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Overview
Irish Immigrants in New York City,
1945-1995
Linda Dowling Almeida
The story of one of the most visible groups of immigrants in the major city of immigrants in the last half of the 20th century.
"Almeida offers a dynamic portrait of Irish New York, one that keeps reinventing itself under new circumstances."
—Hasia Diner, New York University
"[Almeida's] close attention to changes in economics, culture, and politics on both sides of the Atlantic makes [this book] one of the more accomplished applications of the 'new social history' to a contemporary American ethnic group." —Roger Daniels, University of Cincinnati
It is estimated that one in three New York City residents is an immigrant. No other American city has a population composed of so many different nationalities. Of these "foreign born," a relatively small percentage come directly from Ireland, but the Irish presence in the city—and America—is ubiquitous. In the 1990 census, Irish ancestry was claimed by over half a million New Yorkers and by 44 million nationwide. The Irish presence in popular American culture has also been highly visible.
Yet for all the attention given to Irish Americans, surprisingly little has been said about post–World War II immigrants. Almeida's research takes important steps toward understanding modern Irish immigration. Comparing 1950s Irish immigrants with the "New Irish" of the 1980s, Almeida provides insights into the evolution of the Irish American identity and addresses the role of the United States and Ireland in shaping it.
She finds, among other things, that social and economic progress in Ireland has heightened expectations for Irish immigrants. But at the same time they face greater challenges in gaining legal residence, a situation that has led the New Irish to reject many organizations that long supported previous generations of Irish immigrants in favor of new ones better-suited to their needs.
Linda Dowling Almeida, Adjunct Professor of History at New York University, has published articles on the "New Irish" in America and is a longtime member of the New York Irish History Roundtable. She also edited Volume 8 of the journal New York Irish History.
March 2001
232 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4, index, append.
cloth 0-253-33843-3 $35.00 s / £26.5
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253108531 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/22/2001 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Linda Dowling Almeida is an Adjunct Professor of History at New York University. She received her BA and MA degrees from Boston College and her Ph.D. from NYU. She has published articles on the "New Irish" in America. She is a long-time member of the New York Irish History Roundtable and edited Volume 8 of the journal NEW YORK IRISH HISTORY.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Background: When the Irish Ran New York
"The first thing on the agenda is the split."
— paraphrase of Brendan Behan
The Irish have been leaving Ireland to go to America for more than three hundred years. The most significant influx of Irish to the United States occurred between 1841 and 1921, when nearly four million Irish — most of them Catholic — flooded American shores. The migration was notable not only for its numbers but also for the political, social, and cultural impact the immigrants had on the cities and institutions they encountered.
Within fifty years of the famine exodus the Irish had built a complex, diverse community in New York of more than 600,000 immigrants and their children. The total city population in 1890 was 1.5 million, so the Irish were a significant presence. They represented almost one-third of all New Yorkers.
In the latter half of the nineteenth century the Irish typically settled in cities because during this period of industrial expansion the developing urban centers of the United States offered unskilled labor opportunities for both men and women. Although many Irish left rural homes and farms for America, they did not have the capital or experience to buy and/or operate farms in the Midwest as did German and other northern European immigrants of the time. Irish farmers grew potatoes, which required limited agricultural expertise. Young Irish women, migrating alone and at a very young age at the end of the nineteenth century, found work in the homes of middle-class families, keeping house and minding children. They spoke English, had a reputation for being "chaste," and were not prevented from living with their employers by strict parents or cultural codes.
In their essay "The Irish," Daniel Moynihan and Nathan Glazer identified the Irish era in New York City as beginning in the early 1870s and ending in the 1930s. Symbolically the authors cited the prosecution of William Marcy "Boss" Tweed by Charles O'Conor (1871) and the exile to Europe of ex-mayor James J. Walker (1932) as the bookend events for the era. It is no accident that they chose politics to bracket the period. Except for the Roman Catholic Church, city government was the arena in which the Irish achieved the most power and notoriety as an ethnic group in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their success was based on several factors, including numerical strength initially, a common language with the host society, and an understanding of the American political process stemming from their experience fighting for Catholic emancipation, land reform, and home rule within the British system of law and government. The Irish in New York City developed a powerful grassroots base that had its origins in the secret "cell societies" formed by nineteenth-century political movements such as Daniel O'Connell's Catholic Association, the Fenians, and the Irish Republican Brotherhood in Ireland.
