New York's ethnic mix

I've often thought that if you wandered through the streets of New York with a movie camera and filmed not the streets, but the tops or superstructures of various picked buildings, you could fool an audience into thinking they were in Russia, Greece, Romania, Poland, anywhere but the United States of America.

The buildings you'd pick would have to be mainly churches and, in the past couple of weeks, it's been brought home to us again that America is not so much a melting pot – since there are ingredients of the stew that more and more refuse to meld or melt – but a goulash of many peoples, which we all know, but also of many faiths. 

This thought has of course been powerfully reinforced by the inauguration of the new Pope. I'm sure the event, if only for its colour and majesty, has been widely covered in every country outside the communist countries, and perhaps in some of them, every country that has a television system. But I doubt that even Central and South America have spent so much television time as we've done on the whole sequence of ritual and routine since Pope Paul died. 

Ah, it would be natural, for British people especially, to assume that the United States is a Protestant country. That's because the legends and the myths of the Pilgrim Fathers and the Puritans are so solidly established in everyone's childhood instruction. The fact that many of these childhood assumptions are dead wrong does not take away from their acceptance. As, for instance – and this came up the other evening with a perfectly sophisticated group – as, for instance, that the Puritans came to Massachusetts to establish freedom of religion. They most certainly did not. 

They came as a protest against the corruption of the Church of England in England. They came here to establish it in a pure form but they made no bones about that being the only church to believe in. Dissenters were treated almost as roughly as they are today in totalitarian countries and, by dissenters, I don't mean anything as awful as an atheist, but people who wanted to practise in other sects or denominations – Methodists. Quakers were banished from Massachusetts because they were stigmatised as 'questioning' people. 

However, back to the tops of the buildings, the domes, onion bulbs, spires, oriental-looking friezes and such. What you can see within ten blocks of my apartment building is a Russian Orthodox Catholic church, a Greek Orthodox church, an Episcopal church – a Zionist African Episcopal church, not to mention a Meeting House and a synagogue. 

All but one of these are, of course, variations on the Christian religion but there are enough Jews, Mohammedans, even Confucians, to have made it the custom centuries ago for Americans to refer – always to refer – to a first name or given name and not to a Christian name. I believe this custom came in early, even when the United States was overwhelmingly Christian because one of the first things the first Congress did was to proclaim that, in this new nation, there should be no official, established religion. They'd seen enough of religious persecution and the plight of emigrants fleeing from it. The very first phrase in the first article of the Bill of Rights says, 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.' So, visiting clergymen, however pious, have to be warned not to end an address to a general, American audience with an invocation to Our Saviour Jesus Christ. 

I remember an occasion in London, a few years ago. I was staying in a hotel with my lawyer whose surname is Cohen. Late one night, the telephone rang and the hotel operator said, 'Is that Mr Cohen?' It was. 'Just a moment, please!' she said. Evidently, there was more than one Mr Cohen staying in the hotel. And then she came back to him and he frowned. He looked puzzled and said, 'I don't understand. I haven't got one.' He cupped the mouthpiece with his hand and turned to me and said, 'What's the matter with this girl? She wants to know, what's my Christian name?' 'Given name!' I translated. 'Oh oh,' he said, 'Pardon me, it's Irving.' 

So you might think that the networks would be very gingerly about giving undue stress to any one religion when America has such a multitude of faiths, not to mention pseudo and junk faiths. I don't think anyone had to pause for a second thought when it came to televising and reporting the ceremonies attending the choosing and enthronement of a new Pope. We forget, some of us Anglo-Saxons do anyway, that there are in the United States 50 million Roman Catholics and at least a dozen Eastern variants going alphabetically from the Albanian Orthodox Archdiocese in America to the Ukrainian Orthodox or Ecumenical Patriarchate of America. So about one American in four is a Catholic, mostly of the Roman faith. 

There are very few cities in America that dare compose a city council without including, at the very least, two Catholic politicians and, as you might guess in some states – Rhode Island is a good case having by now a huge population of Italian-Americans – it's just about compulsory to have one of the two United States senatorsa Catholic. But more than anywhere, the government of New York City has to be always the finest balancing act between the interests of what used to be called the 'immigrants' and what are now called the 'ethnic minorities'. We always talk about ethnic minorities though in New York City which has more Jews than Tel Aviv, we would do better to talk about 'ethnic majorities'. 

