On Steven Erie's Rainbow's End: Irish Americans and the Dilemma of Urban Machine Politics

...Sharp racial disagreements over preferential hiring programs are, however, evident not only among black and white working-class competitors for municipal jobs but in the entire electorate...

...A central struggle now facing the United States as a whole and blacks most directly is how the black community can develop its own version of the formula for the critical mass—the combination of power, resources, inner strength, cultural tradition, and stratagems for overcoming racism—to make it possible for this large minority of the nation to be fully competitive...

...From 1900 to 1930, the total number of local jobs in New York shot up from 54,386 to 148,421, with well over half the 94,035 new ones going to Irish-Americans...

...Roughly the same proportion of urban blacks in 1979 were on welfare as the proportion of the Irish workforce that held government jobs in 1930...

...For those at the bottom, welfare is in no way comparable to patronage employment, or employment of any kind, as a stepping-stone to the middle class...

...The machines handed out jobs that required little training or education: "[T]he patronage created was blue collar . . . policemen, firemen and city laborers...

...If these contractions were not enough, politically ascendant blacks now face far more severe civil service restrictions on patronage than were present fifty years ago...

...Solutions are not likely to emerge easily from the national political debate, in large part because race has become perhaps the most important dividing line separating the Democratic and Republican parties...

...SUMMER • 1989 • 405...

...The Irish in many respects used political power to achieve goals similar to those now sought by blacks...

...Instead, as was the case with the Irish, Jews, Italians, and Poles before them, the burden will fall largely on black leaders to learn what they must innovate alone as well as what can be adapted from the experiences of other ethnic immigrant groups...

...It is, however, just these programs that have seriously exacerbated urban racial tension and spurred the white backlash voting that can be found 404 • DISSENT BOAS in the white, outer-rings surrounding almost every major American city...

...For the black middle class, the expanding welfare state of the 1960s and 1970s became a critically important source of employment...

...It is time to lay the rainbow theory [that the machines acted as urban melting pots for all groups] to rest" Erie writes...

...Erie found that in Chicago 54 percent of all black job gains, public and private, were in social welfare agencies...

...In addition, IrishAmericans provoked deep hostility among those competing ethnic groups that got a far smaller share of patronage...

...Power in a modern economy requires extensive involvement in commercial and entrepreneurial activities—real estate development, road building, banking, manufacturing—which in turn provide mechanisms to profit from political participation...

...It is just this kind of tension—reaching maximum intensity where the competition between blacks and whites for jobs, housing, tax dollars, and other resources is most direct—that has contributed to the explosive growth of Republican voting in such white communities...

...One area Rainbow's End could have explored in much greater detail is the extremely complex set of relationships between the assimilation of IrishAmericans into prevailing elites, Irish roots in Roman Catholicism and European culture, the self-determined channeling of community resources into establishing a professionally skilled uppermiddle class, and the growing ability of the Irish to acquire the capital essential to establish a dynamic intersection between economic competitiveness and political power...

...Although the two do not overlap entirely, it is, in effect, impossible to separate power from money...

...In the process, Irish-Americans laid claim to the rewards of power: "On the eve of the Depression, more than one third of the Irish workforce in machine cities depended on patronage for their livelihood," Erie writes...

...Through impressive registration campaigns, which often included getting thousands of immigrants naturalized so they could vote, Irish-Americans by the end of the nineteenth century had gained far more power than warranted by their numbers alone in cities from New York to San Francisco...

...For those in the middle class, employment in public and private social agencies provides few opportunities for the sustained acquisition of either saleable skills or capital—both of which are essential, in most modern economies, for the achievement of real, economically based power...

...Because the overwhelming majority of blacks remains aligned with the Democratic party, there is very little competitive incentive to engage in what could be a highly productive battle between the two parties to develop alternative economic strategies within central cities...

...Nearly 80 percent agreed with the statement that "Irish, Italian, Jewish and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up...

...Contrary to the widely held view among political scientists that the machines were a critical step up the status ladder, Irish machine patronage was "the wrong kind for group social mobility . . . [it] hindered Irish economic advancement...

