In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, UNMC Today is highlighting the life and times of Irish Americans. The four-part series continues today with a look at the challenges faced by Irish immigrants.
City life and anti-Irish sentiment: No Irish need apply
During the second half of the 19th century, many Irish men and women were still recovering from the trauma of a two- to three-week Atlantic journey when they saw their first job posting in New York, Philadelphia or Boston. The posters, which listed possible employment opportunities, would be nailed among other public announcements near the pier, the boarding house or the pub where new arrivals would find a cheap bed for the night or their first American meal. Their hearts might have beaten faster with the hope of a job until their eyes read “No Irish Need Apply.”
Prejudice — in the forms of crushing poverty, squalid and cramped living quarters, galloping illness and backbreaking work — was among the hardships the new arrivals had hoped to leave behind. Not until they arrived in the United States did many Irish realize they would be faced with all of these challenges in addition to making a life in a strange, new country.
Millions of Irish Catholics who left in the wake of the famine became the first ethnic immigrant group in the United States to carve their future largely from an urban industrial landscape. Instead of farming a bit of land leased from a landlord, as they did in their homeland, men worked long hours in construction, digging holes for foundations and building the infrastructures of booming metropolises for $1 a day. The Irish women comprised the majority of domestic help as maids and laundresses, with equally demanding schedules and low wages. Their lack of education and skills, combined with the prejudice they faced in America, meant they had to start on the bottom rung of the cities social and economic ladders.
Many Irish were weak when they stepped off the ships. They worked endless hours and lived in unhealthy conditions. Male famine survivors lived less than 10 years after arriving in the United States. Typhus, cholera, and tuberculosis took many lives, as did the alcohol they used (and were often paid with by employers) to escape the hard work and depressing lives they often found themselves living.
The Irish, after surviving the traumatic adjustment from rural life in Ireland to the ghettos of Chicago, San Francisco and the large East Coast cities, built strong communities where they worked, schooled their children and socialized together. These urban neighborhoods offered a familiar place for the new arrival from Ireland to settle and perhaps find work. They also were havens for the many Irish who relied on temporary employment, constantly moving from town to town in search of their next job.
Although the Irish slums might be muddy, loud, and crowded, the immigrant or migrant worker likely would find a friendly face and a saloon where he could catch up on the local news and feel at home. Previous generations of immigrants had not had this kind of reassuring community when they arrived from Ireland.
Taken from “Far From the Shamrock Shore: The Story of Irish-American Immigration Through Song” by Mick Moloney.