and proved to us that real strength can be achieved in unity only.”Footnote ²² Over the next decade this realization would prove central to Perk's development of a new white ethnic politics in Cleveland responsive to the broader political and structural changes affecting the city, and a new white ethnic conservatism capable of realigning metropolitan – and national – politics.

Perk's first major contribution was the creation, in 1965, of the American Nationalities Movement of Greater Cleveland (ANM), which sought to build a new, collective means of both practical political organization and cultural identity amongst the city's individual white ethnic communities. In its founding language, the ANM reflected the secular decline of traditional modes of white ethnic organization in the city and the nascent reality of black political power. “We must solve our own problems,” Perk declared at its inaugural meeting in April 1965, “for if we leave it to others … there is no hope.” While Perk recognized the particularities of language, culture and nationality as a means of mobilizing the twenty-three individual white ethnic groups gathered within the ANM, he preferred to identify common political interests or experiences which could transcend group differences: “We nationalities today are finding more points of common interests and common purposes … something new, a new sense of brotherhood among the oppressed, and a strong sense of justice and unity.” Such collective identity, he argued, carried considerable potential as a means of political mobilization; Perk eulogized the “great potential of strength among the nationality groups … which if unified can exert great force locally and nationally,” almost replicating Stokes's use of race for the same ends.Footnote ²³

Perk's strategies in these early years reflected this emergent ethnic strategy. On the one hand, Perk's development of a political apparatus along ethnic lines acknowledged conventional identifiers of white, European ethnicity. His 1965 and 1969 campaigns were notable for the formation of individual nationality group chapters, with each group in the ANM – from Croatians and Czechs to Italians and Ukrainians – forming their own “Ralph Perk for Mayor” committee; each recruited voters from their own lodges and clubs, secured endorsements from their own media, and organized leafleting and letter-writing campaigns amongst their own group.Footnote ²⁴ Yet on the other hand, Perk also attempted to forge a new, politicized vision of ethnicity, influenced by both a diverse white ethnic constituency and the shifting urban dynamics of Cleveland. While he continued to address conventional nationality group forums, the substance of Perk's speeches tackled universal issues such as sanitation, senior citizens, taxation – Perk's campaigns ran hard against Stokes's proposals to introduce a new citywide income tax – and public safety, particularly salient in the wake of the 1966 Hough riots (Perk pledged to allocate 10 percent of any budget savings directly to the police). He surrounded himself not with old-fashioned ward heelers or émigrés from Eastern Europe but with young, college-educated advisers, themselves advertisements for white ethnic assimilation and mobility. Even the majority of donors to his mayoral campaigns were middle-class white ethnic suburbanites, not embattled inner-city whites.Footnote ²⁵ Perk was thus mindful of a changing ethnicity, incorporating a variety of subgroups, meanings and identities, even before the emergence of a new white ethnic identity politics at the end of the 1960s.

The American Nationalities Movement soon began to draw attention from beyond Cleveland. In 1968 Perk was invited to speak at Princeton University, preempting Kevin Phillips's The Emerging Republican Majority as he identified ethnic groups as “the formula for victory in 1968” and “the greatest source of untapped political strength available.” To access this lucrative resource, Perk recommended a renewed appeal to ethnic identity politics, but he also warned that “nationality groups are learning to think for themselves.” Mirroring his strategy in Cleveland, Perk advocated equivalent appeals on broader issues such as crime – “safety on the streets is the subject of all discussions in nationality neighborhoods” – patriotism and taxation.Footnote ²⁶ The Princeton address was picked up by the Nixon–Agnew campaign, who appointed Perk state director for ethnic groups for both Nixon–Agnew and the GOP. Here he successfully replicated the model he had developed in Cleveland, organizing individual group chapters with individual executive committees.Footnote ²⁷ In Cuyahoga County, where the Plain Dealer observed a GOP “resurgence” thanks to “a citywide Swiss-watch operation” and “new political ideas and techniques,” Perk's efforts reduced the 1968 Democratic vote from 71·5 percent four years earlier to 54 percent, while surrounding counties showed strong swings to the Republicans.Footnote ²⁸ Democratic officials warned candidate Hubert Humphrey that white ethnic voters in Cleveland's 26th Ward – “the most dyed-in-the-wool Democrats in our … area” – were trending towards Nixon. “When a red-hot foreign nationality Democratic area goes for Nixon in a city like Cleveland, that is a big red flag.” Even in October, after a significant counteroffensive from the AFL-CIO, campaign aides in Ohio noted that “the ethnic thing is the biggest problem we face.”Footnote ²⁹ Much of this was down to Perk and the ANM's work in recognizing ethnicity as a potent organizational tool.

Perk's success in using ethnicity as a means of practical electoral mobilization in Cleveland during the late 1960s is evident, but it also presents us with a puzzle. If traditional ethnic identities were losing salience by the 1970s, submerged by the forces of assimilation and suburbanization, and, as the Plain Dealer surmised in 1971, “the nucleus of the Perk vote [was] evaporating,” then how was Perk able to use ethnicity to such great effect in the precincts of Cleveland?Footnote ³⁰ The answer – and the significance of Perk and his strategies – lies in his reformation of ethnicity to reflect its changing meaning by the 1970s – more political than cultural, embedded not in practices or customs but in “values” and experience – and his deployment of it not just as an organizational tool, but as a discursive or rhetorical strategy.

