PLENTIFUL COUNTRY

A scholarly history of 19th-century Irish immigration to New York City, and from there to points far inland.

Anbinder writes that while Irish immigrants to New York in the years around the Potato Famine were not as poor as they’ve been portrayed, only “four in ten managed to improve their standing in the socio-economic hierarchy over the course of their lifetimes.” While 40% may not be the most sparkling record, the author later qualifies his remarks with the perhaps self-evident observation that those who landed with useful trades did better on the whole than those who became street sweepers and junk sellers. It wasn’t all beer and skittles, then, but it wasn’t all Five Points and cholera-ridden tenements, either. Anbinder notes that about three-quarters of the 1.3 million Irish to arrive in the U.S. during and immediately after the Potato Famine landed in New York—but most of them pushed on, and some of the most interesting episodes in this rather formless narrative center on immigrants who made their way to California. Anbinder is good at reading the statistics, working with both digital tools and a vast archive of documentary materials. Using those resources, he ferrets out such things as the gradual Irish dominance of the New York police force, fueled by the fact that apart from giving authority to the previously disempowered, “police work paid better than unskilled work and almost every kind of artisanal labor.” Another lucrative line of work was owning a saloon, and both the police and the alcohol connections have explanatory powers in the New York of today. For all the statistics and social-historical insights, though, the book could have used more vigorous storytelling along the lines of Sean Connolly’s On Every Tide.

Sometimes arid, but with insights into the growth and evolution of Irish America.