Political Behavior Of The Irish example essay topic

Irish Immigration to America There are multiple reasons why groups immigrate to the United States: liberty; whether it be political or religious, the desire for a better life, or in the case of the Irish: starvation. The agricultural collapse of Ireland, widely known as the Great Potato Famine, forced 4.5 million Irish to come to the U.S. between 1840 and 1914. As discussed in the course, this makes them the first major non-protestant group to enter the US, immediately causing Americans to perceive them as a threat. Though the Irish were seen as a threat, they arrived at a time when unskilled labor was needed and a wide range of civil service and state government jobs opened up, thus giving them a niche in society as well as opening up some channels of mobility. As a result of the famine, many Irish families were forced to emigrate from their country. By 1854, between 1 1/2 and 2 million Irish left their country due to the harsh living conditions.

In America, most Irish became city-dwellers: with little money, many had to settle in the cities that the ships they came on landed in. By 1850, the Irish made up a quarter of the population in Boston, Massachusetts; New York City; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Baltimore, Maryland. In addition, Irish populations were prevalent among American mining communities (Quinn). Today the Irish are so thoroughly assimilated into the larger American society that it is difficult for anyone to remember how harshly and unforgiving they were greeted as they arrived in the great wave that began in the mid-1840's and lasted for a decade, but white America equated them with blacks and stereotyped them accordingly as "childlike buffoons, lazy, superstitious, given to double talk, inflated rhetoric, and comic misuse of proper English (Quinn)". For African Americans and the Irish alike, Quinn explains the attitudes against them: "the stereotype became so ingrained in popular attitudes and perceptions that it passed from being regarded as a theatrical parody to a predetermining of group behavior". Blacks were called Sambo, while Irish were stereotyped as Paddy.

Gradually, though, Paddy evolved into what Quinn calls Jimmy, a blend of New York's flamboyant Mayor Jimmy Walker and Jimmy Cagney. Jimmy "expressed the style of the urban Irish in its definitive form. These Jimmies had the blend of musicality and menace, of nattiness and charm, of verbal agility and ironic sensibility, of what today is known as 'street smarts,' that the Irish, as New York's first immigrant outsiders, had developed (Quinn)". They achieved this after overcoming circumstances so dire as to defy description or comprehension. On the subject of the famine, Quinn again is descriptive rather than definitive but he fully evokes the terrible pain and horror it inflicted on millions of people, and he shows how those who fled Ireland for America "began the process of recovering from the shattering experience of the Famine, of unbending from the defensive crouch it had forced them into, of building a new identity in America that preserved their deep sense of being Irish as it prepared them to compete in a country in which the hostility they faced was interwoven with possibilities for advancement that had never existed before (Quinn)". White Anglo-Saxons who regarded themselves as "native Americans" gave the newcomers a frosty welcome.

In Boston, employers famously posted signs that read: "No Irish Need Apply". Irish women, who outnumbered men, "worked in factories and mills. Irish maids became a fixture of bourgeois American life. Domestic service became so associated with the Irish that maids often were referred to generically as 'Kathleens' or 'Bridges,' " just as black railroad porters were universally, and equally patronizingly, called "George (Quinn)".

The Irish were predominately Roman Catholic. Historically, the "white" population in the U.S. had been Protestant until this point. This led to both the ostrification of the Irish and their ability to develop solidarity. The Irish built churches, schools, and other social support organizations for themselves that utilized their religion as a fulcrum for social leverage. It was discussed in class that the Irish shaped the American Catholic church. The very first Irish to be educated in the U. S were the nuns and priests of the Catholic church who had no children to pass this knowledge to, which gave rise to the parochial school system.

These institutions allowed the Irish community to develop internal support mechanisms for economic redistribution and for political activity. In America, the Irish elevated the church "from an ingredient in Irish life to its center, the bulwark of a culture that had lost its language and almost disintegrated beneath the catastrophe of the Famine (Quinn)". The Irish "translated their numbers into control of the Democratic party in the major cities and turned municipal patronage into an immediate and pragmatic method for softening the ravages of boom-and-bust capitalism". They were "prime participants in the often intertwined professions of politics, entertainment, sports (along with its less reputable sister, gambling), as well as a major part of the local criminal underworld (which was not infrequently an ally of the local political machine) (Quinn)". Politics proved to be the key to Irish assimilation, though certainly not in a way of which the Brahmins approved. In New York, Tammany Hall emerged as the great engine of Irish advancement.

Viewed with disgust by Anglo of most classes, but especially by reformers and aristocrats, Tammany did indeed wallow in corruption, but, more important, it "was about practical things: about jobs, bread, influence; about the neighborhood kid who needed a lawyer; about the fees paid a subcontractor; and about the hundred cases of champagne and two hundred kegs of beer waiting in the basement of the Hall for those who endured five hours of July Fourth speechifying (Quinn)". Tammany was practical, unromantic and effective; Quinn correctly concludes that "for all its excesses, for all its thievery and knavery, Tammany afforded the poor what the rich and well-off had denied them throughout history: respect (Quinn)". The Irish arrived at the time in the U. S when unskilled labor was needed for the newly booming industrial economy. Because of their recent agricultural collapse, the Irish generally avoided farming and remained in the cities on the East Coast. "Having arrived in the seacoast cities virtually penniless, they and no funds to move inland.