If we are to understand ethnicity as Werner Sollors's series of “mental formations [and] cultural constructions … constantly being invented anew,” then it is clear that during the late 1960s and early 1970s the concept of ethnicity in American politics underwent significant reinvention.Footnote ³¹ The collapse of the postwar “consensus,” and its normative values of ethnic assimilation – captured by works such as Will Herberg's Protestant, Catholic, Jew (1955) and Milton Gordon's Assimilation in American Life (1964) – created a cultural and political vacuum in many urban white ethnic communities already materially challenged by deindustrialization, economic and racial transition, and the flight to the suburbs.Footnote ³² New ethno-cultural concerns triggered by the social and political upheavals of the period, from race and crime to morality and identity, threatened to eclipse, or at least rival, a traditional distributional politics of economic need.Footnote ³³ The black civil rights revolution, as both social movement and legislative phenomenon, upended the norms of American ethnic and racial politics; many ethnic groups – now formal “minorities” – rejected traditional ideals of integration, individual rights and colour blindness (even whiteness) in favour of critiques of American society that emphasized collective disadvantage, discrimination and difference, as they competed for government resources in a polity increasingly sensitive to group rights claims.Footnote ³⁴ In response, activists on both the left and right developed a “New Ethnicity” which transcended old distinctions of nationality and, in its powerful assertion of a collective “white ethnic” group identity, sought to address white ethnic interests and grievances, many of which, they argued, had been ignored in the rush to support minority group advancement.Footnote ³⁵ From Eastern Europeans demanding representation on equal employment opportunity boards in Pittsburgh to the creation of a “white NAACP” in Newark for “white ethnics … this country's largest minority group,” white ethnic communities were encouraged to unite, organize and pursue rights, representation and reward from employers, foundations and government, adopting the example of the African American insurgency. In Cleveland itself, a new, younger generation of activists – eschewing party political labels and following the 21st District Caucus's template – demanded equal representation for white European ethnics on city commissions and launched campaigns against local (often nonethnic) business interests, charities and politicians – including the WASP Republican Congressman William Minshall, who had voted against proposed ethnic studies legislation in Congress – deemed unsympathetic to white ethnic interests. Observing “a gnawing frustration among ethnic Americans, an alienation, choked and volatile,” the Plain Dealer noted the emergence in the city of “a viable, dynamic and contemporary ethnicity that is no longer too proud to ask, too humble to beg,” and that, “on various local issues, ethnics are beginning to act as a group.”Footnote ³⁶

Much of the “New Ethnicity” distanced itself from traditional notions of ethnicity or the “nationality” issues of the past – a “cynical politics,” according to local ethnic activist Albert Bellew, of proclamations, days of observance, and “musical grandfathers.” This was a political rather than a sociological phenomenon, its understanding of ethnicity rooted in individualized, and often politicized, ideas of self, feeling and experience. Italian American activist–priest Geno Baroni, a veteran of civil rights campaigns, promised a “revolution of [ethnic] consciousness … a revolution of [ethnic] self-assertion,” with ethnic loyalties awakened by an “indignation at having been alternatively ignored and castigated.” Slovak American academic Michael Novak articulated a transformative “New Ethnicity,” not located in traditional forms of ethnic group identity but which “grows out of personal experience … a growing self-confidence and social power; a sense of being discriminated against … a sense of injustice” – a subjective, individualized process. Like Bellew, he distinguished between an “old ethnic politics,” of “national picnics … a few words (badly) in another tongue … a mazurka or a polka … honor[ing] the symbols,” and a “new ethnic politics” of identity and consciousness, “a source of values, instincts, ideas and perceptions.”Footnote ³⁷ Interestingly for Republicans, at the heart of this emergent “Ethnic Power” – “the newest rallying-cry in American politics,” as Newsweek dubbed it in 1970 – were motifs not just nonethnic but also inherently conservative; a point recognized by the political analyst Richard Scammon:

Admittedly, Perk continued to practise a “cynical” ethnic politics: presenting a radio show as “Cleveland's number one ethnic,” crooning Bobby Vinton's part-Polish “Melody of Love” or regularly appearing at ethnic festivals or functions (Perk's “entertainment is shaking hands at a Slovenian picnic,” one aide quippedFootnote ³⁹). However, for Perk ethnicity also increasingly functioned as a discourse within which could be identified a number of powerful, tightly interwoven tropes, or “values.” Many of these had little to do with nationality, religion or heritage; some of them appeared, contrarily, to ignore or transcend ethnicity, while others fused ethnicity with identities of race, place or class. Some spoke to white ethnic aspiration, others to white ethnic ressentiment. Yet each reflected a changing local context; a fragmented constituency increasingly difficult to locate; a dynamic, politicized conception of ethnicity; and, together, a nascent urban white conservatism capable of expanding opportunities for Republicans in urban ethnic communities.

