Boston College professor Thomas H. O’Connor is the dean of local historians in these parts. The following excerpt from the introduction to his fine book, The Boston Irish: A Political History, makes for good reading on St. Patrick’s Day. For those interested in politics, it should serve as a cautionary tale for the electoral aspirations of any Harvard professor named Warren (an old Boston Yankee name):
I should state plainly at the outset that I begin this study with a personal assumption with which many readers may agree, but to which others may take strong exception. It is that the Boston Irish are different. I regard them as different from the New York Irish, the Philadelphia Irish, the Chicago Irish, and from most clearly identifiable groups of Irish Americans in other parts of the United States….
The reason for this “difference,” at least according to my own preliminary assumption, is not that the Irish who came to Boston were significantly different from other Irish immigrants who came to American cities during the greater part of the nineteenth century. Rather, it lies in the unique surroundings in which the Irish found themselves when they first arrived in Boston. If there had existed in the nineteenth century a computer able to digest all the appropriate data, it would have reported one city in the entire world where an Irish Catholic, under any circumstance, should never, ever, set foot. That city was Boston, Massachusetts. It was an American city with an intensely homogeneous Anglo-Saxon character, an inbred hostility toward people who were Irish, a fierce and violent revulsion against all thing Roman Catholic, and an economic system that precluded most forms of unskilled labor. Boston was a city that rejected the Irish from the very start and saw no way in which people of that ethnic background could ever be fully assimilated into the prevailing American culture. Other major American cities, to be sure, shared many of Boston’s social, cultural, and religious characteristics, but few to the same extent and none to the same degree. Yankee Boston was unique in the depth and intensity of its convictions. The generations of bitter and unyielding conflict between the natives of Boston and the newcomers from Ireland would forever mold the social and political character of the Boston Irish in ways not found elsewhere.
These are deep and tricky undercurrents in which to navigate.
Crossposted at: http://masscommons.wordpress.com/
