The American Dream - In Canada: An Irish family buys into the good life, 1960s style

These immigrants consisted of two groups: The last big waves of the "Old Immigration" from Germany, Britain, Ireland, and Scandinavia, and the rising waves of the "New Immigration", which peaked about Some men moved back and forth across the Atlantic, but most were permanent settlers. They moved into well-established communities, both urban and rural. The German American communities spoke German, but their younger generation was bilingual. In terms of immigration, after the old immigration of Germans, British, Irish, and Scandinavians slackened off.

The United States was producing large numbers of new unskilled jobs every year, and to fill them came number from Italy, Poland, Austria, Hungary, Russia, Greece, and other points in southern and central Europe, as well as French Canada. The older immigrants by the s had formed highly stable communities, especially the German Americans. Irish Catholics had arrived in large numbers in the s and s in the wake of the great famine in Ireland when starvation killed millions. Their first few decades were characterized by extreme poverty, social dislocation, crime and violence in their slums.

By the late 19th century, the Irish communities had largely stabilized, with a strong new "lace curtain" middle-class of local businessmen, professionals, and political leaders typified by P. Kennedy — in Boston. In economic terms, Irish Catholics were nearly at the bottom in the s. They reached the national average by , and by the late 20th century they far surpassed the national average.

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In political terms, the Irish Catholics comprised a major element in the leadership of the urban Democratic machines across the country. They were part of an international Catholic network, with considerable movement back and forth from Ireland, England, France, Germany and Canada. The "New Immigration" were much poorer peasants and rural folk from southern and eastern Europe, including mostly Italians, Poles and Jews. Some men, especially the Italians and Greeks, saw themselves as temporary migrants who planned to return to their home villages with a nest egg of cash earned in long hours of unskilled labor.

Others, especially the Jews, had been driven out of Eastern Europe and had no intention of returning. Historians analyze the causes of immigration in terms of push factors pushing people out of the homeland and pull factors pulling them to America. The push factors included economic dislocation, shortages of land, and antisemitism. Pull factors were the economic opportunity of good inexpensive farmland or jobs in factories, mills and mines.

The first generation typically lived in ethnic enclaves with a common language, food, religion, and connections through the old village. The sheer numbers caused overcrowding in tenements in the larger cities. In the small mill towns, however, management usually built company housing with cheap rents. Asian immigrants—Chinese at this time—were hired by California construction companies for temporary railroad work.

The European Americans strongly disliked the Chinese for their alien life-styles and threat of low wages. In the census, there were 63, Chinese men with a few women in the entire U. Immigrants from China were not allowed to become citizens until ; however, as a result of the Supreme Court decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark , their children born in the U.

Congress banned further Chinese immigration through the Chinese Exclusion Act in ; the act prohibited Chinese laborers from entering the United States, but some students and businessmen were allowed in on a temporary basis. The Chinese population declined to only 37, in Although many returned to China a greater proportion than most other immigrant groups , most of them stayed in the United States. Chinese people were unwelcome in urban neighborhoods, so they resettled in the " Chinatown " districts of large cities. The exclusion policy lasted until the s.

A dramatic expansion in farming took place during the Gilded Age, [] [] with the number of farms tripling from 2. The number of people living on farms grew from about 10 million in to 22 million in to 31 million in Even larger numbers purchased lands at very low interest from the new railroads, which were trying to create markets. The railroads advertised heavily in Europe and brought over, at low fares, hundreds of thousands of farmers from Germany, Scandinavia and Britain.

'It's life and death': border crossings continue despite the Trump effect

Despite their remarkable progress and general prosperity, 19th-century U. Along with the mechanical improvements which greatly increased yield per unit area, the amount of land under cultivation grew rapidly throughout the second half of the century, as the railroads opened up new areas of the West for settlement. The wheat farmers enjoyed abundant output and good years from to when bad European harvests kept the world price high. They then suffered from a slump in the s when conditions in Europe improved.