Moreover, farming on the frontier was radically different from tilling the small plots of intensively cultivated ground in the old country (Shannon)". Upper-class Bostonian's began to leave city government for careers in federal government opening up yet another niche in American society. They began to excel not only in industry, but also in civil service jobs and in the Catholic Church because of their high rate of literacy. When the Irish first came to the country they swept into low class jobs by willing to work for the lowest pay. "But if the work was hard and the wages were low, at least there was work and opportunity beckoned. The American cities were in their infancy when the Irish came.

Their rise and the rise of the Irish in American life went hand in hand (Shannon)". They were even cheaper than slave labor by the fact that on dangerous jobs Irish rather than slaves were sent in to work. It was cheaper to lose an Irishman than a slave, who was an expensive piece of property. With the Irish raid on labor they soon became an intricate part of labor unions, that didn't allow blacks. In the labor force they began to exercise power and demonstrate their earned "whiteness (Ignatiev)".

Ignatiev points out: in Philadelphia the Irish gained their own fire companies and became members of the police force. Both of these facts demonstrate major gains in power in the then ultra-corrupt government. With the fact that they had places in the fire companies and the police force showed that they were under no control of another group. Shannon describes the Irish American's awareness of their place in society: "The Irish, despite their growing power, were aware of the social distance that separated them from the American inner group".

The Irish freed themselves of bias by becoming police themselves". The growing group of respectable merchants, of police and fire officials, of securely established, if meagerly paid, Irish schoolmarms and other civil servants could not possibly be viewed any longer as indolent, feckless, good-humored, and irresponsible folk. They had too much power for that; they might be resented but they now had to be taken seriously (Shannon)". After this change is social status the Irish began to question who they were within the context of American society.

They asked themselves: Who am I? What kind of American am I? "They described themselves not only as Americans but of a super patriotic kind, and as proof, they offered the fact of their Irish ness and their devotion to old Ireland (Shannon)". The use of religious organizations as a starting point for political activity is well developed in the book, Free Spaces: The Sources of Democratic Change in America, by Sara M. Evans and Harry C. Byte. These scholars document the importance of independent social organizations that exist outside the government apparatus. These organizations are termed "free spaces".

Free spaces, according to these authors, allow groups to develop political awareness and act collectively to further their interests. The authors emphasize organizations that have collectively helped the traditionally discriminated against groups, such as women, blacks, and labor. The principles outlined, though, are perfectly applicable to the Irish in the U.S. The Irish's organizations allowed them to exercise democratic essentials outside the usual political arena. They were able to develop leadership skills, public talk, discuss issues confronting them as a group, as well as other nascent political essentials. The Catholic church is one of the major factors in the transition of the Irish to becoming a viable political group. The key transition is the move from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party by Irish Americans.

This move marked a fundamental shift in alignment for the Irish. In the middle 1800's, the Republican Party opposed slavery. The abolitionist stance did not allow the Irish to fully enjoy the privileges of being "white" in 19th century America. The shift to the Democratic Party is, therefore, significant because the Democratic Party was pro-slavery.

This shift did not come accidentally, however. Shannon explains the Irish's move from conservative to liberal political ideology: "The Federalists (Republicans) grossly misread the character of the Irish immigrant. The successful Irish already established here were Federalists. The masses of poor Irish who came later may have been turbulent in their manners, but in their fundamental outlook they were conservative.

Nevertheless the stereotype was out of line with the facts, it lingered for nearly half a century and had a profound influence over the political behavior of the Irish. The hostility of the Federalists and their Whig successors, particularly in New England and parts of New York where they were strong, drove the Irish into the arms of the Jeffersonians (Democrats)". The Irish population, although they were socially equated to blacks, were allowed to vote. As the book explains, they initially proudly fought against slavery. By virtue of their abolitionist stance and the other social factors that identified them, the Irish were ostracized from mainstream "white" America. Their gradual transition to political viability came through their organizations and economic progress, though, and as they moved closer to the level of political equity, they continued to be discriminated against based on previously mentioned criteria.

The change came when the Democratic Party realized the relevance of a large untapped population of "white", legal voters, who did not have a strong alignment. The Democrats decided to co-opt the Irish in an attempt to bolster their own agenda. The shift from Republican to Democrat, hence from abolitionist to pro-slavery, caused a permanent rift in the relationship between blacks and Irish. They could no longer be classified as white Negroes, since they were now fighting directly against those very people with whom they had previously been categorized (Ignatiev).

According to Shannon, the Irish had two advantages in American politics that other immigrants did not have: "a knowledge of the English language and an acquaintance with the dominant Anglo-American culture. In addition to a common language and a shared culture, they had gifts of organization and eloquence, a sense of cohesion, and the beginnings of a political tradition in the nationalist agitation in Ireland". This opened up many channels of mobility for the Irish. They now had political influence and were no longer seen as white Negroes by the remaining white community, thus opening up more opportunities for future generations. The Irish, fleeing political and agricultural oppression, came to the United states to make a better life for themselves and in return were forced to work unskilled jobs and were seen as just as much of a disgrace as the African Americans. But through establishing their own institutions to solidify their culture and beliefs, the Irish quickly rose from the bottom rung of society to excel in politics and civil service.

Quinn dictates this best when describing what he believes is the central theme in Irish immigration: "If there is any central theme in the story of the Irish in America it is... how they stayed Irish: how an immigrant group already under punishing cultural and economic pressures, reeling in the wake of the worst catastrophe in western Europe in the nineteenth century, and plunged into the fastest industrializing society in the world, regrouped as quickly as it did, built its own far-flung network of charitable and educational institutions; preserved its own identity, and had a profound influence on the future of both the country it left an the one it came to.".