The Irish in Illinois - Softcover

Mathieu W. Billings (author) & Sean Farrell (author)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0809337991 ISBN 13: 9780809337996

Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press, 2020

Synopsis

The first statewide history of the Irish in the Prairie State
 
Today over a million people in Illinois claim Irish ancestry and celebrate their love for Ireland. In this concise narrative history, authors Mathieu W. Billings and Sean Farrell bring together both familiar and unheralded stories of the Irish in Illinois, highlighting the critical roles these immigrants and their descendants played in the settlement and the making of the Prairie State. Short biographies and twenty-eight photographs vividly illustrate the significance and diversity of Irish contributions to Illinois.

Billings and Farrell remind us of the countless ways Irish men and women have shaped the history and culture of the state. They fought in the French and Indian War, the American Revolution, the Civil War, and two world wars; built the state’s infrastructure and worked in its factories; taught Illinois children and served the poor. Irish political leaders helped to draw up the state’s first constitution, served in city, county, and state offices, and created a machine that dominated twentieth-century politics in Chicago and the state.

This lively history adds to our understanding of the history of the Irish in the state over the past two hundred fifty years. Illinoisans and Midwesterners celebrating their connections to Ireland will treasure this rich and important account of the state’s history.

About this title

About the Author

Mathieu W. Billings is a faculty associate in the history and political science department at the University of Indianapolis.
 
Sean Farrell is a professor of history at Northern Illinois University. He is the author of Rituals and Riots: Sectarian Violence and Political Culture in Ulster, 1784–1886 and a coeditor of Shadows of the Gunmen: Violence and Culture in Modern Ireland.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

INTRODUCTION
           
William Byrne was an ambitious man. Born in Ireland, he emigrated to the United States in 1812, settling down in Pittsburgh, where he met his wife, Sarah. Byrne became a contractor, hiring laborers to build the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal and other infrastructure projects in the rapidly expanding nation. Like so many Irish emigrants, the Byrnes followed the work west, eventually moving to LaSalle County in Illinois in 1837, where Billy Byrne worked as a contractor on the Illinois and Michigan Canal. He was quite successful, building the largest log cabin in the Illinois Valley near the confluence of the canal and the Illinois River. Byrne was determined to create a respectable community in LaSalle. For Byrne, this meant building a church, and he immediately set out to persuade Catholic leaders in St. Louis to send missionaries to the fledgling community. The initiative was successful, and Irish canal workers built the first Catholic church in the county the following year. Rebuilt and renamed after Ireland’s patron saint in the late 1840s, St. Patrick’s Parish Church currently is the oldest living parish church in the state of Illinois. Like the church they had helped to found, the Byrnes remained in LaSalle, raising four children and playing an active role in the town’s public life. William Byrne died in Chicago in 1873. He was one hundred and one years old. Illinois had become his home.
 
Irish men and women played critical roles in the making of Illinois. They first came to the region in the eighteenth century, as soldiers in the British army and settlers in the state’s first European communities. Irish emigration to the Prairie State increased dramatically in the nineteenth century, particularly after the Irish Famine of the late 1840s. By 1890, an estimated 278,729 Irish and Irish-Americans lived in Illinois, the fourth-largest Irish population of any state in the United States. Many stayed. In 2010, 1.6 million people described themselves as Irish; a less precise definition to be sure, but a good reflection of the cultural imprint that Irish men and women have made on the state. The Irish in contemporary Illinois are among the state’s most affluent and best educated residents. Nearly 72 percent own their own homes, compared with a statewide average of just under 66 percent. Their median income stands just above $67,000, considerably more than the statewide median of $56,000. Exactly 40 percent of Irish-Americans in Illinois, age 25 or higher, hold a bachelor’s degree. This compares favorably to the state’s average of a little more than 32 percent.