The farther west the settlers went, the more dependent they became on the monopolistic railroads to move their goods to market, and the more inclined they were to protest, as in the Populist movement of the s. Wheat farmers blamed local grain elevator owners who purchased their crop , railroads and eastern bankers for the low prices. The first organized effort to address general agricultural problems was the Grange movement. Launched in , by employees of the U. Department of Agriculture , the Granges focused initially on social activities to counter the isolation most farm families experienced.

Women's participation was actively encouraged. Spurred by the Panic of , the Grange soon grew to 20, chapters and 1. The Granges set up their own marketing systems, stores, processing plants, factories and cooperatives. The movement also enjoyed some political success during the s. A few Midwestern states passed " Granger Laws ", limiting railroad and warehouse fees. American society experienced significant changes in the period following the Civil War, most notably the rapid urbanization of the North.

New York, Philadelphia, and especially Chicago saw rapid growth. Louis Sullivan became a noted architect using steel frames to construct skyscrapers for the first time while pioneering the idea of " form follows function ". Chicago became the center of the skyscraper craze, starting with the ten-story Home Insurance Building in — by William Le Baron Jenney. As immigration increased in cities, poverty rose as well.

The poorest crowded into low-cost housing such as the Five Points and Hell's Kitchen neighborhoods in Manhattan. These areas were quickly overridden with notorious criminal gangs such as the Five Points Gang and the Bowery Boys. Rapid outward expansion required longer journeys to work and shopping for the middle class office workers and housewives. The working-class generally did not own automobiles until after ; they typically walked to nearby factories and patronized small neighborhood stores. The middle class demanded a better transportation system. Slow horse-drawn streetcars and faster electric trolleys were the rage in the s.

However, this produced uneven wear, opened new hazards for pedestrians, and made for dangerous potholes for bicycles and for motor vehicles. Manhattan alone had , horses in , pulling streetcars, delivery wagons, and private carriages, and leaving their waste behind. They were not fast, and pedestrians could dodge and scramble their way across the crowded streets. In small towns people mostly walked to their destination so they continued to rely on dirt and gravel into the s.

Larger cities had much more complex transportation needs. They wanted better streets, so they paved them with wood or granite blocks. Brick surfacing was a good compromise, but even better was asphalt paving. With London and Paris as models, Washington laid , square yards of asphalt paving by , and served as a model for Buffalo, Philadelphia, and elsewhere.

By the end of the century, American cities boasted 30 million square yards of asphalt paving, followed by brick construction. Big-city streets became paths for faster and larger and more dangerous vehicles, the pedestrians beware.

Gilded Age

In the largest cities, street railways were elevated, which increased their speed and lessened their dangers. Boston built the first subway in the s followed by New York a decade later. The South remained heavily rural and was much poorer than the North or West. The most significant of these was sharecropping , where tenant farmers "shared" up to half of their crop with the landowners, in exchange for seed and essential supplies. Most sharecroppers were locked in a cycle of debt, from which the only hope of escape was increased planting. This led to the over-production of cotton and tobacco and thus to declining prices and income , soil exhaustion, and poverty among both landowners and tenants.

Agriculture's Share of the Labor Force, []. There were only a few scattered cities — small courthouse towns serviced the farm population. Local politics revolved around the politicians and lawyers based at the courthouse. Mill towns, narrowly focused on textile production or cigarette manufacture, began opening in the Piedmont region especially in the Carolinas. Racial segregation and outward signs of inequality were everywhere, and rarely were challenged.

Blacks who violated the color line were liable to expulsion or lynching. Cotton prices were much lower than before the war, so everyone was poor. White southerners showed a reluctance to move north, or to move to cities, so the number of small farms proliferated, and they became smaller as the population grew.

