Humanities 2319
American Minorities: Political Culture in A Global Environment
Catholic Life in Chicago 1850s
While being nurtured by parish life, Irish Catholic identity also received reinforcement from anti-Irish and anti-Catholic prejudice. This prejudice was quite intense in the decades before the Civil War. The Chicago Tribune on several occasions, for example, lashed out at Irish Catholics for their political power and religion, and in 1855 Chicagoan selected an anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant Know-Nothing mayor and Know-Nothing-controlled city council. Some decades later in the latter 1880s and early 1890s, another wave of anti-Catholicism hit the city, with a number of Protestant Chicagoans lending their support to groups such as the American Protective Association, whose members swore never to vote for or employ a Catholic. Anti-Catholic prejudice had diminished considerably by the start of the new century but was sometimes quite noticeable. As late as the 1920s, Catholics along with Jews and African-Americans bore the brunt of attacks from the Ku Klux Klan. Most Protestant Chicagoans, of course, were not bigots, and many had quiet, friendly relations with Irish Catholics. Nonetheless, anti-Catholicism on various occasions reared its ugly head and made Irish Catholics more conscious of their own identity.
Besides Catholicism, devotion to Ireland held Irish Chicagoans together. The most visible evidence of this was the support they furnished for both peaceful and revolutionary Irish nationalist movements. In the1860s, for example, Irish Chicagoans provided money and men to the Fenians, a revolutionary organization that sought to win the complete independence of Ireland. After internal divisions led to the collapse of the Fenians in the late 1860s, revolutionary-minded Irish Chicagoans turned to the Clan na Gael, which for many years supported the revolutionary cause in Ireland.
The Chicago Irish also backed non-violent Irish nationalist campaigns. During the 1880s they threw their support behind the Irish Home Rule movement led by Charles Stewart Parnell, the head of the Irish Parliamentary Party. Though it still would have left Ireland in the United Kingdom, Home Rule would have given Ireland a separate parliament for Irish matters, and thus many Irish Chicagoans, including members of the Clan, supported it as a step in the right direction. Parnell's campaign for Home Rule failed, however, as did subsequent attempts in the 1890s and on the eve of World War I.
As a result of events in Ireland, the interest of the Chicago Irish in revolutionary Irish nationalism increased substantially in the period during and immediately following World War I. A daring but unsuccessful republican uprising in Dublin in 1916 combined with certain ill-advised British policies regarding Ireland ignited the embers of revolutionary nationalism among many Irish people, and in the British general election of 1918, the radical Sinn Fein party obliterated the moderate Irish Parliamentary Party. In 1919 Sinn Fein declared Ireland independent, and war broke out between its military wing — the IRA — and the British. The war ended in 1921, and a compromise settlement gave virtual independence to most of the island in the form of the Irish Free State but left two-thirds of Ulster in the United Kingdom as Northern Ireland. During the struggle for Irish independence, the Chicago Irish aided the Irish cause by joining support groups, holding rallies, and contributing money. With the creation of the Irish Free State, which later evolved into the Republic of Ireland, interest in the Irish nationalist struggle waned but revived somewhat again when trouble broke out in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s.
Besides support for Irish nationalism, Irish Chicagoans showed their interest in their Irish heritage in other ways. Some belonged to organizations such as the Ancient Order of Hibernians, which fostered nationalism but had a broader cultural agenda. Some attended or participated in musical and dance events or in Gaelic football and hurling matches.
Edward J. Kelly |
Besides Catholicism and a devotion to Ireland, another factor that served to unite many Chicago Irish was their high level of involvement in local politics. From the early days of Chicago the Irish were active in politics. The vast majority voted Democratic, as the Democrats had the reputation of being friendly to the Irish. A knowledge of the English language as well as a familiarity with electioneering in Ireland gave them an advantage over continental immigrants.
In the decades after the Great Chicago Fire, as the first American-reared generation reached adulthood, the Irish dominated the Democratic party and emerged as the single most important ethnic group in the city's politics. The Irish liked the local political system which, like that in many American cities of the time, was based not on ideology but on patronage and other economic incentives. The Irish used the system to get patronage jobs such as those on the police force and thus move up the economic ladder. Good government reformers of the period criticized "boodle" politics as corrupt. There was indeed a good deal of corruption (bribes, vote stealing, etc.), but the system also did much good, providing assistance to the poor and jobs to working class people.
The Irish were skilled politicians, using the contacts and connections they made in their parishes or through Irish organizations to enhance their political prospects. They also on the whole were adept at dealing with non-Irish groups and in building coalitions from various ethnic groups. Yet, despite their considerable political power in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the Irish occupied the mayor's office for only a total of eight years during the period from 1871 to 1933. The Irish mayors, all Democrats, during this period were John Hopkins (1893-1895), Edward F. Dunne (1905-1907), and William E. Dever (1923-1927). One of the reasons for this rather spotty representation was that Irish politicians were never as interested in having one of their own in the mayor's office as in supporting winning candidates like the two Carter Harrisons and Anton Cermak. Ironically, during the thirty some years after Cermak's murder in 1933, when the Irish percentage of the city's population fell steadily, Chicago had a continuous string of Irish Democratic mayors: Edward J. Kelly (1933-1947), Martin J. Kennelly (1947-1955), and Richard J. Daley (1955-1976). Of these the most notable was Daley, who was able to keep a political machine with a patronage system running smoothly, even after those in other American cities had died. In the years since Daley's death in 1976, two Irish Chicagoans, Jane Byrne (1979-1983) and Richard M. Daley (1989-), have between them occupied the mayor's office for over half the time, despite the fact that persons of Irish background make up no more than six percent of the city's population.
Although an Irish Chicagoan holds the city's highest office as this century comes to a close, the Chicago Irish are not nearly as visible now as they were at the beginning of the century. In 1990, 660, 343 persons in Cook County (237, 133 in Chicago alone) claimed Irish ancestry, but many of these are probably not Irish in any significant way. Over the course of the century, a number of the descendants of Irish immigrants lost much of their sense of Irishness, either through the passage of time, intermarriage, or deliberate decision. Yet, a core of ethnic-conscious Irish remains in the city and its suburbs. Consisting of immigrants and their children as well as persons of more distant and/or mixed Irish ancestry, this core supports a viable set of organizations that sponsor a wide array of cultural, scholarly, social, athletic, and nationalist events. The vitality of Irish culture in Chicago perhaps has been best demonstrated lately by the artistic success of Michael Flatley, the Chicago-born and-reared traditional Irish dancer and choreographer, who has held the leading roles in the widely acclaimed Riverdance and Lord of the Dance.
Excerpts from http://www.lib.niu.edu/ipo/1999/iht629912.html