Long ago, more than a century certainly, the running of New York City was taken out of the hands of the surviving English and Dutch majorities simply because they'd turned into minorities. And the invading Irish, once they were settled and 'in to' politics, named Tammany Hall, the clubhouse of the Democratic party, as a joking slap at the declining influence of the old English families. They had founded – and it's going to this day – a St George Society which was once powerful in the city's affairs. 

When the Irish allied with the Jews and set up Democratic headquarters, they looked around for a name and decided it must also be that of a patron saint. They found him not in any religious calendar, but in a tribe of Delaware Indians whose chieftain was called Tammany. So, the Order of St Tammany it became, and remains. 

At one time, I was fairly close to a mayor of New York. His father was a very distinguished United States senator and a famous Catholic layman. And one night in September, the son, who was now the mayor of New York and was retiring , sat around with his lieutenants and cronies composing a ticket of candidates for all the city offices in the new election , including municipal judges who are, as you know, not appointed but elected. It's never in this city a question of sorting out the men and women best qualified for the jobs, what you have to do is to put together the best team that most accurately represents all the ethnic groups that make up the city's inhabitants – or better say voters. 

So, they thought of good men and checked at intervals to see that they had three Jews, three Catholics, one Protestant, a black – nowadays it would have to be two blacks at least and also two women, one black for sure – a Puerto Rican, a Pole, among the Catholics, two Irishmen. The team was coming together nicely and they ticked off the offices they had filled – city controller, commissioner of public health, water commissioner, deputy mayor, and so on. They were about to congratulate themselves on a cunningly well-balanced slate and were leaning back and being served drinks when they were struck by a thunderclap of an omission. 'My God!' said the retiring mayor, 'we haven't got an Italian!' One of those absurd oversights that can only happen to experts, like the famous surgeon who leaves a sponge inside your transverse colon. 

They also noticed – they'd been working in a state of extreme concentration – they also noticed that the one office they had not filled was that of the mayor himself. There was about an hour to go before the deadline for filing the slate with the bureau of elections. I was privy to this crisis and it was a scene worthy of O. Henry or Preston Sturges, who wrote and directed the only first-class satirical movie I can remember about American politics. Somebody suddenly cried, 'What's the name of that guy who used to be the night clerk in a hotel in Long Island City? Salvatori, something, Andreotti, Cantona? Oh, help us Lord!' They rattled their brains and somebody came up with it. What was he doing now? Nobody had the faintest idea. They put in phone calls, they riffled through the telephone directories of Manhattan, Queens, the Bronx, Richmond, Staten Island. 

Well, they caught up with him on Staten Island at a family birthday party in an Italian restaurant. They brought him to the phone. They asked him, 'Do you want to be mayor?' He said, 'There's an awful noise in here. They bawled back, 'Look! We've got half an hour to filing time. Do you want to be mayor?' He said, 'Yes!' He was put on the ticket. The Democrats were riding high that year. They won. And the man on the end of the Staten Island phone became mayor. Honest to God! 

Some of you may be itching to know the name of the movie I called the only first-rate movie on American politics. It was called 'The Great McGinty' and it was about an unshaven tramp, a bum, hired by Tammany to go out with a little list of names copied down from gravestones. It was an election of course and he had six names. 'Go to these polling booths,' they said, 'and vote in these names!' 

He was so dumb, he went round four times and so he voted 24 times. When he came into the party clubhouse on election night, it was a melancholy scene. The machine had lost to a reform candidate for mayor and the machine boss, Akim Tamiroff, was gazing into the dregs of his drink. Nothing to do now but start at once to groom for the next election their own reform mayor. 

At this moment, the bum, drenched with rain, shaggy with a three days' growth of beard, timorously appeared – he was played by Brian Donlevy – the miracle of his dumb loyalty was revealed to the boss. Tamiroff called him over. 'Come over here, bum!' he commanded. 'Me?' said the startled Donlevy. 'Listen, bum!' said Tamiroff, 'How'd you like to be reform mayor?' 'Me?' burbled Donlevy. 

The boss brought his fist down on the bar. 'Why?' he moaned, 'Why do I have to say everything twice?'.

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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