Many of the White farmers, and most of the Blacks, were tenant farmers who owned their work animals and tools, and rented the land. Others were day laborers or very poor sharecroppers , who worked under the supervision of the landowner. There was little cash in circulation, because most farmers operated on credit accounts from local merchants, and paid off their debts at cotton harvest time in the fall.

Although there were small country churches everywhere, there were only a few dilapidated elementary schools. Apart from private academies, there were very few high schools until the s. Conditions were marginally better in newer areas, especially in Texas and central Florida, with the deepest poverty in South Carolina, Mississippi, and Arkansas.

The vast majority of African Americans lived in the South, and as the promises of emancipation and reconstruction faded, they entered the nadir of race relations. They mandated de jure legal segregation in all public facilities, such as stores and street cars, with a supposedly " separate but equal " status for Blacks. In reality, this led to treatment and accommodations that were dramatically inferior to those provided for White Americans, systematizing a number of economic, educational and social disadvantages. Schools for Blacks were far fewer and poorly supported by taxpayers, although Northern philanthropies and churches kept open dozens of academies and small colleges.

In the face of years of mounting violence and intimidation directed at blacks during Reconstruction, the federal government was unable to guarantee constitutional protections to freedmen and women. In the Compromise of President Hayes withdrew Union troops from the South; " Redeemers " White Democrats acted quickly to reverse the groundbreaking advances of Reconstruction. The new railroads provided the opportunity for migrants to go out and take a look, with special family tickets, the cost of which could be applied to land purchases offered by the railroads.

Farming the plains was indeed more difficult than back east.

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Water management was more critical, lightning fires were more prevalent, the weather was more extreme, rainfall was less predictable. The fearful stayed home, while migrants were mainly motivated by a search improve their economic life. Farmers sought larger, cheaper and more fertile land; merchants and tradesman sought new customers and new leadership opportunities.

Laborers wanted higher paying work and better conditions. With the Homestead Act providing free land to citizens and the railroads selling cheap lands to European farmers, the settlement of the Great Plains was swiftly accomplished, and the frontier had virtually ended by Native American policy was set by the national government the states had very little role , and after the national policy was that Native Americans either had to assimilate into the larger community or remain on reservations, where the government provided subsidies.

Reservation natives were no longer allowed to roam or fight their traditional enemies. Army was to enforce the laws. Natives of the West came in conflict with expansion by miners, ranchers and settlers. By , the buffalo herds , a foundation for the hunting economy had disappeared. Violence petered out in the s and practically ceased after Native Americans individually had the choice of living on reservations, with food, supplies, education and medical care provided by the federal government, or living on their own in the larger society and earning wages, typically as a cowboy on a ranch, or manual worker in town.

Reformers wanted to give as many Native Americans as possible the opportunity to own and operate their own farms and ranches, so the issue was how to give individual natives land owned by the tribe. To assimilate the natives into American society, reformers set up training programs and schools, such as the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania , that produced many prominent Native American leaders.

However, anti-assimilation traditionalists on the reservations resisted integration and the resulting loss of their traditional life. In , the Dawes Act proposed to divide tribal land and parcel out acres 0. Such allotments were to be held in trust by the government for 25 years, then given to owners with full title, so they could sell it or mortgage it.

As individual natives sold their land, the total held by the native community shrank by almost half. The individualized system undermined the traditional communal tribal organization. Furthermore, a majority of natives responded to intense missionary activity by converting to Christianity.

The long-term goal of Dawes Act was to integrate natives into the mainstream; the majority accepted integration and were absorbed into American society, leaving a trace of native ancestry in millions of American families. Those who refused to assimilate remained in poverty on reservations, supported until now by Federal food, medicine and schooling. In , national policy was reversed again by the Indian Reorganization Act which tried to protect tribal and communal life on reservations. Few single men attempted to operate a farm; farmers clearly understood the need for a hard-working wife, and numerous children, to handle the many chores, including child-rearing, feeding and clothing the family, managing the housework, and feeding the hired hands.