The first of Perk's ethnic “values,” colour-blind meritocracy, positioned itself in opposition to racially redistributive programmes and Mayor Stokes's forceful attempts at the integration of city schools, housing and the police department – even the county Democratic Party – during the late 1960s. While this trope benefited from the immediate context of Stokes's often polarizing approach to politics, enabling Perk to present himself as a candidate of racial moderation, it was also actively constructed by white ethnic ideologues such as Novak, who contrasted ethnics’ pursuit of “moderate success in America … [through] loyalty, hard work, family discipline and gradual self-development,” with blacks’ desire “to jump, via revolutionary militance … over the heads of lower-class whites.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Consequently, Perk's use of colour-blind meritocracy juxtaposed a collective historical memory – albeit a highly selective one – of ethnics’ up-by-the-bootstraps assimilation, built upon ethnic “traditions” or “values” of individualism, sacrifice and self-reliance, with the more recent efforts of African Americans bulwarked by state-sponsored civil rights protections. In doing so, it enabled Perk to overlook the deep-rooted structural inequalities – and ethnic complicity in those inequalities – which Stokes and his mobilization of black political power had sought to confront, and depict himself as the guarantor of a purportedly colour-blind racial moderation – strategies still central to contemporary conservative politics.

For example, Perk regularly denied press suggestions he was the “ethnic” candidate, preferring instead to invoke the language of meritocracy and a superficially inclusive racial universalism. Officially announcing his 1969 candidacy, Perk asked “all of [Cleveland's] residents to take my hand – all of its residents.” The next mayor, he argued in a column for the Plain-Dealer, “should be chosen solely because he is the person most qualified and best fitted for that office.” Identity politics – in particular Stokes's utilization of black power politics to secure a greater black voice in city governance – had been destructive to Cleveland, Perk argued, inflaming racial tensions and exacerbating divisions: “The people of Cleveland can no longer to afford to elect a person because he is a Republican or Democrat, white or black, Catholic, Protestant or Jew.”Footnote ⁴¹ A perceived bias in the Stokes administration's allocation of jobs, funds and programmes designed for economic revitalization was a regular theme of the campaign. Perk's team homed in on alleged discriminatory practices in the allocation of Cleveland Now! monies, which they claimed had been disproportionately channelled towards black neighbourhoods and businesses and even, during the 1968 riots, black militants, and heralded Perk's “honest and nonpartisan” approach to economic revitalization and neighbourhood development. And as mayor, Perk pledged that, unlike under Stokes's administration, “opportunities in public service … will be wide open to any citizen, irrespective of ethnic origin.”Footnote ⁴² Such statements may have been purely rhetorical – conflicting with the efforts of Perk's ANM allies to guarantee equal ethnic representation on city decision-making bodies, or ignoring the historical role of strategies identical to Stokes's in securing white ethnic advancement in Cleveland – but they remained deeply effective in urban white constituencies smarting from the perceived defeats of the Stokes years.

Perk's 1971 campaign for a nonpartisan mayoral primary election, in which any number of candidates could run with the top two contesting a runoff, was another example of this rhetorical strategy. Here Perk used a dispute between the county Democratic Party and Stokes's 21st District Caucus to position himself as the defender of colour-blind meritocracy. Stokes's attempts to build an independent black political machine outside an allegedly racially unrepresentative and discriminatory Democratic apparatus – including running his own slate of largely (but not exclusively) black candidates against incumbent Democrats – were denounced by Perk as “not only wrong but racist; not only unfair but un-American.” Perk's aide Nicholas Bucur denounced Stokes's efforts to draft his own candidate, black school board president Arnold Pinkney, as an independent as “racial trickery” designed to encourage the white vote to split between the two main parties, and positioned Perk as a voice of racial moderation. Perk called for a superficially meritocratic primary system in which only the two most popular candidates, regardless of race or party affiliation, took part in the runoff – overlooking racial inequalities built into the county party's selection process – while claiming that Stokes had practised “racism in reverse” as mayor and “cultivated the art of racial politics … more than anyone in this country.”Footnote ⁴³ He received support for his position from the Cleveland Press, who accused Stokes of “separatism” and “dividing the party along racial lines,” and from a large number of white and black Democrats disillusioned by Stokes's further attempts to unseat the county party's candidate for the Democratic primary and several other county Democrats (many of them, in Stokes's defence, black).Footnote ⁴⁴

Indeed, there was some evidence that Perk's strategy stirred not only white ethnic conservatives, but communities of colour too. His colour-blind conservatism and appeals to meritocracy chimed with a black middle-class constituency in Cleveland hostile to tax increases for social welfare programmes or the construction of public housing in black middle-class communities. As one resident of Lee-Seville, an East Side area targeted by the Stokes administration for new public housing construction, decried, “I had to work fourteen hours a day seven days a week to earn a down payment on my house … why should I say, ‘Come on Charlie, you can have it all for free’?” Perk capitalized upon these divisions to increase his share of the black vote by almost five times between 1971 and 1973.Footnote ⁴⁵ Endorsing Perk for reelection in 1973, the city's largest African American newspaper, the Cleveland Call and Post, praised Perk for his “fairness” in ensuring black communities lost little of the ground made under Stokes in terms of access to city jobs and services. “It is high time that Black voters stop contributing to the division of Cleveland on racial lines,” the Call and Post declared. “If we expect white voters to consider Negro candidates on their merit, then we must consider white candidates on their merit.”Footnote ⁴⁶