The story of the Irish in Illinois thus is dominated by the gradual rise to relative success and respectability. This occurred unevenly and was by no means inevitable. Irish emigrants and their descendants have been involved in nearly every aspect of the state’s history. They waged war against the state’s indigenous peoples, fought against the British Empire in the Revolutionary War, and against the Confederacy in the Civil War. They fought for the United States in two World Wars; in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq. They farmed, dug canals, and peopled the state’s growing communities. They founded churches, organized labor unions, and worked as teachers and police officers. They helped to draft the state’s first constitution, showing an aptitude for politics that quickly became an Irish hallmark. This was particularly true in Chicago, where Irish Americans created a political machine that dominated twentieth-century Illinois politics. As the Byrne’s story illustrates, however, Irish influence was not confined to the Windy City. If Irish communities in Bloomington, Champaign, East St. Louis, Rockford, Springfield, and the Quad Cities were too small to have the same political impact they had in Chicago, they played an outsized role across the state, retaining a powerful sense of ethnic solidarity expressed in the state’s countless St. Patrick’s Day festivals and parades. The Irish footprint in Illinois is a substantial one.

This is the first statewide history of the Irish in Illinois. Most of the excellent work that has been done on the history of the Irish in the state has focused on Chicago, an understandable emphasis given the city’s size and status as the quintessential American city. The Irish in Illinois takes a broader and longer view, detailing the critical roles played by eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Irish emigrants in the settlement and creation of the Prairie State, as well as more familiar stories about working-class struggle and the rise of the political machine in twentieth-century Chicago. The Irish in Illinois combines the insights of existing scholarship with original research, making particular use of often underutilized local histories. The book is written in a narrative format and features short biographies that underscore both the human complexity and rich diversity of the Irish experience in Illinois. These figures range from James Shields, an army general and politician from Kaskaskia, to Mary Harris (Mother Jones), the famed labor activist, and Liz Carroll, the successful fiddler and composer from the South Side of Chicago.

If there is no single Irish story in Illinois, a number of common themes stand out. The historian David Emmons has argued that Irish migrants had greater opportunities as they pushed west, where they were able to take advantage of cheap land and more fluid economic and political structures to obtain higher standards of living and improved social status. This was certainly the case in Illinois, where Irish men and women grasped their chances for advancement through the Catholic Church, the Democratic Party, and labor unions. These opportunities should not be romanticized; conflict and struggle were at the heart of the Irish experience in Illinois. Irish men and women often lived in poverty and faced the same racialized animosity as their fellow emigrants in Boston and New York (particularly in the second half of the 19th century).  What is striking, however, is how effectively the Irish in Illinois used their numbers and the political opportunities offered them to mobilize to effect change.

By the early 1930s, Irish-American politicians controlled municipal politics in Chicago and played leadership roles in Illinois communities from Rockford to Rock Island. Political control in Chicago was particularly important. Named Mayor of Chicago in 1933, Edward Kelly was the first of five Irish-American political bosses in that city, giving supporters access to jobs and resources that shielded them from the worst of the Great Depression and set them up for postwar success. On a broader level, the Irish rise to respectability and relative success in Illinois only occurred after 1945. The Great Depression of the 1930s, along with the Hollywood films that captured its miseries, helped to break down the once-potent ethnic and religious barriers that had separated Irish Catholics from Protestants and rival ethnic communities. Irish American service in World War II further eroded suspicions, and the G.I. Bill that followed the war provided new opportunities for improvement.

Simultaneously, the Chicago Irish took control of a political machine that dominated municipal politics until the late 1970s and helped elect the nation’s first Catholic president, John F. Kennedy. Many continued to clash with African Americans over jobs and housing, but others went to college and gradually entered the professional classes. By the 1960s, they were moving to the suburbs, a shift that was fueled by both increased prosperity and racial anxiety. Despite fears of a postwar “ethnic fade”, these communities have retained and/or reinvented their interest in their Irish heritage, a fact underlined by the popularity of cultural forms like Irish dancing and traditional music as well as St. Patrick’s Day parades and Irish festivals across the state. “It’s chic to be Irish,” as one (admittedly Irish-American) historian, put it.