After a generation or so, women increasingly left the fields, thus redefining their roles within the family. New conveniences such as sewing and washing machines encouraged women to turn to domestic roles. The scientific housekeeping movement was promoted across the land by the media and government extension agents, as well as county fairs which featured achievements in home cookery and canning, advice columns for women in the farm papers, and home economics courses in schools. Although the eastern image of farm life on the prairies emphasizes the isolation of the lonely farmer and the bleakness of farm life, in reality rural folk created a rich social life for themselves.

For example, many joined a local branch of the Grange; a majority had ties to local churches. It was popular to organize activities that combined practical work, abundant food, and simple entertainment such as barn raisings , corn huskings, and quilting bees. Women organized shared meals and potluck events, as well as extended visits between families.

Canadian Pacific Railway

Childhood on western farms is contested territory. One group of scholars argues the rural environment was salubrious because it allowed children to break loose from urban hierarchies of age and gender, promoted family interdependence, and produced children who were more self-reliant, mobile, adaptable, responsible, independent and more in touch with nature than their urban or eastern counterparts.

Some well-known painters of the Gilded Age include: The New York Art world took a major turn during the Gilded age, seeing an outgrowth of exhibitions and the establishment of major auction houses with a focus on American Art. During the Gilded Age, many new social movements took hold in the United States. Many women abolitionists who were disappointed that the Fifteenth Amendment did not extend voting rights to them, remained active in politics, this time focusing on issues important to them.

Its chief leader was Frances Willard — , who had a national and international outreach from her base in Evanston, Illinois. With leaders like Susan B. Many young women worked as servants or in shops and factories until marriage, then typically became full-time housewives. However, black, Irish and Swedish adult women often worked as servants. In most large Northern cities, the Irish Catholic women dominated the market for servants. Thousands of young unmarried Irish and French Canadian women worked in Northeastern textile mills. Coming from poor families these jobs meant upward social mobility, more money, and more social prestige in their community that made them more attractive marriage partners.

In Cohoes, New York , mill women went on strike in to gain union recognition. They fought off Swedish strike breakers in order to protect the status they had achieved. After , as the larger cities opened department stores , middle-class women did most of the shopping; increasingly they were served by young middle-class women clerks. In some ethnic groups, however, married women were encouraged to work, especially among African-Americans, and Irish Catholics. When the husband operated a small shop or restaurant, wives and other family members could find employment there.

Widows and deserted wives often operated boarding houses. Career women were few. The teaching profession had once been heavily male, but as schooling expanded many women took on teaching careers. Business opportunities were rare, unless it was a matter of a widow taking over her late husband's small business. However the rapid acceptance of the sewing machine made housewives more productive and opened up new careers for women running their own small millinery and dressmaking shops.

She worked from home to handle banking business. In an age when philanthropists such as Johns Hopkins, Cornell, Purdue, Vanderbilt, Stanford, Rice and Duke were perpetuating their names by founding universities, she lifted her aspirations from the original idea of an orphanage to the loftier goal and in founded Bradley University in Peoria. A leading magazine, The Nation , espoused Classical liberalism every week starting in , under the influential editor E.

Science played an important part in social thought as the work of Charles Darwin became known among intellectuals. Following Darwin's idea of natural selection , English philosopher Herbert Spencer proposed the idea of social Darwinism. This new concept justified the stratification of the wealthy and poor, and it was in this proposal that Spencer coined the term " survival of the fittest ". Sumner argued for a laissez-faire and free-market economy. Few people, however, agreed with the social Darwinists, because they ridiculed religion and denounced philanthropy.

Henry George proposed a "single tax" in his book Progress and Poverty. The tax would be leveled on the rich and poor alike, with the excess money collected used to equalize wealth and level out society. The Norwegian American economist Thorstein Veblen argued in The Theory of the Leisure Class that the " conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure " of the wealthy had become the basis of social status in America.