The second, a related but more explicitly economic message based around hard work, individual aspiration and achievement, aligned white ethnicity and purportedly “ethnic” values of sacrifice and thrift with Perk's record of fiscal probity as auditor and then mayor. In one of the many oppositions employed by Perk, it drew a contrast with the alleged fiscal mismanagement of the Stokes administration and the impatience of the black communities he represented. “Ethnics” became nonethnic “taxpayers” or “homeowners,” their values shaped by their history of hard work and struggle, their everyday lives burdened not by ignorance of their cultural traditions or the plight of their homelands but by property tax hikes designed to pay for increased city services. These strategies enabled Perk – and many other conservatives – to develop a vision of white, European ethnicity shaped by values such as frugality or modesty, and ally it with a traditional conservative ideology hostile to fiscal or racial redistribution and activist government. Perk's 1968 Princeton speech, where he praised “simple, unpretentious” ethnics and their “plain values of perseverance, thrift, and rugged honesty,” was one such example of this discursive strategy. Such values led, in Perk's view, to an innate white ethnic suspicion of welfare and state assistance or “handouts”: “They [ethnics] seek nothing for which they cannot pay through hard and honest labor.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Such a suspicion, he argued, made ethnics natural Republicans.

Perk's 1969 campaign for mayor was notable for these themes. In the run-up to the autumn campaign, advisers encouraged Perk to focus almost exclusively on Stokes's record of overspending and taxpayer waste as mayor during his first term in office, and to promote Perk's own image as “a hard worker.” Press releases and campaign brochures circulating within white ethnic communities did not dwell on Perk's Czech heritage but compared his record of “honesty and thrift” as auditor – the same ethnic “values” he had eulogized in his Princeton speech – with “the last of the great spenders” Stokes. The mayor, Perk declared, had turned City Hall into “a welfare office,” Perk aligning Stokes with costly redistributive programmes antithetical to “ethnic values” of sacrifice and self-reliance, whilst also constructing a pejorative and implicitly racialized image of the current administration's profligacy and disarray.Footnote ⁴⁸ Major campaign addresses at the Polish Women's Hall, the Slovenian Auditorium or the Croatian Home may have included polka bands, Polish pastries and sauerkraut or Croatian sign-offs of hvala ti i doviđenja, but they dwelt largely on fiscal issues, spending cuts and, in particular, the burden of taxation. In each speech, Perk pledged his opposition to tax rises, attacked a “mess of inefficiency [and] duplication” at City Hall, and styled himself “the champion of the small homeowner” who would deliver an “efficient, economical” city government and strive “to obtain some kind of tax relief for the man whose life savings is invested in his home.”Footnote ⁴⁹ In this vision, white ethnicity represented a collective imaginary or value set of hard work and self-denial, which, despite its evident historical blind spots (for example, obscuring the role of the New Deal state in supporting white ethnic homeownership), enabled Perk's “ethnics” to understand the need for fiscal caution, limited government and reduced taxation, regardless of the cost to city services, more than most.

Two years later, against the backdrop of Stokes's abortive attempts to introduce a citywide income tax, Perk reiterated similar themes. The proposed “Stokes Tax,” put forward to avoid cuts in city services, was aligned with the mayor's alleged fiscal recklessness – the city's deficit stood at $27million – or the spectre of increased social welfare spending, and contrasted with Perk's own record of budgetary restraint.Footnote ⁵⁰ In opposition to Stokes and his consistent, and at times heavy-handed, demands for programmes to improve the lives of the city's poor, Perk praised ethnic whites for having “taught us not to be afraid of hard work, or ashamed of being poor,” before they entered the middle class. He even called upon his own personal experience of growing up “ethnic” and “very poor” on Cleveland's East Side, where he “faced many obstacles, and yet dared to dream.” White ethnic stoicism and self-reliance, represented by Perk's proposed layoffs and budget cuts, were often subtly juxtaposed with the impetuous, even unreasonable, demands and expectations of poor blacks and their political representatives. “When they [ethnics] came here in large numbers, they didn't call up City Hall to say, ‘build us a recreation center’,” Perk declared in a 1971 interview. “They built their halls themselves.” Equally, at an ANM dinner in 1975 the mayor paid tribute to “our ethnic philosophy of hard work – of product instead of complaint.”Footnote ⁵¹ Such statements deliberately ignored or obscured the historical role of labour unions or redistributive federal programmes in supporting white ethnic advancement (and restricting opportunity for others, especially blacks), thus also servicing Perk's own conservative ideology of low taxes and reduced government. Yet they were often internalized by white ethnic audiences: polling conducted during the 1969 campaign revealed that Perk received the highest ratings amongst “ethnic” and “foreign-born” voters on taxes, while his victory two years later was heralded by one white ethnic citizens’ group as “a victory not only for you [Perk], but for all taxpayers.”Footnote ⁵² Indeed, as mayor Perk continued to utilize this narrative of ethnic probity, individualism and hard work against the backdrop of a citywide programme of fiscal retrenchment, in which services were cut, city transit and sewerage systems were sold off, employee pay and overtime were reduced and recruitment was frozen. Media proposals for Perk's 1973 reelection campaign recommended the equation of Perk's ethnic background with his record of “fiscal common sense” – notably turning the city's deficit into a surplus by the end of 1972 through the sale of city assets – and balanced budgets. Perk himself, borrowing from Stokes's own rhetorical playbook, was not shy in linking his own life story to this wider white ethnic narrative of restraint, sacrifice and self-made achievement: “Our ethnic people see in their present mayor a symbol of their own aspirations,” he told a high-school audience in April 1975.Footnote ⁵³

