Defining Italian-Americans: The Ethnicity Industry and the Bicentennial Celebration 1974-1976‪.‬

ABSTRACT This article uses the Italian-American experience to examine President Gerald Ford's attempts to harness the "New Ethnicity" and use it to solidify the conservative resurgence of the 1970s. The New Ethnicity was a vocal assertion of white ethnic identity by the descendents of immigrants who arrived from Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. The exact nature of this reassertion was left up for grabs, however, and ethnic leaders, politicians, the media, and educators all worked to define white ethnicity for their own benefit. President Ford, seeing both the gains made by the Republican Party among ethnics in the 1972 election and the potential of the 1976 Bicentennial celebration to increase these gains, put his own spin on the New Ethnicity. White ethnics like Italian-Americans and Jews, Ford and other Republicans argued, were hard-working, self-sufficient, and worthy heirs to America's founding fathers. By appealing to them through the Bicentennial, he attempted to show that Republicans, traditionally seen as hostile to immigrants and ethnics, welcomed and embraced them. Ford's ethnic appeals were an important--if overlooked--factor in the forging of a conservative political culture.