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Goals and tactics of President Gerald Ford's ethnic politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Ieva Zake
Ieva Zake*
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, The College of New Jersey, Ewing Township, NJ, USA
*
* Email: zakei@tcnj.edu
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Extract

This article analyzes initiatives of Gerald Ford's presidential administration toward nationalities or the so-called white ethnics against the backdrop of the legacy of Richard Nixon and the Republican Party's ethnic politics of the 1960s. Using archival and interview materials, it demonstrates that Gerald Ford intended to improve the relationship between the President's office and the ethnics who were involved in the Republican Party's structures. He consciously tried to respond to ethnics' political concerns and even created a special position on his staff for working with the nationalities. While in office and during the election campaign of 1976, Ford succeeded in engaging the ethnics and in demonstrating his will to address their needs on the domestic “front.” He failed, however, to fully appreciate the importance of foreign policy to the nationalities. The article proposes that today, as in the 1970s, the American political establishment would benefit from recognizing international issues as crucial elements of white ethnics' or nationalities' political behavior.

Keywords

President FordRepublican Partynationalitieswhite ethnicsheritage groups
Type
Articles
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 43 , Issue 6 , November 2015 , pp. 944 - 961
Copyright
Copyright © 2015 Association for the Study of Nationalities 

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