The Irish Road to the White House

The story of how the Irish rose to the top of American politics.

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The Inauguration of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, January 20, 1961.

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An Gorta Mór, the devastating Famine that drove over one-and-a-half million Irish to America, put in place the foundations of the Irish-American community for the next 120 years. The Famine immigrants were a deeply rural people. Endowed with few material resources or capital and little or no education, the great majority were utterly unprepared for instant immersion into some of the fastest-industrializing cities in the world. Yet, politically, the Irish had the advantage of having undergone a process of political initiation that was, at the time, unique in Western Europe.

The administration in Dublin, controlled from London, was often remote and, in places, fiercely resisted. But beginning in the 1820s, with his groundbreaking campaign for Catholic emancipation and in his subsequent drive for repeal of the union with Great Britain, Daniel O’Connell created one of the first mass political movements. O’Connell’s hopes for repeal were crushed by government coercion and the start of the Great Hunger. But as the massive exodus of Irish got underway, with a quarter of the country emigrating in the single decade from 1845-55, the memory of the Famine would prove indelible and the experience of political organization under O’Connell, invaluable.

The disruptions and dislocations suffered by Famine immigrants were often devastating, and the welcome they found in America was anything but warm. Instantly suspect for their religion and poverty, their presence helped spur a fierce backlash that led to the formation of the anti-immigrant American Party, the largest third-party movement in American history. Yet under the democratic reforms brought about under President Andrew Jackson, the vote had been extended to all white males and the unintended beneficiaries were the Famine Irish. Crowded into the worst slums in North America, they had the advantage of being able to use their numbers to engineer voting pluralities and push their way ahead.

While New York’s Tammany Hall was the most famous – or infamous – Irish-American political machine, the rise of the Irish through urban mass politics is a story common to American cities from Chicago to Jersey City, from Albany to Philadelphia, from Kansas City to Boston. The big-city boss – “If I were a Republican,” said Kansas City’s Tom Prendergast, “they’d call me a leader” – not only exemplified the strengths and weaknesses of Irish machine politics, but was influential in forming coalitions that reached out to other ethnic groups, helped build the modern Democratic Party, and brought Franklin Delano Roosevelt to power and, eventually, John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

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