...In the long run, for both middle-class and poor blacks, the welfare state is a weak reed on which to build solid power in this country...

...in Albany, 41 percent...

...blacks should do the same without any special favors...

...But to take the comparison with black Americans a step further, it is just these kinds of jobs with low entry-level requirements that are currently most needed by urban blacks...

...In Chicago, with the active support of the Daley machine, welfare participation rates rose in the black community from 18 percent in 1969 to 32 percent in 1979—rates that paralleled those in nonmachine cities...

...Still, it is equally possible to argue that jobs requiring little formal education or training are ideal for members of a first- and second-generation immigrant community seeking better lives for their children...

...The development of a substantial group of entrepreneurs prepared to capitalize on political power is one area where blacks face far more difficulty than the Irish at comparable periods in their histories...

...Those very bluecollar jobs upon which poor minorities are most dependent for steady employment and economic sustenance have disappeared by the hundreds of thousands, leaving behind what is for them an economic wasteland," Wilson recently wrote in a chapter of the book Quiet Riots...

...The use of power by blacks to expand employment and education possibilities has diverged from past practices in another major respect: Blacks have turned to affirmative action, preferential hiring programs, and quotas as alternatives to traditional patronage...

...Although the legitimacy and efficacy of preferentialhiring (and college-admission) programs are subject to a widespread debate, there is no question that the Irish "overcame prejudice and worked their way up" with an extraordinary array of "special favors" from the public till...

...Erie argues that these jobs did little to move the recipients into the middle class...

...In 1985 just over 69 percent of white voters agreed with the statement that "most blacks who receive money from welfare programs could get along without it if they tried," according to NES...

...In addition, the Irish bosses resisted with varying degrees of success the inclusion of such newly rising groups as Italians, Poles, Jews, and blacks...

...The Irish used political power as one part of an arsenal of weaponry to achieve the far more significant goal of economic autonomy...

...In 1986, white voters said they oppose preferential hiring and promotion to correct past discrimination by a margin of 87-13, according to National Election Studies (NES), while blacks supported such efforts by a 68-32 margin...

...The near tripling of city jobs over those thirty years compares to the effective stagnation of city employment during the last twenty years in cities like Atlanta, Detroit, Baltimore, and Chicago where blacks have taken over local government...

...in Jersey City, 58 percent...

...Throughout most of their history, urban machines did not incorporate immigrants other than the Irish...

...In New York in 1930, 52 percent of local SUMMER • 1989 403 Books government jobs were held by Irish-Americans...

...Steven P. Erie's Rainbow's End is a major study of Irish-American political organizations in eight cities...

...Blacks, in fact, are coming into urban power just when the exodus of manufacturing jobs coincides with a declining tax base, severely restricting opportunities to enlarge city patronage...

...As William Julius Wilson of the University of Chicago and John Kasarda of the University of North Carolina have documented in detail, a major factor in the decline of central cities has been the two-decade-long exodus of manufacturing employment providing jobs for those without high education levels...

...Irish-Americans did not, however, seek either legislative or court sanction to justify their taking of special privilege...

...Although the focus of Erie's book is on the forces behind the successes and failures of such powerful figures as Richard Daley, James Michael Curley, David Lawrence, and Pat Nash, and the organizations they built, Rainbow's End has broad implications for the racial tensions that now characterize every large city in America...

...Figures compiled by Bart Landry in The New Black Middle Class suggest that, nationwide, black employment gains have been closely linked to the expansion of publicand private-sector jobs tied to the welfare state...

...There have been substantial gains for middle-class blacks over the past generation, but these gains have yet to translate downward to the bottom third of the black community, where conditions have been worsening...

...In contrast to the Irish, who first used city government to provide a broad base of employment and then used political muscle to amass capital—the real key to power—through construction, insurance, development, legal work, and other commercial ventures profiting from public decisions, Erie describes a black community dependent for survival at both top and bottom on the welfare system...