In Looking Backward , the reformer Edward Bellamy envisioned a future America set in the year in which a socialist paradise has been established. The works of authors such as George and Bellamy became popular, and soon clubs were created across America to discuss their ideas, although these organizations rarely made any real social change. The Third Great Awakening which began before the Civil War returned and made a significant change in religious attitudes toward social progress.

The Third Great Awakening was a period of religious activism in American history from the late s to the 20th century. It affected pietistic Protestant denominations and had a strong sense of social activism. It gathered strength from the postmillennial theology that the Second Coming of Christ would come after mankind had reformed the entire earth.

The Social Gospel movement gained its force from the Awakening, as did the worldwide missionary movement. New groupings emerged, such as the Holiness movement and Nazarene movements, Theosophy and Christian Science. The Protestant mainline denominations especially the Methodist, Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Congregational churches grew rapidly in numbers, wealth and educational levels, throwing off their frontier beginnings and becoming centered in towns and cities. Leaders such as Josiah Strong advocated a muscular Christianity with systematic outreach to the unchurched in America and around the globe.

Others built colleges and universities to train the next generation. Each denomination supported active missionary societies, and made the role of missionary one of high prestige. The Awakening in numerous cities in was interrupted by the American Civil War. In the South, on the other hand, the Civil War stimulated revivals and strengthened the Baptists, especially.

Moody made revivalism the centerpiece of his activities in Chicago by founding the Moody Bible Institute. The hymns of Ira Sankey were especially influential. Across the nation, "drys" crusaded, in the name of religion, for the prohibition of alcohol.

The Woman's Christian Temperance Union mobilized Protestant women for social crusades against not only liquor, but also pornography and prostitution, and sparked the demand for women's suffrage. The Gilded Age plutocracy came under harsh attack from the Social Gospel preachers and reformers in the Progressive Era who became involved with issues of child labor , compulsory elementary education and the protection of women from exploitation in factories.

All the major denominations sponsored growing missionary activities inside the United States and around the world. Colleges associated with churches rapidly expanded in number, size and quality of curriculum. The promotion of muscular Christianity became popular among young men on campus and in urban YMCAs, as well as such denominational youth groups such as the Epworth League for Methodists and the Walther League for Lutherans. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. This article is about social and economic history.

For other uses, see Gilded Age disambiguation. Great Railroad Strike of Labor history of the United States. History of immigration to the United States. The Price of Inequality: Historical Dictionary of the Gilded Age. Retrieved 7 April University of California Press. Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era: Political Structure in the Gilded Age, — New Orleans in the gilded age: Politics and urban progress, — The Gilded Age, — Progressive Era and the Great War, — 2nd ed. Johnston, Robert; Johnson, Benjamin H. Pioneers in Modern Corporate Management". The Transmission of Power.

The Education of Henry Adams. Retrieved May 11, Jenks, "Railroads as an economic force in American development. Kirkland, Industry comes of age: Business, labor, and public policy, — pp. Jenks, "Britain and American railway development.

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John Stewart Kennedy and the financing of the western railroads Chandler and Stephen Salsbury. Innovators in modern business administration. Working for the Railroad: The Organization of Work in the Nineteenth Century. Cross and Rick Szostak, Technology and American society: A history p. Bullough, and Richard J. Orsi, The elusive Eden: A new history of California p. The Great American Railroad War: Chicago and the Great West. Kirkland, Industry Comes of Age: Business, Labor, and Public Policy, — pp.

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Imposing Liberalism on a Recalcitrant World. The Americanization of the World. The Triumph of Money in America, — Robber Barons and Rebels". A People's History of the United States. Harper Perennial Modern Classics. Folsom, The Myth of the Robber Barons: Boston and the Museum Movement". America in the Gilded Age: New York University Press. The Gilded Age and Progressive Era: The "American Standard" in Comparative Perspective, — University of Pittsburgh Press. The Age of Acquiescence: Little, Brown and Company.

