Making assumptions

Many, many years ago, I persuaded the late Dr Gallup to do a national survey of a kind which, if it was not unique, was all too rare among pollsters. They spent their time then and do now, I think, almost exclusively on finding out how people feel or think about political issues – do you approve or disapprove of the so-called Star Wars plan or abortion, of taxing social security benefits, did the Geneva summit improve the climate of relation between the United States and the Soviet Union, ought there to be a legal limit on cash contributions to political candidates? And so on and so forth.

I, myself, some of you may have noticed, am on the whole more interested in what used to be called social history, that is, not on what most people are supposed to think about the great, big issues of the day, but how they think, how they live from day to day.

In other words, I suggested that we all think we know, without ever finding out, at what time most people eat dinner, what are their favourite foods, how long they spend watching television, is it true that most Britons drink tea for breakfast whereas most Americans drink coffee, what time do most people go to bed?

This idea came to me shortly after a famous English novelist had visited New York and written a head-shaking regretful piece about the city. He was saddened, he said, to see only skyscrapers dedicated to buying and selling dividends. He meant they were all inhabited by the money changers, which made me wonder at the time if he'd not noticed the skyscrapers which house the American Bible Society, the New York Medical Center, not to mention the offices and studio of the BBC.

New York, the man said, was Babylon piled on imperial Rome. Shocking! How come Babylon? Well, he wrote, New Yorkers spent their lives pursuing money by day and crooners by night. They're obsessed, he said, with movies, jazz and a hectic pace, soothed or checked by alcohol. They crowd together out of anxiety, he said, because, I quote, 'the lonely heart of man cannot come home here'.

Dear, dear! This was serious. There were, of course, such people. There are and always will be, except, I ought to note, 30-odd years later that of all the minority interests by way of entertainment, jazz is the most minuscule. From a recent survey of the sort I so long ago urged on Dr Gallup I see that, whereas, of all music records and tapes bought by Americans, 58 per cent are rock music of one sort or another, 24 per cent classical and 2.9 per cent jazz.

An interest in traditional jazz is now about on a par with an interest in the Dead Sea scrolls. Only in the past three months, two of the, say, half a dozen clubs, saloons or what have you devoted to this antiquarian interest have closed down. No more Eddie Condons, nor more Carnegie Tavern and the rare, charming piano of Ellis Larkins. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

So, the man said, the trouble with New Yorkers – at one time I used to collect visitors' sentences that began, 'The trouble with America is' – the trouble with New Yorkers was that they lived too fast, drank too much, built temples to money and wasted their nights and their health in nightclubs. It was after this Jeremiad was published that I suggested to Dr Gallup it would be nice, interesting anyway, to find out exactly what proportion of the city population suffered from these afflictions. He did his survey and the results astonished even me who was then inclined to fear that the great visiting novelist had touched a nerve.

Well, it came out that New Yorkers, a big majority, liked beef, Italian pasta, baked or hash brown potatoes, pies, ice cream, lots of salad, soup with matzo balls or chicken and rice soup, that the overwhelming majority eat at about six pm or thereabouts, that whatever their job, their evenings were spent listening to the radio, then, and a spot of television.

They went to the movies once a week, once a week, too, the men played poker or pinochle with their buddies, they watched over the children's homework and, on Sundays, they took them off to the park or the Bronx zoo or a game of softball, or to a city museum – the Museum of Natural History was a great favourite with its dioramas of exotic landscapes and its planetarium.

About three in ten New Yorkers went to concerts and there were more people through any given year who subscribed to symphony concerts than subscribed to the baseball season. The most glaring fact of all which gave pause to me, if not to the famous novelist, was that only one New Yorker in 15 had ever been in a nightclub and that 92 in a hundred began to get ready for bed around ten, ten-thirty.

About ten years later, I nudged another pollster into going into the tea/coffee business, I mean finding out what the British and the Americans really do drink or drank for breakfast. The legend, the preconception, then, was pretty true for middle-aged and especially old folks, but it was startling to hear that while a majority of the British young – young being in the late teens and twenties – now drank coffee.

