In the 20th Century, events combined to both dampen and mask cultural diversity:
First, World War I triggered an anti-German reaction that all but destroyed the distinctive German culture. In the 1920s, new immigration laws choked off almost all immigration from everywhere except Britain and northern Europe, and even that was reduced. With each passing year, more children of immigrants married native-born Americans, and fewer grandchildren of immigrants grew up to carry on the distinctive features of their Old World culture. By the middle of the century, the percentages of Americans who were immigrants or even the children of immigrants were at all-time lows. Most of the once vibrant ethnic communities of the great cities had faded to shadows. No longer could you find yourself in an American street scene indistinguishable from one in Palermo or the Warsaw ghetto.
Among native-born Americans, our long-standing tradition of picking up and moving continued, with surges of the population to Florida and the West Coast. Then came World War II. Almost 18 million out of a population of 131 million put on uniforms and were thrown together with Americans from other geographic, socioeconomic, and ethnic backgrounds. The economic effects of war production also prompted a wave of African-American immigration from the South to the North and West.
These demographic changes occurred in the context of the culturally homogenizing effects of mass media. Movies were ubiquitous by the beginning of World War I, and most American homes had a radio by the end of the 1920s. These new mass media introduced a nationally shared popular culture, and one to which almost all Americans were exposed. Given a list of the top movie stars, the top singers, and the top radio personalities, just about everybody younger than 60 would not only have recognized all their names but have been familiar with them and their work.
After the war, television spread the national popular culture even more pervasively. Television viewers had only a few channels to choose from, so everyone’s television-viewing overlapped with everyone else’s. Even if you didn’t watch, you were part of it — last night’s episode of I Love Lucy was a major source of conversation around the water cooler.
In these and many other ways, the cultural variations that had been so prominent at the time of World War I were less obvious by the time the 1960s rolled around. A few cities remained culturally distinct, and the different regions continued to have some different folkways, but only the South stood out as a part of the country that marched to a different drummer, and the foundation of that distinctiveness, the South’s version of racial segregation, had been cracked by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In December 1964, Lyndon Johnson evoked his mentor Sam Rayburn’s dream, expressed in 1913, of an America “that knows no East, no West, no North, no South.” Johnson was giving voice to a sentiment that seemed not only an aspiration but something that the nation could achieve once the civil-rights movement’s triumph was complete.
But even as Johnson spoke, Congress was only a year away from an immigration bill that would reopen America’s borders.
Those beer gardens with micro breweries in each tavern also went the way of the dodo with Prohibition. And all for the worse too. German ethnic communities gone forever.
Polish immigration, too, after the end of WW2 ceased for a period of almost fifty years. Chicago used to have five congressmen that had Polish ethnic background — now none.