On Boston's Immigrants

This is Oscar Handlin’s first book, which was an outgrowth of his dissertation. I have to say, his later work is much better than this one—I find his interpretations to be questionable at best.

Basically, Handlin argues that immigration—particularly, Irish immigration—fundamentally transformed the city of Boston in the mid-19th century. In the aftermath of the American Revolution, the city of Boston experienced a steep economic decline, in large part due to the weakening of trade (retaliation by British through tariffs was a bitch) and the movement of industry to other parts of Massachusetts, especially the Merrimac Valley. By the 1830s, the city of Boston stabilized itself, and experienced gradual, sustainable expansion.

Then, the Irish arrived. Although there was always immigration to Boston, the city was never a large importer of immigrants. The city was hardly on anyone’s map of places to go, given its dwindling industry and cultural scene (although Boston’s suburbs and hinterlands faced some solid growth). Those who arrived were thus able to integrate well with the rest of the community, as they were mere “strays.” However, between 1840 and 1849, thanks to the Irish famine, enormous numbers of Irish came to settle in Boston. By 1850, 35,000 Irish lived in the city (making up a quarter of the population), by 1855, there were 50,000.

The transition to life in the United States was extraordinarily difficult for Irish immigrants, who had to turn a six-day work week into a seven-day work week (they received Sundays off in Ireland), and they had to shift from a “leisurely peasant life” to a fifteen-hour workday. Conditions deteriorated further with the coming of the Civil War. They were absorbed into Boston’s economic system at starvation wages, and economic maladjustment made every single step of assimilation much more difficult than was experienced by earlier immigrants. Moreover, Irish immigrants “crammed into the city” (which was already thought to be “full”) and, according to Handlin, they introduced problems of “disease, vice, and crime.” As early as 1845, Boston’s top demographic authority said that there could be no further population increases. Yet, between 1845 and 1855, more than 230,000 people immigrated into the city, “turning a dense town into an overcrowded people.”

In the wake of this transformation, many Bostonians fled for more spacious suburbs, while elite Bostonians of English descent (who would later become known as the “Boston Brahmins”) went to bat against the Irish. Perhaps a saving grace, although Handlin sees it as an ill, the Irish had strong “group connections” and were largely endogamous—seeing themselves as Irish against the world, a result of their persecution in Britain. Irish nationalism became increasingly widespread and, as an ideology, was shared by many Irish immigrants, in opposition in Anglophilic American-born Bostonians. This produced large social tensions, and the tensions between the Irish and American-born Bostonians fundamentally transformed the city.

I’m not convinced, and this almost seems like a case of victim-blaming. While Boston’s population did grow a large amount throughout the 1840s and 1850s, it does not appear to be drastically different from earlier decades. The “overpopulation” and tensions between the Irish and the rest of Boston’s population, while certainly something that existed, appear to be significantly overstated in this case. I don’t dispute that Irish immigration to Boston transformed the city from a sleepy North Atlantic town into a modern metropolis—I find that case really convincing. My primary problem is that the ills of the transformation can be laid nearly exclusively at the hands of the Irish. That seems thoroughly unjust.

This book is worth reading as an early example of American immigration history, but it has been far surpassed by other authors and is better seen as the origin of a historiographical tradition than a good argument in itself.