THE WAR PROVED TO BE a particularly important junction for white ethnic Americans, chiefly the children of Catholic and Jewish newcomers who had arrived in the United States from the 1880s until the closing of the immigration gates in 1924. Military training, wartime service, postwar benefits, and integration into a common American purpose brought many of these newcomers into their first robust contact with the white and mainly Protestant America from which they had lived at a physical and symbolic distance.
