One in a series of articles, appearing occasionally, on the forces that have shaped the current political landscape.
NEW YORK - Consider the class roster for History 284, which Leo Hershkowitz has been teaching for 35 years at Queens College. The last names of the undergraduates enrolled in this winter's course on the history of New York State are Castillo, Demas, de la Garza, DiPietro, Felley, Grossman, Guido, Lazzinnaro, Schultz, Sylecki, and Ting.
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A half-hour away in Brooklyn, under a blue tarpaulin in the shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge, was a clutch of strikers outside one of the landmarks of industrial New York, the Domino Sugar refinery. Huddled against the cold are Winston Jack, who was born in Trinidad; John Houck, a mix of German, Irish, and Native American; and Tony Castillo, who is Cuban.
''The whole country's here,'' said one of the strikers, Hernando Gallego, who is of Colombian stock. ''You've got people from all over the place right here. We get along. We're adults already.''
From one end of the Empire State to the other, from the East River in the south to the St. Lawrence in the north, from Grand Island in the Niagara River to Long Island in the Atlantic Ocean, from the Canadian border to the New Jersey line and back again, are the hops of the most astonishing ethnic ale ever brewed - the raw materials of an astonishing, and raw, political culture.
George Gershwin once called New York, which on Tuesday holds one of the most critical tests in the presidential primary calendar, ''a rendezvous of the nations.''
Diversity is the great virtue and verity of our national life, and nowhere is diversity - in all its manifestations - on display with the verve of New York State.
''You can't talk about politics in New York State without talking about ethnicity,'' said Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. ''Ethnicity is not part of every election in New York. It is every election in New York.''
New York's politicians munch on knishes and kielbasa. They attend lawn fetes in Buffalo and street fairs in Manhattan. They wear Yankee hats and yarmulkes, they spar over St. Patrick's Day parades.
''You have close to 200 ethnicities in the United States and there is not any one of them that is not respectably and formidably present in New York State,'' said the former governor, Mario M. Cuomo.
The state is a place of spectacle (the Woodstock music festival of 1969) and of spectacular engineering achievements (the Brooklyn Bridge), of showmen (Florenz Ziegfeld) and showmanship (the 1927 New York Yankees), of homely ideas gone national (the Buffalo chicken wing, invented in a tavern called the Anchor Bar) and of local tastes assiduously cultivated (Saranac Root Beer, bottled in Utica), of man's ability to improve on nature (Frederick Law Olmsted's Central Park in New York and Delaware Park in Buffalo) and of nature's ability to intoxicate man (Letchworth State Park, which would be a tourist mecca if God hadn't carved the Grand Canyon, and Niagara Falls, which would be a tourist attraction even if God hadn't invented marriage), of soaring structures of great beauty (the polished chrome steel atop the Chrysler Building) and of soaring ideas of great beauty (the equality of women, born in Seneca Falls), of great joy (the ticker-tape parade honoring Charles Lindbergh in 1927) and of great despair (the wreckage of Wall Street only two years later), the home of some of the greatest schemers (the Drexel Burnham financiers who built a fortune in junk bonds) and greatest dreamers (Robert Moses, who built the parks and roads of modern New York) ever to stride the American continent, the playground of character (Joe DiMaggio) and characters (former Mayor Edward I. Koch).
This is a place so big that even its small things (''The Sidewalks of New York'') are the subject of song, and of legend. This is a place so rich that an Upper West Side storefront called Murray's Sturgeon Shop could become a celebrated power center and that a Beef on Weck sandwich made of the cuttings of a center steamship round and placed lovingly inside a Kimmelweck roll (topped with pretzel salt and caraway seeds) could become a cultural icon in Buffalo.
Together the people of New York State have produced one of the most remarkable societies on earth, a culture that celebrates, accentuates, and luxuriates in the differences that, by miracle or magic, make a mess of the mathematics of culture.
''Here the city orders you to come out and greet it, in a thousand strident voices, with a million golden, beckoning fingers,'' the late Bayard Still, who headed the New York University history department, once wrote.
And here the state orders its politicians to do the same thing.
Attorney General Spitzer is part of a state government headed by a governor, George E. Pataki, who is the son of an Italian mother and a Hungarian father. The lieutenant governor, Mary O. Donohue, is Irish. The comptroller, H. Carl McCall, is African-American (and, in 1998, the biggest vote-getter in the state). The speaker of the state Assembly, Sheldon Silver, is an Orthodox Jew who lives in the union-sponsored projects of the Lower East Side. The Senate majority leader is Joe Bruno of Glens Falls, the son of an Italian laborer who shoveled coal.