As the historian Chris McNickle explained it, the Irish understood that politics was about power and control. They knew how to exploit public office to amass loyalty in order to build and maintain a power base in an alien society. The ballot box was their medium. In 1855, 34 percent of New York City voters were Irish. By 1890, the number of immigrant and first-generation Irish (children of Irish-born parents) still equaled more than one-quarter of the city's population. In thirty-five years the city's population grew from 500,000 to more than a million with the great waves of southern and eastern European immigrants who added to the thousands of workers walking the streets of New York in search of jobs and a better way of life. The Irish were represented by the Tammany organization, which virtually controlled the Democratic Party by the 1880s. When unemployed Irish constituents were faced with "No Irish Need Apply," it was the local ward boss who provided a job or a meal for the price of a vote. According to one source cited by McNickle, the Irish Catholics who ran City Hall controlled 12,000 jobs in 1888. Ten years later, greater New York City Democratic Party officials could place faithful voters in almost 60,000 jobs, from civil service posts to construction crews on municipal building projects.
By the 1950s the Irish political star had waned. Though still active in city politics, as an ethnic force the Irish were relegated to coalition building with ascendant power groups such as the Jews, the Italians, and, in the 1980s and 1990s, African Americans and Hispanics. The Irish no longer had the votes to guarantee victory at the polls. By 1950 the number of foreign-born Irish and native-born Irish of foreign or mixed parentage in New York City had dropped to 5.7 percent of the city's population. In addition, the nature of urban politics had changed. Federally subsidized social welfare and relief programs and civil service reform reduced the impact of local patronage power, as did the growing power of municipal unions to provide jobs and job security.
As the Irish moved up the economic ladder they were no longer seeking the blue-collar and bureaucratic clerical positions that city contracts and civil service offered. As entrepreneurs, professionals, and property owners, the Irish were paying city taxes, not collecting city paychecks, so their political demands were changing. McNickle argues that Irish voters were more conservative than the Jewish party leaders who were beginning to dictate Democratic party philosophy by the 1960s, and the Irish thus found themselves drifting away from the party.
Besides politics, the Irish controlled the Roman Catholic Church in New York, dominating the clergy and the hierarchy of the institution well into the twentieth century. The Irish secured their position as leaders of the Church in New York in the decades following the famine. Historian Kerby Miller estimates that the "vast majority" (almost 90 percent) of Irish famine immigrants were Catholic, in contrast to pre-famine migrants, at least half of whom were Protestant. In the post-famine years, not only did Catholics continue to outnumber Protestant emigrants, but they brought with them a stronger, more formal, and conservative brand of religion — one reinforced by the hardship of famine and reflecting the increased presence of the parish priest in rural Ireland's daily life. The late-century Irish were also more likely to equate Catholicism with Irishness, thanks to post-famine nationalist politics endorsed by Irish Church leaders. And in the United States, mid-century nativism served to further separate and alienate Irish Catholics from Americans as well as Irish Protestants.
The Irish presence in the New York Catholic Church was also obvious in the Church hierarchy. Through the nineteenth century, German and Irish Catholics battled to preserve the religion they carried with them from their homelands, eventually establishing national parishes led by ethnically kindred priests who ministered to their needs in the native tongue. The Irish outnumbered the Germans, as well as other groups, and came to dominate not only the faithful of the New York archdiocese, but also the clergy and institutional leadership. In the 1850s Irish-born Archbishop John Hughes made his mark on the New York archdiocese by centralizing power in the hands of the archbishop and away from the lay leadership within each parish. Jay Dolan describes his tenure as "boss leadership": "he ruled like an Irish chieftain" at a time when the church needed focus in the face of a divergent and rapidly growing immigrant urban population. In the fifty-year period beginning about 1815, the Roman Catholic Church in New York City grew from a minor denomination with about 15,000 members and 2 small churches to include almost half the city's population (400,000) and 32 churches. A solid middle class of Irish and German Catholics contributed to the physical growth and presence of the Church.
