This article addresses social and spatial aspects of intraethnic identity transitions within an American city between 1880 and 1910. Set within a theoretical framework that views urban spaces as social and cultural creations that in turn affect the construction of identities, it focuses on Irish Catholic immigrants and their descendants in Buffalo, New York. Evidence is initially presented on their intergenerational residential movements within the city at a time of widening social distinctions and occupational mobility. This is then supplemented by material from more qualitative sources, chiefly a diocesan newspaper and an “urban-ethnic novel.” While Irish American popular culture drew broad lines between working-class “shanty” lifestyles and those of a more respectable “lace-curtain” middle class during this era, the Buffalo evidence demonstrates these categories to be overdrawn and of almost caricature quality. In bringing the upwardly mobile portion of the group into focus, however, the article considers not simply the occupational characteristics of moving households and their destinations but also the sources and effects of place-based imaginations within the city and the relatively neglected roles of homes as sites of socialization and identity negotiation within Catholic parishes. Pursuing these latter lines of inquiry also enriches understandings of the place of women in the process of Irish American social mobility.
Indeed, evaluating the response of those dwellers to the changes of modernity wrought at this time is a key research area in American urban history. See James Connolly, "Bringing the City Back In: Space and Place in the Urban History of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era," Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era1 (2002 ), electronic version accessed through www.historycooperative.org .
2.
Irish American as used in this essay relates to Catholic Irish Americans as an ethnic group. Although I do not accept that the term Irish American belongs exclusively to Catholics, it has been co-opted by American Irish Catholic interests (including history writers) since the mid-nineteenth century at least and is only recently undergoing a process of revision. Moreover, I have not been able to uncover any evidence suggesting a significant Irish Protestant population in Buffalo, though this group did have a noticeable presence in other American cities such as New York, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh, largely through fraternal organizations such as Orange Order lodges. For a recent account of Irish American residential mobility that concentrates more on the early to middle twentieth century, see Marion R. Casey, "‘From the East Side to the Seaside’: Irish Americans on the Move in New York City," in Ronald H. Bayor and Timothy J. Meagher, eds., The New York Irish (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 395-415.
3.
Francis Walsh , "Lace-curtain Literature: Changing Perceptions of Irish American Success," Journal of American Culture2, no. 1 (1979): 139.
4.
Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 495. Also see Miller’s "Assimilation and Alienation: Irish Emigrants’ Responses to Industrial America, 1871-1921," in P. J. Drudy, ed., The Irish in America: Emigration, Assimilation, Impact (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 87-112.
5.
Michael F. Funchion, ed., Irish American Voluntary Organizations (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1983), 195.
6.
William H. A. Williams, "Green Again: Irish-American Lace-curtain Satire," New Hibernia Review6, no. 2 (2002): 9-24; and Walsh, "Lace-curtain Literature."
7.
Jim Tully, Shanty Irish (New York: A. and C. Boni, 1928).
8.
Kevin Kenny, The American Irish (New York: Longman , 2000), 149.
9.
Colleen McDannell, The Christian Home in Victorian America, 1840-1900 (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1986 ), 12; Ileen Devault, Sons and Daughters of Labor: Class and Clerical Work in Turn-of-the-century Pittsburgh (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990 ).
10.
Margaret Mulrooney , Black Powder, White Lace: The Du Pont Irish and Cultural Identity in Nineteenth-century America (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2002).
11.
Noel Ignatiev , How the Irish Became White ( New York: Routledge, 1995); David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991); Kenny, American Irish.
12.
Roediger, Wages of Whiteness , 136.
13.
See, for example, Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1970); and Andrew M. Greeley, The Irish Americans: The Rise to Money and Power (New York: Harper and Row, 1981). For a skeptical view of the argument that politics was an important vehicle for Irish social mobility, see Steven P. Erie, Rainbow’s End: Irish-Americans and the Dilemmas of Urban Machine Politics 1840-1985 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). Political success could also be less than beneficial for the reputation of the Irish, especially when reformers implicated them within various big-city corruption scandals in postbellum America.
14.
See, for example, John J. Appel, "From Shanties to Lace Curtains: The Irish image in Puck, 1876-1910," Comparative Studies in Society and History13 (1971): 365-75; and Kerry Soper, "From Swarthy Ape to Sympathetic Everyman and Subversive Trickster: The Development of Irish Caricature in American Comic Strips between 1890 and 1920," Journal of American Studies39 (2005): 257-96.
15.
