Ever since the [potato] famine immigrants arrived, Americans were convinced that they could not succeed in America. In those days, it took a lot of resources to make it to the United States. The journey from Europe was 35 days … You had to bring your own food. You had to make it to Liverpool, and so you had to have a good amount of money to come to the States. Typical immigrants to the United States were fairly well off.
With the Great Potato Famine, where all of a sudden millions of people are starving in Ireland, people are fleeing and they get on ships even though they don’t have 35 days’ supply of food. And they just figure, somehow, they have to make it, because it’s life or death. They get to America half-starved. And many of them are discriminated against because they’re Catholic. Americans thought, “The Irish, they can’t succeed here. They’re too poor. They’re too Catholic. They don’t have the capital — the resources — that other immigrants had brought with them.”
And then through the generations, historians started making the same argument. In part, that was because it was just impossible to trace Irish famine immigrants and find out what had happened to them. There were just too many with the same names, hundreds and hundreds of Murphys and Kellys and Sullivans.
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I had another book planned, but all the while I kept thinking, these bank records are just so insanely good, because they have so much biographical detail about each depositor. You could see what happened to them, because it listed so much detail about their families and where they came from in Ireland when they arrived in the United States. And then over the years, as their occupations changed, as their addresses changed, they would give that information to the bank, and so you could trace them. And then even people who only had bank accounts for a few months could be traced. There was so much biographical detail in the bank records that allowed you to tell one Michael Sullivan from the next. After I started researching the whole of Irish in New York, and not just Five Points, I saw that the upward mobility for the famine Irish was really quite remarkable.
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As I went from having 10 lives to 100 lives to 1,000 lives, I came up with codes (for different types of jobs) and tallied it up. What I found in the end was 41% of the people who started out as day laborers and other unskilled positions end up at the end of their lives as business owners or other white-collar jobs.
Nobody — even the experts in Irish American history — nobody imagined that four in 10 day laborers could end up in white-collar jobs. This is just inconceivable to anyone who had ever thought about the famine Irish given the obstacles that faced them.
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[Prejudice] also manifested itself in advertisements in American newspapers saying, “no Irish need apply.” Those were pretty rare, because most newspapers refused to publish them. When they did publish them, people boycotted their newspapers. But every once in a while, one got in. And even though those were relatively rare, they were so well remembered and so outraged the Irish that it scarred them.
Lacking employment opportunities means it’s harder to climb the socioeconomic ladder because you can’t advance to the higher-paying, white-collar jobs as easily as native-born Americans can. The result, however, is in some ways beneficial to the Irish, because what the Irish then do is they concentrate in terms of their aspirations in self-employment, starting their own small businesses. Because your boss can’t discriminate against you if you’re the boss.
So Irish immigrants are much more likely to start businesses than native-born Americans in that era. Just like today, immigrants are much more likely to start small businesses than native-born Americans. And that’s not a coincidence.
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I talk towards the end of the book about this one guy who is a gardener for his first 10 years in America. He saves enough money as a gardener to open a saloon in Manhattan, just south of the George Washington Bridge. He opens a saloon up there, which he can afford to do on his gardener savings, because it’s kind of out of the way. But the city grows, and it grows around where he set up the saloon. He runs it for 30 years. And when he dies, they come and evaluate his possessions for probate purposes. And this house has hardly anything in it. And they say $30 worth of possessions is all he has. But he also has this tiny safe. And the judge allows them to open it.
There are bank books from 30 different banks. It turned out he had the equivalent of about $1 million today in 30 different bank accounts and government bonds and real estate, and he owned whole blocks of northern Manhattan as part of his real estate holdings. That was the kind of thing you did when you were scarred so much by the famine.
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In your tenement in Five Points, or pretty much any place in New York in those days, there were no locks on the doors. So you either had to carry your money in your pockets or put it in the bank. Tenement apartment robberies were common.
The other thing was, banks paid really high interest rates. Today, you put your money in your checking account, you get 0.1%. The Emigrant Savings Bank paid 6% or 7% interest every year, whether it was good times or bad. That’s huge.
If you’ve come from a place like Ireland where you’ve been so poor — somebody’s willing to pay you 6% or 7% interest, that’s a lot of money that you’re throwing away if you don’t put your money in the bank.
And as a result, what we can tell is that at the very least, half of Irish New Yorkers had bank accounts, and probably a lot more. And studies even show that Irish immigrants, were more likely to have bank accounts than native born Americans.
From the interview:
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