The third of Perk's “values” celebrated the urban ethnic neighbourhood, a significant totem in the political world of the 1970s.Footnote ⁵⁴ Conceptualizing such spaces as as much a symbol as a discrete place, it equated them with an imagined sense of stability, place and community in fact long since eroded in Cleveland by suburbanization, urban renewal programmes, discriminatory housing policies and ethnic white affluence and mobility, yet also spoke to suburban ethnics who had established new communities on the city periphery. As above, the sectional – “nationalities” or “ethnics” – became the seemingly universal – “homeowners” or “citizens” – while Perk's defence of white ethnic neighbourhoods’ “traditions” or “stability” fused with contemporary anxieties over the black inner city, conservative calls for “law and order” – thus Perk's pledge to increase police investment – or the pastoral image of the ethnic enclave defended by white ethnic advocates and activists. In his 1975 book Affirmative Discrimination sociologist Nathan Glazer paid tribute to European ethnic communities for possessing “a marked social order: stable neighborhoods … strong organizations centered around the church, formal ethnic associations … the local political organization … the local small businesses of members of the group.” One did not need to still reside there to have a sense of its value. The Italian American writer Nicholas Pileggi documented how, even after they had left the old enclaves behind, suburban “Saturday Italians” returned to eat, to shop and – most importantly – to survive: “It is only with a trunk filled with Italian market produce that a Saturday Italian can face six days in the suburbs,” Pileggi concluded. White ethnic “streets, stores, familiar smells and sights and sounds … are identity, life, self [for ethnics]”, Novak argued more viscerally. “Take away such things, and part of them dies.”Footnote ⁵⁵

Like these writers, Perk recognized the value of neighbourhood for white ethnic Clevelanders on both sides of the metropolitan divide, even whilst suppressing the structural explanations for the decline of such communities or ethnic whites’ own historical agency in this process through suburbanization or racial discrimination. To launch his 1969 campaign, Perk chose a series of three neighbourhood meetings over a large downtown rally, and in planning Perk's strategy, aides advised that “the tone ought to be set that Cleveland is a city of neighbourhoods … refer to your audience as ‘Neighbours …’.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Perk followed this counsel to the letter. As someone “who grew up in and still lives in a neighbourhood with a very strong ethnic flavour,” he told the Croatian Home, only he could claim to speak for the interests of white ethnic neighbourhoods. He offered not just a working knowledge of neighbourhood concerns but, as a lifelong resident of such a community, an innate, felt, lived experience of them; they were part of Perk's self. “Garbage collection and recreation centers are more important than having … an office full of high-salaried yes men,” he declared in a 1971 attack on Stokes. “Snow removal is more important than being a judge in a Playboy contest … [or] $200 suits.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Like white ethnicity, neighbourhood represented authenticity, solidity, commonality. And in his addresses to ethnic audiences, Perk consistently equated white ethnic neighbourhoods of family-owned houses with stability, respect for the law and a deep emotional and material investment in one's community. Such appeals carried considerable weight in the wake of the major demographic shifts affecting Cleveland, and spoke to deep anxieties over black residential advancement within urban ethnic communities.Footnote ⁵⁸ Yet their symbolic content did little to ameliorate the flight of industry, jobs and residents from the central city overseen by Perk in this period.Footnote ⁵⁹

Alongside this rhetorical glorification of the ethnic neighbourhood, direct appeals to “homeowners” – especially the “small homeowner” – were a regular feature of Perk's addresses to white ethnic audiences. Such appeals, aligning white, European ethnicity with homeownership and aspiration, enabled Perk to transcend spatial divisions between suburban and urban ethnic whites. “The time has come,” he declared in opening his 1969 campaign at the Polish Women's Hall, “to remember the small homeowner.” At the Croatian Home the same year he described himself as “the champion of the small homeowner.” Such strategies enabled Perk to oppose much-needed citywide tax increases, arguing that such policies worked against ethnic group achievement. Elsewhere Perk merged homeownership, ethnicity and other identities, including religion, class and even parenthood, with “values” such as family, hard work or morality. Speaking to Polish Americans in 1969, he praised the “home-loving family people of this city … who want to build a good society.” Addressing an audience of Croatians in 1973, he noted, “Wherever there are Croatian churches, there are clean neighbourhoods, there are good people.”Footnote ⁶⁰ These rhetorical themes relied upon an individualized, conservative worldview in which the stability and integrity of ethnic neighbourhoods, often implicitly opposed to the disorder of the black ghetto, could be explained by the presence of “good” or “home-loving” individuals and not deeper structural forces and inequalities intrinsic to urban life.Footnote ⁶¹ Such an outlook militated against the need for state intervention in racial and urban problems and thus proved a key component of Perk's own brand of small-government, colour-blind conservatism.