Skilled at ticket balancing
New Yorkers have raised the art of balancing a ticket to a science, with masters in both parties. In 1961, the Republicans in New York City put up a slate that included Louis Lefkowitz (Jewish), Paul Fino (Italian), and John J. Gilhooley (Irish). Then again, in 1949 the Democrats put up a slate that included William O'Dwyer (Irish), Vincent R. Impelliteri (Italian), and Lazarus Joseph (Jewish).
Sandwiched between these two remarkable slates was the Albany regency of W. Averill Harriman, a governor who didn't fit any of these ethnic categories. He had the misfortune of running in 1958 against another member of his own peculiar group, old-line millionaires, Nelson A. Rockefeller, who campaigned with a Westchester assemblyman named Malcolm Wilson, who was Irish American and a master of the ethnic geography of New York State.
In the last century, three New Yorkers stand as classic symbols of the way ethnicity crowded into politics in New York State.
The first was Alfred E. Smith, the first Irish Catholic to win major statewide office and, in 1928, the first Catholic presidential nominee. What elected him to the governor's chair in Albany in 1918 - his ability to embody the immigrant experience - defeated him for the presidency in 1928, which is itself testimony to the notion that New York is different.
The second was Fiorello La Guardia, elected mayor of New York in 1933. He thought of himself as a part-time Episcopalian, but he was known for being half-Italian and half-Jewish, thus appealing to two of the three predominant immigrant groups in the city. He won a House seat in 1920 after he challenged his rival, an assimilated Jewish Democrat put forward by Tammany Hall, to a debate conducted entirely in Yiddish. He was a natural magnet for progressive voters in a city whose newest citizens prided themselves not on the squalor of their neighborhoods but on the excellence of the city beyond their doors - including a public health system that was the finest in the nation, a public education system that propelled immigrants into the professions and the mainstream of the nation, and a public-transportation system that moved people, safely and far.
The third was Jacob K. Javits, a four-term senator who appealed to Yankee farmers upstate because he was a Republican, to Jews in New York because he was one of them, to suburbanites because he was progressive, to Italians and Irish because he was the son of immigrants and to Hispanics because of his ties to the garment-worker unions. (He lost his reelection bid in 1980 to a suburban Italian-American in a three-way race with a Jewish woman.)
But these are not the only groups that are prominent in New York, and contemporary times are not the only moment when ethnic diversity has marked New York. As early as 1646, Father Isaac Jogues wrote in his ''Description of Novum Belgium'':
''On the island of Manhate, and in its environs, there may well be four or five hundred men of different sects and nations: the Director General told me that there were men of eighteen different languages; they are scattered here and there on the river, above and below, as the beauty and convenience of the spot has invited each to settle.''
Although only Calvinists were legally welcome in New York, Catholics, English Puritans, Lutherans, Anabaptists, and Mennonites nonetheless turned up in the colony. By 1654, there were Jews, too. New York State was the only place in the 13 colonies where the founders were not English in origin. Because the settlement was planted by the Dutch, it was separate - and different. The Dutch brought a special brand of tolerance, dating from the 1579 edict of Utrecht, and an appreciation for diversity, growing out of the Golden Age that produced the Dutch Empire and the painters Rembrandt, Reubens, and Hals.
Over time, New York only grew to be more diverse, not less. The Erie Canal, built by hand from Waterford to Buffalo by Irish workers, took Poles, Germans, and Ukranians to Amsterdam, Utica, Syracuse, Rochester, and Western New York. Louis C. Jones, a former director of the New York State Historical Association, said that the mules on the towpath brought the world to and through New York, ''the bloodstream of a nation flowing ever faster.''
A map of New York City in 1920 shows distinct Chinese, Syrian, Turkish, Greek, Russian, Czech, Hungarian, Finnish, and black enclaves. Harlem, predominantly German, Italian, Irish, and Jewish in 1900, grew progressively African-American. Large groups of Dominicans became prominent in Washington Heights and areas of the Bronx by the mid-1980s. Nearly half the immigrants to Manhattan and Brooklyn now are from the Caribbean.
Today foreign-born residents account for more than a third of the population of New York - and more than half of the population in Woodside, Queens. Today's New York has a larger percentage of immigrants than at any time since 1910, at the peak of the great movement through Ellis Island. At the other end of the historical continuum, there are nine Native-American reservations in the state.
New York remains the home to more blacks than anyplace else in the nation and African-Americans play a critical role in the state's politics; blacks account for nearly a quarter of registered Democrats in the state and thus are essential to a winning coalition in the struggle between Vice President Al Gore and former senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey.