Pierre Bourdieu , Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); and Bourdieu’s " What Makes a Social Class? On the Theoretical and Practical Existence of Groups ," Berkeley Journal of Sociology22 (1987): 1-18.
16.
Bourdieu, Distinction, 74-75.
17.
This urban society of "types" stands in contrast to one of undifferentiated "citizens." See Philip Fisher, "The Novel as Newspaper and Gallery of Voices: The American Novel in New York City: 1890-1930," in Thomas Bender and Carl E. Schorske, eds., Budapest and New York: Studies in Metropolitan Transformation 1870-1930 ( New York: Russell Sage, 1994), 346-47.
18.
Bourdieu, "What Makes a Social Class?" 2.
19.
See Connolly , "Bringing the City Back In"; Timothy J. Gilfoyle, "White Cities, Linguistic Turns, and Disneylands: New Paradigms of Urban History," Reviews in American History29 (March 1998): 175-204; and Simon Gunn, "The Spatial Turn: Changing Histories of Space and Place," in Simon Gunn and Robert J. Morris, eds., Identities in Space: Contested Terrains in the Western City since 1850 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2001), 1-14.
20.
Connolly, "Bringing the City Back In," par. 6.
21.
Gunn, "Spatial Turn," 2-3.
22.
For a useful review, see Douglas S. Massey, "Ethnic Residential Segregation: A Theoretical Synthesis and Empirical Review," Sociology and Social Research69 ( 1985): 315-51. For an example, see Olivier Zunz, The Changing Face of Inequality: Urbanization, Industrial Development, and Immigrants in Detroit, 1880-1920 ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
23.
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1991). Also see the discussions of imagined space, spatial practice, and the work of Lefebvre in David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1989); and David Wilson, Inventing Black-on-black Violence: Discourse, Space and Representation (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005). Janice Reiff draws together the different strands of Lefebvre’s "trialectic" thinking in her study of the planned city of Pullman, Illinois: "Rethinking Pullman: Urban Space and Working-class Activism," Social Science History 24 (2000): 7-32.
24.
Mark Jenner , "Underground, Overground: Pollution and Place in Urban History," Journal of Urban History24 (1997): 107.
25.
Gerald Gamm, Urban Exodus: Why the Jews Left Boston and the Catholics Stayed ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-century Urban North (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1996 ), 10.
26.
Lefebvre, Production of Space, 38-39. Also see his discussion on religions, 44.
27.
Ibid., 38.
28.
For some acknowledgement of the role of religion, see McDannell, Christian Home in Victorian America; J. W. Geary, "Toward the ‘Lace Curtain’: The Irish in Cleveland in the Immediate Post-Civil War Era," Ethnic Forum 2 (1982): 60-76; William F. Hartford, Working People of Holyoke: Class and Ethnicity in a Massachusetts Mill Town 1850-1960 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990); Timothy Meagher, Inventing Irish America: Generation, Class and Ethnic Identity in a New England City, 1880-1928 (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2001); and Mary Lethert Wingerd, Claiming the City: Politics, Faith, and the Power of Place in St. Paul (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001). The studies by Gamm and McGreevy deal with the parish as "defended turf" in an era of heightened racial diversity with the migration of African Americans to the urban north. Gamm, Urban Exodus; McGreevy, Parish Boundaries.
29.
Richard J. Dennis, "Historical Geographies of Urbanism," in Brian Graham and Catherine Nash, eds., Modern Historical Geographies (Harlow, UK: Longman, 2000), 242. He adds that "literary accounts of city life should provoke us to examine the statistical record, while quantitative sources require the contextualisation and the embodiment that more discursive narratives can provide." Ibid., 243. Also see Richard J. Dennis, "Reconciling Geographies, Representing Modernities," in Iain S. Black and Robin A. Butlin, eds., Place, Culture and Identity: Essays in Historical Geography in Honour of Alan R.H. Baker (Quebec, Canada: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2001), 17-43.
30.
See Gunn, "Spatial Turn," 10-11; and Dennis, "Reconciling Geographies," 17-25.
31.
Janet A. Nolan, Servants of the Poor: Teachers and Mobility in Ireland and Irish America ( Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2004); and Deirdre Mageean, "Making Sense and Providing Structure: Irish-American Women in the Parish Neighborhood," in Christiane Harzig, ed., Peasant Maids-City Women: From the European Countryside to Urban America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 223-60.
32.
David A.Gerber, The Making of an American Pluralism: Buffalo, New York, 1825-60 ( Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989).
