The Unstoppable Irish

Songs and Integration of the New York Irish, 1783–1883

Dan Milner

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780268105754
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

This unique book captures the rise of New York's passionately musical Irish Catholics and provides a compelling history of early New York City.

The Unstoppable Irish follows the changing fortunes of New York's Irish Catholics, commencing with the evacuation of British military forces in late 1783 and concluding one hundred years later with the completion of the initial term of the city's first Catholic mayor. During that century, Hibernians first coalesced and then rose in uneven progression from being a variously dismissed, despised, and feared foreign group to ultimately receiving de facto acceptance as constituent members of the city's population. Dan Milner presents evidence that the Catholic Irish of New York gradually integrated (came into common and equal membership) into the city populace rather than assimilated (adopted the culture of a larger host group). Assimilation had always been an option for Catholics, even in Ireland. In order to fit in, they needed only to adopt mainstream Anglo-Protestant identity. But the same virile strain within the Hibernian psyche that had overwhelmingly rejected the abandonment of Gaelic Catholic being in Ireland continued to hold forth in Manhattan and the community remained largely intact. A novel aspect of Milner's treatment is his use of song texts in combination with period news reports and existing scholarship to develop a fuller picture of the Catholic Irish struggle. Products of a highly verbal and passionately musical people, Irish folk and popular songs provide special insight into the popularly held attitudes and beliefs of the integration epoch.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Road to Respectability

It’s Ireland and Italy, Jerusalem and Germany,

Oh, Chinamen and nagurs, and a paradise for cats,

All jumbled up togather in the snow and rainy weather,

They represent the tenants in McNally’s row of flats.

“McNally’s Row of Flats” premiered in realist playwright, lyricist, and actor Edward Harrigan’s 1882 musical comedy McSorely’s Inflation. Composed as a nostalgic retrospect on lower-class New York life, its chorus, above, contains a list in broad period ethnic humor of Manhattan’s most visible minority groups at the time of publication. By then, the city had substantially accommodated its Old Immigrants, the Irish and Germans (Kahn 1955, 68), and consigned its largest nonwhite populations, African and Chinese Americans, to underclass status. New mass migrations were already in the making, not as previously from northern and western Europe, but from the continent’s southern and eastern reaches. The first of these, which began in the 1870s, was linked to overpopulation in the Mezzogiorno region of Italy and posed stiff occupational competition for Irish laborers. The second, mainly of Russian Jews, ensued with pogroms and restrictive polices enforced after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 and greatly affected the availability and cost of housing in Lower Manhattan (Burrows and Wallace 1999, 1112-26; Lankevich 1998, 122–25; Rosenwaike 1972, 82-85). The scale of the new immigration was truly huge, “twice that of any previous decade” (Lankevich 1998, 122). But while it brought distress to Irish low-wage earners, it actually conferred long-term benefits on Hibernians as a whole. New York Brahmins, many of whom had previously dreaded, hated, and railed at the Irish, were now confronted by more foreign fears, which included unintelligible languages, an increase in crime, and the propagation of radical theories of wealth distribution.

The vast influx from Italy and the Russian Empire placed another large social layer below the Catholic Irish, allowing them to elevate accordingly; for, facing this alarming alteration in European immigration patterns, many Protestant elites softened their attitude toward the city’s burgeoning Irish American middle class (Miller 1985, 495–96; W. Williams 1996, 239). This attitudinal shift was accompanied by modifications within the Irish community itself, both buttressed by changes in city demographics. In 1865, the Census of New York State enumerated the population of Manhattan at 726,386. By 1870, the count thrust up to 942,292 (Rosenwaike 1972, 55–56). By 1880, with nearly one in every eight urban dwellers in the United States residing in Greater New York (Hammack 1982, 33), the aggregate of the city proper reached 1,206,299. Irish-born New Yorkers now numbered 198,595 of the total; however, when combined with their American-born children, the first- and second-generation total reached 423,159 persons (Rosenwaike 1972, 72–73). This in-group population shift significantly altered the city’s Irish Catholic constituency. With over 53 percent of New York’s Hibernians now American-born, the essence of what it meant to be “Irish” in Manhattan changed forever. While the overriding aspirations of the second-generation were not dramatically different from those of their parents—both wished to share in New York’s prosperity and integrate into its society while maintaining important group cultural tenets—the second-generation frame of reference was far more imbedded in the island of Manhattan:

You see I belong to New York, my boys,

Oh dear old Manhattan Isle,

Famed for its wealth and its beauty, boys,

Its darling dear girls and their style;

On Broadway, my boys, or the Bowery,

No stranger e’er met with a frown;

Take my word, I belong to the city,

And hail from the East Side of town.

(“The East Side of Town,” Harrigan and Hart 1875, 56)

At the same time, the second-generation’s conceptions of Ireland were increasingly formed more from made-in-America accounts that were idealized caricatures of the far-away heritage land as in the romantic “Cushlamachree”:

Dear Erin, how sweetly thy green bosom rises,

An emerald set in the ring of the sea;

Each blade of thy meadows my faithful heart prizes,

Thou queen of the west, the world’s Cushlamachree.

(Johnny Roach’s Bold Irish 1870, 63–64)

Affection for Ireland was great, but, when asked to choose between the United States and Ireland as the better place to live, America won out even among the first generation. Ireland lay close to the hearts of many, and they expressed their love with idealistic sentimentality, but because they believed they had been banished politically and economically (Miller 1985, 3–8), they accepted the reality of a new home in a more promising country. In William J. Scanlan’s “Recollection,” the speaker romanticizes about his youth in Ireland, but taking him literally, it is a part of Ireland he wishes to bring to America rather than to return himself:

When e’er I think of bygone days,

And the happy times we had

At home in dear ould Ireland,

It makes my heart feel glad.

