Survival Over Sentimentality: A Practical View of Irish Emigration Term Paper

Within a generation, the Irish immigrants of New York’s Five Points had amassed an overwhelming political clout that manifested itself in Tammany Hall, today, a synonym for machine power politics in America. If the Irish who fought for survival and then prosperity and ascendancy amid the rough-and-tumble of antebellum New York, truly saw themselves as exiles, as helpless, powerless and involuntary, it seems highly unlikely that they would have exhibited such forceful and robust aggrandizing ambitions. In fact, one could make the case that “initiative” does not accurately portray their evolution as much as “greed” or “lust”.

Miller famously pored over thousands of letters in preparation for his influential work – Emigrants and Exiles (1985). The impression he conveys from those fascinating windows into the past is of remorseful people, homesick for a lost way of life, and who are struggling to cope with a totally alien lifestyle. However, it can be stated that his thesis is not an accurate characterization of early 19^th-century Irish emigrants who shoved their way into New York. Predominantly Catholic, those were not the conservative, subservient pastoral types Miller puts forth. Those were people who readily joined the battle for power, nip and tuck with the “native” population and the subsequent waves of Italian and Asian immigrants. The extent to which they succeeded may be seen in the relative affluence that followed, where by 1870, Irish-Americans were sending money “home” to Ireland in abundant amounts.

Miller writes that the Irish outlooks on life “remained basically passive, fatalistic and nonresponsible” (Miller 132). In general, the Irish were not ambitious to emigrate. Their life was rather a submission to this new but inescapable ‘fact’ of Irish life as their fathers had endured crop failures and poverty. They would have preferred to remain at home, and they often tried to re-create as much of home as possible in their adopted countries” (Miller 132).

Such perspective simply does not accord with Anbinder’s view on Irish emigrants, represented through his book Five Points (2001). A characteristic example of Anbinder’s view is a brief passage about the populist political revolution that commenced with the election of Andrew Jackson, a second-generation Irish himself, in 1828. New York Irish were at the forefront of this tectonic shift in power, ushered in by Jackson’s “raucous inauguration”, which “helped inspire this political revolution … [and] the Five Points election riots of 1834 marked its climax on the local level, as the neighborhood’s Irish immigrants rose up to seize power” (Anbinder 145). Reading Anbinder’s account of those events, one is reminded of adaptive theory, in which humans respond to their current environment, utilizing their energy and abilities for survival and for the satisfaction of desires and achievement of goals.

Miller’s reliance on letters to and from home would inevitably lead to pathos, being sources rife with emotion and longing for Ireland, family, and ancient traditions. Similarly, Anbinder’s use of newspapers’ accounts and city records from that period would seem to reinforce the image of people “on the rise”, perhaps nostalgic – even fervently so – for Ireland and family, but full y engaged in the social and political processes that provided them the most direct route to assimilation and power.

Miller notes that the image of people in exile had a unifying effect, often expressed in correspondence.

…[L]arge numbers of Irish emigrants certainly did see themselves as involuntary exiles, and their letters and songs suggest why the image offered so pervasive and unifying a sentiment to the politics of Irish-American nationalism. (Miller 6)

Letters nevertheless, are such intrinsically subjective sources that they must reflect bias not readily translated into a reliable means of social interpretation. In the case of Anbinder’s book, the accounts provided by heavily, not to mention hyperbolic, topical sources represented unity as well. Such sources, however, took the form of rallying cries, or calls to arms, depending on the faction being supported. “Each faction could…rely on newspaper allies to publish propaganda on its behalf” (Anbinder 162). These particular sources were quite often jingoistic, but as such, they do tell of a highly organized and motivated group, which tends to refute Miller’s image of a displaced Irish population languishing in exile.

Akenson points to Miller’s contention that, “Catholics throughout Ireland, not just in the remote Irish-speaking areas, were much more reluctant to leave home than were their Protestant countrymen” (Akenson 48). This is a significant point, Akenson says, because if that were so it would likely mean that “their behavior in the new country might be hindered by their sense of exile” (Akenson, 48). Yet, Anbinder describes a setting in which a reticent, downtrodden population would have had trouble surviving, much less adopting an aggressive stance. As discussed above, the Irish who rode an often brutal struggle to political ascendancy, which made the Five Points notable as a springboard for subsequent gains, were anything but downtrodden in their behavior. Tammany, and later, the rise of a (Catholic) politician such as Al Smith, provide evidence of a much different situation than the one Miller hypothesized.

Factors of time and geography go hand-in-hand in studies of emigrant Irish. The tendency in the first (and second) generations to settle together in squalid tenements, such as the Five Points, was a simple function of their emigrant status, but this settlement pattern began to break up over succeeding generations. Their geographic reality had a significant impact on the adaptive behavior of the first generations, feeding, as it did, a desire for improvement that was encouraged by possibilities that became increasingly evident as the Irish began to assert themselves. Furthermore, Miller’s portrayal of a largely pastoral people, unused to the problems of living in crowded urban centers, also breaks on the fact that many of the Irish emigrants were increasingly from, and acclimated to, heavily urbanized locations, such as Belfast (Akenson 52-53).

There is often a tendency toward generalization among historians, sociologists, and other cultural researchers. The Five Points has become so closely identified with the Irish “experience” in America, (e.g. the experience the Kennedys had when they arrived in Boston), that a more in-depth look at the actual social make-up and background of the Irish emigrants in early 19^th century-New York is often overlooked in favor of a popular, sentimentalized and monolithic image. This image becomes ossified as it passes into cultural lore (witness the “huddled-masses-on-the-make” in the movie Gangs of New York).

In fact, it seems more likely that the “emigrant experience” is far more nuanced than this one-dimensional view would have us believe. Akenson points out to Patrick O’Farrell’s assertion that,

[S]uch documentation as exists – and the sheer volume of emigration – indicates that emigrants ranged from utter paupers to the reasonably affluent, from misfits to the enterprising; there seems no reason to regard emigrants as anything other than tolerably representative of the range of Irish society”. (Akenson, 44)

The emigrant Irish of the Five Points predominantly belonged to the “pauper” and “misfit” categories, which renders their example incomplete and inconclusive (though interesting) as a comprehensive point of reference for studying the Irish emigrant experience. Yet, we can say with confidence that because the Five Points Irish, underclass though they were, so clearly undermine Miller’s conclusions about the nature of these people that Miller’s theory must be seen as less plausible and less widely applicable. The simple constant at work here is the ability of people to adapt to new circumstances and new surroundings. The true story of the Irish who came to New York in the first half of the 19^th century is one of evolution, of people on the rise, who overcame daunting obstacles, often violently. The notion of the homesick Irish, awash in nostalgia and longing, simply does not square with the image of people who took power for themselves. Sentimentality may have been part of their make-up, but for the Five Points Irish it would likely have been used to serve practical, even cynical goals such as uniting the Irish in working toward a common objective. The controversy in Miller’s work in depicting Irish emigrants is more of a limited view, rather than a representative characteristic of such a wide Diaspora. If taking a single characteristic describing the Five Points Irish, it is unlikely to be of people in exile.

Works Cited

Akenson, Donald H. Small Differences: Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants, 1815-1922: An International Perspective. Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988. Print.

Anbinder, Tyler. Five Points: The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum. New York: Free Press, 2001. Print.

Miller, Kerby A. Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Print.