Irish Immigration to America
Uploaded by Stellar_Anomoly on Apr 16, 2007
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 1½ 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-1840s and lasted for a decade, but white America equated them with blacks and stereotyped them accordingly as "childlike buffoons, lazy, superstitious, given to doubletalk, 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...