33.
A survey of ninety-five headstones in the Catholic Holy Cross Cemetery in Lackawanna, New York, undertaken in November revealed fifty-eight to have a Munster birthplace, the vast majority of these (forty-nine in total) referring to individuals born in the three southwestern counties of Clare, Kerry, and Cork. Thanks to Martha Kavanaugh for her assistance on this occasion.
34.
See the maps and discussion in Liam Kennedy, Paul S. Ell, E.M. Crawford, and L.A. Clarkson, Mapping the Great Irish Famine: A Survey of the Famine Decade (Dublin : Four Courts Press, 1999), 26-41.
35.
Robert James Scally, The End of Hidden Ireland: Rebellion, Famine and Emigration (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 32.
36.
Ibid, 35.
37.
American refers to those whose fathers were born in the United States. German and Irish include both the immigrant generation and the second generation. These figures are taken from a 5 percent sample of 1,336 households from the 1880 American federal census manuscripts.
38.
See Sidney L. Harring, Policing a Class Society: The Experience of American Cities, 1865-1915 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983), 63-75.
39.
Catholic Union and Times, April 4, 1889.
40.
Mark Hubbell , Our Police and Our City ( Buffalo: Bensler & Wesley, 1893 ), 193.
41.
The "west side" was defined as wards 8, 9, 10, and 11. The "East Side" was defined as wards 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 13. Because of its peripheral location and rural character, ward 12 was excluded from the analysis. The occupational classes are based on those used by Richard Harris in his Unplanned Suburbs (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). I am grateful to Richard Harris of Mc-Master University for advice and assistance in this context.
42.
Here, working class is used to indicate all those engaged in manual work.
43.
Buffalo Courier, November 15, 1926.
44.
Gerber, Making of an American Pluralism, 101.
45.
In 1906, almost two-thirds of those reporting church membership (only just over half of the city’s population) were Roman Catholic, a total of 126,395 people. With over fifty church edifices in the city, they far outstripped other congregations, led by the Methodist and Protestant Episcopalian churches (with twenty-nine and twenty-six buildings, respectively) and Northern Convention Baptists (twenty-five). See U.S. Bureau of the Census, Special Report on Religious Bodies, 1906, Part 1: Summary and General Tables (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1910), 84 (diagram 8), 418-21.
46.
This definition of "Irish" ancestry as paternal was done to ensure compatibility with a similar sample done for the city of Toronto in 1881. There, the Canadian census measures ethnic origin as paternally defined. In the original sample, the name, address, age, birthplace, father’s birthplace, mother’s birthplace, occupation, and relationship to the head of the household were recorded for each occupant.
47.
Only those families whose last names occurred four times or fewer in the 1881 directory were traced. The 1881 and 1886 directories were treated as providing information for the populations of 1880 and 1885, and so forth.
48.
For example, Richard Harris, "Household Work Strategies and Suburban Homeownership in Toronto, 1899-1913," Environment and Planning D: Society and Space8 (1990): 97-121; Sherry Olson, "Occupations and Residential Spaces in Nineteenth-century Montreal," Historical Methods22 (1989): 81-96; David Ward, "Environs and Neighbours in the ‘Two Nations’: Residential Differentiation in Mid-nineteenth-century Leeds," Journal of Historical Geography6 (1980): 133-62; Zunz, Changing Face of Inequality.
49.
Ward, "Environs and Neighbours." All families in multiple-family houses were included, occasionally increasing the environ size to twelve or thirteen households. In other cases, where the residence was located relatively distant from other dwellings, data for a smaller number of families (usually between six and eleven) were collected. Ethnic data were inferred through the place of birth of the individual and his or her parents.
50.
The occupational classes used for Table I were grouped to simplify the class designation. Owners and managers, the self-employed, the middle class, and those employed in clerical jobs all formed the "middle class," while the ranks of the skilled, semiskilled, and unskilled were summed to form the "working class." Miscellaneous designations such as "gentlemen," retirees, widows, and others were not considered.
51.
To measure the relative presence or absence of the various ethnic and class groups within each environ, I decided that if the number of families in either the middle or working class was at least twice the share of families in the other group, the environ was characterized as either middle or working class; otherwise, it was designated "mixed." Likewise, if over 45 percent of the families (five out of eleven or more) in a Buffalo environ were of a given ethnic stock (first- or second-generation Irish or German, or Americans of longer generation), then it was also defined in terms of that ethnic group.