American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. A Narrative History Brief 9th ed. A Study in the Nature and Organization of Work. Good, Reliable, White Men: The Dark Side of the Gilded Age. Retrieved March 23, Year of Violence , the standard scholarly history. American Social History Productions, inc. But to this day it has not been discovered who threw the bomb. Weir, Beyond Labor's Veil: Samuel Gompers and Organized Labor in America.

Banking panics of the gilded age PDF. Archived from the original PDF on A History of American Financial Scandals pp The New Encyclopedia of American Scandal. The United States, — Retrieved January 5, Unto a Good Land: A History of the American People, Volume 2: The Third Electoral System — Parties, Voters, and Political Cultures.

Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press. Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion: The Making of a President, University of North Carolina Press. Encyclopedia of the United States in the Nineteenth Century: Wisconsin Magazine of History.

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The Winning of the Midwest: Social and Political Conflict, — Social History of the United States. Lee and Marion Casey, eds. History and heritage of the Irish in the United States Irish-Americans and the dilemmas of urban machine politics, — The saints and sinners who built America's most powerful church Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, — A Nation of Immigrants. Many of the new arrivals, quite frightened at the mere prospect of America, gladly accepted. Those who hesitated were usually bullied into submission. The runner's first con was to suggest a good place to stay in New York; a boarding house operated by a friend, supposedly with good meals and comfortable rooms at very affordable rates, including free storage of any luggage.

The boarding houses were actually filthy hell-holes in lower Manhattan. Instead of comfortable rooms, the confused arrivals were shoved into vermin-infested hovels with eight or ten other unfortunate souls, at prices three or four times higher than what they had been told. They remained as 'boarders' until their money ran out at which time their luggage was confiscated for back-rent and they were tossed out into the streets, homeless and penniless.

During the entire Famine period, about , Irish arrived in New York harbor. All incoming passenger ships to New York had to stop for medical inspection. Anyone with fever was removed to the quarantine station on Staten Island and the ship itself was quarantined for 30 days. But Staten Island was just five miles from Manhattan. Runners were so aggressive in pursuit of the Irish that they even rowed out to quarantined ships and sneaked into the hospitals on Staten Island despite the risk of contracting typhus.

Another way to take advantage of the Irish was to sell them phony railroad and boat tickets. Runners working with 'forwarding agents' sold bogus tickets that had pictures of trains or boats the illiterate immigrants wished to board to leave Manhattan for other U. The tickets were either worthless, or if they were valid, had been sold at double the actual price or higher. On the boats, the immigrant were shoved into jam-packed steerage sections, although they thought they had paid for better accommodations. Sometimes, halfway to their destination, they were told to pay more or risk being thrown overboard.

The penniless Irish who remained in Manhattan stayed crowded together close to the docks where they sought work as unskilled dock workers. They found cheap housing wherever they could, with many families living in musty cellars. Abandoned houses near the waterfront that once belonged to wealthy merchants were converted into crowded tenements. Shoddy wooded tenements also sprang up overnight in yards and back alleys to be rented out room by room at high prices. Similar to Boston, New York experienced a high rate of infant mortality and a dramatic rise in crime as men and boys cooped-up in squalid shanties let off steam by drinking and getting in fights.

Up to ninety percent of the Irish arriving in America remained in cities. New York now had more Irish-born citizens than Dublin. Upon arrival, the Irishman and his family would usually go straight to the 'Irish quarter,' locate people from County Mayo, County Cork, or wherever they had come from, and settle in among them. Unlike other nationalities that came to America seeking wide open spaces, the Irish chose to huddle in the cities partly because they were the poorest of all the immigrants arriving and partly out of a desire to recreate the close-knit communities they had cherished back in Ireland.

Above all, the Irish loved each other's company, enjoying a daily dose of gossip, conversation, poetry and story telling, music and singing, and the ever-present jokes and puns. But the daily pressures of living in America at the bottom rung of society also brought out the worst in them. Back home, the Irish were known for their honesty, law-abiding manners, and chastity. In America, old social norms disintegrated and many of the Irish, both men and women, behaved wildly.