About half of the American young swill down their breakfast with fizzy, sugary soft drinks with names like Mo, Blab, Fuzz, Gurgle. I do believe this has changed drastically and from my own galloping poll at the corner luncheonette where I often lope off to breakfast, coffee seems back in place and a tea bag drooping in warm water a poor second.

However, please don't believe a word I say because the whole point of having these surveys done was to question, or explode, what, on no evidence but that of our senses, what we think must be so.

All this was on my mind dropping in as I do, once a week at least, on my oldest friend who shares my scepticism about what must be true to the extent, in his case, of keeping up a continuous correspondence with the government printing office and collecting all its surveys of American life and labour. Over our wine of Scotland, we go into some of these findings by way of playing a game, tossing challenging questions at each other which have to do with the difference between what we assume is the truth and what government surveys have discovered is the truth.

The other evening, I had a blockbuster of a teaser for him. 'What', I asked him, 'do you suppose is the percentage of WASPs in New York City?' Not the stinging kind, but the humans – white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. I have to admit that if I'd been asked this question when I first landed on these shores, I would have said, 'Oh, I suppose 70, 80 per cent?'

I knew, of course, even then, that New York had a lot of Irish and a lot of Jews and it was obvious from the restaurant that could be spotted on every four or five blocks, a lot of Italians. I didn't know then about the immigrant or children of immigrant Russians and Germans and Greeks and Latvians and Armenians and Czechs and Poles and on and on.

So, but today, how many white Anglo Saxon Protestants, like me, to every hundred New Yorkers? My friend, who is a Jew of Hungarian origins, thought, thoughtfully, and said, 'Forty per cent?' 'Come, come!' I said, 'Remember all the Irish and Italian and Puerto Rican Catholics?' 'Oh!' he said, in a masterly moment of amnesia, 'I was counting in the Catholics.' I stressed the P in WASP – Protestant! 'All right!' he said, 'I should say then 30, maybe as low as 25 per cent.'

I took him off the rack with a bombshell. The answer is 6.5 per cent White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, including, that is, heathens who claim no religious affiliation. My friend jumped in his chair. 'Yes,' I said, 'we are a very tiny minority, subject to discrimination.' 'That's terrible!' he said, 'You ought to get food stamps.'

Well, it is a shocker. Leaving just over 93 per cent of everybody else. As a religious group, of course, the Jews and the Catholics compete in pride of numbers. I don't know truthfully how those numbers compare, but when you consider that one American in four is a Roman Catholic, and when you consider that as the national figure, you can imagine the weight the Catholic vote carries in New York City.

I just scribbled a quick list of the mayors of New York City over the past 36 years. There have been three Irishmen, two Italians (one of them Italian Jewish), one German, two Jews and one lone WASP, Mr John Lindsay. And when he heard about this figure, he said, 'WASPs have become the only ethnic group in the city that's called by a pejorative term.' That's a bright but true remark.

Nobody now dare use in public terms which were once the common vernacular on the street, in the office, the saloons and, for a very long time, on the vaudeville stage – terms like polak, wop, spick, canuck (for a Canadian), mackerel snatcher (for all Catholics) – but the WASP is pointed out as such, a pale, placid citizen who is not expected to take offence. 'It's as if', Mr Lindsay said, 'we didn't bleed.'

And, today, with close to 1.1 million Puerto Ricans and other Hispanics in New York City, alone – the entire population of New Zealand outside Auckland – it cannot be long before we have a Puerto Rican or, like six of the eight largest cities in America, a black mayor.

If you recall that surprising, to most of us tight little island immigrants, surprising figure of 55 million American Catholics – nearly a quarter of the population – perhaps you'll understand why on the covers of two national magazines and nightly on the television news, the main, burning topic this week was the meeting in Rome of 165 bishops assembled to celebrate and argue over the 20th anniversary of the first Vatican council in almost a century.

Bearing in mind the strong split between traditionalists and reformers of various sorts and the lively voices of American women in those reforms, the headline for that story was, inevitably, 'A Church In Crisis'.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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