James Barrett on ‘The Irish Way,’ How the Irish Influenced U.S. Cities

Mar 16, 2012 The Daily Beast

Ireland’s immigrants have had the biggest influence on U.S. city life. James R. Barrett, author of the new book The Irish Way, on how one ethnic group defined the urban experience.

Did the Irish create the American city?

The short answer, of course, is no. Our urban culture has never had a mainstream or core—Hibernian or other. Urban neighborhoods and their cultures were the collective products of myriad racial and ethnic groups.

But what if the question were turned slightly—which group had the greatest influence on the character of American city life in its formative period? Then a strong case could be made for the Irish. They were, above all, city people. As Peter Quinn notes, within a generation they went from being the most rural people in Western Europe to being the most urban people in the U.S. Spread throughout the length and breadth of New York, Chicago, and other cities, many Irish remained behind as neighborhoods changed, acting as middlemen for the new groups. From the late 19th century down to recent times, it was difficult to avoid them—in city streets, the church, the workplace or union hall, on the vaudeville stage, in the political machine. Distinguished from the majority in the 19th century by virtue of their poverty and their religion, confined to the nation’s worst slums, they represented America’s first ethnic group, and they charted a course that countless other groups followed.

The story is not all pretty. As I write in my book, The Irish Way: Becoming American in the Multiethnic City, the cohesive but insular character of parish life often bred a defensive mentality that made Irish neighborhoods inhospitable to outsiders. Having fraternized and even intermarried with blacks and Chinese in New York’s old Five Points neighborhood in the wake of the Potato Famine, the Irish soon embraced a virulent racism, driving these groups from their neighborhoods and workplaces. In many cities, Irish gangs created a geography of ethnic and racial separation, establishing invisible “deadlines” that black migrants and later immigrant youth navigated at their peril. Early Italian immigrants who had not yet established their own parishes were often relegated to the basements of the old Irish churches. An anti-Semitism that was rare in Ireland took hold in cities where Irish neighborhoods abutted burgeoning Jewish ghettoes.

The Irish Way: Becoming American in the Multiethnic City, by James R. Barrett, 400 pages. Penguin History of American Life.
More on this book at The Daily Beast.