In the newest volume in the award-winning Penguin History of
American Life series, James R. Barrett chronicles how a new urban
American identity was forged in the streets, saloons, churches, and
workplaces of the American city. This process of "Americanization
from the bottom up" was deeply shaped, Barrett argues, by the
Irish. From Lower Manhattan to the South Side of Chicago to
Boston's North End, newer waves of immigrants and African Americans
found it nearly impossible to avoid the Irish. While historians
have emphasized the role of settlement houses and other mainstream
institutions in Americanizing immigrants, Barrett makes the
original case that the culture absorbed by newcomers upon reaching
American shores had a distinctly Hibernian cast. By 1900, there
were more people of Irish descent in New York City than in Dublin;
more in the United States than in all of Ireland. But in the late
nineteenth century, the sources of immigration began to shift, to
southern and eastern Europe and beyond. Whether these newcomers
wanted to save their souls, get a drink, find a job, or just take a
stroll in the neighborhood, they had to deal with Irish Americans.
Barrett reveals how the Irish vacillated between a progressive and
idealistic impulse toward their fellow immigrants and a parochial
defensiveness stemming from the hostility earlier generations had
faced upon their own arrival in America. They imparted racist
attitudes toward African Americans; they established ethnic
"deadlines" across city neighborhoods; they drove other immigrants
from docks, factories, and labor unions. Yet the social teachings
of the Catholic Church, a sense of solidarity with the oppressed,
and dark memories of poverty and violence in both Ireland and
America ushered in a wave of progressive political activism that
eventually embraced other immigrants. Drawing on contemporary
sociological studies and diaries, newspaper accounts, and Irish
American literature, The Irish Way illustrates how the interactions
between the Irish and later immigrants on the streets, on the
vaudeville stage, in Catholic churches, and in workplaces helped
forge a multi-ethnic American identity that has a profound legacy
in the USA today.
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