Politics, the Public Sector and Irish Social Mobility: San Francisco, 1870-1900

Abstract

FROM the 1940s through the early 1960s several leading social scientists outlined a political' model of immigrant, primarily Irish, social mobility in late nineteenth and early twentieth century urban America. The most elaborate statement of the argument was made in Robert A. Dahl's 1961 analysis of New Haven politics, Who Governs? Its general contours, however, were evident in earlier work by William Foote Whyte (1943), Robert K. Merton (1949), and Daniel Bell (1953).1 Dahl made the following four arguments: (1) The Irish in New Haven moved rather rapidly from working-class to middle-class status surprisingly quickly considering their meagre job skills and the discrimination they encountered. Thus by 1959 first, second, and third generation Irish Catholics in the city ranked second only to Jews in having the fewest numbers in working-class occupations, ahead of American Protestants, Northern European Protestants and Catholics, Italian Catholics and Blacks.2 (2) Public sector economic resources were sufficient to serve as a major conduit of social mobility. Dahl did not elaborate on this point, critical to his overall argument, but strongly implied that white-collar public jobs significantly aided Irish movement into the middling stratum of New Haven society.3 Daniel Bell, James Q. Wilson and others, however, have emphasized two other important public sector resources: (a) municipal contracts and franchises, especially significant in an era when cities were making their major capital improvements, e.g., public buildings, roads, subways, traction lines and utility systems;4 and (b) unofficial patronage private sector jobs (usually with firms franchised by or doing business with the city) filled on the basis of political considerations.5