Archbishop Hughes's most conspicuous accomplishment was the construction of St. Patrick's Cathedral, a building "worthy of [our] increasing numbers, intelligence and wealth." His sister, Mother Angela Hughes, presided over another institution which symbolized the growing strength and power of Irish Catholics. She established St. Vincent's Hospital as an alternative health facility for Irish immigrants who found the existing public and private health care outlets in the city insensitive to their needs. Hughes was followed in the archbishop's chair by John McCloskey and Michael Corrigan, both of whom shared not only his style of singular leadership, but his ethnicity as well.
For almost a hundred years the majority of the Irish in New York City were Democrat and Catholic. The voting strength and religious presence of the Irish in New York can be easily misunderstood as unity and conformity. But the Irish were not and never have been monolithic. As an immigrant population, their diversity is directly related to the constant influx of new migrants. In the 150 years after the beginning of the famine exodus, emigration to the United States showed highs and lows based on a variety of factors both in the United States and in Ireland. As a result, the Irish who arrived in New York at any given time in those 150 years carried with them more than personal possessions and the addresses of aunts and cousins. They brought with them the expectations and experiences that marked their particular generation in Ireland and influenced the push/pull factors that brought them to America. Conversely, the relatives, family friends, employers, and civic and community leaders who met the arrivals at the docks and airports of New York brought with them their perceptions, prejudices, and expectations of the Irish and Ireland. Quite often these preconceptions clashed with reality.
From 1850 through the 1930s, Ireland's relationship to Great Britain and its struggle for independence shaped Irish migrant identity and nationality. Those emigrants who left Ireland after the famine were raised in a different country from those who left between 1845 and 1850. The post-famine years arguably brought Ireland into the modern era politically, if not economically. At the same time, as the number of Irish in New York grew during this period and they and their descendants achieved power and status, the society into which post-famine emigrants entered changed, as did the host society's perceptions of what was Irish. The Irish in New York were no longer an insignificant ethnic population. Leaders on both sides of the Atlantic valued the votes, dollars, and opinions of immigrants and American-born ethnics.
The dynamic of change and diversity within a community that was growing so dramatically from within, by natural population growth, and from without, by immigration, is instructive. As we look back from the perspective of the 1990s to understand the relationship between late-twentieth-century emigrant generations, that earlier evolution provides a comparative canvas from which to observe and understand the tensions and conflicts that would mark the community a hundred years later.
In the mid-nineteenth century the famine forced changes in the agricultural, economic, and social organization of Ireland. As death, eviction, and emigration emptied family farms and homes through the 1840s, surviving farmers and landlords consolidated, increasing the median size of individual farms larger than one acre from 10.8 acres in 1841 to 15.6 acres in 1851 and to 18.5 acres in 1876. Yet, as Kerby Miller points out, Ireland remained overwhelming agrarian through the nineteenth century. By 1911, nearly 46 percent of Irish farms were under 15 acres, qualifying them primarily as family farms. Between 1861 and 1911, the number of Irish holdings under 30 acres fell by 17.5 percent, compared to 40 percent of French farms in the same period. And while post-famine farmers tended to diversify crop selection and turn more land over to pasture and grazing, most farms were semi-subsistence rather than commercial. Ireland was still a land of small and poor farmers.
The primary significance in the reorganization of farm holdings for Ireland and its population was its impact on social and family relations. The historian Joe Lee argues that prior to the famine, land was subordinated to the people; in the years after, people were subordinated to the land. Before 1845 family plots were subdivided among the children in the family; afterward, the land and dowry resources were provided for one son and one daughter at the discretion of the father. According to Lee and Hasia Diner, a historian who has written on nineteenth-century Irish female emigration, this arrangement created extreme tension and strife within Irish families: jealousy among siblings for the inheritance; hostility between widowed mothers and daughters-in-law who viewed each other as rivals for control of the family economy; and dependence of children on their parents for inheritance or assistance to emigrate. Demographically the changes resulted in later marriages, enforced celibacy, declining birthrates, emigration, and low population growth. Socially, the changes in economic conditions encouraged a conservatism that was reinforced by the Catholic Church. Indeed, following the horror of the famine, the Catholic clergy became more powerful figures locally, promoting the reordered family economy and its emphasis on chastity, obedience, and conformity with spiritual solace and justification.
