The Empire Club Strikes Back

A key flaw in the standard, culturalist interpretation is that prohibitionism was a “whitelash” of conservative, rural, nativists “disciplining” of immigrants and blacks. The reality of 1840s New York was completely different: not only were Irish immigrants more likely to be temperate than their nativist, American counterparts (Chapter 5), but the focus of temperance activism—the money-making liquor traffic—was actually in the hands of established white nativists like “Captain” Isaiah Rynders, “Boss” Tweed, and the corrupt Tammany Hall machine. In upstate New York, temperance-abolitionist-suffragist reformers--including Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Amelia Bloomer, and Susan B. Anthony--began a movement for women’s equality born of their temperance activism. Concurrent with the 1853 World’s Fair in New York, Rynders and his Know-Nothings clashed, physically, with the equal-rights reformers from upstate, whose temperance threatened the financial foundations of the Tammany Hall political machine.

Rewriting the Western: Transnational Dimensions and Gender Fluidity in Sebastian Barry’s Days without End

The present essay will explore the Irish writer Sebastian Barry’s transnational rendering of the American West in his novel Days without End (2016), emphasizing his representation of neglected western questions and realities and his revision of traditional western tropes and archetypes. Barry’s approach to the American West in Days without End moves beyond the regional and national imagery of this territory, revealing its international and hybrid properties and its multiple and overlapping cultures. It is argued that Barry’s recreation of a different reality from the traditional western monomyth of masculinity, individualism, and Anglo-American conquest allows him to challenge classical frontier narratives and to address international and transcultural issues, such as gender fluidity. The novel, whose main protagonist and narrator is a poor, homosexual Irish immigrant, embraces a different West, questioning romanticized versions of the westward expansion and drawing interesting connections between the Irish immigrants in this region and the Native Americans. Overall, Days without End may be viewed as an acute depiction of the transnational dimension of the American West, proving the power of the Western to overcome its traditional formulaic and mythic boundaries and to travel across global spaces.

Global Master Workman

This chapter analyzes the story of a transnational figure who hardly ever crossed a national border in his career as labor leader. Terence Powderly (1849-1924) was born in Carbondale, Pennsylvania, in 1849, to Irish immigrants. He entered the labor force as a switchman for the Delaware and Hudson railroad at the age of 13, as the Civil War raged across the United States, and became a machinists’ apprentice at the age of 17. He was marked out very early as a rising star in the American labor movement, rising quickly in the Machinist and Blacksmith’s Union after joining it in 1871. In 1874, a year after the Panic of ’73 brought economic depression to the United States and forced Powderly west to find work, he joined a relatively new, secret union that he would be associated with for the rest of his life: The Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor.

Tammany Hall and the Machine Style in Black Politics

“I seen my opportunities and I took ’em,” explained George Washington Plunkitt speaking to the journalist William L. Riordan at the dawn of the twentieth century. For many college students, William Riordan's collection of musings and reminiscences from New York State Senator Plunkitt, delivered at a shoeshine stand on Manhattan's West Side, offers a definitive introduction to the history of urban machine politics. Plunkitt of Tammany Hall: A Series of Very Plain Talks on Very Practical Politics, first published in 1905, has become a ubiquitous text, frequently assigned in political science courses and excerpted in U.S. history source books. Plunkitt's reflections, while entertaining, present a transactional and opportunistic form of political practice. He famously differentiates between honest graft and dishonest graft; insists that showing up at fires to help victims is key to holding your district; declares the Irish to be natural born leaders; and derides reformers as “mornin’ glories.” He rages against the key urban reform project of the era, civil service examinations, as “the curse of the nation,” amounting to “a lot of fool questions about the number of cubic inches of water in the Atlantic and the quality of sand in the Sahara desert.” Civil service exams blocked machine politicians from distributing jobs to loyal followers, which in the case of the New York Democratic machine typically meant recently arrived Irish immigrants. As Plunkitt explains, “The Irishman is grateful. His one thought is to serve the city which gave him a home. He has this thought even before he lands in New York, for his friends here often have a good place in one of the city's departments picked out for him while he is still in the old country.” Plunkitt's characterization of the linkage between migrant arrival and municipal work points to the central role that access to city payrolls played in the economic and political history of the New York Irish. Arguably, the only other urban group that relied as heavily on city jobs for economic mobility has been African Americans.