I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

Leonard P. Liggio 195
After the 1969 minority student takeover of CCNY, new departments were created:
Black Studies, Puerto Rican Studies, Jewish Studies, and Asian Studies. The new Open
Admissions did not mean more Black and Puerto Rican students, but fewer Jewish students.
In addition to more Asian students in the sciences, there was a flood of white
ethnic New Yorkers who had thought CCNY too hard when it had had mostly Jewish
students (Jews had moved from New York to suburbs, or preferred to leave New York
City homes to enroll in the many new universities created in upstate New York by governor
Nelson Rockefeller).
(A hypothesis: the publication of Kevin Phillips’s The Emerging Republican Majority
[1969] focused on Northern ethnic Democrats and Southern Democrats. Kevin Phillips
grew up in the same north Bronx congressional district as I did, but he lived in an apartment
house and not a private home as did the majority of voters [making them Republicans].)
He worked for Republican Congressman Paul Fino (1952–68) who was not opposed to the
New Deal. Richard M. Nixon’s 1972 strong election caused a focus on the second wave of
white ethnic former Democrat voters, who began voting Republican (the first was after the
1945 Yalta betrayal by FDR). The Democrats did pick up on it by focusing on the second/
third generation of ethnics, often suburban voters, while the Ford White House looked to
the 1940s game plan of foreign-language-speaking first generation voters.
The loss by Ford to Carter in 1976 in Ohio by 20,000 votes may be so explained.
So can the loss by Conservative Party Senator James Buckley to Democrat Daniel Patrick
Moynihan in New York. Moynihan had written the classic book on ethnicity in New
York, with Nathan Glazer, Beyond the Melting Pot (1963). With Carter in the White
House, the Rockefeller Foundation did not renew the project and, advised by Senator
Moynihan, made the grant to Harvard (where he had been a professor) for an encyclopedia
of U.S. ethnicity (Harvard University Press, 1980) edited by Stephen Thernstrom and
Oscar Handlin.
Michael Novak (who I did not know at the time) was succeeded at Rockefeller by Joel
Colton, a professor of French History at Duke University and author of a biography of
French premier Leon Blum. More importantly he was coauthor with Robert R. Palmer of
Modern Europe, the most recommended survey textbook (no longer used due to its high
quality). Since I had been a member of the Society for French Historical Studies since 1960,
when I was introduced by Fordham professors A. Paul Levack, John Olin, and Msgr. Joseph
Moody (later professor of modern European history at the Catholic University of America),
Joel Colton knew I was a known scholar.
At the 1960 Society for French Historical Studies conference at the University of
Rochester, there was a major session on the French Revolution featuring Peter Gay (of
Columbia, then at Yale) with a radical or Jacobin position; Robert R. Palmer (of Princeton,
then at Yale and author of Catholics and Unbelievers in Eighteenth Century France (Cornell,
1939) representing his two volumes, The Age of the Democratic Revolutions (Princeton, 1957);
and Crane Brinton (Harvard) representing Voltairian Skepticism. A. Paul Levack had been
the first student at Harvard of Crane Brinton. In September 1993 I enrolled in a weekly
Folger Library seminar on the “Orthodox Sources of Unbelief in Early Modern Europe,”
presented by Alan C. Kors (University of Pennsylvania), who had been the last student of