Young Irish Workers: Class Implications of Men’s and Women’s Experiences in Gilded Age Chicago

Abstract

DISCUSSION of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Americans' class--their status as well as their behaviors and attitudes concerning class mobility and working-class solidarity--has been vexed and contentious. The topic's inherent complexity, in combination with the variety of perspectives brought to its analysis, has produced a welter of claims and arguments. Some historians assume a norm of upward mobility and view the as laggards. In contrast, other scholars tell a success story in which immigrants, and especially their descendants, struggled and eventually achieved their goals of respectability and upward mobility. Another contingent has discerned the emergence of an Irish-American radical working-class consciousness that broadened workers' perspectives and encouraged solidarity with members of other groups who challenged the inequities of industrial capitalism. Still others report that a co-opted working class had fallen in line behind the dictates of a hegemonic Catholic middle class by the early twentieth century. (1) Despite these differences, most scholars' attempts to explain the encounter with class in America have focused on men's experiences and perspectives. This article contributes to the discussion by clarifying Americans' class standing and by demonstrating that both an appreciation of the complexity of the Irish-American population and attention to specific historical circumstances must inform any analysis of responses to America's class system. I will illustrate the importance of age, generation, and gender, as well as specific context, by focusing on the experiences of young immigrant workers in Chicago in 1880--during the pivotal period known as the Gilded Age. CLASS AND OCCUPATIONAL STATUS IN THE LATE NINETEENTH AND EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURIES This exploration must begin by assessing the class position of the American Irish. That task alone is a challenge, for the in America were not a monolithic group, and class-based attributes that were common during the famine era were less common by the 1910s. In an effort to provide a basis from which to proceed, I will begin with some general information about both emigration to North America and quantitative measures of immigrants' occupational status in American society. (2) About one million crossed the Atlantic during the prefamine era (1815-45). Protestants from Ulster dominated at first; but Catholics swelled the emigrant stream by the 1830s. While moderately better-off people continued to seek their fortunes in America, less prosperous Catholics eventually dominated the outflow. There was some variety in class background among the prefamine Catholic who established beachheads in the US. Furthermore, even those with few resources usually came from areas of Ireland that had undergone Anglicization and commercialization. They were at least familiar with, if not reconciled to, dominant cultural norms within the US. Despite these relative advantages, turbulence among laborers on public-works projects and in cities broadcast high levels of poverty and dissatisfaction among North America's Catholic well before the Great Famine. (3) Famine-era migrants flattened the existing class segmentation among the Catholic in North America. Repeated failures of Ireland's potato crops set off a flood of 1.8 million people into North American ports in the decade after 1845. While the most destitute could not reach America and a fair number of better-class Catholics abandoned famine-ridden Ireland, the migrants who reached North America during the mid- to late 1840s and early 1850s helped to create a distinctively Irish American lower class. Famine immigrants were, on average, even poorer and less prepared than their predecessors in terms of language, culture, and work skills to accommodate easily to American conditions. …