When I think of my poor ould mother,

And my father, ah! how dear

That sweet recollection is to me,

How I wish they were here.

(Emmet 1882)

To be clear, the post–Civil War Catholic Irish of Manhattan were diverse. Individual station was determined by a combination of factors such as affluence, age, application, class, connections, education, gender, nativity, occupation, and wealth (Miller 1985, 494). Historian David N. Doyle (2006, 214) writes that Irish Americans “were found at all social levels of the burgeoning commercial as well as factory cities,” of which New York was the foremost. Immigration from Ireland, of course, continued even as the percentage of American-born Irish increased. However, down at street level, those who had arrived as laborers and had not materially progressed, and recent immigrants without marketable skills in an increasingly sophisticated urban economy, had a hard time, owing both to competition from New Immigrants and to increased mechanization in the construction industry; the combination of these factors lowered pay for unskilled manual work that was also harder to get. At the same time, savvier immigrants rose through the trades to become proprietors of businesses, while others entered politics. Harrigan’s Timothy McNally successfully worked both angles:

Its down in Bottle Alley lives Timothy McNally,

A wealthy politician and a gentleman at that,

The joy of all the ladies, the gosoons and the babies,

Who occupy the buildings called McNally’s row of flats.

The song elevates McNally for comic effect. Ironically, he was a small cog in the Tammany machine and only relatively wealthy, because Bottle Alley (later famously photographed by Jacob Riis) was one of the lowest addresses in all New York—home to stale beer saloons, where last night’s flat dregs were sold today to the poorest inmates of Five Points. But McNally’s tenants respected him both for his political connection and for the life-sustaining power he held over them as their slumlord. The polyglot diversity of the “new” New York is stressed in a pair of snapshot images:

The great conglomeration of men from ev’ry nation

The Babylonium tower, oh! it could not equal that;

Peculiar institution, where brogues without dilution,

Were rattled off together in McNally’s row of flats.

Its bags of rags and papers, with tramps and other sleepers,

Italian Lazzarones, there was lots of other rats,

A-lying on the benches and dying there by inches

From open ventilation in McNally’s row of flats.

Lacking a governmental social safety net, Tammany attempted to ameliorate the suffering of its most endangered supporters, but it was not McNally’s responsibility to do so at his personal expense. Those who could not provide rent when it was due were sent scattering for other shelter on moving day:

It never was expected that the rent would be collected

They’d levy on the furniture, the bedding and the slats!

You’d ought to see the rally and battle in the alley

A-throwing out the tenants in McNally’s row of flats.

(Snow and Mott’s [1883?])

Irish men of both generations were moving up, driving streetcars and directing traffic, while some of the second generation were entering administrative and managerial fields. By 1890, 18.4 percent of greater New York Irish males performed white collar work, 46 percent had skilled and semiskilled trades, and 29.2 percent were employed as laborers (Hammack 1982, 83), though in that same year Irish men made up a scant, yet growing, 4.3 percent of the area’s professionals (67). Irish women did better. They were increasingly employed as nurses and educators (Barrett 2012, 129–32), so that by the first decade of the twentieth century, “one-fifth of all public-school teachers in northern cities . . . were Irish-American Catholics” (Miller 1985, 496). That trend was observed in song in 1879, when William A. Pond published Edward Harrigan’s “Such an Education Has My Mary Ann,” a comedic lyric based on the manner in which an Irish-born father perceives his American-born daughter, a teacher at a city-administered school:

My Mary Ann’s a teacher in a great big public school,

She gets one thousand dollars ev’ry year.

She has charge of all the children, You’d never find a fool,

For Mary gives them all the proper steer.¹

Irish New Yorkers of the post–Civil War period also included a modicum of super-rich citizens. Belfast-born Hugh O’Neill came to New York as a child and began working at 16. Immediately after the Civil War, he opened a dry goods store on Broadway, just north of Union Square, among merchant firms such as Tiffany and Company and Brooks Brothers. In 1887, he relocated to a purpose-built building in the Ladies Mile section of Sixth Avenue, employing twenty-five hundred people by the 1890s. On his death in 1902, O’Neill’s fortune amounted to $8 million (NYT, 2 May 2004). Similarly, William R. Grace, shipping magnate, merchant trader, and twice mayor of New York, died in 1904, leaving a personal estate of ten million dollars (Clayton 1985, 265).

But before Grace could don the mantle of the mayoralty and the Irish could be recognized by a majority of native-born Americans, the community had to navigate traps that had characterized their settlement throughout as an advance-retreat progress—importantly, the embarrassing Fenian raids into Canada that followed the Civil War and the Orange riots of 1870 and 1871. Again, ancient animosities transferred from Ireland to Manhattan threatened to derail the group transit from alien to American. As seen earlier, many—but not all—of the events in the Irish passage from ignominy to integration are chronicled in folk and period popular song. These accounts, which often conflict with reports in city newspapers, are highly valuable because they convey the wants, needs, aspirations, and attitudes of the community base. As the Catholic Irish became more American, more involved, more hopeful, and more accepted, the content of their songs changed to reflect their new image and outlook. Representations of the previously downtrodden yet rebellious Irish and their destitute homeland do not disappear but diminish. Newer songs generally convey more realistic stories of people who are an integral part of the Empire City, people who remember where they came from and are able to effect change for...