The American Kaleidoscope. Lawrence H. Fuchs
under the jurisdiction of the state rather than the Public School Society.29 Funds were not authorized by the legislature for parochial schools, but in the next election New York City Catholics put up their own candidates for mayor and the common council. Although not elected, they presented a threat to the Democrats, whose state leaders pressured the legislature to establish, for the first time, a school system directly controlled by the people and entirely financed from the public treasury—a full public school system—in what was a major victory for the separation of church and state.
The outcome had vast implications for the evolution of voluntary pluralism. While the New York legislature had voted not to subsidize Irish Catholic parochial schools, it did agree to try to remove the Protestant influence from the public schools, and, by 1844, Bible reading was excluded from thirty-one of the city’s public schools.30 There was nothing to stop the Irish or other national Catholic groups from establishing their own parochial schools if they would pay for them.
Irish Catholics had set a precedent for other ethnic-religious groups: negotiate, bargain, and work within the system. Effective in endorsing Democratic candidates but relatively ineffective in advancing an independent Catholic party, they inadvertently established a presumption against presenting an explicitly religious or ethnic slate in future elections. Claiming American values and institutions as their own and employing the rhetoric of the civic culture, Irish Catholics illustrated Tocqueville’s proposition that patriotism is nurtured and reinforced by participation in the political process.
Irish Catholics had known politics in the old country, where the rules were rigged against them. In the U.S., where every vote was equal, sheer numbers counted most. The Democratic party’s appeal was primarily to those trying to acquire property and status. It was the natural home for the Irish, although in Philadelphia Irish building contractors were tied into the Republican machine. The most strident anti-Catholics were found overwhelmingly among the Know-Nothings, the Whigs, and factional predecessors of the Republican party. In return for Irish votes, the Democrats of New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and dozens of other cities offered jobs in the party, protection against riots, recognition of Irish culture and nationalism, as in the sponsorship of a major Saint Patrick’s Day parade or party, and, as Kirby A. Miller has written, “a sense of belonging to a powerful, American institution.”31 Irish political clubs were set up in Irish grog shops and by street gangs and in volunteer fire companies. The use of repeater voters was common among the Irish, who were taught the practice by non-Irish (usually Anglo-American) political leaders, like New York’s Boss Tweed in the 1860s. Politics became a principal route to municipal jobs, and, for those who could be elected to a moderately important office, it meant a decent income and life-style, too. Before the arrival of large numbers of Irish Catholics, Boston was one of the most tranquil, best governed, and most homogeneous cities in the world, with, in 1845, fewer than ten thousand industrial workers in a population of 165,000.32 Class differences existed, of course; blacks, nearly always at the bottom, lived in “nigger hill” behind the State House and in the North End near poor whites, most of whom lived around Fort Hill. But there was little poverty in the city, the crime rate was less than in cities of comparable size, and standards of public health were relatively high. Harriet Martineau, a visitor from England, wrote, “I know no large city where there is so much mutual helpfulness, so little neglect and ignorance of the concerns of other classes.”33 Then came the famine Irish, and, as Oscar Handlin has shown, they quickly formed an urban proletariat, a laboring class exploited through exorbitant rents for miserable tenement apartments, low wages, and grinding, menial work. Disease and crime followed.
Yankee Protestants were not entirely without sympathy. Yankee doctors treated the Irish victims of the cholera epidemic of 1849, in which five hundred persons perished. Yankee Protestants supported the St. Vincent Female Orphan Asylum, which cared for children who had lost both parents during the epidemic. A Harvard graduate and former Episcopalian minister founded the House of the Angel Guardian in the North End in 1851 as a “moral restaurant” for “intractable” Catholic children who had appeared before municipal court judges and others whose parents and guardians were willing to commit them there.34 But Yankee Boston generally felt outrage, shock, and disdain for the Irish. By the late 1840s and early 1850s the Irish accounted for 97 percent of the residents in the Deer Island almshouse, 75 percent of the prisoners in the county jail, 90 percent of Boston’s truants and vagabonds, and 58 percent of its paupers.35
The Irish themselves, through church and charitable organizations, tried to deal with the survival needs of children growing up in homes headed by women36 and created such charitable institutions as the Working Boys’ Home in the North End and the Carney Hospital, founded by a wealthy Irish merchant, which set aside a ward for abandoned infants and unwed mothers. By the 1870s the Irish “were no longer the illiterate, impoverished peasants who had dragged themselves ashore,”37 but an estimated 22 percent of Irish households in 1870 still struggled in desperate poverty.38 With more than 26 percent of the population in Boston, 24 percent in New York, 25 percent in Jersey City, and 19 percent in St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and Providence, the Irish Catholics established churches, sodalities, Holy Name societies, and social, athletic, and community organizations connected to the church.39 In addition to the network of parishes and parochial schools, they organized fraternities, labor unions, volunteer fire departments, orphanages, homes for the elderly, and temperance halls. Such organizations provided solace and comfort for immigrants and their children, and often served as bases from which the Irish Catholics could express their interests and make their claims in the polity. The most important communal organization of all for the Irish in Boston, New York, and other cities, next to the church itself, was the Democratic party, and for Irish men, the party probably was more important than the church. In and through the party they found sociability, jobs, and a way to claim an American identity.
The Irish were at least as eager to embrace their new country as the Germans. Even at the height of the Americanist–Know Nothing fervor in 1856, an Irish Catholic immigrant standing on the steps of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., recorded his awe at seeing about him “signs of incorruptible liberty.” Writing of the Capitol, he said, “I prayed fervently for its perpetuation and invincibility, as I considered it the shield of the oppressed, the dread of tyrants, and the nucleus of our glorious Constitution [italics mine].”40
The Catholic press in the mid-nineteenth century reflected the hunger of the Irish to be accepted as Americans.41 The first major editor of the leading Catholic newspaper, The Pilot of Boston, Patrick Donahoe, fought to protect Irish Catholics; he urged his readers to become citizens and to get involved in politics.42 Speaking very much as Carl Schurz had to the Germans, Donahoe urged the Irish of Boston and the surrounding area not to anglicize their names but to be proud of every aspect of their Irish ancestry even as they gained self-respect by becoming citizens and voting. He saw the immigrants as continual “‘reinforcements to the principle of our republicanism’ with ‘a strong hatred of monarchy’ and a ‘natural love for this sheltering democracy.’”43
It was advice followed by a succession of Boston politicians. The first great South Boston Irish politician, Patrick Collins, found (in Victor Greene’s phrase) “that America offered a universal ideology that he and his countrymen could share.”44 So strong was Collins’s Irish identity that he joined the Fenian Brotherhood, the Irish-American revolutionary organization, although he did not accompany them in their raid into Canada, reasoning that immigrants should not fight in wars that had not been declared by Congress. An Irish nationalist, he was also an active Democratic party politician, preaching what he called the “genius of republicanism” to all who would listen.45
Collins did not hold elective office in Boston (President Cleveland appointed him consul-general in London in 1892), but Hugh O’Brien, John Fitzgerald, and James Michael Curley did. The nativists of the 1850s had warned that one day the Bridgets and Patricks down below in the kitchen would rule the city of Boston, but there had been only one Irish policeman in the entire city before the Civil War. By 1869, there were nearly forty. In 1871, there were forty-five, and by 1900, one hundred.46 In the prewar years there had never been an Irishman on Boston’s eightman board of aldermen and only