Today's Loneliest Political Minority?

May 10, 2005
Today's Loneliest Political Minority? It's Probably the White Protestant
By S. ROBERTS Excerpt NYT

In New York City, where race and ethnicity often loom large in local campaigns, and where no group constitutes a majority, Gifford Miller is the mayoral candidate of a forgotten minority.

His Democratic rivals include a Hispanic Roman Catholic, a black Baptist and a Jew, giving these opponents a natural constituency that can help in the voting booth. Roughly a quarter of New Yorkers are Hispanic, Black, or white with a quarter or whites being Jewish and the much of the rest being Catholic. But Mr. Miller, the City Council speaker, is the only white Protestant in the race in a city where non-Hispanic whites account for fewer than one-quarter of the population.

New York's early mayors were Protestants, but in the last 100 years the city has elected few Protestant mayors either white or black.

Two of the three were Republicans: Fiorello H. La Guardia, who was definitely not 'WASP' (he was Italian-Jewish and he was loosely a practicing Episcopalian.) LaGuardia relied heavily upon his ethnic base. John V. Lindsay, who decidedly was. David N. Dinkins, a Democrat, is black and an Episcopalian. Dinkins, the only Black mayor was also the only incumbent New York City mayor to lose a re-election bid.

The last Democratic white Protestant to be elected was William J. Gaynor, who won in 1909, and who also distinguished himself by being the only New York City mayor who was the target of an assassination attempt. (Lindsay became a Democrat in 1971, after he was re-elected.)

Mr. Miller's lack of a core ethnic constituency is a chief factor bedeviling his candidacy, often prompting him to reach beyond his Manhattan base for votes.

Four decades ago, just before Lindsay's election, E. Digby Baltzell, the sociologist, popularized the acronym WASP, and before it became pejorative, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan unscientifically concluded in "Beyond the Melting Pot" that it was "not likely that more than about one-twentieth of the population of the city is 'old stock' 'WASP.' "

In 2001, about 6 percent of voters in the Democratic primary runoff and 7 percent in the November general election identified themselves as white Protestants. Even nationally, white Protestants is just over half of the population.

Mr. Miller, an Episcopalian of Dutch, German and English extraction, readily acknowledges his pedigree, but largely discounts it. "In the end, New Yorkers, no matter what their faith, have the same concerns," he said. "They vote on the basis of who will improve their lives."

As for whether he is handicapped in raising money or political support without the broader ethnic or racial base other candidates often court, Mr. Miller replied, with a touch of humor: "I think it's very hard as a WASP to claim disadvantages. WASP's have generally done awfully well in society in the past, so I'm not going to make any complaints."

Still, for a candidate in New York, the label, like Mayor Bloomberg's personal fortune, even though self-made, can produce a whiff of privilege or of lack of empathy. In 1973, as Lindsay prepared to leave office, the Jewish political commentator Jeff Greenfield wrote: "We needed the sense that a fellow victim was governing our destiny, and this John Lindsay never seemed to be."


Lindsay, who, like Mr. Miller represented Manhattan's Upper East Side (it was called the Silk Stocking District then), described white Anglo-Saxon Protestants as an endangered species and added: "You realize you can't call any other ethnic group by its pejorative name. But you can say 'WASP.' As if they didn't bleed."

Political blood gushed in the 1965 mayoral campaign, when ethnically balanced tickets were still commonplace. The Presbyterian Church's official call for "progressive change" in the city was interpreted, and criticized, as an endorsement of Lindsay. It sounded the death knell for Protestant Churches in New York City (which have since all but disappeared as political or social entities). It was also the end to trans-racial Christan coalition politics. Lindsay was popular among WASP liberals and Rockefeller Republicans as well as Blacks and Hispanics but reviled by almost everyone else. Pointing out that Catholics made up the Conservative Party ticket, William F. Buckley Jr., the party's mayoral candidate, referred to Lindsay pointedly as a "white Protestant."

Mr. Miller's is obviously aware of his vulnerabilities which might be one reason he has among other things, learned to sing the Israeli national anthem in Hebrew.