Even Perk's family home played a material and metaphorical role in the development of this discursive thread. He and his wife Lucille continued to live in the two-storey frame house on East Forty-Ninth Street, sandwiched between the Willow Expressway and the Republic Steel mills, that they had purchased for $6,500 back in 1946. The house played a significant role in Perk's ethnic campaigns, appearing in photo-ops, interviews and even a poem he read to launch his 1969 mayoral bid, a signifier of his ethnic localism, modesty and authenticity.Footnote ⁶² Having signed off his 1969 campaign with a rally on the front lawn, Perk repeated the event four years later as part of a week of “neighbourhood activities,” in which a flatbed truck was decorated in the style of the house's front porch to “dramatize his [Perk's] attachment to the city” and its neighbourhoods. Journalists visiting Cleveland to interview Perk were entertained in the kitchen of the house, where they dined on Lucille's tuna salad and photographed the mayor and his wife washing up together.Footnote ⁶³ By contrast, the more affluent Stokes's large suburban pile was assailed as a potent example of his lack of commitment to “homeowners” and “citizens” at a time of neighbourhood change and transition – a theme that Perk, fusing his own ethnic authenticity with racial and class-based resentments, regularly employed before white ethnic audiences.Footnote ⁶⁴

Nonetheless, Perk's rhetorical defence of the neighbourhood did not always ring true. His calls for limited government and opposition to tax increases, often couched in terms of white ethnic aspiration and his defence of the “small homeowner,” tended to work less in the interests of urban ethnic communities, who saw their services reduced or neglected, and more for developers and business interests who benefited from Perk's tax cuts and tax abatement policies or his redirection of urban renewal funds to downtown projects.Footnote ⁶⁵ His increasing national profile, including regular trips to Washington and an abortive 1974 Senate bid, led to allegations that Perk was distant and aloof from neighbourhood-level concerns. One white ethnic neighbourhood group from Perk's own East Side ward, the Citizens to Bring Back Broadway, retaliated against local service retrenchment by dumping their uncollected refuse outside the mayor's office, while in 1976, when it emerged that Perk had been approached by the national Republican Party to draft its election-year urban affairs platform, community groups protested that the mayor was “unfit” to contribute. “Mayor Perk does well in responding to invitations to participate in parades and ethnic festivals,” declared the Buckeye-Woodland Community Congress, “but when it comes to serious issues of inadequate city services, vacant and vandalized houses, street crimes … redlining and disinvestment … issues which face old ethnic neighbourhoods – he is unavailable.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Such criticisms revealed the material limitations of Perk's rhetorical strategies – and his politics – for those left behind in transitional, under-resourced urban environments.

The final “value,” aligning ethnicity with authenticity, combined the populist politics inherent to late twentieth-century conservatism with the New Ethnicity's defence of tradition and localism against what Novak labelled “the high WASP culture, of modernization and of professionalization.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Many have identified within the wider ethnic revival of the 1970s a quest for authenticity in reaction a perceived cultural crisis and the sterile, homogenizing forces of mass culture. In Perk's hands, however, this ethnic authenticity was distinctly political. As above, it recalled the ethnic historical memory of hard work and self-reliance. It called upon the ethnic home and neighbourhood as powerful political symbols. It employed overlapping identities of class and race to construct a powerful and threatening image of racial or socioeconomic inversion. Above all, it reassured ethnic voters that Perk was one of them. Indeed, within this trope Perk, like his home on East Forty-Ninth Street, stood as an exemplar of this authenticity: humble, homespun, genuine, in touch (unlike his opponents) with his “roots.” The much-publicized story of Lucille's rejection of a White House invitation in favour of her local bowling night conveyed this image perfectly. So too did Perk's self-professed “square values,” his criticism of and evident discomfort with black-tie events at downtown's City Club or “silk stocking set” audiences, his background as “the guy next door who used to deliver ice.”Footnote ⁶⁸ So did, above all, Perk's ethnicity: his unwillingness to relinquish his heritage a symbol of reassurance and solidity within a politically uncertain, racially transitional urban environment.