52.
William Jenkins , "In the Shadow of a Grain Elevator: A Portrait of an Irish Neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries," Eire Ireland37 ( 2002): 14-37.
53.
Devault, Sons and Daughters of Labor, 177.
54.
The saloon numbers are taken from the Buffalo city directory for 1910, and the ward population figures were returned on a ward map available in the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library. In 1910, the city was divided into twenty-five wards, although it covered the same area as the city in 1880, which was then divided into thirteen wards.
55.
See John Bodnar , The Transplanted (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1985 ), 57-84.
56.
Niles Carpenter and associates, Nationality, Color, and Economic Opportunity in the City of Buffalo (New York: Roswell Park Publication Fund, 1927).
57.
Richard McCarthy , "A Tribute to Buffalo’s First Ward Irish, Speech Delivered at the Transportation Club of Buffalo, Hotel Buffalo, March 17 1966," manuscript A66-4, Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society, Buffalo, NY, 70.
58.
Catholic Union and Times, April 26, 1888.
59.
Some of these other real estate promoters were well-established public figures within late-nineteenth-century Irish Buffalo. Two examples are Timothy J. Mahoney, Democratic activist, city assessor, and associate of Grover Cleveland, and James Mooney, another Democrat who was pivotal in Irish nationalist circles in the city and beyond and who was a member of the secret "physical force" Irish nationalist group, Clan na Gael. The curses of eviction and landlordism in Ireland were evoked by Mooney in his more fiery speeches, though Ireland’s land question was on the way to resolution by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century legislation.
60.
The Buffalo city directory recognized these national divisions, identifying churches as being "German," "Polish," and so forth.
61.
These parishes are also referred to in Roger Burke Dooley’s Days Beyond Recall (Milwaukee, WI: Bruce, 1949).
62.
The notes from Annunciation Parish are dated 1946 and are contained in the Catholic Diocesan Archives of Buffalo. The notes from Nativity Parish are also contained there but are undated.
63.
Catholic Union and Times, April 16, 1889.
64.
See Irene E. Cuddihy, "Canisius, Buffalo’s ‘Street Car College’: A Study on How Ethnic Catholics in Buffalo, New York, Used Canisius College to Facilitate Movement from Blue-collar to White-collar Occupations" (PhD dissertation, State University of New York, Buffalo, 1989).
65.
Catholic Union and Times, July 5, 1888.
66.
Catholic Union and Times, April 6, 1893.
67.
Catholic Union and Times, April 8, 1900.
68.
Catholic Union and Times, April 23, 1908.
69.
Jay Dolan, The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Time to the Present (New York: Doubleday, 1985), 218.
70.
McDannell, Christian Home in Victorian America, 52-58.
71.
This approach of examining in detail the activities organized within and across parishes received additional inspiration from Evelyn Savidge Sterne, "Bringing Religion into Working-class History: Parish, Public and Politics in Providence 1890-1930," Social Science History24 (2000): 149-82.
72.
Catholic Union and Times, March 5, 1908. Cross-inspection of the directories reveals Collins’s husband to be a policeman and Farrell’s to be an engineer.
73.
Catholic Union and Times, March 5, 1908.
74.
Catholic Union and Times, March 20, 1890.
75.
For more on the Hibernians, see Funchion, Irish American Voluntary Organizations; and Dale B. Light Jr., "The Role of Irish-American Organizations in Assimilation and Community Formation," in P. J. Drudy, ed., The Irish in America: Emigration, Assimilation, Impact (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 113-41.
76.
Catholic Union and Times, January 29, 1903. Page 5 in this issue mentions three card parties in addition to the one cited.
77.
Catholic Union and Times, October 23, 1902.
78.
Catholic Union and Times, February 2, 1888; Dooley, Days Beyond Recall, 11.
79.
As reprinted in the Buffalo Times, April 17, 1927. Courtney, however, had passed away in 1912, and his comments relate to the state of associational affairs in the 1890s and early 1900s.
80.
See Patrick Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London: Verso, 2003), 109, 133, 147-48. Joyce uses the free libraries, instituted in the United Kingdom from the 1850s on, as a prime example of an oligopticon or a space that engendered "a self-surveillance that was also collective."Ibid., 133.
81.
Catholic Union and Times, April 3, 1890.
82.
Mona Domosh, "The Feminized Retail Landscape: Gender Ideology and Consumer Culture in Nineteenth-century New York City," in Neil Wrigley and Michelle Lowe, eds., Retailing and Capital: Towards the New Retail Geography ( London: Longman, 1996), 262.
