The Irish Famine Generation Arrives in Boston

In the summer of eighteen forty-five, a potato blight crossed Ireland. By the following spring it was clear that the potato crop, which fed the majority of Ireland's rural poor, had failed entirely. Over the next seven years, approximately one million people died of starvation and disease in Ireland. Another million and a half emigrated. Boston received more of them, relative to its existing population, than almost any other American city.

They arrived in the harbor with almost nothing. Many of them were sick. Most did not speak English. They were Catholic in a city whose Protestant establishment had been suspicious of Catholics since the Puritan founding. They were Gaelic-speaking in a city where the language of public life was English. They had been shaped by generations of tenant farming in a country where the landlords were English, and they arrived in a city whose landlords were Yankee.

The nativist political backlash was swift. The Know-Nothing Party, which ran on an explicitly anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant platform, swept Massachusetts in the eighteen fifty-four elections, capturing the governorship, the legislature, and most of the congressional delegation. The party's argument was straightforward: the Irish were not American, were not Protestant, were not capable of democratic citizenship, and should not be allowed to shape the republic.

Within two generations, the argument had been answered by the thing it most feared. The Irish built political power through the Catholic Church, through the Democratic Party, and through the dense ward-level organization that Irish Boston pioneered and that became the template for ethnic political machines across America. By the early twentieth century, they ran the city.

The transformation from despised arrival to entrenched machine is one of the central stories of American ethnic politics. It did not happen peacefully or cleanly, and the Irish who achieved power in Boston often used it in ways that excluded newer arrivals as fiercely as they had once been excluded themselves. That too is part of the story.