The campaigning Perk thus presented himself as an independent, authentic underdog fighting powerful, nonethnic interests; typically Stokes's 21st District Caucus or the city's largely WASP and Jewish business and media elite who endorsed Stokes over Perk. Perk was the self-professed “average neighbour and average citizen,” his white ethnic constituents the “little guy, the guy in the middle,” whereas Stokes represented the “big people,” a large, sophisticated (and increasingly black) “establishment” with little concern for white ethnic communities – an image made more potent by the changing political and racial power structure within the city.Footnote ⁶⁹ In his Polish Women's Hall speech in October 1969, Perk allied himself with “the working people, the little man, the forgotten families of Cleveland.” “I stand with these people,” Perk declared, “I am one of them!” At the Slovenian Auditorium the same month Perk swore in every member of his thousand-strong audience as campaign managers, declaring his preference for “his people” over external advisers.Footnote ⁷⁰ Celebrating his 1971 victory – a result which rejected the endorsements and predictions of party organizations, business and the press – Perk heralded his constituents – “Ralph Perk's Poles on Kosciusko, Sowinski and Pulaski Avenues” – and described the outcome as “a victory for the people … ignoring and shattering the image-makers and the professionals.” This brand of ethnic populism adroitly linked ethnicity to a gritty, indigenous knowledge and authenticity. Its blend of ethnic pride and assertion, championing the “values” and “common sense” of Perk's supporters, with more implicit racial and class-based resentments, typically targeted at Perk's opponents, swept him to a surprising popular victory. As one white ethnic constituent wrote, “everyone and everything was against Perk [in 1971], except the people.”Footnote ⁷¹

Stokes, and his status as a wealthy black national celebrity, were regular targets of this trope, illustrating the complex interplay of race, class and place within Perk's ethnic strategies. Comparisons were regularly drawn between Stokes's nationwide fame and Perk's localist authenticity. “The problems of Cleveland need to be solved at Cleveland City Hall,” Perk declared, announcing his 1969 candidacy, “not by a mayor travelling from Boston to Los Angeles, from New York to Miami Beach.” Appearing before a meeting of largely white ethnic Democrats for Perk on the city's West Side, Perk personally attacked Stokes's use of a mayoral limousine, his hundred-dollar-a-plate fundraisers (Perk preferred ninety-eight-cent chicken dinners), and his decision to educate his son privately rather than in the city's public schools. Alluding to both his own home and Stokes's suburban residence, Perk declared, “I get up every morning, look out the window, and see the urban crisis”; similarly, an aide to Perk gushed, “The guy [Perk] actually lives it [urban life]! He knows what it means.” Both statements conveyed the authenticity of Perk; his firsthand knowledge and experience – urban, ethnic, real.Footnote ⁷² Stokes, Perk argued, spent “more time trying to be a national political figure, a TV personality, a recording artist … than he does administering the city,” while his 1971 opponent, the wealthy WASP Democrat James Carney, was “a millionaire businessman from the suburbs” who would prioritize downtown development over neighbourhood needs.Footnote ⁷³ Each candidate's lack of local, and ethnic, authenticity was, for Perk, suggestive of their lack of concern for the city, and thus its white ethnics.

Again, there is much evidence that these strategies had a demonstrable impact on white ethnic audiences. During his 1971 campaign, the Polish Committee for Ralph Perk described him as “a friend of all the little people in our city of Cleveland.” Congratulating Perk on his victory, one white ethnic Clevelander described the result as “the greatest little people's event in the history of Cleveland”; Republican state representative George Voinovich, whom Perk had defeated in the primary, informed him that his victory was reward for “your sacrifice to the little people in Cleveland.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Even after taking office, Perk continued to use this strategy to convince ethnic whites he had not sidelined them, even if some of his policies suggested otherwise. A speech at an “Ethnic Expo” in April 1975 saw Perk trumpet his “continuing membership in the ‘little people’ club,” juxtaposing himself and his supporters – “Mayor Perk's ‘little people’” – with “those the media would consider great – the minority that constitutes themselves and the so-called ‘establishment’.” Authenticity and ethnicity were interchangeable – Perk defined “little people” as “the people of our ethnic communities” – and the mayor had, in his affirmation of his own ethnicity, proved he was one of them: “The ‘little people’ … can directly identify with me, they know I am one of them, they know I have not abandoned them … They are proud when I publicly proclaim my pride in my own ethnic heritage, in the life and achievements of my ethnic group.”Footnote ⁷⁵ In these extracts, Perk's trope of “little people” was both nonethnic, a signifier of his humble origins and attentiveness to local concerns, his sincerity and solidity, his suspicion of large institutions and established interests, and ethnic, evidence of his familiarity and earthiness, his own comfort with his “roots.” This duality enabled the “little people” discourse to transcend divisions of class, age and origin and unite older urban ethnics with younger, aspirational ethnics who had moved out to the suburbs. It successfully melded ethnicity with class resentments and anxieties over racial transition, a sense of something forgotten, lost or scorned in a changing urban environment, and an innately conservative worldview. So successful was it that it would play a significant role in Cleveland politics well after Perk left office, notably in the campaigns of his contrasting successors, urban populist Dennis Kucinich and pro-business conservative Voinovich.Footnote ⁷⁶

