Irish immigrants had a rough start in the United States, stuck in urban poverty and taunted by some of their neighbors. They and their descendants overcame the obstacles and prevailed.

 Kevin Kenny is professor of history at Boston College in Boston, Massachusetts.

In the century after 1820, 5 million Irish immigrants came to the United States. Their presence provoked a strong reaction among certain native-born Americans, known as nativists, who denounced the Irish for their social behavior, their impact on the economy, and their Catholic religion. Nonetheless, by the early 20th century, the Irish had successfully assimilated.

All legal immigrants who subscribe to the U.S. Constitution are entitled to become U.S. citizens, and white immigrants have encountered relatively few obstacles in their attempt to do so. Despite nativist hostility, the Irish never encountered racism comparable to that inflicted on African Americans and Asians, who were excluded from citizenship or restricted from entering the United States. Turning their Catholic identity to their advantage and pursuing political opportunities unavailable in Ireland, the Irish moved steadily upward in American society.

The Irish made up almost half of all immigrants in the United States in the 1840s and one-third in the 1850s. These figures are remarkable given that Ireland is no larger than the state of Maine and its population never exceeded 8.5 million. Between 1846 and 1855, due to repeated massive failures of the potato crop, the Irish population declined by one-third. More than 1 million people died of starvation and famine-related diseases and another 1.5 million fled to the United States. Many Irish immigrants believed the famine could have been avoided. “The almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight,” the Irish nationalist and political exile John Mitchel wrote, “but the English created the famine.” At the heart of Irish-American identity thereafter was a sense of banishment and exile.

Early Struggles

The Irish immigrants of the famine era were the most disadvantaged the United States had ever seen. Some of the poorest lived in the Five Points district of lower Manhattan in New York City, which the English novelist Charles Dickens described as “reeking everywhere with dirt and filth,” with “lanes and alleys, paved with mud knee deep.” This neighborhood, Dickens wrote, was filled with “hideous tenements which take their name from robbery and murder; all that is loathsome, drooping, and decayed is here.”

The Irish poor lived in basements, cellars, and one-room apartments lacking natural light and ventilation and frequently flooded with sewage. They suffered from alarmingly high rates of cholera, yellow fever, typhus, tuberculosis, and pneumonia. They also succumbed to mental illnesses, often complicated by alcohol abuse. They accounted for a greatly disproportionate number of admissions to poorhouses and public hospitals, and they topped the charts for arrests and imprisonment, especially for disorderly conduct. In New York City in 1859, for example, 55 percent of all people arrested were of Irish origin.The Irish immigrants were mostly unskilled, worked for low wages, and were often used as substitute labor to break strikes. Native-born workers worried that their own wages would decline as a result and that gains made by organized labor would be undercut. Many Americans also feared that the Irish would never advance socially but would instead become the first permanent working class in the United States, threatening the central principle of 19th-century American life: upward social mobility through hard work.

Equally disturbing to nativists was the immigrants’ religion. Would Irish Catholic immigrants ultimately be loyal to the United States or to the church in Rome? Were they beholden to their priests on political matters? Did a church headed by a pope, cardinals, archbishops, and bishops have a legitimate place in a democratic republic? And why did Irish Catholic immigrants send their children to separate parochial schools rather than using the free public system? The Irish response was that the public school boards were dominated by evangelical Protestants. Freedom to cultivate their children’s faith as they saw fit, they insisted, was what the United States was all about.

Nativists launched a sustained attack on Irish immigrants because of their Catholicism. In 1834 a mob burned down the Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts. In 1836 nativists in New York published the Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk. An emotionally troubled young woman, Monk claimed to have witnessed debauchery and infanticide during her stay in a convent. The book became a huge best-seller. In 1844 nativist rioters burned two Catholic churches in the Philadelphia suburbs in a dispute over which Bible to teach in public schools, the Catholic one or the Protestant King James version.

Irish-American Identity

Rebutting accusations of divided loyalty, Irish immigrants insisted that they could become good Americans but that they would do so on their own terms. Because they spoke English and were the first Catholic group to arrive in the United States in large numbers, the Irish quickly took control of the American Catholic Church. As a popular saying put it, the church in the United States was “One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic –- and Irish.” Catholicism became the single most important ingredient of Irish-American identity.

Anti-Catholicism remained part of American culture until 1960, when John F. Kennedy was elected to the presidency. The Irish had long dominated the politics of many American cities –- including New York, Boston, and Chicago –- by controlling the local Democratic Party. In the 1920s, they began to move onto the national stage, when Al Smith became the first Catholic to run for president. Smith had little chance of being elected, but Kennedy, who was acutely conscious of his Irish heritage, finally laid to rest America’s long anti-Catholic tradition. “I am not the Catholic candidate for President,” he declared during the campaign. “I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for President, who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters —- and the church does not speak for me.”

Irish immigrants became good Americans without sacrificing their religious and cultural heritage. They demonstrated that assimilation is not a one-way process in which immigrants must conform to a dominant Anglo-Protestant culture while forsaking their own traditions. Immigrants always change the United States as much as the United States changes them. By becoming Americans in their own way, the Irish carved out a distinctive ethnic identity and helped lay the groundwork for today’s cultural pluralism in the United States.

Today the Irish are one of the most prosperous ethnic groups in the United States, significantly exceeding national averages on education levels, occupational status, income, and home ownership. In line with their steady upward social mobility during the 20th century, the American Irish moved out of the tight-knit urban communities of the Northeast and Midwest to settle in suburbs, towns, and cities across the United States. They also married increasingly outside their ethnic group, first with other Catholics and then with Americans generally. The result of these developments is a much less cohesive sense of communal identity than in the past. But Irish Americans retain a strong sense of ethnic pride, especially in the realms of politics and culture. To be Irish-American, after all, is to be part of a national success story.