The age of the Irish: What Ted Kennedy and John Sweeney built on

The death of Ted Kennedy precedes by three weeks the end of John Sweeney’s 14-year tenure as president of the AFL-CIO. Together, these events signal the end of an epoch in American political history: that of Irish American leadership of the nation’s liberal institutions and Democratic organizations.

Time was, of course, when the Democratic Party was largely big-city machines led by and composed of Irish Americans; when the governments of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and San Francisco were run by, and often for, the Irish; when labor, from the CIO’s Philip Murray to the AFL-CIO’s George Meany, was run by the Irish, too. As early as the 1910s and ’20s, when the greatest of all Irish bosses, Tammany Hall’s Charley Murphy, dominated New York politics, the smarter Irish bosses became adept at assembling cross-ethnic coalitions, just as the more progressive Irish labor leaders became tribunes for workers regardless of ethnicity. By the time Ted Kennedy led America’s liberal cause and John Sweeney led its labor movement, there was nothing remotely ethnocentric in their politics, although their cultural Irishness was unmistakable and the Boston and Bronx Irish, respectively, in their voices were impossible to miss.

Today, though, it's hard to find the Irish mayors and governors who were once the backbone of the Democratic Party. In Chicago, the Daley dynasty rolls on, but that is the exception. Big-city mayors are much more likely to be African American, Jewish or Latino. As for labor, there are still a number of Irish American leaders of the building trades, but just one of the largest unions is headed by an Irish American: the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, whose president, Gerald McEntee, a Sweeney contemporary, is the longest-serving member of the AFL-CIO executive council.

When the Irish began arriving en masse in the 1840s, they were met with savage hostility by America’s largely Protestant native-born population and shunted into ghettos. In their residential ghettos, after several decades, they discovered the power of the ballot box, political organization and municipal employment. In their occupational ghettos, laying railroad track and working on construction crews, they became America’s first distinct paid ethnic working class (African Americans were a distinct working class, too, but unpaid, and then barely paid). Other immigrant groups, also clustered into ghettos, found that the Irish had gotten there first, and that they maintained a grip on state, city and union politics that outlasted the days when the Irish constituted a clear majority of city voters or blue-collar workers.

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Nster.com