Irish Americans

Irish Americans. Irish immigrants and their descendants virtually defined the American conception of “ethnic group.” The Irish were the first European people to substantially challenge English cultural dominance in colonial America, to spark significant Anglo‐American hostility, to develop a rich array of community institutions, and to demonstrate that ethnicity could have long‐lasting social and demographic consequences.

English military operations and land confiscations in Ireland propelled over 10,000 Irish to the West Indies between the 1640s and the 1660s, with overflow into English North America. Population pressure and English land seizures accelerated emigration in the eighteenth century, with many of the Irish taking advantage of contractual servitude to provide for the Atlantic passage. By 1790, roughly 400,000 persons of Irish birth or descent populated the United States, three‐quarters of them Roman Catholic. Between 1820 and the mid‐1920s, some 4.75 million Irish migrated to the United States, second only to Germans among non‐English immigrants. Irish immigration peaked between 1846 and 1851, when the United States received most of the 1.5 million who fled the devastating potato famine. The number of Irish‐born immigrants and their children reached an all‐time high around 1900 at almost 3.5 million.

Until well into the twentieth century, a strong social and cultural Irish Catholic community existed in America by both choice and necessity. This community, which arose in the United States before the Civil War, owed much to the nature of Irish immigration itself, a calculated movement—even in the famine years—of men and women seeking opportunities superior to those at home. Moreover, this was a chain migration, with relatives, neighbors, and coworkers paving the way for subsequent arrivals, and with families, parishes, and villages reassembling in America.

For much of the nineteenth century, Irish Americans found social and economic mobility hampered by lack of capital, insufficiency of marketable skills, and outright prejudice. Most avenues of upward mobility—whether politics, the church, or trade—remained focused upon the immigrant subculture and held in the most ambitious youths rather than propelling them outward. One consequence was a highly concentrated population. In 1850, 80 percent of the Irish‐born lived in the urban Northeast. In 1860, nearly one‐third of the Irish‐born lived in just ten American cities, and 40 percent of that number resided in New York City alone. As late as 1920, approximately 90 percent of first‐generation Irish Americans resided in urban areas. Not until after World War I did these close‐knit Irish neighborhoods begin to erode and disperse.

Irish Americans formed aid societies, fraternal groups, small businesses, Catholic parishes, and political organizations. The last offered protection against (while also provoking) periodic assaults by native‐born Anglo‐American Protestants upon the Irish Catholics' alleged loyalty, on account of their religion, to a “foreign prince.” Episodes of nativist hostility reinforced Irish Americans' tendency to identify themselves as a people dispossessed—first by the English and subsequently by Anglo‐Americans. The Roman Catholic church provided a source of strength and a path of upward mobility. By 1900, half of the bishops who had served the American church were Irish‐born or ‐descended. Politics, too, served the community. Thousands of Irish‐Americans earned their wages as policemen, firemen, city laborers, and clerks, while the politicians who secured their places built impressive urban vote‐getting “machines” headed by “bosses” like New York City's “Honest John” Kelly and mayors like Boston's James M. Curley (1874–1958) and, after World War II, Chicago's Richard J. Daley.

Associated with the Democratic party from the 1840s, Irish‐American voters wavered when President Woodrow Wilson showed little enthusiasm for Irish independence but returned to vote for the Catholic presidential candidate Alfred E. Smith in 1928. The New Deal Era's social welfare programs, which undercut the social services provided by ethnic politicians, and the erosion of Irish‐American neighborhoods weakened pressures for political conformity. A residual ethnic pride emerged, however, in Irish‐American support for John F. Kennedy in 1960.

As the twentieth century wore on, Irish America slipped into a pan‐Catholic culture that was no longer purely ethnic. With the growing secularization of American life, a superficial “Irishness” was embraced as part of the American culture. Saint Patrick's Day, shorn of religious significance, became a national festival, and to claim Ireland as one's ancestral home became both fashionable and, ironically, a badge of assimilation.
See also Antebellum Era; Anti‐Catholic Movement; Colonial Era; Indentured Servitude; Nativist Movement; New England; Race and Ethnicity; Roman Catholicism; Urbanization.

Bibliography

William V. Shannon , The American Irish: A Political and Social Portrait, 1963.
Andrew Greeley , That Most Distressful Nation: The Taming of the American Irish, 1972.
Lawrence McCaffrey , The Irish Diaspora in America, 1976.
Timothy J. Meagher, ed., From Paddy to Studs: Irish‐American Communities in the Turn of the Century Era, 1880–1920, 1986.
Denis Clark , Erin's Heirs: Irish Bonds of Community, 1991.
Ronald H. Bayor and Timothy J. Meagher, eds., The New York Irish, 1996.

Dale T. Knobel