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return, the grateful people turned out for every election and cast their ballot as they were told

(Reimers 50-54). Under this system which lasted well into the 20th century, Irishmen won mayoral

elections across the nation. Boss Frank Hague of Jersey City held the office of mayor for three

decades, from 1917 to 1947, and Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago, the last of the big-city bosses,

reigned over Chicago from 1955 to 1970. Many of these men are in the history of American

politics, but especially Boston mayor James Michael Curley, who once won office while in jail.

Irish-American politicians had huge power in cities, but they did badly when running for national

office. In 1928, Al Smith, who rose through New York City politics to the governorship of the

state, ran for President of the United States. The voters rejected Smith, in part because of his

Catholicism, and a Catholic was not voted into the nation’s top office until the election of John F.

Kennedy in 1960. Once the Irish were in power, the Irish politicians used their powers to hire all

Irish as they could, such as policemen, firemen, and civil servants. City halls, operating under the

rule of Irishmen, were often giving construction contracts to Irish men. The political system thus

became an important way for the American Irish better themselves in their cities (Reimers 53).

LIVING CONDITIONS IN AMERICA — WHERE AND WHY Many of the Irish were so poor

that when they got to a port city, which is where they stayed. That is why Boston, New York, and

Montreal became the homes of many of the Irish. For the first time, there were more Irish than there

were English at American ports. By 1860, the Irish made up seventy percent of America’s

immigrants (Sandler 14-16). Since the Irish found many jobs along the transportation routes, Irish

towns started to appear, near railroads, throughout the United States. In the late 1800’s, many Irish

communities were well-established in areas such as San Francisco and New Orleans. The largest

numbers of Irish, however, were in New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Illinois. These

states contained more than half the total Irish-American population (Anderson 57). In many families,

the women and the children worked, but the amount of money they made was only enough for

housing and food. In Boston, one historian tells us; the Irish lived in “crammed hovels without

furniture and with patches of dirty straw for bedding.” In New York City, Irish families lived in the

city’s worst, overcrowded slums. Under such conditions it is no wonder that Irish neighborhoods

were troubled with diseases like typhoid, typhus, and cholera. It wasn’t until after the Civil War that

public health programs gained wide acceptance and improved the living conditions of the immigrants

(Griffen 19).

MAKING A LIVING IN AMERICA In port cities such as New York and Chicago, the Irish

easily found jobs. Not much skill or education was needed to work unloading and loading ships on

the docks or digging up bad streets and building new ones. Nor did the Irishmen have trouble

finding unskilled jobs in the nation’s rapidly growing transportation system. Three thousand miles of

canals were built before the Civil War, along with 30,000 miles of railroad track. All that was

needed to do these jobs was a strong body and a willingness to work for only one dollar a day. The

Irish were able to do both of these. The Irish were the ones that built the Illinois Central Railroad

connecting Chicago and New Orleans, and later they helped lay the tracks for the Union Pacific

Railroad (Purcell 40). Irishmen held railway and construction jobs, but it was the Irish women who

served as the main power within their community. Unlike the other culture groups in America among

the Irish there were more women than men. In Ireland women had often postponed marriage in

order to work, because of the need for money for families. Because of this, many young Irish

women had the freedom and money to make the journey to America. Once in America, Irish

women did the same things as if they had never left Ireland. They were the group that stayed single

the longest. These young women could always find jobs as domestics, an occupation rejected by

many other ethnic groups. In fact, the figure of the obstinate Irish maid “Bridget” became an ethnic

stereotype that lingered well into the twentieth Century (Anderson 59). Historian Hasia Diner has

described marriages among poor Irish Americans as “stormy and short lived. Irish families

sometimes suffered from violence and desertion on the part of husbands and fathers (Purcell 50).” In

her book, Erin’s Daughters in America, published in 1983, Diner writes: “An Irish immigrant woman

who chose in the 1860s or 1870s to marry a construction worker in Boston or Providence or a

factory hand living in New York or Worcester Massachusetts, ran a very high risk of having

someday to be the sole support for a house full of children, existing on starvation’s edge.” For these

reasons, Irish women often stayed single for years, and once they married, they often headed

single-parent households. In 1870, in Philadelphia, 16.9 percent of Irish women were the heads of

their families compared to only 5.9 percent of German females. Only blacks had a higher rate of

female-headed families (Purcell 48-52). The Irish during the famine years (and the decades

following) lived the same as their

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