Although the Irish experience in Illinois is a predominantly Irish-American story, it is one that is inextricably connected to Irish history. Modern Ireland’s global diaspora is a direct legacy of colonial conquest and its economic and political impact on the island. If Anglo-Normans invaded Ireland in the late twelfth century and established a measure of English control in an ever-shifting zone around Dublin, Irish society as a whole was transformed in the seventeenth century, when an expansionist English and Protestant state defeated its Irish and Catholic foes in three dramatic international conflicts: the Nine Years War of 1594-1603, the Great Irish Rebellion and Cromwellian Reconquest, 1641-52, and the Williamite Wars of 1688-91. In the aftermath of each of these wars, land and power moved from Catholic to Protestant hands. By the time the Treaty of Limerick was signed in 1691, it was an English official, the Lord Lieutenant, who governed all of Ireland from Dublin Castle and Protestant landlords owned nearly all Irish land. Between 1697 and 1750, the Irish Parliament, an all-Protestant body that had little independent authority from the British government, passed a number of Penal Laws to restrict Catholic economic, political, and religious power. While these laws failed to curtail the expansion of the Catholic Church in Ireland, the Penal Laws effectively restricted Catholic landed and political power. Perhaps their most powerful legacy, however, was the role they played in strengthening a powerful sense of Irish Catholic grievance against both British and Irish Protestant elites. This is something that emigrants took with them to the New World.

By formalizing Ireland’s place within the British Empire and accelerating the island’s entrance into a dynamic Atlantic economy, British conquest and colonization had yet another legacy in Ireland: emigration. Between 50,000 and 100,000 people, mostly Irish Catholics, left Ireland for the American colonies in the seventeenth century. Little evidence has survived about these settlers, who seem to have been largely young, single males who blended into the general population. Irish emigration surged after 1700, with an estimated 500,000 men and women crossing the Atlantic for the American colonies in the eighteenth century. Roughly 75 percent of these were Presbyterians from Ulster, who left the northern province for better economic opportunities and improved political and religious liberties. While not as well-known as the massive Irish migration of the nineteenth century (an estimated 5.2 million people left Ireland for the United States between 1820 and 1920), eighteenth-century emigration had a huge impact on both Ireland and the American colonies. The 250,000 to 300,000 men and women who left Ulster were roughly 50 percent of the population there. Many of these emigrants were themselves recent migrants from Scotland, settlers who found the rising rents of an Anglican-dominated Ireland less than congenial. These were the so-called Scots-Irish, a term that only was embraced by Protestant Irish-Americans after Irish Catholic emigration increased dramatically in the 1830s and 1840s. In 1790, Irish men and women constituted roughly 14 to 17 percent of the white population in the fledgling United States. These new Irish-Americans played a disproportionate part in the American Revolution, many supporting radical politics in the early Republic, particularly after the failed 1798 Rising in Ireland.

Much changed with the advent of the new century. Frustrated by the failure of the Irish Protestant elite to provide security and stability on the island, the British government successfully pressured the Irish Parliament into voting itself out of existence. In its stead, the British passed an Act of Union in 1800 that brought Ireland under more direct control from London. This made the British government the focus of Irish nationalist grievance, particularly after the Pitt government failed to pass a proposed measure giving Catholics full civil and political rights. Catholic Emancipation was only achieved in 1829, after Daniel O’Connell and the Catholic Association mobilized hundreds of thousands of Irish supporters in a massive public campaign. The lesson was clear; British justice for Ireland could only be achieved through threat or revolt.

Patterns of emigration also shifted. Much of the change was rooted in the island’s unprecedented population growth. In 1750, the Irish population was around 2.5 million; by the early 1840s, it had risen to nearly 8.5 million, an increase fostered by economic growth and the widespread use of the potato, which allowed Irish tenant farmers and laborers to live on small plots of land. Population growth put increasing pressure on an Irish land system that was ill suited to support the island’s rural population; land and resources were poorly distributed and poverty was widespread. After 1800, and particularly after 1820, it was increasingly Irish Catholics who emigrated to North America, aided by money sent by already established emigrant communities and cheaper transatlantic passages. Between 1815 and 1845, between 800,000 and 1,000,000 men, women, and children crossed the Atlantic. In his pioneering study of Irish emigration, Kerby Miller showed that it was more commercially-oriented tenant farmers who left pre-famine Ireland in an effort to maintain their independence and escape the poverty trap. Smallholders in the west of Ireland and other less modernized regions stayed, breaking up their farms into smaller and smaller fragments to support their children. In an argument that has been hotly contested, Miller argued that these decisions were partially shaped by cultural ties to the land as well as a lack of resources and/or incentives to leave.

