Have the Irish Made It in America?

Sociologist and best-selling author Andrew M. Greeley looks at the various immigrant waves of Irish to this country and how they fared.

Have the Irish made it in America? That the question is still asked shows that the Irish are still insecure about their success in this country. In fact, Irish Catholics are the most successful gentile ethnic group in American society and have been for at least a century.

The word “Catholic” is important here. A little less than half of the Americans who identify themselves as “Irish” also identify as “Catholic.” A little more than half identify as “Protestant” (mostly Baptist). The latter are not nearly as prosperous as the former, not because of their religion but because of the time and place of their immigration.

The stories of the various immigrant waves of Irish to this country are complex and intricate and therefore, not easily told. In general, however, one can speak of three distinct immigrations.

The first wave, which came before 1800 and to a considerable extent before the Revolutionary War, was Ulster Protestant –Presbyterian immigrants from Scotland who had settled in Ulster and then moved on to America because of hard times in Ireland and because they resented paying taxes to the Anglican Church.

Many of the men who fought in Irish regiments during the Revolution were Ulster Irish. While they may have been called Scotch Irish early on by their English and German neighbors, they considered themselves to be simply Irish until they adopted the label Scotch Irish to distinguish themselves from the “mere” Irish who came after them. In substantial part these Ulster Irish settled in the rural South and in the Appalachians, where many of their descendants still remain. More American presidents came from this ethnic group than from any other.

At the same time, there was also an immigration of Irish Catholics to cities like New York, relatively small in number but large enough to produce middle-class Irish neighborhoods by 1820.

The second wave of Irish Catholics immigrated in the 1820s and 1830s and during and after the famine of 1847, with the largest portion migrating during the 1860s, 1870s and 1880s. These are the ancestors of most of those who identify as Irish Catholic today.

The first wave was mostly Anglo-Saxon, the second wave largely Celtic. However, there were not enough Ulster Irish immigrants to account for the twelve million Irish American Protestants today. Hence scholars have teased out a more amorphous third wave of Celtic immigrants that came mostly in the first half of the nineteenth century and mostly through Philadelphia and Charleston into the South. Some were shopkeepers and tradesmen, town folk who had converted to Protestantism during the time of the Penal Laws and left because of hard times in Ireland, especially the continuing famines, of which the Great Famine was neither the first nor the last. Others were Catholics who after their arrival in America converted to Protestantism (mostly Baptist) because of the lack of Catholic clergy.

To understand this somewhat mysterious group of converts, one must realize that there were two distinct social classes in Ireland in the middle years of the last century, the tenant farmers and the day workers (in addition to the occasional Catholic aristocrat or entrepreneur). The tenant farmer spoke English (as well as Irish) and was strongly affiliated with the Catholic Church. The day workers, the so-called “Bog Irish,” were poor rural proletarians who were Irish speaking and only loosely linked to the Church. Those who immigrated to the North in the years up to the famine became indistinguishable from the Catholic tenant farmer immigrants. Most, however, migrated to the rural American South in search of land (there were heavily Irish speaking counties in Mississippi in the 1820s). They found land, but did not find priests. In a generation they became Baptists — the greatest single loss to the Catholic Church in this country until the defection of Latino immigrants in our own time.

Finally there was a small group of Huguenot Irish who had migrated from France to Ireland (and brought the weaving trade to Dublin) and then migrated again to America, especially to Delaware in the eighteenth century where they became Methodists.

Scholars today generally agree on the rough accuracy of this model of migration. However, there are clearly many details and individual stories missing, accounts of those who found a better life in America, be it on a farm of their own in the rural South or in a white-collar or professional career in the urban North. There are also, alas, stories of suffering, failure, sickness, and early death that are not recorded.

The net result of these different kinds of immigration is that, with many exceptions, today’s Irish Catholics are concentrated in the industrial urban North and today’s Irish Protestants are still concentrated in the agricultural rural South. The former are today’s obvious Irish; the latter are the almost invisible Irish — George Wallace, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton come from this group and can legitimately claim to be Irish.

The immigrants to the South found the land they were looking for and settled down to rural farming life, and in the absence of priests, Catholics turned to the Baptist church for their spiritual needs. The immigrants to the North became factory workers, policemen, firemen, transit workers, household servants, schoolteachers, and nurses and were quickly integrated into that ingenious American invention, the neighborhood parish.

While the rural Irish Protestants in the South were caught in a mobility trap, the urban Irish Catholics in the North found themselves in a situation of great opportunity. Hence the latter became the most successful gentile ethnic group in America, the former one of the least successful.

Within the Southern social situation there was little opportunity or motivation for upward mobility. In the North, however, particularly after the Civil War when the South languished, there were both the opportunity and the motivation to scale the economic and social ladder.

Religion was a correlate of these different outcomes but not a cause. The place and the time of immigration, not the difference in religion, accounts for the different success stories of Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants.

The United States Census lumps the two groups together. Since the civil liberties organizations, in a strange but not untypical lapse into bigotry, have been able to block a religion question in the census, one must use large national sample surveys (such as NORC’s General Social Survey) to distinguish between the two groups. Those who rely on the census (like economist Thomas Sowell) will insist that the Irish have failed in America. Those who use the surveys tell a very different story.

By the beginning of this century, young Irish American Catholics had passed the national average in college attendance, choice of white-collar careers, and entry into the professional occupations. Many of these young people were the children of immigrants; almost all of them had immigrant grandparents. At the present time only Anglicans and Jews have higher educational, occupational, and income ratings than Irish Catholics.

Despite the intense hardships of the immigrant generation, it did not take long for Irish Catholics to seize the opportunities of the urban North. They became successful, indeed enormously so, either in a single generation or two at the most. Meanwhile, Irish Protestants, many of whose ancestors had come before Irish Catholics, continue to languish in their farms and small towns in the South. Obviously there are exceptions to these generalizations, but social analysis deals with the average, not the exception. In neither case, I must reiterate, is religion responsible for the economic differences.

Are the Irish Protestants and the Irish Catholics completely dissimilar? Not at all. Both have strong propensities to go into government service and politics, to vote Democratic, and enjoy the cultural and social aspects of an Irish heritage

So, have the Irish made it in America? Yes, spectacularly so. Moreover, as the new century dawns, surveys indicate that the two groups, Catholic and Protestant, have the highest rates of personal happiness in the United States, and that Irish is the most popular ethnic identification in America.