CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - Immigrants arrived by the millions between 1890 and 1920, a surge mostly from eastern and southeastern Europe.
As they landed in American cities, Chicago and New York among them, they found the Irish - Irish cops, politicians, saloonkeepers, teachers, priests, union bosses, gangsters.
"Whether they wanted to save their souls, get a drink, find a job or walk around the corner, the newcomers often had to deal with entrenched Irish Americans," University of Illinois historian James Barrett says in "The Irish Way: Becoming American in the Multiethnic City," part of the Penguin History of American Life series.
For many of these newcomers, "Irish" meant "American," according to Barrett. The Irish were the Americans they interacted with, and whose strategies they often sought to emulate. As a result, the Irish would play a vital role, for good and bad, in "Americanizing" the newer arrivals and shaping the multiethnic city.
How that happened - in the street, the parish, the workplace, the theater and the urban political machine - is the focus of Barrett's book.
The Irish were essentially America's first ethnic group, according to Barrett. More than 3 million immigrated between 1840 and 1890. By 1900, there were an estimated 5 million first- and second-generation Irish in the U.S. - more than in Ireland itself.
Their history had been a tragic one, shaped by brutal treatment by English colonizers in Ireland and the country's Great Famine of 1845-52, which killed millions and "haunted their communities for decades," Barrett writes.
In the U.S., they faced nativist hostility and prejudice, both as Irish and Catholics. They were called names like "savage Irish" and "nigger Irish," and often were lumped in with African-Americans at the bottom of the social order.
Those struggles "produced a culture that mixed aggressiveness, a sentiment of grievance, a sensitivity to slights and, above all, a strong instinct to survive," according to Barrett. With "grim determination," they went about "carving out a place in American society."
They recognized they would succeed as a group and not as individuals. They developed defensive strategies and built organizations and institutions, notably the Catholic diocese and its allied organizations, the urban Democratic machine and the city labor movement.
They arrived with an identity based more on kinship networks and the villages they came from, but then constructed a national identity as Irish, as well as American.
They also became experts at building what is now often called "social capital," both a bonding social capital that solidified the group, and a bridging social capital in reaching out to others, Barrett writes.
"They proved to be masters at transforming everyday relations in extended families, neighborhoods and workplaces into institutions that afforded them economic, social, cultural and political power. In the process, they shaped a world that later immigrants and migrants inhabited in their own transition to American urban life."
In the competition for power and resources, the entrenched Irish often would exclude others from neighborhoods, jobs, political slots and positions within the church. In response, other groups learned from the Irish and developed their own networks and institutions.
But the Irish often also sought to help newer arrivals adapt to their new urban environment, through religious, labor and political organizations.
Through the influence of liberal priests, some churches tried to accommodate black and Italian Catholics. Organizations the Irish formed to fight anti-Irish discrimination later adapted to fight immigration restrictions, the Ku Klux Klan and intolerance against all immigrants.
Some Irish American union organizers sought to create a progressive, interracial labor movement. Irish American women played important roles in labor and suffrage movements, bridging working-class immigrants and middle-class whites.
In some cases, Irish Americans were motivated to include others in their organizations or political coalitions by a desire to retain their own power and influence, Barrett writes. In other cases, however, they were following ideals derived from their religious and political culture, as well as from their own history and experience.
"A legacy of real and imagined slights shaped Irish Catholic consciousness and their defensive urban culture," Barrett writes. "They told themselves and others that their success was hard-won, that they must stick together and take care of their own."
At its worst, this mind-set became "an excuse for racial and ethnic intolerance," Barrett writes. At its best, it led Irish Americans to support ethnic and racial inclusiveness, and progressive political and social reform, aspects of which continue to today.