In the hopeless slums of New York, prostitution flourished and drunkenness occurred even among children. Wherever they settled, the Irish kept to themselves to the exclusion of everyone else, and thus were slow to assimilate. Americans were thus slow to accept the Irish as equals, preferring instead to judge them by the cartoon stereotypes of drunken, brawling Irishmen published in newspapers of the day. Irish immigrants were also derided in the press as 'aliens' who were mindlessly loyal to their Catholic leaders in place of any allegiance to America.

The sheer numbers of Irish pouring into the U. Many American Protestants held the simplistic view that if the numbers of Roman Catholics were increasing then the power and influence of the Papacy in America was also increasing, threatening America's political independence. Fear of the Papacy thus became fear of the Irish and resulted in outright violence. In Boston, a mob of Protestant workmen burned down a Catholic convent. Protestant mobs in Philadelphia rioted against Irish Catholics in The Irish in Philadelphia promptly gathered into mobs of their own and fought back, with the violence lasting over three days.

Two Catholic churches were burned down along with hundreds of Irish homes and a dozen immigrants killed. Then he paid a visit to New York's mayor and warned him that if just one Catholic church was touched, the Irish would burn all of Manhattan to the ground. Other cities that experienced anti-Catholic violence included; Baltimore, St.

Louis, New Orleans and Louisville, Kentucky. Militant anti-Catholics formed a third political party nicknamed the 'Know-Nothings' seeking to curtail Irish immigration and keep them from becoming naturalized Americans in order to prevent them from ever gaining any political power. The movement was most successful in Massachusetts which elected Know-Nothing candidates to every statewide office in , including governor. Throughout America, anti-Irish sentiment was becoming fashionable.

In Boston, Irish clam diggers pose on a wharf, In New York, officials investigate a squalid tenement, Former presidential candidate Al Smith on right with Franklin Roosevelt, the man who followed him as governor of NY, Triumphant visit of President Kennedy to Dublin, But American concerns over Irish immigration soon took a back seat to the tremendous issue of slavery which was about to rip the young nation apart.

F or Irish Americans, the turning point of their early years in the U. Over , enlisted in the Union army while others in the South enrolled in the Confederate ranks. Irish units, including the all-Irish 69th New York Regiment, participated in the monumental battles at Bull Run, Antietam, and Gettysburg, earning a reputation for dependability and bravery. At Fredericksburg, the 'Fighting 69th' repeatedly charged a well-entrenched Confederate position on Marye's Heights to the astonishment of all who observed.

However, during the Civil War, Irish civilians were heavily involved in the notorious New York draft riots in which African Americans were singled out for violence. From their earliest arrival in the U. Decades of frustration and pent-up emotions finally erupted on the streets over three hot summer days in July resulting in numerous beatings and 18 blacks murdered.

Federal troops from Gettysburg had to be called in to quell the violence. Following the Civil War, Irish laborers once again provided the backbreaking work needed for the enormous expansion of rapidly industrializing America. They ran factories, built railroads in the West, and worked in the mines of Pennsylvania, Virginia and Montana. They were carpenter's assistants, boat-builders, dock-hands, bartenders and waiters.

In an era when there were virtually no governmental constraints on American capitalism, the Irish organized the first trade unions and conducted strikes when necessary for higher wages, shorter hours, and safer working conditions. Single Irish women found work as cooks and maids in houses belonging to wealthy families on Beacon Hill in Boston and along Fifth Avenue in New York, and in most other big cities. Many lived inside the homes in the servants' quarters and enjoyed a standard of living luxurious by comparison to the life they had known in Ireland or in the tenements.

These women were cheerful, kind-hearted, hard working and thrifty, always managing to save a little money out of their salary for those back in Ireland.