The first blacks arrived as indentured servants in 1626. In the 20th century, the barriers to the professions forced many blacks to work as caterers and in service industries. The Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Sr., the father of the congressman, for example, was a minister - but even after he was ordained he worked as a waiter at the Windsor Hotel in Atlantic City.
More open to blacks
Even so, New York was more open to blacks than almost anyplace in the country, which is why the tide of internal migration to New York was so thick, especially to Harlem, which by 1930 had 165,000 black residents. The Harlem Renaissance gave a platform to Zora Neal Hurston, a stage to Paul Robeson, a forum to Marcus Garvey and an outlet to Duke Ellington, whose ''Take the A Train'' is about the subway ride from 59th Street to 125th.
Today, many experts believe that the survival and success of New York is due in large measure to blacks. Richard P. Nathan, the director of the Rockefeller Institute of Government at the State University of New York at Albany, points to the vibrancy of the 400,000 middle-class African-Americans of southeast Queens.
New York has an inexhaustible ability to absorb and assimilate. Great numbers of Puerto Ricans, spurred by cheap air transportation, began flowing into New York in the late 1940s and for many years were the poorest urban minority, in part because language was a big impediment to social advancement. But Herman Badillo developed a political base for Puerto Ricans in New York and emerged as a prominent citywide reformer, finding allies like Robert Abrams, later an attorney general and Senate candidate, and Harrison J. Goldin, later comptroller of New York City, both liberal Jews. Today, Badillo, who became the first Puerto Rican member of the House with a vote, is a lawyer, a Republican and chairman of the New York City Board of Higher Education, and two Puerto Ricans have House seats from New York. But perhaps the leading Puerto Rican figure in the state holds no elected office at all. He is Dennis Rivera, a union leader who heads the major hospital local in New York City.
Just as the Statue of Liberty opened the gates of the country to the wretched refuse of other shores, the New York establishment, though stubborn and resistant, eventually and always opened the gates of power to the people who passed through. The antagonism inherent in this process was heartbreaking and discouraging, but it also created a spur - a drive to overcome the barriers. In the end, it was the barriers as much as the openness that made the city and state of New York great.
Much of the work of making the new country occurred at City College, which has a special place in American history as a ladder of social mobility. The college, the first public institution of higher education in the United States, counts nine Nobel Prize winners among its graduates.
''This has always been a college for the working class and the immigrant poor,'' said Stanford A. Roman, interim president of City College. ''The only thing that's changed is the composition of these groups.''
Education is only one of the state's resources, though New York is the only place in the world with a school offering a bachelor of science degree in cosmetics and fragrance marketing. It is also home to 59 Fortune 500 headquarters, the most in the nation. The New York Stock Exchange accounts for more than four-fifths of the capitalization of the entire country. But there is also the New York Coffee and Sugar Exchange and the commodity exchange composed of the New York Hide Exchange, National Raw Silk Exchange and the Rubber Exchange. The state has banks, brokerages, and retailers all with folklores of their own, and there is a reliable reminder of that every Christmas, when ''Miracle on 34th Street'' is aired.
Its cabbage producers, concentrated south of Lake Ontario and in Long Island, are the most prodigious in the nation, and the state ranks second (to Washington) in apples and second (to Vermont) in maple syrup.
Then there is iron, oil, and salt mining, lumbering, the great port of New York, huge quarries with limestone, marble, and gypsum, the incalculable resource of the Mohawk Valley and the Hudson - the ''great streame,'' in the words of Henry Hudson, who piloted his Half Moon into the river in 1609.
But oddly enough, New York is not really rich in history; Massachusetts and Virginia were the settings for far more momentous events.
Look in an index of an American history text and you'll find almost nothing except for the Civil War draft riots, the Seneca Falls convention, Boss Tweed and the assassination of President William McKinley in Buffalo. Perhaps the most important event in the state in the 20th century occurred on a Saturday afternoon in 1911, when a fire swept through the Triangle Shirtwaist Co. and in a quarter of an hour killed 146 people, most of them Italian and Jewish girls between the ages of 13 and 23. The fire led to the passage of progressive labor laws, fire-safety codes, and workers' compensation plans.
But none can rival New York's claim to preeminence in a momentous, and deeply American, historic process: the assimilation of new peoples.
''Immigration is what saved New York and is saving New York now,'' said Judge Edward R. Korman, who several times a year presides over the legal process that makes immigrants American citizens. From the bench at the US District Court in Brooklyn his eyes fasten on the eager and proud faces of ordinary people joining a special people and, beyond them on the back wall, on oil murals retrieved from the dining hall at Ellis Island, pictures of Americans in factories and farms doing the back-breaking work of making a country. ''You look out at these ceremonies and you get goose bumps. You see the world.''