In general, while Irish society recovered economically from the famine and demonstrated some superficial signs of prosperity and progress in the years after 1850, it remained a primarily rural and agrarian society. What appear to be improvements to the farm management actually stalled the country's industrial and commercial opportunities and growth. By reducing consumer demand and depleting the labor supply needed to develop industry, depopulation in the years after the famine contributed to the dynamic. The dependence of the population on the family farm, the loss of local non-agricultural employment to industrialization abroad, and an increased reliance on imports prevented Ireland from developing a modern, independent economy.
These changes had an impact on emigration. After 1860 migration from Ireland comprised primarily single men and women — young people who were forced out of the Irish economy thanks to changes instituted in the wake of the famine. They differed from the famine refugees in that they traveled alone, they spoke English, and while most still did not have crafts or skills, they were probably stronger and healthier than famine refugees of an earlier generation. This migration trend continued through the end of the nineteenth century, when the number of single young women leaving Ireland actually began to exceed the number of departing young men.
According to Hasia Diner and Janet Nolan, social and economic conditions in Ireland were far more difficult for women than for men. Women were seeking economic as well as social freedom from the strict codes of Irish society, in which a woman's only hope of economic or domestic independence and "adult" status was to join the convent or marry. Ironically, the changes in the economy created idle hours for young girls and women, who in previous generations worked in the field, traveled to factory jobs or domestic work in the city, or did linen or textile work at home. The free time and Compulsory Education Act of the 1870s allowed young girls the luxury of going to school. By 1900 more girls than boys attended school, and the rate of illiteracy fell more quickly for girls than for boys in the last thirty years of the nineteenth century. The national literacy rate in 1911 was 88 percent, compared to 47 percent in 1841. These literate youngsters could read the letters sent to Ireland from America by sisters, brothers, and cousins and learn of the opportunities for work, marriage, and independence. An improved rail system carried newspapers and journals to the rural population of the country, further expanding people's knowledge of the outside world and arguably fueling the ambitions of disinherited sons and daughters on the farms of Ireland. Ireland had changed in the years after the famine, and by definition so had its migrants. The post-famine generation sailed for America carrying with them more than the desire to work and breathe free.
In the late 1870s Ireland was faced with an agricultural crisis reminiscent of the Great Famine. But unlike the 1840s emigration to the United States did not offer a safety valve. An economic slump in America gave prospective migrants little incentive to leave. Instead the crisis mobilized the Irish countryside politically: crop failure and potato blight in the years 1877–79 ignited the three-year agitation (1879–82) known as the Land War. The movement was an attempt by tenant farmers to wrest control of land away from land-owning families and to "abolish the landlord system" by establishing the three F's: fair rent, fixity of tenure, and free sale. The targets of the farmers' discontent were the landlords. About 37 percent of landowners actually lived in Ireland (although not on their own estates), while owners of about one-quarter of Irish farms lived outside the country. The movement, the farmers hoped, would introduce some security to their existence and the opportunity to eventually own their own land. The vehicle created to effect this change was the Land League. The movement was so deep and strong throughout the country that Irish political leaders seized the opportunity to piggyback on the popularity of the Land League. They harnessed the powerful energy of a popular agrarian revolution for tenants' rights to the political, parliamentary movement for home rule for the entire country.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Irish Immigrants in New York City, 1945–1995"
by .
Copyright © 2001 Linda Dowling Almeida.
Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
Preliminary Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Background: When the Irish Ran New York
Chapter 2: The 1950s: "It Was a Great Time in America
Chapter 3: The 1970s: The Interim
Chapter 4: The 1980s: The New Irish
Chapter 5: The Catholic Church: What Parish Are You From?
Chapter 6: Who Are the Irish?
Conclusion
Epilogue
Bibliography