The Irish in Illinois - Softcover

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.
 

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...