The Irish Famine broke these connections, making Ireland into an emigrant society that depended on substantial levels of emigration for its economic and political stability. Between 1845 and the early 1850s, partial or complete failures of the potato crop led to the deaths of a million people and the departure of nearly two million more for North America. The sheer inadequacy of the British response sharpened Irish nationalist sentiment, reinforcing the idea that emigrants had been exiled from their native Ireland. As the nationalist leader John Mitchel famously put it in The Last Conquest of Ireland (perhaps): “The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the Famine.” While few historians agree with this genocidal interpretation, Mitchel’s emotional charge captured the anger at the heart of what one historian has termed the collective memory of the famine. This sense of anger reverberated across Irish emigrant communities, leading many to continue to fight for Irish freedom from British rule.

Between 1856 and 1920, nearly 3.5 million Irish men and women left Ireland. Most went to the United States. By 1890, there were 5 million first and second-generation Irish Americans – 500,000 more than lived in Ireland. It was these years that saw the creation of modern Irish America – a distinct ethnic community built through participation in the Catholic Church, the Democratic Party, labor unions, and Irish nationalist organizations like Clan na Gael and the Ancient Order of Hibernians. Many were active supporters of nationalist causes in Ireland – providing funding and resources for the revolutionary politics of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the Irish Land War and the campaign for Irish Home Rule in the late 1870s and 1880s, and the struggle for Irish independence from 1912 to 1922. But it was not only their support for Irish nationalism that made post-famine emigrants stand out. Irish women outnumbered their male counterparts—a unique feat among immigrants to America in this era. They took up positions in domestic service and teaching, where women like Margaret Haley of Chicago led the fight for improved pay and status for female teachers.

Irish immigration to the United States slowed after 1920, curtailed by American legal restrictions and the creation of Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State.  It resumed after World War 2, with as many as 200,000 Irish coming to the United States from 1945 to the present, although undocumented and illegal immigration has undoubtedly distorted those numbers. The postwar years saw a dramatic increase in Irish American prosperity, as thousands took advantage of improved economic conditions and the G.I. Bill to firmly establish themselves in middle-class America. They continued to play an active role in Irish politics, particularly with the controversial declaration of the Irish Republic in 1949 and the onset of the Troubles in Northern Ireland in late 1960s.

The Irish American rise to success and respectability has not led to a loss of Irish identity. If anything, the popularity of Irish and Irish-American cultural practices has surged since 1960, marked by countless St. Patrick’s Day parades and Irish festivals of dance and music across the state. And yet for Irish Americans (and certainly those in Illinois), their greatest contributions lay not in their relative material success or cultural vitality, but in marking a path that other immigrants have followed. The Irish experience in Illinois bridged not only the entirety of American history but decades of religious strife as well. Ardent patriots, both Protestant and Catholic, the Irish of Illinois helped win the American Revolution—and they defended the Union during the Civil War. As veterans, they won the admiration of their contemporaries. As immigrant patriots, they recruited and welcomed new waves of Irish to join them in the Prairie State. The Irish Catholics who followed, however, were regarded with far more suspicion than their predecessors, and they took longer to gain respectability in their new homeland. Nevertheless, they populated the cities and built the institutions that greeted new waves of immigrants from around the world. In Chicago, they forged the multi-ethnic political coalitions that led one of the largest cities in America. To be sure, Irish Americans contributed to the racial divides that long have plagued the United States. But without the Irish, it is difficult to imagine how Illinois communities would have accepted, however unevenly, the immigrants who followed: Italians, Poles, Jews, Mexicans, Filipinos, and west Africans, to name but a few. In 2017, one of every seven people living in Illinois was an immigrant. This is the greatest legacy of the Irish in Illinois.

 

Edition details

• Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0809337991
• ISBN 13: 9780809337996
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272