While Ralph Perk's mayoralty did little to arrest Cleveland's decline, there is little doubt that his ethnic strategies, practical and discursive, proved rather more significant. By the time of his departure from office in 1977, Perk had won three consecutive elections, advised two Republican Presidents on ethnic affairs and urban policy, and halved the ratio of Democratic-to-Republican registration in Cleveland. “You go to Republican meetings nowadays, you find average blue-collar workers, real ethnic Americans,” Perk exclaimed, repositioning the Republican Party as the guardian of ethnic “values.” “There's been a tremendous rise in ethnic power all over this state.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Indeed, the ANM reaped further city- and statewide success beyond the 1970s, delivering Voinovich's three terms as mayor of Cleveland as well as Republican mayors in other traditionally Democratic cities across Ohio. Taras Szmagala, who coordinated Nixon's national ethnic campaign in 1972, underlined the importance of the ANM in developing the collective unity that Perk had regarded as necessary for ethnic political power. “[It] was so important from an organisational point of view. Perk and the Nationalities Movement … helped bring ‘ethnics’ into the Republican Party as a solid group.”Footnote ⁷⁸

Perk's use of ethnicity as a discourse defined by shared values or experiences reached well beyond Cleveland, permeating national politics by the end of the decade. Perk captured the attention of conservative strategist William Gavin, who, in his 1975 treatise of “urban conservatism” Street Corner Conservative, had suggested that the Republican Party could capture white ethnic votes if it abandoned identity politics and instead “understands and appreciates the entire reality of the urban conservative experience.”Footnote ⁷⁹ In the run-up to the 1980 presidential election, Gavin, now working for Ronald Reagan, reaffirmed Perk's strategy: “‘Ethnics’ must mean something more than Captive Nations Week … Their lives and values, not just their heritage, are essential to our nation.” He identified a “community of values” in which ethnics could unite with white southerners, union members, religious conservatives, even minorities, around ostensibly universalist “values” such as family, faith, neighbourhood and work and build a new conservative Republican coalition. In another memo, Gavin wrote, “We are not going after the ‘ethnic’ vote as such: we are going after a ‘community of values’ vote … Let's not fall into the same old trap of praising ‘ethnics’ as ethnics – we are praising their values.”Footnote ⁸⁰ This approach enabled Reagan to win large numbers of ethnic votes in 1980, and formed the basis of his appeals to Perk's constituents as President. “The ‘shared values’ concept is one which proved extremely successful with Catholics and ethnics in 1980,” observed a White House “Ethnic/Catholic Strategy” document in 1982, “and should serve as the basis for our relationship with these groups.”Footnote ⁸¹

The story of Mayor Ralph Perk reveals that ethnicity is a significant, if often misunderstood, factor in explaining the rise of conservative Republicanism during the later twentieth century. Ethnicity, reinvented in the late 1960s and 1970s, enabled conservatives such as Perk to craft a traditional Republican message for traditionally non-Republican constituencies, built not necessarily around cultural tokenism or racial reductionism but around positive appeals to shared “values” and symbols – faith, family, neighbourhood, thrift – or achievements and aspirations – meritocracy, hard work, homeownership. Whilst clearly not open to all, this message came cloaked in a superficial universalism and inclusivity, translated easily to Republicans, and was given additional power by its sensitivity to temporal changes such as suburbanization, ethnic affluence or racial transition and thus its ability to reach across generational, spatial and socioeconomic cleavages within white ethnic communities. Such a revelation gives us a more nuanced insight into the changes affecting white urban precincts across the industrial Northeast and Mid-west during the 1970s, yet also helps explain the wider rightward shift which took place nationally at this time.

Yet to grasp this point, historians of contemporary political change must change the way they define ethnicity. Rather than identifying it through seemingly static, “primordial” identifiers, we need to think instead like Perk, and reframe ethnicity as an evolving, fluid discourse: Sollors's “cultural construction” which is under constant reinvention. The case of Ralph Perk illustrates exactly that. It shows us how, in the hands of “New Ethnicity” ideologues, but also through wider structural and demographic changes affecting ethnic Clevelanders, the politics of ethnicity was recast during the 1970s; ethnic affiliations grew more unstable, optional, even post-ethnic, and white, European ethnicities became defined less by nationality, language or place and more by amorphous “values” borne of ethnics’ lived experience. Such a shift was advantageous for conservatives, who benefited both from the increasingly protean, individualized nature of ethnicity and from the increasing politicization of these values.

Ralph Perk's success lay in his ability to identify this changing political and demographic terrain, and to reorient white, European ethnicity – and the political strategies and meanings attached to it – to fit it. He understood ethnicity not solely as nostalgic celebrations of language, homeland and culture, nor narrow appeals to racial grievances, but as something fluid and dynamic. The “Ethnic Mayor” used ethnicity not simply as a means of political organization, nor as election-year identity politics, but as an active discourse which, whilst innately conservative in content, could be recast to suit the changing terrain of 1960s and 1970s Cleveland and an increasingly diverse, fragmentary ethnic constituency. Such a discourse, developed around the defence of totems such as meritocracy, hard work, neighbourhood and authenticity, offers an urban, northern equivalent to Matthew Lassiter's “suburban strategies” of the Sunbelt South, and provided for many ethnic whites a conduit to the conservative Republicanism of Ronald Reagan and beyond.Footnote ⁸²