83.
Catholic Union and Times, February 7, 1889.
84.
Catholic Union and Times, July 1, 1889.
85.
Catholic Union and Times, January 9, 1890.
86.
Two useful studies are Williams, "Green Again"; and Charles Fanning, The Irish Voice in America: 200 Years of Irish-American Fiction ( Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2000).
87.
Hasia Diner, Erin’s Daughters: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century ( Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 66.
88.
Nolan, Servants of the Poor, 87.
89.
Casey, "‘From the East Side,’" 405.
90.
Catholic Union and Times, April 14, 1898.
91.
In making this point, however, I am not treating Dooley’s novel as a mimetic document. For a useful methodological discussion on the uses of fiction in revealing the "characters" of places, see James Kneale, "Secondary Worlds: Reading Novels as Geographical Research," in Alison Blunt, Pyrs Gruffudd, Jon May, Miles J. Ogborn, and David Pinder, eds., Cultural Geographies in Practice (London: Arnold, 2003), 39-51. Also see Marc Brosseau, "Geography’s Literature," Progress in Human Geography 18 (1994): 333-53; and Joanne Sharp, "Towards a Critical Analysis of Fictive Geographies," Area 32 (2000): 327-54.
92.
See the entry on Dooley originally published in Walter Romig, The Book of Catholic Authors: Sixth Series (Grosse Pointe, MI: Walter Romig, 1960), 156-62, now available at www.catholicauthors.com/ dooley.html (accessed October 2007). In this brief reflection on his career to date, Dooley also offers the following with regard to the formation of "composite characters": "I began to see that a number of roughly similar people whose actual lives offered perhaps only one phase of interest to me might far better merge into one character more significant and typical than any one of the original prototypes, a new person, in some ways like all of them, yet different from any individual."
93.
See Fanning, Irish Voice in America, 292. Dooley is mentioned in passing on page 300, marking him out as a rather minor figure in this genre.
94.
Dooley recognized this issue, especially with respect to Buffalonians (see entry in Web address in note 92).
95.
See Mary Doyle Curran, The Parish and the Hill ( New York: Feminist Press, 1948/ 1986); and its discussion in Fanning , Irish Voice in America, 299-300.
96.
The "traditional" Irish vote in Buffalo went to the Democrats. As the novel puts it, "In the First Ward, you were born Democratic as you were born Irish and Catholic." Dooley, Days Beyond Recall, 19. Also see William Jenkins, "Identity, Space and the Political Mobilization of Urban Minorities: Comparative Perspectives on Irish Catholics in Buffalo and Toronto 1880-1910," Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25 (2007): 160-86.
97.
Dooley, Days Beyond Recall, 7. St. Bridget’s church was established in 1853 as the primary place of worship in the First Ward and remained so until 1903, when a parish division resulted in the founding of Our Lady of Perpetual Help parish (known locally as "Pets").
98.
Dooley, Days Beyond Recall , 3.
99.
Ibid., 14.
100.
Ibid., 64, 101.
101.
Ibid., 10, 64.
102.
Ibid., 111.
103.
Ibid., 28.
104.
Ibid., 19.
105.
Ibid., 29.
106.
Ibid., 29.
107.
Ibid., 21.
108.
Williams, "Green Again" Also see Kathleen Donovan, "Good Old Pat: An Irish-American Stereotype in Decline," Eire-Ireland15 (1980): 6-14.
109.
Dooley, Days Beyond Recall, 23.
110.
In total, forty-two private households from the sample employed at least two servants and seventeen employed at least one female servant of Irish birth or paternal ancestry. All were located either on or near Delaware Avenue.
While more than half of all employed Irish-born women in the United States worked as domestic servants by the close of the nineteenth century, their second-generation coethnics preferred office-based work as clerks, typists, and stenographers as well as public school teaching. See Janet A. Nolan, Ourselves Alone: Women’s Emigration from Ireland 1885-1920 (Lexington : University Press of Kentucky, 1989); and E.P. Hutchinson, Immigrants and Their Children 1850-1950 (New York: John Wiley, 1956), 181-88.
113.
Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners and State Formation and Civilization, translated by E Jephcott (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1994), 183.
114.
Dooley, Days Beyond Recall , 33.
115.
Ibid., 243.
116.
Ibid., 444.
117.
Stuart Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City 1760-1900 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 288.
